Google Reader with Firefox has had an offline feature for a while that works nicely. But they should also download and cache other types of content besides text, in particular photos. This would make the Reader even more competitive with other offline full-featured software.

I don’t know what to do about video or other types of richer content (probably can’t cache all the hundreds of Youtube videos I have unread), but simple images in posts shouldn’t be too much to ask for, eh?

I’ve published four new projects that I didn’t yet manage to post before:

• SeeMoney, an interaction design exercise in online personal finance. I don’t like most online finance sites. So here we tried to explore an area that I haven’t yet seen solved well, and namely, working with money across groups. See also an old post of mine. (I use iBank these days to track my cast and do some basic charting and forecasting. Works OK, but still a bit too clunky. Mint tracks one of my accounts and they definitely have potential.)
• EdgeWave, a fun electronics prototyping project. A lot of fun with electronics and laser cutting.
• EdgeWave 2. Even more fun with custom circuit boards and radio communications. But since the board was shipped late to me, the application (software) is not as great as it should be, since I basically had only a few hours in the end to write it and the darn touch sensor didn’t work, so it’s a bit of an act of desperation but it was definitely fun to design a circuit and even find it (mostly) working in the end. Plus I like my power solution that doesn’t involve any complicated conversions, just stabilized AAA battery power.
• LiveAlbum, an interaction design exercise. We went to families to study their needs, and propose a solution to address it. A lot of work, but also fun with user research, concept generation, validation, and finally the video production that took several long nights but I’m pretty happy about the result.

Firefox 3 will be released on June 17, this coming Tuesday. They say they are trying to set a Guinness World Record with “most software downloads in 24 hours”.

I’m looking forward to trying it out. I haven’t tried the betas or RC-s, as a while ago I made a point of not installing beta software unless it’s super essential. Many people say FF3 is nice, and some say it’s ugly. We’ll see.

But I want to talk about this “most software downloads”. I think Skype should look into setting this record instead of FF. Firefox currently has 1,303,700 download pledges on their page. We’ll see how many materialize. But on any given day, I think Skype has download count of equal magnitude. They have this obscure feed to track downloads that I set up a long long time ago and that seems to continue to exist. Just now, it showed me 2555 downloads over 15 minutes. Assuming this rate over 24 hours, this gives us 245,280 downloads over 24 hours. But I’m sure it’s a low rate, as Europe is sleeping and all in all it’s a nice summer Sunday. So I’m thinking this is the minimum download rate of Skype and there are actually many more over the course of time. (Skype Numerology has many other similar and much more detailed calculations.)

On the other hand, serving this magnitude of downloads is not so easy. I know Skype and many other vendors trickle their downloads across time so as to keep the system operational. I’m wondering to see how it works out for Firefox as they try to encourage everyone to download on the same day.

I just watched The Soviet Story. Wikipedia page of the film. Here’s the trailer.

It’s a documentary about some of the Soviet crimes against its own people (Holodomor, forced deportations — how fitting to post this on June 14, my national remembrance day). More importantly, it underlines the similarity of Soviet and Nazi regimes and important ways of how they helped each other. It wasn’t of course new to me that they were both criminal regimes, but I did not really know the extent of their cooperation before 1941. We see footage of their generals celebrating victories together, joint army parades and such. This film illustrates all this with powerful archival materials. Did you know that after liberating concentration camps like Auschwitz, Soviets didn’t tear them down? Rather, they continued to use them for their own purposes, getting rid of enemies of their own using pretty much the same methods that Nazis did.

It ends with a conclusion of how Europe lacks political will to fully condemn Communist crimes against humanity because “this is not how the world works”. With Germany and Russia building gas pipelines together, it is difficult to imagine one being vocal against the other, and requiring e.g extradition of former Soviet KGB interrogators who tortured many people to death. They continue to live in Moscow as decorated veterans.

This is not a pure documentary and not a pure scholarly work. It injects drama and cinematography that goes beyond what we usually see in documentaries. I agree with Edward Lucas from the Economist (the same as a post in his blog), though, who says…

Mr Snore and his sponsors in the European Parliament have produced a sharply provocative work. Its tone, technique and composition may be open to criticism. But those who want to ban it should try refuting it first.

I don’t think you can buy this movie anywhere yet, I hope it reaches wider distribution soon, so that I could get it as DVD or such.

UPDATE: I’ve recently seen a pattern in some recent political discussions on the Internet about the events in Europe during World War II where those supporting Russian imperialist view try to discredit those sympathizing the Baltic view, in the form of “you do not support Soviet communists, therefore you support Nazis”. I don’t think this is an either-or choice. You do not have to support either. It’s OK to say that both were criminal regimes whose days are over, whose sympathizers live dangerous false dreams, and whose living perpetrators must be brought to justice.

Here’s a dialog I got when trying to resize an image. I think it was a 1-bit black-and-white PNG.

Now look again. Doesn’t the filesize look strange? I am trying to REDUCE the pixel size of the image. So how can 40 KB turn into a million terabytes? Hmm.

Mac OS X has a pretty nice calculator bundled that is sufficient for daily purposes. Well, actually there are many. There is a dashboard widget, and Spotlight can do calculations. For more advanced things, you can use the Calculator app. Its scientific view met my needs… until now.

I needed to calculate some base-2 logarithms. Turns out the Mac OS X calculator can only do base-10 and natural logs. So I went to Google and among the first results, found a very nifty Console Calculator. It has a nice view as a widget.

It supports logarithms of arbitrary base, plus a host of other advanced functions. Plus a very nice property is that if you need to do a complicated calculation, you can just paste it in as an expression (as you see above) and get a result, without needing to go through the whole sequence by hand.

The only missing feature? Being able to copy-paste the result from it into another place. Right now you need to type it, which is not too bad, but copy would be a bit more convenient.

MATH NERD UPDATE: I just realized that log2(x) = log(x) / log(2). So in theory, you could do all this with a calculator still that can just do base-10 or base-e logarithms, with an extra division involved. But being able to do log with the correct base right away is much more convenient

In anticipation of June 9 WWDC Keynote, everybody is talking about what new Apple stuff will be released there. Probably a new iPhone. Maybe some other stuff. We’ll see.

I want to talk about another piece of hardware. By now, I think it’s almost the most stale piece of Apple’s hardware lineup. Over the past few years, Apple has updated or released every piece of input, processing, and output hardware that there is. CPU-s and desktop units. Displays. Keyboards. Phones. Laptops. Phones. Music players.

Notice anything missing in this list?

Yep. The mouse.

I started thinking about this the other day and although I’m not entirely sure, it feels like the mouse is the part of Apple’s hardware lineup that hasn’t seen an update in the longest time. Everything else keeps updating. I hope they will update the mouse too, at some point.

I especially hope for a mouse update because it’s one piece of Apple hardware that I simply cannot stand. I think its form factor is stupid and I hate it. I don’t have it and I won’t get one — the current hardware version, anyway. It does not fit the shape of my palm, and the buttons have a bad tactile feel. This is sad, because unless you’re a designer and have a graphic tablet, the mouse is the piece of hardware that you spend the most time with, aside from the keyboard. And both the “old” and “new” Apple laptop and desktop keyboards are great. There’s no excuse not to make a great mouse too.

Until then, I keep using something like my current trusted Logitech LX3. I was actually hesitant to get it at first, because it has a bit unusual shape. You keep your thumb to the right of it, two fingers on top, one on the right, and the fifth finger just keeps sort of floating in the air. Yet this way, it fits my hand perfectly and I can spend hours and hours in a row working without getting tired or anything. The top has excellent curvature to fit the middle of my palm. So it has been a great fit for me for more than a year.

An Apple mouse update would also eliminate one sore discussion point with some of my designer friends. They think that Mighty Mouse is the greatest thing ever. I said above what’s my view. Aside from the ergonomic issues, I keep hearing about how crap gets stuck in the mouse’s ball and what not. The Mighty Mouse from my POV is overdesigned in the sense that user must adapt to hardware and not the other way. The rest of Apple hardware is much more accommodating in that respect.

I wanted to buy a wireless headset. And not just a Bluetooth one-ear tiny thing, but a proper headset with two earpads and boom mike. Looked like the Freetalk headset was exactly what I needed, so I bought it.

The first experiences were great. I really liked the form factor, i.e physical form of it. The instructions, initial charging and setup were straightforward. “Great,” I thought.

But the trouble started when I actually tried to use it. On my Mac, no less. It works really great for listening and the playback sound quality is excellent. But the microphone simply does not work on a Mac. It does capture some sort of signal, but it is quiet and very crappy. Reading the Skype gear blog comments and forum, others seem to have the same problem.

I tried it out under Windows with Parallels. Funnily, the mic functioning seems to be different there, and it captures a better signal in Windows. I don’t understand what’s going on here — how can drivers influence the signal capture? I thought most of the logic is on hardware side? But booting to Parallels for a call is not realistic for me, and in any case, there’s something up with my Parallels setup so I’ll use Skype on Mac only.

In any case, I bought this headset to use it with a Mac. The microphone does not work as expected. Maybe there is some setting to tweak somewhere, but the Skype site or bundled instructions aren’t helping me here.

Unless something comes up over the next days (like do I have to tweak my Mac sound settings somehow to get it work better? And don’t tell me about recording volume settings in System Preferences, as this was the first thing I tried ), I’ll probably end up returning this to the store.

There are a few more short points.

• The purchase process from Skype store and payment with PayPal was ok. Pretty straightforward. Shipment was also fast, just something like 2 or 3 business days, instead of the 5 to 7 that was said. I like vendors exceeding my expectations.
• The SkypeOut voucher coming with the headset was delivered to me at the time of the transaction on the web. This was the only time that I saw it. It wasn’t sent in an email or anything, this was strange. Had I clicked away from the webpage, I would have had no way to see the voucher again.
• This headset is Skype certified. And claims to be working with Mac. Yet it isn’t working. What does this tell me about whether or not I should trust the “certified” label in the future? [UPDATE: the Skype blog says that certification was done on OSX 10.4 Tiger, whereas I’m running 10.5 Leopard.]
• The return instructions are confusing. There is some ugly legalese policy on Skype hardware store site (and what’s with the ugly typesetting there?), and a printed sheet in the headset box. I probably have to follow what was in the box, but it is in really unfriendly legalese and sends me to Dell site (???). There seem to be many vendors involved in the whole flow. I hope the return process works out. [UPDATE: I’ve spoken with Skype and sounds like there was a little distribution glitch… I’ll do another post when I’m done with my return.]
• There are more “bad” than “good” in the above. This makes me really nervous about recommending anything Skype-related, especially hardware, to my many friends in the US and elsewhere.

Anyone, please let me know if there’s something I can try on my Mac to get the mic working properly. I tried to search on the forums and web a bit, but didn’t find anything.

Another question is, are there any wireless headsets that actually work with Mac? I don’t want a Bluetooth one-ear thing. I want an actual stereo headset, probably with boom mike. Freetalk was almost it.

UPDATE: Skype has acknowledged the problem. As seen in the comments below, this seems to be a Leopard-only problem. Which doesn’t fix my personal situation, but it’s good to hear that they (Skype and the manufacturer) are developing an understanding of what’s going on. I hope that the new headset driver comes out soon.