Oh Great LazyWeb Hear My Prayer: An RSS aggregator that converts text to speech and saves the resulting audio in an MP3 file. The result: listen to your favorite blogs’ new postings on your MP3 player away from the computer.
Update! James points out this could be done with NetNewsWire and a little AppleScript, and Greg Hanek sends along a link to Read It To Me , a perfectly named piece of donationware that also works with NetNewsWire. For us Apple users this is quite a nice little solution.
I enjoyed the new Lord of the Rings movie, Return of the King, but it was simply too long. I think the first two did a great job of not trying to convey everything in the books and simply be great movies. The last one is as well, until the ending, or endings I should say, as there are several of them, each longer than the last. And it was here that the movie tried to provide a grand ending to the entire trilogy instead of just providing closure to the story. And it was here that I could no longer concentrate, the urine backing up into my brain – despite my awesomely timed-trip to the restroom during the very last preview – where my last thoughts were, ‘How long can one bladder hold out? Is there a statistical average? If so, has this been pointed out to Hollywood film editors?‘
SpSt 515: Human Factors in Space, 3 Credits: A review of the major stresses experienced by humans on entering the new and alien environment of space. Examples will be taken from the psychological and physiological impacts experienced by U.S. and Soviet crews with emphasis on longer flights. How to avoid and/or overcome these stresses will be examined as an essential and growing need in the future development and settlement of the space frontier.
Update to the post below, Anca has a review of SchemaLogic. ‘The primary use for SchemaServer right now seems to focus on Controlled
Vocabulary Management….Changes to a vocabulary can be made through an automated voting process.‘ Hmmmm, people across the enterprise voting on the vocab, I wonder what LIS people think of that? Link courtesy of Brett. Thanks Brett!
Check out the Dialtastic over at youngpup. It’s an example of the interaction design school of navigation.
Having only recently contemplated the taxonomy dance, I’m now building a user interface to do it within a content management system. It’s nothing new, I see all the thesaurus software let’s you map categories to other categories. But some of those interfaces are soooooo bad, asking you to assign categories a number which corresponds to a level which is specified somewhere else. Eek. I’m curious to see how the new generation of products, like SchemaLogic, handle this. My kingdom for a screen shot.
As Tanya recently pointed out, sometimes you have to go down a research path just to find out if the path is of interest to you, sometimes having to backtrack. The UT School of Info had a little seminar which addressed this, at least on a community level. The Research-A-Palooza:
Original powerpoint (10 megs!) and crude HTML rendering
Stowe Boyd on the challenges new Internet applications face being on the out rather than the in: ‘The final barrier I see to the productive application of social networking systems is that they are…being developed as standalone systems, divorced from the information technologies that businesses are already using to manage business relationships or relationship-related information. In my case, I spend a lot of time “in” Outlook and instant messaging clients of various flavors. The typical sales rep at a large company spends a lot of time “in” Siebel. A consultant in a professional sales firm spends much of her day “in” a project-oriented content management system, like eRoom or Sharepoint. A financial analyst at a brokerage firm “lives” in Bloomberg or Reuters information services. ‘
What happens when you unleash Paul Ford’s design and technology skills on a 150 year old magazine of literature, politics and culture? Harpers.org.
Paul also found a clever way to prototype the site: ‘It’s been noted that Harpers.org looks like Ftrain. It’s actually the other way around: Ftrain looks like Harpers.org. I’ve been using you, the Ftrain reader, as a guinea pig for about 5 months, testing ideas I developed for Harper’s, finding out what JavaScript worked in which browser, which interface ideas were too baffling to include, and seeing how you dealt with different sorts of links. Thanks for that.’
Then of course there’s all that semantic taxonomy hoohah, you’ll want to read about that too.
Fran Lebowitz on Lever House:
“If you live here for more than five years, they’re going to tear down something you like. The invariable rule of thumb is that what they will put up is worse than what they tore down, even if what they tore down is terrible. I mean, I was once with a man who was asked during the course of the time I was with him to sign a petition to keep them from tearing down Lever House and he signed it. He’s a much older man and he turned to me and said, ‘You know, I remember signing a petition to keep them from putting up Lever House.’ And that is the story of anyone who has lived in New York long enough.”
Amy and Mike Lee had a baby girl, and Mike moblog’d the whole delivery. Congratulations!
Brenda Laurel! Very cool, since she’s coming out with what looks like a great book on user research and I’m a fan of that whole generation of Apple designers.
Mark Hurst set up a nice little site called the Uncle Mark 2004 Gift Guide and Almanac. The cynical might see it as an inflated Amazon affiliate play, but I like the idea of looking to particular people we trust for recommendations. I’d love to see, for example, a list of David Byrne’s favorite new records. A while ago I wrote about a record store in Hamburg that operates this way (see April 24 entry). And isn’t this the idea behind the Oprah Book of the Month?
