Apathetic Thursday

UPDATE: I changed the title of this post to something more appropriate. A future post will talk more about my general complaints with web apps.

The last week in February I went out and finally bought myself an iPod Touch. I had been wishing I had one since January 1st when a good friend showed me his. The original idea I had, although now seen as rather naive, was that I would get an iPod Touch, Apple would shortly after announce the SDK and within a week or so I could have some sweet calendar and to-do apps running on my iPod.

For over a year I have been working with a Palm Zire 31, and have been very pleased with it, but when I got my iPod, the Zire went to ebay. I was really hoping that the iPod could fully replace my Palm Pilot. Well, Apple made their announcement and it wasn’t what I expected. They told me I had to wait until June, or more likely, early to mid July, before I could use my iPod like I wanted too.

I figured I could live with this and that I would simply have to run off Web Apps until June, which wouldn’t be entirely hard because most of my time is spent on a well wireless campus. I already had a preconceived idea of how a to-do list should work and I was hoping someone had made a really wicked awesome web app that would fulfill all my needs, hopefully making things easier and more user friendly than my Palm.

I was first recommended towards Ta-da Lists, which I was really hopefully about, coming from 37 Signals. It was a neat app, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. I really wanted something with due dates, so I can put every assignment for the rest of the semester into it, as well as a long list of things I want to try to accomplish in my free time. I quickly decided that Ta-da Lists was not what I was looking for and moved. (I really like the idea behind it and I love the simple to use interface, but it’s just not what I needed.)

I did some searching via Google and came across a site called, Just Another Mobile Monday, which had a list of several good applications for online to-do lists. A site called Toodledo caught my attention and seemed to have everything I needed. I like Toodledo, it did pretty much everything I wanted to do. It has priorities and allows for grouping in folders, and maintained a “Hotlist” of all tasks that were overdue or coming up soon. For anyone looking for a good to-do web app, I would put Toodledo on my list of “web apps you should try.” For some reason though, I wasn’t satisfied. I had used Toodledo for a few weeks and I really liked it, but I decided I needed to try something else, to see if it fit things better.

The next web app I decided to try out was Listingly. The interface looked neat and method of breaking things down into lists looked promising. After trying it out for a bit though, I was not very impressed with the site. The images wouldn’t always load and the text never sat right in the buttons. I played around with it for a day, but by then I knew I needed something else.

I heard Leo Laporte mention that Remember the Milk was a really good to-do list for the iPhone. I had seen it before when searching for a to-do list, so I thought I should try it out. Remember the Milk looks really promising, but unfortunately, it’s not as nice as I would like yet. After playing around on my Laptop I decided to give it a try on my iPod. I finally found the iPod optimized version of the site and discovered that it was for “pro” users. This means that there is a $25 yearly fee to use the service. Fortunately, they have a 15 day trial period for the software, and I was quickly up and running.

Remember the Milk has a very nice interface, although there are some things that take some getting use too. I have used it for 15 days now and don’t fully understand how location and tags fully work, but I really liked the rest of their set up. The little side graphics looked wonderful and they color scheme was nice too. There were a few more options in adding a task than I really needed, but it worked how I expected for the most part and worked well.

Today, however, my trial is up. Ideally, I want to use a iPod based app, rather than a web based app to store my to-do lists. Over the summer I won’t always be in a location that has wireless connection, in fact, after another year of college I can’t guarantee I’ll have wireless connection anywhere. I’m really hoping to find a great to-do list app for the iPod in June or July. One that will sync with iCalendar and everything. As much as I like Remember the Milk, I don’t feel that $25 is worth 3 months of usage, especially if $25 is suppose to give me $12. Personally, I can’t justify the spending of that money. I can work with the “non-optimized” mobile version of the site, but it really isn’t the same if you know how it could be.

Surfing the Apple website, after my trial had ended, I stumbled across Noter, a simple little to-do list on the web. It took me about 2 minutes to decide that it had no chance of serving my needs and again I needed to move on.

Which actually brings me up until now. I decided to write up my experience, and actually in the process have discovered two things. The first is that there is a site called Vitalist, which like Toodledo and Remember the Milk, look promising. The iPhone interface is free, and it appears to have a good feature set. I have signed up for an account and will probably spend the next day or two playing around with it and seeing how well it works.

The other thing I realized while writing this up was that I really did like Toodledo, and if Vitalist doesn’t live up to my expectations I can always fall back onto it for a few months until I am finally able to run apps on my iPod.

In Conclusion

There are a lot of web apps out there for staying on top of your to-do lists. I think my favorite has to be Remember the Milk, but I don’t agree with their policy of charging for an iPod interface. I understand it makes sense financially for them, but I just wish it was free.

Toodledo is probably my overall favorite because I have used it the longest, but I’m curious to see how well Vitalist works in comparison. After I spend more time with it I’ll have to post up my experience, but I’m hoping it’s going to be a good one.

For anyone who needs to have all posts from the current category displayed in their sidebar.

Usage is probably fairly specific, but for sites that break down products into categories it is extremely helpful.

LandofChaos.net, has been in much need of a complete overhaul and today I just sat down and did it.

I went out looking for inspiration at a number of different CSS gallery sites. As I looked I noticed a common theme throughout about 75% of them. They all had a logo in the top left corner and the main links were in the top right. This was what I was originally thinking for a design, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be so cliche.

I decided to be cliche, but give it my own “chaotic” twist. I thought it would be neat if the drop down logo sat at a slight angle, just enough so that it looked like it was on accident. I think I ended up with too much of an angle, but I decided to leave it. The other thing I thought would be neat to not have the main navigation menu line up. As I started playing around with it though, it looked to planned, like I had an artistic theme and not like it was annoyingly off kilter. So rather than try to set something up so it would be pixel perfect, I decided to go with a completely random method by setting up each menu item to be spaced a random distance from the top of the page. I toyed with some side-to-side randomness, but nothing worked quite how I wanted it.

Beyond that I moved a few links around and added a complete RSS feed of latest posts from the Land of Chaos Store, Apathetic Thursday, Blogging While Paused, Flickr and YouTube.

Let me know what you think of the new look.

Just finished some coding work, which at long last has brought some wonderful functionality to my pride and joy, DeChaos.

DeChaos 4.0 has improved functionality, allowing for 1 level of subfolders and also moving forward and backward freely, skipping some photos and going back to rename others. I have also added support for other file types. At first I limited the program to jpegs, but now it accepts jpegs, pngs, gifs and tiffs.

From what I can tell it seems to be working wonderfully. But I am still looking to find any tiny bugs, which is why I’m posting it as a beta. So if anyone happens to stumble upon a bug, let me know and I’ll try to fix it.

You can find the download link here: http://apatheticthursday.net/dechaos/

I’ve been waiting for WordPress 2.5 for a while now, but I’m glad they are taking the time to make sure everything is working well before the official release.

Back in 2004 and 2005, landofchaos.net looked a lot different than it does today. At the time I was using it for my main website, and the content was rather limited and not nearly as interesting as it is today. (Well, I hope it’s more interesting today.)

One of the things I played with on my old site was header images. I enjoyed just playing around and making neat little images to use as headers. I had a small little script to randomly choose a header each time the page was reloaded, so I made sure they all got used.

Anyway, I just was reminded of those headers today, and decided to dig them out of the archives and display them here. So for my nostalgia, and your enjoyment, here are the final 33 header files I had as of June 2005.

I had some time to think today and began to think about the video games that really rock my world. It is hard for me to choose my favorite video games, because I like several of them a lot and hold their potential values about equal in my mind. Some of it simply has to do with the mood I am in. But not only did I want to think about what video games I like, I wanted to look into why I like them so much and what it is that attracts my attention to them.

DISCLAIMER: This is me writing about my opinion, which is inherently bias. If your opinion differs from mine that is perfectly all right, and I would be glad to hear what you think, however, please realize that I hold the right to reserve reading comments until Thursday.

The Legend of Zelda

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was one of the first video games I had as a child. We got our SNES a few months before the N64 came out. (With a promise to our parents that we wouldn’t also want the N64 because it was newer… which turned out to be completely false later.) A Link to the Past has a quality to it that few other games have. I think it has an amazing replay value. Not necessarily because there are different choices you can make, there really are not any choices, or because it has a hard mode, it doesn’t, but it has a unique quality of game play that makes it enjoyable to pick up and play every now and then.

The game has a really neat feel, there is something about a bird’s eye view or a two dimensional world which makes the game a joy to play. The music quality is rather crummy, but the melodies and notation are amazing. The controls are simple which is a major plus because there is no learning curve to just sit down and play. Battling is easy and most the bosses can be killed amazingly quickly as long as you are capable of sustaining a bunch of damage. This is a game I love to sit down and just run through. The Ocarina of Time is also on my list of awesome games. Living in a three dimensional world, being able to rome around, ride horses, explore caverns and take on a number of side quests made this game an absolute wonder. The music was wonderful and the puzzles that were presented in the dungeons made the game a great challenge.

I was put off by Majora’s Mask and I was never able to get myself into Wind Waker, although the music for Wind Waker was awesome. Twilight Princess was a joy to play through, the Wii’s controller gave the game a whole new feel and it was wonderful. I loved the music and the gameplay. The thing I didn’t like, though, was the locked in feeling I was always having. There were blocked passages that littered the map, limiting progress to only one direction. Even when I had finished the game I didn’t feel like I had a direct route to everywhere I wanted to go. I also felt like there weren’t as many side quests and that there was a tremendous amount of unused territory on the map. Playing through the game again may give me a better chance to explore, but until then I don’t know if I’m entirely satisfied.

Metroid

I love metroids. I don’t know why, but I’m actually in the processes of trying to create a metroid screen saver wherein several metroids will roam around my screen guarding my computer from any intruders. (More on this on this later.)

As with Zelda, my first Metroid encounter occurred long after Metroid had been released. We borrowed the game from my cousins who are several years older than myself and after playing the game for awhile we succeeded in erasing their saved data by leaving the cartridge in the Nintendo for too long. Since then I have purchased my own copy of Super Metroid and I still find it to be one of my favorite games. I love the music, the control style and the gameplay as a whole. The maps and the world are fascinating and there is a great potential for exploring and searching out secret upgrades.

I am of the opinion that the Metroid Prime series was also very well done. The first is my favorite in terms of music, plot, etc, the problem I have with it is the control scheme. When I first played it I had not big problems with the control scheme, but since then I have played more first person shooter games which have the dual control stick scheme. That is, looking and walking are controlled separately whereas Metroid had then controlled together.

I played through Metroid Prime three or four times and have always been meaning to go back and play through it again, trying for a low percent walkthrough, or at least try to get the high jump boots first. (I did once and haven’t been able to since.) I have only played through the two following Metroid games once a piece, since school has not allowed much of a break to go back and play. As a result I don’t know them as well as I know the first one, which also makes me not like them as much.

Metroid Prime 3 is my favorite in terms of control style and the music was good too, but I find that the bosses were far too easy. The disadvantage I had with Prime 3 was that I had to put it down for a month due to school and so I had to pick up the game midway and try to remember what I had done. For this reason alone it is on my list of games I need to run through again.

Mario Kart

My life would not be complete without Mario Kart. I could play Mario Kart for hours, and for that matter, on occasion, I have. The racing style of Mario Kart is perfect, the items allow anyone to have a fair chance (well… sort of…) and the variety of tracks and battles keep things interesting.

Going back to the Super Nintendo it is hard to imagine ever enjoying the choppy screen of bad textures which holds a great potential for giving seizures. Nonetheless, I’ll always remember having battles at my friends house and getting that feather so I could jump over the bump into the water, where I could sit until someone chased me out.

Mario Kart for the 64 is still a game I love to play, despite the fact that multi-player has all sorts of sound related issues. The tracks were fun and the cheats were great when you could get them. Favorite track is Rainbow Road,of course (pun intended). Double Dash provided a whole new aspect of racing which I have found to be both a blessing and hinderance at times. I love racing on my own, but having a partner help is a special challenge that is fun to take on from time to time. The graphics are better, there are more courses and more drivers and the music is fantastic.

Kirby’s Avalanche

I don’t know what it is about Kirby’s Avalanche, but I just can’t play enough of it. My biggest problem is finding people to play against. Everyone I know either doesn’t find it nearly as fun as I do or gets tired of being pummeled multiple times over, despite the fact I am playing with a seemingly enormous handicap. The hard part is beating the computers, who have a reflex ability that far surpasses mine.

Donkey Kong

Until recently my family’s Donkey Kong collection consisted of only Donkey Kong Country 3 and Donkey Kong 64. I have finally been able to produce Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2 from ebay and am in the process of working through the second one with my brother. I love the scrolling style of this game, which is something that is not found anywhere anymore.Donkey Kong 64 was a great game as well and has some great music that I really don’t listen too enough. To be honest, I never actually got to beat the game because our game data was erased by a neighbor kid before we finished it and we never started it back up.

Others

I love MegaMan, but never actually bought any of the games. Only rented them and downloaded their soundtracks. Kirby always had great games and I’ve purchased the old ones for the Wii now. Smash Bros is a great series that has offered weeks of great fun with friends. Perfect Dark was by far the best first person shooter for the N64. Beetle Adventure Racing was pretty sweet and while I’m thinking about racing games the original F-Zero is on my list of games I enjoy to sit down and play every now and then. Star Fox is a great series too, but I haven’t played the newest ones a whole lot. I enjoy the occasional jaunt into Halo, but more often then not I’m just listening to their soundtracks. Final Fantasy VII is a classic and one of these days I’ll remember that I still have to fight the final boss. Sim City for the Super Nintendo is the best Sim City game ever except that our cartridge was rather fickle and we were never able to keep a city going for very long before the data was erased. Of course, I can’t leave out Mario World Series and Super Mario 64.

The Why

The big theme that I see running through these games are the soundtracks. Almost all the games I like have a great soundtrack, most have good gameplay and at least some sort of replay value. I just wish I had more time to play some of these old games to see if they are still as good as I remember.

Anyway, those are the games I like. What do you say?

Unfortunately using Airfoil does not solve the problem on the dropping out Airtune speakers. However, I have noticed several things about the issue:

First off, I always thought it was iTunes that was causing most of the problem. I can now see that this isn’t the case. From what I can tell, something happens, what this something is, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s a microwave or a cordless phone or a computer or a solar flare or what, but something happens. This interrupts my Airport Airtune signal and it drops off the face of the earth. (Maybe it’s being moved to an alternate dimension.) Sometimes it pops back quickly, other times it takes a few minutes, and I assume that sometimes it never comes back at all.

During this time, full signal and internet capabilities exist between my computer and Airport Express, it’s just like Airport said “Oh, hey, I changed my mind. There are no speakers here.”

Unplugging and replugging the Airport resets everything (including the internet connection) and the remote speaker comes back.

What Airfoil IS better at than iTunes is finding the remote speaker again after it is gone. When using iTunes I would find often that restarting iTunes was the only way I could make it see the remote speaker, (barring a several minute wait for iTunes to look around again and actually find it.) But with a 25 Gig iTunes library this is no simple task.

The nice thing about Airfoil is that if the remote speaker cuts out my iTunes music continues to play through my computer speakers, so there is less stoppage as things go from working to not working and vice versa.

What I would really like to find out now is what exactly Airport is fighting. If I knew what it was that was giving Airport speaker amnesia I would be much better equipped to combat it. I know some things about it already, such as it’s more likely to occur in the afternoon or evening, while mornings seem to be relatively immune to this behavior. It never just happens once and it’s done. If it happens, it happens every x number of minutes, with x not necessarily being the same for each interval. (I haven’t timed it out yet, but I think it needs to be done.)

One way or another I would really like to get to the bottom of this, I’ve already invested enough money into it. (iTunes = Free, Airport Express = $129, Airfoil = $25, [AirClick = $50]*) So if anyone knows anything more on the whole dropout issue, drop me a line, I would like to hear your experiences.

* AirClick wasn’t specifically purchased for this purpose, but I use it to control iTunes quite a bit.

UPDATE: I tried it out and it still doesn’t solve the problem. Read about it here: http://apatheticthursday.net/2008/02/23/the-verdict-is-nay/

I think I have just discovered a possible solution for my ever cutting out AirTunes from my Airport Express.

My setup is ideal (mostly.) My Airport Express is sitting not 8 inches behind my laptop on my desk. I am never more than a foot away from my Airport Express. Signal is always great, but for some reason iTunes usually tells me that it can’t find any speakers on the network after only a few minutes of streaming music via AirTunes.

Today, I think I may have a solution, but sadly it is not free. I have not had ample time to test this, but if anyone else is having problems I thought I would throw this out there and see if anyone has given this a shot yet.

I (re)-discovered Airfoil today while reading through some RSS feeds.

After thinking for a bit I decided that I needed to give this a try. Instead of having iTunes look for the Airport Express I would have a different program, namely Airfoil do it. I have a feeling iTunes is the program that keeps looking the Airport Express anyway.

I haven’t bought a license yet but for several 10 minute stretches I was able to play iTunes without having any major glitches. (I did notice one small cut out, but I think it might have been my computer slowing down for a second or so.)

I don’t know if this stops all drop outs, because every 10 minutes I had to hit turn the remote speaker off and turn it back on again to get rid of the major static that comes in, but if I have some free time tomorrow I’ll purchase a copy and see if it solves my problems. If it does, it will be well worth the $25 purchase fee.

If anyone has had some experience with this already, let me know. Otherwise check back in for an update tomorrow.

Well. I’d say that things went pretty well. We’ll see how they continue on.