I use the star feature of Google Maps to mark the places I have been. That way when I am searching for something else I have points of reference to where I have been in the past. Over time the collection of stars has grown.
Category Archives: Computers/Technology
Mechanical Turking for Amazon’s iPhone app
So a few days ago I saw a link to the HITs for the photo based product search in Amazon’s new iPhone app. And decided it might be fun to do some. And amazon was paying 10¢ a pop, so I thought it might be worth seeing how easy it was. I quickly started seeing patterns on what people were using to app to find many of them were obviously taken at the office and at their desk because trends appeared quickly.
Below is a list of some of the things I saw come up often and some notes about them.
For the watches, I was only able to find an exact match once. And for the coffee cups, never. I found every book someone took a photo of though. Only two photos appeared to come from inside a store.
Item | # | Notes |
Phones | 12 | Three of them were Blackberries three were iPhones or iPhone boxes and 3 office phones |
Watches | 10 | I was only able to identify one of them |
Figurine / Toy | 9 | Was able to identify about three of them exactly |
Mugs, Cups or Glasses | 8 | Not able to match any |
Computers | 8 | Four were Mac Four were PC. All but one were laptops, the other was an old G4 |
Books | 7 | Was able to find them all |
Appliances | 6 | |
Headphones | 6 | |
Candy | 5 | |
Water | 4 | |
Hard Drive | 4 | One WD, Two Lacie One Maxtor |
Widget | 4 | Adapters, connectors, etc. was only able to find one audio connector |
Household Supplies | 3 | Lysol, Cleaners, etc |
Lotion or Soap | 3 | |
Monitors | 3 | |
Mouse | 3 | One Apple, Two Microsoft |
Printer | 3 | |
Router/Switch | 3 | Two routers and one switch |
Shoes | 3 | |
Coke | 2 | Regular and Coke Zero |
Keyboard | 2 | HP and Logitec |
Lamp | 2 | |
Other drinks | 2 | I think they were wine |
Posters | 2 | Was not able to match either |
Powertools | 2 | matched both |
Speakers | 2 | Matched One |
Sunglasses | 2 | No matches |
Supliments | 2 | |
TV | 2 | Both HDTV |
Video Game Accesories | 2 | Controller and Memory Card |
Water Bottles | 2 | Found both |
Bluetooth Headsets | 1 | |
Calculator | 1 | |
CDs | 1 | Portishead – Third |
Chairs | 1 | |
Clocks | 1 | |
Clothing | 1 | Winter hat |
Decoration | 1 | |
DVDs | 1 | It was the closeup of the back of one. |
Fan | 1 | |
Food | 1 | Bananas (Amazon only had things made from bananas) |
Jewelry | 1 | A blurry ring |
Kleenex | 1 | |
Magnets | 1 | |
Mailbox | 1 | A blue Mailbox! It would be illegal for Amazon to sell one! |
Memory Card Reader | 1 | |
Micrometer | 1 | Digital |
Person | 1 | It was actually their tie, you could not see their face |
Playing Cards | 1 | |
Scooter | 1 | |
Sculptures | 1 | |
Software | 1 | A Garageband Jam Pack |
Stocking | 1 | |
Sun | 1 | |
Video Cameras | 1 | |
Video Games | 1 | Guitar Hero On Tour |
Walkie Talkies | 1 | |
iPod Touch Screenshots | 1 |

Plaxo is Eating Safari’s Cookies
Ok, for the past many months I have been having an issue with Safari losing all of it’s cookies randomly. The Cookies.plist file would go empty thus losing all my logins for websites. I was not able to figure out what was eating Safari’s cookies until just recently.
There never seemed to be a pattern to what was causing it. Not a specific site. Nothing l could seemingly track and reproduce. I always had a feeling it was caused by Mac OS X 10.5. The issue also appeared to be separate from a recent cookie issue that was fixed. But I might have found the real reason.
The desktop software Plaxo provides to sync the Mac OS X Addressbook appears to set tracking cookies in the Cookies.plist. It does this without even visiting the site. And it seems to have a habbit of destroying the Cookies.plist when it tries to update sometimes. This might be due to not using the Cookies.plist API, or it might conflict with an update from a website happening at the same time, thus nuking the file.
Either way, for the longest time my cookies would disappear multiple times a day. But now after removing the Plaxo software (partly a seemingly evil input manager) no more cookie destruction. If you have Cookies disappearing, and Plaxo for Mac installed. Do an uninstall of Plaxo and see if your problem goes away.

A List of Cool Media I am Currently Consuming
Here is a list of some media I am regularly looking forward to consuming currently. I can’t stress enough how cool Skins is.
TV
Podcasts
OwlBoy.com- Now More Valid
Just spent some time fixing errors causing my site to not be Valid XHTML. I found lots of tiny things all over, and was able to go from 145+ errors down to about 5. Those last 5 I just can’t quite get. This is not to say that is true for my whole site. I did the work with the front page of the blog.
Why did the dudes in charge of XHTML not include a simple alternative to the center tag?
IE Sucks.
I just spent an hour playing with CSS to fix the layout on Vicomm.org to look right in IE 5.5 and 6.0. It don’t even look like it does in Firefox and Safari. It is just slightly off, and now useable. Designing for multiple browsers should not be an issue too, since there are strict standards.
Browsers like Safari, and Firefox strive to follow them to the letter. While Microsoft seems to care less when it comes to IE. Internet Explorer 7 seems to getting things better though. At least is does transparent PNG files properly. Now if only it was easy to get everyone to upgrade to it.
I started working on this because I popped onto the forums and saw that there were some crazy errors and layout issues regarding the theme. Turns out the host Emmalee is using finally got around to moving us to a new server like he said he would about 2 months ago. Seems it does what he promised though, finally have access to write privileges on the server and it seems a bit faster. And the fix to the theme was just telling it where things were on the new server. It Coulda been worse. He could have nuked our databases.
Once I fixed the issues I decided it was time to fix the errors I saw when the site was used in IE 6. I saw these for the first time when Emmalee was showing the site to some people telling them I made it etc. It was rather frustrating to find out since I had the site looking fine in both Firefox and Safari, and people had told me it looked fine in Internet Explorer.
Well, enough of this rant, I should go to sleep. Seems most of my blog posts are always made at night, when I should be sleeping.
Phishing PSA
Here is a PSA I made for Video Production. The goal of the project was to make a 60 second spot that was a PSA advocating a call to action on a chosen subject. I picked phishing because I thought it was a new and fresh topic that would be unique, and I knew pretty much how to explain it. This also gave me a chance to work with Motion for the first time. Let me know if you learned anything from it in the comments of this post, or the video’s YouTube page.
Anyone else suspect Mac OS X 10.5 will come in black?

Anyone else suspect Mac OS X 10.5 will come in black? It just seems like all the new styles and designs of late from Apple are headed this way. And their design is always reflected in the OS.
The whole WWDC website is dark, and has the same blue we see in the newer iTunes.
Worldwide Developers Conference 2007 – Sessions
The whole Final Cut website is even more White on Black, with fancy white on black tooltips.
Apple – Final Cut Studio 2
Not to mention the advertising style they are using on the Leopard site.
Apple – Apple – Mac OS X – Leopard Sneak Peek
The way Time Machine looks.
Apple – Apple – Mac OS X – Leopard Sneak Peek – Time Machine
The iTunes website has also gone all Black.
Apple – iPod + iTunes
MacPro too.
Apple – Mac Pro
The iPhone uses White on black in lots spots, and it also uses the same blue we see in the current iTunes.
Apple – iPhone
I think the current UI appearance we see in the Dev builds is just a prepping for a full overhaul.
Shiny Black is the new Pinstripes.
I also posted this on the MacNN Mac OS X Forum
List: Media I am Currently Consuming.
XBox 360: Gamertag
We just got a new XBox 360 for chirstmas. And when setting it up I found out I seem to have lost the gamertag “OwlBoy” to the void from letting my account lapse. So my new one is ‘OwlBoyDotCom’. Add me!