Rotten Tomatoes Mobile Site
I built a mobile app for Rotten Tomatoes (rottentomatoes.com) so you can now access reviews and ratings on your cell phone (blackberry, iphone, etc.,). I’m often at Blockbuster Videos or the theaters, confused about which movie is good to see. This handy website will help you look up reviews fast and easy.
Some images from a Thanksgiving dinner (with a Turduckhen — a hen in a duck in a turkey!).
Announcing the release of TinyUploads 2 (BETA). TinyUploads 2 is a way to share your images easily and quickly on blogs. This version uses the brand new Adobe Air 2.0 Beta. TinyUploads 2 supports a completely revamped workflow for getting images onto your blog:
1. Drag images to the TinyUploads 2 uploader. Resize and upload in one click.
2. On the web interface, select the images you want to publish to your blog.
3. Copy/paste the embed code to share!
The images shown above were uploaded using TinyUploads 2. Additional features include support for 3 different thumbnail sizes, 3 different full-resolution sizes, caption support, exif data support (images are sorted by date taken), and Highslide lightbox integration. Try it out here (look for the Tiny Uploads 2 beta). http://tinyuploads.com/
This weekend I’ve been testing out the Nikon D700 with a 14/24mm Nikkor lens. I visited three different malls for the shots (I’ll find something better to photograph next time, hopefully), and processed images in Lightroom + Photoshop.
The Nikkor 14/24 is one of the best wide-angle zoom lenses today. The results are very sharp and the colors contrasty. The bokeh in the lens is also nice and round — just a little sharp on the edges (see the flowers photo). The wide angle and large aperture allow plenty of room for creativity. The lens is large and heavy, but I don’t really mind (not yet at least). I do mind that the lens bulges out like a glass bubble, so easy to shatter if dropped or scraped against a wall. The 14-24mm cannot use filters either, so the lens cap stays on most of the time.
The D700 also has some features I was impressed with — motion-tracking auto-focus, auto-iso, and the TTL flash. It’s easy and quick to operate, for the most part.
I’ll post some more thoughts later on.
Userplane chat service recently announced they are no longer supporting a free unlimited service. The new pricing schemes are not especially cheap either — $1/GB of bandwidth transferred. For comparison, Stickam StreamAPI charges $0.45/GB. There are rumors that Userplane may soon be deadpooled too. So, I began looking for alternatives to the service. My requirements were support for video chat and transparent site integration.
I checked out a bunch of services that ended in “dealbreakers.” Youcams offers embedded video chat — but there is no site integration support so users need to re-login everytime. Tokbox seemed interesting but they have a limit of 20 users per chatroom. UStream and Mogulus (LiveStream) are more focused on a single broadcaster than on voice chatrooms. JustinTV offers some services, but require registration with their own website. And so forth.
I eventually found Stickam StreamAPI, Tinychat, and Stickapps (Toksta). Stickam StreamAPI would have been cool to use, but the voice chat service is just plain broken. It is odd, so maybe I will check back in a few days. Tinychat is very cool — allows up to 12 users to chat together — this could be a good voice chat alternative. Stickapps is also cool — it’s a Facebook style chat bar for IM. Meebo also offers a similar service, but they only serve very big media sites, so it wasn’t an option. With a Stickapps lite account, you can integrate friends lists with an API and add more customizability. So Stickapps could be a good IM replacement. Overall though, I found nearly all of these chat services quite incomplete with obscure documentation.
Any other services?
I’ve been into this concept of lifestyle optimization — streamlining the way I do things and getting the most value out of my life. There are many things in our lives that we are not utilizing to their full potential. Here are ways you can start to maximize your living.
1. Learn how to use the post office.
2. Learn how to use a store’s return/refund policy. Don’t settle for unsatisfying purchases.
3. Sign up for ebay, and Amazon sellers. Learn not to be a “hoarder” and sell old stuff you don’t use anymore.
4. Learn about your various insurances and what you are entitled to or not entitled to.
5. Organize your finances. Start using credit cards that provide returns. Starwood is good for travel. Schwab cards provide 2% cashback, and 0% foreign transaction/ATM fees. What is the flow between your checking, savings, brokerage, CDs, IRA, credit cards, etc.,? You could probably save quite a bit by fine-tuning that.
6. Make it a habit to check spoofee.com or fatwallet.com for great deals. Sign up to travelzoo.com for travel deals.
7. Secure your stuff. Are your passwords safe? If not, encrypt them and make sure they’re all different in some way. That way, one password break-in doesn’t mean everything you have is broken into.
8. Put contact cards on your wallet and cellphone. Make it easy for people to return things to you when you lose them.
9. Look through your old junk and reclaim things that are useful to you. I found an old watch that still works great. Is the stuff on your desk a mess? If so, that makes it difficult to use.
10. Organize the stuff on your computer and the way you surf the internets. iGoogle and the Google Reader gadgets can help save you time. Is your data backed up? A simple external hard drive can make that easy.
11. How do you share photos? How do you share thoughts? Some people use a menagerie mix of services, which can complicate things and waste time.
12. Is a gym or exercise part of your lifestyle? Do you want it to be? What about salads, fruits, fish, vitamins, etc., Look at your eating and health habits, and re-evaluate it.
13. Consider how your social life has progressed in the last month. Re-evaluate how you are developing relationships with people and the way you attend get-togethers.
14. Do you have a calendar or task list? How do you ensure you don’t forget to do something?
15. Know when your car is due for maintenance.
If you notice anything in your life that is not as efficient or satisfying to you as you’d like it to be, start thinking of ways you can improve that. The solutions often involve you venturing outside of your “comfort zone” or “daily habits.” But you’ll probably learn something useful for many years to come.
I sold this image of DisneySea’s Braviseamo show for $20 to a textbook publisher. It’s a good one — I love the colors and composition. Well, I am available to photograph your wedding or birthday party as well.
While searching for new domain names the other day, I realized that about 99% of my top choices were taken… not by real websites, but by domain squatters. If a real website needed such a domain, I’d understand that — but it’s very ridiculous how many domain names are simply being occupied and waiting to be sold to the highest bidder. For example, on my project eHerds.com, I tested out “mygroups.com” and “citygroups.com,” both of which were occupied with filler pages and advertisements. Dozens of other names I wanted were being cybersquatted on as well.
It’s no wonder that so many new web startups resort to odd and meaningless names like moofd.com, balbr.com, jarbr.com, or whatever. Such names undoubtedly hurt the growth of business since the site names are so unintuitive and awkward. A recent real example is bing.com. What is a “bing”?
A domain can be occupied for as low as $2/year. Domain squatting impedes progress and needs to be stopped — simple ways would be adding or increasing fees to make it unprofitable for cybersquatters, who reserve up to 100,000’s of domain names. I’m sure there are many other ways to do so too.
Organizing local groups just got easier with new site eHerds.com. Often, animals will form herds for protection or social purposes. eHerds.com helps facilitate such actions amongst human beings. The site lets you create location-based herds that your friends or people in your city will be able to join. The members can then plan events or discuss things.
Feel free to join my herd, the Muffy Herd.
Tornado opensources Friendfeed’s realtime architecture. More on real-time web-coding techniques here http://tinyurl.com/tc95h
