I’ve been looking around for open-source libraries (preferably in Java, but not required) for extracting data and metadata from common file formats and Web formats. One project that looks very promising is Aperture. Do you know of any others that are ready or almost ready for prime-time use?… Read More “Open Source Projects for Extracting Data and Metadata from Files & the Web”
Here are some more features that I wish the iPod offered:
Side-Trips From Current Playlist
When I’m playing through one of my playlists and I get to a song I really like, I wish I had the ability to take sidetrips to other related subjects, accessible from the trackwheel or menu button:
If you’ve ever tried writing a business plan, you know what a chore it is to locate statistics about industries, markets and products. While there are many market research firms that charge huge sums for their reports on particular segments, one quickly realizes that the wide degree of variance in their statistics means that just getting reports from one source is not very useful — one really needs to see all the statistics normalized across all the sources that project them about a market.… Read More “Idea: GRASP — The Statistics Portal”
This animated visualizer lets you enter a word (in the little search box on the bottom left) and then shows the word situated next to other words that are used with similar frequency in English. It’s cool — you can discover some interesting things.… Read More “An Interesting Visualization of Word Frequencies”
I just received the following internal release from a company that starts alternative energy companies (Magnetic Power, Inc., which I am an investor in). MPI has a number of interesting alternative energy devices under development. My investment was in their superconducting project (ROOTS) — which focuses on room temperature superconducing polymers.… Read More “This Just In: The Race for Magnetic Power”
The title of this post says it all. I want a single device that has:
– Cell phone
– Email (Blackberry pager style) & PIM (Palm Desktop)
– iPod MP3 player
– Digital camera (stills or short videos)
– e-Wallet (all my credit/debit cards on a chip, securely protected)
– GPS
– LCD for video/still images and text
– Broadband wireless Internet
– Bluetooth, and Bluetooth earbud/mic
– Java OS so I can download and run stuff
– Laser gun (OK, OK, had to throw that in)
– AM/FM radio receiver
– Retinal or fingerprint scanner or some other built-in biometric security so only I can use it
– Bar code reader (would be useful to have — would enable me to scan items that I want to price compare or remember for later)
I have been using Earthlink’s built-in spam filter on my personal email — it works really well. It is basically a whitelist system: Any messages from pre-approved parties get through to me while anything else goes into a “suspect email” folder for me to look at and potentially approve or delete.… Read More “How to Make a Smarter Spam Filter”
I am sitting here using my Earthlink Spamblocker feature — which is a whitelist. I am manually adding in domains for companies that I will accept mail from. That is annoying. Why isn’t there a way to instantly add in lists of companies and others that I want to whitelist?… Read More “A New Feature for Spamblockers that I Want”