sangsara.net

  • ➟ Best iPad accessory under $10

    Might take a little setting up, but guaranteed to get attention.

    Link

  • ➟ Love Plus DS dating sim moves to iPhone, real world

    Konami’s popular DS game that involves courting a virtual girl in real-time – going on dates, buying her gifts, paying her compliments, that sort of thing – is now on the iPhone in Japan. If you remember, this is the game that one young man actually, legally, married. The killer new feature here is an augmented reality mode that lets you be in a photo with your girlfriend, which should help convince people that yours has something in common with a normal relationship.

    Link

  • ➟ iPhone OS 4 preview event scheduled for Apr 8

    Most of our questions regarding the next-generation iPhone (Will it support multitasking? An improved notification system?) will be answered surprisingly soon. This Thursday, in fact.

    Link

  • SANGSARA.NET changelog: April 2010

    Here’s what has changed:

    – This blog is now found at www.sangsara.net. It was previously at blog.sangsara.net, a distinction that became wholly unnecessary about five years ago, when I took down the other more static bits of the site. Eventually, all my online activities will be viewable here.

    – The Tumblr-powered linkblog, blast!, has been discontinued. The original idea for that was to create a wall between the longer posts I write and the things I find interesting and want to link to. From this point on, those two activities will be merged here on this blog. Outbound link entries will be strictly text, an execution I’ve admired in John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog, who was in turn inspired by Jason Kottke.

    – I’m leaving behind my favorite yellow (E3C046), seen in every design since 2002.

    – I’ll be using one of Blogger’s new features to add ‘Pages’ to this blog, starting with an About Me profile page.

    – You’ll find an old-school Blogroll for friends’ sites in the right column. This is an experiment of sorts. Let me know if you’d like to be linked.

    —-

    Here’s what hasn’t:

    – The RSS feed is still at http://feeds.feedburner.com/sangsara. Most subscribers to this site won’t even notice the changes listed above.

    – Positive Machine and Pocket Plastic will continue to be maintained as separate projects. Just in case you didn’t know, the former deals in strange, off-color iPhone app reviewery, while the latter is a place for me to post photos and look at developments in iPhone and toy camera photography.

    – The archives are intact. I had wanted to wipe those earlier uncertain steps and start over, but decided against taking the easy way out. I’ve lost a lot of web content over the years and it hasn’t made me a better writer. You can build better things in the present when you have the past at your back.

  • Year 9

    When most of my peers and I started blogging with a proper content management system (CMS) like Blogger in 2000-2002, it wasn’t really clear what we were signing up for. Blogs were a new, hyper-public outlet for self-expression, a means of keeping in contact with friends, and for feeling the first waves of a democratic future where a student had as much right to virtual real estate as the multinational corporation that might one day hire him. Or not, depending on what he had posted.

    Today, much of what a blog once offered has been decentralized by a slew of dedicated online services. Post your photos on Flickr. Keep a circle informed of your movements on Facebook and LinkedIn. Show off your art, photography, or design skills on any number of portfolio sites like deviantART. Share links and bits of media on scrapbook blogs like the ones popularized by Tumblr. Everything comes with social networking built right in. The standalone do-it-all blog has become something of a solitary pursuit as its necessity fades amongst newer internet users with a hundred other avenues for self-expression and communication. The word ‘blog’ is more strongly associated with a breed of continuously updated semi-commercial news and topical interest sites than it is with personal journals.

    Perhaps the personal journal is a relic of the internet past – emblematic of our emotional reaction to a new technology, and the possibility of audiences larger than had been present before. Or perhaps they’ve disappeared under cover, gone to ground and reemerged with new names, part of our need to understand through categorization. So now there are motherhood blogs, cooking/dining blogs, birdwatching blogs, and so on. Once specific interests representing just a facet of their authors’ lives, these topics now serve to define their bloggers as amateur authorities through posts and reader feedback cycles so regular you can set your RSS readers to them, spurred on by commerce in the form of Google AdSense banners. The personal journal is dead because we reduce people to the one thing they do best.

    So, nine years on and I’m still at it. Still not quite sure what I signed up for, but with some changes I’ll be making here this week, a little more sure of where I should take this.

  • New Google Blogger templates

    Transparency! Three-column grids! An absence of lighthouse imagery!

    Please join me in welcoming Google Blogger to the modern web. As you can see from the look of my site today, Blogger has rolled out a new beta feature called the Template Designer which allows users to assemble several thousand more combinations of layout, color, and graphics than with their previous selection of templates. Those spartan and occasionally cheesy designs were the main reasons why the service has been losing ground to the likes of Tumblr and Posterous amongst those setting up blogs for the first time, and also the reason why most people skin their blogspot blogs with horrendous amateur themes they find on sites with URLs like free-colorful-blogger-templates.com.

    We all know ‘most people’ have no taste, so the Template Designer aims to save them from themselves by having a fixed library of background images from iStockPhoto (you can’t upload your own). I have chosen the least distracting and colorful one, a silhouette of the Parisian skyline, but look forward to experimenting with crazier options now and then. Why not? It used to take a deep dive into the HTML code and some tedious asset uploading to change the look of my site – those who’ve been here before will know that I hardly bothered anymore, and reverted to the most minimal of themes over a year ago – but now it’s all just a matter of clicking around and moving sliders.

    Some of these features, like the dynamic width resizing and comprehensive inspectors for changing text/background colors, fonts, etc. replicate the best innovations of blog hosting company Squarespace. That service does a little more but costs money, and incidentally so does Six Apart’s Typepad, which now stands as the only hosted blogging platform remaining whose templates look so hopelessly mired in the early 2000s. Assuming that Blogger doesn’t just push out this one update and leave it untouched for another six years, they’ve got a fair chance of soundly beating the competition. A few weeks ago they added the ability to create standalone Pages, the kind you can use for an About Us page or FAQ. With a few more templates, perhaps some built for microblogging, some for magazine-style sites, they’ll be able to do everything Tumblr can. They’ve got post-by-email functionality that isn’t too far off from what Posterous does, and WordPress.com can’t compete with the freedom Blogger gives you to add third-party scripts, widgets, and ads.

    One interesting point: Microsoft IE6 is not supported by the editor or the templates themselves.

    Intro video:

  • Photos from Japan

    Late last year, I wrote about returning from my trip to Japan and sorting through the 2000 photos I’d taken. I finished the job of uploading them to Flickr quite a few weeks back, but neglected to post the links here.

    This is the entire set on Flickr, but you will see less as an anonymous member of the public, and a few more if you’re listed as one of my friends.

    This is a ‘Best of’ set that I put together, with 150 photos in all (again, depending on your friendship status), which is much easier to get through.

    This is a 94-photo subset of the main album focused on Tsukiji, the largest fish market in the world.

    ~~

    Shibuya

    Ryoanji zen garden

  • Pocket Plastic

    The last post (a review of Nevercenter’s Camerabag Desktop application for Mac/PC) was also posted on my new site project: Pocket Plastic. I take a great deal of my photos these days with my iPhone, as I have done with all the cameraphones I’ve owned before – Sony-Ericsson made some great ones under their Cybershot brand – but the iPhone is unique. People are now in the habit of actually processing their photos and doing all their ‘darkroom’ work on the device itself, so the shots are ready to go up online before they’ve even rubbed their feet on their doormats.

    There are some sites out there dedicated to helping others with this hobby, reviewing new photo apps and sharing tips, but I often find myself in some sort of disagreement with them. You know what they say: If you want something done right, you’re incredibly anal and have an inflated view of your own importance. Well that’s me, so I’m starting my own. It’s also going to be a place for me to send the photos I like best to, and fish for ever more compliments.

    I’m using Posterous to do the whole thing, and if you’d like a site/blog that you can update simply by sending an email, I highly recommend it. You can send a post from your home computer or your mobile phone, attach photos, audio, or video, and Posterous will automatically put the thing together in the best possible looking way and you’ll look like a star. You don’t even need to sign up beforehand. Just send an email to post@posterous.com from your personal email address, and that will be your first entry. They’ll send you an email back with the location of your new site, which you are free to change at any time. This was not a paid advertisement, I just really like them.