The getting photos off the phone part is sort of helped by Photo Stream, but not really. But that’s also not what this is about.

The podcast bit can be managed really nicely through Instacast. Export your podcast subscriptions from iTunes, import ‘em into Instacast, and it’ll become your podcast player. It’s very handy.

The only thing it doesn’t do particularly well is let you know when to start it up and download new podcasts. (Actually, there’s a cool feature in Instacast HD for the iPad that does just that, but I don’t listen to podcasts on my iPad all that much.)

Screwing around one night, I was trying to come up with a solution, and I remembered that I had Boxcar installed, which gets me push notifications for Twitterrific (since it doesn’t have them natively). I logged into Boxcar, noticed they had a “Push me a notification when there’s a new entry in this feed” option, and thought “Hey, I’ll plug in the podcast feeds and get push notifications whenever there’s a new podcast!”

Amazing, right?

Except, it didn’t work. I don’t think Boxcar supports podcasts as a feed type or something, as it just seemed to ignore any new items that showed up.

But I was not discouraged.

There’s another cool “send me a notice” website/tool out there called ifttt.com. Basically, it’s an awesome little site that lets you plug things together and trigger actions. The premise is “If [this] then [that]” (hence ifttt.com). I’d been using it to send me emails before it’s forecast to rain (can’t forget that umbrella!).

It also lets you send notifications based off of RSS feeds. And it can send those notifications into Boxcar.

That opened up a whole world of possibilities.

First, I plugged in my podcasts. I turned my weather notifications from email to Boxcar push notifications.

While dorking around inside these cool webapps, I noticed that Boxcar also ties into Growl (the Mac desktop notification system). “Awesome,” I thought, “I can have my computer push stuff to my phone when scripts finish and stuff.”

And that is entirely possible. You simply install the Boxcar Growl theme, configure a few easy settings, and boom, your computer can send your Growl notifications to your phone, straight through Boxcar. Mine is configured to only do so when my screen saver is on or I’m inactive. If I’m in a meeting, IMs will get shot to my phone so I can determine if something is urgent. Long backup jobs or scripts will let me know they’ve finished.

Tying all of this into growlnotify (the command line tool to let you send arbitrary stuff into Growl) means you can basically trigger almost anything into a push notification. It’s an amazingly powerful toolset.

It is the one machine to rule them all.

I try to do a lot of smart stuff to keep my machine and data safe, since pretty much everything I care about is on it. I have a Time Machine backup that I keep up-to-date religiously. I sync a collection of documents to Dropbox as an off-site backup. The music and photos get sync’d to another machine on my home network.

Nothing groundbreaking, but I try to do what I can to keep this machine happy and healthy.

Over the past few months, as often happens, software upgrades and new applications put a little extra stress on the hard drive and CPU, so things started to get just a bit slower. Things might stutter a bit as I scroll down a web page, or flip between applications. Just enough to annoy me while I worked and make me look longingly at Katie’s MacBook Air with its nice solid-state drive and near instance application loading and boot up.

So, I tried to do the best thing I could do, short of buying a new machine and having to go through all of the work to make that new machine the machine. I SSD-ified it[1].

Well, first, actually, I found out that I could upgrade the RAM to 8GB. $45 later, I had my shiny 8GB RAM kit, took the 10 minutes to install it, and in the couple of weeks since I installed it, my machine has gone into swap a grand total of 500 times (or so). In the couple of weeks before that, it’d gone into swap millions of times. Score one for memory.

The final step was the actual SSD-ification. I found a reasonably good deal on 256GB SSD (at MicroCenter, and grabbed a USB enclosure for the disk I’d be removing at the same time for $8). When I got home from my excusion, I loaded up Carbon Copy Cloner, and cloned my existing data onto the SSD. About 2.5 hours later, I had this nice SSD with all of my data on it.

Again, another 15 minute surgery to the laptop, and I had removed the old drive, placed in the new SSD, and closed things back up.

This machine now flies. iTunes starts in seconds. Excel opens up in seconds rather than minutes. It boots up and loads up my settings in less than a minute.

It’s a giant MacBook Air.

And, at the same time, I’ve now gained a nice backup drive (remember that USB enclosure). Every week or so, I can clone off my entire drive and have a 3rd backup of my data.

All in, the upgrades cost me about $450, which is less than half the cost of buying a brand-new low end MacBook Air, and about a quarter of what a new MacBook Pro will cost. I’m guessing I’ve added at least another year or two to the life of this machine.

It’s probably one of the easiest and most productive upgrades you can perform on your aging laptop.

I think what I like most about it is that it is does one thing very very well. It doesn’t try to replace your relational database. It just focuses on being a super fast way to store little buckets of data. Now, granted, you can do really creative things with those little buckets of data, but, by and large, Redis is just unbelievably fast.

Today I had a chance to play with Redis using some pseudo-real data. I wanted to benchmark/simulate how it would perform at holding keywords, and then the references (ids) to logs that contain those keywords. I’m imagining using this to keep track of support logs (hey, ftp has been mentioned in support contacts 15x today) or maybe to track server performance (tracking loads of servers or which services are running, etc). Tons of systems can do this. What Redis does really well is doing it fast (have I mentioned that?) and doing really awesome set geometry (intersections, unions).

For instance, imagine you wanted to keep track of support contacts. You look for keywords coming in via email messages (ftp, mail, outage, whatever). That’s easy. But now what if you wanted to get the overlap where ftp was mentioned in the same email as cancel? That’s harder. In MySQL, you might have to do some smart sub-selects, or joins to a bunch of mapping tables. It works fine when you’ve got a small number of rows, but the performance gets progressively worse. You probably also end up writing some ridiculous queries to make it happen in a way that doesn’t end up going off to disk and killing your performance entirely.

With Redis, it’s dead simple. I mean seriously simple.

First, you install Redis. It’s about the easiest thing I’ve done. Untar, make, run. I didn’t even bother to make any config changes.

Next, either via script or via the command line, you start adding data. For the support keyword example, you might do something like:

sadd ftp id_1
sadd ftp id_2
sadd ftp id_3
sadd ftp id_4
sadd cancel id_2
sadd cancel id_4

Basically, messages 1-4 mentioned FTP. Messages 2 and 4 also mentioned the word cancel.

To get that intersection, you follow that up with:

sinter ftp cancel

And that’s it, it’ll tell you id_2 and id_4 contain both words. Done and done.

Of course, that’s a pretty simple example. I threw together a test script that generated 80 random keywords and 50000 random message ids for each keyword. The random ids were all in the same range (1 – 999999), so there’s a good chance of some overlap, but not a ton. This seemed like a pretty good test of Redis.

It took, on average, about 4.5 seconds to insert 50k bits of data. So for the total of 4 million entries, it took about 6 minutes. That’s pretty darn fast.

But what’s so much more impressive is the intersection work. To get the intersection between two sets of data (which was usually between 1500-2500 entries) it took …

.05 seconds

Seriously.

And that, right there, is why Redis is f’ing awesome.

Hands-On: With Wii U’s Touchscreen Controller, Nintendo Could Radically Change Games | GameLife | Wired.com: “As Link duked it out with a giant hairy spider on the TV screen, we could see all sorts of secondary info on the controller screen: the dungeon map, Link’s health bar, the items he was carrying. These icons no longer cluttered up the TV screen and got in the way of the high-definition visuals. The cool part was this: With one tap of an icon on the touchscreen, the images flipped. Suddenly, seamlessly, the game was running on the touchscreen and the map, etc., was on the television.”

Aahhh. So awesome.

Notification Center: “You get all kinds of notifications on your iOS device: new email, texts, friend requests, and more. With Notification Center, you can keep track of them all in one convenient location. Just swipe down from the top of any screen to enter Notification Center. Choose which notifications you want to see. Even see a stock ticker and the current weather. New notifications appear briefly at the top of your screen, without interrupting what you’re doing. And the Lock screen displays notifications so you can act on them with just a swipe. Notification Center is the best way to stay on top of your life’s breaking news.”

Ahhhhh. Awesomesauce.

iTunes Match:”Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.”

Knockout.

Apple and Nintendo should just marry each other. They would have kids as cute as baby pandas, but who hit baseballs like Albert Pujols, and dominate basketball like LeBron James.

“You can’t replace pants with shorts when your definition of shorts is: everyone buy pants and cut the legs off — pants will still be a viable business (the consumer is just altering the usage). Same too with Twitter, Facebook, et al, they are still relying on email for certain parts of their service (like adding new users or sending notifications) while wanting to replace email at the same time.”

I hadn’t really thought about the ubiquitousness of email from this angle before. Even the services that are trying to replace email as the primary communications channel require you to have an email address. Obviously, this is because a) today email is the way they are used to getting their communication of passwords, logins, etc., and b) you have to have a way to communicate to people before they start using your service.

But, it would be pretty ballsy for some new service to require either email or a phone number (or <insert your method of identity here>).

(via The Brooks Review)

»

Hacking NetFlix: “Reuters reports that the new Netflix deal with Showtime withdraws current Showtime originals like Dexter and Californication from streaming, but leaves older shows like Tudors and Sleeper Cell. 

The change, part of a new arrangement, means no ‘Dexter’ or ‘Californication’ episodes from previous seasons will be available on Netflix, as had been the case under the current arrangement which covered the first two seasons of the shows. Episodes of current originals will be on Showtime’s authenticated broadband service, Showtime Anytime.

Instead of introducing the 20+ million Netflix subscribers to past seasons of hit shows to drive interest in subscribing to Showtime, it looks like Showtime joins HBO in realizing that Netflix just might be a competitor.”

Someday, television networks will get it, right? Why would you not want to expose as many people to your show as possible, to get them to then signup for your network (or, for the broadcast networks, to record/watch your network) to stay up-to-date with the latest episodes.

The biggest obstacle to picking up a new television show is fearing you will not understand what is going on. With shows like Lost, Friday Night Lights, etc., the ability to catch up on everything before a new season airs is a godsend. That’s how the girlfriend got caught up on Lost and was able to watch the last couple of season with me, live as they happened. Any TV network that wouldn’t want to take advantage of the opportunity to mint new viewers is destined to end up picking up the scraps left behind by Netflix, Amazon, and Apple.

Or, to paraphrase Sports Night:

Anybody who can’t make money off of television on Netflix should get out of the money-making business

»

From messiah to pariah: The death of open source on mobile • The Register: “Open source has gone from pariah to messiah in the past decade, but it has yet to find a place at the mobile table, and risks being rendered obsolete.”

Interesting. Tell me more.

Part of this comes from open-source licenses clashing with app store policies. It’s perhaps not surprising that Microsoft isn’t a big fan of GPL software within its Windows Phone Marketplace, but given its still-small market share, it may also not be a big deal. Of far more concern is the fact that Apple has started pulling GPL software from its virtual shelves.

This is partially true. In reality, both Microsoft and Apple rely very heavily on open source software. But that’s not the reason GPL’d software doesn’t end up in the various app stores.

No, the real problem is that there’s a bunch of open source zealots (read: douchebags) who want to hold their software hostage to prove a point. Rather than proselytizing the value of open source software (and that you can get high quality, not crappy software inexpensively) these douches just ensure that they’ll continue have a forum to yell at folks while the world passes them by.

I love open source software. By and large, it’s how I make my living (Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Ruby/etc). Folks who are developing open source for the joy of developing would be smart to choose BSD or MIT-like licenses rather than GPL’d licenses. Those licenses were developed sanely for the purpose of pushing technology forward, not holding it hostage.

(Note: this isn’t legal advice. While I’ve watched a bunch of law shows on TV, I am not a law-talking guy. I’m just a caveman, unfrozen by your scientists …)

I’ve collected a handful of things that have proven very useful lately, so I figured I’d throw them up here so I can find them again in a year when I’m trying to dig myself out of another hole.

This isn’t really much of a blog post, as much as it’s just a collection of stuff that is useful to me. Feel free to stop here.

Skitch

Skitch is a super handy screenshot/quick image editing tool. It sits in your menu bar until you need it, and then you just quickly grab a screenshot, throw in some arrows or text or whatever you need, and then it shoots it off to an FTP site or wherever you want. It’s super handy.

See, handy!

Ruby/Rails

One of the things I’ve been trying to spend more time doing is building little web sites. I’m a big fan of Ruby on Rails, but I hadn’t upgraded to Rails 3, since building Rails on the Mac has always proven to be a big pain in the ass. After a whole bunch of Googling and piecing together different sets of instructions, I think I’ve got the steps down. They are, roughly:

• Build a local version of readline and dump it in something like /opt/local or /usr/local
• curl the latest version of ruby, untar it, enter the directory
• run autoconf
• run ./configure –enable-shared –enable-pthread –prefix=/opt/local –with-readline-dir=/opt/local CFLAGS=-D_XOPEN_SOURCE=1
• make, sudo make install
• Boom, you’ve got ruby in /opt/local

Next, you want to install rubygems and then rails:

• curl the latest version of rubygems, untar, enter
• sudo ruby setup.rb
• sudo gem install rails

Now you’ve got ruby, rails, and your gems all setup in /opt/local (or wherever).

csshX

Cluster SSH is something I’d never seen before until one of my co-workers was using it the other day. We have a lot of servers where you need to do something on a bunch of boxes at once (or tail the logs on a bunch of boxes at once). Normally, I end up with 10 tabs in Terminal and flipping back and forth between them.

csshX is a nifty, Mac-native cluster ssh client. You open up a bunch of hosts, and then you can send the same command to them all, and it nicely tiles your windows so you can see them all. It’s so simple, and so brilliant.

ddrescue

Finally, as I’ve been building up a media server to feed my AppleTV, I decided to go back to the many CDs I burned in school and grab some old music. It was like opening a time capsule–little video clips, email, school work, music–reminding me of who I was 10 years ago.

Sadly, my memory works better than the memory of an optical disk. There were a handful of CDs that I burned that weren’t working very well (or, well, at all).

That sucked.

Thankfully, there’s a little tool called ddrescue. I downloaded and built it. It’s been running for the last week trying to scrape every last valuable bit off of those CDs (and has saved some of the amazing papers I wrote in college. Amazing.).

The big takeaway? Don’t use ddrescue. If you’re relying on CDs as backups, burn copies of CDs. Spend 100 bucks and buy a big ass hard disk ad back things up there. Back things up the cloud (Amazon, Mozy, whatever).

Basically, avoid having to use ddrescue.

Whoops! Looks like the TechMeme snippet finder grabbed the advertising block rather than the more important headline/content block from this Washington Post article about Steve Ballmer and Yahoo!. Stupid computers!

It’s very much like the on demand video you might get through your cable company. Except the quality is crappier, the selection is crappier, and the delivery is crappier. Otherwise, it’s just like your local cable on demand.

That’s probably too harsh an assessment of Joost, which is very much in a beta/technology preview mode right now. They’re signing up new content providers on a near-weekly basis, so the content will likely get better very quickly. I just don’t imagine that I’ll ever have a major use for Joost, except as an occasional time-killer.

For example, if I’m at home, I’ve got a 46″ HDTV hooked up to Comcast cable and an HD DVR. If I’m lying on the couch, I can inevitably find something on the DVR or on live to watch, particularly if its in HD. If I’m really bored, I’ve got Netflix, as well as Comcast OnDemand (where I can stream HD movies, if so desired).

If I really can’t find anything to watch, I’ve got Netflix “Watch Now” which streams at better quality than Joost. And, for that matter, has a much better selection.

The other advantage all of these other mediums/models have over Joost? No commercials. Granted, I’m paying up front for them, but (unless I’m stealing someone’s wireless) I’m paying for the network connection that Joost is coming over too. If I really wanted to cut my bills, I could drop everything but Netflix, and probably still have more to watch, at higher quality, on my HDTV, than Joost can offer right now.

Putting another bullet into Joost is the fact that the major networks are offering a bunch of their shows online in pretty decent quality video, with minimal commercials. I’ve watched the entire runs of Raines and Andy Barker, P.I. on NBC.com. The quality is not noticeably different than Joost’s quality and it’s through a web browser, rather than a specialized client.

Now, I’d argue that Joost is dead today, but isn’t dead for the future. If they can beef up the network delivery to deliver even near DVD quality video, that’d be a nice step up. Taking it one step further, if they could make deals with the major content providers to deliver the shows I’m interested in, then you could even make the argument that it might start to encroach on cable’s on demand services. If they can deliver live (or near-live) sporting events, so that I could watch the Sox or Celtics from a hotel room far away, that would be probably the killer app for this technology. Or, if a show like Scrubs got cancelled, but lived on in a Joost delivery mechanism, that’d also go a long way towards helping Joost make it’s mark.

For now, Joost is a second rate on demand service, with a bit of a wonky interface and a crappy selection of content.

(I didn’t touch on some of the community type features that Joost offers because I don’t really care about them. Why would I want to chat with random people watching the same show? Rarely, for me at least, is TV an interactive endeavor.)