As I am preparing to leave for vacation I am realizing just how powerful one website has become in my life.  I had become very stressed out over the staggering amounts of tasks I had to complete each day.  Using the traditional “todo” list was not helping and my todo lists were spanning multiple pages.  I was pointed in the direction of a great book and after reading the book, “Getting Things Done” by David Allen I tried many different applications in order to organize and keep on top of my very busy work days.

An average day for me starts with many tasks and has more added on throughout the day.  These tasks must be prioritized, remembered and most importantly completed on-time.  On a day like today I have already completed 45 tasks.

The site I finally settled on is http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ .  I chose this site for numerous reasons.

1. It provides a very simple user interface which I as a minimalist at heart appreciate
2. It has a pretty decent companion iPhone app for adding tasks when you actually remember them; not when you get back to a computer and can remember what you thought about while in line at the store
3. It is platform independent.  I get the same UI on my work computer as on my home computer
4. Amazingly *knock on wood* it is not yet blocked by my corporates “Big Brother” proxy

This website has helped me organize my professional and my personal life.  I can easily create a “list” to tackle a specific large project (like our kitchen renovation) or use one of the numerous smaller lists I’ve created; like one for each of my accounts at work and one entitled “Pets” that reminds me to get cat or dog food, clean the litter box etc etc.

For anybody looking to get on top of things and to reduce what I found to be a good deal of stress give RTM a shot.  It’s even FREE!

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I’ve always loved Firefox however in recent months I’ve cast this cute little animal into the refuge pile in /Applications and given its space in the warmth of my dock to Apple’s Safari 4 browser.  Firefox had developed a very naughty habit of eating all of my poor laptops free memory and CPU so when Apple came out with Safari 4 I decided to give it shot.

Safari is remarkably faster than the prior versions of Firefox and had a much lower memory and CPU footprint on my laptop.  The browser offered many other nifty features that I loved the glitz of when switching but over the past few months have all but forgotten as I never use them.  Such toys as “Top Sites” and “Graphical History” while being very interesting features don’t serve one well when they never use the “Top Sites” and barely ever check their browser history.

Today a friend mentioned how much he was enjoying Firefox 3.5 and I decided it was worth a shot to install on my work issued Windows laptop.  I replaced Firefox 3.0 with 3.5 and found it remarkably faster, sharper looking and much better with sharing the small amount of memory my work laptop has.  Since I was so impressed with it on the work computer I decided to give it a shot on my personal computer.

I installed the browser and after just about twenty minutes of usage noticed how much faster it was than prior versions.  It was as fast or faster than Safari 4.  The rendering is quicker than it used to be and Firefox’s use of large fonts has always been the most superior out there.  The results are in

Firefox has found it's rightful home

So now I am back on Firefox and quite happy with the performance thus far.

PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
983 firefox-bi  12.1% 13:59.60  24   249   1148  120M    52M   169M   577M

So now a question for all of you out there who actually read enough of this post to make it here.  Do you have any must have extensions I should look into?

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So today I was diving into my /Applications folder (For you Windows users that’s c:\Program Files\) looking for programs installed I no longer need, use, or particularly want.  Quite a few found their way to the trash can as I’ve really been trying to trim down my program usage to the bare minimum and consolidating a lot into single applications as much as possible.  

I’ve come to the conclusion that my “Must Haves” list has gotten very small.  I am down to the following as required for me:

• iTerm
• Safari (switched from Firefox recently)
• NetNewsWire
• iPhoto
• iTunes
• Twhirl

I can get everything I need to get done with just those applications.  I hold onto Microsoft Office for the rare times I need to open an office document on my personal computer; however for the most part Google Documents allows me access to those files as well.  

I was able to remove tons of “Helper” applications in favor of small plugins to the above programs that accomplish the same goal.  For example, I don’t need a Flickr upload application when I can just use their site and or a plugin to iPhoto.  I don’t need Thunderbird, gmail works just fine.  I don’t need VNC as I use LogMeIn for all my remote connections now.  

What are your “must have” applications?  This is more aimed at the Mac users as my Windows computer I do not have any control over the programs on it.

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The World Wide Web started out as a purely text based medium for the exchange of knowledge by mainly government entities and Academia.  I don’t think anybody saw the WWW at it’s inception as being the living and breathing pulse of the internet that it has become.  I couldn’t imagine the framers of the first revision of HTML having imagined the likes  of Facebook, YouTube, eBay and to a lesser extent the web being used to solve the use of another set of protocols; email.

Yet there is no denying it, the WWW has grown well passed it’s pure text roots.  It is, in my opinion, the most rapidly increasing and advancing internet technology.  Much of our online time is now spent on social networking sites, online games, watching videos and corresponding in email.  But what connects us to all of these multitudes of sites?  Our web browsers.

While the web browsing software we use to interact with the web has surely advanced over time to support the new features of the WWW, grow with the operating systems they run on and even to add more robust features they all have some tragic flaws which I have discovered and grown to despise.  The issues I am sharing are my own, and I know my computer usage differs from that of other peoples.  The issues I have may not be shared by many, or for that matter, any of you.  

First and foremost I am a Macintosh user who is forced to use Windows during the day.  I do not believe Internet Explorer should even be discussed as a web browser as it is notoriously the least safe, most trouble prone and least compatible of all the browsers.  Furthermore as my work computer is locked down tighter than a bank vault and I am unable to browse personal web sites with it nor can I upgrade to the latest version I’ll skip it all together.  

When it comes to browsers on the Macintosh you’re left with two major competitors and a few minors.  Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.  For the past few years I have been a Firefox user however that has changed, at least for the moment, as of today.  I’ve had numerous frustrations with Firefox and have wanted to explore other browsers but have been tied in to Firefox as there have always been plugins which allowed me to synchronize my bookmarks with multiple personal computers and even a Firefox install on my work computer.  Today however Foxmarks, the plugin I’ve been using for the past year or so has released a version that is compatible with Apple’s Safari and I now have the freedom to break away from Firefox on the Mac.

I have numerous gripes with Firefox, but two that are the most prevalent and disturbing to me.  Firefox has what I can only describe as rendering issues if you modify the font sizes in its preferences.  This is something I do for any program loaded on my computer.  I increase the font size to be larger, in some cases like web browsers dramatically so.  Going from a default font face of 9 or 10 to 15 or 16 and setting the minimum allowed font for 14 or 15, depending on the font families used.  As I’ve pointed out in other posts, Firefox just doesn’t display a lot of sites right.  ESPN, New York Times and multiple others are nearly unusable with my choice of configuration.  Even Facebook has features I couldn’t use such as IM due to the text overlapping other text on the screen.  

Add to this Firefox’s insane memory and CPU usage and it was always an ugly picture.  I’ve spotted Firefox taking up more memory than even iPhoto which was importing photos from my camera at the time.  It often would freeze almost entirely or randomly crash for what seemed like no reason.  I’ve grown tired of being in the middle of a few articles, email drafts and the like and poof my web browser vanishes.  Even with session recovery some things just don’t come back.

Enter Foxmarks for Safari and my first day using Safari.  While I vastly enjoy it’s ability to handle my large fonts much better than Firefox, albeit not perfectly, I am left with an empty feeling in my computer heart for the numerous plugins and assistance tools I have left behind.  There seems to be very few add-ons for Safari and of them most seem useless or have so many horrible reviews I don’t even want to mess with them.  

I’ve left behind my plugins to control my tabs to my liking (making sure gmail is never closed etc), my excellent ad blocking and my tie ins to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.  I’ve also lost “control” as I feel Safari’s lack of settings in the preferences is a bit shocking coming from Firefox which seems to have much more user control.

Safari still sucks up way more RAM than I think it should but at least my computer seems to run faster.  The browser renders web sites a lot slower than Firefox but they all seem to look cleaner and function a bit better.  The OS X styled buttons and widgets of course help.  But I am still left with the one simple question?

Why are programs that are so often used, and used by so damned many, still full of such obvious flaws as memory consumption issues and usability issues?

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Twitter is,

a free social networking and micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. (Wikipedia)

I first found this unique social networking site in January of 2007 and thought it was a very interesting concept.  However I found that I had no friends on it leading me to rarely check it which of course lead to me never updating it.  Recently Twitter has become more and more popular in the mainstream and has gained quite a strong following in the geek community; and as a card carrying geek I felt obligated to give tweeting a chance again.

I found a few people and organizations I wanted to follow, especially during the 2008 election coverage.  This got me hitting Twitter fairly often and I began to update.  It felt good to do these little 140 character tweets as I had stuff I wanted to share or vent about, but not enough for a full blog post.  You can access Twitter through their website, their instant messenger bot, SMS from your cell phone our a Twitter client on your computer or smartphone.

Well as I have what I like to think is the smartest of the smartphones, an iPhone, I figured I’d start playing with Twitter clients on that first.  I downloaded one, then another, and soon enough I had about seven of them installed.  Each has it’s strong points and of course it’s weak points.   Playing with the applications has become as much fun or maybe even more fun then actually using the service!  After a short bit of time using applications on the iPhone I ventured into the numerous applications available for the Mac.  I think I may have settled on my applications of choice, but I think half of the fun is playing with the new ones that come out almost every day.

For thsoe of you who haven’t used Twitter yet, give it a go.  It’s easy to setup an account and even easier to use.  You can find me on Twitter as dwaxman.

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So I have my lovely Mac Mini back from Apple after having the hard drive replaced and it is now happily living next to our 42″ HDTV and ready to begin its life as our media server.  The delay hasn’t been on the machines side, but more on my failings.  I have yet to spend the time, do the research and learn the terminology and technology to know what I need to convert “obtained*” content into something I can easily use full screen in HD.

The machine comes with Front Row, which unfortunately only works with things in your iTunes library.  I had purchased a copy of VisualHub and has in the past used that to rip into a Tivo format for my standard definition Tivo.  I tried the program again last night to try and convert some “obtained*” content and was greeted with a notification that the author is no longer going to develop the application anymore.  While I can use a program that wont be developed anymore as long as the features still work, I’d like to have something that would progress with my machine as it sees new operating system updates.

What I’d like even more is a better front end than Front Row.  Something that is easy to use with just the Apple Remote and can play multiple file types.  The ultimate would be for me to just play the content in the format it was downloaded saving the time of transcoding and the need for me to learn all the technologies, formats, resolutions and codecs.

Does anybody have any suggestions?

* I know many people have objections to “obtained” content.  I am not inviting a discussion on legality or morality of this endevour.

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I’ve been on the internet for as long as I can remember.  My first web browser didn’t know what a graphic was, the computer had no mouse and the connection speed was slower than my iPhone with 1 bar of service.  Fast forward some 15+ years and the internet has become a major hobby of mine as well as my source for 99% of the news and information I take in.

I gave up print media, specifically newspapers, many years ago for their online versions.  I found the on-screen text to be much larger than the print edition and that the black on white text was a much better fit for me than black on grey with smudges.  I would frequent five or ten news oriented websites a day to take in my news on subjects from politics to technology and from sports to business news.  However in roughly 2005 many sites began to mature in ways that I find counter-productive to their nature.  Sites began to use very structured style sheets which allow them to fit more information and advertisements on a page; but they pay no mind to those of us who enjoy a larger font experience.  I pretty well summarized my complaints in my October 1st, 2008 post here so I wont go on and on about it.

Thankfully around that time a new syndication method was becoming widely popular on the internet.  RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, puts all the updated content from a web site into a “feed” and allows the “reader” application to then view it in any way it wishes.  RSS readers, whether online or as an application on your own computer usually offer you a lot more customization on features like font sizes and font families as well as whether you wish to see the included images or not.

With Social Media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Livejournal and the numerous other personal blogs and blog hosting providers out there I have begone to run into the same issues I had of years ago with the news.  The content was there, but often in a way I didn’t find it to be pleasant to read.  Be it fonts that were too small, horrible choices of background images, themes that use horrible styling or just a poor choice of configuration I’ve come to the conclusion that these sites, jsut as the prior news sites, are not accessible for me.  At first I didn’t know what to do about it.  I ignored these sites for a long time however as they’ve become very popular, especially among the geeks of the world, I’ve been wanting to participate more and more.

Recently I spent quite some time with Google and found how to get all of my Social Media right into my RSS reader.  Some of it was as easy as just adding the feed, others required third party sites to interact with private communities to get friend only posts and some just required me to open my eyes and notice links to RSS feeds.  This has made my reading, following and staying in contact with friends much easier.  Now, if I could easily design a single site with my parameters to make updates to these sites I’d be rocking out.

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Kate gave me a wonderful gift on our anniversary trip to the city.  While we were at dinner we were discussing the iPhone and how much I like it and can’t wait to get one.  We spoke about it for a little while and then she told me that we should just go to the Chelsea Apple Store again and pick one up.  It would be a fun thing to do while in the city and after some back and fourth I agreed and we did just that.

The iPhone is great!  It has its flaws, sure, but I love it overall.  The major things it doesn’t have and or has weak implementations of are:

• It does not have a physical button to turn speakerphone on; this means you have to look at the screen and find the speaker phone button
• There is no hands-free dialing, most often used on blue tooth headsets while driving
• The SMS (text messages for the mainstream) does not show the time of all received / sent messages
• The “reminder” beep for missed calls, SMS’s, email, voicemail etc is not configurable and doesn’t go off at all after 15 minutes
• There is no “notification” light outside of the screen; so if the screen is not on you don’t know you’ve missed a call, received an email, etc

However, the interface is outstanding.  The keyboard is, after getting used to it, easy to use and then disappears allowing the device to be all screen.  The phone is very clear and the speaker phone is amazingly clear.  Visual voicemail is very cool and the email and SMS clients are great.  Add in the third party applications like Facebook, AIM etc and it’s just a really powerful and simple to use device.  Loving it so far!

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It’s no secret that I have below average eye sight.  There are things people with bad eye sight do to get by in life.  I enjoy hard cover books rather than paperbacks because the font is larger, I pay more money for good seats to see a show, and I always increase the default font size on my computer to make things easier to read.  This has never really been a problem until recent years when web-design has become more important to sites than usability.  While I understand that asthetics are important to a web site I firmly believe that these looks should not be at the sacrafice of usability.

Because a picture paints a thousand words and I could literally waste thousands trying to explain this to you I’ve chosen to hilight two very popular and very visited websites.

NYTimes home page with large fonts does not present right

While this one is bad, the site still remains usable.  It is difficult to use some aspects of the site and on some stories the difficulty becomes even greater, but no section of the site is as bad as,

ESPNs site is almost completely unusable with larger than average fonts

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As a long time Tivo owner I’ve grown very accustomed to the luxury of watching TV on my schedule and not that of the television networks.  When the wife and I have a free block of time and want to watch one of the few television programs we enjoy together, or watch a show alone quickly to get back to spending time together the DVR is a great asset.  Our favorite shows are recorded and we can just pick what we’re in the mood for and watch it right then and there.

All modern DVRs offer the ability to record only new episodes of a show.  Recently when upgrading to HD TV service we’ve put aside our Tivo and moved to Comcast’s provided DVR.  The reason for doing this is quite simple, it’s a lot cheaper!  The Comcast device does not offer nearly as attractive of a user interface as the Tivo, it’s a bit more complicated to use and unfortunately it has a few hiccups we msut deal with but it does its job well enough.

Recently I have realized a major problem however.  As the new seasons of shows are shortly to begin many networks are airing “marathons” of their shows so you can re-watch or first catch-up on what happened last season.  My DVR, while set to only record the new episodes, is grabbing tons of these shows and filling itself up almost constantly.  This bothers me as I am continiously deleting items and often sitting in front of the DVR for blocks of time going through the next few days recording schedule to wipe off things it shouldn’t be recording.

I’ve done some research as to why this is happening and have learned a few things that disappoint me greatly.  In this day and age when every cable and satellite provider offers DVRs I find these issues to be unnacceptable and they make me as a consumer believe that the networks and other companies involved are doing their customers a large disservice.

Laziness on the side of the networks:
First and foremost of an issue is that some of the television networks are just plain lazy.  I’ll use two networks and specific shows as an example.  USA Networks Burn Notice is about to air its final episode of the season on Thursday and they’ve been re-playing the entire season over-and-over throughout the day.  The service that provides the guide and program information for DVRs relies on the networks to upload information to them.  USA has chosen not to give information and in the cases that they have they do not notify the service that these are repeats.  The DVR doesn’t see that it’s a repeat as it’s not flagged as such and things that every episode being aired, all sharing a non-descriptive description, are new.

Bravo Network has taken it one step further and airs their Project Runway so often that my DVR could fill up on it in just a matter of days.  They, just like USA, are not putting in notification that the episode is a repeat but they’ve taken it a step worse.  They’re neglecting to put ANY description in and airing ten episodes in a single day!  So not only does your DVR record every episodes but even if you wanted an older one that you missed you’d never be able to tell which one it is!

These two shows and networks are not the only ones.  Shotime’s Weeds, HBO’s Entourage and numerous others are all cluttering my DVR to the point that last night a show I wanted to see was not recorded!

Stupidity on the side of I-Guide:
From what I have read very recently I-Guide, the leader in interactive guide services for cable boxes and other services, has upgraded to a new database server/system.  In this upgraded they dropped the values for “initial airing”.  Now your DVR, or self if using other services, can not tell when the show was originally aired and thus is unable to determine its status of new, repeat etc.  Did they think that this was un-important information or where they simply hoping the TV networks would always be accurate?

In either case, we now have two major contributers to DVRs being unable to do what the user wants easily and leaving people like me having to strongly fight the urge to remove these programs and networks in general from their season pass / serries recording lists.  The shows are “alright” but the trouble involved now in getting them and mantaining the sanity of my DVR usage is too much!

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