RHFtech Help Desk (and more)

When you first surf to ShowtimeFu you are met with an elegantly simple web page.

Type in the location you want to search and click the search button. It may take a few seconds but then you get a screen like this.

Click on any of the results and you the page redraws, now filtered for that movie and adds a synopsis.

You can click on filtered results and get even more information like the map in the screen shot below.

Give it a try. I think you will find it useful.

Do NY Times Crosswords, play Scrabble, play chess and much more.

The Internet constantly changes.

Web 1.0 was static pages. Web 2.0 was about the browser as a platform. Google search and Gmail typify Web 2.0. The social web, Web 3.0, combines many forms of expression and communication, mashed up in a few Internet sites. The social web can be difficult to understand. Facebook and Twitter epitomize it.

Facebook has almost 300 million active account users. Twitter has 40+ million. Most people “get” Facebook. Its primary use is to share thoughts, photos and interests with Facebook friends. It is about conversations in a controlled group setting. The user has significant control over who can and cannot see their posts and personal information. You can publicly comment, direct message your friends (like using email) or go into a real-time chat mode.

Twitter is harder to comprehend. Posts are limited to 140 text characters. Twitter is like standing in the main room in Grand Central Terminal and shouting out a few words every so often. Someone in the crowd may respond. Most will ignore you. Twitter may be right for you if you want to know what Oprah is getting for lunch or whether Ashton Kutscher has anything to say.

The people that run Facebook are envious of Twitter. They have tweaked the Facebook interface to be more like Twitter. It is rumored that earlier this year they tried unsuccessfully to buy Twitter. Last week they announced that they had acquired FriendFeed, a less well-known, but more robust and feature-laden micro-blogging platform.

Wikipedia describes FriendFeed as, “…a real-time feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS/Atom feed.” FriendFeed was founded by former Google employees who worked on the development of Gmail and Google Maps.

Google appears to be Facebook’s major competitor. This is difficult to see today. Google changed the Internet when its search engine came on the scene in 1998 and added advertising sales in 2000. The word “google” has entered the English language as a synonym for online search. But Google is much more than a search engine and advertising company. It owns and runs one of the world’s largest, if not the largest, fleet of servers. It has built a mobile phone operating system, Android, which is beginning to challenge RIM, Microsoft, Nokia, and Apple in the smartphone space. They sponsor Mozilla Firefox and are developing their own Google Chrome browser. They recently announced plans to create a desktop operating system, Google Chrome OS, which will compete with Windows and Apple OS X.

But the services that are truly visionary are the hodge-podge of Web 3.0 services Google offers. Gmail is growing rapidly and recently passed AOL to take third place worldwide. Its feature set is superior to the number one and two, Yahoo Mail and Microsoft Live/Hotmail offerings. Gmail integrates, although not seamlessly, with Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Talk/Chat, Google Voice, Picasa (photos), Blogger, and Google Reader. Someday they may integrate YouTube. Google Knol seems to be searching for its place in this collection. Google Reader’s recent changes have evolved it into a social tool, a place to share items and a feed reader for Twitter and FriendFeed.

The announced Google Wave seems to sew together all of these services and more into a unified communication and collaboration platform that appears ready to zoom past Facebook, just like Gmail extended the email client far beyond what had been done before. We use Google to surf the web today. I’m looking forward to catching the Google Wave real soon.

I am tardy in my follow-up to my previous post wherein I blogged about AOL blocking a client’s site, opticalshopofwestport.com, from appearing on any computer using AOL’s ISP services.

Normally I would not care. Few people in the store’s trading area, Westport CT and the surrounding towns, use AOL ISP services. Those that do are unlikely to be Optical Shop of Westport (OSW) customers. However, the store owner and the shop use the AOL dial-up ISP service. This is because the OSW’s telephone provider, not at&t nor Cablevision, does not offer ISP service. It is an issue that the site’s owner could not see her own website.

I was contacted by telephone shortly after blogging about this by an AOL executive who described the cause of the block and informed me that the problem was fixed. This was unexpected and quite welcome.

He explained that OSW uses GoDaddy to host the website. GoDaddy uses virtualization to share hardware among multiple low traffic websites, thereby minimizing cost and hardware requirements. The websites hosted on a single physical server share one IP address. (This I knew.)

What I did not know was that one of the 58 other sites that shared OSW’s IP address was designated by AOL as suspicious. My understanding is that this is because the site is intentionally or inadvertently linked to spammers or malware vectors. So AOL blocked everyone with that physical IP address rather than just the offending site.

I would think that a simple adjustment to AOL’s DNS servers would suffice. Rather than use a bullet to deal with this problem AOL used a large bomb. It works for them. If innocents are hurt by their bomb, in this case OSW and the 57 other non-offending websites, tough.

I am thankful that AOL heard my complaint and resolved the issue for OSW but…
AOL has the technology to deal with this problem. They choose not to. I suspect that their customers are mostly unaware that AOL does not practice net neutrality. I wonder what the FCC would do if they knew.

Radio is dying. The audience for broadcast radio, AM, FM and satellite, is rapidly shrinking. Commercial radio, which began in the 1920s, is unlikely to survive much longer. The distribution of streaming audio is moving from the radio waves to the Internet. Many radio stations stream their shows today, most will if they want to survive. You can usually find a link to listen to their stream on their website, via iTunes, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer or the Shoutcast.com directory.

From the 1920s to post World War II, when broadcast radio was the only streaming entertainment medium, it featured a huge assortment of content: live and recorded music, comedy, drama, game shows, mystery shows, and news programming. FDR used the radio as a way of communicating with the nation via his 30 fireside chats.

Television forced radio to change its format. Radio focused first on music and news. More recently it has evolved the talk radio format with hosts such as Rush Limbaugh. Unfortunately for radio broadcasters, the Internet provides more personalization and sharing for music and greater tools for discussions. President Obama distributes his messages via YouTube.

Music radio is challenged by MP3 players like iPods and Zunes, and by web services such as Pandora.com, Slacker.com, Imeem.com, last.fm, AOL Radio, Spotify.com and many others.

My favorite one of these is Pandora. It has both free and paid versions, as do other services. Pandora charges $36 a year to get a commercial-free listening experience and access to its premium player application. Slacker charges $4 per month for similar benefits.

Internet streaming music has several advantages over radio. You can pause a track and answer the phone or the door. You can instantly buy a track just it clicking a link if you want to own it. Or you can skip a track if you don’t like it. There is no way to do this on AM, FM or satellite radio.

Pandora lets you create your own radio stations after you register. It uses database technology (the music genome project) to help select music that fits with whatever you start with. You can add variety to your station, songs or artists, and vote thumbs up or down on an individual song.

Recently I showed it to a client. I clicked on the “Create a New Station…” button and typed Glenn Miller. Pandora began playing “Moonlight Serenade” followed by a Jimmy Dorsey tune. If I want more Dorsey I add him as an artist to the station. You can share a station with people simply by emailing them a link.

Netcasting is replacing talk radio. The best example of this new media is Leo Laporte of TWIT.tv who was recently voted President of the Internet because of his TWIT network. Leo, a former radio DJ and technology TV host, started the This Week in Tech podcast several years ago. He now features 16 weekly shows, not only about technology. He does food and fun shows as well. He typically produces 25-30 hours a week of new content. Besides recorded podcasts, the TWIT network’s shows stream live on the Internet at twit.am for audio-only, and video at live.twit.tv. The audience can participate via chat rooms, email and the occasional call-in.

The article skimmer is an alternative way to view the New York Times website. The Times announcement says that it is intended to replicate the Sunday Times paper experience.

You navigate via the left hand panel which shows the Times Sections. Think of it as a table of contents. The Settings button lets you control appearance of the browser through the Schemes panel. They have several alternatives. Pictured above is the default Serendipity scheme. Below is the Large scheme.

And here is the Blackout scheme.

There are several other schemes not pictured here.

You can also select how articles display when clicked in the Click Behavior panel: within the article skimmer, in a new window or in the current window but not in the skimmer.

Give it a try. You might like it.

I learned of the article skimmer from this Download Squad article by Jason Clarke, dated July 28, 2009..

If you ever want to make a PDF from a website, fivefilters.org has the tools for you. These tools take a website’s content and turns it into a PDF, which can be read on your computer or printed and read on paper.

They have three tools for doing this.

Tool 1 – RSS to PDF Newspaper
The first tool is the most extensible one. You enter the RSS feed’s URL into the feed space on their website (see image below). Then select options, if you want. In the image below I chose to sort in descending date order, show images and fetch full-text articles. The output looks like this:

The above is a picture of page one of a three page PDF. I tried this with GigaOM and created a 16 page PDF.

Tool 2 – Feed to PDF
This bookmarklet converts a site’s RSS feed. It is a JavaScript applet that you drag into your bookmarks toolbar (AKA the favorites bar in Internet Explorer). Then when you find a website whose RSS feed you want to turn into a PDF you click on the bookmark while viewing that page. It then turns the feed into a PDF. This applet may only yield partial feeds if the author has set up the feed that way.

Tool 3 – Create PDF

This bookmarklet attempts to extract full-text content from a webpage or feed, unlike tool 2 above. It too is a JavaScript applet you drag into your bookmarks toolbar. Just like tool 2,  when you find a website you want to turn into a PDF you click on the bookmark while viewing that page. The applet then converts the page into a PDF.

Notes:
These tools did not always create the PDF that I expected. I suspect that is do to a combination of operator error (me), the target website’s design and a bit of flakiness on the JavaScript.

I also experimented with the similar Hewlett-Packard Tabbloid service. It lets you subscribe to a site and have the PDF emailed to you on a schedule you set. However, I did not like its output as much as the fivefilter.org PDFs.