I Never Promised You an Organic Garden

I have decided to add yet another new section to my blog. I am adding a “Technology Today” section, where I will select one technology related item each week and write about it so the average non-geek can understand. It could be a website, software, a gadget, or anything else related to technology.

There is always something new and exciting going on in the world of technology, but information is not always accessible to those who don’t have time to devote hours to surfing the net or listing to podcasts. I hope to be able to wade through some of the information out there and pick out one item a week that I find interesting and share it with everyone who reads my bog.

For this week, I have selected the Common Craft Show. The Common Craft Show is run by the husband and wife team of Lee and Sachi LeFever, and they take complicated or commonly misunderstood concepts and make short explanatory videos. Their easy-to-understand videos cover a wide variety topics including RSS, Twitter, blogs, social networking sites, and new light bulbs.

New videos are posted approximately once a month, and they are a great way for non-geeks and geeks alike to learn how things work.

My favorite is their video on RSS (Really Simple Syndication):

I originally posted this entry about Prism on the Summersault Weblog, but because I think it is such a great program, I want to share it here as well:

I recently found a neat little application that has been useful both at work and in my at-home computing. It is called Prism, and what it does is allow you to run your favorite web applications (Remember the Milk, Facebook, Google Calendar, etc.) as if they were desktop applications. Because it was built on the Firefox engine, it will run any web applications you can run in your Firefox browser.
Prism is still currently considered a prototype because it is under development by Mozilla Labs, but it seems to function quite well. I used it to access our VOIP-powered phone call routing panel at work and my Remember the Milk to-do list at home. It has resulted in a significant reduction of frustration caused by misplaced or closed browser windows and reduces the time it takes to reach my information because it is available at the click of a button on my desktop.

Getting Prism
Prism is very easy to use and available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux users. To start using Prism, simply download the appropriate version and install it on your computer. (Eventually, Mozilla hopes to integrate Prism into Firefox so you don’t even have to download and install a new program, but for now, it is still necessary.)

Once Prism is installed, start the program, and it will display an Install Web Application window.
Enter the URL of the application you want to use, a name for the application , and the locations you would like shortcuts to appear. Then click OK , and Prism will create shortcuts in the locations you specified and start the application.

For anyone who regularly uses web applications as a part of their work flow or daily life, Prism is a great solution for bridging the gap between web applications and desktop applications.

As the Presidential campaign heats up and we move closer to the 2008 elections, the potential problems with electronic voting become more and more pressing. Between the lack of a paper trail, closed-source software, and the hackability of voting kiosks, there are some serious potential concerns.

Personally, I think if done the right way, electronic voting could be safe and possible, but it would require open-source software, stronger checks and balances, a paper trail, and most importantly, our shadowy overlords preventing Diebold from leaking the election results early:

Definitely makes you think!

A Connecticut federal judge has ruled that the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) “making available” theory, in which they claim than individuals are breaking copyright law simply by making files available to download on file sharing websites, is insufficient because

““without actual distribution of copies…. there is no violation [of] the distribution right.” 4 William F. Patry, Patry on Copyright § 13:9 (2007); see also id. N. 10 (collecting cases); Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146, 1162 (9th Cir. 2007).”

Now the RIAA must prove that “actual dissemination” of a copy took place in order to accuse someone of distributing copyrighted music; a much more difficult task. This is a small but important victory for all the people the RIAA has been suing without cause and with reckless abandon. And after the RIAA’s recent attempts to force colleges to provide deterrents and “alternatives” to peer-to-peer piracy or run the risk of losing all federal financial aid for their students, it is nice to see someone reining them in.

After falling out of the public eye, Net Neutrality is once again back in center stage with a new bill surfacing in Congress.  The new bill, dubbed the “Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008,” adds a “Broadband Policy” section to the Communications Act.  It will require the FCC to look into current policies and ensure that the ISPs aren’t blocking or delaying traffic to any websites unreasonably.  The bill will also require the FCC to hold at least eight public “broadband summits” to “assess competition, consumer protection, and consumer choice issues related to broadband Internet access services.”

All in all the bill does not actually do anything to write Net Neutrality into law; it simply requires the FCC to do more to keep the net neutral.  To me this seems like a small step in the right direction, but it still leaves opportunity for ISPs and telecoms to continue using their money to influence the powers that be and reverse the neutral status of the internet.

To find out more about Net Neutrality and why it is so important, checkout my most recent posting on the Summersault Weblog.

I heard this song recently on net@nite then saw the video in Amber Mac’s blog. It keeps getting stuck in my head so I thought I would share.

The video is actually created by cutting and pasting together various Apple iphone commercials to make the lips of the man match the words in the song. Pretty impressive if you ask me.

This has been quite a fun filled and varied weekend…

Friday night we had a group of people over to have dinner and play with our new wii. It was quite a spectacle! Seeing 7 grown adults shaking the wiimote like sugar crazed children was very entertaining. We took plenty of photos, and after looking at them, I think I will definitely have to create a wii photo gallery in my Picasa web album.

Here a few samples of what is yet to come:

Saturday Matt and I joined a large group from the church and went to the ice skating rink at Miami University of Ohio in Oxford. We only skated for 2 hours, but it was quite a workout. Unfortunately, at the end of our time I took a catastrophic fall and landed hard on my knee. I have a nice black and blue goose egg but fortunately no real damage.

I also spent some time indulging my geekie tendencies.  I built the newest version of banshee (an open source Itunes equivalent) from the source.  It was a quite a different experience than installing a program that comes prepackaged.  After installing things from the command line, I felt a much greater since of accomplishment than just clicking install in Windows and letting the computer do it itself.   I also spent time playing tech support for my grandparents.

All in all it was a great weekend!

The other night Matt and I were watching the video podcast Geek Brief with Cali Lewis, and I got to thinking…where are all the hot young male video podcast hosts?  There are numerous young attractive female geek hosts like Amber McCarther, Calie Lewis, and Veronica Belmont, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone for us loyal female fans to enjoy.

Don’t get me wrong, I listen to a lot of podcasts featuring wonderful male hosts with great voices. Especially Wil Harris, you just can’t go wrong with a smoldering British accent, but I wouldn’t mind a pretty face to go with my tech news.

Obviously, the largest section of the tech community audience is male, and that makes the cute female host the first choice, but it would definitely help to draw in more female listeners if they threw in an attracitive male host or two.

It is nice to see that Bill Gates has a sense of humor! This video was shown at this year’s CES (Consumer Electronics Show) just before the Gates keynote address. It shows how powerful he really is to be able to get this many famous people in a spoof video like this.

I had to bring back my “Happy Thoughts” post to mention a new version release of Picasa for Linux. (Thanks to Life Hacker and Matthew for showing me this information.) Google has finally released (in beta for now) a new version for Linux that is not only much more stable, but also allows you to upload photos to your Picasa web album quickly and easily from within Picasa.  For me this is great because I have family members who do not use Facebook or any of the other social networking sites, and this is an easy way for them to see my photos online.

I also love Picasa’s photo organization features.  I know a lot of people swear by Flickr, but I love the unified local and remote experience of Picasa.