• Build iPhone-style icons in Photoshop with IconBuilder
  Tutorial for creating glassy iPhone-style buttons in Photoshop
  (tags: photoshop HOWTO)

Anyone can now register at my2unz.com, although the site is still in beta and not feature complete. I’ve finalized the database structure and cleaned up a lot of stuff. Uploading iTunes playlists & exported libraries should be a lot more reliable now.

Other site features include music discussion forums, buddy lists, and private messages, I plan to add a way to view all tracks owned by a member, and rate tracks & artists by popularity.

• The External Editor Protocol
  If I have time I may do something with this to allow photoshop to work as an external editor in Fetch
  (tags: mac programming)

There has been a lot of kvetching about Google Reader’s shared items feature. People say that it ’sends their shared items sent to people in their mailbox’, which isn’t true. You need to explicitly add friends to Reader so you can see their shared items.

Uploaded with Skitch!

When you add someone to your friend list, you see their shared items in your feed list – that’s all.

Uploaded with Skitch!

Google Reader has always allowed you to share items. You have full control over which items you share and whether your shared items are public. I don’t know about everyone else but when it says your shared items are publicly accessible it means just that — everyone is able to see it. I always assumed I was sharing those items with the world.

Uploaded with Skitch!

Furthermore, not all of your items are publicly visible. You control the visibility of each tag, and only ’shared items’ defaults to public.

Uploaded with Skitch!

Articles end up in your shared items only if you explicitly share them by clicking the ’share’ icon on that item.

Uploaded with Skitch!

This isn’t a privacy violation. It’s a neat way to spread news.

If you read Daniel Brusilovsky’s blog, you may have seen his announcement earlier today of a new podcast, Teens in Tech. This is the first podcast hosted at my new network, Techblast.tv.

Techblast.tv uses Wordpress MU with several plugins and themes optimized for podcasting. I hope to add more podcasts and line up sponsors in the next few months.

Sez Meowy Christmas!

After using the XO laptop for a few days, my opinion of it is mixed. On the plus side, it’s small, lightweight, easy for kids to use, and seems to be a good way to help kids learn programming. It’s a real Linux system (kernel 2.6.9) and it looks like it will run GCC-built x86 binaries from a standard Linux system.

However, it has some very serious flaws. The battery life is worse than my MacBook Pro. After about 20 minutes, the battery is 75% drained. This doesn’t look good for a laptop meant to be used places where power is scarce.

The security is very lax – in the terminal you can simply type ’su’ with no password and you have root access! It’s also very slow. It takes a while to launch an activity, which is surprising since everything is in flash memory so it should load very quickly. The UI also feels kind of sluggish.

The wireless connectivity is terrible. I haven’t been able to connect reliably to any of my networks, even sharing from my mini as an open network without encryption. If I have such difficulty connecting, how do they expect a kid somewhere with limited connectivity to get online?

Hopefully a software update will fix some of these issues.

I decided to try out Lijit, which Scoble briefly mentioned and I’m impressed. I just had to enter my blog URL and usual nickname and it automatically located my profiles at Flickr, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Digg and others I had forgotten about completely such as ma.gnolia & StumbleUpon. It also added my entire blogroll as my network, with all of their content.

The result is the search ‘wijit’ you see in the sidebar of this page. It can search all of my content on all sites, as well as content generated by my network.

The Mac world has its share of douchebags, mostly journalists like Rob Enderle who still take pleasure in predicting Apple’s demise. One waste of protoplasm eclipses all of them, and he’s one of us: the dickwad at Rixstep. I’ve avoided reading his site until recently and I regret reading it.

The guy is upset because Mac OS X isn’t a “pure” port of NextStep, so he rants against every piece of Mac software.

Last week he posted a scathing “review” of MarsEdit that made Andy Ihnatko’s review look like a lovefest. His review doesn’t even mention using the software – he complains about the presence of a .Trashes directory on the DMG image and TIFF images in the application that waste a whopping 752K of disk space!

He blames every software mishap (such as QuickBook’s desktop overwriting bug) on Apple’s incompetence, in one of his typical rants:

Steve Jobs came back to Cupertino triumphant. Not only did he get to finally run his own company but he came with the world’s most fantastic system in his suitcase. A system the Grade A Idiots already ensconced in Cupertino have done their best to destroy.

Not that they mean to destroy it of course: they’re trying to make it better. But somewhere between their staggering incompetence and their unparalleled arrogance these graybeards manage to screw up in astronomical proportions time and again.

The QuickBooks disaster is not the first and won’t be the last. The ‘massive data loss’ fiasco before it wasn’t the first either. This has been going on for years – ever since OPENSTEP wasn’t allowed out the door in early 1997 and the Grade A Idiots decided to hold it back for five years and ‘improve’ it.

Now they have their improvements and the whole world is laughing at them.

This was the holiday market – and their sales are going to be a disaster. This was their walkover – and they blew it. Miserably. Worse than any other company has ever done.

There’s never been an IT company with such an inaccessible head start stumble and fall so bad and totally ruin their chances. The worst of it is a great many people may return to Microsoft – and that’s a another disaster of astronomical proportions.

Yesterday he topped himself by ripping off content directly from Stepwise and misquoting it to support his gripe about Apple’s “bait & switch”.

Scott Anguish removed his content in protest:

Although it makes me sick to have to do so, I have temporarily pulled the main page of Stepwise off-line. The rest will likely go this weekend.

The “Rixstep” site has stolen a large chunk of my WWDC 1999 coverage and republished it without permission. deleted

Frankly, I can’t take the stress of fighting this with “Rixstep”, it makes me ill just thinking about it.

Let me just state…

I did not write this for him.

I did not write this for him to steal and misrepresent.

I do not agree that we were ‘lead down the garden path’, nor that there was a bait and switch.

My copyright has been violated by his reproduction. But given the track record, I see no way to stop him from doing this. He’s published incorrect information about me before.

I only hope that the long-time readers of Stepwise will recognize that this is not my feelings on the matter, and that my co-workers also understand this.

More blog coverage at bynkii.com.

I got a developer key for my XO laptop, which enables booting into Open Firmware command mode and running unsigned development builds of the OS.

As my readers know, my XO laptop arrived two days ago. However, I received this email a few minutes ago:

Your XO laptop is on its way.

We’re happy to inform you that your XO laptop has shipped. In order to help you get the most out of your experience with the XO and One Laptop per Child (OLPC), here are some important links. Please save this email for reference.

To find out everything you need to know to get started with your XO laptop, please click here or visit www.laptopgiving.org/start.

Your order reference number: XXXXXXXX

You can track your shipment on the FedEx web site http://www.fedex.com/Tracking

Your FedEx tracking number: 999999999999999

If your laptop is a gift for a child, click here to download a gift card that explains that a child in the developing world will receive an XO laptop, too, as part of this program.

For Terms and Conditions of the Give One Get One initiative, click here.

To learn more about T-Mobile USA’s offer to provide one year of complimentary access to T-Mobile HotSpot, click here. Please note that to activate this offer, you will need to enter your Give One Get One order reference number: XXXXXXXX.

From all of us at OLPC, thank you for your participation in Give One Get One. Your gift will help give children around the globe amazing, new opportunities to grow, explore, learn and express themselves.

We hope you enjoy your XO laptop!

OLPC Foundation

P.O. Box 425087

Cambridge, MA 02142

• Where rap is a peacemaker
  Interesting article by Sean Piccoli about the hip-hop scene in Marseille, France
  (tags: music)

Reason.com: BBC Radio 1’s decision to remove the word “faggot” from the classic Christmas song Fairytale of New York angered their listeners until they finally reversed their decision.

It may have been done with the most progressive of intentions, but BBC Radio 1’s decision to censor a lyric from Kirsty MacColl and Shane McGowan’s Christmas standard Fairytale of New York looks rather to have backfired this morning.

A decision by Radio 1 chiefs has meant that Fairytale, a ballad apparently conducted between two rowing drunks, has been edited so as to obscure the lines “You cheap lousy faggot” and “an old slut on junk”, a decision that was criticised this morning by MacColl’s own mother.

The song had been played unedited for 20 years.

Pogues lyricist and singer Shane McGowen was asked to comment, but his answer was completely incoherent.

(via Metafilter)

• Prius Projects
  Lots of Prius modifications & hacks.
  (tags: prius hacks)
• One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Getting Started
  The XO Laptop ships without any manuals. A sheet directs you to this page to get started.
  (tags: OLPC laptop)

Late this afternoon, UPS left a surprisingly small & heavy box at my door. It was my OLPC laptop! There are no printed manuals; instead a note directs you to a getting started page.

The laptop is much smaller than I expected. The keyboard is a little too small for adult hands to use it comfortably. The screen is very readable, despite the size. It looks like it would be a nice ebook reader for long flights.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to connect it to my home network, since it doesn’t support WPA (an update in early 2008 is supposed to ad WPA support, however). I’m now setting up a computer to computer network on my Mac Mini so I can connect it.

I posted a full gallery here.

This morning I discovered a new Gmail feature I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere yet. The More Actions menu has a new item, “Filter messsages like these”. It takes you straight to the Create Filter screen with the search criteria filled in based on the selected messages.

That was one of my favorite features of Eudora, so it was a welcome addition for me.

Slashdot reports that a student has been given detention for using Firefox to do his classwork. The student was in class, working on an assignment that necessitated using a browser. The teacher instructed him to stop using Firefox and to do his classwork, to which the student responded that he was doing his classwork using a ‘better’ browser (it is unclear whether the computer was the student’s own computer or not). The clueless teacher (who called the rogue program ‘Firefox.exe’) ordered him to detention.

Update: It’s a hoax.

photo.jpg, originally uploaded by mike3k.

This polydactyl cat (6 toes on each paw) has been hanging around here and terrorizing the other cats. He often comes to my door and howls loudly. Today I caught him spraying outside my window. He isn’t fixed and seems to be wild.

I decided to give Google Reader another chance and try the new features like friends, but after less than a day I went back to NetNewsWire.

I find that I can get through the news a lot faster in NetNewsWire. One big reason is that I have full control over when it gets updated. I have one group, Favorites, that gets updated every hour. The rest of the feeds I only update manually. I put feeds that I need to keep up with constantly, such as software updates and warnings from FeedBurner in the favorites group so I get notified right away.

Google Reader, on the other hand, refreshes continuously. I often find new items before I finish reading the last update.

One of Google Reader’s most popular features (and Scoble’s favorite) is shared items. I can do the same with NetNewsWire by adding an item to my clippings, which are automatically shared here.

About a year ago, two kids named Brandon and Erik had a podcast called Mr. Mac Geek, which was usually fairly interesting. As often happens, they became involved with other products and stopped updating their podcast.

I never bothered unsubscribing and it recently came back to life. However, it now appears to be owned by someone else and is full of poorly written misinformation and FUD, such as claims that Macs are plagued by spyware.