CogBlogged from ‘July, 2010’

I’m going to take a wide turn around the iPad vapor huff; whether or not it is the Game Changer that Will Herald Trumpets of Change or it is The Death Knell of Freedom as We Know It. I have one and like using it. That’s my stand. Yet, the process of moving content on or off the device I agree leaves me wanting. Or frothing. The thing is, its silly to rule out the potential of a device for the snapshot of its current capability, especially when the capabilities can be changed via software. The iPad is not cast in stone. Oh, but back to the point. The movement of documents onto the device via iTunes is so awkward, stupid, and lame I refuse to even fool with it. I don;t want to sync when I need a doc; I want to reach out and grab it. My current [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by bobtravis That’s me, second from the right. As a kid, I heard a lot of things cast my way (even from my folks) about being a “Smart Aleck” cause I had a snappy, saracastic answer to anything They never defined it, there was no google, so I just had to infer what they meant. But it was pretty clear. Now that I have the intertubes, I know the origins of the term, yet am not sure how I connect back to Alec Hoag. But sure enough, the description at wordwizard feels appropo An American term for an impudent or obnoxiously self-assertive or conceited individual who thinks they know everything and are not shy about saying so; a pompous no-it-all; a haughty, self-important fool; a wise guy. Yep, and with the internet and self publishing and navel gazing blogging and what I ate for lunch [...]

Harrumph to people who gave up on RSS readers and really are deluded that they can get all their news via twitter; its now my secret weapon of discovery. It was there I found in my techie feeds a story that my bank (Chase) has added the capability to their iPhone app to deposit checks. I had liked over the last year how they updated their ATMs to scan checks for deposits negating the need for deposit slips and envelopes. This is one more step. I already had the Chase app, and sure enough it is in there– well I did have to generate a new security code (shows you how much I use the app)… So it looks like you have to do photos of the front and back of the check, and there are limits to the service (no more than $1000 per deposit or $3000 per week). [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog First image made with the iPhone app Diptic (http://www.dipticapp.com/) to create multipane images from phone photos. I grabbed two of my own photos from flickr and upped them to my phone. The side images are from the same photo, just displaced to make for a framing effect Originals www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4704886736/ www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4704240965/ Diptic is an iPhone app to make “diptychs” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diptych You can choose from any photos on the phone, and a number of layout styles from 2-3 panels for doing before and afters or collages. Once a picture is placed you can pan and zoom it to fill the frame, and also do some basic editing (colors) for the photos and the frames. It’s got some neat potential for $1.99

modified from cc licensed flickr photo shared by Lord Jim I’m looking for someone, some group to take over the development for Feed2JS; I’ve taken it as far as I can possibly can. It gets used a lot, more than I think I want to know. The server empties its cache nightly, but I just checked, and since the last nightly dumped, it has cached feeds from 38746 RSS sources. If you google the right bit of code (that part that is inserted into web pages to make it work, I see 50,000 some finds: Yikes. I have to give a huge shout out and thanks to Modevia Web Services, who have graciously provided free hosting for Feed2JS since early 2006, when luckily I moved it off of an aging Xserve at Maricopa Community Colleges (where it would have died after I left Maricopa in April 2006 and the old [...]

Notes from the blog crypt.. This post has been lingering in the drafts area for a while; it reminds me of one of those mystery containers of Unidentified Food Substances in the back of me fridge. I keep thinking I had thrown it out, and every time I rummage around, I look at it and wonder, hmmm maybe there is still something here? cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I have these two braided streams of thoughts I cannot untwist; these were to intended as separate posts but could not sort which one came first. And I am not really blogging this as much as dumping in an iPad at 30,000 feet over California. One strand is assembling a mixed jumble of thoughts after finishing Anya Kamenetz’s DIY U. I read it partly out of curiosity of what was mentioned of my colleagues/friends in print, partly as a group [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s a few weeks gone by in the rear view mirror, but like last year I wanted to post some notes from the social media aspects we wove into the 2010 NMC Summer Conference. Our host this year was USC, but we had the conference in Anaheim at the Disney Resort. If you want just the headlines, I;d say Twitter Was Big (No Surprise) but this year with More Insights, Photosharing Was Slightly Down, Conference Blogging is a Win, and There’s No Match For Being There. Pathable Social Media Site  This was the second year we use the service offered by  Pathable that provides a platform for connecting and communicating with other attendees. We are able to create accounts for all conference attendees via an API from our own custom registration system, and it transfers some of their user profile information from our drupal [...]

Dear Blog, I’ve been gone so long you are not familiar with who I am? Who, but myself, can I hold up for blame? Have you forsaken me for another, given my inattention? Stephen has already dropped the Wiley E Coyote anvil sized hint. Yet, as we have talked before, fewer things are lamer than blogging about not blogging, yet I shall do so anyhow. That’s the thing, my sweet blog software, you waiting patiently with an empty “Add New Post” form– is that unlike any other places we put our name on in the web, this is the one where we establish all the rules and therefore break them. And that, on this day of USA celebration of our quasi independence (freedom to fill up shopping carts at Walmart, freedom to clog up the cmapgrounds with atvs and generators, freedom to shoot incendiary devices over bone dry forests…), here [...]