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Rhapsody improvements and lower prices

Rhapsody is trying to provide iPhone users with something that Apple may be giving them later on. Apple bought (and is closing) lala.com which allowed users to listen to music (at least the first time) without purchasing it. When users did buy a song it was only to hear on lala and only cost a dime. The end user hadn’t bought the music only rented it. The Zune Marketplace already provides a subscription service that allows users to fill their mp3 players with songs. Users have been having to wait for Apple to catch up.

Rhapsody is a subscription service that allows members to listen to songs an unlimited number of times online and on the iPhone. The service did cost somewhere just South of $20 a month. Now, they have dropped the price to $10 and have begun to allow iPhone users to download songs for listening on their phones when a connection is absent or too sketchy.

That is all great news…when it works.

The app is newly upgraded so I’ll be patient for a while longer but it is very slow and makes the user click through a number of pages before allowing them to actually hear any music. Where is the setting that sends the app straight to the playlist? The Rhapsody app is clunky and crashy and inelegant.

As usual, it looks like we’ll have to wait for Apple to rescue the idea by being the folks who finally do a decent job of implementing the subscription process. Or maybe we just need a Zune.

Deleted Photos from your camera card? No problem, well maybe

Carsten Blum had a problem. He had formatted his camera’s storage card. Game over right? Well, no, he went to work and develooped the mighty “Exif Untrasher”.

His Mac based program can retrieve photos from formatted camera cards many times. Nothing is foolproof in this area as you know if you’ve tried undelete programs in the past. His code does no harm though, so like a careful physician, you can attempt to reclaim your lost photos. Then, if the program should fail, you still have the choice to take it to a house specializing in data recovery.

See his creation here and keep it in your dropbox for emergencies:

http://www.bluem.net/en/mac/exif-untrasher/

How do Techies send a ‘Save the Date’ notice for their wedding?

Google Wave Keyboard Shortcut Cheat Sheet

This is a quick guide to the current keyboard shortcuts supported by Wave.

Wave Navigation
Up/Down arrows use to navigate messages.
Tab/Shift-tab same as Up/Down arrows (outside edit mode)
Home/End focus first/last message
Space go to next unread message (doesn’t have to be within the same wave).
Left/Right arrows to switch focus between digest panel and wave panel.
Page Up/Down go to the next page in the [does not currently work, known bugs]
Ctrl-Space mark all messages read (focus must be on wave panel though mstahl@google.com)

Messages
Enter replies to messages: the new message will appear just below the selected message (it will be the same indentation level if it is the first reply, but indented more if a non-first reply).
Shift-Enter replies to messages at the end of thread: the new message will appear at the same indentation level, and at the BOTTOM most position.
highlight text + Enter inline reply: the new message will appear indented and INSIDE the current message.
Ctrl-R same as enter
Ctrl-E edit message
Ctrl-Enter (while editing) insert inline reply at caret

Text Editing
Ctrl-B toggles bold attributes for selected text
Ctrl-I toggles italics attributes for selected text
Ctrl-G Color
Ctrl-L Links to another Wave (highlight text, hit CTRL-L and put in a URL or a Wave ID (see Debug menu for ID’s) [NOTE: we will soon change the key combo]

Copy/Paste
Ctrl-C copy the selected text.
Ctrl-X cut the selected text.
Ctrl-V paste the text from the text buffer.

Structural Formatting
Ctrl- Make the current line a heading, where n = 1..4 for different sized headings.
Ctrl-5 Bullets
Ctrl-6 Normal (removes heading/bullet style, but not bold/italic etc. current visual glitch in some browsers where text stays big – but this is not persistent.)
Ctrl-7 LTR + Left align
Ctrl-8 RTL + Right align

Slide Show
Space / Right Next Slide
Shift-Space/ Left Previous Slide
Down / Page Down Next set of thumbnails
Up / Page Up Previous set of thumbnails
Home First Slide
End Last Slide

Lifehacker is one of my regular sites to visit

Here is an example of the useful information on Lifehacker.
They crowdsourced their readers to fine the best applications for various tasks we all perform. This link is to a list of some of their most popular results. A good example is the best journaling tools, “pen and paper.”

http://lifehacker.com/5303642/best-of-the-best-hive-five-winners-march-through-june-2009?skyline=true&s=i

Ubiquity: Make your own Mashups, no really

Ubiquity isn’t even beta yet, it’s alpha but it does some amazing things and points toward the future of the web.

For Example:

Highlight some text in another language, invoke Ubiquity with a two keystroke combo type translate and it appears on the web page you’re reading in your language. Type email-alan, it chooses my email from your address book and sends me the portion of the web page you’ve seleted.

You can lookup definitions or articles in Wikipedia then post the links with a note to Twitter. You can mashup gmail with maps or yelp.

There is much more already. See the video link below for a tutorial from the developer about more stuff Ubiquity can do. It’s fun and it’s free:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Electric Avenues from the NYTimes.com and Wired

Op-Ed Columnist – Yes, They Could. So They Did. – NYTimes.com.

Tom Friedman in today’s NYT. Interesting view of a green transportation option in New Delhi. I really like reading this guy when I agree and when I don’t. It seems to me that he is good at backing his opinions with facts. A refreshing thing to see.

The car he refers to reminds me of this story of another automobile innovator in a recent Wired Magazine story.

“The choice: to recharge batteries at plug-in spots, or swap them out at special stations.”
Photo: Joe Pugliese

Losing Weight, Feeling Grateful: Best Free iTunes App ever

Its easy, all the slim people said. Just: get a diet buddy, set your goals, keep track of everything you eat, increase your daily exercise, reduce your portion size and you’ll balance your weight-to-height budget. For a guy like me, easily distracted, disorganized maybe just a touch lazy, this advice has not been easy to follow. Heck, it looks like a lot of work even to get started with all of that.

Funny story: I’m following each of those suggestions in an enjoyable and evidently sustainable way with a free iPhone app called “Lose It” by Fit Now, Inc.

There are several advantages to using this program:

• It is really, really easy to use
• First my Son and now my lovely Wife have started using it and we are enjoying sharing notes and have become diet buddies
• It helps you set goals which are easy to modify and tells you when you should attain those goals
• It keeps a library of the foods and even of the entire meals you’ve entered so you can easily repeat things you’ve looked up before. (I eat pretty much the same breakfast every morning, so I just click on that meal and I’ve added it to the log for the day.)
• It is easy to add custom foods or meals. (My Son Matt has “Dinner with Family” (an average of 600 cals) and things like “terrible school lunch salad” programed in.
• It figures the exercise calories you enter into your daily budget so you can see right away how much more you can eat and still stay on track.
• One tap on the iPhone and one on the day’s log, and I can see where I am. “Business dinner at Maggiano’s tonight, need to hit the gym for an extra 15 minutes this morning.”

I’ve never believed in listening to folks who are in the process of losing weight for advice on the subject. It seems to me that the people who have become and/or remained slim are the ones to emulate. That is where all the advice above came from and that’s what this little application is helping me and my family to accomplish.

Lose It! screenshot from Mashable article

There is a list of weight loss related apps reviews at Mashable if you’re interested in reading about the others, just click on the screenshot above.

Good luck and feel free to check in with me any time after March 14th to see if I’ve reached my goal and maintained the weight loss.

Kidrex: a simple effective web search filter for kids

One of the jobs I do is to run a computer lab I built for a city after school program. I use Open DNS to help protect children and the adults who use the computers during school hours from seeing unsavory material and from going to phishing and spyware sites. I recommend using Open DNS for these situations if you are comfortable with following a few simple instructions from their site.

Here is another tool to help with the same problem, though. The front end for Google at Kidrex.org helps to keep folks away from those sites’ results in their search engines. I might be tempted to use this as a default search engine if I’d ever been embarassed by search results at work. And, remember, lots of adults don’t want to see that stuff either. I’m certainly going to recommend it to my parents. As an additional benefit, when I tested KidRex there were no advertisements in the results.

If you have a computer that kids use regularly, you might want to set Kidrex.org as the start page in your browser.

Kidrex Screenshot