So solid state hard drives (SSD) are starting to descend into almost affordable territory – the popular Intel x25m 80 GB drive can be found for ~$250, which is actually less than I used to pay for drives measured in megabyte capacities back when I started building my own machines. They’re blazing fast at most things compared to conventional drives. The capacities are of course much smaller than regular drives, but folks are following a scheme of installing the OS and the most critical apps onto the SSD and everything else onto a large capacity conventional disc. Supposedly this will lead to a bigger performance increase on the machine than most anything else, including a faster cpu. I’m working on the parts for a new Windows 7-based machine, and stuck on what to do for the disc, cpu, motherboard and video card. The SSD is really the toughest call. I get that it will sleep and restore from sleep virtually instantaneously, which is actually the big draw for me (not that the boot speed and application launching speeds aren’t appealing as well), but the price relative to a conventional disc with 20x more space for 1/2 the price is sticking in my craw. Which way would you go if you were me?

A little friday fun of a different kind, we’ll call it the  ’scare the spouse with your gaming expenditures’ edition. Steam is the most successful of the PC gaming digital distribution platforms. I’m a big fan and have been using it for years. The folks at ddgamer have put together a little tool to calculate what your account’s worth. Remember when you look at this that the numbers are based on the current value of the software, not what you actually paid. For me this means my account looks like it’s worth a lot more than I actually paid because I so often take advantage of the weekly and holiday sales Steam offers. Caveats aside, here’s my account, which today is worth $1,603.26. Change the username to your own to calculate the value of your account. A side note – folks have actually been selling off their Steam accounts, so if the number makes you feel sheepish and you want to try and recoup some of that money, you can try selling it on Amazon zshops or ebay or whatever. Mind that Valve (owners of Steam) may not approve, it’s probably a violation of their TOS, etc etc.

…this $1500 gaming chair:

Who wouldn't want this chair for their entertainment room?

How can you resist? Surround sound, acoustic tile insulation, comfy foam padded seat, this chair has it all. Good thing I’m married….

I love Netflix and use it constantly, both for physical discs and for streaming over the network to my ps3 and xbox360. Consequently I’ve rated a lot of movies on Netflix, 983 to be exact. Netflix isn’t perfect though, and one thing about them that really annoys me is that they still seem to think the walled garden approach to content on the web is the way to go. The simplest evidence of this is how they keep the ratings you apply to movies locked up inside their site – there’s no mechanism to get them out. I’ve started using tools like Fandango on my iphone, and I wanted those ratings available to me so I could start porting them over. Enter the super useful Firefox extension Greasemonkey, and this script by the user Maarten over on userscripts.org. A few minutes after getting this running I had all my Netflix movie ratings in a text file on my local machine. Great, great stuff and super easy to get running.

The Consumer Electronic Show was last week while I was laid up. I missed out on most of the coverage, but one thing I did notice was that the first color ebook readers are shipping in Japan (at $1k +) and that Qualcomm announced a promising new tech for color ebooks that’s superior to the other solutions I’m aware of. They’re promising products this year using this tech at reasonable prices. We’ll see. Anyway the product is called Mirasol and truth be told I don’t quite get how this works, but the gist of it is there are two plates, one suspended above the other in a magnetic field, and the proximity of the two plates to each other controls the color of the refracted light. Or..something. Anyway you can read more about it here on betanews.com, plus check out a video of the tech in action over on engadget.

I’m pretty interested in this stuff. I’d really love an ebook, but not until they’re in full color. Those are definitely coming, and it’s not guaranteed that this Mirasol tech is what will be in the devices we buy, but in terms of price/performance/battery life, this is the most promising development I’ve seen.

Addendum: see the note at the bottom – there’s now a much easier way to do this.

There are multiple solutions to this scattered across the web, and there are probably better places than this to find out how to do it, but since I just went through finding out how to make this work and had to multiple google to find all the pieces of the answers I needed, I figured I  would do my bit to spread the word in case others find it useful. This works in October of 2009. Things are rapidly evolving so I make no promises for the future, but right now if you want to embed a google wave into Wordpress, Drupal, or any static or cms controlled page that allows you to use script tags, there are a couple of options. The first is the wavr plugin for wordpress. The gui for it fails on my instance, but the tag syntax works once you have it installed – just put the following into a post:

wave id="googlewave.com!wavid" bgcolor="#ffffff" color="#000000" height="300px"

Note – surround that with [ brackets or it won’t run. Also note that you’ll need to know both the correct wave server to call and the correct wavid – read below for how to get those.

The second method is to use this javascript:

<div style="width: 450px; height: 200px;" id="mywaveframe"></div>
<script src="http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/embed.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var wavePanel = new WavePanel('http://wave.google.com/wave/');
wavePanel.setUIConfig('white', 'black', 'Verdana', '10px');
wavePanel.loadWave('googlewave.com!w+RhSPBtyUB');
wavePanel.init(document.getElementById('mywaveframe'));
</script>

Which I originally found over on this post on geek whorled.

To actually post the wave you again need the correct server and wave ID. Unfortunately what google prints in the URL bar doesn’t match completely with what the API expects for the wavid, so you have to copy the wave url and change the ‘w%252b’ portion of it to w+ for the waveid . An example – this:

https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BRhSPBtyUB

has a waveid of:

w+RhSPBtyUB

I figured this out thanks to a google support post, which you can see here. Note that the actual answer I needed was not initially shown to me, I had to expand the answers.

The only other thing to bear in mind is that waves can be sourced from different servers. It’s not clear what all is out there in terms of valid server addresses, but googlewave.com is what’s worked for me. The google wave url I’m looking at is wave.google.com, but the source url to pass the api call to I have to use is googlewave.com. I think that folks who were initially granted access to the sandbox that predated the 100,000 ‘public beta’ that started in October 2009 have to use a different url to pass their waveid to, and I suspect if you’re running your own wave server you’d have to use that server’s address, but like I said some of this is still unclear to me.

Anyway, hope this was useful. Now if someone can solve the speed issues…

Addendum: or you could just add embeddy@appspot.com to your contact list and then add this bot to any wave you want all the embed code for. I wasn’t aware of this when I wrote this all up, and possibly it didn’t even exist at that point. Anyway now there’s a much easier way – just use embeddy.