PubSub LinkRanks

PubSub.com has a new feature called LinkRanks: LinkRanks are a measure of how many pages link to each particular site, with more weight given to fresher links and to links from a wider variety of pages. I grabbed a screen shot of the ranking for Cantoni.org (shown below). Clearly there’s some volatility in the algorithm, but I’m not exactly sure what that means yet. Several sites have similar “ranking” concepts, but this is nicely presented as a graph over time. The images are dynamically generated with Flash which is kind of cool. Update 2004-12-17: I forgot to include the link…

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Posted in: Web

Zen Touch Playback Problems

For the past couple of months, I’ve been getting good use out of my Creative Zen Touch 20GB MP3 player. I’ve copied over about 20 of my CDs but use it mostly for podcasts during my commute. Overall I’m quite happy with the device, but have noticed a problem with certain podcast files which would play back at the wrong speed — usually 1/2 or 1/4 speed. Searching the web I didn’t find any similar problems reported, so I sent a detailed explanation to Creative technical support. Their responsiveness was okay, basically responding overnight to each of my queries. The…

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Automatic Weather Podcast

With the rising popularity of podcasting, I’ve been thinking about automated information sources that might be interesting. How about the weather? RSSWeather.com provides RSS weather feeds for different cities. FeedSpeaker is a new .Net application that uses Microsoft’s Speech API to “speak” RSS feeds, recording the results in MP3 format. This is a manual process, but one could easily create a service that did this automatically. Imagine syncing your MP3 player in the morning and catching the day’s weather forecast. (Or you could just turn on your AM radio, but that’s old school.) Here are some samples I created for…

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Newly-Painted Pickup

The wait was longer than expected, but the new paint job on my Dodge truck is finally finished. Check out the photos which I’ve posted to Flickr. I bought the truck earlier this year from a good friend. It’s in great shape mechanically, but the roof and hood paint was beyond fading (and had started to come off in spots). It wasn’t cheap, but now the truck looks brand-new. (Of course, now I’ll be more paranoid about where I park…don’t want any dents!)

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Posted in: Fun

NASCAR in HDTV

Another reason to get with the program and upgrade to high-def TV: Beginning next year, NBC and Turner Network Television (TNT) will televise their entire portion of the 2005 NASCAR schedule in high-definition. … TNT and NBC’s full-season of HD NASCAR coverage will begin with NASCAR Busch Series and NASCAR NEXTEL Cup racing during the weekend of July 1 and 2, 2005 at Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Fla. … All of the main cameras used for NBC and TNT’s coverage, as well as the production truck, will be native HD. The feed will be transmitted in high-definition and…

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