Wayne D's Blog

Freshbooks is a great solution for invoicing, If you need to invoice you should give Freshbooks a look. Freshbooks offers a 30 day money back guarantee, staged plans depending on the number of customers or a free account if your business is just starting out. Now onto the story.

I first met Rayanne from Freshbooks.com when I took a chance to Tweetup with Tara Hunt. As a result I ended up following Rayanne on Twitter which led to me reading a tweet from her about Freshbook's 5th birthday party in High Park. High Park is on the way from Interactive Sports offices in Vaughan to the Rogers Centre where the Argonauts and the Argonotes play so I have driven by it many times but never actually been to the park. The Freshbash afford me the excuse the visit High Park and take advantage of Freshbook's offer of some free food. The Argonotes connection becomes important because shortly ater I arrived I noticed Grace. At least I thought it was Grace, one of the flute player from the Argonotes, an enthusiastic football fan and as I am soon to discover a support rockstar at Freshbooks. She didn't appear to recognize me since I wasn't wearing a blue football jersey and carrying a saxophone. I think she was too shy to ask the old guy in the white shirt whether he hung out with a rag tag band like the Argonotes. I wasn't too shy and found that she was as surprised to see me as I was to see her.

What followed was a whirlwind of shaved ice, burgers,hot dogs, salads, a caricature artist, a monster 1.5 metre eggplant that was just there and a great cake, There were also bees hanging around everyone which necessitated shaking your pop can to make sure there wasn't a bee inside before drinking from it. There were tug of war, sack, three legged and wheelbarrow races and at the end of the night a gift bag with a snazzy Freshbooks T-shirt, a tube of Freshbubbles, a candy necklace, Popeye cand sticks and a Ring Pop that my youngest son wanted to appropriate when I brought it home.

Along the way i had to explain multiple times how I wasn't a Freshbooks customer but instead a hanger on who knew a couple of Freshbookers and had come to shmooze. The Freshbooks customers who were there were over the top in their enthusiastic support of Freshbooks and how it made invoicing simple and easy. Invoicing is a necessary evil for all businesses but when a business can use Freshbooks and take the time they would have spent on invoicing and either bill it or use it to grow their business it's not hard to understand why they love Freshbooks so much.

A few days later I wore my Freshbooks T-shirt into my local St. Loius Wings and Ribs, on the customers saw it and asked me whether I knew Mike McDerment, one of the Freshbook founders. I sheepishly admitted that though I had probably talked to him at the party I wasn't really sure. We chatted for a few minutes and he ended the conversation with a remark something like "They have created quite a unique culture there at Freshboks", I couldn't agree more, Freshbooks is smart, fun people with a great product.

Showing off Freshbooks swag on 12seconds.tv

I just saw an ad for Roger's internet where they tout the "fastest internet". My question for Roger's is, Why tout how fast your Internet is when they cap my traffic at 60 GB a month? I don't need fast because if I take advantage of it I'm sure to hit my cap. The only reason Rogers can offer the "fastest Internet" is because they set their transfer levels artificially low. They try to pretend that this is to protect their network from heavy users but the real reason is to protect their cable business.

This month I had to tell my kids not to use the internet because we were on track to busting through the cap about two weeks through the month. It wasn't because of bit torrent it was because my kids started to use the internet to watch streaming video. Watching streaming video threatens Rogers cable business so that last thing they want people to do is to get used to watching their video online. Why don't most sporting events stream live in Canada? TSN would rather you watch it on TV, Why no Hulu in Canada? The media companies want to maintain their cable revenues.

My plan is to ditch cable TV entirely and use the money I save, which is currently larger than my cable internet bill, to play for my families internet overages. I'll get over the air broadcasts for the network shows I want to watch and though I will miss some of the specialty channels they just aren't worth keeping cable for. To bad Rogers doesn't offer a la carte pricing. The days of ripping off consumers with overpriced bundles can't last forever.

(updated Aug. 24th with sample video and additions marked below)

Until WebcamStudio came along Linux webcam users could only look longingly at the neat effects available to Windows users with WebcamMax. Even if you don't have a webcam you can use the desktop capture functionality to help with how to videos. WebcamStudio for Linux can also play video and be used as a budget switcher either to make your own videos or stream to Ustream.com or another one of the online video services if you have the vloopback module installed in your system. The vloopback module is a handy tool and is included with the Webcamstudio release.

This program shows lots of potential but is still a work in progress. It's written in java and on my Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz machine it wasn't very responsive especially when I had the webcam and the screen capture active. The text overlays in version 0.43 which is what I downloaded and the previous which I also downloaded, wouldn't change size no matter which font or size I selected. The animation and faces files disappeared from the project website before I got around to downloading and trying them. Whenever I try to play a movie as an input I get a Gstreamer error. I suspect this is because Centos 5 doesn't run the latest and greatest version of Gstreamer. I was going to do a short demo video but the audio capture on my PC has crapped out yet again. I'm not sure if it's the old Soundblaster Audigy sound card I have installed or something that gets goofed up in the ALSA subsystem but occasionally the analog audio capture stops working and no amount of fiddling with mixer setting will get it going again. I tried doing a video with the mic on the webcam but it dropped out after only a few seconds of recording, generally when I started the webcam capture. I resolved this by switching to saving the video as a 320x240 avi instead of 640x480. The documentation that comes with is minimalist at best. Sound synchronization can be done using the pulse audio server which I haven't got running as of yet. That and the irritating tendency of ALSA to rearrange devices based on what's plugged in at boot time makes me want to pull what little hair I have left out. Linux audio can be very frustrating at times.

If I haven't scared you away I'd be interested in hearing your experiences with WebcamStudio for GNU/Linux. Go ahead, I dare you.

I managed to snag an invite to lazyfeed.com when Techcrunch.com got a few in advance of lazyfeed's launch at the Real time stream Crunchup. Lazyfeed is a real time blog search tool, you enter tags and lazyfeed.com will return a list of blog articles matching your keyword. It doesn't aggregate the separate tags but highlights when there are new items in a particular tag and moves the tag to the top of the sidebar. You can also add individual blog posts to the sidebar as you can see in the screen shot below. This enables to bookmark a particular post so you can read it at your leisure. Lazyfeed has a lot of promise but there are still some bugs to be ironed out before it goes prime time. One glaring omission is that tags must be one word and there is no Boolean operator implemented yet. I can look for the tag "golf" or the the tag "simulator" but lazyfeed.com won't filter on "golf" and "simulator". The user interface can also be a touch confusing. Sometimes clicking on "View the stuff from past" shows you newer items than the new updates from the topic. Lazyfeed has great promise for lazy blog readers like me who don't want to bother which blogs to read and with a few tweaks could be really be a very sueful tool.

Let me guess, you updated Pidgin because you couldn't connect to Yahoo Messenger anymore and now it won't work at all. If you try to start the program from a console you get the following message pidgin: symbol lookup error: pidgin: undefined symbol: gst_registry_fork_set_enabled

That's what happened to me, the fix was simple, update gstreamer and gstreamer plugins to the latest version. Running "yum update gstreamer*" got me new versions of gstreamer, gstreamer-tools, gstreamer-plugins-base and gstreamer-plugins-good.

I'm running Centos 5 but I suspect others including Redhat EL5 users are running into the same problem, I hope this helps.