They Blue Through That File

We still aren't talking LoCps (Libraries of Congress per second), but I had a chance to do a Bluetooth 2.0 file transfer live and in person and was impressed. The test consisted of two MacBooks using object push.



The test file was about 16 meg and I saw sustained transfer rates over 100KBps.



These rates are more than double any speeds I ever saw with Bluetooth 1.1. You still wouldn't want to use Bluetooth for ripping DVDs, but I think it is plenty fast for occasional file transfer and light syncing duties. Just remember, you probably spent time connecting to the Internet with a 56Kb (bit not byte) modem and while slow, you loved it.

Is the Game On?

In a little more than a day, FIFA World Cup 2006 will kick off. If you are reading this from the US, you are probably thinking so what?. The rest of the world knows what's up and will spend much of the next month watching the games.

There are 64 games. So how's a soccer fan to know when to watch? Well, you can view the schedule on the web at the official Yahoo! site, but who wants to do that? Microsoft will help you load the schedule in to Outlook with an .exe (why an .exe?). If you are a regular reader, you know what's coming next... where is the iCalendar schedule!

The official site lets you down, no .ics to be found. I could have rolled my own, but that's silly when the power of the Internet fills the void. With a few minutes of searching, I found multiple sources ready to load in to iCal, Google Calendar, Outlook, or whatever your favorite calendaring app is.

Truefan serves up an .ics for you. Too bad they don't know anything about MIME types. Worldcupkickoff does better.

Go USA!

5 of the Now

• Stone Lions - Snow Over Arizona From the label that brings you Evil Nine and Adam Freeland, the Stone Lions keep the bass driving and the head wagging.


• Tomas Barfod - Light Shine Light the tiki torches, pour yourself a mojito and enjoy the summer weather.


• Soulwax - Another Excuse (DFA Remix) Raw, restrained, energy ready to make a mess all over your carpet.


• The Chemical Brothers - Surface to Air (Live) It is impossible to describe what it is like to see and hear the Chem Bros live. This is just scratching the surface (ha!).


• Dragon Ash - Deep Impact (DJ Krush Mix) Japanese rock/rap group. If you want to hear it, this one is a tough one to track down. Fortunately, Juno has us covered.

Loudest Media Player Ever

2 cool points to the marketing team at Microsoft. A banner that is clever, relevant, and informative.



I can't say that I have any use for WMP11, but it does look like they've cleaned things up a bit. Have a look and a download.

Podcasting Roll Call

Here are some DJ mix podcasts that I'm enjoying. Maybe you will to.

__SpinCast - Fantastic stuff every time. Both __SpinCast and SoundBytes are products of the superb Progressive-Sounds.

SoundBytes - Chloe Harris has been cranking out SoundBytes long before podcasts were even invented. I was really glad to see them get released as Podcasts so I don't miss any.

Tongcast - You've heard of Pete Tong, right? Right? If you haven't, get on it. Pete Tong is the nostradamus of the dance music world. If you want to know what's hot, just check what Mr. Tong is playing. In addition to his web site, you can find the Tongcast in the music section within the iTMS.

Marine Parade Podcast - From the label that brought you Evil Nine, and Adam Freeland. It's great to see labels getting it and embracing the sharing of their music, rather than beating it down and calling it stealing. The first podcast from Marine Parade is a tight selection of tracks mixed by the Stone Lions. There are tracks from my all time favorite, DJ Shadow, along with some Evil Nine, and even Busta Rhymes. If you like what you hear, don't forget to check out the Stone Lions release Snow Over Arizona . I haven't found a full tracklist yet. If you happen to know where one is, please let me know.

Progcast - I recently picked this one up. I enjoy the mixes, but for whatever reason, they don't seem to have the energy of a lot of other mixes I listen to. I'm still listening though.

Automator Avoids Apps

My Mac mini let out a sigh of relief when I found this tip. Using a 1 step Automator action, you can build a simple photo viewer for your iPhoto library. This allows you to get at your photos, visually, and in the proper albums, without firing up iPhoto. It literally takes 1 minute to go build this app for yourself. TUAW has a picture of the resulting app if you'd like to see it.

Even with the speed-up in iPhoto 6, this "PhotoPanel" is much, much, faster and perfect if you just want to grab a photo or three for a quick task. I saved the Automator action as an application and dropped it in my dock between iPhoto and Photoshop Elements. Now I can drag a photo right out of the panel on to Elements for editing. That's how drag and drop is supposed to work! Sure, you can access the photos via the finder, but you don't get the context of the iPhoto albums so I see myself using this mini-app a lot.

Good Deal for Switchers

Ok, this deal isn't just for switchers (Windows -> Mac), but it is one I made use of when I switched and the deal is even better now. Upon arrival in Macland, I found myself missing my trusty friend, Paint Shop Pro. I like Photoshop just fine, but I bought Paint Shop Pro 5 way back in the day and it continues to be all I need when it comes to graphics editing, under Windows at least. My Mac mini wouldn't run PSP 5, so I decided to get Photoshop Elements. Elements has everything I need out of Photoshop and it is available at a fraction of the price of its big brother.

My brother figured out that you can buy a Wacom Graphire tablet for about the same cost as Photoshop Elements and it comes with a free copy of Photoshop Elements 3.0, along with other software!


The deal is even sweeter this week as Best Buy has the Graphire tablet on sale for $69.99. That's the same price that Photoshop Elements costs at Amazon (ok, 4.0 is out now, but still), so the drawing tablet and mouse could be considered free.

The tablet is nice too. I've used it for graphics editing a little, but even when not being used for that, you get the convenience of a wireless mouse (no cord to tug), combined with the simplicity of a wired mouse. The tablet plugs in to USB, so you never have to worry about batteries. My only complaint is that the 4x5 tablet is a little small for heavy mousing. I think the 6x8 would be much nicer, but it costs quite a bit more.

Netflix and the Bucket of Formats

DVD is old and busted. HD DVD and Blu-ray are the new hotness. I don't really believe that, but none the less, the new formats are here and they bring some interesting problems with them.

In January, Netflix announced that it will support both HD DVD and Blu-ray when the formats are released. HD DVD players are on the market and a small selection of movies are now available. Netflix is making good on their promise and offering HD DVD titles at no additional costs.


If you have a Netflix account, you can enable it for HD with a wizard in your account settings.


I think it is nice that Netflix confirms that yes, you really want to receive HD DVDs, and have the necessary equipment to watch them. I don't have the necessary equipment and really don't care to buy it at the moment, but I went through the process because I was curious :)


Finally, we get to the most interesting part. How will you choose what format your movies arrive in? Netflix is currently offering two options. You can either always add the HD version when available, or you can always add the standard format.


Netflix is even nice enough to switch the desired format on movies in your queue to HD if that's what you want. It is nice that Netflix offers the option to always add the HD version when available, but I think these preferences will need to evolve. What happens when Blu-ray movies start shipping? Will you have to choose your HD format of choice? I guess that makes sense, but do people care more about the format or do they care more about the movie?

If the MP3 age has taught us anything, it should be that convenience trumps quality. For many people, there is a point of good enough and they really don't care about better quality. Since MP3, WMA, and AAC at medium bitrates are good enough for most people, I'd say that DVD is good enough for movies too. Because of this, I think Netflix needs to add a "First Available" option in their format preference. This would be just like when you go to a resturant. Smoking, non, or first available. Sometimes you are hungry enough to put up with the smoke (not me), and sometimes you want to see the movie as soon as you can and you don't really care if it is just in DVD quality.

First available will create some logistics challenges for Netflix. I'd imagine there will be pockets of the country that adopt HD DVD and Blu-ray sooner than others. I'm guessing folks in San Jose will buy more HD DVD players than folks in Springfield (you pick the state). I'd also imagine that Netflix won't be stocking as many HD copies as the SD copies for years to come. So what's a movie lover in the midwest supposed to do? Wait forever for discs shipped from the west coast, or will they want to just see it on whatever format is available? Sure, you can manually go in to your queue and select the format you want to receive, but that doesn't sound like fun and will the disc availability change based on the format you choose? I'd like to think it would, but who knows if Netflix enables that sort of detail to the users. The point is, they don't have to, they can just let us choose first available and keep the secret sauce recipe in the vault.

First available Netflix, make it happen!

5 of the Now

• Imogen Heap - Headlok You know her as the beautiful voice of Frou Frou. Amazing album, but be careful, it isn't a CD, it's one of those stupid Sony BMG discs.


• Blackalicious - Release, Pts. 1, 2 & 3 Real hip hop. A 3 part release of emotion, thought, and consciousness. Zach de la Rocha is heard in part 1, poet Saul Williams is brilliant in part 2, and Lyrics Born joins in for part 3. This one has been a favorite of mine for awhile.


• Collingwood & Swain - Never Be the Same First heard on the blissful Electric Calm Vol. 3 and now available on full EP release. I've been singing this one around the house, yeah, really. Amazing emotion in this one and a great reminder to live in the moment. GU [Music] continues to release quality stuff.


• Junkie XL - Today (Unkle Mix 1)
  I think I would buy Unkle brand toilet tissue if it were available, but that's only because I find Mr. Lavelle to be pure quality, even if he pushes most of the production work on others :) Nice to see Junkie XL back in the mix as well.


• Radio Slave - Get the F**k Up You may be familiar with Radio Slave from some of their remixes of pop tracks, authorized and not. I can see this being big this summer.

My Sanity is in the Mail

I had occasion to print a bunch of envelopes this weekend. Being the smug Apple fanboy that I am, I couldn't wait to show my wife how her silly Excel spreadsheet was going to get trounced by Apple's handling of contacts and envelope printing in Address Book.

We got the Address Book all up to date and I popped open the print dialog to show how easy it is to say you want to print envelopes. I'd show you a screenshot of that, but that's the reason for the lost sanity. After successfully printing some test envelopes, I realized that the text would line up better if I defined a custom envelope for the ones we were using. For those that can't stand Mac carnage, please stop reading now.

While entering my custom envelope dimensions, Address Book just sort of start ignoring me. That's odd, I thought. I closed the dialog and figured I'd try again. Well, I haven't seen that dialog since. Address Book now refuses to open the print dialog. I spent about 3 hours attempting to reinstall Address Book, reinstall the printing subsystem, and reapply the 10.4.6 update.

I got to learn all about Pacifist, a utility capable of reinstalling chunks of OS X, but even though Pacifist seemed to do its thing, Address Book was still snubbing me.

In my Google digging, I came across an alternative solution that was my last resort. It was my last because after using it, I'm much less bothered by the inability to print from Address Book.

The wonderful developers at Ambrosia Software have a free envelope printing widget!

They call it EasyEnvelopes and it is fantastic. Aside from the oddness that it runs as a widget, it is perfect. It taps in to my Address Book contacts and provides quick searching for the person you want to send to. Type a couple of letters and select the contact and you are ready to print. Return address is already filled in based on the me contact in your Address Book. It is even flexible enough to allow editing of the return or to address before printing in case you want to add a spouse name, remove kids names, whatever.

I cranked out the envelopes as fast as I could load them in the stupidly designed printer of mine. Printing one envelope at a time wasn't a problem because I had to load them one at a time in the printer anyway.

My faith in Apple was shaken, but at least Ambrosia was there to pick up my shattered perceptions of perfect software, rainbows, and unicorns.

Boot Camp is About the Sergeants

My friends have already weighed in on Boot Camp, so now it is my turn. Boot Camp is a very crafty move on Apple's part. It's a direct strike at the remaining want-to-switchers. People want to think that you are Mac, or you are Windows, or you are Linux. Fact is, most people are none of those.

They are none of those because most computer users think in terms of sending email, browsing the web, writing papers, and looking at digital photos. Rarely to they think in terms of Outlook, Firefox, Word, and iPhoto. They might associate those names to apps they use, but they don't really care as long as they get to do what they want to do.

The Windows world is at a crossroads. Vista is long overdue, malware infestation is at an all-time high, and resent for Microsoft has been building for years. So, if you agree with me so far, why aren't people running in to the open arms of Apple? I'd say it is because no one is telling them to.

Most computer owners have the computer they do because someone told them that's the one to buy. Maybe their friend did, maybe their children did, maybe the guy at Best Buy did. My point is, they didn't know enough about the alternatives to even consider them. Most readers of this blog won't fit in to this category, but your friends and parents might. Those making the recommendations are the sergeants. They are respected enough when it comes to computers for folks to act on their recommendation.

With Boot Camp, Apple is targeting those sergeants. Apple doesn't expect every IntelMac owner will install XP. In fact, they'd probably prefer you ditch Windows all together, but you and I know that you can't just quit Windows. You need it for work, or you need it for your taxes, or you need it for a game, or you need it for some ancient piece of hardware that you still use. Apple doesn't expect basic users to use Boot Camp, but they sure are hoping that advanced users will know about it. Those advanced users might have been siting on the fence, clinging to that last excuse of not being able to run Windows apps as the reason they haven't tried what Apple is cooking.

Now they can, and Apple is happy to let the entire OS X experience speak for itself. Advanced XP users can slowly explore OS X and still have a safety net of booting in to XP. Over time, I'd expect a few of the advanced users to become true switchers and then have an influence on those around them when it comes to buy new computers.

This is just my opinion. This really-really-really-really smart dude thinks Boot Camp will convince Mac users to swtich to Windows. Uhhh, yeah.

I'm Expired, Sorry For the Mess

Today, I offer another plea to software developers. I just tried to open a file on my iBook here. The file is a Word .doc. At one point I had installed the Office 2004 demo. That's long expired, yet .doc files still open with it. It then tells me how it's expired and I should go buy it and then exits. Thanks Microsoft. I get it. I haven't purchased your software. Now will you please release the damn file associations? I can open that .doc in AppleWorks 6 and TextEdit and read it enough to get what I need out of it, but I don't even get that opportunity because of the helpful "buy me now" interceptor.

After two (2!) runs of the "Remove Office" program, it's finally gone and the file association is back to AppleWorks, but why can't Office just be nice to me and remove the association after the Test Drive expires? I hate how their efforts to sell me something outweight my need to get something done.

Software developers, if you take over file associations with a product that can be expired, remove those file associations when you expire the product, please!

Pennies Per Play

I've reached a milestone in per-track paid downloads from the Internet. This weekend I noticed that I am now over 1000 tracks in my Purchased Music playlist in iTunes. I figure that I have spent about $700 so far on that music. Where did the other $300 go? Well, some of those were the free downloads of the week. Some are free when you buy an album with more than 10 tracks, and at least 100 of them have come free from Mountain Dew and Gap promotions.

If you are keeping score, I now have 4 days and 6 hours worth of purchased music. If you are keeping score even closer, you might wonder how many times I have listened to these tracks and how much each play costs.

Now, I wish I had the motivation and/or the AppleScript skills to sit down and knock out an all-in-one program to do this calculation for me. I have neither of those at this time, so I have turned to the good ol' standby, the command line. I'm sure one of the fabulous readers of this blog has tighter command line kung-fu than I and will offer a more pure, a more efficient, dare I say, a distilled solution. Until that happens, here are 4 steps of a hack you can do at home.

1. We need to get the play counts of the purchased tracks. This is easy enough. Simply open iTunes, select the Purchased playlist and then click File - Export Song List. Give it a name (Purchased.xml) and set the format to XML.


2. The XML is fantastic, but we really only need the raw play count data. Use the following command to yank the counts out and delimit them with plus '+' signs for later.
   
   grep "Play Count" Purchased.xml | sed 's/[[:space:]]*Play Count<\/key>/+/' | sed 's/<\/integer>[[:space:]]*//' > add_up.txt
   
   I'm using grep to pull the lines containing the play counts, and then 2 runs of sed to strip away the remaining XML. (If only I had my XSLT book at home, this would have been so much easier) This all gets tossed in to a text file that I'll pass to bc in a later step. Here's your chance to show your command line fu. I know I can probably do this all with a single call to grep, but I didn't really care to sort that out right now.


3. We now have all of the counts in a file, each on its own line. bc wants these all on one line, so crack open vi and enter this command.
   
   :%s/\n//g
   
   This will remove all new lines in the file and put everything on a single line.
   Before exiting vi, add a 0 as the very first character to make the math statement valid. If you are vi challenged, hit i to insert, 0 to type the '0', esc to get back to command mode, and wq to save and exit.


4. Finally, feed that file to bc (basic calculator).
   
   bc add_up.txt
   
   You should get your number, and then you can type quit and enter to exit.

My play count total was 4220. If I use $700 as my expenses so far, I get 17 cents per play. It will be interesting to track that number as it goes up from buying more music, and down from more plays. To me, 17 cents is a great number. If you consider the average track in my collection is 5 minutes, I pay about $2 an hour to listen to iTMS purchased music. This would be even lower if I had a way to count the plays from CDs I burn for the car.

One final set of stats that I found interesting:
Tracks listened to only 1 time: 195 (not because I don't like them, I just buy music frequently)
Tracks not listened to at all: 2
Largest play count for a track: 20

What cool stats can you tell me about your iTMS library?

Sync your gCal to your iPod

I've never owned a PDA, but I have started to make use of the PDA features on my iPod. I like that I can sync my calendar and contacts and have them at a touch when needed.

The moment I heard that Google's Calendar was ready for use, I wondered if I could sync it to my iPod. I wasn't sure whether you could sync subscribed calendars from iCal to your iPod, so I tried it myself. The answer is yes, you can.

It's pretty easy to sync your gCal to your iPod. Simply follow this tutorial from TUAW to subscribe to your gCal in iCal. Then modify your iPod settings to sync all calendars, or you can specify your Google one specifically.

That's it, you're done. You may want to adjust the refresh rate on your subcribed gCal, but other than that, it will sync up just like native iCal data.

Thank you Google and Apple.

Better Schedule Time for Improvements (updated)

Google has release a calendaring app to beta. You might remember me wondering where such an app was just a short while ago. I've spent a little time playing around, and while I see great potential, I can't help but feel this is another "barely good enough" Google app.

For starters, it doesn't work in Safari. You get to see this great message.

I tried it anyway, and it barely works. You don't get a mini-calendar on the left and the agenda doesn't work at all. You also can't open any events once you've set them, so that's a deal killer. Firing up Firefox under OS X works just fine. I now have two reasons to use Firefox, Google Calendar, and IM through Gmail.

Next up, iCalendar support. Yes, it appears you can import iCalendar items, but who cares about that? That's useful for the switchover from one calendar to Google Calendar, but I want to sync events with other people. People who might be using Outlook, or iCal, or something else. I tried sending an .ics from OS X (iCal integrated with Mail.app) to my Gmail account. It shows up, but Gmail doesn't care a darn about it. This is where the integration needs to kick in boys. Google claims that Gmail is smart enough to pick out events in your messages and prompt you to add them. Ohh yeah? Then why didn't it let out so much as a peep when I sent the following text to Gmail.

Test Google Calendar, scheduled for April 13, 2006 at 5:15 PM.

As a test, I put the same text in to the "Quick Add" feature and it added it just fine. 1 point for the recognition engine. -1 point for Gmail's use of that engine.

Finally, what's up with the invite feature? I sent an invite to my home account. The email showed up with a .ics attachment. I was excited. I clicked that .ics and nothing happened. I saved it off and opened it in vi, and what did I find...

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Google Inc//Google Calendar 70.9054//EN
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:REQUEST
END:VCALENDAR

Where's the calendar data? Can someone else send me an invite from Google Calendar so I have another sample?

This is a start, but more work is needed if I am going to use this on a regular basis. Jason appears to be enjoying it a little more than I am.


Update:
I got another .ics sample to look at (thanks Ian) and this one looks much better. Here, it is, raw and only slightly modified to protect the innocent.


BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Google Inc//Google Calendar 70.9054//EN
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:REQUEST
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20060924T010000Z
DTEND:20060924T020000Z
DTSTAMP:20060414T185156Z
ORGANIZER;CN=Ian:MAILTO:removed@gmail.com
UID:abcdefg-removed@google.com
ATTENDEE;CUTYPE=INDIVIDUAL;ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;PARTSTAT=NEEDS-ACTION;RSVP=
TRUE;CN=Ryan;X-NUM-GUESTS=0:MAILTO:removed@gmail.com
CLASS:PRIVATE
CREATED:20060413T151104Z
DESCRIPTION:View your event at http\://www.google.com/calendar/event?action
=VIEW&removed.
LAST-MODIFIED:20060414T185156Z
SEQUENCE:0
STATUS:CONFIRMED
SUMMARY:Friends and Family Night
TRANSP:OPAQUE
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

OS X Usability - Good and Bad

Apple isn't perfect. There are always things that could be better. Here are just a few things they have done right, things they have done wrong, and a few suggestions for future improvements.

We'll start with the good. Ben Meyer, over on icefox.net, has a nice writeup comparing OS X with KDE. It's titled Nine things KDE should learn from Mac OS X and is worth a read. I especially enjoyed the points on identity, default application views, and having a capable viewer. I thought the screenshot of KDevelop was hilarious. I'm hoping it looks better on a bigger screen, but ouch, talk about confusing. I guess that's why developers get paid the big bucks, huh?

Now for some bad. My first complaint is that I can't show a date in the OS X menu bar. The checkbox in the Date/Time preferences leads me to believe I can, but as far as I can tell, I only get to see the date when I am using the floating clock, bah!


The other complaint comes from the process of getting the screenshot just above posted. I wrote a nice little Automator action to prompt me to drag out an area for capture and then post it to my iDisk for linking in blogs. It was working great. I say was, because it just quit one day. Today I got mad enough to go find out why. The problem appeared to be with my Keychain. Once I removed and added the iDisk Pictures folder, I was prompted whether I wanted Automator to update it's use of my Keychain. This Keychain prompt seems to occur after every 10.x.y update. Sometimes even more frequently. I have seen it many times with accessing WEP protected networks. The problem is, sometimes I have to reboot a few times to get asked whether it is allowed to update the Keychain! That problem showed here again where I had to go back in to Automator and screw with the action before it prompted me. Fix this Apple. The prompts aren't prompting like they should.

Finally, a couple of ideas for improvement. My target here is iPhoto. True, iPhoto isn't really a component of OS X, but it does ship with the device, so it is at least a part of the OS X experience.

* Camera Identity - iPhoto is smart enough to let you search based on a camera, but that isn't good enough. I want to be able to tell iPhoto that the Casio Exilim is mine, the Kodak EasyShare belongs to my parents, and the Nikon Coolpix belongs to my friend. This would make it much easier to sort out the origin of photos when I'm syncing multiple cameras and importing photos from CDs, thumb drives, and Bluetooth transfers. The camera data can stay attached to the photo. The identity of the camera can live in iPhoto because that is data that is relevant to me.

* Sanity Check the Dates - Isn't it amazing that I took photos in 2028 already! Wow, importing photos from 1995, are you sure? I had both of those dates appear on pictures in the last two weeks. Usually this is from a camera that had a dead battery or just took a dump for some other reason. This check could happen on the cameras as well, but I want iPhoto to be at least a little smart about prompting me about photos with dates that are way out of wack. If you are the type that will keep your computer to 2028, fine, we'll let you turn the sanity check off, but I'd really like to be prompted with "The photos you are importing from Ryan's camera appear to contain a date from the future. Would you like to choose a different date for these photos?"

5 of the Now

It's been a long time, I shouldn't have left you, without a dope beat to step to.

5 more to make you nod your head, move your feet, and exercise your brain.

I'm again gifting 1 of the iTMS tracks to the most creative comment that says why you deserve it. I am the judge!

• Coldcut - True Skool The long awaited Coldcut album is here. It's getting good reviews. I'm digging the first half a lot more than the second half. Good stuff though. This track features vocals from Roots Manuva. This guy is everywhere these days.



• Cut Chemist - Storm
  My brother was down in Austin for SXSW. I tried to get him to the Cut Chemist show, but he couldn't make it. Too bad, listen to this instead. If you like Cut Chemist, check out Product Placement, an amazing tour he did with DJ Shadow. It's on CD and DVD from djshadow.com.



• Umut Gokcen vs. Ulrich Schnauss - Between Us & Them : Available for download from Umut's myspace site. Don't stop, get it get it! Ulrich has a space too.



• Broker/Dealer - Satin Jacket Smooth. Ordering the full album from Amazon.



• Grayarea - Yewminyst I've been loving this track forever. I just found it on iTMS, so I had to have it. Grayarea is from Chicago. I'd love to catch them live.
  

Sweat the Commute

When I first read about a bus, full of exercise bikes, I thought it was one of the stupidest things I've seen in a while. Why in the world would you forgo the wonderful sights, sounds, and smells of a bike ride to sit in a loud, cramped, bus and ride a stationary bike? Then I thought about it a bit more and thought maybe it isn't such a bad idea.

BusBike is the name of the company operating the buses in Brazil. They have chosen to just drive the bus around scenic areas. That's part of the reason I thought this was so dumb. Riding a bike along a beach should not be done behind glass.

Today's working world has things that take time away from work and home. Two of those things are the commute between work and home and working out so you don't turn to a pile of goo from sitting at a desk all day like I do. To improve on the idea, I think they should combine the workout with commuting.

I personally couldn't make use of such a system, but I know plenty of folks that live in big cities that might enjoy working up a sweat on their way home from work. It could save an hour that would otherwise be burned at lunch. I tried to think about a complete mobile gym, but then I thought that 50lb dumbbells might not be such a great idea if the bus ever got in a wreck. However, chin-up bars are already pre-installed in busses! Add some stretching mats, yoga balls, $2 bottles of water, and loud dance music and you are all set.

Not What Chevy Had In Mind

Be careful what you ask for. Chevy, along with the popular reality TV show, the Apprentice, has given folks a chance to make their own commercial featuring the Chevy Tahoe. I'm sure Chevy execs pictured dozens of captivating and complimentary commercials being made by SUV fans everywhere. Instead, they are getting a lot of pushback from the SUV haters of the world.

Rocketboom has as a full set of links, but don't spend too much time there. The commercials play out quite slowly and most of them are filled with crafty (hardly) lines like "you won't drive here".

While it is an interesting outcome of today's "remix" culture, it still annoys me. It's true, most people won't drive their SUVs on anything but pavement, but I can not stand the attitude that people have taken against SUVs. Being an SUV owner myself, I object to being grouped with those on the road that can't judge the size of their vehicle. I object to being told I am the reason the world is warming. I object to being told that I don't need that vehicle. These people obviously don't know me. I commute to work, on a bike, when I can. My goal for this year is 100 days. Recently, when I'm not riding my bike, I'm riding the bus. It takes me longer to get to work on the bus than driving, yet I still do it.

I own a 2002 NIssan Xterra. I just recently cranked over 20,000 miles. How many miles are on your car? I don't care if I do burn more gas. Am I burning more than the guy driving 15,000 miles a year? I don't need the vehicle huh? How would you suggest I put 3 muddy bikes in the back of a car? If your answer is an external rack, I'm way ahead of you. If I'm taking my bikes long distance, we do put them on a rack on our car. As for driving off road, I have driven, responsibly, on approved back country roads, in the beautiful state of Colorado. We aren't all late for soccer practice, so stop lumping us together.

Maybe instead of blasting Chevy, we should be applauding them for their efforts to bring us E85 capable vehicles [e85].

If you aren't a part of the solution, you are a part of the problem.
Reduce your use - carpool - ride the bus - ride your bike!

5 of the Now

• Freeform Five - Electromagnetic (Evin Nine Broadway Dub) Nearly picked this up from Beatport, I think they just recently released this to iTMS. Freeform Five is great. Evil Nine makes it even better.


• DJ Shadow - Blood on the Motorway Not a track, an emotional journey.


• LCD Soundsystem - Yeah (Pretentious Mix) I dare you to walk down the street listening to this and NOT start struting.


• 20 for 7, Fred Everything & Vaness Baker - Friday (Trentmoller Remix)
  You need a lot more than 30 seconds to get the groove of this one. You should be rockin' it!


• Ashtrax - Freeload (Freelove) Quality, quality, quality.

Like any of these? Leave a comment why I should gift you one of these tracks. My favorite comment posted by noon on Tuesday (2006-03-21) will get that track gifted to them from the iTMS.

Light Night

Here are a few pictures I captured this past weekend in Milwaukee. I was just playing around with extended exposures on various light sources.







I'm also including a shot of the sky on my drive home. The picture doesn't do it justice. I've never seen a sky look like this. It was like waves in the sky. Lots of people had pulled over to stare. 2 miles later it was gone.

Anal Retentive Closure

I'm sure you remember my post on the stupid Simpson's box and the offer they had to order a non-stupid box. Well, I paid my $2 shipping and handling and finally received the desired box today. I can finally sleep. I can begin eating again. I can stop muttering about "the evil box". My DVDs are in line, and so is the world. Ahhhhhhhhhh.

The ugly lineup



The proper lineup


I like how they incorporated the huge Homer eyes from the original box in to the new design.

Pencil Me In

We seem to be in the middle of a wave of calendaring apps. 30 boxes is gaining momentum, Apple pushes .Mac and its ability to sync your iCal calendar to the web, and Microsoft has decided to put a standalone calendar app in to Vista.

So, we have plenty of ways to see our calendars, but I'd like to talk about how we get things put in to our calendars. The key to calendar sharing these days lies with iCalendar. iCalendar, or RFC 2445, is a text based format, pairing values with known identifiers. iCalendar is not an XML format, but if that is your thing, check out hCalendar which is a 1 to 1 representation of iCalendar in XHTML. iCalendar can do everything you'd expect it to. Set a calendar entry, duration, notification, even advertise your busy and available times. iCalendar is widely supported. iCal, Outlook, and Sunbird all support iCalendar. The calendars are ready, it's the entries that are missing.

I am genuinely amazed that more apps don't make use of iCalendar. You'd think that any website announcing an event would offer a link to be added in to your calendar. You'd think that email apps would be able to embed appointments (no, Exchange doesn't count). Heck, you'd think that Google would have spit out a calendar app by now with GMail auto-linking things that look like appointments.

Let's explore some of the web sites that could offer iCalendar links.

• Movie Showtimes - Visit the page, find the one you want, click the llink to add it to your calendar. More on this later.


• Sporting Events - Live in Los Angeles? Visit the Lakers schedule site early in the year and click a link to have all of this year's home games added to your calendar.


• Earnings Calls - Daytraders and interested employess might like to know when their favorite stock is due for a chat.


• TV Listings - Maybe less for you and more for your ReplayTV or Tivo. Visit a web schedule and click the shows you want to watch.


• School events for the kids - Visit your school's site, drill down to your child's grade and add the month's events to your calendar. Field trips, baseball games, choir practices. It could all be there.

I'm sure you can think of dozens more. It is just strange to me that everyone has an RSS button on their pages today, but nobody I've seen has an iCalendar button. That's not to say that these sorts of calendars don't exist. While researching this blog entry (yes, I do research), I found a couple of resources that house these sorts of schedules. This is encouraging, but for the most part, these are user made calendars, and do not come from the official sources.

Now, let's take a look at how iCalendar files (.ics) are handled. It doesn't really matter how you open these files. They could exist on your harddrive, they could be attached to an email, or even linked from a web page. To test things, I made a simple .ics and linked it from a simple .html file.

iCal under OS X, is very slick. A window will pop up and ask you which calendar you'd like to add the event to. It is quite clear what is going on, so this looks hard to exploit.


As usual, Firefox asked me if I wanted to run the file. After that, Outlook under Windows XP asked me if I wanted to load the appointment, and promptly did when I gave the go ahead. These seems like an appropriate thing to do.

Also of interest, Outlook allows you to forward any of your appointments as an iCalendar file. Good for you Outlook.

Windows Mobile 5.0 also asks if you'd like to save the calendar data, but it could be a little more helpful in letting you know exactly what it is asking.

Even more interesting is the fact that sending the .ics over Bluetooth results in a prompt that actually lets you know that this is calendar data. Say yes and the entry is added. Slick. iCalendar and Bluetooth are a great pair.

I think the reason we don't see more iCalendar links is that there isn't a complete solution. Calendars change frequently and when we need them, we are usually on the go. For that to work, we need our on the go devices, like cell phones, PDAs, and iPods to sync frequently. Unfortunately, most people still sync with cables. Cables suck. If you sync with a cable, you can't get up to date data if your phone is still in your pocket. Cue Bluetooth, but having two devices capable of OBEX push isn't enough. You still need a broker in the middle to do the syncing. Ideally, we can continously sync while in range, but short of that, you could have a handler for .ics files that knows which Bluetooth devices to sync with when it processes a new calendar entry. Perhaps Bluetooth's continued rise will bring about a new focus on calendar and contact data because it can flow so easily.

Finally, let's get to a real example. Here's you chance to see how your system handles iCalendar files.
Read Thoughts Abound
While playing with the sample file, I found that Windows Mobile didn't like the timezone info that can be found in the examples on Apple's page. I read that a lot. Apparently iCalendar implementations are notoriously spotty. Hopefully that is a thing of the past.

Have you seen iCalendar files linked on websites? If you have, leave a comment with a link.