Brentc.com

Back in May I won an iPod, and recently I became an iTMS customer (only to try it out since they’ve only just recently released Canadian version). So far my experience with the two has been relatively good. The iPod is slick and easy to use, which everyone already knows. iTunes is alright, but runs like crap on my aging P3-450Mhz machine.

The only thing that seriously pisses me off about the two is the DRM restrictions. Specifically, if anyone comes out with some amazing music player a year or two from now, I wont be able to take any iTMS music purchased onto the new device unless it supports Apple’s DRM (and how many players support Apple’s DRM? 4: iPod Generation 1, iPod Generation 2, iPod Generation 3, and iPod Generation 4). I understand the desire to not want me to give away free copies of music I’ve purchased to the entire population of the internet, but the restriction to what devices and which software I can use to listen to what I’ve purchased just pisses me way off.

All other things considered equal, the ease of playback on as many different systems (including competitor’s hardware) would be the number one deciding factor for me when choosing a future device.

Incidentally, if anyone is looking for a plugin for Winamp (the only media player that I use with any seriousness) that will allow them to playback their, legally authorized, iTMS music, you can use this one here, providing you leave iTunes installed on your machine. It works fairly well.

I’ve had Scoble‘s “Link Blog” as a “live bookmark” in Firefox for a while now because it’s pretty good for those random moments where your main sources of news/entertainment are all tapped out and you’re looking for something interesting to read.

However, since coming back from the recent bandwidth issues the site has become really painfull to use. With the old theme the feed used to link to a named-anchor (<a name=”blah”>) on the page for that particular item. The new system merely points you to the top of the monthly archive page. The problem with this behavior is that the monthly archive pages become gargantuan (thanks largely to Scobles return to full-text posting); we’re only about 1/2 way through december, and the december archive is already at 559.76 KB spread over more than 100 vertical-scroll-pages. On top of all this, the theme (specifically for the archive page) is nearly unreadable, with no horizontal width defined, and no visual distinction from the end of one post to the start of another. I thought for a second that it was maybe a case of me using Firefox on an IE-only-coded site, but the site looks just as terrible in IE.

To summarize, there are three things which really need to be addressed:

1. At least fix the urls in the feeds so they at least a named anchor (<a name=”blah”>) for that item on the page, or at best point to a individual permanent-link for each item
2. Break down the monthly archiving format into something else thats more manageable for people using Live-bookmark typed (read: Header viewing only) interfaces
3. Add some visual style to the pages that make reading them actually possible

Alternatively (or additionally), make the primary feed, or provide another feed, that merely links directly to the targetted article. It seems odd to me that the feed url is going to a page with a full-text copy of something that already exists elsewhere on the web in a full-text state, especially then the intermediary is suffering from bandwidth issues.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I really like the service the link blog provides, I just want my experience with it to be better.

CBC‘s finally added RSS Feeds for their online news service. I’ve been hoping for this for quite some time, and especially since they’ve started upgrading many their websites/features (By the way, I really like the new ottawa local site launched yesterday I believe)

Get your RSS feeds here! Just click on the orange RSS button for the feed you want, copy the URL from the address bar and then paste it in the appropriate field of your News Reader to instantly add CBC news headlines to your RSS application. The headlines are automatically updated every 15 minutes, 7 days a week.

Way to go CBC! Now if only you’d get around to releasing your entire media catalog online (don’t worry, I’m not holding my breath for this one).

[Source: cbc.ca - RSS Feeds]

Well, I said I was giving it a whirl, but it didn’t last terribly long. Ultimately the interface was just too much for what I was looking for. If only you’re looking for an in-browser feed-reading interface, Onfolio doesn’t quite make the grade yet. This is primarily due to the fact that Onfolio is not a feed-reader to begin with, it’s a research tool. It does seem to handle feed-reading decently, but it’s just not a simple and elegant interface. On top of that, it seems to require a little more processing power than I can muster (however, keep in mind this is more a failing of my 4 year old p3-450 (sigh) rather than any failing of Onfolio).

Onfolio also interrupted my regular workflow enough to annoy me. It seemed 70% of my actions using the GUI resulted in a progress dialog popping up and me having to wait 2-3s before being able to resume my progress (Even reordering the order of my feeds or sorting them into folders popped this dialog on EVERY MOVE).

As a research tool on a more powerful system with feed-reading as a secondary activity, it might be a great tool. As a quick and easy in-browser feed-reader, it’s not my cup of tea.

Scoble reports that Onfolio has released Onfolio v2.0 beta 1 which has in-browser support for Firefox (screenshots: 1, 2). He also hints that he might think along the same lines with my point of view with regards to the proper domain of feed reading.

So I’m giving it a whirl. It seems like an interesting app so far. It did indeed install right into firefox as an extension, and seems to integrate well so far. One problem encountered so far: the ‘blog this option’ (which I used to initiate this post, by the way) ended up opening Blogger.com’s ‘blog this’ window/URL in IE, even though I launched it from the firefox onfolio interface. Probably just an oversight attributable to the ‘beta 1′ status, so I wont gripe about it too much.

The content organization concept (“collections”) may enable me to better track content that I absorb while surfing around, but I’m not completely sold on it. If that functionality useless to me it seems like it might be a bit too much overhead just for feed reading (especially when my alternative aggregates on a separate machine and presents itself through a web page), but time will tell.

Jottings.com has a listing of the 100-oldest .com domains. Pretty neat. Check it out

My girlfriend has spent a bit of energy cataloging and reflecting on her pictures of the “George W. Bush visits Canada” extravaganza; specifically the protests in which she took part. Take a look and feel free to leave comments here if you have any. I particularly liked “‘No to Bush’ (and other slogans, signs and general propaganda)” section.

Source: Ainsley Chapman’s Gallery

I was just thinking of posting a comment on how consistently awesome Engadget has been over the last several months, when I notice (through my feed reader) that Engadget’s scooped up the 2004 Weblog Award for Best Tech Blog. Beating out Gizmodo by ~6% of the votes. This is especially fitting, since I was going mention that I’m seriously considering removing Gizmodo from my subscriptions for three reasons: 1. Everything I get from gizmodo us usually covered by engadget; 2. Engadget seems to have more interesting in-depth features; and 3. I don’t really appreciate the direction Gizmodo’s writing style seems to be heading towards. Lately I’ve found the tone of Gizmodo’s writing to be a lot more negative and artificially ‘in-your-face’ aggressive, and that’s just not my thing.

Anyways obviously the ‘Weblog Awards’ are just a vote-monkey popularity contest, but nevertheless, it’s good to see the team you’re rooting for get the prize. Even if… you know… you didn’t actually… *ahem*… vote.

Sources: Engadget named Best Tech Blog in the 2004 Weblog Awards / 2004 Weblog Awards

One from the “too much” department: Burton, in their on-going strategy (likely referred to as ‘clothing-audio synergy’ in their corporate documents) has apparently created a toque with headphones built-in. Interesting concept, except I think it looks a little dorky if you ask me. The Engadget source provides a link to a review of the new item.

Source: Engadget

” The big secret of lock picking is that it’s easy. Anyone can learn how to pick locks.”
- Chapter 1 – The MIT Guide to Lockpicking

Despite the inclusion of a letter from the MIT Hacker Community attempting to dissasociate itself from the guide (released into the wild without a section on the ethics of lockpicking is wrong, in their opinion), the MIT Guide to Lock Picking is a very thorough document about the ins-and-outs of… you guessed it “Lock Picking”. I’ve only skimmed it myself, but it seems to be clear and easy to follow. Personally, I have little reason to learn lock picking, but it seems like something that would be neat to learn. Hell of a party trick. :)

Also avaliable in tasty PDF or PS.