Newsome.Org - Latest Comments

Re: Delaney Competes in Two Weekend Triathlons

Omegamom — Mon, 07 May 2012 13:35:56 -0000

Woot! Way to go, Delaney! She's very impressive, Kent.

Re: Google Drive: The Good, the Bad and Where is the Embed Option

Mjjones — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:19:33 -0000

I use Wuala (www.wuala.com). It's more pricey but it brings other advantages:

1) The one I find invaluable and difficult to find elsewhere is that you don't neeed to create a special container folder for uploads on your hard drive. You can select which folders you want to upload. This way, your file structure is preserved. So I can sync in real time some folders between my NAS, my powerful laptop and my lighter Tablet PC. And these folders don't have to be the same on each mobile machine. Android and iOs are supported as well.
2) I get more or less realtime synchro of each file modified on any of these machines. If one of them is turned off, synchro will be reactivated as soon as it's on again. By the way, you can also just back up some folders if you don't want the synchro.
3) the files are crypted before being up/downloaded so process is not ultrafast but it's not been a bother for me 'cos I don't upload movies or audio files.
4) you get forum support for the bits and pieces and email support if something goes bad. Never happened to me or to the several people around me who use the service. But I read in the forum that this can happen. We did experience 2 or 3 outages over the years but never past an hour. Since I always have a copy of the files on my NAS, I could calmly wait until the situation got back to normal.

Files can be shared with the Wuala Community if one feels enclined to do so or with some individual registered users of the service. Right now, it's only a 1-way process (the person needs to save the files in its own folder hard disk and upload it in its own shared folder and not the initial one. So it's been pretty useless for collab work. A new version of Wuala was announced for May and I hope they get it right this time.

Files can be shared with unregistered users through a link but I haven't yet shared any on the social networks.

Due to the security measures mentioned under 3), accessing files from a computer which doesn't have wuala applic is a pain. So I would not recommend this service to people who use Internet cafés to work from when on the road.

How about checking it out as a comparison? A free 2 Goplan is available.

As for its history, Wuala was developed by a teams of science geeks from the Zurich Polytechnics and later bought by French storage co LaCie which was painfully trying to provide a similar and more expensive service to its business customers. In the process, LaCie forced Wuala to put an end to the very functionality which attracted me to Wuala in the first place: trading storage. If you gave a bit of your hard disk space for p2p backup of other users files, you gain additional storage on Wuala. A win-win solution which spared a the 3rd or 4th wuala server config. Great as a way to to more fully use the hardware resources and save some energy. Shame on LaCie.

P.S. I don't have any personal or business connection with Wuala other than being a user of their service.

Re: Sky Drive Just Became a Contender in the Cloud Derby

David N Wallace — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:03:18 -0000

Yeah. I intend to upgrade but want to do a fresh one. Have held off due to a a wireless trackball I use being discontinued and therefore no Lion version driver. But that computer has been replaced by a Win7 box now so will move to Lion on other Macs.

Re: Sky Drive Just Became a Contender in the Cloud Derby

Kent Newsome — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:25:53 -0000

Thanks for the heads-up. I didn't realize that. There must be a technical reason, as I can't imagine MSFT has an interest in forcing users to pay Apple to upgrade.

FWIW, I like Lion.

Re: Sky Drive Just Became a Contender in the Cloud Derby

David N Wallace — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 02:36:27 -0000

One caveat Kent.

The Mac Skydrive app requires Lion (10.7) or later of OSX.

Dave

Re: Post Snippets: A Mandatory WordPress Plugin

George M. — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 14:40:45 -0000

It's working fine now!

Re: 14 Years Ago Today

Earl — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 04:56:18 -0000

Kent, a wonderful tribute to your Mom. I'd think she'd be proud of her place on the web and her son remembering her in this way. We never stop missing them.

Re: Post Snippets: A Mandatory WordPress Plugin

Kent Newsome — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:35:57 -0000

Thanks for the heads up. I was using a combo of Post Snippets and Smart YouTube Pro. I modified the snippet to use the iframe html and bypass Smart YouTube. My test post embedded the video in the feed.

Re: Post Snippets: A Mandatory WordPress Plugin

George M. — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:09:23 -0000

Well, the YouTube embed doesn't show up in the RSS feed (in Google Reader at least). It's only a link to YouTube...

Re: There’s a New dB’s Record!!!!

rdfield — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:38:21 -0000

First review of the new album as far as I know -- congratulations!

Fans of The dB's might want to know about my new blog devoted to the band, its members and their musical collaborations:

http://dbs-repercussion.blogsp...

New posts with music every Friday!

Re: Breaking Out of Live365

StreetBlast.com — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 18:57:00 -0000

Ask the broadcaster for the broadcast IP and port, which is found on the broadcaster page. You can drop that IP and port into the "open" box of any player that streams audio, and use the player of your choice.

Re: Help Defeat SOPA/PIPA Now!

zelma — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 16:50:32 -0000

It's now turn for ACTA....what can you say about it?

Re: Dropbox vs Windows Live Mesh: I Can Answer That Question

Ben — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 11:36:09 -0000

Hi All, just to let you know I was using Apple's iDisk, and because the service is going offline in june, looking for an alternative. Dropbox is of course the most well known. However, reading many articles on the net, including the above, I did choose for Microsoft's solution. I do not really have an argument other than free storage size in the cloud, but looking at all other arguments (like security, ease of use, and so on) to me the only thing that matters is that it works without having to think about it. iDisk did that for me. Drop box will do that and Microsoft Mesh will do it. So only thing left is choosing size. Security is an issue, but anything that one would put on a cloud service is subject to vulnerability anyway. So do not store confidential info on there anyway and you're fine. Or am I loosing sight of some very important reason to choose something different?

Re: The Demise of Radio

Ethan Caine — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 21:42:18 -0000

There are a large number of dedicated listeners in offices. I unfortunately am forced to listening to the irritating ads and news all day long. Others in the office are completely oblivious to the crap that is going into their brains.

sad...

Re: Why I Paid $774.00 for Windows Live Writer

Grinning Cheek to Cheek — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:43:34 -0000

I'd love to hear more about this option, would you mind emailing me about this robert? akronstedt@gmail.com

Re: Why I Paid $774.00 for Windows Live Writer

Robert Seso — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:35:10 -0000

Then again, you could have rented yourself a Windows machine in the Amazon cloud (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2) which you pay by the hour (the small Windows instance for $0.12/hr is enough) and use it to run Windows Live Writer. You even get a small Windows instance for free for the first 12 months after you sign up ("Free Tier").

Re: Is Google.Me Getting Cobbled Together via Acquisition?

شقق للبيع في الاردن — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:24:04 -0000

This looks of desperation and is reminiscent of a Yahoo-like flailing.where last decade when they bought Flickr and Delicious and did nothing
with them..

Re: Dropbox vs Windows Live Mesh: I Can Answer That Question

Mike McLin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:55:10 -0000

Yeah, that's great if you only use Office. What about a video editor that is editing HD movies? Until the applications are in the cloud, the files can never fully be in the cloud either. File syncing is the only viable solution for many people that want more than just docs and photos.

Re: Help Defeat SOPA/PIPA Now!

alliegladson — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 14:35:41 -0000

I'm living in the United States, will it affects me? I am against copyright infringement though, but if someone is arrested only because of posting a link, there must be something wrong in it.

Re: Why I Paid $774.00 for Windows Live Writer

Kent Newsome — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:14:14 -0000

I agree about image handling in WLW. That's also something the native WP editor is especially bad at. I'm afraid that MSFT will ignore WLW into obscurity (I have a mental pool about which of my favorite obscure apps- WLW or Yahoo Pipes- will be dead-pooled first). I keep hoping someone will take the best parts of WLW and develop a Mac app. The problem is that it's a desktop app in a world that is rapidly going mobile.

Re: Why I Paid $774.00 for Windows Live Writer

Tad — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:24:13 -0000

For me, the most
irreplacable part of Windows Live Writer is its image handling. On my site, every
post has to have an image – and I want my images to look good. So, I
want to be able to drop an image on there, resize/crop it exactly how I
want, sharpen/shadow and DONE. WLW lets one do this just by copy/paste
from a directory window, or even from the clipboard (in the case of a
screenshot). I haven’t found any other tools anywhere that have this
type of functionality, and now that I have a MacBook I happen to be
typing on, I miss it bitterly. Almost enough to make me want to run a
Windows 7 VM on it just for WLW.

Re: How to Make Everything Better: Evernote Edition

Thomas Kerstens — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 15:11:57 -0000

I just started using Evernote and the first thing I was looking for was how to create subfolders. Please work on this Evernote! Thanks - Thomas

Re: Is Microsoft Trying to Turn Mobile Phone Shopping into a Carnival Game?

David N Wallace — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 01:18:56 -0000

I caught a bit of this in a sleepy daze this morning from Paul while watching Windows Weekly podcast recording on Twit.tv.

What is obvious is that while the WinMobile phones are good and have a unique interface, it's obviously not enough to differentiate them amongst the hoard of other phones made by the Samsung/HTCs of this world.

Like you say... make the phone better, market it better and give it that uniqueness in the customer mindset and under the counter handouts at sale time wouldn't be necessary.

Re: Who Cares About TechCrunch, HuffPo is Ruining TV Squad!

Alon — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:53:27 -0000

hitfix.com, and particularly their "what's Alan watching" blog by the amazing Alan Sepinwall is my favorite spot for episode recaps and tv news.

Re: Why I Paid $774.00 for Windows Live Writer

Bob Beard — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:02:36 -0000

Windows Live Writer is a terrific WordPress editing tool!

As many others have commented, you really overbought RAM for your Mac. Windows 7 runs nicely in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine with only 2-GB RAM allocated. I have a mid-2011 MacBook Air with 4-GB of RAM and it runs Windows 7 like a champ.