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Jabber 4Ever!

I needed a Jabber (oops, I mean XMPP) client for Mac OS 9. What? Mac OS 9? What am I doing, some crazy time-travel experiment?

No, I stopped working on my time-travel experiments in the year 3042, but anyway… I didn’t have to look far. I just looked back to August 2000 when I last mentioned Jabbernaut.

Sure Jabbernaut is no longer being developed, but lucky for us it’s open-source, so it’s still available. Oh, lucky for us it’s hosted at SourceForge, so we can actually download it. (Though I’m sure I have a backup on CD… In a box… Somewhere…) And most importantly, we are lucky that the Jabber protocols have not been changed for silly reasons over the years. Open-source, open-protocols, they’re good things… Do you think a 4 year old version of AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, or MSN Messenger would still work today? (It might, I don’t know for sure, this isn’t one of those rhetorical questions, I honestly don’t know!)

If I haven’t mentioned it recently, I’m a big fan of Jabber (I mean XMPP!) It’s another one of those “edge technologies” that I keep wishing and waiting for to just take off. Next year will be the year it does. I’m sure of it. (Right Apple?)

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Olympus Rides Again!

There have been no photos posted recently. This is due to the death of our digital camera. Countertop. Children. Floor. You can put the pieces together…

So we never quite got around to replacing it, I mean, isn’t the cost of technology supposed to go down? It never seems to, you just get more for the same price. A good Mac will always cost around $2000. Six years ago that got you a 233 mhz PowerMac G3 with 64 MB of RAM, and today you still pay $2000 but now you get a Dual 1.8 ghz PowerMac G5 with 256 MB of RAM. Six years from now you’ll get a 20 ghz PowerMac G8 with 2 terabytes of RAM, and you’ll pay about $2000… (Ok, the numbers might be off, but you get the idea…)

Anyway, I was secretly hoping the upcoming holiday season would help out with this problem, when a friend of mine gave me an old Olympus camera to use. I mean, how often does someone give you a $1000+ camera? Well, when it’s 6 years old! ;) (I should add a sidenote that this friend is the same one that I got my old Wallstreet PowerBook from, and it too was state-of-the-art in 1998. Thanks Friend!)

I’m not complaining, I’m quite thankful actually! It uses SmartMedia cards (of which I have about 5 or 6 now, some from the old Olympus, some from the Rio 500.) It’s a huge camera! It’s not gonna fit in your pocket unless you are a kangaroo. No matter, I can again take pictures! Of course with the 8 MB card it seems to hold only 4 images in “Super High Quality” mode. I’m hoping it can use the 64 mb card I have…

The test images seemed a little soft… Hey, just think of the Dischord inspired photos I can take now – Flickr here I come!

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More New Phones

We got new phones for the house last year, since we started using caller id, and I picked up a dual-handset (two phones, one home base, one recharging station) from Uniden fairly cheap. One still works, but a few months back we noticed that one of the phones seemed to not be transmitting sound when you talked, so people would call, we could hear them, and the could not hear us, they’d get frustrated and hang up. (It was actually sort of amusing… “Hello? Hello? Ok, I’m hanging up now!”)

I eventually opened up the broken one and found the microphone had come loose, and since it did not seem like a fun soldering job, it was time for new phones. (I don’t want to knock Uniden, as the phones did take a good deal of abuse in the form of falling, dropping, etc. and our old Uniden phone is like 10 years old and it still works ok.)

Nonetheless, I had heard good things about Panasonic phones, and picked up the aptly named Panasonic KX-TG2344B. Again a dual-handset model, but this time, it’s got neat features like intercom between the handsets and the base station, speakerphone, (easy to use) phonebook, and I’m sure other stuff…

Let’s hope these last a while…

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Kids and the Internets

Kids use the internets, that’s no secret, but how do you keep them from “harmful matter” out there? I’m not worried about web sites, but I’d like to eventually let the kids use those email addresses they’ve had for years. Do I need to create a whitelist, so that any friend of theirs has to be pre-approved by me before they can receive mail from them? that seems like a good idea, any problems with that? Spoofing? Spammers? Hmmm…

I’ve also thought about IM. I rarely get anything nasty or SPIM-like, and I figured setting up Jabber accounts would be the safest bet. Of course that really only sets them up to IM with me, which is fine for now. I’m sure at some point some of their friends will want them to come to the dark side (AIM, or worse MSN Messenger! I gotta draw the line somewhere!)

Anyway, I’m going to look into ways of protecting the kids without installing goofy “nanny” software, or having to put proxies in place. Good luck to me!

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Podcasting Must Hears

I’ve been busy lately, real busy… But I thought I should at least take a few minutes to list off some of the stuff I’ve been listening to…

  • Daily Source Code [RSS] – Come on, it’s Adam Curry, ’nuff said right?
  • Evil Genius Chronicles [RSS] – Been listening to Dave since we started this stuff and he, Adam and I all had our own versions of ‘iPodder’ clients… Dave’s an interesting fellow, and always has something interesting to say.
  • The Dawn and Drew Show [RSS] – Yes, I’m probably to blame for getting Drew started on the podcasting thing. What can I say, I so proud… (!?!?)
  • Reel Reviews [RSS] – Brilliant! Film reviews that hit the target, dead on… I’m surprised there isn’t a link to Amazon to buy the DVD‘s, seems like a perfect match.
  • The Rock and Roll Geek Show [RSS] – I can’t say I love all the stuff Mr. Butler plays, but I’ve enjoyed the shows, and it’s pretty darn easy to skip the songs you don’t like (try that with radio!) Again, I’m surprised there isn’t an Amazon affiliate thing going on to sell CD‘s.
  • Coverville [RSS] – I’ve figured out the secret of Coverville, and it’s simple. It’s things that are familiar, but newly discovered all at once. Songs you probably know, done by artists you might now, but it’s all mixed up… or something like that. again, simple to skip the songs you don’t like, kicks the butt of radio.
  • Treo Podcast [RSS] – How can you not like a podcast where the host says “This is a special podcast, if by "special" you mean "drunk."”? Entertaining indeed!
  • Brainwagon Radio [RSS] – I really like the geeky topics of the show. Mark always seems to have some new gadget or experiment to talk about.

Wow, the list is a lot longer than last time we looked at my playlist. This isn’t even it, I just wanted to highlight a few… We still got Trade Secrets, all the stuff at IT Conversations, Eric Rice, Esc From the World!, Jimmy Jett… and the list goes on and on…

A while back Drew and I were discussing the fact that neither of us have really heard Lazer 103 since August… Hmmm, about the time podcasting started to take off… And what’s happening in Denver? Denver radio stations launch battle to win back listeners… Wake up RadioLand! It’s a Brave New World…