Do you hit Gizmodo on an hourly basis? Subscribe to Engadget’s feed? Feel envious of Phil Torrone on a daily basis?

If you’re into gadgets, bring them to the Share Your Gadgets session at BarCampMilwaukee.

Did you know you can use a kid’s toy as an MP3 player and photo viewer? You can… Got a cell phone that you think kicks ass? Bring it.

We’ll talk about the gadgets of today, and the gadgets of tomorrow… What’s good, what’s bad, the UI, the battery life, etc…

Besides cell phones, people have digital cameras, media players, PDAs, GPS receivers and on and on… What will you bring?

Just because I can’t participate in BarCampEarth, doesn’t mean I can’t participate in BarCampEarth…

A few months back, my pals at Z2 Marketing + Design gave me an old Mac, so my challenge became “what can I do with it?” You might remember such projects as MacKiosk which was a photo kiosk built using an old Apple Workgroup Server 80. Well, this is Kiosk2 , which is built using an old PowerComputing PowerCenter 150. Ten years ago this was a killer workstation, featuring a 150 MHz PowerPC 604 processor. Nowadays it’s almost useless…

A little MacPerl magic, a copy of the always exellent JPEGView, and an AppleScript applet to kick things into gear, and we’ve got our kiosk!

So what about BarCampEarth? Well, I built this thing to use at BarCampMilwaukee, the idea being we set it up and as people upload and tag photos with "barcampmilwaukee" they will appear on the screen. So since this weekend is BarCampEarth, we decided to test it all using the tag "barcampearth"

So far it’s working ok. There is a weird flicker when the images load, so I’ll have to work on that, and in earlier testing I’ve had the Mac lock-up on me, but a reboot fixes that problem. Old hardware put to good use… hooray!

So I thought, what can I do for a BarCamp session that would definitely overload my plate… A Mash Pit!

At BarCampMilwaukee, we will have a session on what a mashup is, just going over the basics, showing some examples, talking about APIs, and brainstorming ideas, but for those who aren’t into sleep, we’ll start at 11 PM and see what we can crank out before the sun rises.

We are prefixing with “Mini” because it may only be a few hours or so, depending on whatever else is going on at BarCampMilwaukee. I’m still hoping a bunch of code monkeys I’ve emailed plan to come, because while just me sitting at a table doing this alone would still be very cool, and result in some killer app, I’m sure I could use the input and assistance of others… :)

I’ve been meaning to actually use Ma.gnolia for quite some time now, but being happy with del.icio.us, and the lack of a matching API was holding me back… well, no more…

The folks at Ma.gnolia have released The Mirrord API, which (like Scuttle) is the del.icio.us API, so now we should be able to easily more data between the two. (I guess it’s time to update delisync.)

I’m a fan of the “just works” concept (I mean, I use Mac OS X instead of Windows, right?) but A warning for the bazaar nails it.

I’m seeing it from a different perspective though, one of a media creator. Just yesterday I had to deal with the fact that people don’t care about their rights or freedoms, as long as it will work. We’ve had this discussion in the videoblogging community, where most are advocates of creators rights. What does this mean? It means we encourage people to put their video (audio, text, etc.) online where they can maintain their rights over it as the creator. Some people just don’t care about that. They just want what they create to get online in the quickest and simplest fashion possible. YouTube and MySpace are often the conduits for this “I want it now and I want it to work” mentaility. Neither give enough control over the content to those who created it.

It’s also been noted that often times the attitude of “I want it now and I want it to work” is taken by younger people, the under 30 crowd, who haven’t yet got a long term view, or a sense of history with the things they create. This may be true, I see it in other things as well, and I often am not sure how much of my view is shaped by the length of time I’ve been involved in the things I care about, versus just my strong opinions on certain subjects.

It’s been at least a week since I rambled on about BarCampMilwaukee, so it’s time for an update.

The BarCampMilwaukee.com site is growing, but honestly I think it’s getting a bit confusing. Hopefully it makes sense to people not familiar with BarCamps and/or wikis, but if we need to refactor, then we will…

We had a planning meeting last week, and got a tour of Bucketworks. It became clear that Bucketworks will be an awesome venue for BarCampMilwaukee. We certainly are not limited by space constraints. Our biggest concern about Bucketworks is the bandwidth. We still don’t have a definite solution, but we will consider asking people that are not leading a session to refrain from using excessive bandwidth if possible. (Meaning, don’t download Linux ISO’s Saturday afternoon!)

The next planning meeting is Sunday, August 27th, 2006. Stop by if you can and help us out. (Also listed at Upcoming.org) Share your ideas, and get a look at Bucketworks.

There is no doubt in the minds of the people planning it that this will be an amazing event, and probably Milwaukee’s first “un-conference” as well. Please spread the word about it, and make plans now to be there!

A long time ago (in a state far, far away…) Ekwipment was released by our pals at Friday Morning:

Ekwipment is a lightweight PHP/MySQL engine for adding job listings to a website.

And that is what it does… I was asked to test it out, and if you actually read the docs, the install is pretty easy. I did a bit of testing and it worked pretty well. Of course I am not putting job listings on my site, but if you are, take a look at it, and bug them to add the features you want or need…

The folks at Plazes finally launched Plazes for Mobile Phones, so life is good… (See: Plazes goes mobile)

Now us geeks that do not travel around with laptops using wifi on a daily basis, but do have a decent mobile phone can join in on the fun.

I’ve only been running it for a day now, so I can’t give much of a review yet, but it’s a fairly simple (and well done) Series 60 application. Installing and running it is easy as heck. (You don’t even need to install Python.)

Now if they can just make their badge available in valid XHTML, I might use it. :)

This is a subject I’ve been meaning to write about for a long time, and Meg touched on it recently: Can a Recipe Be Stolen?

I like making things in the kitchen, mainly food, and a lot of times I use sites like Recipe*zaar, where it’s common to see people add comments like "I got this recipe from" followed by some food show, or cookbook, or box of whatever. Now, this is something I wouldn’t do, but then again, I’m a Creative Commons geek, and I believe in the rights of the creators, and wouldn’t just take someone else’s work and republish it (to a world-wide audience) without making sure it’s ok to do. (This view probably represents 0.0001% of the people who use sites like this.)

I make my own pizza crusts, and the recipe I use is from some magazine I can’t remember… I ripped out the page about 4 years ago, and eventually added it into my home wiki (where I keep many of my recipes) for use when I need it. I won’t publish it, because I’m sure I don’t have the rights to do so. It may be like 100 other pizza crusts recipes, but still, I didn’t create it.

I don’t have any answers to this problem, other than everyone adopting Creative Commons licenses, but even those have their own set of problems…

This morning I just couldn’t sleep… It’s not even 5 AM, so what do I do? Get up and start working… One problem…

After a bit of panic, I took care of things that I really needed to take care of on my own computer, like entering contact info into Address Book, and file management, and backups, etc. Hmmm, maybe I should disconnect at least once a week.

Ahh, things are back to normal, the connection has been restored. (Thought I still have that Javascript-powered Gallery to write…)

I’m working with a small company to determine what file server and backup solutions might fit their needs. Here is what I’ve come up with so far…

They are a small group all located in one office, so for a file server, nothing too big/costly should be needed. My first thought was a Linksys NSLU2. The pros of the NSLU2 are that it is cheap and simple to set up and administer. It seems ideal for this situation. They would need to add their own external USB drives, which is not a big deal, as they’ve already got a bunch of those in the office. Are there any cons to the NSLU2? Other than the fact that it formats the filesystem of the external drives as something you can’t plug directly into your Mac, I don’t know of any…

Instead of the NSLU2, they could use an old PowerMac G4 that is on hand and not doing much. They could still plug in the external USB (and Firewire) drives, and keep them formatted as-is so they could be moved to another Mac if needed. Internal drives could also be used if desired. The pros of the G4 are that they already have it, it could use internal and external drives, and could be a more full-fledged server (print, http, etc.) The cons to the G4 is that management would not be as simple, and it’s more/bigger hardware with more/bigger failure points.

For an off-site backup solution, I’m seriously looking at Amazon’s S3. I’ve been using it for myself since it launched, and I think with a simple client like Jungle Disk or Interarchy, they could easily create off-site backups at a very affordable price. They do a lot of large files for print, as well as audio & video production, so Amazon’s pricing is excellent.

So what do you think? Did I miss anything?

Since I can’t leave well enough alone with this, I’m following up Calendaring: Still not there… with a post about events. I blame Aaron for this.

Sure, I could talk about Darwin Calendar Server, mention Calendar Swamp, or complain about http and WebDAV and CalDav and webcal in relation to calendars (I guess they are all somehow different…) But why bother? Aaron posted about upcalendar and he even released code.

Now, I’ve known Aaron for a long time, and I still read many of his posts and then re-read them, and then scratch my head and say “Huh?” As for his code, I try not to look at it. Anyway, from what I can decipher, upcalendar is about taking your events from Upcoming.org with you, so that’s what I wanted to attempt.

First I went to Upcoming.org and under ‘My Upcoming Events’ choose ‘Subscribe’ and picked the iCal URL. I then subscribed to that in Apple’s iCal, and set iSync to sync it with my Nokia 7610.

After syncing, my phone had all of ‘My Upcoming Events’ in the calendar.

This seems somewhat close, in theory, to what Aaron did, at least I think so. Who can tell what he’s taking about half the time. Anyway, enjoy… I’ve got to get back to solving this calendaring problem…

I’ve been rolling my own (or trying to) for quite some time now, and I still am not happy with my calendaring solution…

Let’s see, I started with Sunbird, and then added in Upcoming.org (even helped fix a bug) and eventually settled on Thunderbird and Lightning.

Well, Thunderbird and Lightning and iCal and an AppleScript to make sure iCal updates my calendar before iSync syncs it with my Nokia 7610… Did you get all that? Does it sound insane?

I’m all for crazy hacks if the end result is what I want/need, but I also like simple/elegant solutions, so I’m shopping around. I looked at Google Calendar, but I don’t like it. I tried to add in my own calendar, which is stored on my server and accessible via WebDAV, but it didn’t like that. Then later is seemed to like it, but it doesn’t consider that ‘My Calendar’ because it considers the one stored on Google’s server as ‘My Calendar.’ That’s not what I want… I can view my real calendar, but I can’t seem to make edits, and edits I make elsewhere do not seem to update. Google Calendar just plain doesn’t work for me. Google Calendar == no damn good.

Next I gave 30boxes a try. By the looks of the app, the folks behind it really “get it” as far as how the web works. Again, if you have simple needs, 30boxes might work for you, but when I added my real calendar under ‘My Web Calendars’ it showed up, screwed up some events, and doesn’t seem to refresh or allow me to edit my real calendar. Other than those issues, 30boxes looks pretty nice. Sigh…

So is the only answer a display-only solution? (I was doing that with PHP iCalendar like 3+ years ago, and it wasn’t ideal then.)

Is there any web-based calendaring app that will let me use my own .ics file stored on my server and made accessible via WebDAV?

BarCampMilwaukee.com is up and running. If you are interested in BarCampMilwaukee, please go there for details, and to sign-up.

Now that we’ve got a date (Sat. Sept. 30 & Sun. Oct. 1, 2006) and a place to have BarCamp (Bucketworks) we are working on things like getting participants (campers) and sponsors, and promoting it. Are you involved in a technology-related group in the Milwaukee area? Tell the people in your group about it.

We’ve set up a Yahoo! Group for BarCampMilwaukee where we are currently discussing all the details for the event. I think we’ll also be meeting at Bucketworks on Sunday, August 20th, 2006 to do some in-person discussion and planning (waiting for confirmation on that meeting…)

I’m also hoping to design & print up some flyers in the next few days… And, you know, if I’m posting too much about BarCampMilwaukee, just let me know. ;)

I do love my Nokia 7610, but recently had a bit of trouble with it, which involved not being able to actually answer calls…

At first it was somewhat random, I’d get a call and answer the phone, and all was well. I would then get another call, and it would ring once (or just a half a ring) and then no matter what button I pushed I could not answer the call. After the call was over, things went back to normal. I was also using my ringtone for the alarm, which would only play the half-ring, and then stop.

I ended up debugging the problem by changing profiles and selected ringtones, and finally realized that the MP3 I had created and used for a ringtone was causing the problem.

I’d been using an MP3 of a phone ringing for nearly a year now, and never had a problem. Did it become corrupt? It was stored in the phone’s memory, and I’m guessing it was written to memory once when I loaded it onto the phone, and read from memory each time the phone played the sound.

I’m using a different ringtone right now, but I’m going to load a new copy of the MP3 I created to see if a fresh copy fixes the problem.