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Blogs
Impromptu
online journals are popping up all over the Web. If I can
build one, you can too
I believe this is the first time in my life I’ve had
something in common with RuPaul.
The cross-dressing superstar and I have both started blogging,
which is almost as much
fun as it sounds. A blog, short for weblog, is a kind of spontaneous
online public journal. Users typically add to a scrolling
list of entries a couple of times a day with whatever ramblings
come to mind, what they had for dinner, how their grandparents
are getting along, their
10 favourite songs of the year, all sprinkled with links to
cool Web pages they have
discovered. Blogs are so easy to put together that new ones
pop up every day.
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Sacks of fan mail
and nationwide tours certainly give you a lot to talk
about, but you don’t have to be RuPaul to succeed
in the world of blogs. The best blogs are often those
that deal honestly with the trivia of ordinary lives.
Think Bridget Jone’s Diary meets reality TV. From
Polyester Lester in Alaska (premiumpolar.com/polyester),
who just started a band and wants to know what you think
of his haircut, to Becky in France (mybluehouse.com/weblog),
who can teach you how to brew a Scotch cocktail called
a kilt lifter, bloggers star in their own never-ending
soap opera. The result is less intrusive than a webcam
but somehow more revealing.
I had to try it for myself. So I went to blogger.com,
created by Pyra Labs, which is based in San Francisco
and is kind of an assembly line for new blogs. I
was amazed how few clicks it takes to get up and running.
All you have to do is decide on a title, choose one of
the dozen or so nifty colour templates and provide the
address of the website where you want it published. You
can get a free site at places like Yahoo.com,
and Tripod.com,
or Blogger will host your words of wisdom free if you
accept advertising Ad-free blogs cost $12 a year. |
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Given how daunting it is for novices to set up a good-looking
website on their own, Blogger is almost like cheating. I should
know: it has been 18 months since I bought the website name
DailyBlah.com, and in all that time I never mustered the courage
to knuckle down and learn enough HTML (the language of the Web)
to turn it into the irreverent news-and-views site I had in
mind. After five minutes on Blogger, Daily Blah was finally
in business.
Making journal entries is simplicity itself. Type your blinding
brilliant insight or cool link in a white box on the Blogger
website, run it through the optional spell-check, and hit the
button marked PUBLISH. Blogger provides the date, the time and
the layout. If you libeled Granny and didn’t mean to, you
can take back and edit any posting. I had one small hiccup:
adding links for the first time isn’t as intuitive as it
could be. Otherwise there has never been a better way to let
your voice be heard. We may not all look like RuPaul, but that’s
no reason to let him hog the limelight. Get blogging! |
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How
to Hack an iPod
Owners of Apple’s MP3 player
opened it up and added all sorts of bells and whistles.
You can too
Here’s how democracy works in the digital age. Just before
Apple unveiled the
iPod last October, the Internet rumor mill was rife with speculation
that the device
would be some kind of personal organizer, Steve Jobs’
answer to the Palm Pilot. The iPod
turned out to be a palm-size music player with a five-gigabyte
hard drive (a 10-GB version was released two weeks ago). But
now, six months later, that original speculation doesn’t
seem
too wrong. That’s because Apple’s hard-core users
quickly figured out how to hack
the device and write new software for it. It’s as if
they told Jobs, Very nice, Steve, but
what we needed was an organizer, and we’ve decided to
turn the iPod into one.
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The upshot is that last week I used my iPod for
half a dozen more things that it was intended for. I read my
horoscope, skimmed the latest news and sports headlines, sent
little memos to myself, checked my appointment calendar and
uploaded my entire address book. I also cranked up the tunes,
although not in the way Apple planned. The iPod’s original
restrictions, that you can share music with only one Mac and
that you can’t use it with a Windows PC, have been totally
blown away.
Not that anyone should junk their Palm just yet. You can’t
enter text directly onto an iPod, for one thing; you can’t
enter text directly onto an iPod, for one thing; you have to
do it via the computer. That said, the iPod’s design beats
Palm’s hands down when it comes to reading text; with one
hand. And the iPod’s gargantuan disc space, which dwarfs
the eight megabytes of most handhelds, can hold just about anything,
as Com USA found out when an iPod owner walked in, hooked his
device upto one of the store’s Macs and downloaded the
entire Microsoft Office suite.
Assuming you want your free iPod extras to be a little more
legal, here’s a handy shopping list. First, go to , and
make sure you have version 1.1 of the iPod software. This will
let you export your address book from programs like Palm Desktop
and Microsoft Entourage. Checkout iPoding.com or iPodhacks.com
for other address-book formats. Then go to Version Trackers.com,
and search for iPod (specify Mac OS 9 or OS X) to see which
of the following goodies are available for your machine.
Want a date-book? Check out K-Lendar, which will list all your
appointments, by day and start time, under the “artists”
category of your iPod. For a notepad, tryPod text. Need a news
fix with your music? PodNews has an abbreviated choice of headlines
and horoscopes, updated from the Web every time your recharge
your iPod. PodNotes also has headlines and, amazingly, downloadable
driving directions from any U.S. location.
To get around Apple’s built-in restrictions and share music
with different Macs, try PodMaster or Free File SynX. If you’re
using a PC, get EphPod (at ). be warned: you may need to install
a special Fire Wire (or IEEE 1394) port to connect to the iPod).
Although Apple frowns on music-download hacks, it is delighted
with the Palm-style stuff. The wildly popular address-book software
has already been adopted, and similar programs may soon become
part of the official iPod canon. The people wanted a digital
organize, and bit by bit, the people are getting one. Isn’t
democracy beautiful? |
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Wrestling
with Thumbs
Miniature keyboards are muscling
in on the Palm Pilot business. Is the stylus still mightier?
Late last year I watched in amazement as my mother took up
Graffiti (I’m talking
about the system of entering text on digital organizers made
by Palm, Handspring and
Sony; she hasn’t started spray painting walls just yet.)
Using a stylus on the screen, you are required to write characters
the Graffiti way, an A without the horizontal line, and so
on.
It can be a daunting thing to learn, yet after watching my
techno-challanged mom
scribble happily on her new Handspring Visor, I felt certain
it was the
alphabet of the future.
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Now my faith is collapsing, largely because Palm
founder and Handspring co-founder Jeff Hawkins has converted
to the new religion of thumb keyboards. You have probably seen
these things on Blackberry e-mail pagers; they are tiny raised
keys in regular qwerty order, the whole keyboard not more than
a few inches wide. Handspring’s popular Treo ($399), a
combination cell phone and organizer, comes in either Graffiti
or keyboard flavour. The new Sony Clie PEG-70V, a $599 organizer,
is similarly agnostic. It offers Graffiti on the colour screen,
but flip that around and there’s a thumb keyboard underneath.
Hawkins believes the latter will gradually become dominant,
and this is the guy who created Graffiti.
Is he right? Are my mom and millions of other Graffiti users
doomed to eventual extinction, their language as dead as Latin?
To find out, I put the Clie and both versions of the Treo to
the test. I’m a fairly fast typist and a two-year graffiti
artist, so either system could work for me. But I needed answers
which method was faster? Which led to fewer mistakes? And which
felt more comfortable?
Without doubt, the mini-keyboard was the winner of the first
two challenges. My thumbs were able to navigate the keys easily
touch, though surprisingly they did a lot better on the Treo’s
keyboard than on the Clie’s (the Treo’s is smaller,
but the keys aren’t quite so flat). The text raced across
the screen fast enough for me to take dictation, and I soon
needed to hit the delete key only once a paragraph or so. It
made me realize how regularly I make mistakes in Graffiti, every
other g comes out as a q, and I am still at a remedial level
when it comes to the number 9.
When I was done, however, my poor thumbs needed a massage. This
is the perennial problem with keyboards; doing any motion over
and over puts you at risk for repetitive-stress injuries, and
pecking at thumb keyboards is no exception. Graffiti, for all
its faults, has never given me so much as writer’s camp.
The trusty stylus still has a future; it’s better for navigating
menus and playing games. Even the keyboard version of the Treo
comes with a stylus. But I prefer Graffiti the way it comes
on the new Clie. Its screen records characters exactly the way
you write them, helping me nail those pesky gs and 9s. May be
someday I’ll even write as fast as Mom. |
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