Crying Wife

by Mark Shead on February 3, 2010

A guy watches movies with his wife and then films her crying at the ending.

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Downloading YouTube Videos

by Mark Shead on January 28, 2010

YouTube doesn’t have a “Download” button.  However, you can download clips using one of these methods.

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Open Source Apps for Education

by Mark Shead on January 25, 2010

  • Koha – Library management system.
  • Moodle – Course management system.  Similar to Blackboard and Angel.
  • Sakai – Another course management system.
  • Mahara – Portfolio system that integrates with Moodle.

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Charging for Content

by Mark Shead on January 17, 2010

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It sounds like the NY Times is planning on charging for online content.  Right now they ask you to register, but the content is free.  Rumors are that they will let you read a few articles for free before asking you to subscribe.

Maybe this will work, but I think it ignores the way the web is fundamentally different than a newspaper.  When I subscribe to a newspaper, I’ll probably read a good portion of it.  When I’m reading news on the web, I will read the articles I find interesting from a variety of different sites.  Subscribing to a newspaper that gives you 75% of your news probably makes sense.  Subscribing to a newspaper where you get 5% of your news is a harder sell.

For a subscription model to work well, I think you’d either need something like micro-payments or a subscription to a group of online resources. Micro-payments are problematic because they are confusing and because Americans seem to prefer unlimited or package options.  Subscriptions that give you access to a bunch of different web sites might work, but it would require publishers to work together.

Imagine a subscription where you can pay $20 per month and get access to the 20 top papers in the US, plus some sites like Britannica, etc.  Your subscription could be divided up between the publishers based on the number of articles, page views or time spent on each site.  As the number of subscribers grew, more publishers would want to be part of it to get some of the income pie.  As the number of publishers grew, more individuals would be interested in subscribing.

The company who seems uniquely positioned to pull something like this off is Google.  They could easily show subscribers results that they have access to, while showing non-subscribers what they are missing. Since Google controls a good percentage of the traffic for many of these sites, they would be a good company to handle the subscription process.  More importantly, if these companies simply start restricting access to their content, Google will probably stop showing their content in the search results.

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Blind People Mad at Kindle

January 13, 2010
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I would think that the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind would be thrilled with the idea of colleges using Kindles for textbooks.  After all, Kindle’s can read the text to you which would be a great advantage for people who can’t see.  This seems like a big step [...]

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Frustrated with Intuit

January 13, 2010
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Intuit makes Quicken and Quickbooks.  I stopped using Quicken for Mac because it can’t import OFX files. Most banks have a way for you to download your transactions in the OFX format.  Pretty much every piece of financial software in the world can handle OFX files, but not Quicken.  I noticed that there is a [...]

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Paperless Interview

December 7, 2009

My interview about going paperless was just posted at Micro Media Imaging Services.

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Christmas Cards

December 3, 2009

A friend of mine is selling some nice Christmas cards just in time for the holidays.

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Deductible

November 29, 2009

I was getting ready to climb up on our very steep roof to take the cap off the chimneys. Haley: “Be careful. You haven’t met your deductuble yet.”

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Taxing Tuition

November 21, 2009

Pittsburg has decided that since they are projected to go over budget, they should start taxing tuition.  Their logic is that students aren’t paying taxes, but they use city services.  I would assume that these students pay quite a bit in sales tax, but the city thinks they need more.  While the tax isn’t ridiculously [...]

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Snow Leopard Exchange Support

November 20, 2009

Snow Leopard Exchange support isn’t quite as good as it looks.  The email works well, but contacts show up in their own separate folder.  You can’t sync them to your normally contacts on your mac.  This means you can’t sync them with Mobile Me and they often are available in other programs that use your [...]

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Don’t Teach Her That!

November 8, 2009

We were driving home from Kansas City and Haley mentioned she needed to make a phone call. Our two year old then asked…
Katy: Who you gonna call?
Mark: Ghostbusters!
Haley: Don’t teach her that!

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Free with Wired Magazine

November 5, 2009
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So if you subscribe to WIRED magazine what do you get for free?  A wireless mouse of course.  In other news, Field & Stream is giving away chunks of asphalt and Scientific American is giving away dowser rods.

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Free Version of Splunk

October 31, 2009

Splunk now offers a free version.

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Computers make it easier…

October 30, 2009

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done. ~Andy Rooney

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Virtualappoint

October 28, 2009

Virtualappoint will do cold calling for you.  They say that many of the people doing the calling have their MBA.  Seriously?! Oh wait.  They hire people in other countries who don’t have accents.

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