1-800-FREE-411 (or 1 800 373 3411). I don’t know how they’re making money with the service but I just used it and it’s all voice-activated and accurate for a local listing I just tried. No need to pay the $1 for 411 anymore… got it mapped to the “i” button in my treo now.
May 09
Today we released a cornerstone, enabling technology that serves as a librarian/notification service to allow structured blogging content created using microcontent to be funneled to easily consumed by edge aggreator services. My partner Kimbro wrote the structured blogging plugins for both WordPress and Moveable Type which have been available for a few months. Adoption of the plugins is a chicken/egg conundrum however until there exists a compelling reason to create content using micontent definitions.
MCPing is the equivalent to the “Ping-o-matic” service of blog posts and provides a central, open notification system to any edge aggregator that wishes to subscribe to a certain MCD channel. Soon to follow is the next project we have been developing, Rawjobs.com – the first edge aggregator to consume these structured posts and provide a job posting service.
Read more about what’s to come on the Grid7 site and be sure to subscribe to our new podcast that promises to provide a more tangible, organic means for sharing the insights we gain through our pilot program.
© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide
Mar 15
Quicktime Virtual Reality Panoramas are immersive scenes that show a 360deg view of one’s surroundings. There are high-end solutions for creating these scenes that utilize special optics and tripods but you can also create a decent one using the digital camera you already own. I’m down in Mexico once again working from the road and enjoying spring break. My buddy Dave has a beach house here in Rosarito and a few of us shot this QTVR last night from his rooftop:
- Setup the scene – You’re going for 30deg separation on each shot – you need a way of aligning the scene so you can shoot 12 images equidistant around the “clockface” where you are standing. If you’re in sand you can actually draw a clockface on the ground and align each shot on its corresponding numeral, otherwise you’ll need to find orthogonal objects to give you a reference for the “12, 3, 6 and 9” positions and estimate 1/3rd the distance between each for the intermediary pics. I was standing on tile so that made it easy.
- Shoot the pics – the goal is to produce a sequence of images in perfect vertical alignment with a minimal change in brightness amongst each pic. Hold the camera vertically, focus and shoot one pic on each of the twelve numerals of the clockface. If you’re on a slope, you want the camera perpendicular to the sky and not to the slope (if you position relative to the slope you’ll end up with a QTVR that looks like a sine curve). I generally disable the flash unless there’s bright sunlight raking from an angle and you need to compensate for the objects in shadow. You want to hold the camera at the same vertical height as you spin around.
- Produce the movie – there are tons of options but I found a $70 shareware windows app called Panorama Factory by Smoky City Design that does an amazing job of intelligently splicing the photos to produce the final scene. Import the twelve photos you just shot into the program and follow the cues in the wizard using all the standard defaults. You’ll need to rotate your sequence of images unless your digital camera does this automatically for you – Panorama Factory has an option on import to do this automatically. You’ll step through a series of about 6 screens on the wizard and arrive at a point where it lets you save the final image. Choose the QTVR option and jpg compression and adjust the slider for quality depending on the delivery format (CD or Web) and how small you want to make the final file.
That’s it. Once you perfect the process of creating the QTVR, try experimenting with the advanced hotspot features to create a series of linked scenes that make a full virtual tour. Some camera vendors bundle QTVR software with their products – it’s probably a good idea to check the software that came with your camera before buying anything extra.
© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide
Feb 23
Hopefully this trick is useful to anyone doing taxes right now and using MS Money. MS Money is probably the only M$ product I really like. I switched this past year from using Quickbooks to running all my accounting through MS Money and it’s been _way_ easier. I don’t know the proper accounting jargon for how they’re different (as far as I understand, both are double-entry accounting programs but MS Money just auto-handles one side of the equation and assumes it’s crediting cash). Both can integrate with your bank account but I never figured out how to do what I wanted with QB which was to NOT have to enter each transaction manually in two places. MS Money pulls transactions automatically from my bank so all I have to do is go through and reconcile with my paper bank statement at the end of the month so that means less work. Plus it can be “taught” what categories the expenses are and it gradually learns to categorize them on its own. Anyways, this is not a commercial for a M$ product though- it’s a tip for creating a report which they don’t give you out of the box.
Your accountant will probably ask you for a general ledger first thing. For whatever reason MSMoney does not have this as a canned report and looking all through the Microsoft.com site and googling for a tutorial on how to do create one produced no results (I’m using 2003 Deluxe btw- I read all kinds of bad reviews of the latest version). So we waded through a few of the report screens until we figured out how to customize one of the pre-packaged reports to give us what we needed. Here’s what we did:
Fire it up and go to the reports tab:
Choose the Monthly Income and Expenses report:
You’ll get this ridiculous pie chart (which is about as useful to your accountant as a fingerpainting – that’s okay, we’ll fix it).
In the left menu, change the view from Pie chart to Report
This gives us tabular data but is still not useful because we need to specify the date range:
We also need to limit the report to pull from only the account we’re interested in. I have both my personal and business accounts connected to MS Money which is nice for managing things in one place but for the purposes of reporting your business taxes, clearly you want to separate them out.
Okay, good deal- so now we have a general ledger report within MSMoney for the business account for the past year. This doesn’t do my accountant any good though since he doesn’t have this program. We need to export this report to excel.
On the left menu, yea…
And there you have a pretty spreadsheet that contains all the data from our MS Money report and that can be used by any accountant who has excel (and even notepad, but then again if your accountant doesn’t have excel, you’ve got bigger issues ;-)
I’m sure Quickbooks is more appropriate for some businesses but mine is pretty simple and for me the priority is minimizing the time I have to devote to tedious tasks like data entry and still retain useful reporting features and being able to give my accountant whatever as needs as quickly as possible. HTH
-sean
© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide
Feb 20
First off, I love this phone. I think it’s the greatest convergence device ever made. In its defense I work it extremely hard- my treo runs java, acrobat, google maps, excel, word and a bunch of other apps I use daily. It can record phonecalls, give me directions, take hours of video, show me current flight times, play mp3’s, read RSS, sync with all my info, and can probably pilot the space shuttle with a little more tweaking. Right now it can do just about anything except send or receive phonecalls. Instead it has taken a liking to rebooting every 15secs when it’s in phone mode.
The guy at the Cingular store said I needed to upgrade the firmware. Having remembered seeing a post by Ben Forta warning that this was a messy upgrade, I googled around a bit and confirmed that there are many horror stories from people saying the new firmware is more unstable than the last. My phone is past the point of instability though and is now unusable at this point so I figured I have nothing to lose by trying the new firmware. So I read through the instructions and dove into the process.
I downloaded the installer for my CNG version, fired it up and saw the intimidating screen on the Treo:
Step 1 Backup went smoothly- sweet. Step 2 Started flashing the ROM and got about 90% when a small error message popped up on the phone and said ROM upgrade unsuccessful. I threw some salt over my shoulder and hit the hotsync button again. This time it seemed to go through a different series of screens on the treo and threw the following error this time on my laptop:
Well that’s unnerving because if there’s some intermediary upgrade between .02 and .17, I sure can’t find it anywhere. I googled for that error and got nothing. I hit the palm site and searched their support for the error and unfortunately got the expected:
Crap. So I did a hard reset on the Treo, knocked on my wooden desk, threw another pinch of salt over my shoulder and tried the upgrade again. Now it’s in an endless reboot loop. I was half-expecting to see this error:
At least then I would feel like it was being straight up with me. I’m hesitant to go back to the Cingular store tomorrow as last time I was there their idea of custotmer service was spelling out the URL of the support site for me. And all in all, I have found Cingular’s service to be infinitely better than Sprint’s hamstermaze . At this point I think the best chances of resolution are if anyone happens to have a good contact at Cingular who would sympathize and hook me up with a new 650. If you have such a contact I would be greatly-indebted as I do really love this phone and Palm OS and would seriously like to keep using it. This is more a testament to a great device than anything- when you’re willing to put up with this kind of frustration to keep it. My Israeli roommate tells me that cellular stores in Israel are entirely different and will bend over backwards to please customers- they’ll rip open a box and give you a new phone on the spot to keep you happy. All this hot on the heels of yesterday’s toilet incident (read below). Here’s hoping that there’s an Israeli guy working the counter tomorrow…
UPDATE: I went to the Cingular store and they dialed the support phone number for me. I explained my situation to the Customer Service person on the phone line. Fortunately I came in 4 days under my warranty expiration on my treo and they shipped me a new one. The call to them was 15min and pleasant, I had the phone on my doorstep 16hrs later with $7 expedited shipping fee. I popped the battery, simcard and sylus into the new one and I’m back in business. fyi: i’ve been relying on skype for phone service the last few days and skype 2.0 is amazing for call quality- zero detectable latency, they really got it right. The only real bummer was reinstalling all the apps back to the Treo from scratch. Here’s a quick list of URL’s for anyone who needs to do the same:
- Docs to Go – comes on Treo disc
- Acrobat reader – comes on Treo disc
- Java
- Directory Assist
- Kmaps
- Avantgo
- CallRec
- Flight Status
The only caveat is I had to reinstall palm desktop to get my outlook conduits working again. It required a reboot before it successfully synced but now all is as it was before the firmware upgrade. I just saw Forta reporting a nasty CS experience w/ Cingular. I guess it’s all relative – I have found them insanely more helpful than Sprint (but then i’ve had oral surgery that was less painful than sprint csr calls).
So just to reiterate:
I love the Treo 650.
I love Cingular.
I hate this firmware update.
Avoid the upgrade if you possibly can unless your phone is running the old firmware and is still under warranty in which case you are better served taking a shot at the upgrade while they will still replace your phone in the event that you brick it.
© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide
Feb 20
Was hoping someone could beat mine from last night… I won’t even describe the scene as our upstairs toilet overflowed with the –ahem– “contents” of the bowl spilling over, well, yea- not good. And the water valves were rusted permanently in the on position. Oh and did I mention I was wearing flip flops? The funny thing is, as bad as it sounds, it’s still a distant second to a Mexico experience I had a few years ago. I’ll refrain from posting that one out of decency (and fear of creating the internet-wide version of the “ultimate barf-o-rama” in Stand By Me). Can anyone beat this one though? What’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever had to do?
