Flotsam & Jetsam » Technology

Roots of American Music

Zeke — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 18:11:20 +0000

I’ve always been a big fan of early American Music – Blues, gospel, country, jazz & folk. Oftentimes, finding recordings or collections of music other than stuff that’s already made it to the mainstream can be difficult. Back in 2002 I came across an amazing collection called “Goodbye, Babylon” which was a collection of Gospel songs from the Rural South. Since then, Dust-to-Digital, the company that released the collection, has continued to seek out old recordings and collections that have been lost or forgotten and is slowly releasing them to the public. They’re a good example to the music industry as a whole of a model that works – give people a good product that they’d be willing to pay for and, guess what, they’ll actually pay for it.

If you like hearing music from the Roots of US music, I highly recommend their stuff:

http://dust-digital.com/index.htm

Email syncing issue

Zeke — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:28:28 +0000

Like a lot of connected tech people, I have multiple email accounts, multiple computers and multiple locations from which I connect to and read my email. The problem is that there is no good way to keep all the activity you do on those various places synced up. For instance, I read and delete a bunch of mail while sitting at my laptop downstairs. Last thing I want to do is repeat the same thing on my machine at work and my machine upstairs. When I send mail from upstairs, I want the same message to be in my sent mailbox downstairs. In theory, IMAP should solve this problem, but I have yet to find a good, stable IMAP client that doesn’t freak out when the ‘net connection is lost. *sigh* Searching the web I’ve come across a couple of tools that claim to solve the problem for a slight fee. In the not too distant future I’m gonna check these things out and see how they fare.

Syncing.net claims to be able to sync your inboxes even through a NAT or firewall
http://www.syncing.net/en/home.html

BeInSync claims to be able to sync your inbox and specified folders on your desktop with each other.
http://www.beinsync.com/

Anyone have any thoughts or experience using any of these tools? Know of any others?

Verizon DSL

Zeke — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:52:01 +0000

Ah, Verizon. The company we love to hate.

I’ve had Verizon DSL for near on 9 years now. I got it when I lived in Morningside Heights and they first started offering it in NYC, then moved the service to Brooklyn when I graduated from school, then moved it to Astoria when I bought my house. Throughout that time I’ve had long bouts of good service followed by long (but shorter) bouts of bad service. This last long bout (for poor internet service that is) has lasted about a month. Every couple of days my download speed – which should be 3mb / sec down falls to, oh, 3KB / sec and stays that way for several hours, or days, depending on how long it takes me to get through the myriad of drones Verizon has manning their tech support lines and convincing them that the problem isn’t the fact that I’m not running virus protection, but that they have a problem in their switch. In the past month I’ve spoken to support people in India, Mexico, the Philipines and somewhere in the fly-over. Well, now thanx to the Consumerist, I have a secret weapon – Verizon’s Landline Executive Customer Support:

Call 1-800-483-7988 and press 3 to reach the Verizon Customer Advocates for landlines and DSL

I called them today and got a support manager on the line who filed an escalated complaint and has promised to send out a technician tomorrow. Hopefully this will get the situation solved once and for all. If not, Speakeasy here I come.

*Edit*

If that doesn’t work, call the New York State Public Service Commission: 800-342-3377. They take complaints, register them and then force the utility companies to respond. From everyone I’ve spoken to, going this route gets the most difficult problems solved quickly.

Here’s their website: http://www.dps.state.ny.us/

Wakin’ and Bacon..

Zeke — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:35:34 +0000

Now, I hate alarm clocks as much, if not more, than the next guy, but this one just might convince me to not throw it across the room.

http://www.mathlete.com/portfolio/wakeNbacon.php

I think my biggest issue would be getting at the bacon before Feena and Mush did. Evern try to wrest a piece of bacon from the mouth of a 130+ lb hungry Rottweiler before you’ve had your morning coffee? I don’t suggest it. It’s not pretty.

Anonymous Phone Number

Zeke — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 19:54:11 +0000

If you’ve ever posted to CraigsList, or responded to a post, you know that CL protects posters by assigning an anonymous email forwarding address to you which expires after X days. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could have the same type of thing for your phone? Well, the folks at http://www.numbr.com/ have done just that. The next time you need to give out your cell number and you’re afraid it will get abused, give them your numbr instead.

Online Photo Editor

Zeke — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:07:04 +0000

Ever need to make some quick edits to a photo, but don’t have easy access to photo software? Check out http://www.picnik.com/ they have a free online photo editing system that works pretty well. Granted, it’s not as fast, or powerful as some of the dedicated apps out there, but it does the quick and easy stuff from anywhere.

Wi-Fire

Zeke — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:03:58 +0000

If you’ve ever tried to access a wi-fi hotspot using your laptop while traveling, and can never quite get a strong enough signal, check out this cool piece of kit:

http://hfield.com/wifire.htm

It’s a compact range-extending device that triples the range of your internal adaptor. I’ve tried using a variety of antenna’s in the past, but none of them seemed to work all that well. But, from the reports I’ve read, this thing works like a charm and for $80, you can’t beat it.

Lost MBR?

Zeke — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 07:49:16 +0000

Lots of people use external USB drives for backup and extended storage rather than installing an additional drive in the machine. It’s easier, faster and you can easily move the drive from machine to machine with few hassles. The problem is that occasionally problems do occur and, unless you know how to fix them, you can end up losing all your data.Â This happend to me the other day. I was moving a USB drive from my laptop to my dev machine. In the process, the MBR (Master Boot Record) was destroyed and my dev box could not load the drive – said it was unitialized. After a bit of a scramble, I found this little utility:

http://www.ambience.sk/fdisk-master-boot-record-windows-linux-lilo-fixmbr.php

I downloaded Fixmbr, ran it against my drive and … voila! Drive back up and running like nothing happened. Disaster averted.

Now it’s time to make backups of my backups …..