I carry way too many gadgets around, so I’ve always liked clothes with tons of pockets to keep them in. In particular, I’ve spent more money than I want to think about on threads from ScotteVest, since they somehow manage to stuff dozens of pockets into everything from hats to hoodies, without making you look like John Goodman in Lebowski. But Scott may have met his match. I recently picked up a Tactical 5.11 VIP Blazer on eBay, and it’s amazing. This is the kind of thing Secret Service guys wear to carry their walkie talkies, weapons, protein bars and whatever else they stash when they’re on duty. All without adding bulk. It seems to have been discontinued, which may explain why I was able to get it for $40 on eBay, rather than its $169.99 list price. Of course, I won’t be wearing it until the fall, so until then, I may just continue shopping with Scott. After all, where else can I find a plain white tee with three zippered security pockets?

This is a proof-of-concept based on a recent blog post I wrote in wihch I posited that an easy way to create long posts for Twitter would be to combine the data:URI format with a URL-shortening service. This form basically does that. All you have to do is type or paste your text into the form below, click “Shorten” and you’ll be presented with a TinyURL that contains your encoded text. Copy and paste that URL into a Twitter form, and you’re done. The form itself is based on The Data:uri Kitchen, and I’ve chosen TinyURL as the shortener because it has a dead simple API.

Next up: Combine this with the Twitter API, so that you can automatically enter the shortened URL into a tweet.

Note: This works with recent versions of almost all major browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Konqueror. The one exception is Internet Explorer. So, if you’re planning on sharing your long tweets with folks who are still using IE, you’ll have to go elsewhere. And by that I mean go elsewhere and download another browser!

Update: TinyURL seems to have suddenly taken to choking on data URIs, So, it may be back to the drawing board this weekend!

(Photo: kopp0441)

If you use Twitter much, you’ve inevitably come up against the service’s 140-character limit, and have tried various workarounds to get your thoughts across within that constraint. You can judiciously edit your text, send followers to a blog, or break your content into multiple tweets. None of these solutions is ideal.

What’s really needed is a way to just type as much as you want into the text-entry field of your Twitter home page or a desktop client like Tweet Deck, click Update, and have your message appear on a web page, with a shortened URL helpfully embedded in your tweet. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way to do that—yet.

What I present below is a proof-of-concept, which should allow a programmer to build this functionality into a tool like Tweet Deck or a browser extension like Power Twitter. I’m not a programmer, so I can’t build it, but I’m hoping someone will take this idea and run with it—or poke holes in it if there’s a better way to make it happen. (A programmer may also be able to find a way to make this work in Internet Explorer; right now, it works in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera, but not IE) Here’s how my concept works:
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Now that the new Star Trek trailer is out, it’s not surprising that the haters are out as well. And their numbers include not just sci-fi fans, but mainstream columnists like conservative Atlantic scribe Ross Douthat. And, sure, there’s plenty to dislike, from young Kirk’s opening joyride (come on, a mid-20th century ‘vette in the 23rd century? That would be like a kid of today taking a spin in a stagecoach) to the gratuitous flash of Zoe Soldana’s bra. And canon purists can find even more to hate, including the Pike-Kirk teamup, Chekov’s early arrival on the Enterprise and, of course, the appearance of Romulans several years before they’re meant to show their pointy ears. And, sure, some of those things bother me, too. But they don’t bother me nearly as much as Q, the holodeck, Sybok, the Nexus, and the entirety of Voyager (except for the Doctor, of course). I grew up on Trek, and have enjoyed many of the movies and latter-day series as well. But there’s also been a lot of dross over the years, and in the end, I’m willing to cut the new Trek a lot of slack. As TOS purist James Cawley says:

Right now as I write this there are no less than 4 different versions of Batman available to the mainstream viewing audience. ... They are all wildly different interpretations of the character, and no one confuses one with the other, they are all Batman! … So, why can’t Star Trek do the same? No one will confuse this new feature with The Original, or vice versa. This new feature will hopefully be a slam-bang adventure with some of Gene’s morals thrown in for good measure. This is simply another take on Trek. No one will punish the die hard fans, if in the end they enjoy it. This New Trek, will hopefully serve to remind people why they Loved Star Trek so much to begin with. I believe it will re-awaken people to the fact that The Original Series was so good … It will also, more importantly, introduce those legendary characters to a new generation of kids who have no idea who Kirk and Spock are, and what the heck is Star Trek.

Based on the trailer, there’s plenty to like about the new Trek, including the cast, which looks perfect (well, I’ll reserve judgment on Winona for now); the CGI, which looks hot; and the uniforms, which look enough like the originals to fill in for them, without being dorky (and they’re light years better than the TMP jammies!). Oh, and the bridge is way cool. I’ve heard that wags are comparing it to an Apple store, but they’re about two generations removed from the reality. It’s Saarinen! Even the Captain’s Chair. It takes the best mid-century modern design elements from the original sets (which included some Saarinen pieces) and blows it out across the board. Another nice touch: the goose-neck reading lamps as a subtle homage to Pike’s bridge. So, yes, beam me up, J.J. I’ll forgive almost any canon-busting loopiness if you stay true to the spirit of Trek. And if you don’t, there may just be some room for you on Rura Penthe.

No black hole, but lots of cool tributes like this one. Of course, the one good thing about falling into a man-made black hole would be that we wouldn’t have to listen to any more inanities from the John & Sarah show about lipstick on pigs.

While the revolt against Spore’s DRM continues, Amazon, site of most of the negative reviews, is proving the adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Do a Google search for spore drm, and you’ll get the page shown above. The sponsored link on the right? It’s an Amazon ad with the title “Spore DRM Revolt?” Click through and you’ll go to the order page, negative reviews and all. From the looks of things, Amazon may be right in its assumption that the “revolt” won’t hurt sales. Spore is currently the top-selling game on the site, despite close to a thousand negative reviews and a day’s worth of press on the contretemps.

I was recently “deactivated” by Facebook. The details of what I did to get myself taken down aren’t worth going into right here (though if you’re interested in all of the lurid details, you can find them here). What really concerns me is what occurred after I was cut off. Because what actually happened is that I completely disappeared from Facebook. Not in the simple sense that my friends would get a message saying that my account had been deactivated; that would have been fine. What happened was much worse, and says a lot about what can occur when we entrust our social networks to commercial enterprises: I disappeared completely from Facebook. My profile vanished, along with anything I had ever done elsewhere on the service. Posts to friends’ walls: gone. Comments on boards: gone. History of participation in games: gone. In short, it wasn’t just a simple service cut-off. For all intents and purposes, I had been erased. It was as if I had never existed on Facebook.

I eventually opened a new account, and painstakingly rebuilt my network and profile. But I’m still troubled by the way in which my account was disabled. Facebook has become extremely powerful, and countless numbers of people almost literally live their lives within the service’s walled garden. However, Facebook’s power isn’t based on its technology or brand; it’s based solely on its network of users. If those users begin to defect in large numbers, Facebook will rapidly find itself in the same predicament as other former powerhouses that took their users for granted, like AOL, which virtually invented for-profit large-scale social networking without quite realizing it.

Fortunately, Facebook seems to recognize this risk, which is one reason the service has opened itself to so many third-party tools. It’s now extremely easy to maintain an active profile on Facebook without ever actually using the service. This post, for example, was written for my blog, but if you’re reading it on Facebook, you may never know that. Ditto for my updates, which are sucked in straight from Twitter. Of course, this openness is a two-edged sword. The value of Facebook’s network is based on user interaction. If I post on Facebook via third-party tools, and then interact with my friends directly on other platforms (such as comments in my blog, or Twitter replies), rather than Facebook, ultimately Facebook has a lot less value for me, and I may eventually stop checking in at all; my profile will still look active, but it will essentially be an automated shell, with all the real action taking place offsite.

For now, Facebook has the critical mass, and more of my friends communicate there than through Twitter, FriendFeed or any of the other services that allow easy online interaction. Which is why I went through the trouble to reconstruct my profile and nag my contacts to friend me again. But there’s no guarantee that this will remain the case, and if Facebook wants to retain its dominance, it will need to do more than just provide a convenient place for users to share their thoughts, pictures and experiences. It will need to provide better customer service, and be able to assure users that their digital life won’t be snuffed out without notice because of one careless mistake.

When I was six years old, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. I don’t remember much about it; this period of my childhood was suffused with the great memes of the space age, and memories of black-and-white images of Neil Armstrong on the moon blur with furtive late-night (for a six-year-old) viewings of “Star Track,” picture books about brave test pilots who became pioneers of the Gemini program, and card games like “Space Race,” with their way-cool period graphics. Being an astronaut seemed like the coolest job in the world, and I really believed—along with a whole generation—that it was only a short matter of time before we’d all be blasting off to the final frontier.

With NASA’s 50th anniversary today, I’m reminded of those heady days, and I can’t help but feel at least a little bit melancholy. The space shuttle program is about to come to a close, and seems destined to be remembered more for its tragedies than its triumphs. Space exploration for the accumulation of knowledge (and the excitement of beating the Russkies) has been replaced by space tourism for those who have accumulated wealth (and who are willing to write big checks to the Russkies). And NASA’s budget seems forever on the chopping block. Yes, recent years have brought us some notable successes, including missions to Mars that have come close to proving the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. But it’s hard not to think that the space program’s glory days are long behind it. Do today’s kids dream of being astronauts, of blasting off to the moon, and exploring the far reaches of the solar system? Or have they come to think of space travel as a distant fantasy, something that reached its zenith a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away?

Back in early 2005, I was working as a blogger for Engadget, and, in a brainstorming discussion with some of the other bloggers, I raised the idea of a software blog. We’d cover new releases, betas, warez, the whole scene. The idea was quickly shot down; there wasn’t a big enough audience, and besides, Beta News, Tucows and Download.com already covered that market. A few months later, however, I learned that geek minds think alike, when I got an IM from Weblogs Inc. honcho Jason Calacanis letting me know he was launching Download Squad—a software blog—and he wanted me to help run it. I jumped at the chance, and began posting for DLS in June 2005. For the next eight months, I had a blast writing about everything from DOS nostalgia to Google Goo, and especially about non-downloadable, cloud-based apps, which—despite the site’s name—Jason felt were the most vital segment of the software market (gee, looks like he was onto something, there). After eight months, with DLS up and running smoothly with a talented team of software-obsessed bloggers, I went back to working at Engadget full-time, but I continued to keep a watchful eye on DLS, and saw it grow to become a successful blog in its own right. Later, some of WIN’s other platform-specific blogs were rolled into DLS, giving it a larger audience—and a new pool of talented bloggers. The site grew in popularity, and even gained the grudging respect of bigger competitors such as Lifehacker . Last year, PC Mag listed it as one of the " Top 100 Undiscovered Web sites." It looked like the naysayers were wrong after all.

Until this morning. That’s when word leaked out that AOL, as part of an effort to "trim up for a sale," would be pruning its blogroll. One blog, DIYlife, would get the axe immediately. DLS (and The Unofficial Apple Weblog, another WIN property) would be going on a one-week hiatus. "DLS bloggers should immediately press pause on new content," wrote an AOL programming manager in an internal memo. According to the memo, the site will "emerge stronger" on August 1st, but it’s hard to see how that will happen—or how a one-week break, apparently instituted to help balance the July books, really accomplishes anything. During that week, RSS feeds will go dead, writers will turn to other sources of income, and advertisers will lose faith. How will that help a potential acquirer? Despite the negative prognosis, I’ll be rooting for DLS. I need my Time Wasters, freeware fixes, and web service updates, and I believe AOL does too.

Like many people, I’ve shifted more and more of my computing activities to "the cloud," using services like Flickr, Zoho Writer and Gmail as regular tools, not merely adjuncts to desktop applications. And I’m not alone; entire businesses are being built on the idea that desktop apps are dinosaurs, and the future of computing rests with thin client appliances connected to massive servers and databases. However, this weekend’s outage of Amazon’s S3 data storage service may have some people rethinking their commitment to the cloud. It’s unclear how many services were offline as a result of the outage, but one that particularly irked me was Amazon’s own Kindle network. As a recent convert to Kindledom, I’ve gotten used to using the device as a thin client appliance, downloading RSS feeds, checking my email and sometimes even buying books. Yesterday, however, I was offline all day, and nothing on Amazon’s Kindle support site made note of the issue. I was left to wonder whether, despite having three bars most of the day, I had somehow wandered out of range. The event left me frustrated, and served as a reminder of how fragile cloud computing really is. As Om Malik points out, "the cloud has many points of failure – routers crashing, cable getting accidentally cut, load balancers getting misconfigured, or simply bad code." I’m not ready to give up on the cloud (or the Kindle) just yet, but I am going to continue to back up my data locally—and make more use of applications like Evernote that have both desktop and online versions, so that I can work efficiently regardless of connectivity, and be sure that my work is accessible wherever and whenever I need it.