I came across this article on ESPN.com today. It discusses the graduation rates for the Division I schools in the United States and compares athletes to the students at large. I don’t know what shocks me more: the fact that at a 62 percent graduation rate for athletes that’s 2 percent higher than for students at large (both seem low to me) or the fact that near the end of the article, they start comparing “black” and “white” athletes. Even though I’m shocked that in this day and age they still make this comparison, perhaps with better terminology/writing it wouldn’t have caught me off-guard as much as it did.
Updates from October, 2004
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Andy -
The rumors were true. Two new iPods were released today. The first is the iPod photo and comes in 40 GB and 60 GB models featuring a colour screen to view all your photos. While the colour screen is a nice touch, I have a feeling many people will find it a tad expensive to start – but still very nice! Of course, most people initially feel that Apple’s products are a bit expensive when they are first announced but then Apple can’t keep up with the demand. This will probably be the case this time again! These are available to purchase immediately.The second is the U2 iPod that has been passed through the rumor mill for the past few days. It’s a black iPod with red scroll wheel on the front to correspond with the album cover for U2’s new album. These will be available in November when U2’s album is released.
Many European countries were added to the iTunes music store today as well. While Canada is still left out, Apple also officially confirmed today that we would be getting our own music store in November. Looks like the November 26th date that’s been floating around might be correct afterall.
Andy -
I was having some troubles with Windows Explorer crashing – explorer.exe errors – when I was trying to either move DivX or Xvid files around on my computer or watch them. After a quick Google it turns out that it’s actually a problem with these codecs and SP2 for Windows. The latest version of DivX fixes this problem for both DivX and Xvid files. You can get the codec here. When it’s installing, it will ask you if you want a free trial of DivX Pro – no need to do this if all you want to do is playback files. I would also recommend using Media Player Classic as your default player which can be found here (scroll down until you see the file) or from the links on my Files page.
Andy -
BugMeNot – If you are annoyed by having to fill in forms online just to view free content (the NY Times website is an example), just install this extension, then right-click on the fields in the form, and user-submitted logins will be automatically entered allowing you to get right to the content.
IEView – As much as I’d like to say that I use Firefox for everything, there are the occasional sites that either aren’t functional or don’t look right. In that case, I just right-click anywhere on the page and chose ‘View This Page in IE’ and it will automatically launch Internet Explorer and go directly to the page I was viewing.
Copy Plain Text – Ever try to copy some text from a website into Word or another document and the formatting is all off or all over the place. With this extension, it allows you to highlight text, then right-click and chose ‘Copy as Plain Text’ to have just the information and not all the formatting copied to the clipboard.
Web Developer – For someone like myself who is always tinkering with web development, this extension makes my life so much easier. With drop down menus for CSS formatting and validation services (to name just a couple), this extension must be had for anyone looking to make developing websites easier.
Those are most of my favourites. You can find a few more on my Files page. Let me know if you have any others!
Andy -
Rumours are starting to surface on the internet that Apple may be extending their iTunes Music Store to Canada this holiday season. The date that is floating around is November 26th. I for one am super excited about this since I’m an iPod owner and there is currently no online store in Canada with downloads supported by the iPod. Rumour is that the prices will be 99 cents a track.In other news in iPod land, it is expected that on November 23, U2 will be releasing its new album in a new way. One option instead of buying the CD will be to purchase an iPod with the new album pre-loaded. Again, this is just a rumour but U2 has been doing some advertising with Apple lately and their new single is availble from the iTunes Music Store in the US. To add further fuel to the rumours, some sites have also reported that it will be a special edition black iPod containing the new album and various songs from older U2 albums. I don’t know if I beleive that Apple will move away from its white product line, but it will definetely be interesting to see how this plays out, and if true, what kind of effect this marketing strategy will have for both U2 and Apple. Stay tuned!
Andy -
Time for yet another of my favourite Firefox extensions. If you’re tired of the annoying ads that are showing up on almost every website these days, the Adblock extension is for you. I know that websites need to generate revenue from ads to keep their sites alive, but some sites have become so ridiculous with ads popping up or flash animations that cover up site content that it’s time to put some of that to an end. After you install Adblock you have some options by going to Tools -> Adblock -> Preferences. Under the Adblock Options button, you can choose what you want – play around with it a bit to see what everything does. Then, when you’re surfing the web and come across an ad you don’t like, you just right-click on the ad, choose Adblock image, and you’ll never see that ad again. You can also use wildcards (*) to block a series of images. For instance, let’s say that the ad came from http://someadsite.com/ads/ad.jpg – you could block that one jpg, or you could set the filter to block http://someadsite.com/ads/* – this way, you will never see any image from that directory. You’ll get the hang of it once you start playing. Also, remember that this only blocks ad images so any ads that are text only will likely still be seen. Sometimes you can get around this if the company uses iframes by saying Adblock iframe when you right-click – but sometimes text ads will be there to stay. I don’t mind that though because if all ads were just text ads, I don’t think they would be nearly as annoying.If you don’t want the hassle of having to “start clean” and block all ads yourself, I’ve decided to make my adblock file available to you. Save my Adblock text file to your computer and in the Adblock Options, choose Import filters. Use OK to override your filters or Cancel to append my file to yours. This file will get your started but remember, it’s most-likely specific to sites I visit regularly or from filters that I’ve collected by visiting Adblock sites and/or forums on the internet. Therefore, you may still need to add some filters for sites that you visit.
Enjoy the internet without ads!
Andy -
A while back I mentioned that I would make some posts about my favourite extensions (plug-ins) for the Firefox web browser. First off, if you still aren’t using Firefox, download it now!My favourite extension has to be the news reader Sage. Simply put, if a web page that you visit frequently has syndication features, in the form of RSS or Atom feeds, you can add that feed to Sage and quicly read and search your favourite sites in a consistent format.
For instance, if you look to the left side-bar on my page, you’ll see that there is a link for RSS 2.0 – that’s the RSS feed for my site. If you install Sage into Firefox, you can then setup a folder in your Bookmarks (I call mine RSS) and put the link to my RSS feed in that folder as a bookmark. I’ve also added a Sage button to the top bar in my browser (it sits beside my Home button) that opens a side-panel for Sage listing all my RSS feeds. I can then quickly scan or search all my favourite websites each day without having to load up each page individually. I find the content much easier to read when it is shown with consistent formatting.
Here’s a list of some of my favourite RSS feeds – let me know in the comments section if you have any other good ones that you read regularly or if you have any problems getting Sage to work for you. I find it easiest to right-click on the feed, then click Copy Link Location. Then go into Sage and under Manage Feeds, and paste the link (ctrl+v) that you just copied into a New Bookmark.
Hoyd News Network, Scott Mills.ca, Slashdot, Engadget, Wired News, TSN
If you like this extension, stay tunded since I’m also preparing a post about how people have now started integrating audio into their RSS feeds and have these feeds automatically update on their iPod or other portable device – it’s called PodCasting and I’ll be writing more about it soon!
Andy -
I know it’s only mid-October, but it’s getting colder here in Calgary and with all the rain in the city today, that meant snow in the mountains! (the picture is from the Mountain Cam at Sunshine. Since I’m such a fan of skiing, I’m of the opinion that once it starts getting cold outside, it should just go all the way and get cold enough to snow so that the ski season will start sooner. Judging by the picture, it looks like the snow has started. I haven’t heard the projected opening date for Sunshine yet, but Lake Louise says they will be open early November. Bring on the snow!
Andy -
More Gmail functionality! For those of you that love the storage of Gmail, but aren’t too keen on the web interface, you can now use a typical mail reader (I recommend Thunderbird) to read and send from your Gmail account. The program is called gPopper and is totally free! I’m only using my Gmail account as a Gmail drive right now, but if anyone tries this out, let me know how it works! I have heard that there may be issues with people using SP2 and this utility, so I’d be interested in hearing your experiences.
If you don’t want to completely move away from the web interface, there is also a utility called gNotify that will sit in your sytem tray and notify you when you have new mail.
Andy -
I’ve finally gotten around to updating the Files section of this site – not only does it now match the rest of the site, it has also been updated with some new programs. I hope to have even more up in the near future but for now, these are the must have files. As always, you can get to the files section by clicking on Files on the left, or by going to http://files.hoydnewsnetwork.com.
Andy -
I saw this in a couple of places but I’m going to take the description from kevinrose.com since it explains it really well:“Turn your GMail account into a 1GB of off-site storage:
GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium.
GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag’n’drop files to.
This is a great way to backup your important docs. The only downside is that it’s limited to 10MB per file (the GMail attachement limit). Hopefully future versions will break up large files, then upload.”
UPDATE: I just got around to trying this out and I must say, this is an awesome feature of Gmail! It’ll be interesting to see if Gmail does anything to stop it. There is the downside of the attachment limit, but I can see this being great for people that use a computer at home and at work and want to be able to move files back and forth very easily. Just install Gmail drive on both computers and you’re good to go. You can choose to have it log you in automatically or not, which makes it possible for multiple users to use the program from the same computer. Very cool!
UPDATE 2: I’ve also set up a filter within Gmail to automatically label any email that starts with GMAILFS (the header for all Gmail drive files) to be labeled as GMAILFS and automatically be sent to the archive. That way, when I’m actually using Gmail, I don’t see all the files that I’m storing with the Gmail drive in my Inbox – give it a try!
Andy
