illumeon

Wow, this is big…

jbw1291 — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 11:39:26 +0000

It looks like Google’s releasing chat in gmail! They added a “chat history” section in some people’s gmail accounts, and from the looks of the screenshots on the page they set up, they’ll have a full-featured chat client up there within a few weeks. Check out this, this and this.

Even the French are doing it…

jbw1291 — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 19:41:52 +0000

Here’s an interesting article about the French police ditching IE and Windows, and why they’re doing it. Maybe this will convince my dad to relinquish his beloved IE 6.0, but I doubt it. He has no reason to hold onto it, except for pure stubbornness: once I tricked out Firefox on his laptop so that it looked exactly the same as IE, and he did not know the difference ’till I told him. I had quite a laugh.

Dell exits the hard-drive mp3 player business

jbw1291 — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 19:37:52 +0000

Yet another victim of almighty Apple, Dell has recently announced that it will discontinue making its “Dell DJ” hard-drive based mp3 players. Dell will not, however, discontinue its flash-based players. Dell’s announcement follows a slew of other such announcements from other players in the mp3-player industry. The wild success of Apple’s iPods has blown the majority of its competitors out of the water. There are only a few of them left in the industry: notably Sony and Creative.

What is the key to the iPod’s success? For a very long time, Apple had a sort of iconoclastic appeal to a small cult-like group of geeks, but it never won out on the mass market. Why was the iPod so different? Only two answers are readily available: the iPod’s comparitively immense storage, and its fashion appeal. I think the second answer is far more important.

Google and VW to develop in-car navigation system?

jbw1291 — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 19:21:42 +0000

There have been rumours flying around recently about Google and VW jointly developing an in-car navigation system. Now, it seems that they are true. Using the technology pioneered by the people at Keyhole (now Google Earth), the navigation system will display photos or satellite images of the route ahead, instead of the simple lines and names displayed by almost all in-car GPS navigation systems. It definitely seems like a good use of the Google Earth API. I wonder how much VW is paying for Google’s participation?

this is cool…

jbw1291 — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 12:48:15 +0000

i was surfing around and doing my history the other day when i accidentally came across altavista.

altavista has been around for a long time. it was the premier search engine for a while, before google came along and wiped everyone else out of the field. i don’t know of anyone who uses it any more…it’s kind of sad. anyway, i figured i’d surf around altavista just for the heck of it, see if there were any cool research tools or anything…i found that the web search does not hold a candle to google, but the mp3 search…was another matter. it was awesome. within three minutes of using it i found good versions of “no rain” by blind melon and “she will be loved” by the maroon five. i’d suggest you check it out.

google working on alternate internet?

jbw1291 — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 09:58:44 +0000

according to a new post over at engadget, there’s a possibility that google is working on a cheap pc called the “google cube” that runs on “the googlenet”, an alternate internet devised by google and running off of google’s massive amount of bandwidth. i’ve heard many rumours like this, including that “goobuntu” rumour over at the register that turned out to be a hoax, but i’ve also thought that google should release a product like this for a while. also, i think engadget has a great deal more credibility than the register does. i take all of their posts with a grain of salt.

despite all this, the chances are that google comes out and denies the rumour once it starts snowballing. no fair.

digitizing my dad’s cd collection…

jbw1291 — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 02:54:32 +0000

sometimes i feel like my family’s it department. there’s no one else in my family who appreciates computers, and very few people in my family can even turn a computer on the right way. thus, snce i’m the only one doing regular maintenence on my family’s three computers, i get blamed for any problems that the other family members have with them. but i’m rambling.

a week ago i embarked on the monstrous task of ripping every track in my dad’s cd collection onto my main computers’ massive hard drive. and it is a massive task. my dad has hundreds of cds, and they’re not categorized, they’re just sort of set on the shelf in no particular order. i wanted to digitize the collection for obvious reasons: to make it searchable and organize it, to make it easy to transfer tracks to my mp3 player (which is a rio, by the way), and to make it easy to recover tracks if one of the cds was lost or destroyed. admirable goals, i think. i have the perfect setup for this kind of operation: suse linux running kde, which uses an app called kaudiocreator to rip cds, two disk drives (one dvd-r-cd-rw and one dvd-rw-cd-rw), and 512 megs of ram.

kaudiocreator clusters my music files together in a folder in my home directory. then when i want to search them i can using the excellent built-in kde search, and i can play them using amarok, the excellent music player that also comes with kde. when i get a 60-gb video ipod, i’m going to dump every cd onto it…then i’ll buy one of those gadgets that hijacks a radio frequency within a one yard radius of the device and plays your music on it, and i’ll be able to play my dad’s entire cd collection anywhere i want…and slip it into my pocket

isn’t the digital age fun?

free ipod…or just free spam?

jbw1291 — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 19:03:13 +0000

theres a site out there, freepay.com, that offers free electronics of many types, from laptops to psps to flatscreens to ipods. i’ve come across it several times during my extensive wanderings across the ‘net, but always dismissed it as a scam. now i’m not so sure. my mom recently lost her hp jornada 680 when it was dropped on the floor from a pretty nice height, and she needs a replacement. naturally i was the one to look, since i am the family it department, and during my series of searches i came upon freepay yet again. so i resolved to find out once and for all if it was a scam. i was extremely surprised when i came across a media page on freepay that links to dozens of legitimate news articles saying that freepay was not a scam (including stories from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Wired News). digging around further, i found several “fan sites” of freepay, featuring photos of the merchandise people recieved. i was convinced, mainly because the New York Times had leant its credibility to the program. i figured that they would not have done that unless they knew freepay was legit, so i looked into the program.

here’s the way it works…or, at least it’s the way they say it works. you sign up for an account on the freepay page for the product you want to get for free. this involves giving them your home address and email address. i knew there was a good chance i would get bombarded with spam if i did it, but i trust my spam filter, so i put down my addresses. the next step in the process is to complete one of a few dozen “offers” from freepay’s “associates”. a couple of examples are free trials for aol 9.0, rhapsody, and stamps.com. once you complete one of these trials, you have to recruit five friends to do the same. once all that is done, your product will be shipped.

i still don’t know if it works yet. if you want to find out for yourself (and help me find out) become one of my “referred friends”, and try it yourself. if it works for me, believe me, i’ll tell you .

after all that…?

jbw1291 — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 17:35:06 +0000

there’s been a lot of buzz in the past week and a half or so about the fact that google agreed, finally, to censor a version of their search for china. people said that google was breaking its “do no evil” mantra, that they were doing it for the money, and that the googlers deserved to be eaten (no, i made that one up ). well, after all that buzz, is google.cn (the censored chinese version of google search) really being blocked by the chinese government? phillip lenssen seems to think there’s a chance…

welcome…

jbw1291 — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 17:12:38 +0000

hi. i’m joseph wilkinson, and i’m finally revealing myself. for several years now i’ve written articles for various blogs, created several google groups (one of which is now popular beyond my wildest dreams), created multiple websites, participated in many different forums, and beta-tested hundreds of products. but no one online has really known who i am. so, hi: i’m joseph wilkinson, and i’m fourteen years old.
to give a more specific summary than the one I just gave, i write for the amcp tech blog (i’m a “senior editor”), i’m chief moderator and owner of the “google is awesome” and “firefox is awesome” google groups, and i’ve maintained the illumeon.com website for a long time, although it is in a state of serious disrepair right now. my newest project is apOs, my attempt at making an ajax-powered online operating system.

The reason that i’m coming out and talking in this weblog is the fact that i’m tired of hiding in the dark. i’m sick of people thinking i’m an adult and being wrong. i think i’m going to have a great time doing this, and i hope you do reading it.