One of major weaknesses of Google Wave is that you need to specifically check the site to see if any of your waves have been updated. Google Chrome extensions are available, but don’t yet work on the Mac (besides, as we’ve already established, Google Chrome is slower than Safari on the Mac).
A better solution may be the Unofficial Google Wave Notifier for the Mac. It’s a free download and, in my 2 minutes of use, seems to work pretty well. It basically sticks a little Wave icon in your menu bar and displays the number of unread messages. If you click on the menu, there’s a link to go to Google Wave, as well as a list of the Waves with unread messages.
I still find Wave a bit clunky for most uses, but this is a step in the right direction.
There’s a lot of buzz about the new Google Chrome beta, which is now available on the Mac. I had an earlier version on my machine, but decided to upgrade to see if the beta was up to snuff.
Overall, I like the tab-oriented design, which requires some hackery to emulate in Safari. Lacking is 1Password support, which essentially rules it out as a primary browser for me. The main advantage, as cited by some of my Windows-using colleagues, is speed. While tests seem to show that Chrome is quite a bit faster than most other browsers in Windows, I can’t say the same of the Mac, at least my machine running the latest Safari on Snow Leopard.
Subjectively, I can’t see much of a speed difference between the two browsers – if anything, Safari seems a hair faster. This benchmark seems to substantiate these results. I’m getting a score of 527 in Safari, but only 489 in Chrome. In comparison, Firefox 3.5.5 gives me a pathetic 149.
Chrome also lacks one of my favorite features of Safari: speed dialing (which lets you load the bookmarks on your favorites bar by typing command-#, where # is any of the number keys). It’s always nice to have another browser in the mix, though – competition is good to keep things moving.
I’ve got a decent collection of t-shirts which find some use throughout the year. I’ve tried various ways of folding them, but I’ve never manage to reproduce the aesthetic of an obsessively-neat roommate in college. Never, that is, until now.
Yes, it’s not in English, but that doesn’t matter. It took me several attempts to get this method down, but once it “clicks”, be prepared for t-shirt nirvana. I actually look forward to the laundry. It’s that good.
Ever since my Reneka Techno died, the search for good espresso drinks in the Boston area has changed from an interesting challenge to a more urgent need. During a trip to Seattle, I was easily able to locate top quality espresso houses like Vivace, but Boston is not a coffee town at heart. Dunkin’ Donuts seems to be the most popular source for black gold around here. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon Taste in Newtonville. It’s a surprisingly good Seattle-style coffee house. All the barista’s seem to be able to pull off impressive-quality latté art, and appear to actually know what they are doing. The espresso is the best I’ve had in the area.
As you can see from the blurry picture above, it’s effectively caffeinated as well.
Google Voice is more useful in theory than it is in practice for me. If I had multiple phones to manage, it would be great to have one number that could ring them all, and a centralized voicemail system to unify them. While voicemail transcription is marginally useful, I don’t really get all that many voicemails, and hearing the original audio via visual voicemail is already pretty convenient. The fact is that most of my calls go to my cell anyway, so routing them through Google Voice first is not of much utility.
On the other hand, faxing seems like it should have been replaced with something better (like, perhaps, email?!?), but is still widely used despite its relatively archaic technologic foundations. Most people don’t have a fax machine of their own at home (or, increasingly, even a phone line). This requires resorting to paying someone to use their fax machine or slumming off of the work fax machine, which is clearly a suboptimal solution (even if it’s generally accepted or at least overlooked).
What would be better is an online service which could route documents to those who still rely on fax machines. Even better, this service could provide a virtual phone number (much like Google Voice does) that could receive faxes and email them to you as PDFs. Services like eFax have the right idea, but are not free and, at least the last time I tried, require a special viewer app. This is the kind of problem that Google could solve. Well, Google, are you up for it?
It looks like the New York Times has a new interface option: Times Skimmer. It’s a nice layout. I’m withholding full judgement until I get a chance to give it a full trial, but so far I think I like it better than the standard layout. NYTimes is generally my preferred news source, but I’ve never found their newspaper-style layout to work that well on the web. This seems like a step in the right direction, at least at first blush.
One thought that struck me was that it looks like it’s designed for a tablet style interface. Maybe the rumored Apple tablet? It wouldn’t surprise me if the New York Times was one of the first partners.
My last post on this blog was over a month ago. Some have criticized me for “dithering” while my readers were desperate for new posts. Let me be clear: there was no material before me that could have reasonably been posted before this month. However, after much internal debate and consultation with my advisors, I have decided that what the internet needs is more posts on this blog. This blogging “surge” will begin immediately. As I have consistently said, it is my duty to inform the internet community of my opinions and thoughts, even when they are not what the internet wants to hear. My strategy will consist of three components:
1) More frequent posting: because a blog without posts cannot stand
2) More thoughtful posting: because posts without important content will just embolden the enemy (other blogs)
3) More pictures: because blog posts based on text alone cannot be as effective as a coordinated strategy.
Thank you for your understanding in these trying times.
Speedtest.net is a nice way to make you feel less guilty about spending too much money on Verizon FiOS test the speed of your internet connection. I decided to test things out on my Mac Pro. I tested out two different setups:
As you can see, the second test was significantly faster. What’s the difference between the two?
The first test was run via my Apple Time Capsule, an 802.11n-based wireless base station. Not only was it running 802.11n, the fastest current WiFi standard, but it was running in dual-band, 5 Ghz mode.
The second test was run using the stock Actiontec 802.11g router that Verizon supplied.
The two routers are connected via ethernet and are only inches away from each other. While the Actiontec is one hop closer to the external network, it really shouldn’t make that much of a difference. The 802.11n router should be faster or, at worst, the same speed as the g router (if the external connection is the limiting factor). The best I can do to explain the fact that I’m seeing an 802.11n router perform worse than an 802.11g router is that the antenna in the Actiontec (which is external) is better than that on the Time Capsule.
I adjusted the Multicast Rate on the Time Capsule to the maximum, which in theory shouldn’t really affect the speed, but it did seem to make a difference.
However, the speed was still a bit worse than the g router.
Flash, the media plugin from Adobe, is pseudo-ubiquitous on the web. It’s used on nearly all large websites, but often in form of useless additions such as ads. There are a few uses of Flash for rich applications (e.g. Mint), but often it’s just a distraction. Furthermore, and particularly on the Mac, the plugin can slow down your machine and consume resources.
Enter ClickToFlash, a Safari plugin that gives you control over which Flash objects to load and when to load them. You can “whitelist” certain sites, so Flash you actually want to use gets loaded automatically. For other sites, you can, well, click to Flash, allowing you to selectively load objects.
Check it out, it’s free. So far, it’s worked nicely for me.
