Now that Blogger supports labels

I can consolidate all my blogs into one blog. That means I'll need to move everything here, but I think that will help me to have everything in one place.

Collaborative calendars

Not only are there calendars available online to manage your schedule, but in these days of collaboration, calendars are also designed to not only manage your calendar, but in conjunction with others.

Calendar	Pros	Cons	URL
Airset	Can sync with phones Drag and drop Click on date for adding new event Very intuitive way of collaboration Maximum flexibility in sharing events Search capability	Little bit slow Cannot customize look Color-coding fixed by calendar	www.airset.com www.airset.com/User/Cal.jsp?gi=YdJCMGlxLgcP&all=0
30boxes	Click on date for adding new event Tag and search capability Ability to highlight selected tags Ability to "publish" calendar Supports "badges"	Only 3 themes for customizing look No drag and drop Events can only be marked private or not private Does not show time of event directly on calendar URL for published calendar contains my full name (privacy concern) Code for "badge" contains my full name	www.30boxes.com http://30boxes.com/
Planzo	Direct typing in calendar for new events Drag and drop Search capability	Some customization available but limited to approximately 8 color selections Color-coded events seem fixed per type of event Privacy limited to private, none (share with all), or with "favorites".	www.planzo.com jimrin.planzo.com
CalendarHub	Drag and drop Supports "badges" Tag and search capability Ability to "publish" calendar	Cannot click date or directly type for new entry Privacy limited to private, none (share with all) or with "favorites". Columns in calendar representing the days of week are not equally spaced. Aesthetically, it looks odd. No color-coding of events	www.calendarhub.com www.calendarhub.com/calendar/55776/month www.calendarhub.com/pub/jimrin
Trumba	Ability to "publish" calendar Click on date for adding new event	For free version, no customization for look and feel (except for primary color) Sharing limited to all (for those authorized) or none No color-coding of events No drag or drop No search capability	www.trumba.com www.trumba.com/t.aspx?e=CgAzdYV*VrG1eOBPBtwQYIzsehUA13kn5-S*H7VK2*CVig!!X www.trumba.com/calendars/jimrins_calendar
Goowy		Problems when adding full-day events (says end time cannot be before start time) Selection of date is not used as default when adding new calendar event
Mosuki	Can define specific groups for viewing events Search capability	No customization for look and feel No color-coding of events No drag and drop Limited view of event description in calendar
Kiko	Drag and drop Color-coding of events (16 colors)	Sharing limited to all, contacts, or none No customization for look and feel No search	www.kiko.com www.kiko.com/appt/application?user_id=2580

Fun with pictures

If you're looking for something to do with your pictures, you can try out Flash Gear at http://www.flash-gear.com/index.php?watV

There are different things you can do with pictures including making a puzzle out of it. I don't know how long they last though. Anyway, here is one created from today:Unfortunately it looks like this website only works with Internet Explorer, not Mozilla Firefox.

Update: I seem to have found how long the pictures stay on their website... Approximately 25 days.

43 Things to do in my life

There is an interesting website which is called 43 Things at http://www.43things.com. The concept behind this website is for people to document what are some things they want to do. It's a bit ambiguous whether these things are to represent more short term goals or long term goals. Some people have put down more long term goals, like "Be happy" while others have realized it is better to put more realistic, achievable goals. Not to say that "Be happy" is not an achievable goal, but in order to accomplish a long term goal, it would be good to document the short term goals which need to be done to achieve the long term goal.

Anyway, you don't have to document 43 things if you can't think of 43 things. I am up to 23 right now. The interesting part comes in that you can see how many other people have the same goal. You can then document comments about each goal and read other people's comments about them trying to achieve their goals. The website also provides common other goals for people who have the same goal. For example, it is not surprising that a common goal among people who want to learn Japanese is to go to Japan.

There's also a sister website called 43 Places, where you can list places you want to go... You can then see other people who the same desire to go to the same place as well as see comments from people who have already gone there.

An interesting website... How useful it is is another question, but it's still interesting.

Some more Mozilla extensions

I added a couple more mozilla extensions...

Auto copy is useful because it will automatically copy what you've highlighted onto your clipboard. I mean, what else would you be highlighting text for anyway? Auto Copy is available at https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=383&application=firefox.

I added the Google toolbar... Some useful parts of the Google toolbar is knowing how many sites are referenced for a particular search term. For example, there are over 16 million hits on "learn japanese". No wonder it would be difficult to get Japanese Tutor better search results.

There is also a tool called Conquery to allow querying of highlighted text by using the context menu (right-click). It's sort of useful to be able to highlight the name of a movie, perhaps found on a program guide, then right click to look up the movie in IMDB. Conquery is available at http://conquery.mozdev.org/installation.html.

And finally, I did add an extension which makes it possible to right-click in Gmail to preview your mail... The guy intentionally did not do it while hovering over mail because he said it was not very well performing, but actually, I don't find right-clicking so convenient either. I mean, if I am going to have to click to see the mail, then I might as well left-click. Gmail preview bubbles are available at http://persistent.info/archives/2005/08/20/gmail-preview-bubbles.



Oh, and this image is simply that there are products, such as Window Blinds, which allow you to use skins to customize your Windows appearence... This one in particular has some transparency in the windows to allow you to see what's underneath. A review of Window Blinds is available at Extreme Tech. I don't have Window Blinds myself... Sometimes I have to think about whether I really need something before I buy it... Hey, wait a minute. What's "need" have to do with spending money?

I wiki, do you?

One of the newest trends these days are wikis. The most famous is wikipedia available at http://www.wikipedia.org. This is an online encyclopedia where anyone on the Internet can contribute to enhance the information in wikipedia.

In general, wikis are collaboration tools which allow multiple people to edit a document to share information. These documents are presented as web pages. However, knowledge of HTML is not required. Wikis have their own simplified formatting markup language. For example, to make something bold, you simply enter *bold*. To make an ordered list, you simply use the # sound, like:

# bananas
# apples
# oranges

And they will automatically appear as:

1. bananas
   
2. apples
   
3. oranges
   

For those of you who are not familiar with markup languages would wonder why you wouldn't simply number your own lists. Markup languages make for easy modification. For example, if I had a list of 25 numbered items, and then I needed to add a new #1 item, I would have to renumber all the other 25 items... But with a markup language, I simply add a new "# pears" and it will automatically take care of numbering all of the items.

At work, we have already discovered the advantages of wikis and are trying to use them within our project. However, the tools we use are only available within our own company. For personal wikis, there are websites available on the Internet which provide wikis, many of them are free.

One of the available places for free wikis is PBwiki. I haven't yet defined the uses for my own personal wiki, but I am sure I will be taking advantage of this soon. Some of the functional benefits are:

• Easy to use markup language
• Sharing of information
• Automatic versioning of changed information
  

Free acounts are available at PBwiki. Premium accounts are also available for more storage.





Google this! (Please...?)

For some reason, the description from Japanese Tutor "disappears" from Google, so that without any description for the site, of course the site will never be found by anyone searching for a tutor. I can't really find a pattern for when the description disappears and when it comes back.

Google results (previous):

japanese tutor flower mound	japanese class flower mound	japanese language class flower mound	learn japanese flower mound
4. KBCafe Argyle reference		3. Learn101.com reference	25. KBCafe Argyle reference
6. Wink.com reference		97. Wink.com reference
25. Jimrin's Gadget blog
26. Learn101.com reference
33. Blogger profile
38. japanese-tutor.com

Yahoo results:

japanese tutor flower mound	japanese class flower mound	japanese language class flower mound	learn japanese flower mound
1. Japanese Tutor on Comcast
2. Tagbert Grapevine reference
6. KBCafe reference
10. Japanese Tutor in Texas Frappr reference
17. Japanese Tutor in Texas Frappr reference

MSN results:

japanese tutor flower mound	japanese class flower mound	japanese language class flower mound	learn japanese flower mound
1&2. japanese-tutor.blogspot.com	1&2. japanese-tutor.blogspot.com	1&2. japanese-tutor.blogspot.com	1&2. japanese-tutor.blogspot.com
3. Japanese Tutor in Texas on Frappr

I can add URLs to Google or add a sitemap to Google.

Useful Firefox extensions

There are quite a few Firefox extensions which are extremely useful. Here are a few I use:

Title	Description
Xinha WYSIWYG editor	Provides a WYSIWYG editor to create HTML in any input field. This is useful when editing a wiki or blog which supports HTML but does not provide a WYSIWYG editor. Or even in the case of Blogger which does provide an WYSIWYG view but does not provide table functions, you can use Xinha to create tables.
Internet Explorer Link	If you need to view specific web pages in Internet Explorer, this extension will provide a right-click context menu to open the link in Internet Explorer. The alternative is to copy the link, open Internet Explorer, and then paste the link in the address field.
Firefox Keyword	Not a Firefox extension, but I use this function of Firefox a lot. If you right-click on an input field, you can define a keyword for that field. Then in the address field, you can type the keyword name plus the data you would like to put in the input field which corresponds to that field. As an example, I can create a keyword "google" for the Google search input field. Then if I type "google search-term" in the address field, it will automatically behave as if I had gone to http://www.google.com and entered the search term in the input field and pressed Enter.

By the way, in case of using Xinha for creating tables for my blog, I have my Blogger setting to automatically assume a line break for each new line, and Xinha tries to make the HTML look nice in tables, but Blogger interprets the nice formatting as extra line breaks, so after creating the table, I've had to delete all the excess line breaks.

Spurled Kyoko's bookmarks

As mentioned previously, using bookmarks stored on the Internet, also known as social bookmarks, provides the following advantages:

• Gives you access to your bookmarks from any computer.
• Allows you to store new bookmarks from any computer.
• Allow you to tag your bookmarks, making it easier to find them.
  
• Allows you to see bookmarks of other people who have similar interests. Perhaps they have found some sites which you would find interesting as well.

Although there are some problems (ie, bugs) with Spurl, with its sidebar and flexibility in categorization, it seems to be the best choice (although I do have problems with it from within the IBM network in Vienna). Anyhow, before getting Kyoko to use Spurl, it would be ideal to move her current bookmarks to Spurl first. However, when trying to upload her bookmarks to Spurl, it did not recognize the fact that the characters in the bookmarks were Japanese characters and then it ended up being garbage. I tried upload to del.icio.us but with roughly the same result. However, with Spurl, it just completely ignored the text or after importing the garbage text from del.icio.us, replaced the text with "BADSTRING". At least in del.icio.us, it still kept the string in tact, even though it did not know how to display the string. Therefore, when I changed the encoding to Shift_JIS, it was able to display Japanese. I was then able to copy the text, edit the bookmark, and paste the text. This time, when pasting, Windows/Internet Explorer knew to paste the Unicode version of the text., and voila, I had Japanese text. I had to do this manually for all her bookmarks, but it is better than retyping! Then I imported these bookmarks into Spurl, and Spurl was able to preserve the Japanese characters.

Making a million on the Internet? No problem.

I guess this shows there are endless possibilities on the Internet to make money. Or at least 1000x1000 ways.

From Reuters:
Link to referred home page: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com

Cash pours in for student with $1 million Web idea
Dec 29, 1:05 PM (ET)

A view of Alex Tew's page, www.milliondollarhomepage.com. Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small... Full Imag

By Peter Graff
LONDON (Reuters) - If you have an envious streak, you probably shouldn't read this.

Because chances are, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, is cleverer than you. And he is proving it by earning a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet.

Selling porn? Dealing prescription drugs? Nope. All he sells are pixels, the tiny dots on the screen that appear when you call up his home page.

He had the brainstorm for his million dollar home page, called, logically enough, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, while lying in bed thinking out how he would pay for university.

The idea: turn his home page into a billboard made up of a million dots, and sell them for a dollar a dot to anyone who wants to put up their logo. A 10 by 10 dot square, roughly the size of a letter of type, costs $100.

He sold a few to his brothers and some friends, and when he had made $1,000, he issued a press release.

That was picked up by the news media, spread around the Internet, and soon advertisers for everything from dating sites to casinos to real estate agents to The Times of London were putting up real cash for pixels, with links to their own sites.

So far they have bought up 911,800 pixels. Tew's home page now looks like an online Times Square, festooned with a multi-colored confetti of ads.

"All the money's kind of sitting in a bank account," Tew told Reuters from his home in Wiltshire, southwest England. "I've treated myself to a car. I've only just passed my driving test so I've bought myself a little black mini."

The site features testimonials from advertisers, some of whom bought spots as a lark, only to discover that they were receiving actual valuable Web hits for a fraction of the cost of traditional Internet advertising.

Meanwhile Tew has had to juggle running the site with his first term at university, where he is studying business.

"It's been quite a difficulty trying to balance going to lectures and doing the site," he said.

But he may not have to study for long. Job offers have been coming in from Internet companies impressed by a young man who managed to figure out an original way to make money online.

"I didn't expect it to happen like that," Tew said. "To have the job offers and approaches from investors -- the whole thing is kind of surreal. I'm still in a state of disbelief."

Streaming live video

I am trying to stream live video on my home network.

I have a Hauppauge PVR-250 video card and based on information I've found on the Internet, I should be able to use it with Windows Media Encoder to stream video.

I have found I can stream video which has been recorded from the Hauppauge PVR-250 card (such as recording a TV broadcast and then streaming that), but I receive this error when trying to stream the live video directly from the PVR-250 card.

This is the setup in Windows Media Encoder. WME does recognize the PVR card as a valid choice for source.

This is how WinTV2K looks, so everything looks ok here.

I thought the codecs problem may be related to the type of output, so I played around with various settings, but nothing seemed to work for live video.


Here are a couple of links describing how this is SUPPOSED to work:
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/faq/support_faq_pci.html#5b
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=386789&rl=1

I have been able to perform normal file conversions using WME. For example, I was able to convert a recording from WinTV2K into an ASF video appropriate for video streaming.

So far, no solution yet...

Update: So my solution was to go without WME. I used VideoLAN (free software) for both streaming and client software. In theory, I would have thought that I could use Windows Media Player as the client as well, but that does not seem to work. Anyway, it is a moot point. I use VideoLAN anyway as the client for streaming from ReplayTV. The whole purpose of streaming live video was to be able to view who is at the front door (through the front door camera) from any PC in the house. Beats actually having to get up and go to the front door. Just kidding! But we would like the ability to screen who we greet at the door, just as we screen our phone calls, and it would not help if they see us through the decorative glass we have at the front door or adjacent satellite windows.

But this does provide additional possibilities, like watching live TV from any PC. I do have sling box, but this would in theory provide a cheaper solution and does not limit the number of clients who can view at the same time.

Anyway, this does leave a challenge regarding my PCs. Now I need to have one PC in the study to run the streaming software. This PC can do other things, like it could be my MovableType server. However, it does seem to be running high on CPU.

I moved the NetVista into my home office, but since this is an older, slower machine, I am not sure this is the right machine for my office. In addition, that'll mean I should move the old printer in my office, so I should clean up my office a little bit so noone breaks their neck trying to retrieve a printout. Obviously, another choice is to put an old ThinkPad in the learning center to be the print server for the upstairs printer. Update: Ah, I had an old USB HUB I wasn't using at the moment, so I hooked up Kyoko's ThinkPad to the printer, bluetooth adaptor, and external hard drive by using the USB HUB. See! It helps to have old stuff around and to buy things even though you don't know exactly what for yet...

The NetVista could go downstairs and work double as the downstairs print server as well as a client for the front door camera. That way, we don't have to walk ALL THE WAY to the study to see who is at the front door. Life's tough.

Windows Media Encoder, although not working out for streaming, may be the solution if I want to get video into a format to play on my Zaurus. Since I moved PCs around and the one which I used to use as my "work" (ie, sandbox) PC is now streaming the video from the front door, I put the NetVista in my home office. However, it seems to be missing some codecs and does not properly play some of the MPEG2 videos. Strange, though, is that they play on WMP but not on WinDVD. I tried to re-install WinDVD from the CD but it complains that I don't have a DVD player on that PC. Of course not, I moved the DVD to a different PC! Doesn't the software know that! Grrr, so now I have to either move it back, or perhaps I'll just get that region-free DVD-ROM drive I've been thinking about. Anyway, seems like it may be a couple of months until I can get around to trying this out.

Don't I need a new PC anyway? This is a rhetorical question by the way... But don't tell Kyoko!

Update: Placing a monitor to the downstairs print server (old iSeries ThinkPad) seems to work out well. Now, I am out of monitors and cannot set up my ThinkPad for work with dual monitors while working. Does this mean I need to buy another monitor??? Actually, it's not high on my priority list right now. However, the iSeries ThinkPad (266MHz!) seems too slow for video display. In fact, I seem to remember watching MPEG movies on this ThinkPad was not possible. If I am fast enough, I can walk in the front door and go to the monitor and still see myself at the front door. Wow, I can be at two places at the same time! OK, maybe not... So anyway, I guess this really means I need another PC, maybe two! (As if there was any doubt...)

Update to Googling

japanese tutor flower mound	japanese class flower mound	japanese language class flower mound	learn japanese flower mound
1. Craig's list	1. Craig's list	1. japanese-tutor.com	1. Craig's list
2. Furl.net reference	20. Craig's list	2. japanese-tutor.blogspot.com	101. movil.be reference to del.icio.us
6. japanese-tutor.com	299. movil.de reference to del.icio.us	3. Craig's list	116. movil.be reference to del.icio.us
7. movil.be reference to del.icio.us	319. movil.de reference to del.icio.us	12. movil.be reference to del.icio.us	265. japanese-tutor.com
11. japanese-tutor.blogspot.com	380. japanese-tutor.com
13. movil.be reference to del.icio.us
26. Jimrin Gadget blog

Social bookmarks

I believe it is good to have information all in one place. That way, you know where to look for it because there is only one place it can be. However, one thing about information is that it doesn't do you much good if you do not have access to it.

That's why I have been using iwon.com's capability to store and categorize bookmarks. Other web sites have capabilities for storing bookmarks, like Yahoo and MSN. However, the way in general that the iwon.com page can be organized is a little more aesthetically pleasing. In addition, iwon.com allows the bookmarks to be sorted in any sequence while Yahoo always sorts them alphabetically.

Anyway, this way of storing bookmarks has been useful to keep handy the sites I use regularly... But not a good way to store sites I ran across which I want to keep around. I've been doing that in my private blog.

My private blog as well is a place where as long as I have access to the Internet, I have access to my private blog (assuming Windows is running IIS ok on my machine). But it is not always handy to go to my blog to save a link and this definitely would not be a good way for my mom.

Bookmarks/favorites are ok but I never seem to organize them. In addition, those are stored only on one's own machine and not accessible from a public Internet terminal or someone else's PC. What I need is a place to store my bookmarks on the Internet! These are also known as social bookmarks.

I have found a few:

del.icio.us
www.sitebar.org
www.furl.net
www.spurl.net

del.icio.us does not seem to allow categorization. Ugh!

Both sitebar.org and furl.net allow categorization. In case of furl.net, it seems to allow multiple catgorization but does not seem to allow customized sequence. sitebar.org has a limit of 100 links for the free accounts. Spurl allows categorization and subcategorization, but also does not allow to customize sequence. Spurl seems to perform better than furl.

Therefore, the winner seems to be spurl.net although furl.net is close. I can use this as a backup for my links on iwon.com as well as categorizing anything I want to save from the web. Response seems to be a bit sluggish when I want to save a link. In addition, "furling it" does not necessarily sound like something I want to do voluntarily, but I guess it's just a name.

Impressively enough, furl.net also saves a cached version of the web page, so in case the page has changed and you cannot find the original information, you still have the cached version. I assume Spurl does the same.

Update: I am using Spurl because of the capability to display the bookmarks on the sidebar of the browser. It makes it very easy to navigate and find the desired bookmark without having to go to the Spurl website first.

Photosharing

We have a Flickr account. I like the way you can see thumbnails of all the pics at once and the slideshow function is pretty good.

There are some things about Flickr aesthetically which are not clean.

There is also Smugmug. Smugmug is very well done. One thing I like about Flickr is the calendar function to be able to see when pictures were taken very easily. Smugmug does have a map function which would be good in our case since we do a lot of traveling.

Smugmug does require an annual fee, but it is $29 and there's no limit on the amount of photos you can post. Flickr is free with no limit on photos as far as I can tell, but you can only post so many photos per month (as determined by how many bytes are uploaded). I signed up for the premium account in Flickr which increases significantly the upload limit.

I'll have to play around some more to see what are all the pros and cons between Flickr and Smugmug.

New blogs

I found another website for blogs:

http://www.cjb.net

It has some features which Blogger does not, like categories and making posts private.

Update on cjb.net: Although I like the functions available on cjb.net, I am not thrilled about the fact that I have received spam mail (including phishing) to the e-mail address registered there.

In addition, there's:

http://www.faces.com

which has the advantage of being able to post by e-mail from multiple e-mail addresses and also allows private posts. However, it seems very slow and does not allow a lot of customization.

And finally, there is:

http://www.iblogs.com

It has multiple categorization but seemed to have some bugs with its composer editor. It also does not allow a lot of customization. Entries on it seemed to turn up quickly in the blog search.

If I decide to go with other blogs, I would need to come up with a way to backup the content, perhaps using the RSS feed...

Lingo... You're fired!

After being in japan and comparing Skype to Lingo, there is no contest. The quality is very good with Skype, plus there are no drops, like I experience with Lingo. To be on the fair side, I am not sure if some of the problems are caused by Lingo directly or my D-Link router. However, considering Skype also has to go through the same router, Skype performs much better. Now the only question is when dialing a phone number with Skype (as opposed to PC to Pc communication), is there any degradation in quality. We'll find out soon.

Another major annoyance with Lingo is the time delay with Lingo. There is about a second delay. However, since communication is a two-way street, the one-second delay actually means a two-second delay. There is a one second delay on what you say to the other party, which means there is a one-second delay for the party to hear what you said, and then they reply, which means there is a one-second delay in what you hear as a reply. So at the end of what you say, you wait two seconds before hearing the reply. This causes major problems when there is "interactive" communication. That is, someone interrupts you, but it is two-seconds later from the point where you should have been interrupted.

By the way, this delay is most notable with calls to Japan. With calls to Europe, the delays are not as significant, but that doesn't help with the calls to Japan.

Of course the dropped lines is pretty bad, and the worst part about it is that you are not aware you were dropped, so you can keep on talking and talking and not realize the other party is no longer there. I am even calling into conference calls with two lines just so that in case I am dropped by my Lingo line, I can quickly join with the other connected line.

Worked on Ohtomo Bar home page

I worked on the home page for Ohtomo Bar. I realized that blogs would be a good way to set up a web page where Shinobu-san can also easily post new information. I was able to set up a page using Blogger.

The web page is accessible through http://www.ohtomobar.com

I also started to work on Kyoko's home page. Even though she does not have as much new information to post, since blogs are easily updated, then she can maintain it herself. I also used Blogger to set up her page. Unfortunately http://japanesetutor.blogspot.com even though the username was available.

I should try to see if I can do the same for Vista Ridge Golf Center.

While trying to update my blog from Zaurus, it somehow truncated the entry. Arrrgh!