Where it has fallen short is in the posting interface. It’s not particularly complicated, but it is definitely busy. Adding photos and videos to a post can be a hassle, and rarely in an online post am I too concerned about the exact spacing, size and location of an online photo.

These are the kinds of things that have made Posterous so useful for me! Their goal is to make the task of posting dead simple-and they succeed.

Here’s an example: want to start a posterous blog? Just send an email. Yep, that’s it, a regular old email sent to post@posterous.com will create a blog for you, add a post with the text In the body, and send back an email confirmation with a link to see the new site. Couldn’t be simpler. Want to embed a YouTube video? Put a link to it in your email. Want a photo album? Attach some photos to the email.

No need to log in, no need to do anything special. Of course, if you want to log into their service, you’re still given full control over theme, layout, etc. so no worries that it will be too bland. They also have a great mobile app with additional features you can flip on.

I’m not moving old sites over to Posterous, but it’s been awfully tempting. We’ll see where I go from here.

Learn more: posterous.com

It looks nice on paper and in pictures, it's easy on the wallet, but Ars says Beware!

On paper, the Maylong tablet looks… okay. It has a 7″…resistive touchscreen…a 400MHz (or 533, depending on whom you ask) processor, 256MB of RAM and 2GB of built-in storage. It comes with 802.11b/g for WiFi and no 3G support, though it claims to be able to use USB-based 3G cards via the extra dongle that comes in the box. It weighs less than a pound and comes with Android 1.6. Hey, what do you expect for $100?

In the box is the tablet itself, the aforementioned dongle, the power cable, and a very simple manual. The stylus rolling loose around the bottom of the box was a very nice packing touch.

Hop out and read the full review at Ars Technica.  Once you’ve recomposed yourself, check out the Best Buy Blog response, which takes a bit more positive of a tone.

I’ve been in a local cover band for the last three and a half years.  We specialized in rock music: 80′s, some 90′s, and some 2000′s.  It was a lot of fun, but it was getting to be more of a chore than it was a hobby I looked forward to.  The toughest part was that I did still want to be playing….it’s a great distraction from long hours at work.

The solution?  Start a new band.  So a group of us did.  Daisy and the Dukes.  That’s all well and good…but that doesn’t explain the lack of posts here.  Allow me to continue.

Along with the new name, came a change of players, a change in music style (now a mix of country/rock), and we went back to square one as far as marketing.  This meant my time went two places: 1) learning a lot of new music….well. and 2) building up our electronic presence.

I jumped right on top of getting a domain name, facebook page, myspace page, twitter account, flickr account, and started weaving it all together.  My background served me pretty well for putting something together.

There are two pillars with our electronic presence, the daisyandthedukes.com website, and our facebook page.

The website is focused on being an easy one-stop shop to find us.  The fact that we have our exact band name as our domain name is a huge plus, especially with such a memorable name.  From the website, you can see the facebook badge (and recent updates), see a list of shows, see our recent tweets, and get a general feel for who we are and what we play.  All without a requirement of signing up or logging in to anything.  Make it easy.

The facebook account is all about the social aspect.  It’s a great tool for having regular interaction with folks, and specifically with people who opt in (via the like button on our page).  This has been more work than I expected, as I’m not a very regular facebook user.  That said, through the advertising efforts of the group, we passed 100 Likes by the time we hit our first full show!

Feel free to have a look at the website!!  More posts to follow.

1. It allows me to group icons together in little fenced off groups, in little areas on my desktop.
2. When I dock and undock my computer, things rejigger themselves in a rational way.
3. I can double click on my desktop, I hide or show all icons, fenced or otherwise.

It’s been great for me, because I like to keep a tidy desktop with a view of my wallpaper, but there are a handful of things that I do like to keep handy if I need them.  Practically speaking, I keep a few basic fences, and leverage the “hide” feature often.

Here's a fenced off area with some keepers.

It’s great because I can make everything on the desktop disappear, leaving only the pretty picture to look at.  I only wish it were this easy to keep my home office this clean!

Fences is there, but everything's hidden. It only took a quarter of a second to do this!!

That’s all there is to it.  Stardock publishes this software, and they’ve come up with another winner.  While I’ve been an on/off dock and WindowBlinds user, Fences is here to stay.

One might have expected Sprite...

I only wish I’d seen this in person. I learned about it via reddit, which is also where I ripped off the Sprite comment.

When I was originally setting up our website, twitter and facebook pages we needed a working logo.  I pulled down a sketch of a Dodge Charger and put on the band name.

Basic, but directionally accurate

While that was nice and all, it wasn’t something we were ready to use to put on a banner, t-shirts, etc because it got all pixeley when you increased the size.

Being someone without a lot of artistic skill, I looked to find a professional.  I turned to elance.com, a site where you can post jobs for people (or companies) to bid on.  While I’d heard of it, I only knew one person who’d used it (Storage Texan‘s logo was commissioned through elance).  He had a good experience, but is only one datapoint, so I was a bit wary.  It was still worth a shot, because if worst came to worst we could make do with my logo.

After deliberating on exactly what to include in the request, I laid out a handful of deliverables and some direction of what the feel of the logo should be.  Once posted, I searched through a list of well-known companies and requested that they bid on my project.

The responses came back quick!  Within an hour, I had two back, but both were fairly generic and I wondered if they had actually read through my request.  After about 12 hours, I had a good handful to choose from, and I was messaging back and forth (through elance) to get samples of their work as well as additional info about the way they like to interact during the project.

Once I awarded the business, we were off and running.  After filling out a “brief sheet”, I had back some logo concepts in under 24 hours.  Two in particular were on the right track.  After a few more iterations back and forth, we’d arrived at the final logo, which was delivered in all of the requested print and digital formats.

It was really simple, and the pricing was very reasonable.  While I certainly didn’t go with the lowest bid, the logo didn’t require a loan either.

Yeah, that's way better.

Now it’s time to start making some swag for our upcoming shows.  Should be gigging by mid-September!

Makes me wonder what the average APM comes in at for the Guitar Hero version of DragonForce’s “Through The Fire and Flames”.

[Original post from Ars Technica]

Not really a big deal, but a lame annoyance.

The truth is that the solution couldn’t be much simpler.  Chris Prillo (of Lockergnome fame) details it in this post [found via Lifehacker].  Outlook is using the autocorrect functionality, replacing the common smileys with a single character in Wingdings, so deleting these autocorrect rules will put an end to the substitution.

Woohoo!

The catalyst may have presented itself.

I’m shocked that I haven’t heard about Wubi before today, but I tell you, I’m pretty geeked about the app.  It’s a Windows application that gives the option (after a shutdown or restart) to boot into Linux instead of the Windows OS you already have.  I’m too much of an Excel guy to move away from Windows, but there are plenty of times I’m not playing spreadsheets and I’m annoyed with the general bloat of Windows.

For my first crack at Wubi, I’ve chosen the Ubuntu Netbook Edition release to go on

After a few hours and a change of the background

my little Acer Aspire.  Should be nice and lightweight, as well as reasonably-tuned for the smallish screen.  Once I had the Ubuntu .iso downloaded, the install took about 15 minutes, which included installing the Wuby app, selecting my distribution, then rebooting into Linux and waiting for the first-time-boot to grind through.  Now I’m cold-booting in under a minute.

It recognized my wireless adapter right away–which is nice–and I was able to connect out to my network with little trouble.  Actually, my biggest roadblock was that Firefox was pretty fussy about resolving websites.  That’s fine, it gave me a good reason to download Chrome for Linux, which doesn’t have the same problems I was seeing.

We’ll see how things go, but so far I couldn’t be happier.  If anyone else out there is interested in installing Wuby, but wants a little how-to, check out this guide at the how-to-geek.

ZBar Barcode Reader – After seeing a number of QR barcodes, I wanted to download an app that would read them.

Public Radio – Pulls both live streams and provides easy mobile access to historic Minnesota Public Radio content. One day, if I’m curious, I might explore some of the additional content available through the app.

Solitaire – Because who doesn’t need solitaire at some time or another?

That’s all…not too many adds (but I’m not having to remove anything either).