August 11, 2003

Portables review site: GoodStereoToGo

Ran across this when I was tyring to find reviews of the Archos Studio I bought. No reviews of what I bought but it's a good informational site.

Posted by tony at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)

OurNotePad.com and OnlineHomeBase.com

Found a note about OurNotePad.com in one of the ASP.NET weblogs. Another interesting idea: an free online notepad that can be shared amongst users. Not too sure of the utility of this particular idea but I haven't had a chance to play with it much yet. I think you've already grasped the basic concept. It's simple, yes, it's not as fancy as a weblog or a forum ... and that may be its beauty. The interface is a little cluttered for me and I can't get to the notepad sheets themselves without using the mouse but I'll diddle with it and we'll see.

Another free service: OnlineHomeBase.com. This actually predates OurNotePad, I think. It's OurNotePad.com on steroids in that it provides a calendar along with a notepad organized in to "sheets" wrapped up with notification capabilities (email and cell phone) and collaboration. It has free-form text entry and it (supposedly) figures out what's what (reminders and such) based on context.

Hmm ... am I gonna have enough time to explore this stuff?

Posted by tony at 08:34 AM | Comments (0)

RSSJobs update

I got my confirmation mail from RSSJobs and am not impressed! Below is a copy of the headers. Note the from line, that it comes from an Earthlink account (64.203.48.190), that the IP address sending it to Earthlink is an unroutable one (probably a NAT firewall at home) and there's no host/domain name in the SMTP chat. The service is probably legit but it looks like it was thrown together by someone with the germ of a good idea and no real experience. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. We'll see.

From: "nobody@."
Apparently-From: [email protected]
Received: from unknown (HELO 192.168.1.2) (64.203.48.190)
Received: from localhost [127.0.0.1] by 192.168.1.2 (AppleMailServer 10.2.3.0) id 3213 via TCP with SMTP; Sun, 10 Aug 2003 07:55:06 -0700

Posted by tony at 07:48 AM | Comments (0)

Just bought an Archos Studio 10 Jukebox

It's a 10GB unit that serves as a removable external hard disk (USB 1.1) but its primary function, for me anyway, is as an MP3 player. It normally sells for $149 on Amazon but they've got a $50 Amazon mail-in rebate which brings it down to $99 and at that price it's not a bad deal. Powered by 4 AA NiMH batteries, it can play for up to 10 hours on a single charge and there's an Open Source software project that's been pretty active for quite a while now called Rockbox.

The way it works is you simply plug it in to your PCs USB port and it appears as a removable drive (just like a USB thumbdrive thingy) and you can copy files in and out at well. Later, in your car, for instance, when you want to play something, you use the controls built on to the player and treat it like you would any Walkman or stand-alone CD player. If you wanna store regular files on it, fine ... obviously they won't play but you can do it if you like.

There are larger players but with the $50 mail-in rebate, I just couldn't beat it.

Posted by tony at 05:51 AM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2003

Job searches delivered by RSS

And for those who are looking for a new opportunity, RSSJobs will search on 4 sites: Monster, Dice, HotJobs and UCSD Job Link (a job board at UC San Diego).

I dunno that I'd go giving them money yet, though. The domain was registered on July 13 of this year (by a guy in (gasp!) San Diego) and it looks like the searches go directly to the standard search facilities of the 4 boards. I'm curious whether the guy that's started the service has gotten the OK from the targets. Also, there are only 4 boards, there's no company information (the contact page simply let's you enter a comment/email) and, on top of everything else, the service is pretty restrictive. For $5/month you only get 10 saved searches, each delivering up to 25 results. For free you get 5 saved searches, each delivering a maximum of 10 results.

Posted by tony at 08:06 AM | Comments (0)