Webcams are interesting beasties…

First of all, I found out, somewhat to my surprise, that the quality of a webcam can depend as much on the software used as on the camera itself. It turns out that Yahoo’s webcam is very choppy and slow, though it gets the job done. The webcam through the MSN protocol was much better. However, using Kopete’s MSN protocol let me to run into a bug where the incoming cam just freezes and lags — at one point, I realized I was seeing images 10 minutes old. I can only speculate the packets took a quick side trip to a sun-drenched beach somewhere first before coming back to our gray, drizzly area.

So, I tried out aMSN to see if it was true that the webcam performance was better over MSN. This package is strictly for the MSN protocol and is designed just for Linux. The interface to this looks a little rough around the edges, although it’s possible that it’s a font issue in my installation. Ubuntu has 0.95-2.1 in its repositories, but I don’t recommend installing that. aMSN has a later version (0.96) that’s demonstrably improved, and I found it here using a standalone installer (a tar.gz for more traditional compile/install is also offered) which intrigued me enough to try it out, and it installed without any problems.

And indeed, it proved quite responsive with both incoming / outgoing webcams, showing the picture with much less choppiness.

I think in conclusion I’d have to say that I really look forward to Gaim incorporating video capability (which is rumored for 3.0, but as I said, I’m not holding my breath since 2.0 just came out) because I like Gaim’s interface the best. Kopete seems to be actively working on its code, judging from all the email on its devel list, so I would expect the bug I found to be fixed quickly. At that point, I’d be happy to use Kopete, as I can see its interface growing on me. It’s just a pity it doesn’t have a windows version, as I like being able to use the same programs at home and at work. But, in the meantime, aMSN’s not bad at all and I won’t mind using it for the webcam until one of the multiprotocol apps work for me. I prefer to run as few programs as possible

But if what you need is a robust MSN connection, I’d definitely recommend aMSN.

In general, the programs and tools I use revolve around a couple of considerations:

1. I need to use them at home/at work (or more precisely, from different computers)
2. I want to use the same tool regardless of the operating system I’m using (I have linux at home, but must use Windows elsewhere)

Ideally I’d like my data accessible from anywhere, and I don’t want to have to learn new applications just because I’m on a different operating system. Obviously there are no hard and fast rules because some programs are just too useful not to have around even though they only run on Linux. (Don’t let the mentions of Linux scare anyone off here. Everything I discuss is either a web application or works on Windows as well as it does on Linux.)

In practice, this means I gravitate toward browser based utilities and open source cross platform utilities. In the former category are many of the Google tools: Gmail, Calendar, Notebook, plus others such as Bloglines, Meebo. In the latter category are Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, Gimp. Sometimes there are programs near and dear to my heart that I take the trouble to locate off platform versions of them, such as vi (yes I know I’m depraved) but this last category I’m not addressing here.

I’ve actually known about Meebo for some time, but I’ve started experimenting with it only in the last few days. I have no complaints whatsoever with Gaim which is what I normally use. However, when I was travelling for a few weeks last year, it was very cumbersome to download it, unpack it, use it, and then delete it. I should have made use of Meebo then although I’m not sure how usable it was at this point. Right now, it’s pretty sleek, works very well. Could use some more bells and whistles (I do not mean this literally in the sounds sections) — I have a hard time telling when I’ve got a new message in, for example. But it’s got a good interface, looks very smooth, and is worth checking out. It also offers a one stop place to log all your conversations, which could be a good thing or a scary thing, depending (completely configurable, never fear).

Feed aggregators have been interesting. There’s plenty of computerside clients, of course, but for this one I definitely want a web based one! Google Reader and Bloglines seem to be the main contenders out there. I tried Reader first, but it has an inherent disorganization that makes me want to scream. You get fed a steady stream of all the new articles that have come out. And if non has, no problem, it will show them to you over again. You wind up completely uncertain of what you’ve seen, where you’ve seen it or even when you’ve seen it. You lose all context since a post from that political blog might be followed by a post from that comics blog and then your little sister’s journal entry. No thanks. Yes, there’s kind of an edit subscription mode at the top you can turn on that helps organize the information, but there’s no settings to turn that on or anything. Bloglines is much better organized, although their frames setup makes me want to scream. They could set the sidebar up without frames, I’m sure, and make a much nicer interface. Still, the organization of the subscriptions into orderly files is wonderful, and they have several API’s for accessing the feed list which you can turn to nefarious purposes on your own website and so on. My particular favorite has been to assemble a comics folder, in which I placed all my comics subscriptions — rigorously selected to actually display the comic (some will just give you links to go to your comics — no thanks!) — and in the morning i just flip that folder on, go to wide view and jump down each one almost like a regular newspaper. I love it! And of course all I need is a browser and I can go thru my feeds.

Different web utilities can be combined in sometimes unexpected ways. Here’s one that’s proved very useful (via LifeHacker) if you use Google Calendar and you want to track the daily weather: Go to Weather Underground and find your zipcode or area of interest. When you get to the page in question, you’ll find a green ICAL link in the upper right hand area of the screen. Copy the link location for this ical file (in FF, right click and choose copy link location) and then go over to your Calendar, click on Settings, then Import Calendar and paste the ical address in there. What’s cool is that the next seven days or so have weather information in them, which gets updated. It cleans up after itself: the weather information is always eight days including yesterday. Plus, as the weather info updates during the day, the info box also updates in the calendar.

I’ve been using Delicious for several months now to collect my bookmarks in a completely accessible fashion, although I use DR’s delicious account more for “reporting back” here, so with that account I take the trouble to copy or type up some notes with each link. Either way, Delicious offers a way to access your bookmarks from anywhere, and through the different utilities and API’s that it has, you can do all kinds of stuff with the bookmarks you make, besides go searching or browsing through them at Delicious itself. They finally took the smart step of adding private entries to this utility, which is good for people who want to keep certain work links or personal links private and yet keep everything together. I experimented with Magnolia as well, which could be another alternative, but I have enough links on Delicious that exporting/importing isn’t an attractive proposition. Oh, and you can save an xml export of the Delicious bookmarks, although at present I don’t know of any utilities that work off of it (even Delicious itself!). Still, you can download that to your personal computer for backup.

The final sort of online utility I’ve been considering but have not actually used yet, is an online password saver. I’ve looked at this one, but I have serious reservations about saving passwords online. At the same time, if they are saved on my personal computer, I’m really screwed if I can’t remember something while away from my computer. (As an aside, I should note that I’m very strict about setting FF and other browsers and utilities to never remember passwords. Even if someone should get on the computers I actually use, they will find that nothing has my passwords: not my ftp or ssh utilities, not my browsers, nor my mail clients. Nothing logs in automatically and so on. Perhaps the constant need to remember my passwords will keep Alzheimers at bay, who knows…)

I don’t think I need to extoll the virtues of Firefox here, but it sure does have good extensions, which would make a post in of themselves. I’ll confine myself to the latest one I’ve nabbed: the copy as html link firefox extension which is a boon to bloggers everywhere (along with Google Notebook) in cutting and pasting links (how often have you copied the address, come back here, pasted it, gone back, copied the title, back here, paste, and so on ad infinitum?). With this, you highlight the text you want, right click, choose the copy as html that is now present, and go back to paste in one step. This is one of those tiny little utilities that fix something which was truly headdesking and yet never addressed till now and you wonder why it wasn’t done this way to begin with. This is functionality that should be built into browsers.

Thunderbird is a very well thought out program, and I do like how it’s set up. However, while it meets my criteria for operating across different platforms it still renders my mail inaccessible if I download mail with it onto a particular computer. So although I prefer its interface to Gmail’s, I primarily use it to retrieve and archive my email, from Gmail and IMAP clients (had to leave the pop ones alone). Still, if you use something like Outlook (shudder), you should definitely be looking at something like this. Plus, Thunderbird also has cool extensions like Firefox does, to help you customize it exactly the way you want.

I was initially somewhat dubious of Open Office’s Write as I’d tried converting a few files a couple years back and had too much trouble with tables, but the OOo team seems to have been hard at work and I’ve been very pleased with the results this time around. No trouble with any of my files so far. Ditto Gimp — I coudln’t figure out how to do anything the first go around, and this time I transitioned right off Photoshop with nary a hiccup. I’m particularly pleased that the interfaces on the Windows version are the same as in Linux. Saves me a lot of bother. Plus which the applications are smaller, faster, and somewhat cheaper than the Windows counterparts Even if you’re not a Linux user, you’d probably be pleasantly surprised at the speed and ease of use of these programs. They keep getting cast in terms of substitutes for Windows programs, but in reality they’re full fledged programs with a good deal more functionality plus interoperability.

If you’re not off internet cafe hopping, Gaim’s a great application. It combines all the major IM interfaces into a single program. Yahoo IM, AIM, Jabber (which hooks up to Gtalk), and others are all represented here. You don’t have to have multiple programs running if you’re talking with people on different IM’s. It’s got a slick interface, tabbed conversations, and it can do group chats as well.

There. That should be plenty of toys to look over…