I haven’t tested it, but I’m assuming anyone can create a new ID easily. My ID is for the US store since that’s my billing address, but I would be interested to know if people form other countries have difficulties signing up. Amazon has said that people in certain countries won’t be able to upgrade their cloud drive with extra space at this time. You can see the upgrade plans and pricing here.

First impression: where’s the desktop client? As far as I can tell at this time, you can only add files to your drive either by uploading them via the web-based interface, or by purchasing music via Amazon’s MP3 store. The latter is pretty cool, since, if you’re going to purchase MP3s from Amazon anyway, they might as well be stored in your free online storage.

You can then play your MP3s via the web-based Cloud Player or on your Android device with the Android Cloud Player. However, when I tried to visit the Web-based Cloud Player, since I am currently located in Budapest, Hungary, I got this message:

For U.S. Customers Only

It appears that you are attempting to use Amazon Cloud Player from outside the U.S. This service is intended for U.S. customers only.

I can feel the “clouds” darkening over my head even as I write this blog post.

The bottom-line deal breaker: without a desktop client (and it’s got to be as good as Dropbox’s), iPhone app, and no support for non-US locations, Amazon’s cloud drive is a nonstarter for me.

A thing for toiletries

I have a confession to make. When it comes to hearing God’s voice, I apparently have a thing for toiletries.

Let me explain.

The year is 1995, and I’m in between college and well, whatever’s next, working as a cashier at the local Wal-Mart.

One day, I receive a newsletter from Youth With A Mission Hong Kong. I had been in Hong Kong back in 1990 for my very first missions trip overseas, and had pretty much sworn off of missions. It’s not that the trip was so bad, it was great, actually, but I was only 17, it was my first time away from home for more than two weeks, first time overseas, etc. You can imagine. So, I had come home form that trip in 1990 and decided that I wouldn’t go into missions; I would go to college, get a good job and make lots of money and support missions.

Well, as I said previously, I was no longer in college at this point in 1995 and wondering what God had in store for me, so that whole thing obviously didn’t work out for me. And then I get this newsletter from Hong Kong. In the newsletter, they mentioned they were looking for people to come and help. Nothing special, what missions organization doesn’t mention that in almost every newsletter they send out, right? However, that one, simple sentence umped off the page and punched me in the gut.

It was clear at that moment that that was “what was next for me”. However, I apparently needed a lot of reassurance because strange things started happening in that Wal-Mart check-out line.

Every time any kind of toiletry product would come by, shampoo, toothpaste, deodorant, etc. I would start thinking about one particular drug store I had been in my first time in Hong Kong back in 1990. And not just thinking about it, longing for it to the point of being homesick. So much so, I could hardly do my job.

Now, don’t think I’m off the deep end, here. I would, of course never make such a large life-decision as quitting my job, leaving family, home and friends and taking off to Hong Kong based on toiletries alone.

However, in the grand scheme of things, and amidst all the other avenues and wise people God was using to speak to me. God’s still, small voice was coming to me through toiletries.

So why am I writing about this now? The last few weeks, every-time I use toiletries of some kind or another, I think about Budapest and the fact that toiletries are so much cheaper there than here in The Netherlands.

Is that really God once again speaking to me through toiletries, or is it just my shampoo?

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Beyond the Cosmos: What Recent Discoveries in Astrophysics Reveal About the Glory and Love of God

After the jump…

An example of a solarcooker from solarcooker.org

I just read about something called the “Kyoto Box” over at Steve Milloy’s blog.

What is it exactly?  According to an article on the BBC website:

It is made from two cardboard boxes, which use reflective foil and black paint to maximise absorption of solar energy.

Shockingly innovative!  Furthermore the BBC article claims:

The Kyoto Box is made from cardboard and can be used for sterilising water or boiling or baking food.

However:

Covering the cooking pot with a transparent cover retains heat and water, and temperatures inside the pot can reach at least 80C. (emphasis mine)

Now that’s interesting, because it seems to me that the inventor, Jon Bohmer, has done something even more radical than (re-)inventing a cheap oven, he has somehow managed to lower the boiling point of water to only 80C when it is normally 100C!  Put in that perspective, the $75,000 he received as prize money seems like a paltry sum.

Maybe we should put him to work on cold fusion.

But the most interesting thing, as Steve Milloy puts it in his blog post:

Isn’t it interesting how the purpose of the contest is to avert climate change rather than to help poor Africans lead a better life? if you’re a poor African, do you really care about atmospheric carbon dioxide and mean global temperatures 100 years from now?

Well said.

Well, I started this post several days ago, but never got to finish it because WordPress for iPhone crashed on me and when I restarted it wouldn’t let me access this blog. I was also busy doing other things this weekend and so I forgot about it.

The cool thing is that when I started WordPress up just now and went to this blog it informed that it had auto-recovered the post and I could pick up where I left off. Seems like although there are a few bugs, they’ve got a nice auto-recover built into it.

I’ve taken a few screenshots, but I really suggest you check out the video.

]]> http://thedonkeysmouth.com/2009/04/wordpress-for-iphone-12/feed/ 0 http://thedonkeysmouth.com/2009/04/my-idea-outsource-to-a-computer/ http://thedonkeysmouth.com/2009/04/my-idea-outsource-to-a-computer/#comments Tue, 07 Apr 2009 10:02:59 +0000 thedonkey http://thedonkeysmouth.com/?p=103 In Dave Barry’s article, Technical Difficulties, he laments the fact that much of modern telephone tech support is being outsourced to foreign countries.

As he so eloquently puts it:

THE GOOD NEWS IS: The foreign tech support people are smart, educated and eager to help, and they speak English.

THE BAD NEWS IS: They speak it in such a way that you understand only about every fifth word.

I recently had some experience with this, and it was obvious they were using some sort of script, because they kept repeating the same things over and over again. The advantage was that I good clearly understand them, but every time I asked a question, the person answered the questions as if it was the first time we were speaking.

Me: I am calling to find out how to activate internet on my cell phone.

Tech Support: Yes sir, you are calling to find out how to activate internet on your cell phone?

Me: Yes, please.

Tech Support: Sir, you are calling to find out how to activate internet on your cell phone, so I am going to find the information on how to help you with that.

Me: Okay, thanks.

Tech Support: Okay sir, you are calling to find out how to activate internet on your cell phone, so I have found the information on how to help you with that. Please follow these instructions.

I remember back in the 90′s when call centers first started using computers to answer the phones.  People could often be heard lamenting: “Can I please just talk to a real person?”

In my recent conversation with outsourced tech support, I found myself thinking: “Can I please just talk to a computer?”

Apparently, this has been happening since 2005, according to the article:

This cooling is reflected in increasing amounts of winter ice since 2005.  Not surprisingly, as the temperature gets colder, the amount of ice increases.

Or perhaps Earth Hour is already having an effect, retroactively that is.  Oh wait a minute, was Earth Hour actually meant to help fight Global Warming, or Global Climate Change? Is there a difference or does it all just boil down to rhetoric and plausible deniability?

Hmmm, I’m still not sure whether to invest in a hundred acres in Kenya in preparation for the coming ice age, or beach-front property in northern Sweden in preparation for Global Warming.

I’ll let you know how it turns our, because either way, I’ll need some VC.  Got any you could spare?

Download RSS Thumbs Widget here.

I wrote this because I was originally trying to use the very nice KB Advanced RSS Widget, but apparently, the feed parser in WordPress doesn’t support enclosures.  I still use the KB widget for other feeds on my blog.

Since I’m using SimplePie, I also could have just included the necessary SimplePie code in my template, but I wanted to include it with the other widgets on my blog and be able to move it around from within the WP Admin.  Besides, what’s the fun in that?

Requirements:

• The RSS feed from which you are pulling must contain thumbnails.  I use the plugin MediaRSS on the WordPress blog(s) providing the feed, which works great.
• Requires that both SimplePie Core and SimplePie Plugin for WordPress plugins be installed.

Installation

You MUST be using a widgets-enabled theme. If you are using pre-2.2 WordPress, you’ll also need the sidebar widgets plugin.

1. WP 2.7+: Use the plugin installer (oops, not yet, I still have to submit it to WordPress). Upload the rss-thumbs-widget folder to either /wp-content/plugins/widgets/ or /wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate the widget through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
3. Add the new RSS Thumbs widget to your sidebar through the ‘Presentation => Sidebar Widgets’ menu in WordPress.

Features:

• Provides a control panel where you can specify name, two feeds (one feed is also okay), how many items to display from each feed, what html should come before and after the feed(s) and the individual posts (defaults are <ul></ul>, and <li></li> respectively).
• If there is more than one thumbnail associated with a post, it will pull only the first one.
• Degrades gracefully.  If there are no thumbnails for a particluar feed or post, only the post title is included with a link to the post.

The Options and what they do:

Title

Pretty obvious, I think.  If you put a title in here, then that shows up, otherwise it doesn’t.

Feed 1 & Feed 2

The urls, including http://, but not including feed:, of the feeds you want to use.  The plugin uses SimplePie, so if you don’t know the exact url, SimplePie might be able to locate it.

Both feeds will be merged together and appear in the same list.

Max number of posts per feed (Default: 2)

If you have two feeds, then each feed will only be allowed to show x number of posts.

Total number of posts

This is the total number of combined posts that will be shown.

Before Feed, After Feed

The HTML you would like to have appear before the list begins.  Defaults to <ul> and </ul> respectively.

Before Item, After Item

Same as above, except this appears before each post.  Defaults to <li> and </li> respectively.

Here’s some example code using the default before and after values:

<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://link-to-blog-one">Blog One Name:</a><br /><a href="http://permalink-to-post">Post Title<br />
<img src="http://link-to-thumb.jpg" /></a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://link-to-blog-two">Blog Two Name:</a><br /><a href="http://permalink-to-post">Post Title<br />
<img src="http://link-to-thumb.jpg" /></a>
</li>
...
</ul>

TO-DO List

• Add support for multiple instances of the widget
• Templating
• any suggestions?

If SimplePie ever comes out with a widget, then this plugin will (probably) become obsolete.

If you like this plugin please considering making a donation: