I’ve mentioned in the past how much I like theFeedDemon RSS reader from Bradsoft. One of the reasons I am so fond of it is the ‘watches’ feature it has – you can set watches on a collection of terms and phrases (say ‘New York Giants, NY Giants, Giants Football, Giants NFL), and it will automatically build you an RSS feed with links to any items it finds in all your RSS feeds that match on those terms. It’s extremely useful and makes it possible to much more quickly refine your RSS feeds for specific topics you’re following.

Unfortunately FeedDemon is Windows only and so far I haven’t encountered a mac or Linux RSS client that has a similar feature. If anyone knows of one please comment. Anyway, enter Newstrove.com. The site is a search engine that tries to one-up news.google.com with a massive index of news from around the world. The site also has a very handy feature similar to FeedDemon though – look to the right side of the page near the top for the build your own topics link. Build your custom RSS feed, then copy it into your favorite RSS reader. You’re good to go with the same sort of news ‘watches’ that FeedDemon provides.

The downside is that this is a server-based system. Personally I’d prefer it be client based for performance reasons, but on the positive it does expose a lot more feeds to your search terms than the client-based one does.

Google needs to get on top of this stuff. They could do a masterful job with this. And while they’re at it they should add beysian analysis to the feeds, so that instead of seeing 120 links to posts covering whatever the media buzz dujour is (8 dead in iraq!) I see 1 aggregate feed for that topic. This is the next step in the evolution of browsing information space in my opinion, and it’s actually critical – even with RSS the situation is a total overload in terms of the voulme of content I would like to be able to look through compared to what I can reasonably manage.

I’ll return to this subject again, as I want to touch on email and usenet as other components in this information space, and I want to return to the visualization systems liketouchgraph and some of the tool prototypes like MIT’s Haystack and the OSAF’s Chandler. None of these is hitting all the bases yet but folks are working on this stuff. I feel like a drowning man waiting for a life preserver, and they haven’t cut a hole in the middle yet 😉 But at least as I said, there’s progress.

Bought music at the iTunes Music Store and want to move it to a machine you haven’t blessed with a key? Now you can. Or more precisely, it’s now a lot easier to do. I wonder what it will take to convince the content companies that DRM simply does not work. There has never been a lock that can’t be picked is the short and simple way to put it. This fruitless quest to engineer the impossible is wasteful and it makes the consumer experience with the products using it suck, with a bewildering array of specifications and a lack of interoperability. Anyway, at least for the time being there’s another lockpick to bring to bear. You can grab the actual software here, mac and linux only, though apparantly if you’re clever you might be able to get it working under win32 using cygwin.

If you’re on a pc, check out this suite of audio utilities, including a conversion utility that will transcode between most audio formats. It’s one of the few that handles FLAC, SHN and Monkeys Audio. Until I found this I was using a host of small utilities to handle the live music I am always grabbing, it’s a huge time saver. Plus the portable audio tool is great if you’re using a portable MP3 player but don’t like the software that’s needed to move music onto the device (but check to see if your device is compatible first). All of it is free to try, some of it requires licensing in the $20 range after 30 days.

VCD. SVCD. DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW. DVD+RW. DVD-RAM. Dual layer. Blue Laser. Good lord there are a lot of recordable media formats, and the market’s about to get shaken up with the introduction of the dual layer and blue laser burners, each with their own collection of acronyms and incompatible formats. Frankly it’s a huge pain in the ass, and the manufacturers’ inability to agree on a simple set of standards is hurting consumers with reduced market penetration, higher costs, and a bewildering array of incompatibility problems. What’s a regular bloke to do? I have a couple of simple suggestions. First, visit dvdrhelp.com and research the DVD player you own by using the links on the left to search their database. Make sure to read a selection of reader comments, since what manufacturers claim to support and what actually works often vary widely. Establish which formats your player supports. Chances are if you paid over $200 for your player, it will support at a minimum either DVD-R or DVD+R media and SVCD and VCD discs. Then the next time someone asks you what kind of disc they should burn to share their wedding video with you, you can comment intelligently, and actually play the disc. Or lie, if you’d rather not re-live the experience 😉

If you’re a techno-weenie like me, you can also keep an eye on cdfreaks.com, which covers the news on recordable media. Even if you don’t use it regularly, their forums can be really helpful when you’re trying to get help with a compatibility problem that’s troubling you.

Have you noticed the proliferation of the little merit badge-like buttons folks are putting on their weblogs? Take a look at the bottom right of decafbad.com for example. Sort of a geek street cred item, the more badges you have the more ‘in’ you are with the vox digerati….or something. Actually I don’t mean to tease, though to some extent I do find it amusing and the comparison to merit badges pretty much sums that up. But anyway the point of this post is to note the availability of a handy web-based tool that will build the merit badges for you. Get with the program and add those badges to your site today.

Got multiple machines running multiple operating systems? Wish you could afford one of those killer USB KVM switches from Belkin so you could run all the machines off of a single keyboard and mouse? Turns out there’s a workable software solution to this issue, Synergy. It’s got less overhead than VNC and unlike Timbuktu, PC Anywhere and so on, it’s free. Runs on Win32, Linux and OSX.

How annoying those wall warts are – buy a new power strip and find you can only fit 4 plugs in it out of the available 8 because most of your devices terminate in wall warts – the ubiquitous power converters that clog power recepticles everywhere. I stumbled across a great solution to this problem on the cyberguys.com site – a short 1 foot splitter. You plug the splitter into your power strip, then plug the wall warts into the splitter. Very nice – a cheap ($3), effective solution to the problem. I’m ordering up a dozen so I can clean up my office and home theater power situation – I have 4 power strips and a UPS in my office and 3 strips by the home theater system, leaving me with a rat’s nest of cords. This won’t solve the problem but at least it will reduce it somewhat.

A Japanese company is releasing light emitting diodes that require no power source – you power them by shaking them. Imagine the fun Deadheads would have had in the 70’s-80’s with these. My bet is they start showing up in the clothing of ravers and other nighttime party folk in the near future.

source: [engadget]

…and it is going to require petabyte storage systems in the home. A clever programmer has married two of my current fave geek toys, Bit Torrent and RSS. Imagine a system where you subscribe to certain content channels, say ‘1970’s comedy tv’ and ‘classical music,’ and every morning when you wake up, there’s a selection of such content available to you on your home machine/network. Seem far fetched? Wired has an article covering a prototype of such a system, built by a clever programmer. It’s not really ready for the average user yet, and it’s built on Userland’s Radio, which limits the potential audience, but the concept is just fantastic. I really hope (and expect) that refined versions of this are going to pop up like wildflowers over the next couple of months. Get ready for a multimedia content rich summer and a freaked out broadcast television industry.

As an aside, I really feel like there’s an opportunity here for Apple. Imagine a setop box from them that works like a tivo, but has the RSS publishing and bit torrent file sharing built in. Tie this to their .mac and iTunes architecture. This would offer Apple the opportunity to bypass the broadcast and cable networks in the same way that iTunes and the music store offer Apple the potential to become the music distribution point, bypassing the recording studios. Steve Jobs is just the iconclast to bring this to the public over the loudly protesting corpse of the existing broadcast and publishing industries that can’t bring themselves to adapt to the always on networked future.

Go get the latest release of the bit torrent engine. There are quite a few improvements, especially on the bandwidth use of the tracker. Note that you might have to re-associate bit torrent with your preferred client after installing this, it will probably change your .torrent associations back to the default client. My client of choice is Azureus, which is java-based and thus runs on any OS. And as a bonus, they happen to have a new version out this week as well. Get downloading!