Anyone know of a good online spellchecker? I did a quick google search, none blew me away.
Then I remembered that I had a great spellchecker already for my blog posts, the Google Toolbar!!

Finally some decent use for that thing!

Technorati Tags: google toolbar

Saw this tool called
ZenGarage via GeekNewsCentral and having been in the web development space for a number of years now I can see how something like this could be very handy. Described by the author as a “The CSS Showcase Tool” , it is basically a nice organised PHP framework where you can slot prototypes for your pages into.

There is a folder for each different project and its templates and within each project you can have set of different styles.

The only change to your templates is to replace the normally CSS include with something like this …

<?php echo $this->styleSheet(); ?>

what I like about it is the fact that for each major revision, just add another folder and forget about the old complications of renaming stylesheets etc. etc.

For all you guys out there in the design space, instead of giving your clients sheets and sheets of links give this a go, I like it.

Technorati Tags: css,web,zengarden

I wonder if Tristan Louis was planning on evoking such passion from so many people when he made this post. In his post he evaluates the perception that the balance of power has only shifted somewhat and that the little guy still has no voice in the blogosphere. Are we being controlled, influenced and reigned-in by the “A list”?

The question, in all this, however, is whether we could be suffering from possible group myopia. What if a rumor is wrong and gets propagated by the gatekeepers? What is that impact?

Doc Searls was one of the first to get on the bandwagon and I think he must be feeling geniunely perplexed ..

I don’t know.
I do know what it is like to be on the outside, to face gates far more closed than those anybody faces in the blogosphere.

The truth is I think both sides of the conversation has a point. For one you can’t deny the power of the A-list, these people can bring any story or person to the fore if they pay attention, isn’t that why we read their writings? To me this concept of gatekeepers is firmly rested in our own minds, maybe it represents our own phsycological barrier to entry.

No, I rather think of the A-list as on-ramps to the bigtime. Take me for example, my interest in the blogosphere is a constant ebb and flow, I have been cruising along the rural roads of the blogosphere choosing to avoid driving up those on-ramps for a while now. I know that when I am ready to start making my journey I can just hit one of the on-ramps, but for now I am just reading the signs, taking in the destinations those on-ramps will take me to.

If we never had an A-list, how would the little guy ever make sense, how would I ever had stumbed on Tristans blog? Thank you to the A-list for being my powerful filter, I like what you think, though I may sometimes disagree, but I trust you. I pay attention to what YOU pay attention too… beautiful.

C’mon lets not bash the early adopters, they do nothing more or less than we can. Sure it helps if you work for Microsoft or if you stay in San Fransisco, but lets not forget why these people are A-listers in the first place.. because somebody payed attention to them. You and me.

Maybe oneday , someone will pay attention to me as well.

Technorati Tags: gatekeepers,blogging

A LATE upload, after some bandwith issues.. enjoy

The Musically inclined Apple Cast!

MP3 can be found here.

Hi guys, great to see you back!! Sorry about the damn Archos harddrive whine you’ll hear every few minutes .. gotta work on that!

I have a music heavy podcast for you tonite, I play 4 songs by some great bands as provided by the podsafe music network.

Songs:

All songs released under Fat Wreck Records

Decendents/Cool to be you

MxPx/Lonesome Town

Chixdiggit!/Geocities Kitty

Descendents/Nothing With You

I tell you about the Tech Podcast Network live events, the k7.net free voicemail service, Backpackit , online workspace.

We Talk about the new apple goodies:

New G5
The new Powerbooks
Everything you wanna know about the 5th Gen iPod

Cheers!
Me

Subscribe to out feed , hit the feedburner link on the right hand side of this page!

Geekspin #4

Mon, 11 Oct 2005

After a long period of silence, I’m back with another riveting installment of my late night ramblings!

Download the MP3 here…

We play in with a great rock track, Uncrowned – Queen of New York. Thanks to the Podsafe Music Network

I apologise, talk about homefront developments, mention the ZA Show and introduce you to Ancestor, the new podcast novel by Scott Sigler.

I play a promo for podsafeaudio.com

News Covered:

Yahoo launches podcasting support

One laptop per child, details on its proposed $100 laptop.

Robofish

Apple Announcement, 12 October. Think Secret.

MySQL getting attention.Ken North.

Stanford wins $2m Dollar Arpa Grand Challenge. 132 miles in under 7 hours. VW Touareg R5.

15 to 20 launch titles for xbox 360 on November 6

Intel launches dual core server platforms.

Panasonic announces Blu-Ray by early 2006.

Play out with another podsafe song .. Brother Love – Summertime

Podshow PDN {podshow-1b68744c38a1ff2f8b2042c213ecaefc}

Hot off the presses today is the announcement of the new iPod player that seems to be a replacement for the mini (which has disappeared of the site) as well as the long awaited Motorola ROKR E1 iTunes phones.

Read about the nano here ..

Nano: The good ..
1) Super bleeding edge 4Gb solidstate flash technology.
2) Color screen
3) Super slim + tiny
4) Just plain sexy
5) Did I say tiny?
6) I want one

Nano: The bad …
1) It causes the instant demize of a whole market of compact HD based players. awww.
2) The put the audio jack at the bottom. umm…
3) How are you ‘sposed to read that little screen?
4) Why not support the alternative colors that where so popular with the mini?
5) WOW!! Why so pricey? You can get a 20GB photo for $50 less? Guess thats the price
you pay for bleeding edge tech.
6)What up with the name? C’mon apple Creative already have a Zen Nano, see it here

Read about the ROKR here …

ROKR: Good
1) Its a phone AND and iTunes based mp3 player .. wow..
2) um …

ROKR: The bad
1) Its very definately a Motorola, no Apple design influence. In fact I’m sure its a
rehashed E398, which I
actually think looks better in its black.
2) Its too basic dude, nothing special
3) Only supports like 100 songs out the box.
4) The iTunes support allows only random auto MP3 populating (like the shuffle), or
manual USB based MP3 populating. I guess that cause of the limited storage space

oh well.

Tags: iPod Nano,ROKR

Oh well.

So you wanna find a blog specialising on Rhododendrons? Or maybe you just wanna read some general Apple, or Microsoft news. But how to find these niche blogs? Before the only solution would have had to be a google search or maybe a tag based search on something like technorati.

Not anymore, technorati has launched a blog search. As a claimed weblog owner you can now add up to 20 tags to describe your weblog.

Will be enabling it and checking it out.

Read more here http://www.technorati.com/weblog/2005/09/44.html

Via Scoble

Tags: technorati, Tags: blog search

Ok this is old but, Haha!

Scoble posted a link to this South Park derived sketch on him visiting google.

Pretty funny.

Link to sketch here..

Scobles original link here

Hmmm , space elevators , fluffy bunnies …