Gadgetopia

Now, I realize that Hulu got lot of crap for being a YouTube ripoff, and I know NBC got a lot of crap for pulling all its stuff off every video sharing site in the world, but…

Hulu is awesome. Seriously. I don’t know how I ended up there today, but I think I’m in love.

Here are all the things I watched today:

• Saturday Night Live clips, including this one with Steve Martin that could solve the American financial crisis if everyone just put it into practice.

• An episode of 30 Rock that I missed.

• An episode of Miami Vice. They have the first two seasons — the first two seasons!! (True story — if Isabella had been a boy, he was gonna be named “Sonny.” I’m not kidding.)

• The pilot episode of Stacked, a sitcom with Pamela Anderson that really shouldn’t have been canceled — it was genuinely funny.

In exchange for this, my show stopped every 10 minutes or so for a commercial that lasted all of about 20 seconds. The timeline on the Flash Player even has little dots on it that let you know when it’s going to break. (You can’t skip them — the controls disappear during the ad, and an ad plays if you move the scrub bar past a dot.)

Picture quality was good, ad intrusion was acceptable, content selection was good and — I’m assuming — just going to get better.

As much as I want to join the “Let’s Bash Big Media” party on this one, I’m still looking for a downside.

definr - incredibly fast dictionary: This dictionary seems pre-occupied with speed. I was thinking, “Um, who cares? Who goes to a dictionary for speed?”

Then I tried it, and it really is crazy fast. It’s like the results are there before you hit the Enter key. It’s kind of eerie.

But, still, who goes to a dictionary for speed? File under “oddly interesting.”

Glassbooth: According to this site, I’m solidly a Democrat, which I find a little odd, I guess.

glassbooth connects you to the presidential candidate that represents your beliefs the best.

It’s a very well-done and usable survey that attempts to match you up to a presidential candidate that represents your interests. Apparently, Dennis Kucinich is my man, followed closely by Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd.

The interface is great, and when it shows you results, it will show you why. You can pick any candidate and any issue, and it will explain why you match or do not match their views, supported by quotes, links, and video. It’s impressive.

Boing Boing gets a semi-extreme makeover: Boing Boing made some changes this morning.

[…] the blog has reinstated comments along with a redesign that went into effect on Tuesday morning. Additionally, there’s a new Boing Boing Gadgets vertical helmed by former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson.

But I’m still beating both Cory and Mark over at the Toshiba Battle Royale.

Toshiba Battle Royale: FM and Toshiba have put together something kind of cool: the Battle Royale.

The gist is that the Ninja poses a question, and a bunch of A-list bloggers (and, uh, me too) write answers. You guys get to vote on which is the best answer.

I’ll make it easy for you: my answer is always best. Go vote for me. This week’s question is:

What technology from TV, movies or books would you most like to see become a reality?

My answer is obvious if you’ve been hanging out here for a while.

Update: I just read through them all. Holy cow, teleportation is a really common theme, isn’t it? Four of the official entries picked it (including me), and two of the Toshiba sidebar quotes.

One of the things about Google Maps that I never cared for was that the route it gives you when you ask directions isn’t always the route I want to go. So I’d usually use it along with a couple of other resources to plan a trip.

I just discovered a new trick though; you can now customize your route (caution: cheezy intro video). Add as many stops or side trips to your route trip as you like by clicking on the path, or click & drag the path to take a different route altogether. After you modify your route, the total distance and estimated driving time is updated — the system is apparently smart enough to take into account slower speeds on secondary highways and having to slow down in smaller towns; the shorter route isn’t always the fastest. But neither is the more interesting route.

Very neat feature. Very intuitive and functional. Why can’t all software be that slick?

I’m happily married with three kids, but I don’t think it’s inappropriate to say that Morgan Webb is crazy hot. Since I’m not a gamer, I have no reason to watch her on X-Play, so I’m happy to say that she’s back with WebbAlert, a video blog.

Now, a short disclaimer: Blend designed Morgan’s site, so I’m a little biased (no, I didn’t get to meet her…). Regardless of bias, it’s still pretty cool. It’s a daily roundup of what’s going on in the blogosphere. I just watched the first episode, and it was pretty enjoyable. It’s not hard to watch Morgan talk.

Now, Morgan is perhaps not as well-known in the business world as Guy Kawasaki. But I think our esteemed rivals over at Electric Pulp will agree that she looks better in a swimsuit. Point to us.

When was a pre-teen living in Pinole, California, my best friend in the world was Joey Markert. We were inseparable. We went through all the stages together — Stars Wars action figures, then G.I. Joe, then role-playing games, and finally — suddenly — girls. (You can imagine how much success we had with that last one…)

I eventually moved away to beautiful South Dakota, and Joey and I lost touch. With the help of the Net, we reconnected about 10 years ago, drifted apart again, then re-reconnected about three years ago.

To my amazement, Joey and I were still doing the same things. I was running Blend, and Joe was running Gamehelper, a Web site devoted to all things gaming. I think its remarkable that Joey and I never drifted too far apart in terms of interest.

For his part, Joey has been around Gadgetopia. Here’s a picture of me, Joey, and All-Pro defesive end D’Marco Farr playing D & D back in the day. And this post about the role playing game-geek connection was based on many a late night gaming session around Joey’s kitchen table.

Anyway, Gamehelper has just gone through a huge redesign, and it’s become pretty kick-a**. I don’t have much time for gaming besides, ahem, the occasional three-hour PGR3 sessions on my kid’s XBox360, but I still find Gamehelper interesting as all get out. Regardless, I’ll never understand rock band video games. Ever.

Guitar Hero? Seriously?

Over four years ago, I came up with an idea: a home intranet. I said this:

Do you think there would ever be a market for home intranet software? There’s so much to keep track of within my own family — people we know, appointments, lists for every such thing, etc. If intranets handle business management, why couldn’t they be adapted to a family?

I’m happy to report that someone has actually done this. I knew that Matt and Brian were working on MyHomepoint, but I thought it was just a calendar. It’s not, and the net result is exactly the “home intranet” I was talking about four years ago.

There’s a calendar of course, but there are also tasks, contacts, lists, a home inventory, etc. The entire concept is wrapped around the members of your family, even the pets.

The lists thing would come in handy for me. So many times, I think there’s stuff I need to write down somewhere so my wife and I will be able to find it someday.

Last week it was paint color codes — I was throwing away a bunch of old paint cans that we used to paint the inside of our house seven years ago. I kept thinking that I should write down the color codes so I have them handy if I ever have to repaint anything. I did, but they’re just on a piece of paper hanging on the fridge, and that ain’t going to last long.

(I actually tried a wiki to manage this stuff once. I can’t remember what happened to that, which just goes to prove that I shouldn’t trust my wasteland of a computer with anything.)

While a family intranet is a neat concept, I’m sitting here and wondering what separates this from a standard intranet app? I like the idea of the family metaphor, but I hope these guys made the family part of it extractable, because it would be a heck or a little intranet on its own, frankly.

Already use a calendar? That’s cool — MyHomepoint has iCal integration. You can give it a URL and it will import. I couldn’t figure out how to schedule this, which would be handy.

Here’s something else I’d like to see — a log. This would be kind of like a blog, and a lot like their lists/notes system, but in chronological format. For instance, we’re involved in a situation with our insurance company right now that involves a lot of phone calls and legwork. It’d be nice to have a place to track all this, so that when Annie or I call someone, or someone calls us, we have a spot to log what was said and when. It could be a little running record of the massive pain in the rear this situation has been.

All that’s really left here is for me to sue these guys for taking my idea. (Go ahead, laugh, but remember that Microsoft dropped Bob for good reason — my high-powered lawyers, yo.)

The Wife was having e-mail troubles a while back, so I dove into Entourage one night to see what the problem was. After a simple fix, incoming mail started flowing again. Flowing to the tune of 80 new messages! I thought for sure that it was all spam, and her junk filter would also need some tweaking, but looking at the inbox, most of the messages were coming from the same source — FlyLady.net — and she wasn’t at all surprised at how many there were.

FlyLady is a bit of a difficult concept to wrap your mind around; the Wife says it’s more than a resource website, it’s an entire program that’s teaching her new and better ways of approching the chores she needs to do, but doesn’t necessarily enjoy doing. Kind of a Getting Things Done program for homemakers. One of the keys to the program is that you can do anything, no matter how unpleasant, for 15 minutes. So if you give yourself 15 minutes a day to do those nasty things, it’s not so bad. Daily routines are also a big deal on FlyLady; shining the kitchen sink before bedtime is one of the biggies.

A friend of hers turned her on to the site a while back, and she had mentioned it to me from time to time, but I never really checked it out until I saw the glut of stuff in her inbox. I’m now a subscriber too — they really have some great advice to offer that extends to all areas of life, but you do have to weed through a bit of fluff to get to it.

The website is only the tip of the iceberg; 15-20 email messages are sent out daily to the FlyLady mailing list (or “Mentoring Program”). Subscribers are told to just delete unread messages if they get behind, and then pick up with the current messages; “You are not behind - you are just getting started!”

Thanks to LifeHacker for reminding me that I was going to write this post.

Apple gets a lot of good press (well deserved good press) for the slick design of the Apple Stores and the Genius Bars at each of the stores. But try as they might, the geniuses that man the Genius Bars aren’t always as well informed as they ought to be and don’t always give the best advice, so some customers walk away less than satisfied.

ungeni.us is a blog run by “JC”, who put in four years as an Apple Genius, and shares some of the good and bad about the Genius Bars and Mother Apple. Interesting insights for the Apple users, as well as some ammo for those who love to hate Apple (you know who you are.)

A Social Experiment In Pain/Prevention: So far, good is prevailing unanimously

For the next three months I will be wearing a dog obedience shock collar around my neck. During this period you have the choice to shock me or prevent a shock from occurring. There are four levels of intensity to choose from, each progressively more painful. The price is represented by the Intensity level, $1-4.

gotAPI.com :: Reference Lookup Service: Gosh, this looks handy. API reference for scads of languages.

As we (in the US) take a day off today to celebrate Memorial Day, I thought it appropriate to spend the day in remembrance of the soldiers, sailors and airmen that have given all to ensure the freedom we enjoy, and all too often take for granted. It’s all too easy to use the day as just another day off, but the intent of the holiday goes much deeper.

remember.gov is a great place to learn of the sacrifices that have been made throughout the history of our country.

Remember to observe The National Moment of Remembrance at 3 PM local time today.

Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang! The Premier James Bond Web Site: This is a small tribute to the end of a site I helped build. Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was — at one time — the most amazing James Bond site ever. I was one of the four founding editors.

It’s never easy letting go of something you care deeply about, but after a lot of difficult soul-searching we’ve all come to realize that we simply don’t have the time or resources to keep this site flourishing as it should. To that end, we’ve reluctantly decided to shut down operations at MKKBB (at least as we’ve known it to date) and give the old girl a graceful exit.

Over the years we:

• Had the author of the James Bond novels stay with one of our editors will he researched his next book.
• Interviewed a five-time James Bond director
• Camped someone out on the banks of the Thames while they filmed the teaser sequence from The World is Not Enough (we found out later that the first unit was checking our site daily for updates on what the second unit was shooting).
• Got linked to from jamesbond.com — they just decided that we were covering the news better than they were.
• Maintained and greatly expanded the official James Bond Usenet FAQ.
• Gave away an HP Journada — the PDA thingamjig from The World is Not Enough. PDAs were wicked cool back then.
• Auctioned off a copy of Playboy signed by Raymond Benson — the author of the novels — Hugh Hefner, and the two playmates who appeared in a Bond short story within it.

This site was the first cool thing I ever did on the Internet, and I think it set the tone for everything I’ve done on the Net since then. It’s sad to see it go, but we all…grew up. We got married, had kids, got “real” jobs. I can’t believe it’s been 10 years since it all started.

So, David, Panos, Ajay, and James — thanks for all the memories.

Fifty Ways to Take Notes: Here’s a fairly insane list of ways to take quick notes online. I still use Yahoo Notepad, but I need to start using my company wiki.

[…] when it comes to note taking, I personally look for quick and simple. If I have something on my mind, I don’t want to go through some advanced system and climb a mountain just to save a note for myself. There won’t be all the note taking tools out there on my list, but ones that I feel get the job done well.

Seriously, though, there are services here I never knew existed.

popurls.com: Although the last thing we need is another aggregator, we really do need to aggregate the aggregators.

PopURLs puts everything from the big link sites on one page — Digg, Reddit, Furl, etc. It’s quite good.

Solution Watch: This is just a great blog. It’s full of in-depth reviews of really cool new Web tools and services.

Solution Watch surveys the bleeding-edge of the productivity world, reviewing and providing in-depth walkthroughs of today’s best services all day and every day.

The posting volume is low — perhaps three or four a week (certainly not the “every day” the above quote claims), but the reviews are deeper than what you get in most places.

There are very few blogs that I get excited about when Bloglines tells me there’s a new post. Solution Watch is one of those few blogs.

Not sure if everybody knows this, but it’s pretty important.

AnnualCreditReport.com processes requests for free credit file disclosures (commonly called credit reports). Under the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACT Act) consumers can request and obtain a free credit report once every 12 months from each of the three nationwide consumer credit reporting companies. AnnualCreditReport.com provides consumers with the secure means to do so.

AnnualCreditReport.com is the only service authorized by Equifax, Experian and TransUnion for this purpose.

This is not a scam. This is the real deal. I got mine just now and it works great.

Go to the website and get your Credit Report from all 3 agencies.

Federated Media/Tech: FM Publshing has released their “metablog” for technology, which aggregates posts from all the technology blogs in their networks: us, GigaOm, STREETTech, SearchBlog, Boing Boing, TechDirt, Google Blogoscoped, TechCrunch, 43 Folders, etc.