Last year's trashy GoDaddy SuperBowl commercials annoyed me enough to switch domain registrars; this year's just confirmed I made the right decision. If you want out, here's what I posted about it last year:
Yes, I knew that popular, cheap domain registrar GoDaddy always used sex to sell their services, and yes, their bullying upsells always bugged me, but yesterday’s Super Bowl ad shot my “Stop doing business with GoDaddy” to-do to the top of my list. But where to transfer to? I polled my Twitter friends on which registrars were the best alternatives. Here’s a spreadsheet of the full vote tally; turns out the least expensive, top vote-getter was Namecheap.com.
Been very happy with NameCheap ever since, and their "Not happy with your current registrar's advertising methods?" switching coupon code, SWITCH2NC, still works. Sorry, Danica: I like looking at beautiful people, just not at Hooters.
A week ago I asked readers to tell me how they're using Google Wave in their daily lives, and despite a bit of "ha! no one's using Wave!" snarking on the Twitter, I got lots of interesting responses. Unsurprisingly, most Wavers use it as a real-time wiki, but some take advantage of features unique to Wave, like inline and private replies, public tags, and gadgets. I featured the most unique use cases I got in a brand new chapter just added to The Complete Guide to Google Wave. The following is the text of the just-published Chapter 10, which describes ways in which a few people who don't work for Google are using Wave to get things done--with screenshots.
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Must-Know Browser Tricks · My latest at FastCompany.com dives into your browser's options dialog and keyboard shortcuts: Five Browser Secrets of Power Web Surfers · 14 hours ago
It’s the Software, Stupid · "In hardware you can't build a computer that's twice as good as anyone else's anymore. But you can do it in software." —Steve Jobs in a 1994 Rolling Stone interview [via] · 5 days ago, 4 comments
I'm thrilled to announce a new series of weekly videos and blog posts that I'll be publishing at FastCompany.com called "Work Smart," which will cover personal productivity in a digital world. Long-time Lifehacker readers will recognize much of the material, but some fantastic editing and animation make each 2-4 minute video segment a whole new, fun format. The debut Work Smart video segment takes on the age old digital productivity problem: email overload.
In this 2 minute, 45 second segment, I describe my three-folder system for emptying your email inbox on a day-to-day basis, and keeping on top of everything you have to do, are waiting for, or want to keep on hand for reference.
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Once you're active in Google Wave, you want to know if something new is happening there--even if you don't have Wave open in your web browser. Several Wave notifier applications and browser add-ons can do the work of checking your Wave inbox for you, and letting you know you've got new and changed waves.
The following is an excerpt from the all-new Chapter 9 of The Complete Guide to Google Wave. Got feedback? Let me know in the comments and help write the first book on Wave!
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Just like it isn't on the iPhone and iPod touch, Adobe's Flash browser plug-in will not be on the iPad, and there are a whole lot of opinions about that decision. Predictably, Steve's apostles are smug, Adobe's pouting, and the rest of us will have to field questions from our relatives about why they keep seeing a blue lego piece. Flash usage has been declining over the years anyway, and a few web publishers have shared numbers to prove the point. 32% of visitors to John Gruber's Mac blog Daring Fireball, which has a large percentage of visitors from the Flashless-by-default iPhone/iPod touch, did not have Flash enabled. Andy Baio says 16% of Waxy.org visitors don't have Flash enabled, up from 4% a year ago. This site wasn't around a year ago, but about 16% of Smarterware visitors don't have Flash enabled either.
Because its readership represents a mixed group of both Mac and Windows users--albeit more tech-savvy ones than your average web surfer--I ran the numbers for Lifehacker, which currently gets about 39 million visitsors a month. As you can see in the chart above, the number of Lifehacker visitors without Flash installed enabled nearly tripled from 2.32% in 2006, to 6.07% in 2009.*
My attitude about Flash? Thanks for all the video, but it's time to go. I welcome HTML5 and the browsers that support it. For an even-handed discussion about the realities of Flash from a current Adobe employee who doesn't work on Flash but does have lots of experience with standards, check out John Nack's post, called "Sympathy for the Devil."
* Update: These numbers do not include the majority of iPhone/iPod touch traffic to Lifehacker because a partner manages Lifehacker's mobile site and as far as I know, we're not using the Google Analytics tracking tag for the main site on the mobile site.
Mark Pilgrim's excellent exposition on the "tinkerer's sunset" (an idea Alex Payne put forth in his iPad piece I linked earlier) got me thinking about the nature of tinkerers, and whether the iPad really represents a sunset for them. The optimist in me thinks it couldn't even if it tried.
First, know that I fundamentally agree with Alex and Mark: the closed nature of the iPad turns me off, and I wouldn't give one to my kid if I were encouraging her to learn about how computers work. But, Apple's rightly betting that most people don't want to know about the inner workings of a computer,* and regardless of the fact that Apple runs the App Store with an iron fist, dedicated hackers have still figured out ways to run whatever software they want on the iPhone/iPod touch. They'll do the same with the iPad, and this led me to muse that the open versus closed debate, which has geeks like me in a tizzy, may be 99% a philosophical discussion. Because while we're all ranting about how closed the iPad will be, the jailbreak community is planning competitions to see who can crack it first. The sun isn't setting on tinkerers; their desire to crack things open intensifies when faced with something that's closed by design. The challenge is part of the appeal.
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Alex Payne on the iPad · "The iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent from my own. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home." al3x on the iPad. Read it. · 1 week ago, 12 comments
iPad First Impressions · Based solely on live blogs and a choppy audio feed: Terrible name, gorgeous device, great price point. I may be an Apple critic, but I'm not made of stone--this thing is beautiful. Instantly my Kindle seems like a joke. Kottke may be right: The Kindle app plus Instapaper installed on the iPad may very well be a much better reading and browsing experience than the Kindle itself, plus you get everything else it does. Here's Apple's official iPad page. And you? · 1 week ago, 34 comments
Android and Me Interview · Thanks a million to Eric Weiss at Android and Me--one of my favorite blogs for keeping up on Android news and tips--for interviewing me about my own Android habit, space travel, cloud comforters, third-party ROMs, and my favorite gadgets. · 1 week ago
Google Wave may be in invite-only preview and still lack important features, but early adopters ARE using it--and we want to hear about it. Tell us about how you use Wave on a day-to-day basis, and your use case just might get included in The Complete Guide to Google Wave, the first book about Wave.
My co-author Adam and I are updating the book to replace theoretical, potential uses for Wave with real-world case studies of actual humans putting Google Wave to good use. We need your help. If you're waving regularly, please tell us about it, and we may include your story in the book.
Update: The brand new chapter 10, called "Wave in Action," has been posted. Check it out!
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How Richard Stallman Avoids Internet Distractions · "Most of the time I do not have an Internet connection. Once or twice or maybe three times a day I connect and transfer mail in and out. Before sending mail, I always review and revise the outgoing messages. That gives me a chance to catch mistakes and faux pas." [Richard Stallman uses this] · 2 weeks ago, 3 comments
One of the most-needed missing features in the Google Wave preview rolls out this week: user access permissions. Now, rather than everyone being able to edit everyone else's blips in a total free-for-all, the creator of a wave can add users and groups and give them either full access to edit everything, or read-only access. The binary choice is still too limiting, but GOOG says that "Reply only" access is on its way.
To limit a contact's access to a blip you created, click on their icon on the top of the wave and choose "Read only" from the drop-down, as shown. You can give both individual users and groups read-only access; though individual access permissions trump that of the groups. (For example, if the public group has read-only access, you can grant a single user full access to edit, even though that person's part of the group.) You can only set permissions for waves you have created.
Along with this first iteration of access permissions, the Wave team also added a "Restore" button to Wave's playback feature. If a wave gets destroyed beyond easy repair, you can use playback to roll it back to a former version of itself.
Even though this means quite a bit of revision to the book, it's great to see Wave evolving into something much more usable. I've also updated the Wave vs. the Rest chart to reflect this new feature.
As promised, Google Docs has rolled out the "upload any file" feature that lets you store files up to 250MB in size in Docs (up to 1GB for free, $0.25 per extra GB).
Just checked my account and got the notification near the Upload button explaining the new capability. Coupled with the ability to share folders, this can easily be used to share any kind of media--like an album of MP3s, as shown in the screenshot (supplied by a reader).
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