Theme your iGoogle

While catching up on my RSS feeds via Google Reader, I saw that Google has greatly expanded the theme options for their personalized homepage called iGoogle. I really like iGoogle for a couple of reasons:

1. it’s cross browser/platform so it works fine on my work PC running Firefox or (shudder) IE or any of my Apples (iPhone/Mac/etc).
2. it lets me keep track of a bunch of key feeds, email, weather, etc all in one page while also having a Google search box
3. I can easily scroll through all my ‘must read’ feeds in single box

It’s been theme-able for awhile now but I was never too fond of the themes they had. They now have a huge directory of themes, some guest artist themes and a developer guide on how to make your own. They are pretty simple to put together since they are just CSS and any images you’d like to incorporate.

Currently, I’m fond of this theme but will most likely make my own very soon.

Back from Austin - SXSWi 2008 Wrapup

I really wanted to do a proper, long and detailed wrapup post for SXSWi but I’m not going to because there was just so much going on and it’s still digesting in my mind what transpired in Austin. That and I’m really tired due to a day at the airport, flight delays and BBQ withdrawal.

So in no particular order, here’s some thoughts on what happened in Austin over the past week:

• this year was way bigger than last year - lots of people guessing on the numbers so take this with a grain of salt but it’s ’supposably’ 50% bigger than last year. So that puts it somewhere between 5000 and 10000 geeks in one place. This was especially evident since previously, you’d always run into people you know but this year, I know there were people I knew in Austin and yet I never managed to see them in the halls/panels
• I wished I made it to the I Can Haz Cheeseburger panel - they were actually giving out hamburgers to the audience
• 12 sessions per time slot does not work
• 10am panels are very hard to attend
• there needs to be more technical panels. Of all the ones I attended, only two could be considered (by me) technical and they were incredibly well attended - as in standing-room-only-geeks-sitting-in-the-aisles-fire-hazard kind of well attended. Of course since there was 12 sessions in every timeslot (plus other stuff in and around the convention center), it’s entirely possible there were more technical sessions.
  
• the panel rooms need to be reworked (again). Nothing sucks more than having to go from room 18ABCD to Room C - it’s like walking to Surrey from North Vancouver. I’m all for the walking but when you consider that a panel ends at say 11am and the next one starts at 11:30am, it doesn’t give you much time to actually talk to the panelists afterword, or with friends about the panel before you have to start hoofing it to the other end of the convention center to get a decent seat for the next session
  
• Twitter stayed up during the whole conference which is a huge deal since it was probably the number one web site talked about (yes, even more than Facebook and the infamous interview). Impromptu ‘Tweetups’ happened everywhere and were awesome. Your twitter name should be printed on the badge next year (everyone just wrote it on theirs this year)
  
• Internet access generally seemed better this year…except at my hotel which crawled. The convention center’s wifi was much more robust this year and they had a 802.11n access point which was great. Also more and more venues had free wifi so it made using Twitter and checking Google maps a breeze. My prepaid AT&T sim also got a good workout and thanks to some flaky hotel access, ended up costing more than it should have - see my $12 flickr photo for one example:
  
• Apple should have sponsored a shuttle to the Apple Store…there was a convoy of cabs there from the convention center on a daily basis.
• Canadians showed up in force this year. Not just the 20-30 Vancouverites I knew were going either….great folks from across this great land came down and had a great time
  
• Once again, the Raincity Studios crew had the best, most coveted t-shirts (read about it in the L.A. Times) and hosted the best party at the Iron Cactus. My second favorite shirt (after the Space Invaders RCS shirt) is the “Hacking is not a crime” shirt I picked up from the MAKE booth
• in Austin (and probably just for SXSW) the term ‘Ranch’ can mean many things. What I didn’t expect it to mean at the Pure Volume Ranch (home of the huge Digg party among others) is dirt floors covered in wood chips and port-o-lets. Moby and Kevin Rose didn’t seem to mind.
  
• Finally had a chance to visit the Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, Texas (outside of Austin)…been coming to SXSW for three years and always heard about it but never had the chance to make it out there. It lives up to the hype
  
• you can buy iPods at the Houston Airport from a vending machine
  
• iPhones were everywhere and mine at least was indispensable during the trip. From the wifi that was available everywhere, to the Google Maps locate me feature, it was easily the most used item I brought. Using the sched.org tool to make a customized calendar of sessions/events/parties to attend, it was easy to see where to go next or what our options were if we decided to change our minds.
• I was able to get a tag for my camera that I should have exploited more. Strangely, I saw all kinds of cameras (not just DSLRs) with the tag, including a tiny little lipstick-sized webcam. There also seemed to be some discrepancy as to who should get a tag as Peter was denied just minutes after I got mine.
  
• If you don’t like Rockband, be glad you weren’t at SXSWi….every second booth in the Trade Show had it setup and many events used it as a focal point
• Adobe had a sneak peak of their new Adobe Media Player in a bar with a live band and a skateboard halfpipe. Nothing kills a party faster than trying to demo your software on a projector in the middle of a bar AFTER a decent local band played while skateboarders used the halfpipe in front of the stage. Still surprised about the presentation’s inappropriateness and the fact they thought they had to explain RSS feeds to a room full of geeks. The Media player actually looks decent (if not a little iTunes-ish) but they really need to work on the promotion side of things and figure out who the people that attend Southby are
• Most heard/overused word/phrase I heard this year: ‘Fail!’ or used in a sentence: ‘Epic Fail!’. #2 was ‘iPhone’. #3 was “I’ll have another Shiner Bock”.
  
• There wasn’t as many MacBook Air’s there as I would have expected. Consensus from those I talked to about it was they were hoping for more from Apple - or technically less as they wanted a true replacement for the 12″ Powerbook in screen size (or even smaller). It definitely got a lot of looks and was asked to hold it many times. There were a ton of eeePC’s in attendence which was cool to see.
• I managed to head over to BarCamp Austin between sessions at the convention center and sit in (briefly) on the iPhone DevCamp. As if the fact there was too much concurrent content at SXSWi, the fact that an awesome BarCamp AND iPhone camp was going on at the same time. Too much to do, not enough time to take it all in.
  
• As if you aren’t already tired of me talking about the BBQ, all the food was amazing…well except maybe not that late night pizza from 6th street
  
  
• as I write this post, there are over 12,000 SXSW related photos on Flickr. I have about 200 in there.

That’s pretty much it for me and this post…as I said at the beginning, there is still a lot of digesting to do (bbq and otherwise) so I may add to this once I’ve had time to take it all in.

See you next year, Austin!

The cows came home

I finally received my Moo cards that I had ordered at the beginning of February. This was my third batch and it was strangely the only one to take a really long time to arrive. I wonder if it had anything to do with an influx of orders from people getting them for SXSW which is also the place I was first exposed to them in the first place.
What are they? I tend to call them my ‘personal cards’ as opposed to my somewhat boring ‘business card’ that I have for my corporate day job.

Moo cards are small (about half as tall as a business card) but are very personal. You order them in batches of 100 and are comprised of text on the back and photos on the front. You can customize the text that appears on the back and the cool part is that you also get to choose what appears on the front. Since they partner with a lot of photo sharing sites (I use Flickr), you can easily pull your own photos into Moo and create the card front with these photos. Unlike getting cards from a traditional printer, you can choose how many of your 100 cards has which photos on them. You can get 100 of the same or 100 different photos on the front of the cards or mix and match as much as you want. Pretty cool for only $19.99 plus shipping - just try to get card stock photo cards from a local printer for that little.

My third batch has turned out the best…I decided to order a lot of different photos this time around instead of just a couple of my favs. I also got a few geekier photos in there since I’ll probably be giving a lot out at SXSW soon enough. I expect to come back from Austin with a ton of other people’s cards and look forward to the Moo party down there as well.
You can use an Altoids Chewing Gum tin as the perfect case for them too.

Good Experience: Crumpler Bags

I think I have a problem.

Is it weird for a guy to like gadget bags? I think I have a bag/pouch/container for just about everything gadget I own. I guess I like to protect my stuff. I especially like Crumpler bags.

The latest one I bought a few months back was the Crumpler Keystone which is a laptop and camera bag. It’s very light, small, heavily padded and perfect for running around taking pictures at geek events.

What else can I say, I love the bags that Crumpler makes and keep getting them anytime I see a new one (or get something that needs a bag). I wish there were more companies that cared this much about their products and had such a unique way of marketing them.

Sometimes they send me stuff too (I highly recommend you sign up for their newsletter):

Totally irreverent marketing (who else takes beer in trade for their products?), completely unusable but fun flash website and awesome containers/protectors for geek tech - what more could you want?

More of them of course!

Another reason to like Apple

After picking up a new ginormous hard drive on boxing day (think Black Friday in the US, only much lamer), I went about adding it to my Powermac G5 tower (aka my server).

For some reason, Apple always does things different than other computer manufacturers and the process of upgrading the hard drive is no different. Fortunately, they tend to do amazingly beautiful documentation on everything so after opening up the tower, it was pretty easy to get down to business.

Small problem though - since this was an additional hard drive, I needed to use Apple’s little rubber coated screws as guides to hold it in place. Since this PowerMac was given to me by a client after upgrading, I didn’t have the original box or anything that might contain the screws needed to install the hard drive.

Of course, Apple thought about that and actually installed four extra screws inside the chassis (green arrow in the image above which I added), right where you’d see them when upgrading your hard drive.

“it’s the little things…”

Right Brain Left Brain test

A coworker sent this to me and I’m sure it’s been around forever and I just saw it for the first time but I thought it was cool so here it is.

Take a look at the following image:

Which way is the dancer turning? If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Most people would see the dancer turning counter-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it. I see it as clockwise and have been able to change it’s direction.

Interestingly enough, the email I got stated that Nikon DSLR owners would see it counter-clockwise and Canon owners would see it clockwise - sounds like a shot from a Canon forum or Flickr group directed at us Nikon owners.

I couldn’t find the source of this test (my email was slightly different than this layout) so I’ll attribute the first google result that resembled the email I got (I also grabbed the table content from this source as well)…if you know the source, let me know and I’ll give it proper attribution.

The New Canucks Logo

I attended the Vancouver Canucks Tailgate party and new uniform launch thingy at GM Place today.

It was nice to jump on the seabus and get out of the office for a bit. Of course they picked seemingly the hottest day of the summer so far to do it. There were a lot of people lined up to for free hot dogs and a chance to hang out with FIN the Canuck’s mascot before the big event.

I was able to hook up with Rebecca and Dave from The Crazy Canucks who helped me skip most of the big lineup and get to a good spot with JJ in the shade - he was thinking ahead and got there early.

They managed to record a podcast despite the huge crowds and noise. I even make a brief guest spot on the podcast too.

Once we got inside, we got pretty decent seats, albeit on the opposite side of the proceedings. To my surprise, the event started right on time at 12:30pm and they introduced a number of key members of the Canucks organization.

But we weren’t there for speeches, we were there to see the new uniforms and logo.

Pretty much as expected, they revealed the logo design that I had spotted in a Gastown store a few weeks ago. I was hoping for something a little different or a retro design so I’m basically indifferent to the new look. I do like the addition of “Vancouver” across the front but as Rebecca said, it does make it look a little busy.

Considering they had well over 8000 people come out on a sunny day during the summer, you still couldn’t even buy a new jersey onsite. They were only selling t-shirts and taking preorders on the jerseys. Talk about a lost opportunity to sell a ton to some of the most passionate fans….although it’s not like those people won’t still buy it all up like Rebecca did:

More pictures from the event in my photo section. Rebecca and John already have more in depth coverage on their sites. My friend Dave (who wasn’t able to attend) has posted his thoughts on the new look as well.

UPDATE: The Crazy Canucks podcast that was recorded during this event is now online! You can listen to it right on the site or download the mp3 for your favorite playback device. I start mumbling around the 3:20 mark.

The one about the iPhone

The inner fanboy won out and I acquired an iPhone this week.

After getting to play with one last week at DemoCamp, I couldn’t resist any longer.

So yes, I have an iPhone that I can’t use as a phone (yet)…in Canada at least.

I’ll be using it fully as intended when I visit a friend in California next week but once I return, the phone function will cease to work unless an unlock solution is discovered….and I’m fine with that. The rest of the device’s features really are that good. I have faith that the hacker community will find a way to unlock the phone so it can be used in Canada and even if they can’t, it’s still easily the best iPod ever made plus the smallest Apple laptop-ish/tablet/internet device available. My first iPod (2nd gen, 10gb model) cost the same as this a few years ago as did my unlocked Treo650.

My standard ‘pitch’ these past few days to people asking about the phone is that it really does live up to the hype and the commercials pretty much capture the way the device functions. It just seems like a device from the future compared to any other ‘phone’ on the market. I’m specifically referring to the user interface and how you use the phone. Many of the things the iPhone does can be done on other phones….some even better. But none of them are as much fun to use, as beautiful to look at or in a few cases, as powerful.

I did want to do the usual unboxing pr0n shots of the iPhone but since I missed launch day by a bit, those shots have already been taken hundreds of times….although this is definitely a device that fits in the ’sexy technology’ category worthy of pr0n shots in the first place.

In case you were wondering how I activated the iPhone, TUAW.com has the scoop on the method I used. As of this blog post, it’s unclear if this method still works so YMMV. As Yoda would say, there is another…(way)…actually probably a few others. As always, google is your friend as these things change rapidly.

Suffice to say, I’m not in a contract and have a working iPhone.

Today I had my first chance to really see all the features of the iPhone in action. Up until now, I’d only be able to use the wifi features but as I happen to be in the states again today (don’t ask), I was able to see AT&T’s Edge network in full effect. People have been complaining that it’s slow and unreliable. Maybe….but considering I was in Bellingham and not some major metropolis, I thought it performed admirably.

Unlimited data service on a device like the iPhone is great compared to the deal us poor schlubs get with Roger’s in Canada (I’m on the $5 for 5mb plan…which is much better than the previous $5 for 250kb I had before). I used 10.1mb during the 5 hours I was down south today…which would have blown my monthly plan and incurred 5.1mb in excess data (@ $0.03/kb if I remember correctly). I’d be living in a cardboard box pretty quickly if I was using my Roger’s data plan with the iPhone.

Anyways, enough bitching about the price of data….here’s hoping when/if Roger’s gets their act together, the data plans don’t make the iPhone unusable in this market. Back to the iPhone…

The first thing that happened once I was in AT&T service-land was a popup on the iPhone that said the iPhone was now activated on the AT&T network. I then got my first SMS on the device telling me to ‘enjoy your new phone’. I presume it was from AT&T as it was from some generic non-telephone looking number.

I then was able to see the visual voicemail screen for the first time and got a message about my voicemail not being setup. It gave me the option of choosing the default message or use a custom message. I opted for the custom message although I’m curious what the default it….I’d guess the usual ‘the cellular customer is away from their phone…please leave a message after the beep’. The custom message option then revealed a record button on the screen and I recorded a boring outgoing message and pressed the stop button. The stop button changed to a play button and I was able to play it back. There is also a speaker button on the screen so you can route the playback to the onboard speaker which is a nice touch. There is also a scrub area that allows you to ’scroll or scrub’ through the recording with your finger. Very nice (Borat voice).

I had prearranged a buddy to call me and I’d not answer so that I could try out the voicemail feature. When he called, what struck me immediately was how loud the ringer was and how strong the vibrate function felt. Compared to my Treo650, the iPhone was much better. I usually carry my phone in my pocket and miss a lot of calls because the Treo is too quiet (at the loudest setting) and can’t feel the vibrate mode when walking. The iPhone was only at half volume and I heard it clearly in my pocket and felt it vibrate no problem while I was walking. Sure my Treo is 2 years old but even when it’s battery was new, it wasn’t this strong. I can’t believe some people have been returning their phones over the volume….maybe they just got bad units. I also realized that it would be louder if I placed it in my pocket upside down so that the speakers which are at the bottom faced up. Made sense to me.

As when I recorded the custom greeting message, playback of the voicemail he left worked the same way with play and stop buttons, a scrub line (I’m sure there is a better way to describe this) and the speaker option. It worked as advertised. The cool thing is that your voicemails are downloaded to the phone so upon my return to Canada tonight, I still had the message on there and could play it back without network access. There is actually a message at the top of the page that says that Visual Voicemail is not available and a ‘Call Voicemail’ button to go the old fashioned route of dialing into the network to retrieve your message. I’d guess this is what we’ll see when we have the unlocked iPhone on a different network.

The next app I got to play with a little more is the SMS app which for all intents, comes across looking like an iChat client. This is not unlike the SMS app on my Treo with a threaded discussion, it just looks prettier on the iPhone. Unfortunately, there isn’t much more to say about it other than it just works but you can’t even change the chat balloon colors at this point. I don’t really care about MMS (or the lack of it on the iPhone) as I’ve never really used it. Apple seems to want you to use email for most things anyways…at least on the 1.0 release of the iPhone’s software.

Things got really interesting when I started playing with the Google Maps app while in a different city. The main reason why my wife and I go to Bellingham so often is that due to her chemical sensitivity, she uses as many natural products as possible and there are a couple of great places for these products down there. We’ve been going to a Food Co-Op down there for a couple of years now because they tend to carry a wider range of the products and are a lot cheaper than in Canada (hmm…sounds familiar). While I was waiting in the car for her while at the Co-Op, I decided to play with Google Maps and simply put in ‘food coop, bellingham, wa’ and it instantly came back with a zoomed map of Bellingham and three pins ‘fell from the sky’ and landed on the center of Bellingham, the Food Co-Op whose parking lot I was parked in and another store about 2 blocks away that I had never heard of. So when my wife came back, we decided to check it out. It turned out to be a small discount food place that only carried natural foods and products. Score one for Google Maps. We’d been coming here for years and never stumbled upon this other place that had some great deals until today.

Again, to be fair, I’ve had the Google Maps app on my Treo for ages but never really used it because of the data charges. I wouldn’t expect this to change much with a Roger’s iPhone either though since I was still in another country and the data-roaming would have scared me off. But in a pinch, I might if I was really curious to find something. The other cool part about the app is that you can tap on the pin (just like in the commercial) and get the phone number and full address of the business. There was even a link to their website included in the Google result.

The last thing I’m going to talk about in this post is Facebook (well and Safari too I guess)…while waiting in the Co-Op’s parking lot, I thought I’d check my Facebook page to see what had been going on. This is where the Edge network started to show it’s true speed a little.

Once I logged in, it took a fair bit of time (1-2 minutes) to render my status page completely….but it did have a lot of photos on it…it can take awhile to render on my laptop as well so I’ll cut it some slack here. When Stacie came back to the car and found out I had been to Facebook, she had to check her page out as well. She thought it was cool to be able to do so from the car so effortlessly. The only problem was that she couldn’t update her status. Of all the websites I’ve tried on the iPhone, this was the first time that I wasn’t able to do something. It seemed to work at first - popping open the edit status window/dropdown but then it closed again. Here you go….and no you can’t. Not sure where the issue is but it’s a minor one to me that could probably be fixed quite easily. Besides, you could still do a mobile update if you really wanted to.

I also experienced my first Safari crash while browsing Facebook and Flickr (in separate tabs/windows). You’re scrolling around and then poof, you get dropped back to the ‘home’ screen of the iPhone as if you pressed the home button. You can click on Safari again and your tabs and pages are still there which is nice though.

So there you have a not-so-brief look at some of my first experiences with the iPhone….this only scratches the surface of the features of the phone so I expect to make more posts about this device as I get more familiar with it and software updates are released for it.

I’ll try not to say ‘iPhone’ a million times in future posts too.

Polar Clock

I found this Polar Clock via the UX Magazine homepage and think it’s really cool….would make a great watch (I don’t think Toyko Flash has anything quite like it yet) or a screensaver (possibly for an iPhone?):

Everything I Know About Design I Learned from The Sopranos

Michael over at the Design Observer has a fantastic post about design and the end of the Sopranos.

Check it out now or I’ll send Paulie to visit you.