Some Blog Site

Jimmy Blogger here…

What’s wrong with Tag Clouds?

There are no clouds!

While everyone else has plain tag clouds, your blog can have cloudy tag clouds.

(cut to scene of people using laptops at coffee shop)

“Thanks to Cloudy Tags, my blog isn’t boring anymore!”
“I love this new widget!”

(cut back to set with audience)

SSSSSStamp!

Blogging tested!
Blogging approved!

For many of you, that spoof made no sense. For others, it did make sense. But in about 6 months, that line of commercials should have withered and no one will appreciate this post anymore. By that time, there should be plenty of other posts and I wouldn’t expect that many people to be reading this one anyway.

I have completed my second plugin for WordPress blogs, Cloudy Tags. It makes your tag cloud look cloudy, like this:

[cloudytags]

Details are at the Cloudy Tags page.

Hey all you WordPress users: are you jealous of people on Blogger who get fancy archives and categories that display the links in a collapsible/expandable list? Do you want the little arrows next to your links too?

Your wait is over – Collapsing Archives and Categories are here.

Okay, maybe it’s not that dramatic. And it’s not new. I noticed that my WordPress blog had very bulky and boring Archives and Categories sections, so I searched for widgets that would make them better.

I found Collapsing Archives and Collapsing Categories, by Rob Felty. They did basically what I wanted, but they didn’t look quite right to me. So I separated the date from the post title and I think they look much better now.

Before
After

Anyway, he did all the hard work – I simply modified them slightly so that they would look more like I wanted them to look. If you want to see them in action, just look on the right side of this blog until you see “Categories” or “Archives”. Those sections are the widgets.

You can visit the Collapsing Categories page or Collapsing Archive page to read more about them, including steps how to modify the widgets to make the dates distinct from the titles.

Hey all you WordPress users: are you jealous of people on Blogger who get fancy blogrolls that sort the links in chronological order by most recent post? Do you want the little favicon next to your blogroll links too?

Your wait is over – SBS Blogroll is here.

Okay, maybe it’s not that dramatic. I noticed that my WordPress blog had a boring Links section, so I searched for a widget that would make it better.

I found RSS Blogroll, by Mr. Pants On Head. It did basically what I wanted, but it didn’t look quite right to me. I added a favicon option and also set the blog title to be a link.

Anyway, he did all the hard work – I simply modified it slightly so that it would look more like the Blogger or Blogspot format. If you want to see it in action, just look on the right side of this blog until you see “SBS Blogroll”. That section is my widget his modified widget.

You can visit the SBS Blogroll page to read more about it, including how to setup the thingy. Or click on SBS Blogrollsource to download it directly.

Ah yes, the long-awaited digital TV deadline is here – June 12, 2009. Although Congress does have about 30 more minutes to act to delay it again, I think they won’t bother.

A few months ago, people were concerned for the 7 million viewers who had not updated their TVs yet, and thus would lose their all-important TV viewing rights. Now, there are still over 2 million people who do not have the capability to watch digital TV (as they have only the analog receiver) and who will therefore not be able to watch TV tomorrow.

These 2 million people include the same poor, elderly, and minorities who were in the 7 million group. Why is Congress not fighting for these people anymore? Have they slipped through the cracks? Does the federal government have a disaster-preparedness plan for June 13, when all these people will be TV-less?

On a somewhat related note: I wonder how many people will check the old analog stations tomorrow just to see if they have really stopped transmitting…

A previous post mentioned how some people have problems with percentages. Now there should be fewer problems with percentages, since there is a Percentages Calculator to help everyone get their percentages right. You can go directly to the calculator, or you can visit the calculator entry page that lists some equations and tries to explain how to use percentages.

Enjoy!

Digital TV is great for watching football, because I don’t see the announcers.  I have noticed one problem, since writing glowing reviews of digital TV, or reviews of digital TV glowing.  That is that most programs have noticeable sync problems between the audio and video.

It seems to be due to signal processing time – the audio is easier to process than the video, so it appears first.  Analog TV didn’t have this problem because there was no processing involved – the signals were converted straight to images by hardware, with no software needed.  I find it hard to believe that of all the people it took to create and approve the digital TV standard, not one of them actually saw a digital TV signal and noticed the lip lag.  It’s fairly obvious on most programs.  Most people are accustomed to a bit of audio lag – sound travels slower than light so it is common to see something happen and then hear the sound that goes with that.  But digital TV is the opposite – the sound appears first.  Video lag is so contrary to nature that it is more disconcerting to people than audio lag is.

All they had to do in the standard was have some sort of time stamp in the audio and video data so that they can be synchronized by the receiver.  Maybe they were expecting the receivers to be smarter than they are.  Maybe they noticed the lag but left it in due to heavy lobbying by the lip fixer manufacturers.

We received our vouchers from the government for the digital-to-analog TV signal converters. So we went to the store last Saturday and bought a couple converters. I hooked up one of them as soon as we got home, and it is a vast improvement.

I was skeptical beforehand – getting the converters only because we will have no choice in a few months. Since we live on the fringes of some TV stations’ ranges (the analog signal is slightly fuzzy at best), I was expecting that the digital signals wouldn’t be clear enough. Since digital signals are all-or-nothing, you can’t get a fuzzy digital signal. That means you can’t watch a fuzzy station, but then some stations that are on the edge would be gone completely. With analog, a station on the edge could be tolerated for a while.

That’s what I was expecting. But it seems that the digital signals travel a better than the analog signals, because I think we get more channels now with the converter. Some of that is due to the extra channels that each station has (e.g. 7, 7-1, and 7-2), but we are getting other stations that we couldn’t before. And they’re all clear. Which is what I knew would happen, but it is so nice to actually see it. I was surprised how clear it is, after I have spent the last 8 years with fuzzy reception in my rural area.

Occasionally, the digital station will fade out, which means that it just stops, as opposed to getting static-y temporarily. I would rather it get fuzzy for a little bit than just disappear, but there’s not much I can do about that at this point. I am glad we got the converter boxes that allow the analog signal to pass through to the TV still. That way I can still view the old station if the digital signal is not strong enough. That will last until February for most stations, but I will still get to watch CBC over analog for a while.