Category: General

General thoughts that defy categorization.

Wanted: Radio-Amazon bridge

I’ve decided what the world needs is a Radio-Amazon bridge. I don’t want to have to blog music, book, and movie recommendations and then update my Amazon lists. I want one interface for all of my internet authoring. It seems like I ought to be able to make Radio posts that would also upstream to my Amazon Wish List or into my list of ratings for CDs I own, etc. Another cool feature would be a little bookmarklet or something that would scan my posts and find related books/movies/music. It seems like this should all be possible relatively easily using Radio’s UserTalk and the Amazon web services API.

Death by spam

Saw in the Technology section of Thursday’s Dallas Morning News in an article by Doug Bedell that spam’s percentage of legitimate email increases by 4% each month and is forecasted to comprise 50% of total email traffic by the end of the year or possibly even by this summer.

Searched added

Added search to my blog this evening. Works like a charm. I was at Borders this evening and noticed a cool little O’Reilly book called Hacking Google. Flipping through it I noticed that Amazon has a web services API. I could see some cool stuff being done with the Google and Amazon web services APIs. Even though I’ve got zero time to mess with it, I signed up for Google dev key and an Amazon web services token.

I’d like to write something that would make it easier for me to manage my wish list as well as add my CD ratings to Amazon for every CD I own. That way, Amazon’s rec engine would have the complete picture of what’s going on in my collection.

I’ve heard that old cue cats can be turned in to general purpose bar code scanners. If so, and if someone’s got a service that maps UPC to ISBN for books and whatever unique IDs are there for CDs, then I could just scan my book or CD and it would magically get added to my Amazon wishlist, listmania list, or whatever I needed, courtesy of my little Perl program.

Had a weird problem with my WiFi hookup at home

Had a weird problem with my WiFi hookup at home. Some days I’d have perfect connectivity from the living room. Other days it’d be real spotty. The weird thing was that it wasn’t like I had a weak signal. The signal would go from 100% to 0% then back to 100% repeatedly about every 5 seconds. Of course, I ultimately fixed it by trying the obvious solution last. The solutions that did NOT work were disabling all of the cordless phones, adjusting the antennae, turning off WEP, etc. What did work was upgrading the driver on my laptop and the firmware on the access point.

And, the added bonus is that now the built-in wireless bells and whistles with XP are functional. XP keeps track of the wireless networks it has come across. You can configure WEP keys, passphrases, etc. and it keeps track of that hooha for you so can just go from wireless net to wireless net without having to remember the SSID for Starbuck’s or whathaveyou.