shahine.com/omar/

At long last dasBlog 1.9 is finally out. Originally this release as a few bug fixes but in the last few months a lot of new folks started to contribute some great stuff and all the small and not so small things that Scott and I did started to add up to quite a bit of stuff .

You can read all about the new features on Scott's blog.

This is a rather humorous post by Yahoo on how to make the annoying clicking sound that explorer makes for every navigation event go away. I hate clicking navigation sounds. I hate whenever I upgrade to a new build of IE 7 that it resets my setting so that the clicking starts again. I don't understand how this sound provides any value to anyone.

So like everything else, I have a handy dandy registry entry to automate this process on all your machines.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\AppEvents\Schemes\Apps\Explorer\Navigating\.Current]
@=""

Jut copy the text above into notepad, and save as "Navigation Sound Off.reg" and open the file in Explorer.

This phone (Samsung i320) has some pretty great looks and even better specs, EXCEPT, if you live in America, don't bother as the phone doesn't have support for GSM 850... and unless you want to pretend you're living in a world with circa 2001 GSM coverage, you want GSM 850. Oh, and it will set you back a good $620... ouch.

I just ordered a Nokia E61 (thanks to Chris Sacca for the pointer!) and am anxious to get it. Not impressed by the UPS tracking features I searched and found this Package Alert Service. It rocks, you input your UPS or FedEx tracking number and it emails you with any changes in the progress of your package.

"About this Service

Have you ever ordered something cool online and just couldn't wait to get it? Do you agonize over when it will be in your clammy little hands and obsessively check delivery tracking websites?

Of course I certainly wouldn't do such a thing, but just in case someone else has this "problem" I created an email alerting system for package deliveries. A number of people are offering RSS feeds for tracking packages, but that's still the wrong model. Don't make me check when my package arrives, push it to me.

It currently works for UPS and FedEx packages. (USPS already has a nice email alerting service.) You will get alerts whenever the status of a package changes until it is delivered. You could use this service to be alerted when a package is out for delivery so you can know when to be home to accept it. You can track packages you send too, as long as you know the tracking number. "

Why yes I have... and this service helps me avoid checking the UPS site every few hours .

The emails come with little map links as well so you can see where your package is!

BTW - ExpanSys rules. I ordered my phone at 1pm and it shipped at 3pm.

Apologies in advance because all the posts in my feed will show as unread today as I finally made the move to feedburner. For one thing the bandwidth usage on my site was getting crazy and I have pretty bad stats on who is reading etc. Plus I just saw a great presentation by Steve Olechowski of FeedBurner and decided to sign up .

If you are using an aggregator you should automatically be migrated to the new feed address (you don't need to do anything).

Everyone is going gaga over Digg River, and River this, and general attention to something that's not news. For the longest time it's been in every web site's power to provide a mobile friendly version of their web page, it's just that no one has cared to do so (or if they have, you don't know about it cause typing www.somesite.com usually doesn't give you the mobile version on your phone). Dave Winer recently got a Blackberry and what's old is new, except now the spot light is pointing out the fact that in the past few years, nothing has changed the fact that most sites are still not readable or discoverable from a mobile device. Read this for a good synopsis of the exact situation.

However, the recent hoopla seems to be to create a new domain for your site (ending in river.com), and creating a mobile friendly version of your site and declaring victory. Ummm, I don't think so. That's not discoverable. Oh, and you didn't solve the problem of what happens when I click on any one of the links on Digg to read the article... yeah, I thought so... still sucks and is unreadable on a mobile device.

To me there are a few solutions.

1. Every web site go and build a mobile optimized version and have the server figure out if you are a mobile browser and provide the appropriate UI (if you are a new site then River of News). Also provide another standard mechanism of getting at the mobile content (mobile.sitename.com etc).
2. Read all the stuff you care about in a mobile RSS aggregator that is web accessible (NewsGator Mobile is a great example and what I use). I don't need DiggRiver.com because I can just go read my Digg feed on my mobile device the same way I can on the web, in Outlook, or in FeedDemon. No work required except supporting RSS.
3. Read the web through a mobile transformer. Both Google and Microsoft have software that will take a web site and make it mobile friendly.

None of these is perfect but I hardly see how this River business is anything special. At it's core it's not going to solve some of the biggest problems browsing the web on a mobile device.

It's nice that people are starting to pay attention to this again... and for that I'm sure Dave pointing a spot light at the problem will motivate some to attempt to address the situation, but I seriously doubt it will matter as you'll still need portal sites just to find out what all the mobile URLs are for these sites.

PS - Scott Hansleman recently added mobile support to dasBlog. However, you don't need to set up a new domain for your blog or do anything special (nor does Dave Winer). What you say? That's right, dasBlog uses some built in stuff in ASP.NET with some extra browser detection logic to figure out if you are a mobile device and automatically themes everything using a mobile skin making the site totally usable and readable on a mobile device. Nifty.

iTunes 7 = Software that makes me happy. Hats off to Apple for creating a fantastic upgrade to what was becoming a very creaky user experience.

iTunes 7 is soo different from Windows Media Player. Each facet if iTunes is optimized for that specific scenario. Things like finding, downloading and subscribing to Podcasts is fantastic. Flipping through my CDs is finally more fun then it was back in High School when I used to go through my CD collection looking for something to listen to... connecting and managing an iPod is even better than it was before. Bliss.

Torres says it best in his blog:

"You know though, Apple is truly at the top of its game these days.  Even more so than a year ago - or 4+ years ago when I bought my first-gen 10GB iPod.  As much as I critique their lock-in model, they never cease to wow me with how much they're able to do, and the innovation and quality bar they set for others.  I applaud them."

If Apple would just support WMA and get HBO to offer their shows for download I'd be set, I'd never consider any other device or audio software for my desktop/laptop (still need Windows Media Center though). Zune better ship soon so that we can get started on v2 and of course v3. Apple has a massive head start and I'm not sure anyone will ever catch up (or that it matters).

I love this view...

So, lets see. It's a Nokia phone (that means it works), it's got a keyboard, it's going to sell for $150 on Cingular (my carrier) and it support push email from Exchange via Exchange ActiveSync, and is half an inch thick? Does anyone know if this bad boy sync's contacts and calendar as well? If so I need to get one of these so badly.

On July 26th I signed up for Carbonite. This photo is worth a thousand words. I managed to back up all the lossless WMA music I have ripped as well as all my RAW photos. Total amount backed up is 107202 MB (roughly 107 GB) over 46 days. I averaged about 2.3 GB a day uploaded, or 1.6 MB/minute.

The nice thing is that through the entire process I used my PC normally, Vonage seemed to work just fine, and I didn't notice anything special going on. For the record, I use Comcast at home and I get  3474 downstream / 349 upstream (kbps) to Reston, VA where Carbonite's Data Center is.

Anyway, I could have never reasonably backed up all my ripped music and maintained the data remotely, dito for my photos. Now that I've made it this far I need to finish organizing my photos so that I can upload all the jpegs as well.

If you want to try out Carbonite, use this link and you'll get a free month (and I'll get 3!).

Note: I don't recommend this be your only backup strategy. For one thing restoring over 100 GB will take a long time. You should have DVD or other archival media backups of your important photos, data etc (I create a DVD backup of photos regularly) and consider running your computer using some kind of RAID (I use RAID-1 for my desktop PC at home). RAID has saved my ass numerous times, and comes in really handy when one of your drives is about to go south (you can RMA the drive, pop the new drive in, watch happily as the RAID rebuilds itself and return the bad drive with about 5 min of total downtime). I have done this 4 times in the last 4 years. I'm also considering getting a > 1 Terrabyte RAID system from Infrant for my Video/TV/Audio/Pictures so that I don't have to have this data sitting on my desktop and Media Center.

This is simply a must have add-in for IE. For those of us that used the FireFox Find feature and were like "OMG", you can now have the same thing in IE. 

You can see in the screen shot below how this works:

[Source: Paul Thurrott's Internet Nexus]

Colibri happens to be my favorite launcher. I tried it a long time ago, but never used it because it wasn't possible to add your own search paths for applications. This meant that all my little PortableApps never appeared in Colibri's index of applications I could launch.

Well, there is a post over on the Colibri forums that details how you can add your own search paths. It's a bit light on details and Colibri currently lacks any UI to do this. However, it's easy enough.

Step 0: Download SQL Lite Database Browser

Step 1: Launch SQL Lite Database Browser

Step 2: Open Colibri's Filesystem database in %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Colibri\

Step 3: Browse to the folder table

Step 4: Add your own custom folder path to a new row in the folder table

Step 5: When you are done, you should see your new folder path

Step 6: Improve Colibri's Performance by navigating to the Settings and selecting Store user-defined items in database

Step 7: Quit and Relaunch Colibri.

So a few days ago Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2 was released. I was wondering why I should bother installing it. After all, I didn't think that Beta 1 was all that. Sean says it's a must have update. Um, ok, I usually upgrade to the latest and greatest, but I'm still curious what's new.

This reminds me... it appears that the Windows Media Player Team is the only team at Microsoft that isn't blogging about their product. So,I go and read the Read Me and it says:

What's new in this beta release compared to the first beta release of Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP?

The following list highlights some of the major changes since the first beta release of Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP.

• Fixing issues. Fixes have been made for issues that occurred in the first beta release of Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP.

• Additional online stores are now available. More online stores are available in this beta release of Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP. For a listing of online stores that are now available, see Availability of online stores.

• Changes to sharing digital media content. The functionality of Windows Media Connect is now integrated into Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2 for Windows XP as the new Media Sharing feature, which lets you enjoy the contents of your Windows Media Player library from anywhere in your home. If you have a home network (wired or wireless), you can use Windows Media Player 11 to stream the contents of your library to networked devices such as Xbox 360 or other digital media receivers. For more information, go to Digital Media at Home.

  Note that digital media sharing is targeted for home users; therefore, computers that are joined to a domain might experience issues when trying to share digital media.

Hmmm, lets look at the first bullet point. Fixing Issues? Hello, but could you be more non descriptive? Oh wait, it goes further to explain that "Fixes have been made for issues that occurred in the first beta release..."? Oh really? Like what fixes? How about the fact that it's pretty much still unusable and has a completely weird menu system that I can't figure out? Sometimes I wonder... if you take a look at a pretty radical User Experience change like the Ribbon in Office, you can tell that a lot of hard work, usability testing and iteration went into that product. In fact, Jensen Harris does an amazing job of making this all very transparent to all of us. Want to know or understand how or why WMP 11 acts and behaves the way that it does? Browse over to Microsoft.com and check out a multi-page read me with 3 bullet points explaining what is approx a few months of work by a team of folks.

Seriously, in the age of blogs, wikis, and the ability to have a 2 way discussion with end users, it seems odd to me that this product is being designed in a 1990s style process.

Personally, I'd love to read about how the team addressed feedback in the latest version.

I got mine last week. I love them. I keep them in my backpack and whenever I have loose papers they now find their way to their respective location.

The Traveling File Folders are a set of plastic manila folders such as "In", "To Home", "To Work" etc. They make shuttling around odds and ends convenient.

Yes, I'm a GTD geek.

I've been a member of Costco for like 10 years now. However, every so often they amaze me. No it's not the fact that they sell Chateaux Margaux in the wine section (for $350 a pop), or the fact that they sell practically every thing under the sun, but the fact that it's taken me 10 years to figure out that they sell contact lenses for CHEAP. You see, I stopped buying my lenses from the eye doctor the day that 1-800-CONTACTS hit the street. I thought I was saving some dough over the ridiculous prices that optometrists charge. Well, turns out I was saving chump change.

I wear Accuvue daily's. So basically I have to put a new pair in each day. I do this because I'm actually allergic to contact lenses (well not terribly, but if I wear a lens long enough, I get conjunctivitis, which is no fun). Not to mention cleaning lenses sux. So the dailys have been great. The downside is that they cost a bundle.

My optometrist charges $30 a box, so a 1 month supply runs $60 or $720 a year. 800-CONTACTS charges $25 a box or $600 a year, and a bit less if you buy a year supply. Costco charges $17 a box or $408 a year, with free shipping.

Once again, another Costco success story.