Been trying for the last couple days a few times unsuccessfully to get the most recent Wii system update and have been receiving error code 32002, as pictured below:

Testing connection inside the Wii options was successful but the system process would hang with only a small part of the progress bar. I kept telling myself to check this out on the web and finally got around to it today. Seems like changing the router’s wireless channel from the default of 1 to 11 was all that was necessary to fix the issue. It couldn’t be that easy, could it? Consult your wireless router admin area under basic wireless settings or similar for this setting.

Also been having a lot of trouble with Xbox Live over the holiday. Talk about crappy timing. Hope your holiday is going well, we’ll be ringing in a new year soon.

There are a few different ways to explore new music and artists.

You could listen to traditional radio, free, but ruined by too many commercials. Sirius and XM offer commercial free stations in many different genres but you’ll need a player and a monthly subscription ($$$). In the last few years there has been an explosion of online music sites like Pandora and last.fm which are good free options.

What if you already have a favorite artist and would simply like a list of related artists? Try entering in the artist into the Music Artist Cloud and a page will be returned with a tag cloud of similar artists and links to YouTube videos. Along the right you can see what a search for Quiet Riot returns.

There is the less technical way of talking to friends and family members. Yesterday was my sister in law’s 21st birthday and she wanted a CD by a group I hadn’t heard before called Living Syndication. We played it in the car as we spent the day taking her to all those got to be 21 sin places.

Today, I bought Living Syndication Aneurythm (affiliate) at Amazon MP3 for $8.99 which contains one of my new favorite songs: “Love Your Disease.”

Way down, you gotta live to breathe,
way down, you gotta love your disease

There is a short clip of them playing the song live below at YouTube.

Nice cowboy hat! My sis-in-law told me Living Syndication sounds a lot like the band Perfect Circle but the Music Artist Cloud oddly doesn’t recommend Perfect Circle. Sometimes it’s still best to go offline for related artist recommendations. I’m going to have to check out Perfect Circle too.

Do you eat enough fruit? I don’t. One of my favorite snack foods are those dehydrated granny smith apple chips. You can find them in the grocery store in bags like potato chips, but more healthy.

I decided it would be fun to make some myself. To do that, I learned that you need the following items:

- a Dehydrator (affiliate)

Nesco offers several different dehydrator wattages. The higher the wattage, the shorter the drying time. Wal-mart sells them too if you don’t want to go through somebody online like Amazon. Wal-mart is where we bought the one pictured in this post.

- knife
- some granny smith apples
- some oranges
- a can of pineapple juice (for pre-treating apples)
- zip lock bags or saran wrap
- (optional) sugar

The Nesco dehydrator we bought didn’t require any assembly. Simply open the box and remove the instruction manual and jerky spice bags. I’m not going to cover making jerky in this post, but that’s another common use for a dehydrator.

There are four trays that stack upon each other with the blower inserted at the top and down through a hole in the middle. Whatever you’re dehydrating — fruits, vegetables, flowers — is placed on these trays.

How to pre-treat apples
According to the instructions that came with the dehydrator, most fruits do not require pre-treatment, but ones that oxidize more should be pre-treated. Oxidation is what happens when sliced fruit turns brown.

Apples, pears, peaches and apricots have a longer shelf-life, are more appetizing and higher nutritional value when pre-treated. To pre-treat apples, once sliced immediately put in a holding solution of pineapple juice. Do not keep the apples in the solution longer than an hour. Slice the apples in half and then into 1/4″ or less slices, place them in the solution, wait a few minutes, and then lay out on the trays.

You can also squeeze a few orange or apples and use that juice for a pre-treatment solution. Tip: drink the juice when done pre-treating, it’s good for you.

Oranges
You can optionally peel the orange. Cut the ends off the orange to where there is a small amount of peel and mostly orange on the inside. Then cut the orange in half down the center and cut into 1/4″ or less thick slices and place them in a circular pattern around they trays.

If they are touching they will stick together when dried, so try to leave a tiny bit of space between them. You can mix the orange and apples on the trays.

Notice how the apples appear a bit brownish in the picture below? These were not pre-treated. I wanted to run a test batch that wasn’t pre-treated to see the difference in taste. There is a loss of flavor and vitamins A and C if not pre-treated.

As mentioned above, the dehydration process varies based on the wattage of the dehydrator as well as how full the load is on the trays. The instruction manual provides a range of 6-12 hours for apples and oranges to dehydrate. The first batch I tried took about 8 hours to fully dehydrate three of the four trays.

Optional: you can shake sugar over the fruit before drying. This will make them a bit sweeter. You can also add sugar afterwards. If you’ve ever had the apple chips in a bag, you’ll notice they are sugary. The oranges have enough flavor as is. I prefer the granny smith apples dehydrated to the oranges.

Once done remove the trays and either put on a plate and wrap with saran wrap to keep the air out or put in ziplock bags to store. You can also use tupperware. If any condensation appears on the lid then you didn’t dehydrate the fruit long enough.

Beyond dehydrated snack chips
You can do a lot more with a dehydrator besides fruit snacks like make your own leathery fruit roll-ups, beef jerky and vegetables. If you’re like me and don’t eat enough fruit and enjoy snack foods like potato chips, pretzels, consider dehydrating your own fruit and vegetable chips instead. A healthy alternative.

Got any other dehydrated foods you enjoy that we should try out?

Let’s embellish on some Quiet Riot: Bang your head. Web sites that will drive you mad!

Face it, neither your websites or ours are perfect. We need help. We need to listen to what visitors are saying aggravates them and do something. One good way to becoming a better listener is being accessible through services like Skype, answering email and replying to comments (instead of claiming you’re too busy), perhaps even [gasp] getting involved in social networking where your site niche is relevant.

The list scene is hot right now. Some days I think maybe that’s all we should do is just sit around and make lists. Would probably increase the traffic to this site tenfold. One interesting list I came across today was from PC World.

Noticeably missing from their 10 Biggest Web Annoyance list is something very annoying:

Unnecessarily spanning pages for articles — almost always to artificially increase page views — that could easily fit on one one page. It’s inconvenient and insults reader’s intelligence. Note that PC World’s list spans four pages instead of one. Shame on them. Why didn’t this make the top 10 aggravation list? Are there people out there who actually like having to click multiple times to read one article?

PC World’s list of 10 aggravations
With that said, let’s check out what is on their list and suggest some possible tips for how to combat aggravating site visitors and readers.

1. Dubious Privacy Policies. Aggravation factor: 69 percent. Privacy concerns continue to abound on the web. Do we need any more evidence that people visiting your site want to know what you’re doing with their information? If your site collects anything from people, what is the site doing with this information? Can they get it back out through an export function or non-crippled API?

How to avoid aggravating tip: Spend some time reading and going through and stripping the legalese in your privacy policy. Shorter is better. We need to do that with our privacy policy at Hmm. Short and straightforward privacy policies are better than long and convoluted.

2. Difficult Online Forms. Aggravation factor: 65 percent. I wonder how much we should thank spammers for this? The need to incorporate CAPTCHA or other less and more complicated techniques to trick the bots has added complexity to online forms. Also, with a growing desire to collect more information at some sites (see #1).

Tip: forms gotchas to avoid:

• illegible CAPTCHA. Offer quick refresh option like we have in the comments below using reCAPTCHA.
• forms with too short timeout. Ticketmaster, anyone? Not everybody is a speed typist.
• should allow entering in secure passwords. Why have a password field if one can’t enter in a secure password? This means allowing for password lengths as much as 12-24 characters, allowing symbols, upper and lowercase as well as digits. If your password doesn’t allow all of these or forces passwords smaller than 12 characters it is insecure.
• let us enter in valid emails with a + in them. A frequent gripe. It’s a handy Gmail filtering technique, although I picked up another one recently using a period in the email address (e.g h.m.m at gmail same as hmm at gmail).
• too many items on a single form. Unlike page spanning articles, I’d rather see page spanning for large forms. Let me go through the process in stages rather than show me a bunch of different things that are wrong.

3. Overcommercialization of the Web. Aggravation factor: 62 percent. I think with popup blockers in the mainstream we’re past that, but publishers and advertisers still have plenty of other annoyances to throw at us. I’m not a fan of those hover over text ads. They always seem to get in the way. The Flash overlays that run across the article you’re trying to read suck. And let’s not forget interstitials — those “skip to next page” full page ads.

Nice bit of honesty from PC World:

At MySpace, Yahoo, and even (we have to admit it) PCWorld.com such advertising has grown more aggressive, increasingly annoying, and impossible to avoid.

Tip: Laser focus about where to put ads and instead of adding more advertising, add more content. Keep the content to ad ratio no less than 70% content to 30% advertising on each page. Shoot for 90% content to 10% ad or better. Your visitors will love you and bookmark. So will the search engines.

4. Need for Standards. Aggravation factor: 58 percent. From the publisher side, trying to design sites that look good in all the major browsers isn’t quite rocket science, but feels like that with all the competing formats. We experienced this recently trying to get the search box CSS in the header in Internet Explorer (thanks again to web designer reader, Mikull).

Tip: Use tools like browsershots.org to see how your website looks in different browsers and work with designers — or do it yourself — to get your site looking good on the most popular browsers. And don’t forget about mobile users.

5. Trolls in Forums. Aggravation factor: 58 percent. Free for all forums aren’t about Free Speech, they are about free abuse. I’m in the crowd that strongly believes in at least some moderation of public areas. I’ve yet to see any completely unmoderated area that hasn’t devolved into a spam, flame and troll infested swamp. Yes, some of the comments from the “anonymous cowards” are funny, but too much and they turn people off.

Tip: moderate public areas and employ policies that keep some level of civility.

6. Buying Event Tickets. Aggravation factor: 54 percent. A whole annoyance devoted to Ticketmaster ticket fee gouging? Guess I don’t buy enough event tickets through Ticketmaster to get upset by this one. I’m thinking there are bigger annoyances than this, although it’s interesting that Pearl Jam thinks TM has a monopoly.

Tip: I don’t have any tips for this one, do you? Use the comment section below to suggest how to get a better deal buying event tickets online.

7. Web 2.0 Help Doesn’t Help. Aggravation factor: 49 percent. This could have been classified better as ‘Unhelpful help.’ I’m not sure who started the whole knowledge base scene, but I cringe when I’m being sent to one of those for help. The more technology employed, the higher the level of possible compatibility problems, I get that, but our browsers and OS can stay caught up.

Tip: don’t send people to a knowledge base or customer support form for support. Try using live help, provide Skype or other IM options. Don’t staff those live support options with people who follow moronic scripts.

8. The Expense of E-Books. Aggravation factor: 41 percent. I wonder if the expense of eBooks (or is it E-books?) have hurt the medium as much as the fact that people don’t want to read books on a computer screen? There is a distraction factor associated with computers. Some people associate — perhaps rightfully so — that the computer is for work, not for pleasure. I’d argue against this perception that the computer can be used for work and pleasure. Work hard, play hard, but I understand those like my wife who would rather relax with an old-fashioned paperback book over an eBook any day of the week.

Tip: If you release an eBook version, make it half the cost of the paperback version, at least.

9. Disappointing Web Video - Aggravation factor: 38 percent. No, they’re not talking about Scoble’s seemingly endless raw footage … or are they? It’s criticism of not enough top shelf tier content. Projects like NBC’s Hulu might help which bring more of the shows we see on TV to the computer screen. The subpar resolution and bandwidth constraints are a real issue. I’d like to see more HD quality video being released over the web. People are shooting HD video but then compressing the hell out of it so that it looks like pixelated crap when shown on a larger monitor or TV screen.

Tip: Shoot and share more high quality video using sites like blip.tv (better quality videos than YouTube). Use the medium (edit, edit, edit!). Don’t waste people’s time.

10. Boring Virtual Worlds. Aggravation factor: 9 percent. Since being active in virtual worlds since December 2005, I’m convinced those who label virtual worlds “boring” just aren’t trying hard enough. Go spend some time and really, really try to have a good time in virtual worlds. There are tons of things happening covering thousands of different interests. To say virtual worlds are “boring” is a statement about one’s own ability and effort, not about virtual worlds. The 9% aggravated need to be more creative.

Tip: the group blog I’m part of, VTOReality, is having a Halloween Avatar Contest tonight at 6:36pm PST. Dress up as your favorite avatar, create one from scratch, buy one from one of the virtual stores, and stop on by. Maybe we’ll judge yours as the best and you’ll win some L$.

Parting thought on the importance of listening
Stop a minute and ask yourself how good a listener you really are? Lately I’ve been trying to increase my listening skills by getting much more involved with a few third party sites/services that focus on social networks. I hope if you enjoyed or disliked this post you’ll take a second and either rate it above and/or leave a comment. Give me something to listen to, good, bad or indifferent.

One of the complaints about Zune v1.0 was the lack of built-in podcasting support. That’s all going to change when v2.0 comes out next month. Head’s up podcasters, Rob Greenlee in his new position as Zune Podcast Programming Manager, just dropped this podcasting link nugget in my Skype: how to add 1-click podcasting subscription. Just use the format for your links:

zune://subscribe/?PodcastTitle=PodcastRSSFeedURL

Our Hmmcast Feedburner feed is:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/makeyougohmm/hmmcast

So the Zune format link would be:
zune://subscribe/?Hmmcast=http://feeds.feedburner.com/makeyougohmm/hmmcast

I’ll be getting this added to the Hmmcast category page as soon as the Zune rollout begins. Thank you, Rob!

A person’s name isn’t something, it’s everything. Machines have a hard time understanding the emotional nuances of identity, human beings shouldn’t.

If you’re out there personally marketing a blog with your latest, greatest post, always be certain to get your contact’s name right. Double check, triple, quadruple if necessary. This extends to leaving comments on blogs and all other communication online. Step #1 to becoming an online “Rock Star” Ich.

Today’s early morning lesson in the Twilight Moan.

The site ClassicVanHalen.com shows how to save and print the classic Van Halen CD Covers which include: Van Halen, Van Halen II, Women and Children First, Fair Warning, Diver Down and 1984.

If you need the covers for the Van Hagar era, try albumart.org, or as I’m finding with my exhilarating and exhausting quest to get our entire CD collection ripped into MP3 with cover art, Google images and Amazon work well too.

Yesterday I was looking for firsthand accounts of the details behind how the Nintendo Fan Network worked. After going through the turnstyles at the Mariners double header yesterday, here are the step by step details to get connected and start using the Nintendo Fan Network:

STEP 1. Download the small application wirelessly from the Nintendo DS Download Station. You need to be fairly close to these small booths with the Nintendo logo for your DS to find the application. You’ll find them in the following locations:

Along the concourse near the signs in sections: 108, 116, 123, 134, 227, 238, 314, 327, 333 and 344. Also in front of suites 27 and 55 and in the Diamond Club and Bullpen.

STEP 2. You can either purchase a NFN authorization code or use your credit card to buy NFN access. The cost is $5 per game. Yesterday was a bonus, $5 bought access for both games. You’ll be given a card with a code that you enter in later.

STEP 3. If this is your first time, click on Register New Use on your DS and choose a username and password.

STEP 4. Enter in your seat section, row and seat separated by spaces. So if you were in section 123, row 19, seat 9, you’d enter it as follows:

123 19 9

STEP 5. Choose an option from the menu pictured above. The red numbers are explained below:

1 - Food & Beverages. If you want to order food and drinks you have to enter in a credit card number, name and zip code of the billing address. It will be saved to your account so once entered, you don’t have to worry about it again.

2 - Broadcast Video. With this option you can watch a slightly delayed (a few seconds behind) TV broadcast of the game in progress. Video quality of the game is decent, however the graphics that show on the scoreboard, like the trivia is pixelated and difficult (in some cases impossible) to read.

3 - MLB Stats & Standings. Reference the detailed player statistics. You can sort the lists by name or position. This came in handy a few times when we wondered about specific players throughout the games.

4 - MLB Games in Progress. Check in on other games happening around MLB.

5 - Fan Network Games. A few casual games you can play if you’re bored with the game.

6 - Fan Network Messaging. You can send and receive messages with others around the stadium on the Nintendo Fan Network. The messages you can send other NFN users include canned messages like: “Bad call, the umpire got that wrong” and “Where are you sitting?” You can send custom messages to the NFN representative. The one at the game yesterday was named Pat and he responded right away when I messaged him a question about the service.

Other thoughts about the Nintendo Fan Network
Disappointing that the snacks menu doesn’t have any garlic fries. That’s a Safeco Field tradition. Some other examples of pricing which includes taxes: beer is $7.25 where you can get for $6.75 from the vendors walking up and down the aisle. A Philly cheesteak and fries cost $11.95.

I asked the woman at the Nintendo DS Download Station if this service would be back in 2008 and she said it would with a slight graphical difference. She didn’t know how many other stadiums would be getting the Nintendo Fan Network. Overall, I’d say it was a cool experience and think it adds to the experience. My friend who isn’t very technology-oriented thought it was fun.

My DS was fully charged and made it through the entire first game and to the fifth inning of the second game.

There are two languages that would come in handy if you live in the United States and like to travel to neighboring countries: French (for Montreal and Quebec, Canada) and Spanish (Mexico).

Our middle son is currently taking Spanish and when I saw the language learning site trymango.com this morning, he was the first person who came to mind. Could this help him with his Spanish studies? I signed up and took a peek inside.

But first, a hat tip to Jay at Dumb Little Men who also shares two additional resources at the end of his post for learning foreign languages for free: FSI Language Courses and the foreign language podcast collection from openculture.

Signing up for Mango (oddly it’s not called Try Mango, it’s called Mango) involves only your email address. Why does a site like this need your email address?

Privacy Policy: We will NOT sell or provide your email address to any third party. We will only use this email address to authenticate your access to the Mango Language application and provide you with update information. You may unsubscribe at any time.

Authenticating access with email only is hopelessly insecure, but we aren’t trading military secrets or stock information, so maybe this is cool. The first email address sent thanking me for signing up, however, did not provide unsubscribe instructions (CAN SPAM compliance). The site is too new to have a rating from SiteAdvisor yet, so we have to take this one on faith.

Mango is a flash-based learning environment with voices that are clear and hover overs with your mouse to indicate the pronunciation of each word. After showing you a few common sentences, the system will test you by giving you the English word and seeing if you know how to say it in the language you chose.

Today’s Hmmcast #173 takes a look at the language learning process, particularly the importance of repetition.

BTW, if you haven’t noticed, I’ve fallen off the 4:20 schedule a bit this past week. I’m still working through the wonders of HD video. Things should be back to normal the first week in October. Hang with me and it should be worth it — at least visually — no matter what resolution you view the show at.

Hmmcast #173 downloads
PSP .mp4 (480×272) iPod .mp4 (640×480) Windows .wmv (1480×1080 HD)

Generally I enjoy the site sci-fi.com. Enjoy the blog, the writing, I’m subscribed. They’ve linked to blog posts here in the past and seem like good blog neighbors. Their comment registration system, however, is about as anti-commenter friendly as a blog can get. Check out how they describe their own system (emphasis mine):

You need to be registered to comment on this site. No worries, though — registering is easy, fast and completely free.

After trying this morning to register, I disagree. It’s one of the least futuristic comment registration systems I’ve ever seen and experienced firsthand on any planet. But don’t take my word for it, follow along below with the sequence of events.

First, follow the Sci-fi Members link and end up on their comment form to see they default check three different subscriptions.

Pitching their newsletters and store during the comment registration process? I understand why they want to do that, but if the subscriptions are that great, we’ll be more than happy to sign up for them. Add to that in my Firefox status bar the McAfee SiteAdvisor for scifi.com is in yellow caution mode:

Oops. A third party program received 5.7 emails per week? Looks from what we’re agreeing to is 3 subscriptions, not 5.7 subscriptions a week. What’s the story here? Not wanting any of this, my email box is crowded enough, I uncheck the boxes and move onto the other parts of the form.

Does it let me use a tagged email address so I can more easily figure out who sold or gave my email address to spammers: myemail+tag@domain.com?

Even though the error message above says it accepts the + character in email addresses, it doesn’t. Moving past reason #2 not to register and leave a comment, we move to the password field. You’d think a site that looks forward like scifi.com would encourage SECURE passwords. Passwords at least 10 characters, letters (upper and lower case), numbers and symbols, right?

Wrong, it’s letters and numbers only. That’s strike reason #3 to leave comments, but let’s not stop there. The username field doesn’t employ any sort of AJAX username checker so you can see if your name is already taken. This means you need to fill everything out over and over again trying to find out if your name is taken. Has some imposter has already claimed TDavid? Yup.

Another bummer? When you click back on the browser, the password field is erased (sessions, use sessions). This registration process just to leave a comment on a blog is a mess. Sure, we have CAPTCHA enabled for new commenters here at Hmm, but I’d rather fill out two separate CAPTCHAs (and help a good cause) then jump through all these hoops only to be added to a list that gets 5.7 emails a week. As for us default checking the new comment notification by email? That is a benefit to readers, unlike newsletters sent too frequently and that are difficult to unsubscribe from according to a third party source.

It’s no wonder very few people seem to be leaving comments with a system like this. It isn’t that the content doesn’t encourage feedback, it’s the system telling them no, no, no. I’d probably have left this comment somewhere on Scifi.com, perhaps this post ironically titled, if I had the patience to beat my way through this system. Two people did.

Scifi.com I like your blog and your site, but you need to get your engineer Scotty to work on your Movable Type comment registration warp drive post haste. And for any other bloggers out there with a similar anti-commenter system: please don’t do this.