Video has been hot online for a few years now. Broadband has become more widely available and YouTube gave us a simple channel for distributing our videos. However, in the past year, a number of video cameras have been introduced that cater to a new generation of online content producers. Cheap cameras are available from Flip, Creative, and Kodak (among others) to fill the niche. These cameras are tiny, shoot decent quality video, and make transfer to online venues quick and easy.

9. Maintain your social networks

No, we aren’t talking about your Facebook and Myspace profile although there are certainly benefits to participating in those communities. We’re talking about maintaining connections with the people you actually know. You never know when you may find an opportunity to collaborate with a friend who has a unique skill or when you might need a reference for a job application or maybe you know someone in a high place who could get you a job if times get hard. Maintaining your existing relationships when you don’t necessarily need them is much easier than making new ones when you do need them.

8. Fully utilize your calendar

I’m a big fan of Google Calendar, but there are plenty of nice calendar apps out there–web-based and otherwise. Whichever calendar you use, you may not be getting out of it everything it can offer. Sure, the calendar is a no-brainer for tracking events like birthdays, meetings, appointments, and the like, but have you ever thought of using the calendar to remind you when that promotional APR on the new credit card expires? How about a reminder every six months to make an appointment with the dentist? Maybe a reminder for changing the filter in the A/C unit in your home. Dare I suggest a reminder for your wedding anniversary? You wouldn’t forget that now, would you?

7. Get rid of stuff

It’s 2009, and you’re a geek. Unlike some people, you understand that movies and music are data. They are no different from Word documents or your computer’s alert sounds. I’m betting you don’t have a burned CD lying around for each document you want to keep, but you very well may have a stack of DVDs and CDs ready to play at a moment’s notice. Rip those bad boys to a cheap internal hard drive and ditch the mountains of discs. They will be easier to organize and access, and you’ll appreciate recovering that space they were taking up.

6. Who needs paper?

In keeping with the theme of getting rid of unneeded stuff, most paper records can be digitized and the original documents trashed. All you need is a scanner and a little free hard disk space and you’re ready to go. If you really want to do it in style, consider a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner which will feed multi-page documents, save as PDF, and OCR (That’s optical character recognition. It makes the text of your documents searchable!) your documents with the press of a button. It makes things much easier.

5. Setup a home server

So, now all your video, audio, and paper records have been digitized. It would be nice to have a centralized location to store all this data. You can use a spare computer you have lying around as a server to create a central point for storage and access of all your files! If you go with Linux, you can expect to do a bit more tweaking, but you can get away with a bit less in terms of hardware. I retired my old gaming PC into service as a home server/media center. It is connected to my TV and receiver so that I can fully enjoy all my media. I have a couple of 500GB hard drives in it to store everything. They are RAIDed so that I always have my data if one of the drives goes bad. If you’re really serious about preserving your data, there are several off-site backup solutions that give you peace-of-mind for a price.

4. Keep up-to-date backups

Speaking of backups, here we have the nerd equivalent of the “lose weight” New Year’s resolution: that thing that everyone knows they should be doing yet no one does or wants to do. The thing about backups is that they don’t pay off unless something goes wrong. You gain nothing from having one if everything is running smoothly which makes them that much more difficult to do because you can only perform them when everything is running smoothly. Don’t be that guy who has to mail off his hard drive and pay hundreds of dollars to have mission-critical data recovered the next time disaster strikes. Try one of the aforementioned off-site backup services or just buy a cheap USB hard drive and copy your entire hard disk over to it every couple of weeks or so. You’ll be glad you did.

3. Cut the cord and ditch your landline phone

It’s nothing new to cancel your landline and use the cell phone exclusively. Nearly 16% of Americans have taken this step already. If you’re like me, there may be some reason compelling you to hang on to the old standby. If that’s the case, you may be able to retain key functionality while saving loads of dough with a Skype subscription. Skype is an excellent VOIP service that works through your computer. I was able to cancel my already-cheaper-than-traditional-phone-service VOIP line which was $25 per month in favor of a year’s subscription to both SkypeIn and SkypeOut which gives us inbound and outbound calling for only $60 for the entire year! And if you really don’t want to have to use the computer as your phone, you can always pick up a standalone Skype handset.

2. Be more active on the social web

This may seem frivolous to some, but you’d be surprised at the value you can glean from seeing what everyone is raving about on the web. Certainly, some communities have more to offer than others, but “crowdsourcing” is an awesome way to find cool stuff online more efficiently. Take a social news site like digg or reddit: you have a group of net addicts surfing millions of web sites, finding the best content, and putting it all in one place. Then you have those same users collectively voting on the content which should be seen most of all. The content that gets the most votes is what you see. It’s a win-win for everyone involved. Just don’t forget to give back by participating.

And the number one New Year’s resolution for the geek masses:

1. Make awesome things and put them online

Human beings need a creative outlet. The feeling of making something that others can enjoy or derive some sort of value from is without compare. Everyone can contribute something. If you are a professional geek, take what you do as your job and apply it to your own pet project. Developers- make a web app on your own time that fills a need you have (most likely, others have that need too). Writers- write an awesome story or a how-to article and post it on your blog. Artists- put up some of your work online for free. Troubleshooters- hang out in the forums for some software you like a lend a helping hand occasionally. There is no one who cannot contribute something of value to the fantastic ecosystem of knowledge we call the Internet.

Are there any of these items you would like me to elaborate on further? If so, hit me up in the comments or @raddevon on twitter. I love hearing from you!

Image used under Creative Commons license. By Mr Magoo ICU @ Flickr

It’s called FriendFeed. It’s intended purpose is as an aggregator for the many social sites typical addicts (like you and I) participate in on a daily basis. That’s flickr, twitter, Netflix, Disqus, digg, reddit, YouTube, brightkite, del.icio.us, last.fm, Facebook, and LinkedIn, among others. However, the most important supported service for the purposes of this post is Google Reader.

For many of it’s supported services, FriendFeed is very selective in the content it chooses to add to your feed. In Google Reader, only your shared items will make it to the feed. It would be a bit overwhelming if all of everyone’s items were posted. Since only shared items make it, you will get only the best of your friends feed items.

Once you have configured FriendFeed to link to your Google Reader account, FriendFeed will periodically check for shared items and add them to your FriendFeed. You and your FriendFeed subscribers (Unlike twitter, when you add a FriendFeed user, you have “subscribed” to them.) will have the opportunity to interact with shared items in a number of ways: by commenting on them, liking them, or re-sharing them. The comment system is really where it’s at. In Google Reader, sharing is a one-way affair; I share an item (with a note if I so choose) and you look at it. In FriendFeed, I may share an item which can then foster an entire discussion around it by way of the comments. The commenting isn’t over after the initial posting. This is really a groundbreaking new facet of sharing Internet content.

FriendFeed has features that foster community. When you first get started, your page will be barren, but you will soon start to find friends as with other social networks. You can use the friend recommendation page to quickly find like-minded people to connect with. You may also browse the rooms which are spaces where users may share items with others with similar interests. You will find a room for Apple-loves, for gamers, social media buffs, and just about any other group you can think of. Feel free to create rooms around your own interests and start sharing.

On its surface, FriendFeed appears to be a very focused feed reader that delivers only your friends’ activities online. However, it is a fantastic community built around the wealth of content published daily on the Internet. Jump in and start talking! Also, be sure to subscribe to me!

First, you will need to make a stop by Doug’s AppleScripts. There are two scripts we need for this process: No Lyrics to Playlist and Needle Drop. The former is fairly self-explanatory; it makes a playlist of every track in your library without lyric information. The latter allows you to specify a number of seconds to play of each track in a given playlist. After invoking Needle Drop, it will load up and play each song in your playlist for the time you specify.

There is one more piece of software needed to complete the process: TunesTEXT. This is a dashboard widget that finds lyrics for the currently playing iTunes track and adds them to your library.

Now, we can put the pieces together. Install the dashboard widget by double-clicking on it. The scripts have to be installed manually. Unzip the downloads and drag the scripts into (your home folder)/Library/iTunes/Scripts/. Once everything is installed, start your iTunes. If iTunes is already open, you will have to close and re-open it so that it will pick up the new scripts.

Once iTunes has started, you should see the scripts you just installed in a menu on the menu bar that looks like an unfurled scroll . Switch to the music section of your library. Click the scroll and choose “No Lyrics to Playlist.” This script will take a minute to comb through your tracks to find those that have no lyrics. Now, you may have to clean this list a bit. If you have podcasts, they will also be included in the list. Sort the list by Genre and delete any tracks that you don’t want lyrics for (e.g. books, comedy, classical, podcasts).

Now, you should have a playlist with only the songs you want to search lyrics for. We can use Needle Drop to play just enough of each track so that TunesTEXT has time to find lyrics. I found that, on my connection, five seconds was plenty of time for the lyrics to be found. You may have to experiment to find the perfect balance. Especially if you have lots of music, you want to choose the shortest playtimes that are enough to find lyrics to reduce the time the search will take.

While still in the No Lyrics playlist, click the scroll and select the Needle Drop script. You will see a dialog box where you can enter the playtime for each track. Enter the time you determined was ideal for your setup (or just try five seconds—it worked for me!). Now, the tracks will begin to play, the lyrics will be searched and added by TunesTEXT, and all will be right with the world. Enjoy!

1. Do not buy from Dell. Their products are tested so poorly they may come to you bad right out of the box.
2. Buy a Mac. Their support staff speaks English as their first language. I have no problem with anyone no matter where they are from, but taking people and teaching them enough English to troubleshoot is an unnecessary barrier between the customer and a solution. Troubleshooting is a process that is difficult enough already. I also have problems with companies that run a business in the United States to get our money while shipping as much work as possible overseas to save on labor costs. It exploits Americans and those people who are left doing the jobs for practically nothing.
3. Having a store nearby (as Apple does) is a fantastic tool in getting issue resolution. It’s easy for a Dell rep halfway across the globe to hang up on me because I don’t have the first name of the person who originally purchased the PC from them. It’s not so easy for my physical presence in a retail outlet to be ignored.
4. You get what you pay for.

Happy computer shopping!

If you know who you want to vote for and why, then you should certainly vote. However, this leaves out a huge percentage of the people who will be voting this time around and choosing people based on party affiliation, skin color, or how they look in a bikini. If you are one of these people, the country would hope that you would stay home! Democracy is government by the people, but there is no value in this principal if the people are uninformed about the issues. If people are not educated to understand the implications of casting their votes for one or another candidate, everything good about the system is undermined. There is no value in a popularity contest to decide the presidency, no value in voting your pocketbook, no value in voting your skin color or the name you like or who is a better speaker or any of that. None of those things will determine where we will be in four or eight years.

So, I speak to those of you who don’t know what the fuck is going on right now. If you plan to vote for who your parents are voting for (for only that reason), if you plan to vote straight down the line for the party you prefer (without justification), or if you plan to vote based on the names of the candidates, do the world a favor: stay home and watch soap operas!

Unfortunately, the burden shouldn’t fall entirely on the voter. People must continue to live their lives in spite of the coming elections. The information we need to inform ourselves about the issues should be readily available. The presidential candidates are doing a much better job than they ever have (thanks in large part to the Internet) of getting out the information about their stances on the issues. There are also lots of lies coming from all sides of the debate. We are fortunate to have access to resources like factcheck.org to help sort those out. However, it seems that local politics (at least in my part of the country) thrive on as little information as possible getting out. It is very difficult to find pertinent information on local politicians. Local governments should take responsibility for making this type of information more easily accessible.

To get you started on the right foot, I would like to let everyone know that John McCain drowns puppies for fun on the weekends. He also enjoys burning down orphanages. Those are, of course, only the worst things about McCain. For the most part, he likes to just relax and “hang out with friends” on the grounds of his home, Castle Greyskull Snake Mountain.

Hit the link to see the rest…

Evil socialism

Defense- What if society as a whole were asked to be responsible for providing everyone that wanted it a shiny new set of golf clubs? It would also provide a new set every time those ran out. Would you be outraged? There’s a small chance that the golfers out there might not mind… even some of them probably do mind. What does this have to do with defense? That starts with a deeper question.

The argument for socialized military is that, were we ever attacked, we would need to have defense provided for us by the government. Great. However, I would think we could build that defense on a much smaller budget. How is our military actually used? Let’s look at the attack on Iraq. Iraq: a country with no WMDs and no ties to 9/11. That takes care of the justification we originally had for going. This is how this attack was justified as a social service. We are threatened by this entity. We have linked them to something everyone is scared of right now. We need to go in and stop them. Of course, we now know that these justifications were contrived (or, at best, derived from bad intelligence). What were the true motives for an attack on oil-rich Iraq? This pattern of fighting for the economic interests of American corporations is not new. It has been repeated throughout history. There are always injustices taking place. Just look at Darfur. We have labelled it “genocide” but have not intervened on the behalf of those people. If we were looking for places that needed help in 2003, Iraq was certainly not at the top of the list. America tends to find a way to muster the most outrage in places where our economic interests are at stake. Let’s go back to socialized golf equipment. Most would agree that you should pay for your own golf clubs if you want them. Why? Because not everyone needs them so not everyone should pay for them. What if we have a defense budget that is sold as a service to everyone but used disproportionately by our richest corporations?

I would propose privatized defense in which people could contribute to a national defense fund or even hire a party of their own choosing to defend on their behalf. If we have such faith in the fantastic free market, wouldn’t we want to let that market dictate our defense budget too? Many people have problems with insuring the survival of poor people on welfare who they perceive as lazy. I have a much bigger problem with paying taxes to kill hundreds of thousands of people just becase they happen to live in the same region as people who don’t care for America. This is why 2,500 people died on 9/11—a group of leaders who didn’t mind writing off lives as collateral damage in order to make a point. I’m sure we have taught them a lesson they will never forget what with us validating their methods by using them against nearly 100,000 of their own civilians.

Corporate welfare- Let’s everyone get pissed off about having to make sure the poor have their basic needs met such that they may survive while also applauding tax breaks to corporations, tax cuts for the rich, and the recent $700 billion dollar bailout that is paying for retreats and hunting trips for AIG and fucking bonuses for corporate executives. I can’t imagine the outrage if Congress had said we needed $700 for a humanitarian emergency. People starve all the time. That much money would go quite far to help them. Instead, we waste it on people who are nowhere near the point of starvation. In fact, most of these people have lived a far more decadent lifestyle than 98% of the planet for years now. Now, they have begun to ask for more. And, yes, I know the argument that the entire economy will collapse if we don’t bail out Wall Street. So, how long are the taxpayers expected to prop up this house of cards?

Some infrastructure- I can concede that running water and sewer systems provide either direct or indirect benefit to near everyone, but what about the massive sums that are spent on maintaining the infrastructure to support travel by car? In this economic climate, there are growing numbers of people who either don’t use these services altogether or use them in a much more limited capacity to, say, your average Hummer driver. I do not believe that road building and maintenance should be relegated entirely to the private sector, but It does seem more logical that these things should be paid for exclusively by taxes collected in actions directly related to use of the roads. Tax bus fares, cab fares, fuel purchases, and car purchases and tax them sufficiently that no other sources of funds are necessary. Property taxes and sales taxes on non-automotive items should never be diverted to any road maintenance tasks.

Good socialism

Health care- Lots of countries do it very successfully. Sure, there are horror stories. We have our fair share. Unfortunately, in this country, you don’t get to qualify as a horror story unless you are paying for health coverage whether on your own or through your company. What about the millions who cannot afford coverage who are having to suffer without treatment. Well, they can’t be angry about our system because the system requires that you buy coverage. Why is that not reason enough for outrage? I personally have insurance and have had numerous issues with my coverage in spite of the fact that I am in excellent health. I have never had any surgery, chronic problems, or any really expensive healthcare for my insurer to cover. It always feels as though the insurance company is just looking for any reason not to cover me in spite of the fact that they have no qualms whatsoever taking my money in the meantime.

Socialized retirement (social security)- No one should have to work his entire life. Why not guarantee retirement? Why should retirement savings hinge on the whims of the market? Long-term returns on the stock market are pretty solid, but what does that mean for people who were planning to retire about now? Chances are, they don’t really want to wait another five or more years for this mess to straighten back out. I know if it were me ready to retire, I’m not going to want to wait another six months!

Education- There is certainly a place for private education. I know that, if creationism takes the reigns from evolution as the choice origin of life story in public schools, I will be sending my child to a private school. I know there are as many and probably more who would state the exact opposite. The value of a free-for-all educational system cannot be disputed. We have enough socio-economic inequality as it is. This is a rather significant way our society attempts to level the playing field. It is certainly flawed in more ways than can be counted, but the solution is without a doubt reform rather than abolition.

Socialism that is rarely—if ever—questioned

• fire protection
• police protection
• trash pickup
• city water
• city sewer
• recycling

Conclusion

So, what does all this tell us? As with almost anything else, socialism is not black or white. It doesn’t fit squarely into the Star Wars good versus evil view of the world that has been popularly propagated by fear mongers. Some services make sense socialized. Others are better purchased on an individual basis. Many aspects of our society that are wholly American are socialism on a small scale. We should be aware that this idea of services provided through taxpayer money is not wholly evil while other forms of socialism we have already adopted but not framed as such may go too far.

If you are interested in collaborating with me, drop me a line via e-mail or in the comments of this post.

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