CogBlogged from ‘May, 2006’

Language translation via Babelfish? That is soooooo Web 1.0. Check out Polly Glotta, the text to speech language translator: You type a phrase in the top form, select a language translation pair (English to Dutch, French to Italian, etc). Polly not only translate the text of the phrase, she also speaks it out loud! She’s quite a gal, that polly. Wow 2.0. Tip of the cog dog blog hat to RsearchBuzz

Thanks Canada!

flickr foto available on flickr That’s right, he’s back. Not his back! Stephen Downes is back in the blog saddle. Hold on for a wild ride.

Okay, I know there are a lot of blogs. And it seems we are still at an inflection point, so soon there are going to be A LOT OF BLOGS. The long tail of blog is growing longer by the second. Yee-hah! Ride the tail! It just struck me as I was counting down with Will as he heads off for new horizons, with a first jump off at ScotEduBlogs, a bloggers meet up over in Scotland. Just browsing the list of towns, and people who blog there, my look at the long list of blogs located in Argyll and Bute just made me smile! It’s rich with fascinating topics… There is Blethers, where you can read about a “retired English teacher keeps her brain alive”. How about the Interactive Chatting Teddies– news and stories as Campbell bear and Spencer bear travel. Where are they going next? Chris and kids [...]

Does he ever get weary of it? It’s not a criticism (really! I mean it, sincerely). I admire someone who can take a show on the road like that. I got worn out after one repeat. Wow.

I’m again at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport for another jaunt out of town. I recalled reading somewhere online a few weeks ago that the airport was offering free wireless, not the pay through your nose service that was there before. Sure enough, flipping open the laptop, there it is: This is a welcome change from a place where small pizzas are 10 bucks, bottled water $2, etc. Free! Free Wireless! How cool. “The new wireless Internet service will allow travelers to sit in comfort as they log on to check their e-mail or even look at the latest headlines from their home town,” said Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon. “It’s part of our on-going commitment to making Phoenix a great place not only to visit, but to do business.” Heck, if I lived in the city, Phil may have won my vote with just this move. Update: Make that free web. [...]

Rightfully so, people have been requesting the Feed2JS be able to display content referenced in RSS 2.0 or podcast feeds. Until now, these enclusore tags have been ignored because it is not supported in the underlying MagpieRSS library code. It turns out there is a fairly simple patch / adjustment to the Magpie code that seems to make it work and a few folks that have emailed have shown it can be done (Thanks Aaron Axelsen for the nudge and the sample code) I have a preliminary version of Feed2JS running on the Maricopa Jade server only that supports podcast media. I hope I can get a few testers to try it out before it gets rolled into the download versions. There is a new option on the Feed Builder form to indicate whether enclosure media should be displayed (default is “no” just so we do not present any surprises [...]

flickr foto iAudio and Shuffleavailable on my flickr My new iAudio U3 is so tiny and light you’d think it might float away.. but it can carry 1 Gb of stuff. Here is relaxes next to my Shuffle My iAudio U3 MP3 player/recorder prompty arrived and I am just starting to play with it. I got this model given the phase out of iRiver models that work with Mac OS X (the T10 lines are Windows only). It is tiny, tiny, a tad heaver than my Shuffle and light (no battery, it recharges via USB). Moving files to and from are easy, as it mounts as a desktop drive via USB 2.0 connection, so no funky middle software needed. The audio sounds very good, decent bass, so as a player, it is great. I’ve only done limited testing with the recording– the process is easy (buttons and menus a little [...]

flickr foto Mouse, No Tailavailable on my flickr Ha, I am eating my own crow. After baseless ridicule of 3 button mice, I am now loving my Kensington mini Bluetooth critter, on both sides of the operating systems in my MacBookPro. Right clicking saves key-click combos for the Mac, and on Windows on the Intel Mac, I can more easily access those property windows. Plus, as a remote I should be able to mouse around during presentations. And now for somethig completely different… blogging about technology that works! I now am a proud and loud propnent of multifunction mice…. I am very happy so far with Bluetoothing my MacBookPro with this Kensington PilotMouse Bluetooth mini mouse.

I am already 3 hours deep of my weekend time trying to resurrect Windoze XP (Xtra Polluted) from its now threatened partition on my MacBookPro. This began with login errors like “winlogin.exe- unable to locate component– failed to start because ole32.dll was not found” Well that is utterly useful information and gives me a clear sense of what I need to do next, eh? So I have been rebooting in Safe Mode (same results, same errors). Then I have tried the WinXP start up disk which offers this useful access to “Recovery Console”, which is no console at all except for a DOS command screen and a listing of things like FIXBOOT, CHKSYS, and other more clearly labeled and understandable programs. But to even get that far, it kept asking me for an administrator login, which I had no recollection of ever setting up. My ususal passwords all failed. Rebooted [...]