Check out powerfolder, a free java-based file sharing and synchronization utility. I’m using it to synch the subscription list for my feeddemon RSS feeds so the stuff I read at work doesn’t show up at home and vice versa. It takes a little twiddling to set up (and on the mac I had to use the webstart version, the download version failed to run) but it’s worth the trouble for file sharing and synchronization and free is a great price.

Two weeks ago or so saw the launch of ourmedia.com. Now we have another entry in the ‘free media hosting’ sweepstakes – Open Media Network. This one is from Marc Andreesen, of Netscape fame. So far it supports windows/ie only (ugh…they’re doing a tv-guide wannabe interface and used activex, it seems) but Firefox/other OS versions are promised. If you’re looking for more legitimate content to fill you Mediagate box (see recent posting) with, here’s another service for you to check out. Or maybe you’re convinced the world is ready to see those wedding videos. Whatever it is, here’s another place to stash that content.

A brief slightly related aside – anyone else noticing a recent flourishing of free web services? It’s evocative of the whole dot.com boom of years ago. I seem to remember Robert x Cringley speculating this was going to happen a few months ago, guess he was onto something.

Let’s say you’re interested in playing media back to your television/home theater setup, but you’re unwilling to go through the trouble of building/maintaining a media pc and you don’t necessarily want to record stuff, you just want playback of materials you’re grabbing off the net, whether it’s legitimate stuff from, say ourmedia.com or archive.org’s live music archive, episodes of your favorite BBC show you’ve downloaded off p2p, or a rip of a DVD you borrowed from a colleague. Whatever it is, I just happened across a fantastic way to get this stuff into your tv for relatively cheap. Check out the Mediagate MG-25. $130 plus the cost of a 2.5″ hard drive gets you a fantastic, extremely versatile little media playback box and a remote control. It’s only slightly larger than an Ipod, it supports pretty much every video and audio codec you would reasonably expect it to, and it’s damn cheap. I can actually envision a use for these at work (instructors moving content around via sneakernet instead of relying on our flakey and overwhelmed network) and am going to try and get one in-house or buy one for myself. You can check out a review at akihabaranews.com as well.

[update]

A little digging has revealed that they have a new model coming, the MG-35, that handles 3.5″ hard drives and has an ethernet port. Even better! So far it’s not available in the US and appears to be a bit more expensive (~$220 or so) but the extra features are more than worth it.

Check out these excellent demos of javascript enabling drag and drop functionality in your web browser. Pretty cool stuff, and it works (with a variety of small glitches) across the major browsers. Use the link at the bottom of the page to see other examples of this at work. The slideshow you can rearrange and re-title is probably the coolest of the bunch.

Just a brief mention, again, of ecto. It was updated again this week and it just continues to improve. It costs, but it’s worth every penny. If you’re blogging from a mac you owe it to yourself to check it out.

If you don’t know the first thing about the unix command line and want a quick, easy way to learn the basics, check out the freeengineer.org’s learn unix in 10 minutes guide. Concise, easy to understand and free for the bookmarking. Next time you can’t figure out how to change file permission on a set of subdirectories, check this site.

I love my little shuttle pvr box, but if I had the money I would buy one of these cases in a heartbeat. It would greatly simplify the wiring and shelving situation in my living room, it looks great, and the touchscreen integrated into the case makes for a fantastic control interface. I want one. I just need an HDTV first. The case runs for about $600 if you just want to see the pictures and don’t want to bother with the whole article.

Check out this submersible camera from pentax. All my recent hiking has led me to start craving a new camera. My trusty Canon A40 has been fantastic, but it’s only 2mp and is also very slow to start and shoot compared to cameras of more recent vintage. I’ve been unwilling to really consider something else though because I invested in a watertight enclosure for the A40. It’s also been great, but it’s tremendously bulky too. Enter the Pentax linked to above – no bulk, 5mp, and speedy shooting times. On the downside it uses proprietary batteries and secure MMC memory cards. I’ve got 1.5gigs of compact flash and 4 sets of 4XAA batteries that would become superfluous if I went with the Pentax, which is kind of a bummer. I’m going to wait for some reviews though and if it works as well as it looks like it will on paper, I’m going to get one.

I’ve actually blogged about this in the past, though I didn’t know this term exists. It’s a way of reading material that allows you to absorb text much faster than the typical words on a page approach – basically an RSVP app streams the words at you very quickly, one word at a time. I’ve shown this to folks and most of the time they’re non-plussed, partly I suspect because it’s so different from the typical reading experience. Trust me though, it really can lead to faster intake of printed materials. If you don’t believe me, take a moment to review some research on the subject [.pdf]. If you’re on windows, you can grab a copy of an app I found on sourceforge, called dictator, which is Python based but has a complete pre-packaged installer for windows. Other OS’s will have to monkey with it to get it working on their OS – basically all you’ll need is Python (you already have it on OSX) and wxPython, which you can get here. I’ve been using this to stream manuals and documentation to myself. In a way it’s like ….passive absorbtion, like the stories you used to hear about people who taught themselves by playing tapes while they slept – my comprehension and retention is not as good as if I had sat and studied the manual in the traditional page-turning manner, but I find that I have these ‘aha!’ moments where I suddenly realize I know the answer to ‘x’, without having really read about ‘x’ before. Basically this is a great time saving device for things you need to have a passing knowledge of. It’s also great for those guilty pleasure books, like a tom clancy novel you can’t find yourself justifying the time it would take to actually read it, but that you can spend 2-3 hours sucking in.

If you can’t get dictator working on your OS of choice, you can also check out jrsvp, a java-based rsvp client. I had trouble getting this working correctly but it’s under rapid development and I was less incented to tinker with it since I already had Dictator up and running.

I’m a big fan of outliners, as I’ve mentioned in the past. A substantial portion of my life lives in shadowplan, the palm/windows/osx outliner, and I’m always looking at interesting new examples to play with. (As an aside, there is a fantastic series of articles that’s been running in About this Particular Macintosh called About this Particular Outliner that anyone even mildly interested in outliners should check out.) I’ve been tinkering with a couple of web-based tools lately: tadalist and sproutliner. They’re both well designed with clean, easy to understand interfaces, but sproutliner wins on features – it’s actually an outliner whereas tadalist is, as the name signifies, just a way to make lists. Anyway both are free and well worth checking out.