Category: Good things

Yahoo is beta testing a new search concept that adds a social aspect to search. My Web 2.0 gives you the ability to bookmark websites with your own tags, a la Flickr. You can share those links with friends and search for links based on tags. Neat concept. You can read more about it on Yahoo’s own Search Blog.

I really don’t like Walmart. Their merchandise is generally second-rate quality and their business tactics hurt smaller, more personal local businesses. But the world’s largest retailer cannot be ignored. Recently, my wife had to print out some digital photos for a piano recital. Our printer, for whatever reason, has decided that all photos should be printed five shades darker than they appear on the screen, making them look as if they were taken in a dark room by candlelight. So I looked into ordering prints.

Walmart currently has the best deal going. 4×6 prints are just $0.12 each, which is cheaper than the glossy photo paper I buy (nevermind the outrageous cost of ink cartridges). The process is pretty simple. You upload your images, select which ones you want prints of, the size and quantity. You can either have them shipped to you or arrange to pick them up at the nearest Walmart.

In our case, we placed the order about 9:30pm, and picked them up at 10am the next morning. Not bad.

There were a few usability issues with their website. When the photos were printed, the order status showed them as being “shipped” (they were printed locally). And the sales tax calculated online was lower than the sales tax computed at the local store (about a $0.42 discrepancy). But the price is difficult to beat. If you need prints from your digital camera, check it out.

In keeping with the theme, the Geoblogging site is another terrific example of what you can do with two of my favorite technologies: Google Maps and Flickr. Put’em together and you get GeoTagging. See where photos were taken and find out who else have been a shutterbug near you.

Got Flickr? Join the GeoTagging group and look here for super-simple instructions for adding geotags to your photos…if you use Firefox.

Can you ever have too much bandwidth?

For many years, the small rural town that I live in had no broadband internet options. I had at one point even created a website where fellow residents could voice their desire for someone–anyone–to come in with a broadband service.

After many painful years of dial-up access, Verizon finally came through with DSL. This was a huge improvement over dial-up access. About 18 months later, our cable company Adelphia started rolling out their broadband internet service, and I switched and got even more bandwidth. I get download speeds up to 3Mbps and occasionally a bit higher.

Finally, Murrieta hit the bandwidth motherlode. We are one of a handful of communities in California that Verizon selected for their initial roll-out of fiber-optic internet service. Last year they began tearing up streets and sidewalks, laying the fiber-optic cable throughout the entire city (all utilitiy lines are underground). And yesterday I finally got a card in the mail saying that the service is ready to order.

Needless to say, I picked up the phone and ordered right away.

Verizon calls their fiber-optic service FIOS: Fiber-Optic Internet Service. So what’s the big deal?

Fiber-optic broadband will give me 15 Mbps downstream speed. This is at least 5 times faster than my cable internet. It means that video chat performance will be even smoother. Downloads will be faster. VoIP service won’t choke my son’s important Everquest play. It means Jeff will be wearing a big smile.

The installation is scheduled for Tuesday, May 17th. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

And to think that when I first got online, I was connecting with a 300 bps modem…

May 18 Update

The installer showed up a few minutes past 3 PM, and left precisely two hours later. All I can say is that fiber optic broadband is amazing.

I ran a couple of before-and-after bandwidth speed tests at .

With Adelphia cable Internet, I had a download speed of 1.1 Mbps.

With fiber optic, my download speed jumped to 14.8 Mbps — over 10x faster!

Of course, having a big, fat pipe doesn’t mean that everything loads faster. There are still many other variables in the equation — many other choke points in any path on the Internet. But it does make a difference, especially in a household with several PCs and lot of heavy Internet usage.

Flickr has an API that allows you to create new programs that interface with their website in innovative ways. One such example is the Flickr Screensaver.

I’m not really into screensavers, but this is actually pretty cool. You can configure it to show photos from a particular group, or the most recent photos from your contacts, or your favorites… pretty much whatever you want. This is a great example of push technology; the content comes to you automatically.

Kudos to the folks at Wackylabs.net for creating such a neat tool.

Neil Stephenson created a rich vision of a dysfunctional future in Snow Crash, but he really proves his mettle in Cryptonomicon. A departure from his earlier science fiction writing, Cryptonomicon is a historic fiction with several parallel storylines that eventually weave together in the present day. So is it worth the 1000+ pages?
Continue reading Cryptonomicon