Monthly Archives: July 2005

iTunes’s podcast feature is lame

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I don’t know if other podcasting programs allow you to play more than one song from your podcast stream at once, but iTunes doesn’t. You can’t just leave your podcasts running. You have to click each one individually to play it. This is silly, because I’m not going to sit around and keeping clicking every time I want to hear another song. I could just add the entire podcast to my library, but how do I know that I want to do that until I’ve heard the songs in the podcast? Bad UI! Bad!

What software would you suggest for receiving podcasts? Obviously I’m most interested in open source software available for Mac OS X, but let’s hear what you’ve got.

Is this necessary?

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Should we all be using this GoogleAnon bookmarklet to set our Google GUID to all zeros, in order to anonymize our searches? Is that a paranoid thing to do?

Does it even work? Is this sufficient to keep users’ searches anonymous?

On the other side, should we all be using the Search History feature on Google, which is now part of the Personalized Search page? You get cool new toys and usability improvements in return for potentially giving up some privacy… is the trade-off worth it? Personally, I think would be better to have the option to store your “search history” on your computer instead, but as I found when I was forced to wipe my hard drive and reinstall recently, it’s frequently more convenient to have your personal stuff stored on a remote server.

That’s why I use del.icio.us… it now has a “private” tagging option, which means that I can even save links which I don’t want the general public to know I’m interested in visiting. However, the government or whoever is running del.ico.us could presumably discover what I have saved “privately” on their servers, so it’s not useful for anything more sensitive than porn links.

So, to recap…
(1)Is anonymizing necessary?
(2)Are the features you can get by giving away some privacy worth the tradeoff?
(3)Can we get the same features while retaining our privacy?
(4)Does anonymizing even work?

Pop And Politics interview

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Some of the answers are shorter / less detailed than I would have liked them to be, but I took this opportunity to throttle my inner perfectionist and sent it off… the article is simply entitled “Free Culture” and is posted on Pop and Politics as well as on Pravin Sathe’s blog Solid Hang.

If you have any constructive criticism, please leave it here! scibilia already gave me her input, so she’s off the hook 😉

Towards Nelson 2.0

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As you may be aware, the Pavlosky development team has recently reached release 1.1 of Nelson Pavlosky, the revolutionary free culture advocate and guitar-playing geek, and we are steaming at full speed towards the 2.0 release. These are exciting times! What new features can you expect as we race towards 2.0? Well, first let us look at what we have already achieved.

==Nelson 1.0==
With the 1.0 release, we certified Nelson as sane, sanitary, and sexy enough for normal women to date (for some values of “normal”). Features included:
* Eats well enough to have a sex drive
* Knows how to cook own food (with a rather limited but healthy menu)
* Showers/bathes daily
* Leaves room at least once a day
* Does not play computer or video games frequently

While the 1.0 release was groundbreaking in many ways, especially compared to the cringe-worthy beta releases, it left a great deal to be desired. Nevertheless, it made Nelson a contender in the marketplace!

Certain bug reports, among them the infamous “total disrespect for authority” and the “tendency to break into song at inopportune moments” bugs, were marked WON’T FIX. These are features, not bugs. Similarly, while we hope to make strides towards a healthier Nelson, he is not intended to be an athlete. We will stick to what we’re good at, which is producing geeks and dorks. Jock-lovers should look elsewhere.

==Nelson 1.1==
With our recent 1.1 release, we added important features such as:
* Flosses daily
* Cuts toenails every two weeks (whether they need it or not)
* Uses deodorant
* Keeps to-do lists
* Knows how to do own laundry

We continue to make progress on basic organization and personal hygiene issues. We expect to make many incremental improvements over the summer, so while there may not be earth-shattering developments, we hope that you will be pleased with our handiwork by the “Swarthmore Senior” release in the fall.

==The Road to 2.0==
The 2.0 release will include dramatic improvements, including:
* Gets to class/work on time on a regular basis
* Keeps all required tasks in centralized to-do lists, maintains/updates them
* Meets deadlines (with few or no extensions required)
* Exercises daily
* Eats enough calories to build muscles/fat

Stick around until 2.0, and you’ll discover the many other pleasant surprises that we will have in store for you! Please feel free to leave comments on this development blog if you have feature requests or bug reports, until we have an official bug-tracking system.