Where's Waldo?
Ok so I admit, posts are still spotty. I've been in media sponge mode - the 360 stuff and a bunch of books and podcasts. My podcast backlog had gotten immense and it's taken a lot of intense listening and pruning to bring it back into manageable. On other notes I got a metric ton of books for my birthday and I've been reading through a few. On TV I've been watching Babylon 5 on DVD's from Netflix (into season 2 now) and watching the new series of Doctor Who on the Sci-Fi channel.
Books: I finished The Physics of Superheroes which I enjoyed. It's basic physics stuff - I mean if you know what do to with F = MA then most of it isn't educational exactly, but it's a fun read. I like it, but if you're looking to learn much physics . . . well you might. But if you've had much of a brush with physics you'll know most of it.
I'm about halfway through The Elegant Universe right now. Now this one is educational, unless you're pretty current on your string theory and your quantum mechanics. It stays away from math so it's accessible to basically everyone and it just fascinating stuff. Greene goes through the basic background of relativity (both special and general) and quantum theory and basically crash courses the high points of 20th century physics. And after a few chapters we plunge right into the depths of string theory - and how it emerges from trying to reconcile quantum theory with relativity. Accessibly written and fascinating stuff. Highly recommended.
Tomorrow I'll post some fiction. I've been working on my just-for-fun web serial and my new plan is to post an installment every Tuesday. Tune in tomorrow to meet my gang of silly space pirates!
Ok so I admit, posts are still spotty. I've been in media sponge mode - the 360 stuff and a bunch of books and podcasts. My podcast backlog had gotten immense and it's taken a lot of intense listening and pruning to bring it back into manageable. On other notes I got a metric ton of books for my birthday and I've been reading through a few. On TV I've been watching Babylon 5 on DVD's from Netflix (into season 2 now) and watching the new series of Doctor Who on the Sci-Fi channel.
Books: I finished The Physics of Superheroes which I enjoyed. It's basic physics stuff - I mean if you know what do to with F = MA then most of it isn't educational exactly, but it's a fun read. I like it, but if you're looking to learn much physics . . . well you might. But if you've had much of a brush with physics you'll know most of it.
I'm about halfway through The Elegant Universe right now. Now this one is educational, unless you're pretty current on your string theory and your quantum mechanics. It stays away from math so it's accessible to basically everyone and it just fascinating stuff. Greene goes through the basic background of relativity (both special and general) and quantum theory and basically crash courses the high points of 20th century physics. And after a few chapters we plunge right into the depths of string theory - and how it emerges from trying to reconcile quantum theory with relativity. Accessibly written and fascinating stuff. Highly recommended.
Tomorrow I'll post some fiction. I've been working on my just-for-fun web serial and my new plan is to post an installment every Tuesday. Tune in tomorrow to meet my gang of silly space pirates!
Xbox 360
So as many of you know, I acquired an Xbox 360 last Friday (tax returns don't ya' know?). I thought it might be appropriate to jot down some of my impressions and thoughts. So, here's my 4 day review of the 360.
It's a nice piece of hardware. The dashboard and new Live services are particularly slick. I did something a bit odd, but I might recommend people try this out. I knew I was going to attempt to find one so earlier in the week I bought several games through Gamefly. Kameo, PGR3, and Dead or Alive 4 to be specific. So I didn't buy any games with the console. When I brought it home I had just the console. I hooked it up and logged into Live. I was able to download demos, a new trailer for Pixars Cars (in high definition, no less!), and buy a couple of Live Arcade games, all from the box. All told I had the console for about six hours before I even put a disc inside it. That's just plain cool.
The new mandatory Live support is very nice. You can always see your friends list, you can create a chat session with a friend that survives switching games, downloading stuff from the Arcade and so forth. The best feature of an Xbox 360 is custom soundtracks though. In any game you can punch the guide button, the game pauses and the dashboard comes up. There's some buttons there for friends and the like, but there's also media controls. You can pick out music and the game's music is mercifully shut off. I chortled with glee when I started the Burnout Revenge demo and the hated, awful EA Trax bullet came up telling me what crap it was going to start playing. I hit the Guide button and fired up some Beastie Boys instead. I win! Take that EA and your stupid music seletions!
But it gets better. There's some connection to Media Center or a Windows XP machine. I haven't gotten it to work on XP yet, but I did find some Mac software that emulates the features. It's called Connect360 and it's awesome. I installed it on my Mac and now my 360 can see all my iTunes playlists, and it can display iPhoto albums as a slideshow. So on my Mac I created a Playlist called "Racing Tunes" and I can select that from any 360 game and stream the audio from my Mac. Connect360 can't share the tracks from my iPod, but that's a minor grump. In theory I should be able to connect my iPod directly, but my iPod cables are firewire and I need to buy a USB cable.
I thought the launch lineup was sort of weak, but a bunch of stuff has come out for it recently, and the Live support seems to be everything I had hoped Xbox 1 would be. Of course, they were also impossible to find until recently, but apparently the supply lines have opened up. All in all I'm happy with the purchase and I expect to get a lot of enjoyment from it over the next few years.
I might write more about specific games in a future post - let me know if people have any interest. I also have rented Full Auto and intend to pick up Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter tomorrow.
So as many of you know, I acquired an Xbox 360 last Friday (tax returns don't ya' know?). I thought it might be appropriate to jot down some of my impressions and thoughts. So, here's my 4 day review of the 360.
It's a nice piece of hardware. The dashboard and new Live services are particularly slick. I did something a bit odd, but I might recommend people try this out. I knew I was going to attempt to find one so earlier in the week I bought several games through Gamefly. Kameo, PGR3, and Dead or Alive 4 to be specific. So I didn't buy any games with the console. When I brought it home I had just the console. I hooked it up and logged into Live. I was able to download demos, a new trailer for Pixars Cars (in high definition, no less!), and buy a couple of Live Arcade games, all from the box. All told I had the console for about six hours before I even put a disc inside it. That's just plain cool.
The new mandatory Live support is very nice. You can always see your friends list, you can create a chat session with a friend that survives switching games, downloading stuff from the Arcade and so forth. The best feature of an Xbox 360 is custom soundtracks though. In any game you can punch the guide button, the game pauses and the dashboard comes up. There's some buttons there for friends and the like, but there's also media controls. You can pick out music and the game's music is mercifully shut off. I chortled with glee when I started the Burnout Revenge demo and the hated, awful EA Trax bullet came up telling me what crap it was going to start playing. I hit the Guide button and fired up some Beastie Boys instead. I win! Take that EA and your stupid music seletions!
But it gets better. There's some connection to Media Center or a Windows XP machine. I haven't gotten it to work on XP yet, but I did find some Mac software that emulates the features. It's called Connect360 and it's awesome. I installed it on my Mac and now my 360 can see all my iTunes playlists, and it can display iPhoto albums as a slideshow. So on my Mac I created a Playlist called "Racing Tunes" and I can select that from any 360 game and stream the audio from my Mac. Connect360 can't share the tracks from my iPod, but that's a minor grump. In theory I should be able to connect my iPod directly, but my iPod cables are firewire and I need to buy a USB cable.
I thought the launch lineup was sort of weak, but a bunch of stuff has come out for it recently, and the Live support seems to be everything I had hoped Xbox 1 would be. Of course, they were also impossible to find until recently, but apparently the supply lines have opened up. All in all I'm happy with the purchase and I expect to get a lot of enjoyment from it over the next few years.
I might write more about specific games in a future post - let me know if people have any interest. I also have rented Full Auto and intend to pick up Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter tomorrow.
PSA
Hazard: The battery charger’s circuit board can overheat and cause its plastic cover to melt which poses a fire and burn hazard to consumers.
If you own one of those external batteries for the PSP (the Pelican Power Brick) they are being recalled, apparently they can catch fire. The crummy thing is that there is no replacement battery, so you get to send it back and get other accessories, like a carrying case or the like.
Hazard: The battery charger’s circuit board can overheat and cause its plastic cover to melt which poses a fire and burn hazard to consumers.
If you own one of those external batteries for the PSP (the Pelican Power Brick) they are being recalled, apparently they can catch fire. The crummy thing is that there is no replacement battery, so you get to send it back and get other accessories, like a carrying case or the like.
Please Stand By
Fixing RSS Feeds
I've had a minor gripe that has been growing for quite some time. I don't like reading blogs via a web browser anymore - RSS is where it's at. I have a small collection of blogs that I didn't have a RSS feed for and I tossed those links into a Bookmark folder called Blogs. Every day or so I'd do an "open in tabs" on the Blogs folder and get as slew of tabs with these archaic blogs in them. However, lately it had been growing and Firefox got slower and slower to handle this operation. Today I declared I was going to "fix" it once and for all. I did so mostly - although I have a handful of blogs that simply don't HAVE a RSS feed. I suspect those are going to wither away though lack of caring on my part.
So, there were three main categories that were a problem.
1) Blogs that had RSS feeds but no visible link to them. In the html of the page they list a feed and Firefox finds that and gives me a cute little "Live Bookmark" icon in the address bar. The thing is I don't read RSS feeds in Firefox, I read them in NetNewsWire. Blogger.com sites seem to do this often. (I should not this is not the feed's fault - it's a design flaw in Firefox.)
SOLUTION: The Firefox Feed Your Reader extension. Now when I click that icon it tosses the feed over to my registered feedreader and life is good.
2) NetNewsWire doesn't like some Atom feeds (particularly only from Blogger.com or LiveJournal). I don't know why, they seem OK when I open them manually in a browser.
SOLUTION: If the url is in the format http://username.blogservice.com/atom try manually editing it to http://username.blogservice.com/rss - seems to work in every case.
3) I have friends who use LiveJournal to "lock" entries so their blog is only visible to authorized friends. I understand the motivation, but it's annoying because now to see them I have to open a web page and log into LiveJournal (which I don't use personally).
SOLUTION: Loosely based on the information here but slightly modified. The mechanism as described is kinda cruddy, because you have to store your LJ password in a URL, presumably plaintext. In the case of NetNewsWire you can do better. Enter the following URL for the subscription http://www.livejournal.com/users/username/data/rss?auth=digest and obviously replace username with the LJ account you want to read. The first time NetNewsWire tries to access the feed it will pop up a dialog for a username and password. Give it your LJ account and it stores the password in the Apple keychain, where it is safely encrypted.
Those three tricks deleted 8 links from my "Blogs" folder - cutting it from 13 to 5 links. One of the cut links was the LJ "friends" page which was 5 other pages rolled together meaning I moved 12 blogs that annoyed me a little every time I read them into RSS where they belong.
BONUS TIP: I have my feeds organized by topic mainly. So there's a folder for "Writing" a folder for "Games", a folder for "Tech Blogs" and so forth. I realized that this was slowing me down because there are several blogs that I only lightly skim. They are prolific (many entries per day) and low interest (in that I only read a small percentage of the entries on any given day). They still have value to check but I tend to blow through them much quicker than blogs where I want to read each entry. I realized today that this trips me up because one of those skimming blogs is in the Tech Blogs folder and gets mixed in with the other tech blogs so I have to shift back and forth between reading and skimming as I review entries.
No more! I moved all the "Skimmable" feeds into their own group at the bottom of the list. So Tech Blogs now contains tech feeds that I probably want to at least process the subject. Slashdot, Version Tracker, Netflix New Releases and other feeds that I only glance out quickly all go at the bottom and I can review dozens of entries just by scrolling the titles quickly.
technorati tags: software, LiveJournal, web
I've had a minor gripe that has been growing for quite some time. I don't like reading blogs via a web browser anymore - RSS is where it's at. I have a small collection of blogs that I didn't have a RSS feed for and I tossed those links into a Bookmark folder called Blogs. Every day or so I'd do an "open in tabs" on the Blogs folder and get as slew of tabs with these archaic blogs in them. However, lately it had been growing and Firefox got slower and slower to handle this operation. Today I declared I was going to "fix" it once and for all. I did so mostly - although I have a handful of blogs that simply don't HAVE a RSS feed. I suspect those are going to wither away though lack of caring on my part.
So, there were three main categories that were a problem.
1) Blogs that had RSS feeds but no visible link to them. In the html of the page they list a feed and Firefox finds that and gives me a cute little "Live Bookmark" icon in the address bar. The thing is I don't read RSS feeds in Firefox, I read them in NetNewsWire. Blogger.com sites seem to do this often. (I should not this is not the feed's fault - it's a design flaw in Firefox.)
SOLUTION: The Firefox Feed Your Reader extension. Now when I click that icon it tosses the feed over to my registered feedreader and life is good.
2) NetNewsWire doesn't like some Atom feeds (particularly only from Blogger.com or LiveJournal). I don't know why, they seem OK when I open them manually in a browser.
SOLUTION: If the url is in the format http://username.blogservice.com/atom try manually editing it to http://username.blogservice.com/rss - seems to work in every case.
3) I have friends who use LiveJournal to "lock" entries so their blog is only visible to authorized friends. I understand the motivation, but it's annoying because now to see them I have to open a web page and log into LiveJournal (which I don't use personally).
SOLUTION: Loosely based on the information here but slightly modified. The mechanism as described is kinda cruddy, because you have to store your LJ password in a URL, presumably plaintext. In the case of NetNewsWire you can do better. Enter the following URL for the subscription http://www.livejournal.com/users/username/data/rss?auth=digest and obviously replace username with the LJ account you want to read. The first time NetNewsWire tries to access the feed it will pop up a dialog for a username and password. Give it your LJ account and it stores the password in the Apple keychain, where it is safely encrypted.
Those three tricks deleted 8 links from my "Blogs" folder - cutting it from 13 to 5 links. One of the cut links was the LJ "friends" page which was 5 other pages rolled together meaning I moved 12 blogs that annoyed me a little every time I read them into RSS where they belong.
BONUS TIP: I have my feeds organized by topic mainly. So there's a folder for "Writing" a folder for "Games", a folder for "Tech Blogs" and so forth. I realized that this was slowing me down because there are several blogs that I only lightly skim. They are prolific (many entries per day) and low interest (in that I only read a small percentage of the entries on any given day). They still have value to check but I tend to blow through them much quicker than blogs where I want to read each entry. I realized today that this trips me up because one of those skimming blogs is in the Tech Blogs folder and gets mixed in with the other tech blogs so I have to shift back and forth between reading and skimming as I review entries.
No more! I moved all the "Skimmable" feeds into their own group at the bottom of the list. So Tech Blogs now contains tech feeds that I probably want to at least process the subject. Slashdot, Version Tracker, Netflix New Releases and other feeds that I only glance out quickly all go at the bottom and I can review dozens of entries just by scrolling the titles quickly.
technorati tags: software, LiveJournal, web