25 entry limit in Blogger atom.xml
If you use Blogger + FeedBurner to publish your podcast, you may have noticed that iTunes only lists the last 25 episodes of your show. To fix this problem, at least temporarily, change your url (Edit Feed Details) from the first URL below to the second URL below. Fill in the word YOURBLOG with the actual name of your blog. This should fix your problem without interrupting any existing subscribers. They should see the fix immediately by collapsing the tree for the podcast, right clicking on the podcast title and selecting "Update podcast". If this tip helps you out, let me know.
http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/atom.xml
http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default? alt=rss&max-results=100
Of course, this is only a problem until you've posted 100 episodes of your podcast. You can enter numbers lager than 100 for max-results, but the maximum number of items returned is hard coded at 100. If you look at the RSS you'll find an opensearch element indicating the "maximum number of items that appear on one page". This number never grows beyond 100. At least, not in the tests I conducted when I posted this article.
This driver shows us how to drive a Hummer in Baghdad.
Hospice patient hires sex worker
A young disabled man who receives care for his life-limiting illness at a hospice run by a nun speaks of his decision to use a prostitute to experience sex before he dies.
Read more...
A Girl Like Me
Kiri Davis, a 17-year-old film director created this 8 minute revealing video about how children are affected by images of race.
Stewart interviews Gates
John Stewart interviewed Bill Gates last night. I'd like to know how a guy like him goes his entire life without any social graces. Do you think an interview with Steve Jobs would have gone this way?
The Comedy Central website is not at all blogger friendly. If for some reason however the above YouTube link doesn't work, here are the links to part 1 and part 2 on the Comedy Central website.
Vista hits stores tomorrow
Microsoft Vista goes on sale tomorrow. It's a shame that Bill can't pull together videos that are as interesting as Steve's. His keynote at Macworld was over an hour long and not once did I gloss. This video is only a couple minutes and I found myself daydreaming while I was watching it. Oh well.
Shutterfly
There are a variety of reasons why Shutterfly's interface is not as good as it could be. I have a collection at qicboy.shutterfly.com. That collection has an album called 'Random pictures'. Let's suppose I want to add some additional pictures to that album. Here are the steps I have to go through.
- Open qicboy.shutterfly.com
- Click on the 'Random picture'
- Click 'Add pictures'
- Select 'Upload from my computer', click 'Next'
- drop item, close popup
- Repeat steps 1-3
- Transfer from my Shutterfly account, next
- Select that were just uploaded, next
This is where it gets stupid. The pictures were added to album 2007-01-24. They are not in the album in my shared collection. I have to follow these additional steps to get them in there.
The biggest problem I have with the site is the disjoint between pictures you have on your account and the pictures that other people can see. If you're already confused by the terms collection, album, shared album, shared collection you're not alone, that's part of the problem. Instead of having this mess of different folders, I want to have one master list and indicate whether I want the folder shared or not.
What really bugs me is if I ask to log out it nags me about things in my cart. This seems like a serious security flaw to me. If I hit the log out it should do so unquestioningly. If I'm at a café and don't read the fine print then I'm in trouble.
Shutterfly's redeeming qualities is that it doesn’t have a max upload. While Flickr's interface might be more intuitive, their max upload makes these two sites equally frustrating.
Fluevog
Last Sunday I went shopping for shoes down on Haight. I went into the George Lucas in Love
Some of you might remember this video from a while back. It was a parody of Shakespeare in Love called George Lucas in Love.
Beatbox cooking show
This is a cool video from a bloke in the UK that calls himself the Beardyman. He does this show where he demonstrates how to do beatbox cooking.
Frank Chu
Frank Chu just added me as a friend on MySpace. At this point he has fewer than 200 friends. That actually surprises me because I consider him to be pretty well known. He has a wikipedia page dedicated to him. There's a bar that was named in his honor and if you've spent any time in the city you're sure to have seen him.
Hounddog
I've seen movies or shows on TV in the past that included material that I thought, if i had children, would be inappropriate for them at that age. I can't help but notice the young actors in the scene and wonder how it affects them. They are after all real people, even if the scene they're acting in is fiction.
I wonder if most people notice that these are kids playing roles in these scenes and if they dismiss it because it's scripted scripted. Maybe it's less of an issue if the role they play in the scenes is minor. Perhaps children find themselves in these roles because the scenes themselves go largely unnoticed, start to become commonplace and are eventually accepted by both the viewers and the parents whose children are cast in the roles.
Exposing children to adult content during the creation of entertainment media isn't anything new. Brook Shields was 12 in 1978 when she appeared nude in the role of a child prostitute in Pretty Baby. At age 14, Jodi Foster was nominated for an Oscar for her role as a pre-teen prostitute in Taxi Driver.
Last week the film Hounddog premiered in competition at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. The movie was filmed when Dakota Fanning was 12 and includes a scene of her being raped. From what I've read, the scene is supposed to be graphically disturbing.
Beer for man's best friend
A pet shop owner consigned a local brewery to make non-alcoholic beer that he sells to pet owners.
L-word's chart
If you watch the L-word then you're probably familiar with the chart that one of the characters keeps with everyone she's slept with. The chart is online and the site indicates that they will eventually make it available for people to make their own version of the chart.
Time travel
I've decided to do my own time travel experiment. I had originally decided to do this at burning man 2007, but today I realized that it would be more practical to do this from my work (you should be able to whois my domain qicboy.com on the day you visit me). My time travel experiment assumes that if someone wanted to use me to prove that they could time travel into the past, that they could do so by traveling back into January 23, 2007 and meeting me at my work. I am of course, publishing this from the future even though it was written in the past, so there's no way anyone could "cheat". I spent the day being open minded about time travel. I was resolved to post this regardless of what happened. If someone wanted to prove that they could in fact time travel, they simply have to slip back into the past, into January 23, 2007 between PST 10:30 AM and 4:00 PM; this post had already been typed and saved by then. I will take (have taken since you're reading this from the future) an hour for lunch at noon. They could stop by my work (or even call), tell the receptionist that they're looking for me (she's quite friendly), come up to me and introduce themselves. The fact that I'm not someone without any noteriety makes me the perfect candidate for a visit. If you need a password for me, go with the word oregano. Sorry, no latecomers will be received.
If you decide you want to do the same thing, post your day here so that people know when to find you.
Niagara
You've found that one special someone and you never want to be apart. You dine together. You play together. You sleep together. You even bathe together. So why not share the most intimate moment of them all?
Are we stupid?
Hilary Clinton is running for president. As we well know, this country doesn't always choose the best person for the job. This film with Julian Morrow can give us some insights as to why. Laugh when you see item, laugh so you don't cry.
Clinton for President
There's an old saying that claims that behind every great man, there's an even greater woman. What happens with the great women behind an already great president, herself runs for president?
Saturday, Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy for president of the United States.
Celebrity (the game)
Celebrity is my FAVORITE party game. You can play it with just about any size group but groups with about 6-8 people is best. You don’t need to buy anything to play. All you need is little scraps of paper and something to write with. People write the names of celebrities (e.g. Santa Claus, Brad Pitt, Bart Simpson) on pieces of paper and throw them into a bowl. People split into two groups and compete to see who can name the most celebrities.
The pictures from Melanie and David's weddings have been
SuicideGirls Gallery
The art coming out of SuicideGirls.com is amazing. Check out this gallery and see what I mean.
Cars drift down a slippery road while their drivers try uselessly to control them.
Ninja warrior
Only one man has cleared the Ninja Warrior obstacle course, a 33 year-old fisherman by the name of Makoto Nagano. Here he is.
Jeep has this waterfall that works like a printer. It uses water to display images.
iTunes bug
I added the following thread to the Apple support discussions.
BUG: Certain podcasts are not added to library properly
If you follow these steps, the files from the podcast that have already been downloaded will not reappear in your library as a podcast. I can list other podcasts with the same problem if anyone is interested.
1. Subscribe to "Sam Has 7 Friends" podcast and wait for iTunes to finish downloading the most recent episode.
[http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=186035615]
2. Find "Sam Has 7 Friends" in the Library and delete it (choose "Keep Files").
3. From the file menu select "Add Folder to Library..." and select your "iTunes Music folder location". Notice that the podcast is not added back into the library.
4. Notice that the podcast was not added to the list of Podcasts in the library.
This is a problem because, if you move your music folder, the podcasts are not detected properly and you have to re-download the podcast in its entirety.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's either the file type or one of the tags in the file that's causing the problem. Guy Facius mentions the PCAST tag [http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1727166�] in his post but I can't verify that the tags are missing.
This girl freaks out because the car her daddy bought her is the wrong color.
This is a funny video about how evolution might be failing some of us.
Italian hidden camera show
They convinced this girl that she has a stalker. The stalker traps the girl in her garage and shows her the neighbor bound and gagged in a box.
Mashuptown
This site lists some pretty wicked mashups. They even have video mashups, check out the SIMS2 one.
If you want to learn how to make your own mashups, here's a wicked video from Granny WhatsHerBucket. Oh snap!
Heidi Neff exhibit
I went to see Heidi Neff's exhibit at Los Mendanos College last night. There was less sexual this time, more political. Still if you looked closely into the paintings there were still images of sensuality, even if covert, like the one of her and James nuzzled in front of the TV. If you missed her last night, it sounds like she'll be doing another exhibit in SF in a week or so.
Interesting at Flickr
Here's a blog posting with some tips on photography, I really like the photos. He took them from Flickr's interesting section. They have interesting pictures from the last seven days and a calendar with interesting pictures.
Amazing magic milk
These guys do a cool trick with food color and soap. I'm dying to try this at home.
Approve comments
You can choose to approve comments before they're posted on your MySpace profile page. Here's how.
- Open the Change Privacy Settings page
- Make sure "Comments - approve before posting" is checked
- Click the "Change Settings" button.
You can also get there by navigating the following steps
Home | Account Settings | Privacy Settings (Change Settings) | Comments - approve before posting (Privacy Settings).
Combustible cell phone
According to the news stories, Firefighters arrived at the Travelers Hotel in Vallejo Saturday Jan 13, 2007 just before midnight. The sprinklers had been activated when a phone in the right hand pant pocket of Luis Picaso, 59, caught fire. Picaso was transfered to U.C. Davis Medical Center with burns on over half his body but is in "stable condition". There was $75,000 damage done to the room.
"Authorities declined to name the phone's manufacturer and model."
--Associated Press
This is the kind of shit that bothers me about the media. If you Google "Luis Picaso" and phone, there are 10,300 results (15 pages worth). Not one of them lists the make and model of the phone. Doesn’t Luis have any friends or family that he calls with that phone? Am I to believe that not a single person that knows him knows what type of phone he uses? Couldn’t even one of these reporters have tracked down one of his friends in the hospital and asked them what phone he had used? They could have done any number of things with that information to further the story, not the least of which would have been to contact the company for comment.
If anyone knows this guy and has any idea what sort of phone he was using I'd like to know.
Black Rock City 2007
I did it. I was one of the first 10,000 people to get my Burning Man ticket. Tickets went on sale this morning at 10:00 PST. With any luck I'll be going to Black Rock City in August to watch the man burn.
The theme this year is The Green Man.
A couple years back, at a regional Burning Man festival, a friend of mine showed me his yurt dome. I was so impressed with it that last year I purchased my own. As it turns out, the dome is way overkill for my personal needs, at least it was last year. Hopefully this year I can find some way to personalize it at make it more of a home.
UPDATE: It's a little after noon. I just went back to the site and they've already sold out of the first 10,000 tickets ($195). They're going through the second 10,000 tickets ($225). The page was last edited at 11:28:48 AM. That's probably when they updated it to say they were sold out of the first batch.
Brown Bunny scene
I was watching the Golden Globe red carpet the other night when Chloe Sevigny came on. The first time I'd ever heard of her was when she did the famous Brown Bunny scene. I don't doubt that there are people who were turned off of her when they heard about this scene. I suppose there will always be prudish people in the world, just like there will be spouses that are married to them that surf the internet looking for porn and refuse to admit that they masturbate.
HD DVD movies
Now that HD DVD movie copy protection's been cracked, how big does that mean the pirated files will be on BitTorrent?
A variety of movies are available on BitTorrent in 1080. The Lord of the Rings The return of the King weighs in at 34 Gig while many of the IMAX movies come in around 3 Gig. The serenity files available come in at about 10.5 Gig.
Here's a rough comparison of the different resolutions available for TV.
0.3 MP (analog) 0.4 MP (EDTV) DVD 0.9 MP (HDTV 720p) ABC, ESPN, FOX 2.0 MP (HDTV 1080i) CBS, NBC, HBO
Read more about this on gizmodo and arstechnica.
Sacha Cohen speech
This is Sacha Baron Cohen's speech from the Golden Globes. It's agood speech; well, at the start anyway. It always bugs me when actors get an award and start listing off names that mean nothing to us. It bugs me just as much when they start playing music during a person's speech, particularly when its a good one because what it means is they're taking away time from something that's entertaining and giving it to someone else so that they can rattle off the names of people that mean nothing to me.
There's also footage of interviews with the Hollywood Foreign Press.
Scarlett Johansson as Jenna Jameson
A film adaptation is being made on "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale". The author, Jenna Jameson, told FHM she wants to see Scarlett Johansson play the role of her.
Jenna has starred in over 100 films but if you don't know who she is, perhaps one of the films linked below will refresh your memory. Read more...
movie movie movie movie movie movie movie movie movie movie movie movie movie movie movie movie
To download, follow these steps. First of all, these are avi files. They will not play in the regular windows movie player, you need a program like DIVX to play them.
- click on the link above
- Scroll down on the page and click "Free"
- Wait for the timer on the page to reach 0.0
- Type in the Code that displays on the page and click on the button next to the entry field
- The usual dialogs to save the file should appear, save the file somewhere like your desktop
If you're interested in seeing preview images to the movies you can find them at jaggle.
UPDATE: Here's another story on the topic.
Muslix64
Most of us know by now that the copy protection (CSS) on DVDs has been cracked. It was done in October 1999 by Norwegian teenager Jon Johansen who went to court over it and was acquitted. Some of us even remember when the code to do the unscrambling was floating around on T shirts.
A new copy protection (AACS) has been adopted by Disney, Warner Bothers and others. On December 26, a hacker by the name of Muslix64 posted BackupHDDVD, a program that cracks that.
Center for Sex and Culture
One of the most wonderful things to spring out of SF's progressive sexuality is the Center for Sex and Culture. This organization offers classes in human sexuality through the Good Vibrations stores. The organization was started by renown sexologist Carroll Queen.
If you think you've seen the face of sex shops in America, this will change your impression of them. Forget the image of dark dingy store you might have in your mind, this store is more of a boutique than anything else with friendly employees with over 60 hours of sex training.
Stalking on MySpace
Stalking people is almost always bad form. In fact, I know people from MySpace who have stalked other people on MySpace and upon first meeting the person, spew forth the information they've gathered from their MySpace page. This didn't go over well. So if you're going to stalk someone on MySpace, be aware that even though it's cyberspace, social etiquette still applies.
By far the easiest way to find someone is through a friend. If you're looking for someone and know they're a friend of someone you already have a profile for, then the best way to find that person is to look through their friends.
If the person has a handle they tend to use, try appending this handle to www.myspace.com; for example, www.myspace.com/tom.
Suppose you're looking for someone but have no idea what where their profile is. Here are a couple of suggestions. These tips only work if the user you're looking for has specified the information in their profile and is accurate. A common trick users employ is to set their age to 100 to prevent others from knowing their exact age. It's sometimes easier to specify a variety of different options than to omit the information entirely. For example, if you're not sure whether someone is 31 or 32, specify 31 in the search then change it to 32. Start off by going to the browse page and entering the following information.
- Specify their zip code and limit the search to 5 miles
- Specify an exact age
- Specify a gender
- Specify whether they're single or not
- Limit the search to users with photos
MySpace layouts
To change the look of your MySpace page, Google "myspace layouts". These pages will show you a variety of layouts. When you find one you like, find the codes for the layout. On some sites, like the one I found the layout code I use on, they're available in a text box labeled "Layout Code". Follow these steps to customize your layout.
- Find the layout code of a MySpace layout you like on one of the many sites where they are available
- Copy and paste these codes into your "About Me" box, Edit Profile page available from the "Home" link on MySpace
- Save the changes
- Reload your profile page to see the change
If you use MySpace, then you're well aware of just how ugly some of the pages can get. This is due in no small part to people choosing poor layouts for their profile page. If you're going to use a custom layout, take some time to find one that isn't difficult to navigate.
These custom layouts work because some time back someone figured out that if you paste HTML style codes into their profile, magic happens. Here's a subtle example. If you paste the code below into your "About Me" box you should see the table for you "Extended Network" change into a image.
<style type="text/css">
span.blacktext12 {
background-image:url(http://www.qicboy.com/themes/user-default/header2.jpg);
font-size:0px;
width:456px;
height:140px;
display:block !important;
}
</style>
Some of the available layouts include advertisements for the site that provided the layout. You can reduce the about of ads by copying only the information between the "style" tags.
Your life in your pocket
Steve jobs is undeniably the most brilliant man in the computer industry. When he gave us the Mac he revolutionized the way we thing about computers. When he gave us the iPod, he revolutionized not only music but the way people broadcast. Now he's done it again but this time with the phone. In the beginning of his iPhone introduction he said his product was five years ahead of the competition. When I heard that I was skeptical. Now I think it was a drastic understatement. If he's only five years ahead it's because his competition will incorporate some of his ideas is their products. This phone has over 200 new patents. It's amazing.
The phone has 3 advanced sensors built in to improve user experience. The phone uses a proximity sensor to detect when the user's brought the phone to their ear so it can disable the controls and turns off the display. It has a ambient light sensor to automatically adjust brightness. It has an accelerometer so it can detect when the user holds the phone horizontally and automatically goes into landscape mode [00:13:00].
You control the phone using your finger not a stylus. There's no hardcoded keyboard. It's software driven so the interface can actually evolve after the hardware's been released. Text messaging is done using a GUI QWERTY keyboard for example. When you first pick up the phone you slide the unlock button across the screen start using it. It uses a technology Steve calls "multi touch" so to zoom in to a picture you un-pinch your fingers on the screen [00:33:00]. There is only one button in the hardware, a home key [00:15:20].
The device runs OS-X so it runs full blown applications, not the trimmed down stuff you see on most phones. That means it has a fully functioning browser for example. You sync your phone to your PC using iTunes. The phone includes an iPod application that allows creative way to scroll through album art (an app it calls Cover Flow). It supports widgets and email through either pop3 (Google Gmail, AOL Mail, Most IPSs) or imap (e.g. Yahoo Mail, MS Exchange, .Mac Mail). They've partnered with yahoo to offer free email.
One of the most impressive parts of the demonstration was when he demonstrated the call management features because it's hard to believe that he actually improved the basic functionality of a phone. When calls come in there's a picture of who's calling. You can answer the call and the person goes into a list. You can merge the call, unmerge the call, drop a call, switch between the calls all with the GUI interface. He made it seem really simple, far simpler than my RAZR. The phone also supports video voicemail which allows the user to pick which voicemail you want to listen to instead of listening to them in the order they came in [00:29:30]. At some point he called his favorite sushi restaurant (415-332-3940) sushi ran, you can't get a better recommendation than that.
The phone supports 5 hours life (16 hours of audio playback). It has a 2MP camera. It supports Bluetooth 2.0, WIFI and it switches between WIFI or the network intelligently.
Apple has teamed with Cingular and will start shipping the phone in June. It is priced at $500.
Just to get a sense of how big this market is, here are some stats from the speech. If you get 1% market share that means you've sold 10M units. [1:16:00]
Game consoles 26M Digit Cameras 94M MP3 players 135M PCs 209M Mobile phones 957M
It's a GSM phone so that means it won't work with the MetroPCS service I use but is so amazing that it might get me to switch phone carriers.
The video for the iPod introduction and the Macworld keynote are available on the Mac site.
Blog plugin for MySpace
Let's face it, blogging on MySpace sucks. With so many alternatives its surprising that MySpace decided to reinvent the wheel. MySpace doesn’t allow you to incorporate a third party blogging service into your profile like tribe.net does so here's an alternative. It uses a flash movie to list your latest posts on your MySpace page.
First you need to find the RSS feed for your blog. Next go into "Edit profile" from your MySpace homepage. Paste the code segment below into your "About Me" box, change the word TEST in the flashvars parameter of the code segment you pasted to the URL of your RSS feed (e.g. http://www.qicboy.com/rss.xml) hit "Save All Changes".
<embed flashvars="file=http://downloads.thespringbox.com/widgets/RSS Reader.sbw¶m=TEST" allowScriptAccess="never" allowNetworking="internal" enableJSURL="false" enableHREF="false" saveEmbedTags="true" src="http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.swf" allowScriptAccess="never" allowNetworking="internal" enableJSURL="false" enableHREF="false" saveEmbedTags="true" quality="high" wmode="transparent" width="435" height="300" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"> </embed>
The widget above is just one possible widget you can use for this. There are others available. Pick the one you like best, just make sure it can be inserted using an embed tag.
Some time back I used a hack which included an iframe on the blog page to point back to my blog site. This was a hack and MySpace has since fixed the exploit. I went in and made a change to my blog preferences and it wiped out the hack. So if you've already taken advantage of the sploit and want to keep it, don't change your settings. Personally I prefer to hide my blog on my MySpace page entirely. You can learn how to hide both your "blog" and your "extended network" banner with some simple codes.
You can customize the code by visiting the SpringBox site.
French maid TV
This cute video podcast (subscribe) features women dressed up as french maids explaining how to do various tasks on the PC. It has a nice tempo and is a pretty creative idea.
Google home page
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To add your favorite blogs to your Google homepage follow these steps.
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When you click on your browser icon or do whatever it is you do to start your browser, you're often sent to a default web page. This is called your "Home page". There are a variety of companies offering different web pages for you to use as your home page, Microsoft for example offers one that it sets as your home page when you first install internet explorer.
The companies that offer home pages, Microsoft included, often include content from a variety of sources and often give you the ability to customize the page. One of the more powerful home pages, and the one I personally use is, is made available by Google.
The Google home page allows third party developers, people who don't necessarily work at Google, to develop gadgets that you can plug into your home page. This makes the number of things you can actually add to your Google homepage, nearly limitless.
Additionally, Google allows you to add your favorite blogs to you homepage using a technology called RSS. Almost every blog published supports RSS, all you have to do is find the link for it.
The RSS for this blog is as follows. You can make google your default homepage.
http://www.qicboy.com/atom.xml
Melo-Whitman wedding
I'm in Toronto visiting family. I just attended the wedding of my cousin David and his new wife Melanie. This is a shot from the shore of lake Ontario just outside the church where they were married.
Violet blue
She's an award winning best selling author,
a lecturer,
a podcaster (subscribe),
a video
blogger,
a sex columnist
for the SF chronicle and
much much more.
She is in my opinion one of the smartest women in San Francisco.
NWA collision
KTSP (channel 5 in Minneapolis) has D___ in a box
This is a hilarious skit. I've gotten so many references to it that I've decided to just host it here. It seems to be spreading like wildfire. The title of this post was inspired by Shannon (gf and gifter of the ipod) who's work seems to filter things like d___ and c___ but ironically has no problem with the word facial; interesting.
14 threads of facism
Accord to a college professor Dr. Lawrence Britt here are 14 defining characteristics to a fascist regime.
Sexy tongues
This video shows two girls with super freaky cool tongues. The video starts off with Angelfire, then 1:06 minutes into it moves onto Cameron. It goes kinda long so you may want to fast forward.
My hitman name
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