Ken Newquist's blog

November is coming. And that means so is National Novel Writing Month. In years past, I've watched and read as my friends fought their way through it, some succeeding, some failing, all glorious in the pursuit. I've sat, thought, considered and ultimately come up with one excuse or another not to do it. There's always next year, I told myself, I don't have time for it now.

Now it's next year. And I'm going to do this.

Open Office is a free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. Based on Sun's Star Office, Open Office has been around for a number of years, and has proved fairly popular with the geeks, particularly those who dislike being beholden to Microsoft, Apple or any other proprietary software developer. It's the predominant office productivity suite on Linux, and comes bundled with distributions like Ubuntu.

I'm an uncle again. My sister Kristen had a baby boy earlier this week -- Benjamin Francis weighed in at 8 lbs. 8 oz. and measured 22.5" long. That's an inch and a half longer and about 5 oz. heavier then Luke when he was born ... and about 2 lbs. bigger then Ben's sister Sydney. (Ben came 8 days late, Syd 10 days early).

Babies Vs. Chimps: Who's Smarter?

Good news everyone -- your kid really is smarter than a chimp!

Reports: Disney to test toys

And this is how capitalism works. Companies have been doing testing prior to this, but it appears not to have been standardized. In addition to Disney, Hasbro and Mattel

American life expectancy longer than ever

Quick -- grab a cigar and celebrate! And remember this the next time you hear people stressing out over the "obesity epidemic" (you know, the one that isn't killing all those people).

Will Super Smart Artificial Intelligences Keep Humans Around As Pets?

I sure hope so. 'Cause my dog's got it pretty good...

The Atomic Age Resurgent

I've had an Xbox for going on four years, and a 360 for one and a half. I've spent many a happy hour playing online, both over Verizon DSL and RCN Cable, on the 360 ... at least until Halo 3 arrived.

For some reason, Halo 3 refused to play nice like the rest of my game; it would let me get into two or three multiplayer games and then suddenly lose its mind and drop the network connection.

My new MacBook Pro arrived Friday, and the first thing I did (after basking in the beauty that is a new Mac) was to start loading my “must have” applications on it it. Of these, the Quicksilver fast app launcher is probably the single most important tool I have -- using it has become as instinctive as breathing, and it’s disconcerting for me to work on a Mac that doesn’t have it installed.

Hallmark's released their Winter 2007 ornaments, so it's time to warp ahead to the future of this year's Geek Tree. I have my eye on three new ornaments, two spawned by Star Trek and and Joss Whedon's Firefly.

First up is the three-warp nacelled Enterperise 1701-D from the episode of "All Good Things", the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation:

The Cosmic Cup had live jazz tonight (with my boss on drums, so I stopped by with the kids for coffee, hazelnut chocalate gelato, and good music. We didn't stay long -- Jordan was tired after a big day at preschool -- but the kids seemed to enjoy it, and it was a great break from the regular routine. Luke really liked it, and spent half the time bouncing up and down on my lap, smiling at my friends, and occasionally pretending to be shy.

For a while, it looked like the Unconference was going to live up to its name: while Podcamp Philly had a list of proposed seminars, we didn't get a concrete schedule until Wednesday. No worries though -- Podcamp's organized chaos congealed at the last moment, providing a rambling structure to a Saturday full of podcasting goodness.

The chaos lurked just behind the corners as folks tried to use the guest ids scribbled on  whiteboards around the Drexel University classrooms to log into the wireless network … at least until they figured out that the IDs only worked on the lab computers. Wired connections for the wandering bands of Mac, Windows and Linux laptop owners were scrounged however, giving rise to deep-sea scuba-like drama as people swapped Ethernet cables back and forth to share net connections.

The sessions were about what you'd expect at any conference: some good, some blah, with the best ones being those that encouraged audience participation (the exception being Apple's GarageBand session, which gave a lightning fast overview of the software, but still managed to provide some helpful insights into it.  Of course, the conference itself was free, which gives it an edge up over many conferences I've gone to that had so-so seminars but cost a few hundred dollars.

Presented by Mike Wolk, Senior Systems Engineer, Apple Inc.. He provided a quick overview of how to use GarageBand to record podcasts and enhance them with photos and web addresses. I knew a lot of this, having used GarageBand before, so I'm just focusing on what I didn't know.

If you right-click on a photo in Safari, you can add it right to your iPhoto Library

Need to record your lectures with PowerPoint/Keynote slides? Use Profcast to record, then edit in GarageBand.