Oct

Responding to this week’s news of phishing scams leading to thousands of passwords to online email accounts being published online (Mashable has more on this story here and here, with links to the original news reports), Google and Microsoft are attempting to educate consumers about how to choose strong passwords, etc.

Just so we’re clear, if my password gets posted online, does it really matter how strong the password was to start with???

  

Jul

Okay, so head over to TeamKirith Tidbits (our home page). I bought a new template from 11 Mystics – love, love, LOVE their stuff! Also love the ease of getting advanced features all the while be clueless as to HOW they happened – compliments of iWeb. Made some quick pages for Samara and Eli, too. Will be updating mine/Craig’s work pages soon. Stay tuned!

  

Jun

Well, I just bought my first digital download from Amazon, and I do feel like a traitor. In my defense, it was a song that iTunes actually didn’t have (which is odd given that their catalogue is so much bigger than Amazon’s, at least so far).

Comparison:

web interface — iTunes gets the edge here, though I think Amazon’s site has potential (they do a great job in other domains of making suggestions of things you might like, etc.); also, iTunes is much snappier, the Amazon site was sluggish speed-wise in comparison

price — identical (99 ¢)

the ease of download — iTunes is FAR superior, the Amazon interface is awkward, and not automatic the way it indicates; it’s a two-step process getting the download into my music library – not a huge deal, but notable

In sum, there’s not much risk so far that I will be switching from iTunes to Amazon for my digital downloads.

  

Jun

Craig sent me this link from the New York Times this morning: a video game controlled by your BRAIN!!! Here’s what it looks like:
Pretty trippy. We still know so little about the brain and how it functions – we know a lot about what happens where, but current imaging techniques don’t give us a lot of info about the process. I can’t imagine that these things actually work, especially with the technology they’re using. If you read carefully, they have a pretty limited utility – it’s not like a game with a lot of action sequences! It sounds like any brain activity/muscle contraction is going to produce the effects. Cool, but not as cool as you might initially think!

  

Apr

Being a big fan of free speech and all…still, pretty repulsive stuff Very hard call. I do really feel, though, like we have to protect the rights of people to say even repulsive things. Hell, W says repulsive constantly, and no one censors that sorry…well, I digress.

  

Apr

The iTunes music store is now the largest music retailer in the US, beating out WalMart, which used to hold that honor.

That’s pretty amazing if you think about it. Go Apple! This makes me really happy (and not just because I hate WalMart with a passion). It means Apple has leverage against the damn record companies trying to screw everything up. Remember that it was the RIAA that insisted on the ridiculous DRM restrictions on the original iTunes songs that Apple has been criticized for, and it is the RIAA that is now leaning on Apple trying to get them to raise prices on the songs. Even in the face of rampant illegal downloading, iTunes works – you’d think those industry execs would get a clue and stop being so idiotic.

As much as I love iTunes, I do hope they keep expanding the catalog. They are great on current (mainstream) stuff (though Craig’s son Aaron tells me not to so much on things like prog rock), but still have some glaring omissions – like The Beatles catalog, for one. I’m not such a huge Beatles fan myself, but it would be nice to have available.

Another couple of things I wish they would fix:
1. The GENRES – OMG, these are ridiculously off most of the time. So bad that they’re useless. And, even worse than just having bad genres, when you import a song into iTunes from another source, iTunes will only find the artwork for you if the genre matches the one they have listed. This is personally very annoying to me, since I like to have the album artwork for my songs.
2. Recommendations – iTunes could really boost this feature. They seem to make recommendations for new artists, etc. based on genres and artist-matching, but there are lots of shareware options (like Goombah, iLike, and The Filter which have moved nicely in this direction.
3. Playlists – Although the iTunes Essentials lists do a good job in this domain, there is, again, a lot of shareware available for building playlists based on the songs you already own. This is important for me, as I have over 12,000 songs already, and it’s growing all the time. But you know most of those 12,000 go unplayed, because they’re not in playlists. Programs like nexTune, beaTunes & Tangerine (which analyze your library based on BPM), and SonicSwap (based on a social networking paradigm) do a great job with this. If anyone knows of other programs of this type, let me know!
4. Fields in iTunes – I have already harped on the genres tags, but iTunes also just needs a uniform field for users to put notes of whatever type they want – right now the “comment” & “description” tabs are overlapping, and there are rumors that Apple will be doing something with them in the future, though it’s not clear what. ALSO, it would be really useful if the “category” field, or something like it, could display for you what playlists a song is in. Then you could make an easy playlist of songs that aren’t in any playlists, so you’d know which ones to target.

That’s all I can think of for now. Doubt anyone from Apple will see this anyway!

  

Apr

iPhone Goes International with Iridium

For a moment, I was thinking … wow, I am totally going to wait until this new version comes out to buy this phone!!!

Great job, Tidbits!

  

Feb

Wow! I don’t know what else to say. While I don’t think I would give over a whole room of my house to a Mac shrine, I have to say this is pretty cool. The best part? The bar built out of Mac Classics!

Basement Mac Collection

  

Dec

Can you tell I’m doing last-minute Chanukah shopping? These are hilarious.

http://gadgets.fosfor.se/the-top-10-weirdest-usb-drives-ever/

  

Jul

Both the fact that Google is “officially” a verb, and the resulting controversy, are hilarious!

But, I had my annual exam today, so I may be a little skewed in what I think is funny…don’t even get me started on just the WRONGNESS of pap smears! %-)

  

Jul

Well, Sami did stay asleep last night, and she had even crawled back into her bed before falling asleep (the doctor had said to be prepared for her to sleep on the floor the first few nights). She just climbed up and curled into a ball at the bottom, but she did sleep in her big girl bed. And she didn’t wake up in the night, either (I figured she would). This morning, she didn’t cry when she woke up, she just opened the door and stood at the gate calling for Craig (he’s usually the one that gets her up).

But, today for nap – no way! I put her down, she wailed, then went back to bed. Then Craig decides to go check on her, and she wasn’t quite asleep and so she saw him – more wailing. This time she doesn’t get back in the bed, but rather gets pissed and throws everything not nailed down in her room onto the floor, then starts hitting the gate, then finally just starts playing. Finally after about an hour and a half we decided to go get her, but then she was in a very bad mood. Craig put her back down for a nap about 4:30 (which is *way* too late for her to be taking a nap), and (after screaming at the top of her lungs for 10 minutes or so) she did sleep for about half an hour before waking up and wailing some more. I just went and got her – it was almost her dinner time by then, so trying to get her to nap was a lost cause.

Tonight at bedtime – more wailing, but this time only 5 minutes or so. She was *so* exhausted! We figured that she had crawled into the bed again, but Craig just went and checked on her and she was kind of half-standing, half-lying on the bed – her feet were still on the floor and it looked like she had just kind of bent over and collapsed! It was very pitiful. Craig thought we should put her all the way in bed, which I agreed with – she couldn’t possibly have been comfortable the way she was. But, I forget that Craig has even less ability to be quiet than a bull in a china shop does. So he trips over her gate on the way out and wakes her up – more wailing. He sat with her for a few minutes hoping she would fall asleep, but she didn’t. Now he left and she’s standing at the door crying more. I really don’t know if *I’m* going to survive this transition!!! I feel like I’m torturing her…

And, in the midst of all of this, Craig has spent all weekend changing computers. I got a new computer last month, and I had given him my old one, but he hadn’t had a chance yet to make the switch. So, this weekend was it. The computer was completely set up with all the software he needed, etc. – all he had to do was copy his personal files over, and he was good to go. Simple, right? NOT!!! I swear, he has the worst luck with computers of anyone I’ve ever seen. Somehow it got all screwed up, we ended up having to re-install things what seemed like a million times – he would get error messages that not only had never happened to me when I was using the machine, but I’d never even *heard* of. This happened the last time he switched computers, too – it’s like he emits magnetic impulses that make the computers mad or something! %-) I’m still not sure the damn thing works, but I’m so sick of the never-endng stream of problems I’m ready to just hurl it (and sometimes him! out the nearest window. It has truly taken him longer to get his files set up on my old computer (which worked just fine until he started using it! than it took me to set up my new computer from scratch. Much, ***MUCH*** longer, as a matter of fact. No wonder he’s so hesitant to make a change!

My baby is finally quiet again – wherever she fell asleep this time, we’re just going to leave her!