Technology: December 2005 Archives
Our house is one of the few places on earth where you can still find a television without remote control. We have been thinking about upgrading it to one of those modern TFT or plasma screens, but have been waiting for affordable models that incorporate Digital Terrestrial Television. Until today...
DTT is available for some time now, but television sets are still running behind on this. This morning I ran into a very good offer for a Nokia Mediamaster 110 DTT set-top box.
I connected and configured it well within 5 minutes, effectively upgrading our old television set to a TV with remote control, teletext and 20+ channels ---we used to have 8 channels. This small device just saved me a lot of money!
Now that I have left Bloglines and use RSS Bandit, it came to me that Bloglines is still fetching all those feeds in my name. So if Feedburner reports 9 Bloglines readers, I really should subtract one of them, since I am not using Bloglines anymore. Of course I could go back in and delete all my subscriptions, but nobody ever does that, do you? I wonder how many of Bloglines' reported tens of thousands of people are zombies like me, still subscribed to feeds but not actually using Bloglines anymore to read them. And does Bloglines disable accounts after a certain period?
Of course the same goes also for other web-based feed aggregators.
I have been looking at Google Personalized Homepage (GPH) before, but quickly decided that it has no additional use for me. GPH offers you the possibility to add content (RSS feeds) to the Google Search home page, which is fine if you only use three or four news sources to stay up-to-date. But if you use several more news sources, you probably already use a feed aggregator to read them, and don't need the GPH. I did like the idea of seeing the weather forecast on the homepage, but unfortunately neither Lleida nor Harmelen are available in the configuration of this widget. Microsoft does this better on their Start.com portal, since it does have information for Lleida, and correctly recognizes Harmelen to insert the weather forecast for Utrecht.
Today Google published an API for GPH, which hopefully will set a lot of creative programmers to work. At this moment I am only interested in two widgets: a better weather widget and an e-mail linked to my normal POP3 or IMAP mail --- I normally don't use GMail.
I have switched my RSS reader from the web-based Bloglines to the PC based RSS Bandit. I have always used Bloglines, since I wanted to access my feeds from anywhere, but recently came to the conclusion that I only read feeds from exactly two PC's. Whenever I am traveling, I hardly have the time or possibilities to connect to the Internet, and usually only read my e-mail. Bloglines has many features, but misses one: the ability to work off-line. One of my wishes was to be able to search through feeds while being off-line, which by nature is something Bloglines cannot offer. Another ---less important--- feature I missed in Bloglines is a three-pane view: folder-headline-text. A three-panel view saves time when going through a big list of headlines.
While I am still tweaking RSS Bandit to my wishes, I am quite satisfied with it. I get through my feeds faster and can spend my off-line time reading as well. RSS Bandit has a nice little feature that lets me upload the feed list and the read status to a FTP server, so I can continue where I left off on another PC.
Squidoo is open for public. Squidoo is a community where members ---lensmasters--- built Lenses. A lens is simply a page with information about a certain topic.
I joined the beta some weeks ago after reading the e-book by Seth Godin, and have created some lenses:
- Point Of Sale technology;
- The tech-life of Jeroen Sangers;
- Apple iBook;
- Apple Powerbook;
- Types of web hosting.
So far the tools to built lenses ---and the time I had available to use them--- are limited, but it looks like a viable initiative. Squidoo is still considered a beta, but they already earned some real money:
5,241 Lenses Made $148.88 Earned
I will continue playing with Squidoo, and will post more about it in the future.
I have two address lists, which I synchronize daily. On copy reside on my Palm Zire
Looking up addresses is fast. The search function on my Palm and the excellent LookOut plug-in for Outlook are very fast. But updating information cost more. I regularly receive address changes from companies of friends. And if it is a big company I might have dozens of entries for it in my address list, which I have to update one by one. The same happens for friends and family. I usually have two entries for each 'couple', so I can store birth dates and mobile phone numbers. But they share the same address and home phone.
My ideal PIM application would store 'contacts' in two separate but linked tables: an address and a person. If I change the address, it will change for all persons within that address. Yes, that would be great!
