mike.whybark.com

A rare day spent out and about.

I did an informal usability review for an iOS app oriented toward consumer-sourced aggregation of review and product info. No, I can’t tell you who.

It was fun and I was glad to contribute, being a fan of the service.

Thinking about it a few minutes ago I started poking around the profile-based suggestions embedded into my Amazon user account and as expected they are fucking terrible, as they always have been. Amazon should figure out how to buy my search history from, well, actually from me, not Google.

I suppose I would totally let Amazon snoop on my user-ID tied search results for a blanket, all-merchants discount of something like 20%. The problem (for them) is that I have multiple Google IDs, but honestly, how many of us can there be?

Being an Amazon merchant, I would expect they would pass the 20% on to third party merchants, and as a merchant that would be something I would very much NOT appreciate. Unless they could show specific, attributable revenue growth that exceeded the discounted charges. That sort of transparency seems unlikely.

Randomly showing a friend Justin.tv on my phone, explaining how I used it to watch baseball in Japan last season, I notice a game in progress.

It’s the February 14 practice game on Okinawa between the Hanshin Tigers and the Hiroshima Carp!

Currently, it’s the bottom of the 8th, Carp on and trailing 4-2.

Judging simply by the sun angle, it looks to be about noon in Okinawa right about now, 9:30p Seattle time. Boy, I wish there were regular season NBP games in Okinawa.

I reminded Viv that the Grammys were on in an ill advised fit of Valentine’s Day spirit.

Viv tells me she gwine download the roses. I became concerned that they might digitally vanish, so I have documented them.

The ancient 1st gen Mini has just been reallocated to media center duty, once again, this time in the basement, where it will drive an even-more ancient video projector, one I dumpstered many years ago.

XBMC finally arrived for PPC systems sometime in the past couple of years. While it is far from as polished a product as Boxee, it was able to browse to and add nearly all my LAN media sources. The exception being the recently-added eyetv, which sends and shares happily to the iPads but not via UPnP/DNLA.

It looks as though I need to pop for a bigger screen than the 64″ model we scored at a salvage place for five bucks, as well as a ceiling mount for the projector. I am still mulling options for audio. The Mini will never be able to install Lion, with its broad support of AirPlay options, but might be able to support an Airfoil-based audio redirect. The question, then, is “Can Airfoil support multi-channel surround?”

AirPlay appears to and Airfoil claims to support all AirPlay enabled devices, so one would think the answer is yes. I need to test this somehow.

Further equipment gathering is needed as well; I have a pre HDMI 5.1 receiver currently in use only as a stereo output device, and I do not have an additional set of surround speakers. Therefore an additional stereo-only receiver and some set of speakers is suggested. Out if curiosity I looked for wireless surround systems but that appears to remain a pipe dream.

Given the recycled nature of this project, I think Craigslist would be the place to go for the speakers and receiver.

UPDATE: scored a nice compact 5-way Samsung set. No sub, but I’m sure that will, er, surface in time.

In rooting through my antiquarian cables and such, I realized that with the exception of books, I have more tools and electrical stuff (extension cords, what not) than my family did when I was a kid.

Waxy has some analysis and handwringing up about OAuth and third-party apps accessing Google account info, specifically Gmail.

I took a look, and yeah, I don’t trust you motherfuckers very much. Tripit and Yahoo are the only non-Google services I have granted OAuth inbox access to. I obviously need to nuke Yahoo, but Tripit is essential.

I suppose the answer is to stand up a dedicated travel-oriented gmail address with forwarding. The problem generated there would be two unique uid/pw instances.

Hm. Anyway, yeah. Nerds who use crypto use gmail and grant OAuth access just like normal people. You know who uses crypto and doesn’t do that? Corporations and governments, and not all of them, even.

Interesting thread on writer’s software at Mefi.

I am amazed to discover that I lack an early digital video cable, the M1 variety. Monoprice is there for me, natch.

Not sure why, but as I was posting this I remembered that my parents were supposed to send me the family pachinko machine, like, two years ago. Outrage, or a good excuse for a cross country road trip?

Much of my dream space last night was occupied by a dream about bagels, wherein I made several dozen and then inexplicably bought six, hot from the oven, for twenty dollars, grumbling about the price. I am not sure if I bought them from myself or what.

I was the bagel maker at a coffee shop in my youth and once entirely forgot I knew how to make them. On a whim I invited a friend over and once the ingredients were assembled, muscle memory took over and it was as if I had been possessed. I watched my body move efficiently and swiftly through the steps of the process, agape and not knowing how it knew what to do.

About the time the bagels were going into and out of the boiling water, my on-hand lack of a large steel mixing bowl to boil the water in (the 20-inch diameter of the water surface meant you could get eight or so in at a time) FINALLY triggered a clear, conscious memory of mixing, kneading, turning, twisting, and baking.

How it is that one can totally forget something that one loves remains a complete mystery.

I don’t think I will bake some today – twenty bucks is an outrage – but I might roll out on a bagel quest later on. Seattle is in general sorely lacking in east coast deli food but there are indeed a few decent bagel sources. Thank god.

As briefly noted earlier, I have been working through using Amazon EC2 instances as an on-demand proxy. I am making progress, and can reliably launch and ssh into a given instance.

The problem is that so far I can’t figure out how to share that ssh connection with applications or the operating system. There are plenty of tutorials that cover setting up the OS or an app (usually a web browser) to use an sash session as a proxy; my problem appears to be that once I have ssh up, the session is not being shared outside the establishing application.

This could be a consequence of some firewalling I am unaware of or it could be something more fundamental (application walls or something) which the easy-to-find pre-Lion and pre-Win7 tutorials don’t have to address.

Anyway. Learning.