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 If Twitter wants to be a force for good they should stick to small things they have high leverage over, not fancy "big picture" things that any other rich person could do.
Bill Gates made this mistake. Instead of cutting off the air supply of his competitors and landing his company in antitrust hell, he could have been a Force For Good by welcoming competition as a way to keep his company tough and on their toes and responsive to customers. It would have been good for business and made him a force for good.
Instead, he's giving money for education and health care, obvious good things, but places where...
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Another "keeper" -- this week Jay is on the phone from SXSW and I'm in the studio at NYU.
http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Mar15.mp3
Topics include: Jake Tapper, problems with WordPress, Thursday evening meetup, Dave pre-orders an iPad, Jessica Roy, general mayhem.
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 So now I'm following Lee Joramo's instructions for installing Snow Leopard on the Mac Mini, in target mode. So far I've got the Mini showing up as an external hard drive on the MacBook.
Update: It worked. I got a clean installation of Snow Leopard on the Mac Mini, using the method outlined by Lee. Unfortunately it didn't get the scanner working. I give up on that. I'll try getting another scanner. Canon LiDE 700F is a bad deal. I hear the hardware works, but the drivers are a nightmare. I concur with the drivers part, never got to use the hardware.
Update #2: Netbook haters are...
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 I take the Fifth.
I plead temporary insanity.
Nolo contendere.
I threw reason out the window.
I felt smug for some reason.
And I was feeling jealous of all the people who, on April 3, would have their iPad. And I won't.
So, after reading that Andrew Baron ordered one with his winnings on AAPL stock, I figured I could do it too. So I sucked my gut and pressed Submit.
Now I have one of these things, whatever the frack it is, on its way to me in just a couple of weeks.
At least I'll be able to watch Fargo on it.
PS: I am totally out of my mind.
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 Every few years I almost get snookered into making a major furniture purchase at Ikea. Then I come to my senses.
First, what Ikea is good for -- the little chotchkas you need to get a house started. Dishrags. Flatware. They have a starter box with a few pots and pans, measuring cups, a spatula, scissors, cheese grater. A hundred little things that if bought separately would cost $500, but they charge about $100. And you don't have to think of everything. A shower curtain. Cheap drapes.
But when you buy things that require assembly, that's when I get in trouble. And it's even worse if you have...
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Not sure how long it's been down, but it's been a while. Nothing on status.twitter.com.
This reminds me what I'm going to talk about at the 140Conf on April 20. How we are fools to think that something like Twitter can run entirely on one company's servers.
The Twitter guys should know that can't work, and should be planning on a resilient future, one where we can trust them because we don't have to trust them.
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See this announcement on the Frontier News blog.
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 I bought a Canon scanner to use with my MacBook Pro 13-inch laptop, but it just doesn't work. Once in a while it produces a scan, but most of the time, the drivers say they can't find a scanner attached to the computer.
I've been advised this may be because the device is powered through USB, and there isn't reliable power coming through USB so the scanner doesn't power up.
It first I thought I was out of luck cause I don't have a desktop at the NY apartment, but then I realized I do have a Mac Mini. So I tried installing the drivers on that computer, but...
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 I was up this morning at 8:30AM Eastern and saw the notes that the iPad was now available for pre-order. So I went through the process, updated my credit card on Apple's website, changed the address and phone number. The total price was a bit of a shocker -- approx $650 including tax.
I hesitated. I was typing the order on a $350 Asus Eee PC that I had bought a long time ago. It gets about 8 hours on the battery. It has a 160GB hard drive, three USB ports, Ethernet, webcam builtin. Real keyboard. No DRM.
I went to Amazon to see what I could get for...
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 Just read an article by Felix Salmon in response to a decision by Gawker to stop pushing the full text in their RSS feeds.
I've heard this argument over years, from many people, but I've never agreed with it. I prefer if publishers include thoughtfully written synopses in their feeds, with links to the full articles.
The reason I prefer this is that I am probably one of the few people to use River of News approach to feed reading, which imho is the only rational way to read feeds.
I skim. I don't need the full text of each article, in fact I was so annoyed by feeds...
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 Many years ago I wrote about an idea for simplifying hardware devices that scan stuff producing digital images. They shouldn't require any drivers and they should work effortlessly. But the architecture they use for these devices is still rooted in the 1980s, when it should have and easily could have made the transition to HTTP.
I'm thinking about it again because I wasted a bunch of time on a Canon 700F scanner that, because of driver problems, just won't work with my Mac laptop. Now that I've got the problem I see that dozens of other users had it too (the problems didn't show up in the Amazon...
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I can't figure out how the new location-based Twitter works. Firefox can't figure out where I am. No surprise, My 13-inch MacBook Pro doesn't have GPS. Is there some place I can click on a map to say This Is Where I Am? Not at all obvious. Other people say they see it. Not on my machine.
Anyway, that doesn't mean we can't have fun with location stuff.
On Twitter, I posted a link to a Google Map asking if this was the location of the Fillmore East.
 I got back an answer that it was close, but the supermarket next door is where the...
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I was doing some research for a blog post and came across this folder of RSS enclosures from late 2004 and early-mid 2005.
These were the months when podcasting was beginning to take root.
I was doing Morning Coffee Notes. Adam Curry was doing Daily Source Code. Together, we were doing the Trade Secrets podcast.
Dave Slusher, Steve Gillmor, IT Conversations, Dawn and Drew, Tony Kahn at WGBH, Engadget.
It occurred to me that this slice of early podcasting might be worth preserving, so turned it into a torrent and have uploaded it
http://static.scripting.com/misc/earlyPodcasts.torrent
If you have questions or comments, you can post them here.
PS: Another reason I like it is this is a non-infringing use of BitTorrent. We need more of those to...
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Jay and I use WordPress to do the http://rebootnews.com/ site.
It's a mixed bag. On the pro side, we both know how to use WordPress, and because Jay writes the show notes and I do the tech stuff, it's a good tool to put between us.
But WordPress doesn't do podcast feeds well.
And that's being generous.
Here's how the UI works currently. You edit your post and link to an MP3 or a movie or an AVI or some other media object. The first one that WP encounters as it parses your text, it will supposedly turn into an enclosure. If you happen to link to two MP3s but the second is the enclosure, you're out of luck. And...
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 It's been a while since we could announce new major support for rssCloud, but today is one of those big days we'll remember for a long time.
Status.net has now enabled rssCloud support in the RSS 2.0 feeds for all its users.
This means that identi.ca, the server operated by status.net, has the feature, as well as all other sites they operate. I assume it will be baked into a subsequent open source release (status.net is GPL software).
What does this mean? Well, when I post an update to my account on identi.ca, any cloud-aware aggregator will receive an update notification. River2, the aggregator I've built for Frontier (it runs...
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 I stumbled across this very interesting list of 18 firsts on the Internet. It's a good way to look at things. You could argue who invented what first, and you often get nowhere that way, because "invention" is such a poorly understood concept. Everyone's work builds on other people's. The guy who invented the car used a lot of other people's work to create something with four wheels and an engine. Did it have to have a steering wheel to be a car? We could argue about that, and that would change who the inventor was.
It may be more useful to say who had the first car. Who...
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Several interesting half-developments in the competitive landscape from non-dominant tech entities. I believe in supporting the second and third tier companies and startups, when they offer alternatives to the BigCo's. I like the little guys because they have an incentive to listen to and please users, without the strategy taxes almost always imposed by the big guys.
 First, there is Mark Fletcher's SnapGroups. It's basically a threaded discussion group with a modern browser-based UI. It's perhaps a framework that something like FriendFeed can develop from, although it's just a framework. There are no feeds in either direction -- you can't subscribe to feeds from within SnapGroups,...
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Zadi Diaz got this great picture of Steve Jobs on the red carpet at the Oscars last night.
Click the thumb above for the full effect.
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This week's Rebooting The News podcast, recorded in the studio at NYU, was particularly good. It starts off a little slowly, but picks up speed.
http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Mar08.mp3
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Tomorrow night they announce the winners of the Academy Awards, and for the first time in a long time, I don't really think there is a movie up to being called Best Picture.
The only one I haven't seen is Precious. So it might be the exception.
Of all the nominated pictures I have seen, if I had to choose one, I'd go for Up In The Air. Great acting, interesting plot, well done all around. Second choice: An Education.
Each of the others has something to recommend it, but none of them put enough of the pieces together to qualify as a Best Picture.
Curious what other people think.
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