Hopeless Geek

I used to love Digg. I really did. Every day, possibly several times a day, I’d hit the site and run down the front page opening all the interesting articles in new tabs and then the comments as well if it was something I wanted to know more about. It was quite nice for a few months.

Then they got money. Ever since that day, Digg has been going downhill quite fast. First came the popularity, and then the trolls that come with it, then the exodus of the good comment-writers because of the trolls. Later came the large upgrade the money paid for that alienated a large number of users and generally killed the features I used frequently.

That might just be a recursion issue. Yay for notifications causing notifications.

... by about 1 to 6 feet. A fence built in 2000 to prevent people from crossing the border in vehicles was built by using a local rancher’s fence as a guideline rather than using an official survey. As a result, we get to pay about 3 million dollars to redo the fence so that it’s all within the country’s border. Go team!

read more | digg story

Rainforest Pyramid, originally uploaded by ahknight.

One of a set of photos I recently uploaded to Flickr from my trip to Galveston (I’m using Flickr because I don’t want to pay the bandwidth costs of hosting them myself, of course).

A while ago I read a tip somewhere about how to make a few smart playlists work with each other to make a mix of music for a smaller iPod. After thinking for a short time I realized I could make a perfect little ever-changing radio station out of iTunes with a similar methodology. Start by considering what makes a good radio station (I know, it’s been a while…):

• Your favorite music.
• A balance of new and old music.
• A moderate variety. You want to hear some songs repeatedly, but not at close intervals.
• New old music. Don’t just play the same old songs, cycle them in and out.
• Old new music. If a newer song is really good, keep it in rotation as an old song.

iTunes has a way to handle all of this. The core here is that you’re going to have to rate all of your music for this to work. Unrated music will not make it into rotation. It doesn’t have to be accurate right now. You can go find a favorite artist and mark all the tracks as fives or find all your audio books and mark them twos or something. Just get some ratings in. As your ratings change, so will the station.

Some folks just aren’t getting the idea behind the Mac mini. A shame, that, because this product is going to take over and help make switchers out of a good chunk of PC users, despite what some may think. So far it seems that the largest complaint about the Mac mini is the lack of a keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

You know, those things it was intentionally designed around not including.

So since he’s the only person that I can find that’s posted a semi-coherent rant about this view (though I’ve seen it elsewhere in bits and spurts) I’ll sift through Bill’s issues with the Mac mini and see what clarity can be brought to this.