Scripting News for 1/26/2007

The HTTP interface for my new receiver. Sure, it’s ugly, but it works! Geek dream realized. Ha! 

Observation on my new stereo — it’s the first time in 35 years that I’ve had a stereo that’s good enough to sit and listen to and do nothing else. When I was a teen, I had a great (for the day) stereo, and young ears that could hear all the highs and lows. Now, I’m listening to a sound system that is so incredibly great you can feel the quality in your bones, even if my ears can’t now grasp all the greatness. Quite unplanned, I find myself sitting here listening to the Beatles’ White Album and it’s so sweet. That the music is playing from a 160GB disk that I paid $99 for at Best Buy would have been hard for 16-year-old Dave to comprehend. He didn’t even know what a byte was! 

Insider Higher Ed: “While plenty of professors have complained about the lack of accuracy or completeness of [Wikipedia] entries, and some have discouraged or tried to bar students from using it, the history department at Middlebury College is trying to take a stronger, collective stand. It voted this month to bar students from citing the Web site as a source in papers or other academic work.” 

Interesting comment thread on Snap at Rafe Colburn. 

Rob Safuto: “We agree! Snap is useless and annoying.” 

Is it just me or does it seem that the user generated content panel at Davos didn’t have any users who generate content? 

Open podcast device ideas 

I’m at the mobile identity workshop today, and I led a discussion this morning about features that people want for an open podcast player device. The rules were anyone could blurt out any feature they wanted and I put them all on the list. (I’m not endorsing these ideas, or explaining them.)

clips

recording

open platform

auto-tagging/voice tagging

transcriptionability

speaker

TiVO features/last ten seconds

voting mechanism

popup menu for categorization

wifi

hyperlinks

touchscreen

no buttons

keyboard

mashable

waterproof

synching

text input

video input

not modal

lots of dials

real volume control

multiple people

mixer

bookmarks

one-click publishing

surfing

PS: Dean Landsman photographed the handwritten version of this list.