A Dog's Life

Ninotchka's been living it up at the bucolic Daisy Hill Kennel and Rifle Range north of Fredrick MD while her master's been off flying hither and yon in an overloaded T-41C USAF trainer aircraft. There being no internet connection at Daisy Hill, hence the lack of recent postings.

Discover Your Inner Pollock

Discover your inner Pollock. For $0.99 (plus tax) your iPod Touch now allows you to splash and drip with abandon. The resulting 480 by 320 pixel paintings will look nice on your wall in their little 3 by 2 inch frames, don't you think?

BlackBerry App Store Open for Business

The BlackBerry App Store is open for business. First, what you won't find there: apps like iFart Mobile, which is one of the best selling apps for the iPhone. But you will find all the Google apps, Pandora, Shazam, Facebook, Twitter, reQall, Superpages, Pageonce, etc. All available OAT (over the air).

Klaatu Barada Nikto

Having put Netflix on hold with 100+ unviewed movies accumulated, but always a big fan of both Meryl Streep and Seymour Hoffman, went over to get newly released Doubt from ye nearby REDBOX. Also out on DVD the same day was The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008). Had lousy reviews but a nice trailer, how bad could it be? Answer: amazingly so. On any level of analysis, this "re-imagining" of the 1951 sci-fi classic starring Michael Rennie has got to be one of the worst movies ever made. Believe it.

Flashcards on the Fly

Remember flashcards? About the size of business cards, they came in a box and cost a lot. Now with novel GFLASH, you can have flashcards on your iPhone, iPod or BlackBerry. Download cardsets from online libraries or create custom flashcards yourself using Excel via Google Docs.

Obama Breaks Teleprompter Dependency

Perhaps stung by criticism he was using a teleprompter at just about every opportunity, President Obama dispensed with the rather obvious prompter "paddles" at his recent news conference. Wait, hold on, what's that large monitor screen at the back of the East Room? Let's watch the VIDEO.

Professional Print Results at Costco Prices

All one-hour photo operations are set up to do a pretty good job printing jpeg images straight from consumer point-and shoot cameras, and this they do by autocorrecting the color and, for borderless prints, bumping up the size a bit, the equivalent of video overscan. This may be fine for Liz and her vacation snapshots, but if you've color corrected and otherwise teeked your pictures in Photoshop, you may find yourself fighting the process. The solution lies in using your Costco's custom printer profile.

Step (1), go to DRYCREEK PHOTO and download the printer profiles (glossy and lustre) for your particular Costco, these are .icc files and go in /Library/ColorSync/Profiles. Might not hurt to read the instructions.

Step (2), play around in Photoshop as usual, leaving the color space as sRGB. But change the resolution from 300 to 320 pixels, that's what Costco's Noritsu printers work at. Then make a copy of the image file.

Step (4) has to do with soft proofing your image file copy using the printer profile, something best left to those who actually know what they're doing. Instead, go immediately to step (5), convert the profile from sRGB to the printer profile, which in Photoshop CS4 is Edit > Convert to Profile.

Step (6), save the PSD file and then save as a high quality jpeg without checking the Embed Color Profile checkbox. At Costco, order your prints as usual, including these special instructions: "No auto correct. No resize. No back print. Use printer (insert the one specified for the profile, assuming they have more than one)."

As a check, you might want to include this on some of your prints:


The 640 pixel line should, of course, measure exactly 2 inches.

Honey, I Shrank the Queen

Alltop, from Guy Kawasaki

To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone talks about RSS but nobody does anything with it. Guy Kawasaki — yes, THE Guy Kawasaki — considered this situation and came up with ALLTOP. So watch the VIDEO.

New for Your pet: iFeast

New from the makers of USB Toaster. Finally, a portable feeding/watering system for your pet that incorporates an iPod docking station. Let's face it, you and your pet don't share the same "taste" in music. But now with iFeast, mealtime for your dog or cat will never be the same. Available at PetsMart and Amazon.

Redmond Says Macs Too Pricey

Why spend 2799.00 on a MacBook Pro, Microsoft asks, when for the same money you can buy a perfectly good Lenovo laptop running Vista and have enough left over to buy an 8 GB Zune iPod wannabe and 365 tall lattes at Starbucks. Why indeed?

Dot Tel Domain Names Available

Following a "sunrise" release period for trademark holders and a subsequent "landrush" release period for premium buyers, .tel domain names are now available for regular purchase. Prices range from 34.99 at NETWORK SOLUTIONS (no surprise) down to 8.95 at el cheapo NAME.COM. Being called a "phone book for the internet" by its promoters, these .tel domains store company or personal contact details as DNS lookup info rather than web content, as described HERE.

Did You Know?

Did you know? You can click on small embedded images and see the full-size original image in another window.

New USB Toaster

New for the fully-equipped road warrior on the go, USB Toaster makes perfect toast every time, thanks to its included BreadBrowner 2.0 software. System requirements: Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS 10.4 or higher. Available from Best Buy, Amazon. Important: USB Toaster must be connected to a full-power USB port, not a keyboard port. Or use a powered USB hub.

How's That Again?

Obama on 60 Minutes

Runtime 0:28:05

The Incredible magicJack

If you've seen the commercial, you possibly waited for Ron Popeil to appear. But MAGICJACK is conceptually brilliant and it works. The USB device self-installs into a PC, installs with just a little work into an Intel Mac. Then you plug any landline phone (including cordless) into the RJ11 jack and get, amazingly, a dial tone! Outgoing calls to anywhere in the 50 states and Canada are free, and incoming calls to your assigned magicJack number ring thru to you. Voice quality of the VOIP is excellent, far better than Skype. When installed, you use your phone conventionally, no need to be anywhere near your computer. If you wanted to kiss your local telco completely goodbye, you could unplug from your POTS network interface and put your whole house on magicJack (assuming your ISP is cable).

But wait, there's more, it gets more interesting if you travel. When outside the US, calls to any stateside number are free. And people calling your stateside number reach you wherever you may be, free again. MagicJack sells for 39.99 including first year of service, thereafter 19.95/year (compare to Vonage), which includes caller ID, voicemail, call waiting, 3-way calling and enhanced 911. Available at RADIO SHACK with 30-day satisfaction guarantee.

Full Faith and Credit

Over the past 50 years regardless of which party was in power, federal tax receipts have generally provided 80 to 90 percent of the money needed for the budget. Thus, the government has borrowed only the remaining fraction. But this year, it will need to borrow 45 percent, virtually half, of what it is projected to spend. Just think.

All Your Eggs in One Basket

Would you like to see all your various account information — bank balances, credit cards, cell phone usage, etc — all online together, accessible by computer, BlackBerry or iPhone? Maybe not. But if you do, the answer is PAGEONCE. It really works. Of course, in order to fetch all this info for you, Pageonce needs your, ahem, login details for all these accounts. Worried? Pageonce is vouched for by VeriSign Secured, TRUSTe, McAfee Secure and BBB Online. Still worried? Then perhaps Pageonce is not for you.

Google Invents Unsend

If you've ever hit SEND and then immediately said oh [expletive deleted], this new Google labs feature is for you. Now you get five seconds to hit UNDO. To install this potentially career-saving feature, go to Settings > Labs and enable UNDO SEND. Needless to say, this only works when you're sending Gmail from the browser interface, not your email client, BlackBerry, iPhone, etc.

Obama on Tonight Show

Runtime 0:25:30

Well, That didn't Last Long

It seems like only yesterday that TimesFile became Furl, and now Furl's done gone and become something called DIIGO, which gives you a feature-laden toolbar (click on above) with multitudinous options in addition to bookmarking and tagging. Just what we needed. Read the manual, I guess.

How Money Is Made (the Sequel)

While Congress still squabbled over approx $7 billion in stimulus bill so-called earmarks, the Fed, with no public debate, in effect pulled $1.2 trillion out of the hat yesterday. By comparison, Obama's total proposed FY 2010 budget is $3.6 trillion. View video on the modern MEANING OF MONEY and what the FED ACTION actually means. Just who's really running the show?

Apple Announces OS 3.0 for iPhone/iPod

Apple has just released to developers a beta version of iPhone OS 3.0, with many enhancements that iPhone and iPod Touch users will eventually see, perhaps as early as this June. Meanwhile, you can enjoy the rollout in your choice of either STANDARD or HD FORMAT video (1 hr 27 min).

From Factory Floor to Your Door

Used to be when you ordered your new made-in-China tech toy, it came thru US distribution channels, eg factory > distributor > retailer > you. With Apple these days it's Fedex all the way, from the factory in Suzhou to you, in this case taking just three days eight hours — and all this for a purchase of 74.00 (with free shipping).

Click on the image for a larger version.

The Open Library — Alexandria 2.0

Discovered by accident: the OPEN LIBRARY, whose modest goal is one web page for every book ever published, with online scanned versions whenever possible. To date approx 30 million books have been indexed, about 20 million are listed on the site now and, of these, approx one million scanned books are readable (and searchable). Plus you can download the scanned books as pdf files to read on your Kindle. It's all the brainchild of internet savant Brewster Kahle, founder of the INTERNET ARCHIVE. Read about this remarkable project HERE.

Don't Be Cheap, Pony Up

NPR stations everywhere are hurting, support your local station with a full membership, it's less than a dollar a week. And if you listen to distant NPR stations on your computer or mobile device, go online and contribute something. Do it, you'll be a better person for it.

Shazam!

The problem: You've ripped a friend's mix CD, and now your iPod helpfully shows track 01, track 02, etc. What to do? Enter SHAZAM, a free app for the iPhone and now the iPod. Play 10 seconds of the mystery track and Shazam (usually) comes up with song name, artist and album info. Plus, depending, also discography, lyrics, YouTube links and the inevitable iTunes purchase button. Now if Shazam doesn't nail it, try the very similar MIDOMI app.

What's with the Advertising?

The targeted text advertising you see in the sidebar column is what's called Google Adsense advertising. Advertisers only pay when potential customers, ie you, click on the ads, and the site owner, ie me, then gets a pittance of commission (we're talking pennies).

The fact that Google, under its nom de plume Blogspot, provides the blog hosting service is only incidental — advertising is optional and absent by default. You can put Adsense advertising on any web page you manage. Our modest aim is to accrue enough revenue to buy some premium dog biscuits for Ninotchka.

Stand By for Google Voice (Née GrandCentral)

If you've been using GrandCentral as a follow-me number and voicemail service, or even if you just have an inactive account, check your inbox over the next several days for instructions on how to use the many features of new GOOGLE VOICE, a service being made available initially only to us lucky GrandCentral beta subscribers.

Learn How Money Is Made (Really)

Every time there's a story on the news about the Fed, they roll out that same tired clip of money coming off the presses at the Bureau of Printing & Engraving. That's not the way money is made. To find out how, read the Fed's PRIMER on Modern Money Mechanics. Warning: contains lengthy explanations of fractional reserve banking, etc.

Apple Unveils Smallest iPod Ever

Apple announces its newest member of the iPod family, the amazingly Lilliputian IPOD SHUFFLE, retail and educational price 79.00, federal employee price 74.00. Holds 4 GB (approx 1000 songs), new voiceover technology announces song artist and title, allows switching between multiple playlists. Size 1.8 x 0.7 x 0.3 inches (including clip). Weight 0.4 oz.

How Much Is a Trillion?

We all know trillion is the new billion. Just as we used to say "billion with a B" to distinguish it from mere million, now we say "trillion with a T." But how much larger is a trillion? — to the innumerate, they're just big numbers, what's the deal with a few extra zeros? An apocryphal tale may help illustrate: An incredibly wealthy man tired of his wife, so he gave her a billion dollars and told her to go shopping, spend a million dollars a day, and don't come back 'til your done. To his dismay, she was back in about two years and nine months (do the math). He figured, that didn't work. So he gave her a trillion dollars. And she was gone for almost three thousand years.

The Origin of Daylight Saving Time

In 1784 while serving as American ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. His proposal included taxing shutters, also the rationing of candles and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. Prescient though Franklin was, his basic concept would have to wait until 1916 when Germany first enacted daylight saving time as a wartime measure.

Turning Your iPhone/iPod into a Kindle

If you have an Amazon KINDLE reader, install the free Kindle app and your purchased Kindle books will appear on your iPhone/iPod, and just exactly where you left off reading. Moreover, you don't even have to buy a Kindle, you can set up a Kindle account and just go about using your iPhone/iPod as your reader. Note: at present the Kindle app only shows purchased Kindle books, not magazine, newspaper and blog subscriptions, nor does it display user-uploaded content — for all that you need the actual Kindle reader.

Amazon Rolls Out Kindle 2

---

Tomorrow: Turning your iPhone/iPod into a Kindle.

The Coming of the Netbooks

What's a netbook? A netbook (internet+ notebook) is a class of small laptop computers designed primarily for wireless internet access and targeted increasingly at cloud computing users who require a less powerful client computer. The HP 1033CL, shown here, has a 10.2-inch diagonal 1024 x 600 pixel screen (approx 16:9 aspect ratio), 1 GB RAM, 60 GB HD and runs Windows XP using an Intel Atom processor. Dimensions are 10.3 x 6.6 x 1.0 inches, wt 2.4 lbs, it fits easily in a field jacket pocket. Selling price at Costco is $400.00.

Conspicuously absent from this and other netbooks is a built-in optical drive, although HP does make an external CD/DVD player. In practice, you install QuickTime and watch your movies in MPEG 4 format. When will Apple make a netbook? — who knows? And if and when they do, they'll probably screw it up as with the MacBook Air (sealed battery, only one USB port, etc). So if you want a netbook, and you undoubtably will, welcome grudgingly to Windows XP. Life's full of trade-offs. BTW, Costco tech support is surprisingly excellent, and they extend the warranty to two years.

Most Blog Visitors Using Firefox

---

According to an analysis of traffic on Ninotchka's Occasional Blog, 38 per cent of unique visitor to the site are using Firefox on a Mac, while 23 per cent are using Firefox on a PC, 23 per cent Internet Explorer on a PC and, bringing up the rear, 15 per cent Safari on a Mac. Figures do not total 100 per cent due to rounding. Source: Google Analytics.

Quicken Returns to Mac

Goto QUICKEN website

Photoshop CS4 Missing Manual

Well you've gone and bought yourself a licensed copy of Photoshop CS4 (retail $699, $199 for the upgrade), and the box feels pretty light. That's 'cause Adobe no longer gives you a !#*&%@%!!! manual, the cheapskates. Good thing there's the Pogue Press book (written by Lesa Snider King, forward by David Pogue), at $30 from both Barnes & Noble and Amazon it's well worth acquiring. To peek inside the book, click HERE, to read the book free online for 45 days, click HERE and enter code JPKUJGA. The missing CD for the missing manual, it's HERE.

Jack McBrayer (Kenneth the Page) on Bobby Jindal

Stevie Wonder Plays the White House

Stevie Wonder plays the White House. SHORT CLIP (8:10) FULL PROGRAM (54:57)

Escher on Your Desktop

For Mac users, a free ESCHER SCREENSAVER animation with 24 variations.

Google, Googler, Googlest

Read David Pogue's piece on what's new (and not so new) from GOOGLE.

Obama Suffering from Acute Pronounitis

When President Obama speaks before Congress and the nation tonight, he will be facing some of his toughest critics: grammar junkies.

Since his election, the president has been roundly criticized by for using “I” instead of “me” in phrases like “a very personal decision for Michelle and I” or “the main disagreement with John and I” or “graciously invited Michelle and I.” The rule here, according to conventional wisdom, is that we use “I” as a subject and “me” as an object, whether the pronoun appears by itself or in a twosome. Thus every “I” in those quotes ought to be a “me.” So should the president go stand in a corner of the Oval Office (if he can find one) and contemplate the error of his ways?

---

Read MORE.

Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?

Where in the world is Osama bin Laden? Using principles for predicting the distribution of wildlife, geographers at UCLA have identified what they say is the most logical hiding place for Osama bin Laden, to wit: PARACHINAR, a town in the mountains of Pakistan south of the Khyber Pass. And they’ve even identified the most likely buildings in town.


VIEW LARGER MAP

---

Read the NEWS STORY. Download the recent MIT International Review ARTICLE.

Our Best (and Worst) Presidents

What's on Ninotchka's iPod?

Click to see the APPS

Say Hello to Xee

Xee (pronounced xee) is a lightweight, fast and convenient Mac image viewer and browser. It is designed to be a serious tool for image viewing and management, with a sleek and powerful interface. Xee is useful as a more powerful replacement for Preview, or most any other image viewer available on Mac OS X. It is very fast, and uses less memory than most other image viewing tools. It also uses OpenGL to display and scroll images much more smoothly than other viewers. Its interface is highly streamlined and has easily configurable keyboard shortcuts.

Xee can:

• Display a large number of image formats — any format QuickTime or Preview can open, plus several more, including PCX, Maya IFF and Amiga IFF-ILBM.
• Easy browse through folders of images — open any file in a folder and use the toolbar, keyboard shortcuts or mouse wheel to view the other images in the same folder.
• Losslessy rotate and crop JPEG images. This lets you edit your digital photographs without losing quality by recompressing them like most other editors do.
• Effortlessly copy, move, rename and delete of images while viewing.
• View more EXIF data for JPEG files than Preview.
• View images in full-screen.

---

Xee is freeware, donations appreciated. Download it HERE.

Marc Andreessen on Charlie Rose

Watch the STREAM (54 minutes)