Tonight, I happened to stumble on a new service from Joyent called “Bingo!” or BingoDisk and I’ve decided to take the jump. What they provide is simple:

Joyent’s new Bingo! on-line disk service gives you 100, 50 or 25 gigabytes of disk storage on Sun’s amazing X4500 platform with a generous serving of free bandwidth per month over WebDAV for a super-low price! You get one user account and the ability to serve files from a public folder (for images, podcasts, whatever). On top of this, you get a complimentary 5-user subscription to Connector, Joyent’s amazing group collaboration product.

I really like WebDav because what I really want is something that is disk-like that I can use to store files that are relatively small in size. I don’t intend to use this for photos or music at all (the network requirements for larger files are too much for my meager roadrunner connection to handle currently), but I do plan to keep a tightly organized set of of documents as well as other things (like app settings or other exported data). I have local backup disks that I use for all current backup at home and I’ve bumped up the process after being burned the first time (it was a while back but the memories of such events always remain fresh in my mind). I’m happy with Bingo tonight but I’ll keep posting on my experiences with them going forward. I hope that it remains a stable and reliable friend going forward.

I’d also like to say that I enjoy that their site is easy to use and straight forward. Not over done - just the goods, an easy signup process and even a way to demo the product. Nice. I should also point out that I signed up for the lowest package - 25GB at $49/yr.

Bingo!

We’re really excited over here at Carson Systems headquarters!

Our SXSW panel idea “Barenaked App – the Figures Behind the Top Web Apps” just got approved and will be on March 12th from 10:00 - 11:00am.

Via Carsonified!

Excellent! Trust me, Ryan, we’re excited, too. Definitely looking forward to a great year at SXSWi.

Do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new…

The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.

From How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later via 37 signals

Wow. Beautifully put.

The signup is simple - you can see part of it here. The process actually starts by sending you an email first, which is not the usual process. It actually works pretty well and once you click to verify you get a very straightforward signup page. There are some really nice and unobtrusive details like the instruction box at the right…

…which follows from field to field giving you information about what they’d like you to put there and why you need it. A good example, on the postal code area they tell you they won’t share the information but it might be useful for the social aspect. Nice.

The library portion of VOX is slick. This has been on my wishlist for Wordpress for ages and the current set of WP plugins only get you part of the way there. The interface that Six Apart has created here is straight forward and makes excellent use of Ajax (using JSON!) to generate an interface that is responsive, allowing you to search for and add media items very quickly. In reality, this is a very part of the app, but it is very well done here. Six Apart allows you to hook into a number of other places like Flickr and photobucket and they promise more “conduits” in the near future. This is *excellent* because duplicating data is just silly - being able to grab a photostream right out of flickr to use within VOX just makes sense. I’m curious at the continued possibilities that open APIs will bring us - mashups are certainly just the beginning.

If you are already blogging you might not use VOX, but if you already haven’t jumped ship or hate myspace or blogger, then give VOX a try. It’s well worth it and you’ll notice the staggering difference in quality right away.

You’d think google would want to brand their docs and spreadsheets better, no? Either 1) text is the best design strategy ever or 2) they really didn’t give a shit. I think it was no. 2, what about you? At least it kinda sorta lines up and the color is almost complementary. Given their regular logo maybe we should be happy it’s all one color…

Why don’t they get some decent design people over there….it’s clunky…clunky stuff

-Miles O’Brian on CNN talking about the Zune vs. the Shuffle

First, do this: 10.4: Add Motorola V710 Bluetooth support to iSync
Then this: Motorola V710 setup as Bluetooth Modem under OS X/Panther (ignore the Panther part - I’m using Tiger and it works like a champ)

It is actually quite important that you perform the instructions in the first part before you do anything else. You will need to open up a terminal and use vim to update the (text) file (or depending on how you have finder set up you can browse there and use textedit or textmate). If you had already tried to pair the phone and did so successfully you’ll want to delete what you’ve done and start from scratch (sorry) but after altering the file. I couldn’t get anything to work until I changed that file so that seems to be the key here.

Works like a champ. iSync gets all my contacts and ical events and using the phone as a modem through BT is slow but usable for surfing. Mail is no-go on VZW, probably since I use secure imap (gmail pops fine). My firmware version is 8700_02.03.00R and, of course, ymmv.