And a Partridge in a Pear Tree...
Here is the first-ever Lapis Knight Technology Feature! It's entitled
10 Easy Ways to Be Technologically Hip
or, Technologies that Ryan Thinks are Just Great
All of these suggestions follow the simple rule that all the hippest tools and tricks are highly effective yet free. For the mathematically inclined, hipness = usefulness x [1/(price+1)]. (At the risk of overanalyzing, I put (price+1) because free items are not infinitely hip.)
1. iTunes. iTunes is free and is one of the most intuitive ways (in my opinion) of organizing music. You can carry out the standard sorting by artist, album, et cetera, along with rating your music on a five-star scale. In addition to normal playlists, there are also "smart playlists" that automatically pick all the songs that fit a certain condition. So if I wanted a playlist with all the Five Iron music on my computer, I would simply make a smart playlist that contains all songs whose artist is Five Iron. Optionally, I would tell it to keep the list updated so that if I import a new Five Iron CD to my computer, the new CD would get added to the playlist. Also, if I choose to rate my music, there is an option in shuffle mode where it will play music with a higher rating more often. You can get iTunes at Apple.com.
iTunes's visualizer is pretty neat, as far as visualizers go. There is only one style option for it, but you get a lot of variety from it. I'm almost convinced that it fits the music more than most visualizers. Like it will change colors and shapes right at a crescendo or something. It's one of those things where I'm not sure if it's real or my imagination, but I'm willing to believe that's a good thing.
With iTunes, it's easy to make your music available over a local area or wireless network, and it's supposedly easy to make an internet radio station, though I've never taken the time to figure out how.
Now, I realize that other music programs may offer similar functionality, but I submit that Apple's products are innately hipper than, say, WinAmp. WinAmp could have smart playlists and weighted shuffle, but iTunes would still be Apple. And iTunes is very easy to use. I downloaded WinAmp a while ago and found it to be simply less intuitive than iTunes.
2. Podcasting. Once you've got iTunes, you can start listening to Podcasts. A podcast is rather like a radio show in MP3 format. You can get a podcast for everything you can imagine. I just found one entitled "Devotions 4 Gamers," though I haven't had the chance to listen to it yet. Typically, podcasts are updated periodically with new episodes, or releases, if you will. iTunes will automatically keep updated with the most recent releases of the podcasts to which you are subscribed. If you have an iPod (or other high-capacity music player of your choice), you can load the podcast onto it to listen on the go. This is very hip, let me tell you. I'm just starting with the whole podcasting thing and my internal hip-o-meter is going up already.
3. Gmail. Google Labs are simply amazing. In addition to coming up with one of the best search engines on the internet, their mail service is awesome. And free, by the way. You can search your mail using a Google search. When you and someone else bounce a message back and forth, the "conversation" (as it's called) will only show up in your inbox once. When you click on it, there are expandable tabs containing the text from all the messages previously sent in the conversation. There are numerous other things that make the gmail interface far more intuitive and friendly than Outlook, for example. (Thinking of Outlook in retrospect makes me shiver). Did I mention you get over 2GB of space? And that number is contiuously increasing. So as long as you send and receive less data at a slower rate than space is added, you'll theoretically never run out of room. Gmail is, however, by invitation only. Someone who already has the service has to invite you. Luckily I have 50 invites and not enough friends who want the service. (hint hint). Check out gmail at gmail.google.com.
4. Mozilla Firefox. You've probably heard of Firefox. It's free and very effective. Totally hip. You got your tabbed browsing, your bookmarking features and a wicked cool Find function. On top of that, it will read RSS feeds as "Live Bookmarks" (see RSS below). But that's just the basics. The cool thing about Firefox is that you can make it as beefy as you want. You can keep it lean and simple as just the core program, but you can also add as many plugins as you want. In fact, Firefox is designed for using plugins. Plugins install in like 2 clicks of your mouse and can make Firefox do almost anything. I got one that will identify the color values for any pixel in the browser window. This is tremendously helpful in web design. Also, I've got one that displays the CSS for the current page in an editable pane so that you can mess around with it and see the results on the page you're looking at. Also tremendously helpful for web design. I got another one where you can control the browser with "gestures" you make with your mouse. Make a certain squiggle to go back, make a different squiggle to go forward, etc. It takes a little getting used to, but it'll dazzle your friends and confound your enemies. And the list goes on. Take it from me, if you're using Internet Explorer, you're missing out. Did I mention that often Firefox is more secure than Explorer? Or maybe that's my imagination.... actually, don't quote me on that. Download Firefox for 4 easy monthly payments of NOTHING at GetFirefox.com.
5. Mozilla Thunderbird. Thunderbird is Mozilla's mail program. I'm ashamed to say I haven't used it yet, so I can't pass any real judgement (I had a hard time putting it on this list). However, if it's built anything like Firefox, it's worth every penny (that you don't have to pay, incidentally.) Once I really get going on my school email account, I plan to use Thunderbird instead of the webmail service. Did I mention that Firefox and and Thuderbird are open-source? That increases their hip factor by a hundredfold. Open-source means anyone can look at and edit the source code for the program, allowing for much cleaner development. And you don't have to pay for anything open-source. And often, it's better than the Windows alternative. Hook up with some sweet Thunderbird at GetThunderbird.com.
6. Picasa. Google Labs, in addition to the stellar Gmail service, also has a nifty program called Picasa. It's (gasp) free, and is a wonderful way to organize the pictures on your computer. It really works best if you have a bunch of digital camera pictures, because it can use the information in the files to organize the pictures chronologically, which is neat. I wouldn't recommend letting it import all the pictures on your computer, because if you're like me you have buttloads of random GIFs and JPEGs that you really don't want clogging up your photo library. There's an easy way to do this: in your My Documents, add a new folder called "My Photos" or something and then set up Picasa to only keep track of that folder. Since this isn't a walkthrough, I won't tell you exactly how to do that. Get in on Picasa at picasa.google.com.
7. Hello. Isn't sharing pictures on AIM or MSN a pain? You have to establish a direct connection or whatever and I don't know about you, but my firewall simply won't allow that sort of risque tomfoolery. Hello is an IM program specially developed to share pictures. Now I understand that you probably don't come home with picture sharing foremost in your mind. And you might not know anyone else with Hello. So you're not likely to use it for that purpose a heckuvalot. But if you keep a blog (which is, by the way, incredibly hip; the only reason I didn't put blogging on this list is it's not easy) using the hip blogger.com, you can use Hello to post pictures to your Blogspot in a matter of, oh, 2 clicks or so. You wanna know what's really cool? If you use Picasa to organize your photos, you can use Picasa to send the pictures to Hello, which will post them to your blogspot. Nifty, huh? Say hello to Hello at Hello.com. (So I'm running out...)
8. Gaim. Do you use more than one IM protocol? If you don't know what that means, are you using AIM, Yahoo! Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger all at the same time? Don't! Gaim, which is free, by the way, can handle multiple accounts on multiple protocols. Using only Gaim, I can talk to my friends that use AIM and my friends that use MSN Messenger at the same time. I can even have two AIM accounts online at the same time. If I had friends that used YIM, IRC or even ICQ, I could talk to them with Gaim also. I can have all the creature comforts of AOL Instant Messenger, like a buddy icon and a profile, but without all the advertisement and the antics of AOL trying to take over your computer. Gaim joins your party at gaim.sourceforge.net.
9. Mozilla Sunbird. Okay. Bear with me for this one. Sunbird is Mozilla's calendar program. This isn't for everyone. However, Mozilla Sunbird is currently in the 0.2 version, which I believe is beta, so it is tremendously hip. Like on a scale of one to hip, Sunbird is hip. So hip, I'm probably the only person who says it's hip. Sunbird hasn't had a real release yet, but the current version is a fully functional standalone calendar program. It's already pretty cool, if not slightly buggy, but I'm excited to see how much better it is by the time 1.0 rolls around. Of course, it takes a certain kind of person to keep an electronic calendar, so I'll be seeing if I'm one of them when school starts. Like Firefox, Sunbird is open-source and likely to be highly expandable. In a year or so when Sunbird has a full release, you'll be (or at least feel) like the hippest kid on the block for having picked it up early and kept up with the beta releases. I speculate that Sunbird will eventually be renamed Sunfish before it's out of beta. Firefox was originally Firebird. If they changed Sunbird to Sunfish, you'd have the cool combo of Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunfish. You watch. Find Sunbird here.
10. RSS. RSS is so hip, it's not even a program. RSS stands for different things (Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication), but they all mean more or less the same thing: awesome. You really have to see RSS in action before you can ooh and ahh, and to be honest, I don't think I've seen it's best applications. Right now I have Thunderbird reading what's called "RSS feeds" which tell it what all the big headlines are and where to find them. For instance, I have an RSS feed for Wired News, so Thunderbird knows what all the big headlines are for Wired.com so I don't have to actually go there. It's like having your newspaper delivered every morning instead of buying it at the newsstand on your way to work. One neat thing is that most blogs (including all LiveJournals) have RSS feeds so you can see in one place (in my case, Thunderbird) if any of them have recent updates. So when you update your LJ, if I have your RSS feed, the update will show up in Thunderbird the next time I open it and it'll be like "bing bing bing I've got something here you haven't read!" Well, maybe not like that, but you get my drift. When you're using Firefox, you can see if a site has an RSS feed by looking in the bottom left-hand corner of the Firefox window. If there's a little orange square with quarter-circles, you can click on it to "subscribe" to the page. Check the properties on your new Live Bookmark to get the URL for the feed, and add it to Thunderbird. You can also add RSS feeds to Gmail so you'll see top headlines of your favorite news sites when you check your gmail. RSS has many more applications, but none of those are very easy to explain in like 5 minutes 'cause I'm tired and this is the second night I've stayed up late working on this.
By the way, right now I'm listening to Sanctus Real. I like them a lot. Like a lot, a lot. They have cool disc art too. 4.9 out of 5.
10 Easy Ways to Be Technologically Hip
or, Technologies that Ryan Thinks are Just Great
All of these suggestions follow the simple rule that all the hippest tools and tricks are highly effective yet free. For the mathematically inclined, hipness = usefulness x [1/(price+1)]. (At the risk of overanalyzing, I put (price+1) because free items are not infinitely hip.)
1. iTunes. iTunes is free and is one of the most intuitive ways (in my opinion) of organizing music. You can carry out the standard sorting by artist, album, et cetera, along with rating your music on a five-star scale. In addition to normal playlists, there are also "smart playlists" that automatically pick all the songs that fit a certain condition. So if I wanted a playlist with all the Five Iron music on my computer, I would simply make a smart playlist that contains all songs whose artist is Five Iron. Optionally, I would tell it to keep the list updated so that if I import a new Five Iron CD to my computer, the new CD would get added to the playlist. Also, if I choose to rate my music, there is an option in shuffle mode where it will play music with a higher rating more often. You can get iTunes at Apple.com.
iTunes's visualizer is pretty neat, as far as visualizers go. There is only one style option for it, but you get a lot of variety from it. I'm almost convinced that it fits the music more than most visualizers. Like it will change colors and shapes right at a crescendo or something. It's one of those things where I'm not sure if it's real or my imagination, but I'm willing to believe that's a good thing.
With iTunes, it's easy to make your music available over a local area or wireless network, and it's supposedly easy to make an internet radio station, though I've never taken the time to figure out how.
Now, I realize that other music programs may offer similar functionality, but I submit that Apple's products are innately hipper than, say, WinAmp. WinAmp could have smart playlists and weighted shuffle, but iTunes would still be Apple. And iTunes is very easy to use. I downloaded WinAmp a while ago and found it to be simply less intuitive than iTunes.
2. Podcasting. Once you've got iTunes, you can start listening to Podcasts. A podcast is rather like a radio show in MP3 format. You can get a podcast for everything you can imagine. I just found one entitled "Devotions 4 Gamers," though I haven't had the chance to listen to it yet. Typically, podcasts are updated periodically with new episodes, or releases, if you will. iTunes will automatically keep updated with the most recent releases of the podcasts to which you are subscribed. If you have an iPod (or other high-capacity music player of your choice), you can load the podcast onto it to listen on the go. This is very hip, let me tell you. I'm just starting with the whole podcasting thing and my internal hip-o-meter is going up already.
3. Gmail. Google Labs are simply amazing. In addition to coming up with one of the best search engines on the internet, their mail service is awesome. And free, by the way. You can search your mail using a Google search. When you and someone else bounce a message back and forth, the "conversation" (as it's called) will only show up in your inbox once. When you click on it, there are expandable tabs containing the text from all the messages previously sent in the conversation. There are numerous other things that make the gmail interface far more intuitive and friendly than Outlook, for example. (Thinking of Outlook in retrospect makes me shiver). Did I mention you get over 2GB of space? And that number is contiuously increasing. So as long as you send and receive less data at a slower rate than space is added, you'll theoretically never run out of room. Gmail is, however, by invitation only. Someone who already has the service has to invite you. Luckily I have 50 invites and not enough friends who want the service. (hint hint). Check out gmail at gmail.google.com.
4. Mozilla Firefox. You've probably heard of Firefox. It's free and very effective. Totally hip. You got your tabbed browsing, your bookmarking features and a wicked cool Find function. On top of that, it will read RSS feeds as "Live Bookmarks" (see RSS below). But that's just the basics. The cool thing about Firefox is that you can make it as beefy as you want. You can keep it lean and simple as just the core program, but you can also add as many plugins as you want. In fact, Firefox is designed for using plugins. Plugins install in like 2 clicks of your mouse and can make Firefox do almost anything. I got one that will identify the color values for any pixel in the browser window. This is tremendously helpful in web design. Also, I've got one that displays the CSS for the current page in an editable pane so that you can mess around with it and see the results on the page you're looking at. Also tremendously helpful for web design. I got another one where you can control the browser with "gestures" you make with your mouse. Make a certain squiggle to go back, make a different squiggle to go forward, etc. It takes a little getting used to, but it'll dazzle your friends and confound your enemies. And the list goes on. Take it from me, if you're using Internet Explorer, you're missing out. Did I mention that often Firefox is more secure than Explorer? Or maybe that's my imagination.... actually, don't quote me on that. Download Firefox for 4 easy monthly payments of NOTHING at GetFirefox.com.
5. Mozilla Thunderbird. Thunderbird is Mozilla's mail program. I'm ashamed to say I haven't used it yet, so I can't pass any real judgement (I had a hard time putting it on this list). However, if it's built anything like Firefox, it's worth every penny (that you don't have to pay, incidentally.) Once I really get going on my school email account, I plan to use Thunderbird instead of the webmail service. Did I mention that Firefox and and Thuderbird are open-source? That increases their hip factor by a hundredfold. Open-source means anyone can look at and edit the source code for the program, allowing for much cleaner development. And you don't have to pay for anything open-source. And often, it's better than the Windows alternative. Hook up with some sweet Thunderbird at GetThunderbird.com.
6. Picasa. Google Labs, in addition to the stellar Gmail service, also has a nifty program called Picasa. It's (gasp) free, and is a wonderful way to organize the pictures on your computer. It really works best if you have a bunch of digital camera pictures, because it can use the information in the files to organize the pictures chronologically, which is neat. I wouldn't recommend letting it import all the pictures on your computer, because if you're like me you have buttloads of random GIFs and JPEGs that you really don't want clogging up your photo library. There's an easy way to do this: in your My Documents, add a new folder called "My Photos" or something and then set up Picasa to only keep track of that folder. Since this isn't a walkthrough, I won't tell you exactly how to do that. Get in on Picasa at picasa.google.com.
7. Hello. Isn't sharing pictures on AIM or MSN a pain? You have to establish a direct connection or whatever and I don't know about you, but my firewall simply won't allow that sort of risque tomfoolery. Hello is an IM program specially developed to share pictures. Now I understand that you probably don't come home with picture sharing foremost in your mind. And you might not know anyone else with Hello. So you're not likely to use it for that purpose a heckuvalot. But if you keep a blog (which is, by the way, incredibly hip; the only reason I didn't put blogging on this list is it's not easy) using the hip blogger.com, you can use Hello to post pictures to your Blogspot in a matter of, oh, 2 clicks or so. You wanna know what's really cool? If you use Picasa to organize your photos, you can use Picasa to send the pictures to Hello, which will post them to your blogspot. Nifty, huh? Say hello to Hello at Hello.com. (So I'm running out...)
8. Gaim. Do you use more than one IM protocol? If you don't know what that means, are you using AIM, Yahoo! Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger all at the same time? Don't! Gaim, which is free, by the way, can handle multiple accounts on multiple protocols. Using only Gaim, I can talk to my friends that use AIM and my friends that use MSN Messenger at the same time. I can even have two AIM accounts online at the same time. If I had friends that used YIM, IRC or even ICQ, I could talk to them with Gaim also. I can have all the creature comforts of AOL Instant Messenger, like a buddy icon and a profile, but without all the advertisement and the antics of AOL trying to take over your computer. Gaim joins your party at gaim.sourceforge.net.
9. Mozilla Sunbird. Okay. Bear with me for this one. Sunbird is Mozilla's calendar program. This isn't for everyone. However, Mozilla Sunbird is currently in the 0.2 version, which I believe is beta, so it is tremendously hip. Like on a scale of one to hip, Sunbird is hip. So hip, I'm probably the only person who says it's hip. Sunbird hasn't had a real release yet, but the current version is a fully functional standalone calendar program. It's already pretty cool, if not slightly buggy, but I'm excited to see how much better it is by the time 1.0 rolls around. Of course, it takes a certain kind of person to keep an electronic calendar, so I'll be seeing if I'm one of them when school starts. Like Firefox, Sunbird is open-source and likely to be highly expandable. In a year or so when Sunbird has a full release, you'll be (or at least feel) like the hippest kid on the block for having picked it up early and kept up with the beta releases. I speculate that Sunbird will eventually be renamed Sunfish before it's out of beta. Firefox was originally Firebird. If they changed Sunbird to Sunfish, you'd have the cool combo of Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunfish. You watch. Find Sunbird here.
10. RSS. RSS is so hip, it's not even a program. RSS stands for different things (Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication), but they all mean more or less the same thing: awesome. You really have to see RSS in action before you can ooh and ahh, and to be honest, I don't think I've seen it's best applications. Right now I have Thunderbird reading what's called "RSS feeds" which tell it what all the big headlines are and where to find them. For instance, I have an RSS feed for Wired News, so Thunderbird knows what all the big headlines are for Wired.com so I don't have to actually go there. It's like having your newspaper delivered every morning instead of buying it at the newsstand on your way to work. One neat thing is that most blogs (including all LiveJournals) have RSS feeds so you can see in one place (in my case, Thunderbird) if any of them have recent updates. So when you update your LJ, if I have your RSS feed, the update will show up in Thunderbird the next time I open it and it'll be like "bing bing bing I've got something here you haven't read!" Well, maybe not like that, but you get my drift. When you're using Firefox, you can see if a site has an RSS feed by looking in the bottom left-hand corner of the Firefox window. If there's a little orange square with quarter-circles, you can click on it to "subscribe" to the page. Check the properties on your new Live Bookmark to get the URL for the feed, and add it to Thunderbird. You can also add RSS feeds to Gmail so you'll see top headlines of your favorite news sites when you check your gmail. RSS has many more applications, but none of those are very easy to explain in like 5 minutes 'cause I'm tired and this is the second night I've stayed up late working on this.
By the way, right now I'm listening to Sanctus Real. I like them a lot. Like a lot, a lot. They have cool disc art too. 4.9 out of 5.