Jasonified Tech Blog

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The other day I ran into research project done by microsoft called, MyLifeBits.

MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort.

In the experiment, Gordon Bell captured everything, cds, cards, books, articles, letters, memos, photos, and is now starting to record phone calls, im transcripts, television, and radio.

Most people would ask, “Why would you want to log your life?”. Well one of the main reasons is total recall, being able to remember any point in your life.

They have also created a device they call the sensecam. The sensecam is a camera that you wear around you neck that will take pictures when it notices a large change in the view.

This project is mainly geared towards amnesia victims. In a test that they preformed, they saw that after 2 weeks the person with the sensecam could remember an event almost completely, when before, they would of completely forgotten it. Sometimes I have that same problem though.

Total recall sounds really cool to me, so I’m going to give life logging a try.

I started to write my own program that is basically a exe form of a tumblr blog that will store the data in a sqlite database. A more private form, with some added posts types like webcam and audio. I will post here when I am finished with it.

OctalMage

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Recently I’ve been hearing a lot about a new kind of blog, called a tumbleblog, so I decided to take a look at them. A tumbleblog, or tumblelog, is a weblog written with a “stream of consciousness” approach, kind of like the traditional journal/diary that begat the entire blogging phenomenon, as Dave Taylor put it.

The most common tumble blogging platform is Tumblr, the platform that Kevin Rose uses for his blog hosted at tumblr.com.

I made an account and started using it, and I found that it was really fun. Its a lot less formal than a normal blog.  Instead of having a nice blog with a tutorial or some tech news,its just random stuff, usually only 1-2 sentences.

With tumblr there is six types of blog posts, text, photo, quote, link, chat, or a video. So you can share your favorite quote, or a funny conversation you had, or a cool video you found on youtube, or just about anything.

Another tumble blogging platform I found is called Bazooka. Bazooka is the first self hosted php/mysql tumbleblog. Basicly its a php version of tumblr. The main differences is that Bazooka has less blog options, like no video or chat, and the themes aren’t as good, but thats my own fault. I like/use Bazooka because Its self hosted.

Now, how is Tumblr different from Twitter? There are two main differences, Twitter is to tell what you are up to, not to tell about cool things you found, and Tumblr is more of a blogging platform, not a social network. When you go to a tumblr blog, the only sign of it being a tumblr blog is a small link at the bottom, they will even let you have your own domain, but on twitter it is very clear that you are on a twitter because of the large twitter banner at the top. But I would say that Twitter is a type of tumble blog.

In conclusion, I would have to say that tumbleblogs may be a lot more fun to write and read, but aren’t that useful. They don’t tell you why something is important, they just tell you where to find it.

Here are my different tumbleblogs.

Twitter

Tumblr

Bazooka

OctalMage

Buy Jason a cup of coffee.

Have you ever been searching on google and came across a good tutorial, and when you click on the link it takes you somewhere in the middle. Then to get back to the table of contents, you have to erase the name of the html page in the address bar, which can get annoying.

In windows explorer it seems like they have the perfect solution to this problem, buy why isn’t it implemented in any of the browsers?

Thats right, the parent directory button.

Well this is a feature that I really wanted in firefox so short term, I developed a bookmarklet.

To use, drag the link below to your bookmark bar.

Parent Directory

Like so,

If for some reason you can’t get it up there, just right click and say bookmark this link. When it ask you where to put it, say the bookmark toolbar.

Then anytime you want to visit the parent directory of a website, just click that bookmark.

I’m also making it into a firefox addon, coming soon.

It is also apart of the BlueShirt toolbar, with many other tools.

Enjoy,

OctalMage

Buy Jason a cup of coffee.