AskLG

Today class was canceled so I became a homebody. Instead of going to class, I decided to pretend like I was in school and still work my ass off. Actually I just have a ton of work to catch up on and more will be piled on soon so I had to get some done.

I did take a nice long break today. I noticed that the Flip Camera has already taken 13% of the market according to Gizmodo. In case you were keeping tabs on me, the Flip Camera is definitely on my “to buy” list and will soon be purchased. I keep trying to justify not needing it but its just so awesome I might not be able to resist. In the event I do eventually buy it, I will be giving you an AskLG YouTube link to catch all of our random vids with this thing. If you feel like you can persuade me one way or the other, hit me up in the comments or on Twitter.

I also spent some time checking out the Webby nominees today. The Webby awards is an annual celebration of all things online. It could be websites, video, audio, whatever. Even if you don’t feel like voting, you should check them out to see the really cool things people are doing. I found some great sites myself I plan on using now that I didn’t know about before. Go take a visit at the Webby’s.

My buddy Khoa uploaded this hilarious video on Flickr as well. Check it out:

Woah I’m really late today.  It seems like my days are lasting longer and longer into the night.  Tonight I was helping a friend work on some beautiful PHP code.  Anyways, something miraculous happened today that will probably never happen again: I actually understood the majority of what my professor said.  Its a huge breakthrough for me.  Maybe even a small battle won between me and myself.  Damn, I really should have put money or something on it.

Remember yesterday when I mentioned how Psystar is building OpenMac computers?  Well people naturally become a little more interested in these whole Psystar people and dug up some information.  Gizmodo coincidently noticed that during the writing of one of their blog articles, the Psystar corporate address had changed online.  Now if that doesn’t scream legit, I just don’t know what does.  [Via Gizmodo]

In other news, Facebook has released a few social features from 3rd party sites. Currently it doesn’t support much but it does include my beloved Flickr.  At this point its in its infancy but is a step in the right direction.  Score one for Facebook.  Now if only it supported all my other favorite services.  I just really hope these updates maintain tasty and throttleable.  I’d hate to stop liking Facebook because I’m being spammed and can’t weed out the news I actually care about.  You can set this up by going to your profile and hitting “Import” in your mini-feed.  [Via The Facebook Blog]

Aside from taking a test and the Astros losing (again!?), today was a pretty good day. The pictures from tonight at the Astros game are up on Flickr (here). I do have a little to talk about tonight, but I’ll save it for a later time. It is 12:30 in Houston and I’m falling asleep. Apparently sleeping less than 4 hours is bad thing.

Instead of ranting, I’ll let other people do it for me. MacTips.org has a great preview of Pixelmator software. This image editing tool is nearly as powerful as Photoshop, but comes at a mere $60. Oh, did I mention its MUCH FASTER than photoshop? Pixelmator renders graphics on your graphics card instead of your CPU, which keeps from bogging down the ol’ processor. Nice right? Check out the video:

Also, thanks to PHP-Princess, I found this video from PikaPika. Its amazing. Its all done with a still camera (not video), flashlights, and genius:

I have used Flickr for a few years now. Eloy got me hooked and even convinced me that a Pro account is worth it. Today, TechCrunch broke a story (before it happened coincidently) about Flickr Video! The videos have the same features as normal pictures so you can tag them, group them, throw down some geo codes and so forth. The interface is very simple and clean. Only Pro users can upload videos though and these videos can only be 90 seconds long. I understand they are trying to cut down on copyrighted content being uploaded, but 90 seconds is severely limiting. Even though I am in love with Flickr, I’d probably use YouTube or Vimeo for video uploads. Tagging videos is cool, but when I read the article I was expecting much more innovation.

Also its nice to note that Philips is pulling their TVs out of the USA. According to Gizmodo, all “new” Philips TV’s will be produced by a 3rd party (Funai). Crap-tastic. I actually liked Philips. I guess now I’ll have to settle for some uber-sweet Samsung love.

As a personal note, I’m getting bored with twitter. Not many of my true friends use it (cause they’re lame!) so I’m left with a void in wasting time during the day. Hit me up! Tweet!

When my new MacBook Pro came in December, I decided to try something new. In this case, it was Flock. I have tried it out in its wee-bit early stages, but it wasn’t yet stable enough for daily use. Now that a few revisions have come down the pipe and I have used it for a few months, I can officially endorse its awesomeness. Well, granted awesomeness is even a word.

What is Flock?

For those not quite savvy on the what Flock is, lets talk about it. First and foremost, Flock is an internet browser. So it competes with Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari/Webkit. It is actually based on the same code Firefox is which means everything Firefox can do, so can Flock. So what’s the big deal? Flock takes a different angle on the web market scheme rather than just delivering you the internet page you oh so love. It wants you to be a social butterfly.  While it won’t completely help your unsocial self, It does have tools that link your browser quite conveniently with social services you might use already. These services are places such as: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Magnolia, Delicious, and so forth.

So, Here’s what I like:

1. Its just Firefox, but with a sexy face lift.

Generally speaking, anything you can do in Firefox can also be achieved in Flock. That includes Extensions/Add-Ons, live bookmarking, and whatever else you do. Tapping into all those Firefox Extensions was huge for Flock.  The Flock community also builds other extensions just for Flock so it has two sources of add-on glory.  Here’s a look at the user interface:

2. Its really easy to Get Started

You have all this stuff setup on you old browser and you’re too lazy to set it up again. Thats OK, Flock imports all that junk on installation. At least it does Firefox (haven’t tried any others).  Yes, Flock does import all extensions as well.  See:

3. Its social!

You can easily hook up with most social sites. They are introduced in an unobtrusive manner so its not annoying/counter productive. I’ve actually found myself spending less time on these sites since Flock makes using these quite efficient. Supported Services are: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Photobucket, Piczo, Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, Typepad, Wordpress, Xanga, Delicious, and Magnolia. MySpace support is in the works for all those wondering. Setting up these services involves (in most cases) just visiting the website and logging in.  Once logged in, Flock recognizes the site and asks permission to link the browser with that account.  When you log out and log back in once more, it is completely setup.  Simple, indeed.

4. Searching made easy.

Just like most browsers these days, Flock has a miniature search box to the right of the address box. It also allows you to search from any site that has a search box. For example, I visited YouTube and clicked on the “Add Search” button. Now anytime I want to search for a Video instead of going to Google/Yahoo, I can use YouTube. I also setup Wikipedia about a month ago. Pretty much any search box can be used, so Flock is quite tailorable to your interests which makes finding what you want much quicker.  This is what was resulting when I searched for Flock.  Obviously, you can search any of search engine installed as well as view pages you have previously visited.

5. Flock handles media well. Very well.

I admit this probably goes under the 3rd point, but the media stuff is cool enough to have its own section. I can view any of my friends images from Facebook, Flickr and such without actually visiting those websites. It comes in a nice little banner across the top of the page which is scroll-able and search-able. This allows me to quickly find any image I’m looking for. Once found, I can click on it to visit the site hosting it. Flock also provides ways to upload your images. Its very easy to do, completely tag-able, and just plain nice.  Speaking of images, there is a built in web clipboard.  You can drag any image, text or link to the clipboard for convenient safekeeping or later use.  Here is the search-able, configurable media bar:

There must be a catch. What’s wrong with it?

Yes, Flock is very powerful indeed but it has some flaws. First, the blog writer doesn’t work well on AskLG. I have a self-hosted Wordpress blog. It does correctly post, but tags are improperly posted. This makes it unusable for my purposes. Sometimes, Flock alerts me up updates when those updates aren’t there. That isn’t a very big issue though, but I’m a perfectionist so I’ll complain about it. Finally, I loathe the RSS reader. Maybe I’m spoiled using Google Reader, but Flock’s RSS reader is out of date. It would be nice if Flock could link up with some popular readers to provide content through them. That idea is probably out of the realm of Flock’s powers though, since most haven’t released an API as of yet.

But you still like it?

Overall I love Flock. I use it daily. I will continue to use it, and I recommend you start. Just visit Flock.com, download, and enjoy.  When you do, be sure to hit me up on Twitter or Flickr or something of that sort. Its time to be social people, join the community. 

Has anyone ever mentioned how they love Fridays? For me, its normally a good day. I have Computer Security which is typically interesting. Its also an arm day at the gym so I get to flex and feel proud when I can barely feel the guns any more. On top of that, its an ab day. I love working on abs and getting some hardcore multi-mile cardio in. Hoo-rah! That didn’t exactly happen today though. I went to class, like always. Today we talked about DES, which is a quite boring encryption algorithm. Yawn, I won’t bore you with the details. After class, I was asked to give a tour to my alumni. I felt its nice to give back, so I agreed. An hour after class, they arrive to meet with another grad student’s advisor. Then we took them out to get the grand tour. After some nice conversation and a few hours of time passing, they left. At that point, I was starving so I opted to not work out (blasphemy!). Ah well, at least there was a good Las Vegas on tonight.

In other news, I’ve been a long time supporter of Yahoo! Inc. Eloy got me hooked on the lovely photo tool called Flickr. I am also a del.icio.us user (sparingly) and an early adopter of KickStart. Why the Yahoo love today? Well, according to the NYTimes (and everyone else), Microsoft has offered a whopping $44.6 Billion to Yahoo for ownership (roughly $31 per share). We should all start jumping for joy right? Wrong (unless you like failed online businesses). Microsoft buying Yahoo! is admittance of Microsoft’s faltering web market. It shows they have finally given up competing with Yahoo!, AOL, and Google. Fine, Great, even monopolies need help too. If you can’t beat them, buy them up right? The problem is, people actually like Yahoo (like myself). Seriously. A Microsoft buyout will potentially degrade Yahoo’s products and kill all the creative juices that made Yahoo innovative in the first place.

With this news, are their alternatives for the ever popular Flickr, del.icio.us, and Upcoming? Lets start with Flickr. Google offers a photo service called Picasa Web Album. Aside from not having a fully featured toolset available for Mac users (grr!), Picasa just doesn’t have the pizazz that Flickr does. Here’s my sample album so you can see how it looks and feels. It seems Google forces you to create albums which is great for organization, but not so great for a quick look at the full image set. Also there isn’t a preview to see what’s images are coming up next (like Flickr’s PhotoStream feature). Just a little tidbit I missed. Tagging is still available which is really really nice. Its also quite easy to geotag images base off of the albums. Its a nice little image album program, but nowhere near as robust as Flickr. Another great online image app is SmugMug. I don’t have an account, but I hear tagging and organization is easy there as well. The downside is the roughly $40/yr price tag. Ouch!

Next up is social bookmarking from del.icio.us. There are again, a few options to replace it. First and foremost, Google has a mini-app in their igoogle (or personal homepage suite) that allows you to save bookmarks and retrieve them from anywhere. Each bookmark is tag-able and search-able. The problem (or maybe not for you) is that none of my friends can see the bookmarks. So it makes it just that much harder to share cool stuff with others. Another wannabe del.icio.us replacement is Spurl. It falls under similar sharing issues with Google Bookmarks. So, these do patch the problem well but aren’t really del.icio.us replacements.

Finally, Upcoming is a great event site broadcasting parties, conferences, and all other events going on in your area. Eventful is another solution to this problem. In this case, its actually a good solution. They both cover a broad range of events, are search-able, and can limit events based on a timetable (say like the next 7 days or the next month). The only advantage Upcoming has over Eventful by allowing users to proclaim their attendance. This could potentially show if the event is going to be a bust or not. Of course this is relative to all the Yahoo! users that actually use Upcoming and not representative of the event as a whole, so this feature can be quite easily forgotten.

Overall, there are many alternatives to these great Yahoo apps, but not many are as robust. Each have their own disadvantages of use (except maybe Eventful) when compared to the Yahoo alternative. What’s the verdict? Either better apps need to be produced, or we need to fight for our Yahoo goodness. I personally prefer to fight for Yahoo (especially since I paid them for Flickr Pro already this year) to live Microsoft free. The choice, is yours my friends.