#147 Bonus Episode – Kindle, Quizlet, Facebook Podcasting, iShowU

Why Twitter is the Borg mind, Blu-Ray free digital download, George’s backup rant and Kindle review, Quizlet for studying from quizlet.com. Facebook gets Podcasting, Elliott’s iShowU review from shinywhitebox.com. Introducing the Dumb Question Corner.

Listen to the Podcast Once (30 min 25 sec)
[tags]Macintosh, Twitter, blu-ray, Kindle, Quizlet, flash cards, screencasting[/tags]

Today is Friday April 25th, 2008, and this is show number 147. This is a bonus episode because I have TOO MUCH content! I have a bunch of stuff I’d planned on talking about weeks ago but I kept having too much to say each week, so there was no solution other than to create an extra show. I’m assuming that’s more fun than having an 80 minute show in your feed all of a sudden – let me know which you prefer.

Twitter is the borg mind
A lot of people have been jumping into Twitter, and I’m excited about how many people have started following me. One of the main questions people who haven’t used it, and those who HAVE is “what the heck IS it?” I think the reason we can’t define it is that it because the answer is, “it depends”. It depends on who you decide to follow and what you decide to say in your tweets. Here’s what I’ve discovered about Twitter for me. It’s a vast resource of knowledge. I choose to follow people who talk about technology. I avoid those who say “eating lunch” and things like that. If you’re eating lunch, you’d at least better tell me what’s interesting about your lunch!

by following geeks, I know have a research program at my fingertips. I realized this week that I can ask Twitter a tech question and actually get the answer faster than looking it up myself! And, I can work on something else while I’m waiting for the answer. Here’s an example. this week I was toying with the idea of buying Motion, but it looked like maybe it was only bundled into Apple’s Final Cut Pro for $1300! Rather than dig around in the specs on Apple’s site, I just asked Twitter if that was the case. Within just a few minutes, I had three people confirm that Motion is only inside FCP. Even better though, Don McAllister tweeted back the right question, “what do you want to do with it?” I explained that I was curious what it would cost to get the tools to do cool text fly-ins for screenscasting. Don tweeted back that LiveType is already inside Final Cut Express, which I also own and is a LOT cheaper! how cool is that? It’s like my own personal Ask Jeeves. I tweeted back to the Twitter collective that Twitter is actually like the Borg mind from Star Trek; I don’t have to know everything because WE know everything!

One last Twitter story. I did a pitch to our communications staff at work and I was trying to explain Twitter. I explained what I get out of it, and I explained that some people just tweet things like “I ate a cheese sandwich.” I swear, I just made that line up off the top of my head. I got back to my office afterwards and there was a tweet from John C. Dvorak talking about a cheese sandwich! i listened to TWIT the next day and he was talking about the “cheese sandwich” problem in Twitter! Too funny.

Juno
For my birthday my son Kyle bought me the movie Juno on blu-ray (ok, so he made me give him $40 so he could go buy it for him!) If you haven’t seen it, it’s a really intriguing little movie, very clever dialog, and it’s a feel good movie. I know, nothing blows up, and no raining blood like Steve likes, but I liked it! the reason i bring it up is that it came with a free digital download. A few companies are starting to do this – they KNOW we want to rip our content to our iPods and other portable media players, so why not make it easy, make the experience good, and the quality outstanding? Somebody’s got the right idea out there.

I wouldn’t call it an intuitive process, it requires some dinking around in itunes, requesting a download and entering a code that was in the box. I’m assuming that means I can’t put it on more than one device, but perhaps it obeys the 5 Macs authorized to one account rule. It also failed the first time I tried to download, told me my session had timed out (hey, I was confused, it took me longer to figure it out!) One thing that I’m still noodling is why it had to be a download. I mean, c’mon, they have an entire blu-ray disk there, what’s that supposed to hold, 40-50GB right? And this was a TWO DVD set! They didn’t have room for that little 1.12GB file???

After all those shenanigans, i was finally able to sync it over to my iPhone, and you know what? It was GORGEOUS! If it were just me though, I think ripping it using VisualHub would have been easier, more intuitive, and maybe even FASTER than all this! After a little assistance from my favorite DRM removal tool of course…

Backup Rant & Kindle Review from George
George is an enthusiastic listener to the show, and he sent in a great review for us. We’re working on getting him set up with a little better audio, but his content was so good and I really liked his dry delivery style, so we’re going ahead with it enhnaced to the best of my abilities using Sound Soap. He starts with a rant about how careful you need to be doing backups (not just doing them, being sure they’re working) and also a review of his new Kindle. I hope you enjoy his rant AND review!

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Technology moves so fast that the Amazon Kindle, introduced in November, 2007, is no longer news. Though for those of us who ordered and at on the waiting list for weeks, even months, a Kindle in hand is pretty big news.

Mine arrived a month ago. The reason I bought it is, I sadly confess, I’m getting along in years and my eyes are more valuable to my ophthalmologist’s retirement fund than for reading fine print. I’d seen the Sony eBook reader and presumed the Kindle ePaper would be pretty good. What i really wanted was to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal in a format which would be easy to read. For years I’d been reading the paper version, and for a few adding the online. But while the articles are of value in selecting what investments NOT to put my employer’s money in, most of the charts, tables, etc., are available online in real time for free. So the Kindle.

I let my paper and online Journal subscriptions expire. But like the Terminator, they just didn’t stop. Finally, an exasperated WSJ envelope arrived, “You’ve expired and we’ve stopped sending you free copies!” So I clicked to subscribe on the Kindle.

The news (other than the ongoing subprime fallout) is all good. The articles are easy to read on the Kindle and the subscription service works as promised. Zap! I’ve also subscribed to the AP Business News blog which is updated several times a day.

Okay. If you have a Kindle, or have read about it, you might wonder why I subscribed to a blog. It is just a matter of convenience and formatting. The AP news comes in as it is delivered and is easy to read and navigate.

It isn’t necessary to buy a blog to get one. I opened Allison’s Nosilla blog right on the Kindle using its FREE connection to the Sprint cell network. No, it isn’t as good as on a Mac, but it is possible, and it is ubiquitous. I’ve stopped carrying my Mac around to hot spots. I even leave the iPod Touch at home. The Kindle gives me always on high speed internet, FREE. I think that’s revolutionary.

In fact, one of the SD cards I’ve always had for my Palm gadgets and Treo phone is the Encyclopedia Brittanica. It is a nice little Encyclopedia very useful when I’m having a discussion with my friends who tend to wonder who was the King of Slovenia in 1413. My first buy for the Kindle was going to be such a small Encyclopedia, but to my surprise Amazon doesn’t sell one. Then as I experimented with the device I had the big Duh. There’s a live link to Wikipedia–and it works great.

I’ve not tried the music player as I’ve a plethora of iPods. I plan to do that. I have a few ergonomic issues with the placement of buttons and switches, but the little keyboard is good enough. Everything else is OK, and I don’t have instant ideas on how to improve the controls. The software is excellent and manges the device with ease. My 2GB SD card barely shows any content, and I’ve been saving all my read WSJs and some other materials there.

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Thanks so much for the backup advice AND the Kindle review. Years ago I had my disk backed up by the proprietary format in Retrospect and I felt all warm and cozy about it, that is until I had a file corrupted and tried to retrieve it. It turned out all of my data in the backup was unavailable to me! I was BUMMED! Ever since then I’ve been a fan of the backup programs that are doing a simple copy of your data, where you can actually LOOK at your data on the backup drive and open a few samples to make sure it’s really there! In case you’re wondering, you CAN do that with Time Machine, just plug in your backup drive and when in mounts in the Finder, you can navigate down into the backup folder and see everything there like a “normal” backup. I’m glad you’re enjoying ArRsync – I think I have to give credit to Bart though for bringing that one up. I keep saying I’m going to try it out but I never get around to it!

Quizlet
Research Assistant Niraj sent me a link to a really interesting website dedicated to helping students. Imagine having a whole social network available studying for the same kind of exams you’re studying for. Enter quizlet.com. Quizlet’s opening line is “Quizlet eats flashcards for breakfast. Quizlet helps you and your friends learn vocabulary. You make a list of words, and we teach them to you. Feeling lazy? Your friends can share their lists with you. You’ll never use flashcards again. Plus, it’s free.” I think the way I’d describe the site is it’s like flash cards on steroids. Because so many tests in school are standardized, you probably won’t even have to type in your own vocabulary words because someone else has probably already done it for you. Of course contributing to the work is important too, and Quizlet makes that really easy too. Quizlet is governed under the Creative Commons license, so which means you’re more than welcome to steal it and repurpose it for your own use (I’m quoting the license directly here!

When you need to study a subject, you start by creating a Set, or by finding a set someone else has already created on the same subject. When I visited the site, there were 1200 new Sets available that day alone! Hot sets that day were the SAT4, the Cold War, Latin lessons, capitals and countries of Europe – the list kept changing as I was watching the site. they have Sets under 14 languages, six fields in science, and tests such as the GRE and SAT.

When you start studying a Set, you’re given 5 ways to learn. First is familiarize where you see the vocabulary word for example, and then the definition. You can show both the term and definition at the same time if you want, or flipping it like a flash card. You click through each term until you feel pretty good about the words. Next you need to Learn. Entering the Learning section requires creation of a free Quizlet membership. I created one (no CAPTCHA, btw) and jumped in.

Learn shows you the term, and you have to enter the definition. Luckily they have a button that says “give up?” which I had to use a LOT when playing with the site! Once you’ve worked through the Learn module, you go to Test. The tests can be word definitions only, or multiple choice, or true/false questions. You can tell they’ve really exercised this module because one of the options is to choose “show symbols” which gives you little buttons for weird symbols you might need in a test – like non-English characters for foreign language tests and scientific symbols like the Greek characters used in Engineering. when you’re working on the test, you can regenerate the test so you get different questions to make sure you learn everything in the module.

Now is when things actually get fun. You’ve done the tedium so now it’s a game called Scatter. the directions say “Make everything disappear – drag corresponding items onto each other to make them disappear.” It’s SO fun – the screen suddenly has a bunch of the terms you’ve been learning and definitions floating around and you drag them together and they disappear. It’s a REALLY fun way of learning! My first time with the game I took a minute 24 seconds, so I took it again and got it done in 10.6 seconds! the final game is space race, which was way too hard for me – I actually would have had to learn the module to make it through!

My daughter is really enjoying taking Quantum Mechanics in physics, which was the 2nd hardest class I took in college I’ll never forget that class. You know how sometimes when you took a really hard class you’d start to get confused during the lecture, and at first you get really anxious because you’re trying to catch up. Then maybe you get a little farther behind, and you start to get angry. If you get far enough behind, you can slip over the other side and actually start giggling because it’s so absurd how far behind you’ve gotten? Aw c’mon, you KNOW you’ve been there, right? Well, when i was taking Quantum, I remember a day when the ENTIRE class started giggling! We were ALL so lost that the whole class slipped over that edge. Steve was in the class with me, and he developed a theory about the class. this was during the Cold War, and our professor was Doctor VanHoven. Steve decided that the Russians had infiltrated the school systems of our engineering programs, putting in professors to teach absolute gibberish to us, so that a generation later, all our engineering infrastructure would collapse because we had learned all this nonsense. I still think Steve was right! Anyway, I checked and there’s two sets in Quizlet on Quantum so I can’t wait to show it to Lindsay!

If you’re a student or you know a student who wants some help studying some tough material, check out Quizlet.com. I didn’t even get into some of the more social aspects of Quizlet – check it out to find people with the same test requirements you have.

Facebook Gets Podcasting

I don’t know if you’re into Facebook, but I really like it. I started a Facebook Profile mostly so that I could communicate with my teenage kids. By being in Facebook I’ve gotten to know their friends better, I get to see my daughter’s pictures from college and when she went to Italy – it’s so much fun! This week one of my Facebook friends, (and I can’t remember who doggonit), invited me to add the Podcast application! How cool is that? Facebook has podcasting!

they did a REALLY good job of it too. there’s a “top podcasts” listing, podcasts your friends listen to, and then you can search on podcasts. I searched on the NosillaCast (of course) and I got a nice subscribe button. It was even better when it brought up my show – a nice icon with the description, and three buttons for subscribing – RSS, iTunes and Zune! i thought it was cool there was a Zune button. Below that are the controls to listen right in Facebook, and a little fake equalizer that bounces around playfully. You can scroll through all the shows in the feed too. I noticed one thing – they have a little video icon next to my title – and I think it’s because of the one video I’ve done – which was really done by Bart! Oh well, maybe it will TRICK someone into listening! I put a screenshot in the shownotes so you can see how cool it all is. One thing I wish the showed was which friends like which podcasts, but I guess you can’t have everything!

If you aren’t in Facebook already, come on in and join the fun! I have made lots of new friends in there who are listeners to the show too. And hey – when you get in there, add the Podcast application and subscribe to the NosillaCast!

Elliott’s iShowU review
Friend of the show Elliott has sent in another review, this time about the screen recording software iShowU from shinywhitebox.com.

===========INSERT ishowu=================

thanks Elliott. There’s so much about your reviews I like. I like how concise you are, I like how you explain the problem to be solved, and I just love your voice! Ok, enough praise, this might just be what I needed to push me over the edge to buy iShowU – I keep meaning to!

Dumb Question Corner
We haven’t had a homework assignment in a LONG time and I know how much you like them. I had an idea the other day that just might take off. how about a segment of the show called the Dumb Question Corner? to be eligible to for homework credit, you would have to send in a dumb question that you’ve been afraid to ask, because, well, you just didn’t want to sound dumb! When i was younger my dad used to always tell me that if I had a question i thought was dumb, you could guarantee someone else had the same question too.

I was in calculus once when I asked a dumb question, and the professor actually made the entire class thank me for it, because he said I wasn’t dumb, I simply had the courage to ask the dumb question, and that he was CERTAIN others in the class had the same question.
In my early working career I used to watch my boss Dave in meetings. Dave was a brilliant scientist and engineer, with all kinds of inventions. We’d be sitting in a briefing and there’d be something that just didn’t make sense to me that the speaker was saying, but there were all these high level, much smarter than ME people in the room, so I’d be afraid to ask. Invariably Dave would ask the speaker to stop and he’d always start with, “maybe I’m being slow here, and really forgive me for not being smarter, but there’s one thing that doesn’t make sense here.” i asked him about it and he said that I should follow his example as I got more confidence because of all the same reasons my father and my calc professor explained.

So, the next time you have a tech question that you think is too dumb to ask anyone else, submit it to the Dumb Question Corner so we can all learn the answer. Ok, students, you have your homework assignment, now get to it!

Well I TOLD you I had too much content for one show this week! I really think this was a fun show with all the user contributions, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Keep up all the great feedback by emailing me at [email protected]. If you want to send in an audio review, it’s best if you send those into [email protected]. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.