Author Archives: Ed Holloway

Ink Blog Plugin goes Gold!

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Version 1.0 of the Ink Blog Plugin for Windows Live Writer is now available!  You may download it free here

The self installer will overwrite any previous beta versions, just make sure WLW is not running when you install (or you may be required to reboot).

Most of the changes from Beta 2 to v1.0 were minor bug fixes, tweaks, and the October 1, 2006 expiration was removed.  (NOTE: If you are using Beta 2, please upgrade ASAP, since it will quit working soon).

There were two features I really wanted to get in, but couldn’t (A Call for Help):

  • Ability to show / hide recognized text on the blog pages
  • Ability to hyperlink inside the ink

I was able to get both of these working inside my test blog, but as soon as I tested on other blog service/software everything broke.  It seems that many blog packages strip out certain HTML, JS and CSS tags inside the post, presumably for security, which makes sense.  So finding the right combination that will work on the major blogs, without being stripped out, seems to be difficult.

I’m sure there is a HTML/CSS guru out there who could whip this up quickly, but unfortunately this is not an area of expertise for me (though it’s been a lot of fun learning!) and I did just not have the time to get it in V1.  If you are an expert, and would like to help here, please get in touch.  Since this is a free product, the only pay will be the joy of knowing thousands of people are using (or at least downloading) something you helped create.  You do not need to be a .NET or plugin programmer to help here, you would just need to supply the sample HTML etc.. in a text document, and I can integrate it into the code.

That’s all for now folks, please keep the great feedback and suggestions coming!

One Phone Number, for Life

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Grand Central, a new ‘find me anywhere’ phone service just launched in beta. 

The basic concept is that you get to pick a ‘main’ phone number (many area codes available), and it stays with you for life.

Then, via the web interface, you can enter home, work, mobile, VoIP, and any other numbers you have, and when someone calls the main number, it will route them to any of your numbers based on rules you select.  It will also prompt the caller for their name, and based on that you can take the call or send them to voicemail (heh heh).  I’ve used several similar services in the past,and Grand central seems much more feature packed.  This is a MUST have service for any mobile professional.

Free service includes 100 inbound minutes a month, but during beta everything is free.

GigaOM has more details , and better yet, just go sign up for a free beta account and play with it for yourself – get a number soon, while there are still plenty easy-to-remember ones to choose from!

 

Update- Their support is AWESOME.  I received email response from 2 feedback notes I sent within minutes.  The second was a bug I (thought I) found, and the support guy and engineering were emailing back and forth in near real time as they fixed the problem and updated me.  Turned out not to be a ‘bug’, but a just a minor usability issue, I’m sure they’ll fix soon.  Either way,  VERY Cool to get that kind of support!!(is this Customer Service 2.0??)

Vista, EVDO, and the Toshiba M400 Tablet PC

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I just installed Vista on a shiny new Toshiba M400 Tablet straight out of the box (I booted to XP once just to make sure the hardware was ok).  One of the items I have not seen addressed, and that I was concerned about was whether or not the internal Verizon WWAN EVDO card on the M400-S4032 would work under Vista.

I’m happy to report that using the XP driver for the Novatel Card, available from Toshiba here works just fine.  I have not used EVDO much yet (just 5 minutes to verify it works), but Vista does recognize the device using this driver, and makes a connection just fine.  One less Vista worry 🙂

 

[Update 9/24/06] – A few additional items, and answers to questions:

  • Make sure to activate the EVDO card under XP, and get it running there first
  • If you install Vista to a bare drive (not an XP upgrade) you will want to install a few utilities :
    • Toshiba 3G Power Manager, available on Restore DVD #4 at \comps2\Toshiba 3G RF Power Control Utility\Manual.  Just run the self extracting zip. (Note, if you have CDs instead of DVDs, I do not know what CD# they are on, but I would guess it is on one of the last ones in the set)
    • Latest Verizon Wireless Dialer App, available here
  • I’ve had some on and off issues using the VZW dialer app, but you can create a dial up connectoid (are they still called that in Vista?)  in the following format:
    • Phone #777
    • User: YourPhoneNumber@vzw.com (where YourPhoneNumber is your 10 digit phone number, assigned to your card) Note: some people may need to use @vzw3g.com instead of @vzw.com
    • Pass: vzw
    • If you google #777 and vzw, you’ll get a lot more information about setting this up.

 

Other Vista Resources for the Toshiba M400:

Wireless Airports, The Complete List

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I had the pleasure of a brief layover in the Phoenix Sky Harbor (PHX) on my way home from Seattle / Redmond (more on that trip soon) yesterday.  While I was standing in the SouthWest airlines cattle callboarding line,  I brought my X41 Tablet PC out of hibernate mode and started fumbling around for my EVDO card.  While I was doing this XP found some local access points, and I decided to take a look.

I fully expected to see the normal airport fare – a paid access point from TMobile, AT&T or Boingo, a few locked networks for who knows what, some security enabled airline clubs, and of course several honeypots claiming free access – what they will really do is sniff your traffic, and steal your identity. (NOTE: NEVER connect to a peer to peer network if you are not 100% sure what it is.  I constantly see these now in airports, hotels, and other public places – very dangerous).

I was surprised to see an open network named Sky-Harbor (the name of the airport), so I decided to connect.  Instead of being brought to a “Please enter Credit Card’ page, I was brought straight to my home page!  Perfect!  I was able to sync with Exchange, grab my RSS feeds, and be on my way before the boarding line even moved.  I travel A LOT, and this was only the second time I’ve bumped into a free WiFi point sponsored by the airport itself.  All other things being equal, I will now make sure to fly through Phoenix when I have the opportunity instead of another connection airport with $12.95 WiFi.

I did a quick search this morning, and found a great list on TravelPost.com that covers 164 US airports and their WiFi availability.  This page is a must bookmark for all Tablet (and I guess laptop too 🙂 ) travelers who like staying connected.

Of the top 20 US airports, only 5 have free access (Las Vegas, Phoenix, Orlando,Philadelphia, JFK – Jet Blue Terminal).  But quite a few of the smaller airports do have free access.  Way to go small airports, maybe the larger ones will get a clue soon!

Logitech Wireless DJ System now Shipping

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I just got word that the new Logitech Wireless DJ Music System is now available.  Retail price is $249.99 direct.

This seems like a great way to stream your digital music collection through your house.  It works by installing their Streampoint software on your PC, plugging in the base station, and then connecting a wireless remote station to your stereo.  You can then access any song, album or playlist on your PC via the graphical remote and stream it from the PC to your stereo.  Logitech also claims that the system will work with Internet radio and podcasts, but does not list comparable providers yet.

This system also uses it’s own wireless system, so you do not need to install or configure a WiFi router for use.  All in all, this seems like a nice system, and a real competitor to the $1000+ Sonos wireless music system.

Tivo HD Series 3 Ships!

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Just got an email from Tivo, looks like the Tivo 3 is now availableat the $800 price point I was fearing.

If you must have one, use the link below to get in their ‘preferred subscriber’ queue. (whatever that means)

Looks like an awesome box, but I think I’ll pass until the price falls some.

PC Mag has a nice review here

 

Letter from the Editor
I promised a “defining” moment last newsletter and that moment has arrived: The TiVo® Series3™ HD Digital Media Recorder is here!
Inside and out, no compromise was made to bring this perfect HD product to life. Not only is it TiVo, it’s also the world’s first and only DVR with THX® certification.
Are you ready to rock your home theater with the highest quality, high-definition entertainment experience possible? I’ll spill more of the exciting details below and in the Showcase video (find it in your living room on TiVo Central) so all of your questions are answered. You can also share the news with friends by sending them this youtube.com link. (How hot is the TiVo guy on the red carpet, by the way? And yes, I’m wearing exactly what I wore to the Emmy® awards. Pretend to be Joan and Melissa if you must.)
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go shopping: It’s finally time to get myself an HD television!
Series3ly yours,
Shanan
P.S. It’s a limited first run, so hurry—snag one of your own before the holiday madness! There’s been great (pent-up, is probably the word) demand for the TiVo Series3™ HD, so we want subscribers to have first dibs!

Microsoft Max, Part 2 – The Tablet PC (with video)

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As I mentioned in my last post, I was installing Max on my X41 Tablet to check out the ink.

Some quick observations:

  • Max is EXTREMENLY slow on my X41, basically unusable.  I’ll have to investigate why.
  • Ink is only available in the photo edit mode, not in slideshows or RSS news feeds
  • Only white ink and an eraser are available

All in all, not a great Tablet experience, but I’m sure it will get better, and at least they have started down the Tablet PC / Ink path with the product.

I’ll need to try some other WPF apps on the X41 and see if they are all slow, or if these issues are limited to Max.  My guess is the weak video power (Intel 915 chipset) on the X41 is the culprit, and most next generation WPF apps may behave this way.  Not good :-(.

 

UPDATE: Here is a  better quality video

Oh, and here is a quick screen cap I did showing some of the functionality of Max, including Ink on the Tablet PC.

Microsoft MAX

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There has been a lot of buzz this weekend about the new Microsoft Max (beta) product.  I hadn’t paid much attention to it for a while, but decided to grab the latest version and take a look for myself.  Like everyone else, my first impression is that MAX is beautiful!  This thing looks great!  Seeing something like this really excites me about the possibilities of future applications using Avalon  Windows Presentation Framework(WPF)  .NET 3.0.  I guess I need to dig out that WPF book I bought a while back, and see what a person with zero artistic abilites can do with it (Warning, it probably will not be pretty!)

For those of you who are not familiar with Max, it is primarily a photo application used for cataloging and sharing photos.  The most recent build has also added in a RSS reader that makes RSS feeds appear like a newspaper or magazine layout – very slick.  A photo app and RSS reader do not seem like congruent features in an application to me, but I am sure Microsoft will tie all this together somehow.

There have also been some posts speculating that Max may be a NewsGator killer.  While I don’t agree completely with that, I do have some thoughts:

  • I think getting RSS readers into the ‘mainstream’ can only help everyone in the blogsphere – from content creators (bloggers), to advertisers, to software providers.
  • Yes, many users may eschew advanced readers like NewsGator in favor of Max, but these users would probably have never heard of RSS before Max, let alone in the market for a RSS software purchase
  • Some Max users will get hooked on RSS, and will find they need more power than what Max has to offer – Boom! – new RSS client customers!
  • Existing NewsGator folks (like me) will think Max looks great, enjoy the variety, and user experience, but will not convert to Max for many reasons (as of the current Beta – if you are on the MS Max product team and reading this, consider them feature requests):
    • No synchronization between PCs.  If I read / delete 150 posts on a plane (or anywhere for that matter), I don’t want to have to delete them on my home and office desktop manually.  NewsGator handles this transparently.
    • While the Max UI is awesome, I believe in the long run it makes reading or quickly deleting posts more time consuming and cumbersome.  For speed, I like my single column in Outlook for quickly looking at posts, determining “Read or Delete?” and moving on.
    • Max does not provide the full post in it’s feed, just a quick teaser.  If you want to read the rest, it pops a browser window.  Reading blogs in a browser is just so 2004 🙂
  • At the end of the day, how many ‘average’ user will adopt RSS?  Every Windows PC for years has shipped with a News (NNTP) reader inside of Outlook Express.  How many folks outside your tech circle of friends know what a newsreader even is?
  • No import or export for OPML feeds, or any other settings for that matter.  I’m sure this will change in the final product, but it’s annoying for now.
  • And, no open API or SDK for Max.  I can think of 50 things I’d like to add to Max, with now way to do it.  Again, I’m sure this may change with the final product, but if Microsoft is serious about building an ecosystem around this product sooner is always better than later.

 

As I write this, Max is installing on my X-41 Tablet PC, I’ll be interested to see how the ink features work.  More soon.

Slinging to South Korea

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Just read an interesting article in the Buffalo Business Journal about a South Korean professor who is using my new favorite device , The SlingBoxto stream shows from Buffalo, NY to his home in South Korea.  Apparently he fell in love with American TV while in Buffalo, and convinced a colleague to install a SlingBox in their Buffalo home so he could use it once he got back to Korea.

Very cool!