Carl Hutzler’s Blog

The OLPC is a sub $200 laptop created with the goal of providing a laptop to every child in the world. Right now you can buy two of them for $400 and they will ship one to you and the other to a child in a part of the world that needs one.

The machine is fairly nice. It has Wifi, ethernet, USB ports, sound in/out, a decent screen which even works in the bright sunlight, a still/video camera, a nice battery, and more. It really is a lot of machine for the money. It includes a web browser and several applications for kids to learn how to work with computers like how to program, memory games, music composition, and more. And if you are at all linux savvy you can install other stuff too (the operating system is linux although you don’t have to be a geek to make the machine work). Their help site (wiki.laptop.org) is very well done and has great information too.

I just bought one (and donated one) because I think my son will love having his own laptop. I was even showing him something last night called “Turtle Graphics” which is programming language (formally called LOGO) on my computer and he was very interested in how to make the turtle draw what he wanted….and LOGO is built into the OLPC. It even has the PYTHON programming language built in which is what makes most of the web work! What a great thing to learn. And it comes with a number of games and funner stuff too like the ability to compose music.

So, if you haven’t found the perfect gift yet and are interested in something that is both educational and also might help a kid somewhere else in the world, this might be a great idea.

http://laptop.org/

As you can probably see from the last 4 posts, I am playing around with podcasting. Its very easy to upload an MP3 file to your blog and have it become a podcast. You just go over to Feedburner.com and give them the normal RSS feed for your blog. Feedburner will then massage it into the right RSS format for iTunes and other applications to consume as a podcast.

One small downside is that the normal RSS feed for my blog has ALL of my posts in it. What if I had a link to an MP3 in a post that I did NOT want in my podcast?? I was interested in how I could segregate those posts. Turns out its simple. If you apply a category (tag) to your podcast postings (like category=podcast) then you can very easily have wordpress create an RSS feed for just that category. Below is such an RSS feed link for my blog. I have all my test podcasts under a category called “podcast”…

http://carlhutzler.com/blog/category/podcast/feed

I then tell feedburner to digest the above RSS feed and produce an MP3 Podcast feed which gets published as:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CarlHutzlersBlog

Add in the special itns:// service delineation and you have a podcast rss feed that will automatically open itunes and subscribe the person to your podcast with just one click. Cool :-)

itns://feeds.feedburner.com/CarlHutzlersBlog

My Conservatory Ballet client wanted to sell tickets online to some upcoming performances of the Nutcracker Ballet. I guess doing it all by hand as they have done in the past (phone calls, running a credit card, recording who paid, etc) is a pain in the you know. So with just 4 days notice :-) they asked if I could whip something up.

I took a quick look around and was overwhelmed by the number of shopping cart programs available. Everything from a service to software to freeware. I tried to ensure the package I was going to use had inventory management and could take paypal payments. You need inventory control to sell tickets of course. And Paypal is just easy to set-up on such short notice.

I went with Zen Cart and have been reasonably pleased. The software seems robust and the shopping experience is very professional and amazingly full featured. And the price was $0!

My only complaint about the program is that the admin interface is very poorly organized. Trying to find a setting for this or that is a 10-15 minute exploration. There are just zillions of options and its not clear what category the option you need is located under. I usually had more success Googling it and seeing someone elses frustration trying to do the same thing along with a reply from someone who happened to know how.

Not sure I would want to run a store with 1000’s of items for sale using Zen Cart, but for something small like we are doing, it worked out just fine. Take a peek if you like…and if you are in the Washington DC area, you should consider buying a ticket. The show is held at the amazing Madeira School overlooking the Potomac in Great Falls, Virginia. The view is worth the price alone….but the show (the 35th production) will be amazing too!

http://conservatoryballet.com/tickets/

Added @11:30am 11/30: Found out that we also need to allow for a 10% discount for purchases of >10 tickets. Zen Cart can discount a single product but did not have the ability to discount an entire shopping cart. Since we wanted the discount to apply for any mix of adult/child and show time tickets, I thought we were stuck. But then I found a free module called Quantity Discounts. After installing the code and activating it under modules, I applied a 10% discount to the cart for >10 items and viola!

My hiking buddy Davy Crockett is running the Grand Canyon again this weekend. This time he is carrying a Satellite Phone and a Satellite/GPS location device. The location device reports his position periodically so we can track his progress on Google Maps. As you can see from the map, his latest position is on the return trip across the Colorado. He just crossed the bridge and is making his way up to Phantom Ranch. Next is the long 5000+ foot climb to the North Rim and the end of his 80+ mile journey which started at 2am yesterday!

He is being sponsored on this run by SKYCALL satellite phones and the SPOT GPS/SAT location device company. So to help with sponsorship, he called into the KSL radio station on their morning outdoor show today. I caught it on the internet from my location at 38.969ºN / 77.341ºW. Here is the recording (7.5MB mp3) if you want to hear what it sounded like live via satellite phone to the radio to the internet to my laptop :-) Not bad!

Update 11/28/2007: Davy just posted his write-up. Fun read.

Email Submission Operations: Access and Accountability Requirements :-)

Network Working Group                                         C. Hutzler
Request for Comments: 5068
BCP: 134                                                      D. Crocker
Category: Best Current Practice              Brandenburg InternetWorking
                                                              P. Resnick
                                                   QUALCOMM Incorporated
                                                               E. Allman
                                                          Sendmail, Inc.
                                                                T. Finch
                               University of Cambridge Computing Service
                                                           November 2007

  Email Submission Operations: Access and Accountability Requirements

Status of This Memo

   This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the
   Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
   improvements.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

   Email has become a popular distribution service for a variety of
   socially unacceptable, mass-effect purposes.  The most obvious ones
   include spam and worms.  This note recommends conventions for the
   operation of email submission and transport services between
   independent operators, such as enterprises and Internet Service
   Providers.  Its goal is to improve lines of accountability for
   controlling abusive uses of the Internet mail service.  To this end,
   this document offers recommendations for constructive operational
   policies between independent operators of email submission and
   transmission services.

   Email authentication technologies are aimed at providing assurances
   and traceability between internetworked networks.  In many email
   services, the weakest link in the chain of assurances is initial
   submission of a message.  This document offers recommendations for
   constructive operational policies for this first step of email
   sending, the submission (or posting) of email into the transmission
   network.  Relaying and delivery entail policies that occur subsequent
   to submission and are outside the scope of this document.

No kidding. Just Google “Carl Hutzler” and check out the fourth result down. Funny.

It’s evidently very new. I could not get it on my regular Gmail account, but I did get it on my hosted domain account….and I had to login and logout and re-login again before it showed in the preferences.

Haven’t tried it yet, but if Gmail’s IMAP works as advertised (and I expect it will) this is a fantastic addition to gmail allowing you to keep your inbox in sync across mobile devices, desktop mail clients, and gmail’s web client.

Follow-up: I tried it and it works just as you would expect with Thunderbird. I will have to try it with my wife’s hacked iPod Touch later. It’s late :-)

So I have a Sprint phone these days (Moto V3m) and I added a Phone as Modem option to my plan which allows me to tether my laptop to the phone via USB or Bluetooth and get an Internet connection (EVDO ~400-500 kbps). All this for $40 on top of the normal voice plan. Not cheap, but not terrible.

Anyway, if I want to, my Mac Book Pro can share the internet connection established through the phone with users on the Mac’s wifi port (or wired ethernet). So I can essentially re-broadcast my EVDO internet connection to people near my Mac laptop either via the Wifi or ethernet connection. I have used this a few times in a meeting or while driving in the car (not me driving) and even on vacation once. Basically if other people need a connection, I can share mine.

And I can see using it more as my wife just got an iPod Touch with wifi built in. And Jake has one of those wifi Nintendo DS units. But to be honest, its kind of a pain to lug around a laptop to do this little function.

Tonight I stumbled upon what may be the answer, the CTR-350 by Cradlepoint. This little “Cellular Travel Router” connects to compatible phones via a USB cable and automagically makes the phone connect as a modem. Then the CTR-350 re-broadcasts the internet connection on 802.11b/g. It will even charge the phone for you which is good as the EVDO runs the battery down quickly.

So for $149 you get a drop dead simple device. Plug and play. No software, no configurations, no drivers. No nothing.

I might just buy one of these if it will work with my Moto V3m (says it will work with the VZW V3c so maybe mine will work too?).

I blogged about this a few weeks back but wanted to update everyone that IK did a press release on Monday announcing their service. The release has some nice information in it for all you independent artists trying to make a few bucks.

INDIEKAZOO: New Service Takes on Goliath in the MP3 World

OK, maybe this is not earth shattering news by itself, but it gets a little better.

• The music is $0.10 less per song than iTunes and the albums seem to be about $1 less than iTunes.
• The music is DRM free. No more pain in the ass restrictions on what I can do with my music
• The MP3 files are encoded at 256 kbps which should translate into very high quality listening
• Files work on just about any device that can play music as it is just a regular MP3 file.

I do not buy much of anything on iTunes mostly because I can usually find the CD for the same price at BestBuy or Target and I hate the DRM crud. No, I don’t steel or provide illegal music, but the DRM stuff is just annoying and inconvenient especially on iTunes video files. With Amazon providing high quality, DRM free, MP3 (as opposed to Apples AC3) format, for LESS money, the choice is clear for me.

The only downside I can see is that Amazon only has two major labels right now - EMI and Universal among many other smaller labels.

Note: There is a small “downloader” application which Amazon recommends installing. They have a Mac and Windows version. I don’t think you need this but it does sound convenient as it will auto add the music into iTunes for you.

A bit off topic, if you are looking for one of the best pure “rock ‘n’ roll” albums out there, spend $9 on this one and you will not be disappointed. Its one of my favorite all time albums.

Ryan Adams: Gold $8.99