Since I'm in a pop-culture vacuum, even though I edit an entertainment section, I only heard about comedian and actress Sarah Silverman's "I'm %&$#-ing Matt Damon video when Ilene told me about it. And now longtime boyfriend (and talk show host, if for some reason you didn't know) Jimmy Kimmel has come up with his music-video answer: "I'm ^&%$-ing Ben Affleck." The sheer number of cameos is astounding -- and extremely funny.

If you've been under the same sort of rock as I have, here's Kimmel's video, which I just saw a link to at Out in Hollywood:

And if you want to see Silverman's, here it is:

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While I'm pimping Web sites, I might as well put in a plug for LXer, which collects links to posts and articles everywhere about all things Linux and open source.

The beauty of it is that anybody can become a member of LXer and submit their own links of things that look interesting on the Web.

I did it ... and now I'm a contributing editor. I mostly post links to items on Click, but every once in a while I find something not already on LXer that I can post a link to.

The site is valuable because it acts as an intelligent clearinghouse of open-source news. If something's happening in the world of Linux, BSD, or anything in the open-source software (and related hardware) world, chances are the LXer community already knows about it and has links to everything they can find concerning it.

Equally important is LXer's "Latest Discussions," where users bat around the dozens of articles linked from the site.

I've asked my LXer guru, Scott Ruecker more than once: The LXer concept is so novel and works so well -- everything from the conception and ideas behind the site to its programming (no pictures, just ultra-fast PHP and MySQL) -- that I wonder why there aren't LXer-type sites for Windows, Mac, and even for things outside the realm of computer hardware and software. It's a concept that just might work in both larger and different spheres -- everything from politics to quilting could benefit from an identically programmed forum.

LXer isn't as complicated as Digg, nor as chaotic as USENET, and it's not a fiefdom in any sense ... it truly reflects its community. And I couldn't imagine not being a part of it.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I hadn't taken a look at Lifehacker in awhile, but a recent visit proved it to be a good source of tips for the fully geeky, the would-be geek and, occasionally, the rest of us. I should probably start checking it every day.

A site I do manage to get to most days is the great BoingBoing, which once again appeals to the geeky, those who love them and ... yes, there's stuff for everybody.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

But the 1962 Sears Catalog is a different story. There's no better way to see the way we were (in the cobwebs not of my mind) than an old Sears Catalog. And yes, I'm old enough to remember poring through the toy section during the holidays.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rumour has it that Apple Inc. is planning on introducing a cheaper, smaller version of the iPhone later this year. The rumour gained momentum last Thursday when it was made public that Apple Inc. filed a patent application last November describing "a multifunctional handheld device with a circular touch pad displaying illuminated symbols that could change depending on the mode in use," which Apple enthusiasts are interpreting as an "iPhone Nano."

Posted by Armando Hernandez at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The beta version of RealPlayer 11 is out and it's free.

Among the new features, RealPlayer 11 allows users to burn videos
to CDs in the VCD format. (You will need to buy the $29.99 RealPlayer Plus to burn to DVDs).

RealPlayer 11 is also capable of recognizing video content protected by DRM (digital rights management) and blocking it from being recorded.

RealNetworks is also planning additional features - such as allowing video content to be downloaded to iPods and other portable devices.

Posted by Armando Hernandez at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Communications Workers of America has released a report on how the web access speed in the U.S. compares to other nations. I have to admit that the results surprised me - not because the U.S. wasn't at the top of the list but because how meager our speed seems compared to other countries.

Here are some numbers:

The median U.S. download speed 1.97 megabits per second.
In Japan: 61 megabits per second.
In South Korea: 45 megabits per second.
In France: 17 megabits per second.
In Canada - yes, Canada - 7 megabits per second.

The report also reveals that among the states, the East Coast is definitely speedier than the West Coast.

The Top Five: Rhode Island, Kansas, New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts.

Posted by Armando Hernandez at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anticipating an increase in service demand - thanks to Apple's much-hyped iPhone - AT&T has hired 2000 temporary employees and has trained them on how to sell Steve Jobs' latest gadget.

Considering that AT&T has some 1,800 stores nation-wide, the surge in available staff amounts to just one extra person per store.

One more thing - in case you were wondering - we are NOT (sadly) getting any kickbacks from Apple Inc., there's just plenty of iPhone-related news coming out regularly.

Posted by Armando Hernandez at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I saw a plug for the Command Line Warriors blog in a British Linux magazine.

An enjoyable read, to be sure, with lots of GUI content, Mac OS X stuff, general Britannia and even shell account info.

Especially notable are the iPod and Linux series, Installing Gentoo series and Intro to the OS X command line.

My quick hint for OS X users:

Go to Applications, then to the System Utilities folder, then run Terminal. That's the OS X command line (your box is running BSD Unix, and it's there in all its glory).

at the prompt type this:

top

You will see most of the running processes on your machine and the percentage of memory and CPU power they are using.

To turn off top, on the PC it's ctrl-C. Maybe it's the same in OS X. If not, try Apple-C, or just close the Terminal window.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sorry about the long title, but some things just piss me off so much. In this case, I want to make it clear that Microsoft isn't 100 percent to blame -- maybe 80 percent, since half the times that Microsoft tries to add value to their operating system, software companies that make money downstream by selling you stuff that would be made obsolete by that added value start bitching about it -- and the feds tell MS to back off.

And while I'm no Microsoft apologist, the consumer often gets screwed in the process. But that doesn't have to happen. There are some excellent free antivirus programs out there (I prefer Avast), and just about everybody knows that Open Office can replace MS Office, GIMP can replace Photoshop, Firefox subs for Internet Explorer, Thunderbird and Evolution (not to mention Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and the like) replace Outlook ... (and, of course, Linux can replace Windows, if you're so inclined).

So now on to my point -- and I do have one. The state of multimedia -- audio and video -- on the Internet is a big hot mess. Microsoft controls the Windows Media format. The MP3 format, which can get you a swift summons from the Recording Industry Association of America, has recently led to lawsuits over royalties for use of the format itself -- and besides that it's lossy and sounds compressed. Apple's AAC is somewhat more accessible, but there still is licensing and proprietary technology involved, and Apple Lossless is another proprietary format.

But there is an alternative: the Ogg Vorbis standard for audio and Theora for video are free, open-source alternatives, and Ogg is the primary multimedia format being used by Wikipedia. For true audiophiles, Ogg's FLAC codec -- used by the Philadelphia Orchestra for its online muslc offerings -- allows for compression but is lossless, unlike MP3 and AAC.

But can your computer play them. (Go to the Ogg Vorbis site for setup info, or keep reading). If you have a Linux box, you're in luck -- just about all the players on that platform can handle the audio Oggs, and many (including mplayer, xine, helix and VideoLAN) support the Theora video format as well.

But what if you have a Windows box? Windows Media Player handles MS's own audio/video format and will play MP3s, but it won't play Ogg files without a helper app. Luckily you can play OGGs on a Web page (as Wikipedia does on this C.P.E. Bach excerpt) if your browser uses Java.

Or you can download an application that will make your Windows Media Player (or other player) able to handle Ogg files. So if you are running Windows Media Player (which I do -- I happen to like it), download and run the program, and then download an Ogg file (like this version of "Giant Steps" by John Coltrate from Wikipedia), right-click on the file, then left-click on Open With and then navigate to Choose Program and choose Windows Media Player as the default app for Ogg files. Then when you click on an Ogg link on Wikipedia or elsewhere, the file will download and play in your Windows Media Player

For Mac OS X users, there are some players available that will handle Oggs (again, check the Ogg Vorbis page), but if you use iTunes (and what Mac user doesn't?), there's a plug-in to enable it to play Oggs.

And for all of these platforms, the Democracy Player is open source and handles just about every video format on the Web, including Theora.

Bottom line: In this case, Microsoft and Apple should add Ogg support to their players straight out of the box. Nobody would complain, sue or petition the government if they did. Users should not be steered toward and forced to use restricted file formats when free, quality open-source alternatives are available. Luckily there are work-arounds for this problem, as I have described above, and I encourage all of you to implement them on your own boxes, tell others about them and help your fellow users do the same.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It's Friday, and while's it's been good enough for this Hebrew, I just had to hear the "Sanford & Son" theme, which I've been teaching to the toddler -- hey, it's our cultural heritage!

I found it at Sitcoms Online, specifically right here, where you can click and hear it in all its .wav glory.

To hear the late, great Redd Foxx say, Lamont, you big dummy! click here. To here Fred G. Sanford have one of his many fake heart attacks, click here.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I ran across this site, BSD/Linux Gangster (also known as Linux/BSD Gangsters), and it is freakin' hilarious. Just dip into the forums and be prepared to laugh your geeky ass off.

P.S. The guy pictured on the left is "Mob Tux"

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just came across this great blog, Pain and Glory From the Trenches of the IT World, I'm not really sure who is behind it, other than being from IT (and I do believe it), but for a reasoned look at operating systems, hardware and general technology opinion, I find it to be a very good read.

For instance, he's of the opinion that converting an old PC into a home server is probably a waste of resources, and you're better off adding a hard drive to your existing PC if you need more storage.

And he things NetBSD would be a good OS for the One Laptop Per Child $100 PC initiative (which is currently using a cutdown Red Hat, I think). Here he's talking about Intel's low-cost PC made for the Third World (and not part of OLPC):

I have used NetBSD on a wide variety of older systems, and I have to say, it works wonders. When using NetBSD, it’s quite possible to turn old Sun SPARCstations into very capable mail servers or web proxies. Now, these low-end laptops are far, far more powerful than such obsolete Sun systems. The enjoyable experience of NetBSD on a 33 MHz SPARCstation 10 will no doubt be quite magnified on a 900 MHz Celeron-based system.

As you may have gathered -- and will gather upon more extensive reading, he's rather fond of NetBSD.

He also likes KDE as a desktop environment and thinks it's not just better but faster than GNOME, he again suggests NetBSD as an alternative to one of today's popular "low-spec" Linux distros, Xubuntu:

NetBSD is a truly remarkable and versatile system. And for many people, I think it would make a great alternative to lightweight Linux distributions like Xubuntu and Ubuntu Lite. The very philosophy of the project, that being widespread portability, will no doubt go a long way towards ensuring it remains a modern system that consumes minimal resources. If you’re currently a user of a minimalistic Linux distribution that you think is beginning to get bloated, maybe you should give NetBSD a try. It may just be exactly what you’re looking for.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let's get it out in the open. Java is slow. Flash, though proprietary and closed-source, rules.

That's why I like the Speakeasy Speed Test for determining the health of your broadband connection -- it uses Flash instead of the usual Java.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The internet is entertainment, no way around it. So it only makes sense that newspapers begin to cover the internet the way we cover movies and television. Which means the inevitable end-of-year lists.

So here, from the Associated Press' Jake Coyle, is a list of the Top 10 YouTube videos from 2006, with the videos embedded for your viewing pleasure:

2006 was the year YouTube became culturally ubiquitous. Declared the invention of the year by Time magazine, the video sharing web site had Ohio judges posting their weekly sentencing hearings and spawned countless explosive experiments involving Diet Coke and Mentos candies. YouTube, based in San Bruno, provides a list of the most viewed videos, which remains the gauge upon which all clips are judged. Here, though, are the most significant YouTube videos of the year:

1. THE FACE OF YOUTUBE: The cute, bedroom confessions of Lonelygirl15 remain the site’s quintessential expression. Of course, the pretty high schooler named Bree was eventually revealed to be 19-year-old actress Jessica Lee Rose, who was acting out a scripted plot with two behind-the-scenes producers. But that strange mutated duality of what’s real and what’s fiction, what’s amateur and what’s professional, remains the heart and soul of YouTube, where everybody and nobody is a star.

2. NETWORK WAKE-UP CALL: Saturday Night Live’s “Lazy Sunday� mock-rap sketch was, in some ways, what started the revolution. The video was seen by more than five million viewers before NBC asked YouTube to remove it in February. Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg’s rhymes boosted the hipness of “SNL,� but more importantly, it was the first time networks were alerted to their new competition. NBC reacted fearfully, and later opted to built up its own Web sites with online video. The networks continue to experiment with YouTube; recently, CBS has claimed its late shows have increased in ratings after posting clips from “The Late Show with David Letterman� and “The Late Late Show� on YouTube.

3. POLITICAL FALLOUT: YouTube — like the Internet in general — has made it a specialty to reveal the gaffes and mistakes of the establishment. Of course, few would say Virginia Sen. George Allen didn’t deserve his fate after a video of him calling a rival campaign staffer “macaca� drew constant clicks on YouTube. Allen went on to lose an extremely close election — a race that YouTube could well have turned. On the other end of the spectrum, Michael J. Fox’s tremulous campaign ads for various Democratic candidates who support stem cell research proved powerfully effective and were seen by millions more than would have otherwise caught them on TV.

4. FLOUNDERING FOUNDERS: When Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in October, YouTube
founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen posted a goofy, unrehearsed video with a glint in
their eye and a smirk on their face that said unmistakably: “We just became insanely
rich.� It was true to YouTube style, but the site’s video-posting community couldn’t help
thinking, “Didn’t we do all the work?�

5. OK STOP: MTV turned 25 this year, but it became clear a long time ago that its programming doesn’t have room for music videos anymore. YouTube’s expanse is endless, of course, and the site turned a little-known power pop group into the music video sensation of the year. OK Go’s video for “Here it Goes Again� was made in one long take with the amateurish creativity that YouTube specializes in. Their playfully choreographed treadmill dancing was the most absurdly graceful thing of the year: YouTube saved the video star.

6. CELEBRITY SPY: Michael “Kramer� Richards’ racist rant at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood in November would have drawn headlines without YouTube, but would millions have seen it? We’ve all become trained at this point: if something happens — check YouTube.

7. NOT JUST TEENAGERS: Though YouTube is generally viewed as a playground for the young,
many elderly people have seen its unique facility for communication. A user named Peter
who goes by the name geriatric1927 has become one of the biggest and unlikeliest stars of
the YouTube community. Dubbed “Virtual Granddad,� the British 79-year-old is beloved for
his “Telling it all� series of posts in which he warmly recalls his life stories — from
his days as radar mechanic during WWII to his life as a motorcycle salesman.

8. DOCUMENT OF INJUSTICE: A number of videos led to legal action that might not have otherwise been taken. Footage of a police officer striking suspect William Cardenas in Hollywood was viewed in court in September and a Superior Court commissioner ruled the officer’s conduct was “more than reasonable.� But after the video hit YouTube, it triggered an FBI investigation. The law can work both ways on YouTube, though. When two Nebraska teenagers posted a video making threats against their high school, they were soon arrested and ticketed on suspicion of disturbing the peace.

9. INTERNATIONAL COMPENDIUM: Unlike perhaps anything before, YouTube compiles videos from around the world, making for a truly borderless repository of pop culture. We’ve become accustomed to seeing soccer highlights among the most-watched YouTube videos, and aren’t surprised to see videos in Japanese or other languages. In this environment, two art students in China — known as the “Two Chinese Boys� — became internationally known without saying a word. The basketball jersey-wearing duo (Huang Yixin and Wei Wei) captivated with their passionate lip-synching of Backstreet Boys songs.

10. STAR MAKER: One of the most viewed, most discussed videos shows a slight figure, his face obscured by a beige baseball cap, sitting in front of his bedroom computer playing electric guitar. Sounds typical right? Except he’s playing a rock arrangement of Pachelbel’s Canon using a difficult technique called sweep picking. The guitarist, named in the video only as “funtwo,� was eventually revealed to be a 23-year-old Korean named Jeong-Hyun Lim, now known the world over. Others, like the comedy duo Barats & Bereta, parlayed their video success into deals with giant media corporations like NBC Universal. Some didn’t find fame on purpose: Aleksey Vayner saw no humor in his boastful video application for an investment banking job.

Posted by Josh at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

O.J. Simpson's latest 15 minutes of infamy may have passed for many of us, but the site geeks at GSN.com aren't over it. Those still thoroughly disgusted by his ploy to profit from his alleged crimes with a book and a TV special can work out their anger with an online game called "Throw the Book at O.J." The idea is to put the crosshairs on The Juice and then click to clobber him with airborne copies of "If I Did It" as he dodges behind a sign about a cancelled bookstore appearance. It's primitive, as these current-event-inspired games usually are, but there's something satisfying in scoring points by bruising him.

Posted by Valerie Kuklenski at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You're not the only TV star who figured out that the internet can create a comical dialog with your audience.

That's right. Conan O'Brien gives us hornymanatee.com.

Because we all need some horny manatee. For the history of The Tee, check out this New York Times story.

Yes, that's Mark Pender, the great trumpet player from the Max Weinberg 7 (who also toured in Springsteen's Seeger Band and is a longtime member of Southside Johnny's Asbury Jukes). Pender has provided some great Conan moments, including a hilarious ode to Gigli, which I have long searched for on YouTube, to no avail. So if you've seen it, post a link.

Posted by Josh at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you like those video tidbits of two-liter Coke fountains triggered by Mentos dropped in the bottles, and if you get a little thrill from those (usually Japanese) guys who set up and then knock down sprawling domino layouts, have we got a video for you. Fritz and Steven, a couple of goggled and lab-coated geeks with way too much time on their hands, set up the mother of all Mentos blasts, with 251 two-liter bottles of soda and 1,506 mints. Aside from the mechanics of one eruption triggering the next, you gotta give them points for creative spewing, some of which rivals the dancing waters at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, only stickier.

Posted by Valerie Kuklenski at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You remember Heath Shuler, right? NFL Quarterback, expected to be the savior of the Washington Redskins, who amassed a whopping 4-15 record over three seasons, 1994-96?

Well, in case you haven't heard, Shuler is running for Congress. He's a Democrat in North Carolina's 11th Congressional District, and apparently he's got a pretty big lead in the polls heading into election day.

Of course, this enrages Redskins fans, who don't want Shuler anywhere near their city. So a group of them formed stopshuler.com to prevent their nemesis from returning to the nation's capital.

This week, Heath Shuler himself agreed to an interview with the boys of stopshuler.com. The results are entertaining.

Sample questions: Why did you fail in the NFL? The names of your kids are Navy and Island -- what’s up with that? If you do get elected, will you stay away from the team? Okay, November 26, 1995. RFK stadium -- a 14-7 loss to the Eagles. Did you hear me boo?

Thanks to the good people of deadspin for showing us the beauty of stopshuler...

Posted by Josh at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Or so says Adam Robert Gusha at Low End Mac.

He writes that Gmail's notifier for both Mac and PC is pretty sweet. And while Gmail is free, .Mac e-mail only comes at the price of $99 per year. Hmmmm ... $99 ... free ... wonder which one I'm using? Oh, there's also a five-account .Mac "family pack" for $179.95.

Since I use so many other Google services (Google Groups, Blogger, Google Docs), more and more of which require a Gmail account, I do have one, although I use Yahoo! Mail because, after all, I am a creature of habit, and Yahoo! sweetned the pot by giving us all the same amount of storage as Gmail as well as addresses with dots in them (previously not allowed). But Google will continue to eat Apple's lunch in the e-mail sector until such time as .Mac e-mail's price comes down to ... free. Hey, it's called "selling advertising." Try it sometime, Steve Jobs.

From Gusha's article:

Apple is in a better position in the market today than it was five years ago when mac.com was a free service. People know the Apple brand, know the image, and know what people are saying. They know iTunes, and they're starting to know the paranoia that Microsoft is creating by requiring its users to validate their software before installing any updates. They know the confusion of multiple versions of Windows and the user-interface disaster that is Hotmail.

If Apple were to provide free webmail, it would help to bring more people to the brand. They will soon understand that Apple isn't just a company that makes the Mac and the iPod, but also quality software and essentially all of the things necessary for the digital lifestyle.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

... this is what the College Football top 25 would look like (last week ranking in parentheses):

1. Ohio State (1)
2. Michigan (2)
3. Southern Cal (3)
4. Texas (5)
5. LSU (14)
6. Florida (9)
7. Cal (12)
8. Clemson (10)
9. Wisconsin (17)
10. West Virginia (4)
11. Louisville (6)
12. Tennessee (8)
13. Notre Dame (11)
14. Auburn (7)
15. Nebraska (20)
16. Oregon (25)
17. Oklahoma (19)
18. Arkansas (13)
19. Missouri (23)
20. Boise State (15)
21. Boston College (18)
22. BYU (NR)
23. Rutgers (16)
24. Georgia Tech (21)
25. Virginia Tech (NR)

This comes by way of the Washington Post's DC SportsBog, where blogger Dan Steinberg discovered rankings by the Las Vegas Sports Consultants.

Basically, it works like this: If teams were playing on a neutral field, without taking into account gambling trends or fan bases, who would be favored in Vegas? The favorite is ranked higher. So Ohio State would be favored over every team in the nation. Michigan will be the underdog on Nov. 18, when it faces Ohio State, but would be favored over everyone else. Etc, etc.

It's an interesting way to rank the teams. Anyone who gambles on football knows that Vegas has an uncanny knack for nailing the spreads most of the time. They can't do that much worse than the BCS, could they?

Posted by Josh at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yes, you can find anything on eBay. I learned that lesson six years ago, when I first discovered eBay and spent three days searching for everything imaginable. During those three days, I typed in the name of my favorite baseball player growing up, Gary Carter. Along with lots of baseball cards, magazine covers and autographed memorabilia, I found a listing for the 1972 Dodge - a brown piece of crap, complete with rust-like coloring. That's right, it was the car that The Kid was driving when he broke into the Majors.

So I wasn't surprised when I saw a link on deadspin to this gem: a Mark Foley action figure. That's right, the disgraced former congressman embroiled in the White House page scandal has his own action figure. With his pants down. And for a few hundred bucks, it can be yours. But as the packaging says, "Warning: Not for children."

Posted by Josh at 4:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So you've got a super-cool name for your Web startup, and then Google buys your ass ... you drop out of sight for awhile ... you return to mild fanfare, and then you lose your super-cool name ... but you're still part of the world's biggest Web conglomerate. Hey, as long as the checks don't bounce, it's all good, no?

I'd call it a wash for Writely, which has now been folded into Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Turns out I haven't been on Writely in about six weeks, and the change happened right under my nose. The only problem I had with the name is that at first, I tried typing in writerly.com ... which ain't writely.com. Two words with dubious origins ... but then again, who'd name a bookstore Amazon, a search engine Yahoo! (or Google, for that matter) ... the list goes on.

Yellow alert: There's a new Writely/Google Docs feature: "Indent Less" and "Indent More," which doesn't really solve my problem, because I want/need/have to have Microsoft Word style PARAGRAPH indents for the first line of a paragraph. As I've said, give me that and "smart" quotes, and I'll never use Word or OpenOffice again. It's nice that blogging has sallied forth with no need or regard for both features (paragraph indents and smart quotes), but real-world print writing requires them -- and how.

Holding my breath for these features, I'm not.

And one of the things that I thought was totally cool about Writely was that it supported a whole bunch of browsers, especially important due to my work with This Old Mac. For a Web-based application, Writely was and is surprisingly nimble, and I loved being able to run it on Netscape 4 and IE 5 for Mac. Well, say goodbye to that, because the list of supported browsers has changed:

Which browsers are supported?

Google Docs & Spreadsheets will work wherever you have access to the Internet via a Windows or Macintosh computer with one of these browsers:

IE 6.0+ (Windows)

Firefox 1.07, 1.5.0.6+ (Mac & Windows -- except for 1.0.8 on Windows and Mac, and 1.5b1 on Mac)

Mozilla 1.7.12+

Netscape 7.2, 8.0

Google Docs & Spreadsheets is not supported, and probably won't run on*:

IE 5 (Mac) or IE 4 (Windows)

Safari

Netscape 4

Opera

* We've heard from some folks who run Google Docs & Spreadsheets on Linux, but don't support it because there are outstanding problems with it.

Let me tell you, lots of stuff doesn't work with Netscape 4 and IE 5 for the Mac, and with older computers running 7.6.1 and before, that's just about all there is, so I enter a period of mourning for the Writely that once was and will never be again. I thought it was unusual that the original Writely worked at all with such old browsers, given that it's a suprisingly powerful interface, but with such a gift-horse/mouth situation, I didn't think it would've left the barn so soon. (Report me to the mixed-metaphor police, immediately!)

And that means that I won't be giving up on the other free online-writing service, Pote.

All of that said, you just might find Google Docs & Spreadsheets to be of use, especially if the project you're working on is collaborative in nature. I will try to export a doc into Word (or, in my case OpenOffice) and see what transpires.

Update: The Open Office export gave me a file format that OO didn't recognize. I associated the .odt file in XP, and all was fine. (My OpenOffice 1.1.4 creates .sxw files -- perhaps .odt is part of the new version 2 of OO, which I haven't bothered to download.) The Word export worked fine in OO. Hint: Don't add tabs in Google Docs, as I did, but wait until you get to Word/OpenOffice to change the formatting for paragraph indents -- and then do an Autoformat to get the smart quotes. And since you can call for smart quotes in HTML, though nobody ever bothers, I expect there's a way to get them in your Google Docs stuff now. If only Google made it easier -- and I suspect they will.

Previously from me:

In Web we trust
Your applications are moving
Writely to Blogger -- what's the frequency?
Writely can indent and print ... but nothing's perfect
Writely just a few rocks short of a full load
What the hell is Writely anyway?

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Face it, ladies and gentlemen, the future is always cool. Even the future past is cool, and that's why I love Modern Mechanix. Whoever runs this blog spends their days and nights scouring old Scientific American, Popular Mechanics and other various and sundry technology-dominated magazines of yesteryear, presenting sometime dead accurate, other times totally absurd looks at their own tech-forward present and wistful, perfect future.

This image above, from this entry, comes via Popular Science magazine from February, 1947. Hell, they barely had television at all at that time, let alone color.

The whole thing got me thinking about Scientific American, which I've read in the past, but not in the recent past, know what I mean? Well, they have a kick-ass Web site, that's for sure.

Another great site is Sky Tonight from Sky & Telescope magazine, for the astronomy buff within. Try their Interactive Sky Chart, which can give you a view of the night sky from anywhere on Earth at any time between the years 1600 and 2400. Take that, astrologer-to-the-stars Sydney Omarr. Hey, aren't you dead? Yes, you are -- and your real name is Sidney Kimmelman.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 10:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Nobody does it ... better. Makes me feel sad for the rest. Nobody does it ... quite the way you do. Baby, you're the best."

Thanks, Carly Simon. Yep, that's how I feel about BoingBoing, the best nerd blog going. Written by a team of bloggers, and with archives going back to its inception in 2000, BoingBoing is a virtual repository of all things techy-nerdy. I check just about every day and nearly always find something amusing. If I was stuck on a desert island with wireless Web and only 10 browser bookmarks, this would be one of them.

Hey, this is a nerd story, so go with me on the desert-island metaphor.

BoingBoing -- your passport to geeky-cool.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some day, some year, there will be a new version of Microsoft Office for Windows. Six months after that, there will be one for the Mac.

Keep an eye on how it's going, and follow the musings of Microsoft's very own Mac fans (remember, MS is the biggest Mac developer next to Apple itself) with the Mac Mojo blog. It's Microsoft for Mac from the inside ... deep inside.

And check out the individual blogs at the right. I don't know if Apple's employees all have company blogs, but Microsoft's sure do. Same for Sun Microsystems.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Even though I blog about old PC and Mac hardware, the reality is that I work on between two and four separate computers per day. Often the things I'm actually working on are often stored up there -- on the Internet. If there's a way to do it away from a single PC, via a browser, I'm all for it.

Before I started blogging, I used Pote to write articles. I could write them on a browser and pull the files down when ready to send them to an editor. No smart quotes, but a Microsoft Word autoformat usually took care of it.

(Handy tip: Don't trust/burden your editor with doing the smart quotes. Chances are they'll do them wrong, and even if they do them right -- and I do them right when I edit -- they've got better things to do.)

The new state of the art in terms of online composition is Writely. Google bought the small company behind Writely recently, and at that time the site stopped accepting new users. Now open to new accounts again, Writely is still geared more toward Web writing and blogging (you can publish directly to many blog systems, including Google-owned Blogger of course), but it is a way to write and access your work wherever you have Web access.

Writely's powerful features, in addition to posting to a blog (I'm still not entirely clear on why you'd want to do that, though it does work) include outputting your Writely files as Rich Text Format and even Microsoft Word files. I haven't tested this feature, but if it does work, and if they can get the paragraph indents and smart quotes right, Writely just might be the writer's killer app of the late '00s.

While it's as ubiquitous as toast for breakfast, Web-based e-mail continues to be one of the most important tools in my computing life. I've been using Yahoo! Mail for years now, and the ability to read and write e-mail from any Web-connected computer is pretty much essential to my work and home life. I barely even knew what a traditional mail program like Outlook or Eudora did until about a year ago, and while I finally got one to work on my Powerbook 1400 (don't ask), the whole idea of my e-mail being stuck on a single hard drive is a bit unnerving to say the least.

As far as photos go, sites like the Yahoo-owned Flickr (if you're cool) and Kodak Gallery (if you're me) allow you to store, share and print photos. I haven't delved into them yet, but I can't believe that the kind of storage required to do this is available to mass numbers of people -- and it's definitely something I'd be willing to pay for.

Google is committed to bringing more computing tasks to the Web. In addition to Writely and Gmail, Google also has a spreadsheet program in beta. The spreadsheet and Writely both encourage collaboration. In Writely, for instance, you can release a document for editing by others. And you can track all those changes.

The new Blogger beta, for which users will have to get a Google sign-on (you have one already, don't you?) seems to me to be aimed at businesses; there are provisions for "private blogs," which I imagine can keep sensitive business information within a group and out of the eyes of the casual Web surfer.

Between these Web-based applications and free, open-source software like OpenOffice (we use it at the Daily News), Microsoft has to be re-evaluating its business model. Even http://www.adobe.com/ will be affected. The Gimp program I use to work on photos is free. It may not be as powerful as Photoshop, but it's adequate for what I need -- and you can't beat free.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Did you know that "For Better or for Worse," is one of the most popular newspaper comics in the country? Make that two countries, because the strip is produced in Canada and is so relentlessly Canadian that they must love it up there, too.

Well, if you think the Pattersons and their various and sundry friends/co-workers/stalkers are saying one thing in their dialogue bubbles but really saying something else, check out End of the Foobiverse. (For those not in the know, or perhaps who aren't Canadian, a "foob" is a derogatory term used, if not by the whole of Canada, at least by those Canadians in "For Better or for Worse."

I found out about this blog entry from the king of all newspaper-comic-commentary sites (that's assuming there are others, but rest assured, this one is great), The Comics Curmudgeon.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Remember the time when Dave Letterman was begging Oprah Winfrey to be a guest on his show. For months. Remember the haunting love theme, "It Ain't Oprah Till It's Oprah," as sung by Paul Shaffer?

Well, the memories can be yours once again. The exhaustive archive of "It Ain't Oprah Till It's Oprahs," show banter and more is still on the Internet for you to do with what you will. I annoyed plenty of people by playing these songs incessantly. Now it's your turn.

Recommended: The Bryant Gumbel version of "It Ain't Oprah Till It's Oprah"
Dave sings the Oprah love theme

Just GO TO THE PAGE ALREADY and download everything.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just want to give a shout-out to the new L.A.-based Macintosh columnist on the block. Ask the Macist, on the Laist blog, has just started to answer the Mac questions we all have (those of us who aren't as geeked out as we think we are, anyway).

He already hipped me to some cool backup software, as I elaborate on at my own geeky Mac blog.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)