Category: Uncategorized

So, when I was Googling for ‘Server based RSS aggregator,’ why didn’t I stumble over Bloglines? As it was, I had to find out about it from back-with-a-vengence NTK (which opens this week with the Big Red Button quote below, hurrah!). Still, Feed on Feeds is working extremely well for me so far, and since the developer is a chatty/friendly sort I may as well stick with it.

Ooh, shiny.

Looks interesting – but then, anything that offers new ways of data mining on the desktop is interesting, if you’re me. Anyone actually running this? Go on, Martin, leave that printer on eBay and cough up $99 for this.

In a Media Guardian story on reporting cruise missile firings:

One HMS Splendid crew member tells the BBC: “A left mouse push fires it. Kinda crazy really. We actually asked for a great big red button, but they wouldn’t give us one.”

A curious sound emanated from the end office, home of my MD. It sounded like a cry of anguish crossed with an attempt to wrestle a dinosaur into submission.

We all looked at each other.

‘She’s working on the company website,’ said Paul, the rights manager, who’s nearest and can just about see what’s on her monitor if he gets the opera glasses out.

‘Ah, that explains it, then,’ we all replied, and got back to work.

Martin, start blogging. I mean it. It could be wishful thinking, but I’ve a hunch it’s going to be a big thing in politics.

[edit: the typically pithy put-down in last Friday’s sub-mini-NTK made me chuckle.]

[edit2: Tom Coates has the session notes up. Written in Hydra, of course.]

It gets better.

The guy who wrote Feed on Feeds (see previous post) also knows a bit more about the table tennis video (scroll down a bit more), and provides a link to another clip from the same show. There’s a whole load more here, if you click the sixth link down.

[geek mode on]Feed on Feeds is a young (read: ‘immature/buggy’), simple (read: ‘ugly as sin’), basic (read: ‘bits plain don’t work’) server-side RSS aggregator.

It does the job. It sucked in my subscriptions list from NetNewsWire (yay OPML!), and it’s happily sitting on my server, waiting for me to click ‘update all’ to find out what’s changed online. So next week, I can sit in the office and still check dozens of websites.

Oh, happy day.
[geek mode off. Normal people may resume reading]
[oh, wait! This is what Moveable Type categories are for. Dang.]

Drat. Reading reports like this, I really want to try scriptwriting in Hydra, but of course the office network is Windows-only. Grrr.

Anyone out there played with Hydra outwith the geek context?

(You’ll gather that I’m catching up on RSS feeds in NetNewsWire, having been away from my Mac for a week. When I’ve finished, I’m going to set up a server-side aggregator so I can news-surf from the office. Stripped of NetNewsWire, I just don’t know what to do with the web any more.)

I recently toyed with some digital SLRs, and dismissed them largely on the grounds that genuinely wide-angle lenses are wince-inducingly expensive still. But now I discover that I was investigating entirely the wrong end of the market. Tom Coates’ photo collage is terrific, in more ways than I can enumerate.

[edit: While I’m on the subject of photography, I’m a big fan of Chris Heilman’s weblog, 101-365. A mix of hard science and beautiful images that strangely works. Though the wine transmission spectroscopy series was perhaps a tad bizarre.]