Paul Tow » Picks & Reviews

Run your own wiki

Paul Tow — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:27:23 +0000

A wiki is a type of website that anyone can edit, with Wikipedia being the most popular example. Anyone can run their own wiki and use it however they’d like for whatever purpose they desire. They’re incredibly useful for collaborating with audiences large and small, and don’t need to be long term websites. How you use a wiki is completely up to you.

As a student, I’ve made wikis for specific group projects for collaborating outside of class. Unlike phone calls or email, information was preserved and available for the entire group to see. We could update them whenever we wanted, from wherever we wanted. We could build on each other’s work, make changes a little at a time, and even search. Once the projects were done, their wikis were simply deleted. Throwaway wikis can be very useful.

There is an overwhelming number of wiki solutions to choose from. You might be tempted to choose based on number of features, but a wiki is a collaborative tool. It should be simple and easy to use. PBworks is free, takes about a minute to set up, is hosted for you, and will be extremely easy for the other people to use. If you want a self-hosted wiki and your server supports PHP, I recommend PmWiki. If you don’t have PHP, WikiMatrix is a comparison site that may help you decide.

MediaWiki is noteworthy for powering Wikipedia and having many features, but in my opinion there are easier-to-use options available.

Mac pick: Tangerine!

Paul Tow — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:35:49 +0000

In my iTunes library and on my iPod, I have two thirty-minute playlists. One is called “Energize” and contains songs ordered by increasing speed. The other, “Rest,” is ordered by decreasing speed and helps me fall asleep. These playlist are automatically created by my computer and are constantly changing. My computer does this using the BPM (beats per minute) field in the iTunes metadata. Normally, this requires manually determining and entering that information by hand for each song, but there’s a much, much easier and less time consuming way.

Tangerine! from the Potion Factory is a $24.95 shareware application that quickly analyzes your each song in your iTunes library and automatically calculates the BPM and beat intensity. Within its very well done, very Mac-like interface, it lets you create iTunes playlists following a desired pattern. For example, you can make a workout playlist which becomes faster and more intense, reaches a climax, and then slows for your cool down. You can also control the playlist’s length, BPM range, and/or beat intensity range. Perhaps most importantly, BPM data can be exported to iTunes so that you can make smart playlists such as the two I described earlier.

A competing application which may be worth looking into is beaTunes, which is $31.95 shareware that runs on both Windows and OS X. Personally, I prefer Tangerine for its interface.

Mac pick: RSS Menu

Paul Tow — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:03:05 +0000

RSS feeds have changed the way many use the web. People don’t go to content; content comes to them. Instead of manually checking individual websites for updates that might not have been made, they check just one place- their feed reader- and see new stories from all of their favorite websites. Feed readers are often used as an alternative to visiting the actual web site, but they don’t have to be. If you like the update notifications of RSS but prefer to visit the actual web page, there’s an app for that.

RSS Menu is a free menu extra for OS X, and its interface is very simple. When closed, it’s just a little icon that sits in the right side of your menu bar, and when open it looks like a standard OS X menu. Choose a feed, then a headline and the web page opens in your default web browser. It’s like having Firefox’ Live Bookmarks without having to use Firefox. It also has scheduled checking of feeds, notifications via Growl and/or speech, and optional integration with iTunes podcasts and Safari RSS. RSS Menu is free as I said, but if you like it the developer accepts donations via PayPal or Kagi.

What feed reader do you use, and why? Sound off in the comments.

Multiplatform pick: Folding@home

Paul Tow — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:25:44 +0000

Folding@home is a way to easily contribute for free to the search for cures to Alzheimer’s disease and even many cancers. All you have to do is let Stanford University’s free program run in the background on your computer (Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD) or Sony PlayStation3. I recommend that you give it a try if you haven’t already. More details after the jump.

An important biological function that scientists still don’t have a firm understanding of is how proteins fold (assemble themselves). By studying the results of computer simulations, they hope to find cures to diseases resulting from proteins misfolding. These simulations are extremely complex, to the point that they require massive distributed computing. Nobody on their own has enough computing power to do the work alone. The Folding@home project needs the help of many computers from around the world. Further information can be found in their FAQ.

Review: TracFone LG 225 Phone

Paul Tow — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:28:55 +0000

Keith Tyndall hired me to write a thorough review of a simple phone- the LG CG225 Tracfone- for his website after having read my posts on HowardForums.