Category: internet

The best thing at DigitalLife was the giant Robosapien. There’s a good pic at Engadget.

Since I’m now switching back and forth between IE, Opera, Firefox, and Safari on three computers at home and one at work (one Mac, the rest PCs), I’m starting to think about bookmark management and synchronization. Here are some links:

• This page has a pretty big list of bookmark managers.
• Bookmark Buddy: Windows software. $30. Looks like it’ll import and export from IE, Firefox, and Opera. (Not an online service.)
• Sync2It: This one’s got Windows and Mac client software, which apparently syncs your bookmarks to their web site. Besides supporting IE, Firefox, and Opera on the PC, it looks like it supports Safari on the Mac, which is nice. The price varies from free to $25/year, depending on what you’re doing.
• Powermarks: Windows software. $25. Looks like it suppors IE and Opera, with Firefox support in beta. Online sync.
• del.icio.us: Very popular online “social bookmarking” site. Free. There are some cool things about it, but you have to dig if you want to figure out how to import/export bookmarks from your machine(s). Looks like you could do a lot with the API, and maybe a bit of Python coding.
• Spurl is also a social bookmarking site. It claims to support IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari on Windows and Mac.
• This guy has some stuff to say about the differences between Furl, Spurl, and del.icio.us.

I think I’m most interested in Spurl right now, but I haven’t tried any of these yet.

I’ve actually made some progress this week in integrating Google Maps into our company’s intranet site. Fun stuff, but kind of frustrating at times.

Essential Resources for Google Maps — examples of some things that people have done with Google Maps.

My Flickr photos can now be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyhuey/. I still don’t have much there, but the “andyhuey” address is much nicer than the old “15415177@N00” thing.

Horror stories about AOL cancellations. Nasty stuff. Best to just stay away from them.

I set up a Flickr account for myself a few days ago. My pictures shoud be here. All I’ve uploaded so far are my Gates pictures.

www.streamload.com — looks interesting. I need to look at this more closely at some point.

Some interesting stuff on Skype :

Skype Journal

Jyve

I’ve been plugging a lot of numbers into this Rent vs. Buy Calculator, and most of the scenarios I come up with point me towards continuing to rent. The big variable is the expected appreciation of the home you’re theoretically buying. There’s no real way of knowing that, of course. If I pick a conservative value, like 2% or 4%, it usually comes back telling me I should continue renting. If I assume a 10% annual appreciation, and I stick with the place for 10+ years, then it tells me I might want to buy.

This calculator, on the other hand, is pointing me towards buying over renting in most scenarios. It’s taking into account a number of variables that the other one doesn’t ask for. Who really knows what calculations they’re doing behind the scenes, though. I guess I need to do some more reading.