While we’re still waiting for the BBC to roll out the international version of its brilliant iPlayer, you can now at least grab some Beeb video from iTunes. The iTunes store has just added BBC America to its TV section. It’s limited at the moment – just a handful of $1.99 episodes of Torchwood, Robin Hood and series 3 of Little Britain are available right now. Looks like they are testing the waters with more likely to follow soon.
I’m a big fan of GMail – it’s been my primary e-mail for a while now – but one thing that bugs me is that I can’t sync my Mac address book with my GMail contacts. But salvation is finally at hand. Spanning Sync, a great tool I use to sync my Mac iCal with my (preferred) Google Calendar, will shortly release version 2.0 which will do both Contacts and Calendar syncs. If it works as well as this demo, I’ll be first in line …
I’m a big fan of GMail – it’s been my primary e-mail for a while now – but one thing that bugs me is that I can’t sync my Mac address book with my GMail contacts. But salvation is finally at hand. Spanning Sync, a great tool I use to sync my Mac iCal with my (preferred) Google Calendar, will shortly release version 2.0 which will do both Contacts and Calendar syncs. If it works as well as this demo, I’ll be first in line …
The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, which I wrote about a while back, is now finally on sale. It’s $149 for the 1GB version and $199 for the 2GB one. I’m intrigued by the technology which records audio and links it to your written notes or drawings and interested to see if it takes off. As noted before, no Mac version yet and you can’t use it with Parallels or VMWare but Livescribe says it is ”actively developing a native Mac solution … and will post more details and timing as soon as possible.”
Using Back to My Mac… to Catch a Thief!
Back To My Mac – the new Leopard utility which lets you log into your home Mac remote using dot Mac – doesn’t seem to work as easily as most of us would like. Would anyone show me (in easy-to-digest non-geek terms) hwo to operate it over anything other than a local network? I know it must work because Dan Dilger has this brilliant story in his Roughly Drafted blog about how a woman is using Back To My Mac to track down the thoeving hound who swiped her iPhone and MacBook from her truck.
I’m one of those people thatbif I don’t write something down, make a list or stick a note in my Crackberry, it doesn’t get down. Problem is, although I love my Google Mail/Calendar and integrating it with my Blackberry, there’s been no way to sync tasks across my favourite apps. But this week I heard about Remember The Milk, a free Australian web app that makes it easy to organise your tasks and you can add a gadget that integrates it right into GMail, Google Calendar and your iGoogle home page. And as my Google Calender syncs with my Crackberry, I’m sorted! Now I’m hoping someone comes up with a plug-in for Mailplane, my favourite e-mail program which turns GMail into a Mac-looking app that’s available offline.
As I’ve shared here before, one of the joys of my week is reading anything AA Gill writes in the Sunday Times. This week brought another classic barb. I mean who esle would have the verve or the nerve to write this:
Anyone care to join me in a whip round to get AA and Gordon Ramsay to come out here and give some of our complacent over-priced establishments the flaying they deserve?
If you’re into social networking sites, blogging and sharing stuff you find on the web, you know it can get crazy trying to keep track of it all. Which is why you might want to take a look at a browser you may not have heard of, called Flock. What makes Flock stand out from other browsers is that you can build direct links to things like your Facebook account, MyGoogle, My Yahoo, your blogs, Twitter, Flickr and so on – and makes sharing between them as easy and drag and drop right from a web page. You can also run news feeds and media from YouTube right in the browser as well as keep track of your networked buddies in handy sidebars. Importing bookmarks, cookies and other preferences from other browsers was a snap. If I have one criticism is that there seem to be so many bells and whistles that it can seem a little overwhelming and busy but once you’ve got the hang of it, it might just become your favourite browser. The much improved 1.1 version is out now.
I missed it but I hear veteran newsman Bryan Darby bowed out of the local media in style last week. Signing off, he assured VSB listeners that Bermuda’s soccer team were out of the World Cup, having drawn 0-0 in Cayman. Unfortunately, Bryan had been taking the news from the ESPN site which didn’t update the score until the end of the game. Bermuda won 3-1 to win 4-2 on aggregate and earn a tie with the Soca Warriors of Trinidad & Tobago.
Enjoy your retirement in Canada, Darbs – we will miss you. The last of a generation of legendary journo rogues and gentleman.
The local media are pretty good these days about running corrections – at least in print. But what about the online version of the copy. I had occasion to ask The Royal Gazette to run a correction this week, which they duly did – but the incorrect version lives on online, as I suspect many others do. The result is that this incorrect fact will no doubt be taken as gospel by subsequent readers and continue to be repeated, requiring another printed correction and so on. Surely the advantage of the web is that things can be changed quickly – so why, when an error has been acknowledged can at least the online version of a story be edited? Many other online news sites either insert clearly marked corrections, have clearly-designated correction areas on the home page or add the correction at the foot of the story. Some media sites are touchy about changing “archived copy” but this is nonsense in this day and age. If something is wrong, it’s wrong – and surely no newspaper worth its ink wants to print errors. Correct the online copy and be done with it. We all make mistakes.
For more on this subject, I recommend visiting Regret The Error, a whole site devoted to the topic of media corrections – humourous and otherwise – by Canadian author and freelancer Craig Silverman.
