bellingham public library audiobooks block ipod users April 20, 2008
Posted by Al Castle in : Puter Stuff, gnash-teeth, Must Listen, OSX, Travel, Web Design & Dev, iPhone , 1 comment so farThis evening I finished reading a book and was investigating whether the next book I’d like to read is available from the Whatcom County Library. I notice on their horrifically designed and sluggish website a blurb about audio books, now available. It is with some joy that I follow the link to Northwest Anytime and read more. Then the let down comes crashing down like a Bengal tiger to the groin.
At this time, OverDrive Media files cannot be used on iPods or Mac computers.
Our media titles, provided by OverDrive, Inc., use DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection technology from Microsoft Corporation. Unfortunately the iPod (and Mac) currently support neither DRM-protected Windows Media Audio (.wma) files nor Windows Media Video (.wmv) files.
OverDrive, along with hundreds of online media providers, is hopeful that Apple and Microsoft can reach an agreement that would enable support for Microsoft-based DRM-protected materials on the iPod/Mac.
To review a list of devices that are compatible with OverDrive Media, click here.
You may also want to check device documentation to determine if a device supports DRM-protected Windows Media content.
Reading through their FAQ…dear god. This wonderful software that you are required to use supports everything from Windows 98 on up. Oh, and in case you didn’t catch it, the company/product name for this wonderfully backward media software is called OverDrive. Is this a joke? Someone has to be playing an elaborate joke on me.
OverDrive has this tidbit on its website.
The OverDrive Team is a group of innovative, passionate masterminds who build and distribute technology solutions for the real world.
What twisted dimension did these guys crawl out of? Ok, I’m straying a little here. Back to the Library and its suckiness.
Ah here we go, apparently iPods are far too modern. Lets support the Palm!
Can I use OverDrive Audio Book titles with my Palm device? OverDrive Audio Book titles may be transferred to certain Palm devices with the help of a third party application called Pocket Tunes….
The iPod (& iTouch, iPhone, Shuffle) is decidedly the most prevalent portable music listening device on the market. Why then is the Bellingham Public Library, choosing to use a Windows Media Audio format and DRM solution that locks out the most widely used device for Mac and Windows users?
Yes, I would agree that Windows is what is running on the majority of desktops, but who really listens to audio books at their desktop? In your car and on your mp3 player are the more likely of places. Why the sites main blurb contains this statement.
Transfer audiobooks to your MP3 player or burn selected titles to a CD for listening on the go.
The press release for this service has this mention.
“This service is great for travelers, commuters, and for those who like to listen to books while they exercise,” said Joan Airoldi, Director of Whatcom County Library System. “With so many best-selling titles available, there’s sure to be something for every listener.”
Again, the majority of people are using iPod family products. The release goes onto say,
Beth Farley, Head of Information and Reader’s Services at the Bellingham Public Library, listens to audiobooks when she goes on vacation. “No more piles of CDs to keep track of on the airplane,” she enthuses, “I’ll be able to fit several entire novels on one tiny MP3 player.”
Alright, what the hell? I fly a lot and I’ve never seen anyone with a stack of CDs on a plane. And please tell me Ms Farley what sort of MP3 player do you have? Sounds to me like most bureaucratic organizations and companies, someone out of touch with the market and technology is making the decisions.
I really wish I wasn’t so agitated and it wasn’t so late. Otherwise I’d write a more coherent piece on why not only this is a very poor implementation of great idea, but also on the correct course of action the library, publishers, and most importantly authors should have taken.
More Info On The Black App April 16, 2008
Posted by Al Castle in : Squirrels, gnash-teeth, OSX, TimeWaster, Marketing, Castle, Web Design & Dev, iPhone , add a commentThe Black App - A possible iPhone application of unknown coolness. For more info, you could go to the website. That was a joke.
They Hype::
All the references and blubs are essentially the same, I’m guessing it’s by their own people digging themselves and such. Since they hit dig, twitter and a few other places, it’s been syndicated and quoted all over the place.
No one knows anything though.
The Companies ::
Epic Apps is the company producing this and purchased the “theblackapp.com” domain via proxy in an effort to hide. They’re hosting at Media Temple, Inc. who provides services to big names and high traffic sites.
theblackapp.com was registered for only one year on Mar 31st 08
epicapps.com was also only registered for one year, 7 days later on Apr 6th 08 - redirects to theblackapp.com
epicapps.com ping responses come from godaddy.com though.
The Code ::
Since the web page is really simple there’s nothing to gleam from the markup accept that they are using google analytics. I’m sure they’re collecting a lot of good marketing data.
The registration page, now this is interesting, is posting to theblackapp.wufoo.com
Related ? ::
wufoo.com was registered Jan 16th 06 to Chris Campbell - http://wufoo.com/about/
So three guys with an idea and venture money from Ycombinator started Infinity Box Inc. and built wufoo.
What is wufoo?
Wufoo is an Internet application that helps anybody build amazing online forms. When you design a form with Wufoo, it automatically builds the database, backend and scripts needed to make collecting and understanding your data easy, fast and fun. Because we host everything, all you need is a browser, an Internet connection and a few minutes to build a form and start using it right away.
Chris also has a site called particletree.com, which is hosted and links to mediatemple and their venture backers.
Chris Campbell is too common of a name. I’ve yet to find anything relating him to even owning an iphone. I’ve also yet to dig around about his two other partners. So we’ll prematurely jump to the conclusion that this is probably just a tangent.
Or they were simply hired to setup the whole site. Which could mean that Ycombinator (the venture company) is also working with Epic Apps and recommended wufoo to them.
————
This is all from wee hours digging last night. I did find a few articles about social networking apps for the iPhone, nothing too exciting. As you can tell I’ve lost interest.
Let me know if I’ve got something wrong, you have more information or if Chris actually does own an iPhone.
Unthreaded Editable Tagline April 15, 2008
Posted by Al Castle in : Puter Stuff, Squirrels, TimeWaster, Marketing, Castle, Web Design & Dev, Friends , 4commentsFor a long time I had a bit of code in my blog header, just beneath the blog title (Unthreaded), that randomly choose and displayed a quote, quip or blurb that I had written. Things like “Castlemonkey Speaks of Lemon Scented Victory” or “Castlemonkey Speaks of hotdogs with no cream cheese” and so on.
Sure to become a bore quickly, I’ve added in some code to make the tagline for this blog editable. By anyone. [Currently I’m not requiring you to identify yourself or login to do so. This may change later.]
Simply click on the text, whatever it may be, as anyone is free to change it, and you should see something like the picture above.
Type in whatever you like and click SAVE. The changes are global and saved to the database, meaning everyone who views the site right after you made that change, will see the new tagline. Until it’s changed again.
Dangerous huh?
Attribution Update: This idea was swiped from my amigo David. You can also see his version at Cranberry.
official iphone & itouch unthreaded blog icon April 2, 2008
Posted by Al Castle in : Puter Stuff, OSX, Techy, Castle, Web Design & Dev, iPhone , add a comment
tada!
ok no i didn’t create it the icon. it’s from the tango icon gallery and published under the creative commons attribution-share alike license.
from your apple iphone or itouch, visit my blog and then tap the + (plus icon), then “Add to Home Screen”. You’ll now have a quick link to my very unthreaded ramblings marked with this wonderful castlemonkey icon.
———-
To create your own simply upload a png image to your root web directory and name it apple-touch-icon.png. If you’d like this image to also be the bookmark (favicon.ico) for your site, you can easily use one of these sites to turn your apple icon into one.
Tags: tango, icons, creative commons, unthreaded, castlemonkey, iphone, apple-touch-icon.png, favicon.ico
flock buggery & tricks March 28, 2008
Posted by Al Castle in : Puter Stuff, gnash-teeth, OSX, Web Design & Dev , 1 comment so fari should point out, since it took me a minute or two to figure out, that if you host your own blog as i do you need to deal with a bit of oopidity.
most of you probably use a service like wordpress or blogger and the setup is really as simple as the url to your blog, username and password.
if you host your own, its the same questions, but it always fails for some reason. looking at my server logs i see its getting a status 200 which means everyone should be happy, but for some reason not so much.
the key is to enter any url when it asks for your blog url. when it fails to find the api it’s looking for you can simply continue to do the setup manually.
all it really needs to know is where the api is, so in this manual configuration you’d enter something like http://myblog.domain.com/xmlrpc.php
then your username and password.
tada.
Tags: browserwars, social networking, flock
my flock March 28, 2008
Posted by Al Castle in : Puter Stuff, OSX, Web Design & Dev, Friends , add a commentlast week sometime i finally decided to give flock another shot. It’s based off of mozilla - runs on windows, macs and linux. it seems primarily focused with the social networking aspect of the internet and provides many built in tools to keep me up to date on the happenings of my friends and visa versa.
for starters it has a built in wysiwyg blog editor which i’m using now to compose this. i can save a draft, work offline and then upload it to one or more of my saved blog profiles [blogger, typepad, wordpress, et al]. since i tend to travel a lot having the ability to work offline is pretty handy.
it has a built in feed reader which also lets me define the layout (number of columns), allows me to mark posts or comments as viewed, blog about, save, or email a post with a click and so on.
i can easily upload pictures by drag and dropping them into the media sidebar, which ties into facebook, photobucket, youtube, picasa and flickr. since it knows who i am it can pull pictures to view from one of my accounts or about my friends too.
send and receive email with its tie in’s to gmail and yahoo mail without having to switch to my native email app.
perhaps one of the handiest things is just staying on top of what my friends are doing. it ties into twitter and facebook, you can see status, profile changes and even poke someone right from the sidebar.
i still use firefox as my primary browser for web development since it has my most useful extensions installed. but for my socializing and online recreation, flock has my attention.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
Tags: browser wars, social networking, multi-tasking
Google, PRWeb and the Audio CAPTCHA January 2, 2008
Posted by Al Castle in : Puter Stuff, PRWeb, Insider, Marketing, Castle, Web Design & Dev , 2commentsDarrell Shandrow of Blind Access Journal made a celebratory post of his many accomplishments this year (including marriage - congratulations Darrell!) and was kinda enough to mention the hard work last year that went into quickly making PRWeb’s CAPTCHA enabled contact forms more accessible to visually impaired and blind users.
January 2006 - PRWeb makes their visual verification scheme accessible in less than one week of the request! We thank Al Castle, the company’s Chief Technology Officer, for his amazing communication and responsiveness.
See the InternetNews article for more details including Google dropping the ball (repeatedly).
Unfortunately it appears, as of this writing, that the audio alternative is no longer available on the PRWeb “Email Contact Form”. I know after I left PRWeb there was a lot of work going on in upgrading the impressively complicated infrastructure which runs the press release juggernaut. It is perhaps a simple oversight (no pun intended) and I’m sure the team at PRWeb is on it.
All the best in your endeavors for 2008 Darrell.
Don’t Mess With My Browser November 4, 2007
Posted by Al Castle in : Puter Stuff, gnash-teeth, Web Design & Dev , 2commentsThere’s so many things that piss me off about web development and design. Generally what passes for it. I just experienced a big pet peeve. I go to a page and it resizes my browser to full screen. Wtf? Why not have all your navigation be java applets and a 007 midi playing too.
I had all my windows right where I wanted them. Sure I could disable Javascript or only allow approved scripts. Anyone of you who suggest such impracticalities I hope you burn in whatever place of damnation your belief system provides.
If your site requires greater than 1440 x whatever resolution to be viewed you should take your freaking Front Page 98 install cd and cut it so its all jagged, then force it into your brain stem via your eye sockets and a dirty plunger. Ass clown.
(I had to edit this - the original was far to vulgar for even adults, truck drivers and psychopaths.)
StumbleUpon Rampage October 24, 2007
Posted by Al Castle in : Puter Stuff, gnash-teeth, Web Design & Dev , 1 comment so farAs most of you know I’ve been a StumbleUpon user for awhile, normally I wouldn’t rate anything unless I really liked it or really hated it. (My own submissions are few and far between, but of quality I feel.) For the last few months I’ve simply had too much crap thrown my way, especially from the StumbleUpon/SEO/SERP/Social Media/Marketing/Web-2.0/Google-Juicing “Experts”. In fact there’s a lot out there thats just not fit to be viewed so I’ve changed my thumbing policy as follows:
These sites all automatically get a thumbs down and I won’t even check out the actual content no matter if it’s really “cool”.
- If your site is about any of those “Expert” items.
- Your website is hideous to look at.
- Contains pop ups of any kind (including dhtml)
- Takes too long to load.
- Is all flash.
- The start of the meaty content is not above the fold.
- Contains an abusive amount of ads (Including Google Ads).
Additionally I’m thumbing down all content that passes the above filter, but fails to tickle me. On some of the more lofty subjects, If I don’t feel like researching the topic further, I may simply wave a vote in either direction and continue Stumbling.
Likewise anything that delights me receives a thumbs up vote. I invite my fellow Stumblers to take similar action if you too are passive in the handing out of votes.
Moving On - Castle Leaves PRWeb / Vocus August 10, 2007
Posted by Al Castle in : Puter Stuff, PRWeb, gnash-teeth, Insider, Castle, Web Design & Dev , 4comments
Just this last month, I posted about my two year anniversary as the CIO of PRWeb. I’ve accomplished quite a bit with David, Kevin, Jed, Karl and Poem. Tons of new features, widgets and thousands of lines of code to make PRWeb what it is today. Too many feeds to count, the first to implement Trackbacks for press releases, the recently released Feature Video, the creation of EON for Business Wire, Billboard Publicity Wire, and IssuesWire. Many services have been built from the ground up — including 301url, PRWebPhotowire, PRWebPodcast, and RSSPAD. There’s so much more, it’s exhausting just thinking about it all.
David McInnis founded and built a great company, hired talented people (cough), nurturing a controversial vision and leading an industry. You’ll find a recent article on CNN about just that, confirmation of our ongoing success. With Business Wire embracing us as partners, countless copycat companies springing up like weeds, tremendous growth, and finally the sale to Vocus just last August.
This past week I was in Lanham, MD, to coordinate with several of my co-workers to prepare for a smooth transition as I have resigned from my post as the unofficial ‘creative thunderstorm’ and leader of the PRWeb development and network operations team. Mark Heys, the VP of Web Development for Vocus, will be taking over the reigns, and I have complete confidence that he and the team I built will continue to innovate and provide the tremendous quality of affordable service PRWeb is known for.
I also had the pleasure to partake in the festivities of the Vocus quarterly boat cruise in Annapolis and the highly energetic post cruise activities. It was a lot of fun and a great way to step aside for a new prosperous era of PRWeb/Vocus to begin.
To all those that I’ve met along the way and had the pleasure of working with at Vocus East, I shall miss you. To those in the Washington office, I shall be by to have lunch with you all from time to time. Be well my friends.
