I accidentally clicked on a link in my del.icio.us inbox that got me to an article on Web 2.0. I think that this pretty much sums up what most people think about this way-way-new-web malarky way better than a translation would.

My $0.02

A while back I came across the Gameboy Advance Movie Player on the Lik Sang site. At the time, it really seemed like just a toy. After all, I already had a Dell Axim on which I played movies, and really, the screen just seemed too tiny. The sound quality was supposed to be only mediochre. I wrote it off.

At some point this summer, I found myself with a lot of CF cards kicking around, and I thought: why not? There were a couple of other items I wanted to buy, and USD$25 is well within my discretionary spending budget. So I bought it, and it’s been kicking around with the odd episode of Family Guy or Aqua Teen Hunger Force on the card I leave in it. I showed it off at work a bit, and used it for commuting.

To tell the truth, I pretty much forgot about it, until my wife and I were getting ready to take a five hour train trip to Montréal. Michelle usually sleeps on trains and planes, so I wanted to have some entertainment. I had a book on the go, but knew it wouldn’t take me long to finish. I didn’t want to take another book, since I had every intention of travelling light. So I went to Craphound, and grabbed a bunch of Cory Doctrow’s short stories from his latest book (which seems to be trapped and eternally checked out at the Toronto Public Library), and some recent scifi from the Gutenberg Project, and dumped them into a folder on my 512M CF card. I also converted the Pimsleur French lessons I’m doing into GBA audio, and grabbed a homebrew Lumines clone called Luminesweeper.

Well, the Pimsleur lessons were a bust. For some reason, the audio came out worse than anything I’ve ever dumped to GBA Audio. Possibly since the original encoding was pretty low-bitrate.

Everything else was a phenomenal win. I have the most up-to-date ROM for the Movie Player which adds bookmarks. This is now my favourite ebook reader, and I take it with me everywhere. The screen on the GBA SP is very readable, and the d-pad is actually very natural for scrolling. I like the positioning even better than the scroll wheel on the Axim. Luminsweeper is every bit as addictive as the original is purported to be, and there are a number of other homebrew games that work with the Movie Player. Best of all, since the ebook reader is really just a text scroller (like | less for the GB), there’s little limit to what you can place on there. You could even turn your GB into a read-only PDA like some folks do with their iPods. Minus, of course, the calendar …

Long and short, if you’ve got a GBA SP and some moderate-capacity CF cards lying around, this device will give them a whole new lease on life.

It hasn’t been that long since 4.8, but many folks have been nuts for 4.9 ever since it was announced. Why? Buzzword compliance. iTunes 4.9 supports subscribing to podcasts, short radio-style shows distributed in MP3 through RSS.

Many people where concerned that podcasting would be restricted to Apple-sanctioned shows. I’m happy to announce that I’ve got it, and you needn’t be concerned. Apple supports subscribing to any show you want the same way it handles streaming radio that isn’t listed in the directory. Open the Advanced menu, and right under “Open Stream” is “Subscribe to Podcast”. Grab the link to the XML for your podcast, and drop it in the dialogue, and you’re good to go.

The subscribed podcast display has handy links to more info about the podcast and the broadcaster’s homepage. The Settings button allows you to chose the frequency with which you check for updates, how many episodes to snag, how many to keep, and what to upload to your iPod.

I’m pretty technical (a polite way of saying I’m a total geek), but I’ve found the podcasting process to be to hands-on and complicated for me to really get into regularly. The simplicity of handling podcasts in iTunes will no doubt have me and a lot of other neophytes getting into this popular medium whole-hog.

Go snag iTunes 4.9, and check it out for yourself.

I work for a company that is really into Flash. And I mean really. They toss around phrases like “HTML is dead” and “freed from the ridiculous constraints of HTML” with complete abandon. They’re getting the shirts made. They say it in their sleep. Why? Flash looks pretty, and everyone has it.

I wonder how much longer this will be the case, though. First off: have you tried to install Flash recently? It comes with the Yahoo! toolbar which has dramatically increased the size of the thing. They’ve toned this down a little bit; if you have IE you can unbundle the toolbar, and I don’t think they include it in the Firefox download anymore. But this gave a lot of people pause. Its not too huge a leap from a toolbar you don’t want to GAIN.

Secondly, Flash is the tool of choice for people who really really really want to pop up ads. They’re pretty clever about figuring out if your pop up blocker is enabled, and using tiny flash movies to open pop ups instead of Javascript.

Thirdly, Flash ads are starting to stream video and audio to you without asking. Yeah, I have a broadband connection, and yeah, I can handle it, but I think its terribly impolite to push rich content on people who haven’t asked for it.

But finally: Flash can now track you, replacing those easy-to-nix doubleclick/adserve cookies. I have no doubt that the security sandbox settings will change in an upcoming version of the Flash player, but at this time all you can do is modify your security settings in such a way that legitimate Flash movies may break.

The net result of this is that the more savvy web surfers are using Flash blocking tools that require the user to specifically request a Flash movie rather than letting it autoplay. No doubt this technology will become more accessible, and thus more widespread, meaning Flash movies will be crippled in more and more browsers. What will happen the first time a client views their in-production site and instead sees an Adblock window? (Unfortunately, they’ll probably demand the developers find a way to circumvent it, and hopefully our account execs will sit down with them and explain the situation.) Will clients really want their sites built in such a way that users have to go through a number of deliberate steps to visit them? I hope that we’ll start to once again use Flash where it is appropriate instead of a catch-all for web-unfriendly design.

On an unrelated note: why are market wonks fighting with us to show us ads we don’t want? Do they really think eventually we’ll relent? “Okay, you’ve forced me to download 10M of stuff I don’t want to see, I’ll buy your car.” In contrast, last night I was reading up on Agile development. I clicked on about half-a-dozen well-targetted text ads for related projects, and even downloaded a demo of a tool I’d consider recommending for purchase. I’m not adverse to advertising; I object to being abused by advertisers.

UPDATE: There is now a tool in Firefox that lets you manage Local Shared Objects just as you would cookies. Go get Objection.

I’m really loving Apple, today.

I never thought I’d get so excited about an official firmware update, but version 1.5 for my second generation iPod is terrific. The fact that you can configure what appears on the top level menu is great. I have trouble getting certain kinds of calendar items to show up on my iPod, and some of my contacts come out funny, so I ditched “Extras”, but put the clock at the top menu, since I use it all the time. I also only use “Albums” and “Playlists” for browsing my music collection, so I put them right at the top menu, and hid everything else. Now that I walk to work, its a pain digging through a huge collection. Apple’s new firmware moves the stuff I use up about two-clicks.

The rest of my Apple love is dedicated to the creaky G4 sitting in a closet at home. I pulled a couple of 20G hard drives out of storage yesterday, along with a gig of old PC100 RAM. A quick test of my work machine confirms that these guys are happy to boot with no display, keyboard or mouse, and OSXVNC is up and ready to serve a desktop in about a minute. I should be able to stick a headless G4 on my home network with no trouble!