Brentc.com

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.

I know a few people out there who have modded their Xboxes not for the ability to pirate games, but for one specific application: Xbox Media Center. For those of you who don’t know, Xbox Media Center, or XBMC (as it’s known), is a very slick, network-file-sharing-enabled interface for playing movies, picture slideshows, listening to music using your Xbox. One thing that has been lacking in the XBMC scene, in my opinion, has been a centralized source for following XBMC’s development unless you wanted to spend hours browsing through the two main XBMC forums (the official forum, the xbox-scene.com forum).

Enter ‘Jon’ from Jon’s Thoughts on Everything who has started up the XBMC development tracking ‘What’s Up With Xbox Media Center’ blog. So far he’s posted fairly consistently, giving some insight into upcoming features as well as providing personal commentary on feature suggestions. Overall it’s a fairly good resource, and if you use XBMC you should check it out.

FreeBSD released version 5.3 this weekend, and declared 5.3 to be their new stable release. This is a significant step in the evolution of the FreeBSD OS, given that 4.x-STABLE originally debuted in March of 2000 and the 5.x-RELEASES have been around since Jan 2003.

Why am I posting about this? Well, my own server setup uses FreeBSD 5.x, so it will be nice to be able to get it up to a “stable” point, so I’m just excited about it in general. The other reason I think this is interesting, is because of a posting one of the FreeBSD developers made to the FreeBSD-current mailing list. In the posting, FreeBSD 6.0 and onwards, Scott Long talks about the reasons behind their long overdue major version increment and describes the change in direction the FreeBSD development process is taking…

By the middle of 2002 is was very apparent that we needed to start focusing on getting 5.0 released. Unfortunately, we fell into the trap of wanting to finish more features in order to feel good about 5.x. We kept on ignoring the fact that 5.x already had a lot of good and needed features, and that the number one goal needed to be to get it stabilized and turned into 5-STABLE. Instead we drew up a road map document that dictated releases based on features rather than on stability and, even more importantly, timeliness.

The new cycle, Long says, will be more geared towards “calendar-based” releases rather than “feature-based”. Which will enable FreeBSD users to “plan effectively for upgrades” through increased predictability of release times. The proposed timeline so far is a 12-18month cycle for major releases and a 4-6month cycle for point releases.

Being fairly new to FreeBSD myself, I haven’t really head much about FreeBSD’s development cycle, but it’s good to know that there seems to be a open line of discussion between the developers and the users.

FreeBSD 6.0 and onwards

I find the Thunderbird releases seem to come out of nowhere usually. Anyways, Mozilla Thunderbird 0.9 has been released.

Highlights from the Release Notes include:

• Saved Search Folders – Basically a Tb implementation of GMail’s labels (
• Message Grouping – Basically a copy of Outlook’s display features (screenshot)
• Bug fixes etc…

Overall, I tend to find Tb’s releases are quite as interesting as its big brother‘s releases, but nevertheless always good to see a product being kept up-to-date.

Maybe Bug #224795 – (The message was sent successfully, but could not be copied to Your Sent folder) will have been magically resolved (unlikely), as it prevents me from keeping Tb open for longer than I need to read an email (which makes me depend on a systray email checker to know when I have new mail). Grrrr.

[Source: Thunderbird 0.9 Released - MozillaZine]

Patrick, at Strang’s Blog, comments on a something I’ve noticed too: The lack of people using Google to answer questions.

Just today on IRC someone was asking if there was a Thunderbird extension that would minimize Thunderbird to the tray. In typical IRC fashion, a reply came back:

<@blitz> there’s a goddamn extension
<@blitz> to minimize thunderbird to the tray
<@blitz> make a fucking effort
<@blitz> and use google to search for it

Is it the human touch that causes people to ask before looking themselves? If that were the case, I doubt they’d be asking on IRC first.

Strang’s Blog: How do people use Google?