There’s an interesting piece about RSS feed requests exceeding homepage requests on the infoworld site. This means more folks are reading their content using their RSS reader than with their web browser. This is huge. While this has started with a technology site, you will see this trend make its way out into the larger consumer sites over the course of this year. It has big implications for me (I’m a web developer after all) but also for info consumers, ie, as I have been saying endlessly, get on the bandwagon and try RSS readers, they’ll change the way you access content greatly for the better.

Well, not really. But Victorinox, makers of the popular swiss army knives, has introduced a new model that incorporates a USB flash memory module. I’ve kept a swiss army knife on my keychain for years and I would actually consider this, though the asking price (roughly $90 for a 64MB model) is too steep. If they get the price down to a reasonable range, I would replace the one on my keychain in a heartbeat.

There’s a story on slashdot.org about the software I’ve been using on my ‘tivo’ computer, Beyond TV. I’ve been very happy with it despite some occasional glitches and the thread is well worth a look if you’ve been considering setting up your own personal video recording box.

One word of advice that only a few folks mention in the thread – if you’re serious about doing it, invest in an MPEG encoding card for the machine you’ll be using. The difference in quality is night and day.

Ok. A childhood of Tolkein and Dungeons and Dragons has left me secretly craving these new dungeons and dragons miniatures. I’ve actually accumulated miniatures over the years, in the theory that I would spend the time to paint them. But numerous aborted attempts have led me to conclude I lack the aptitude or patience to seriously take up miniatures painting as a hobby. But these come prepainted, and besides, what child of the 70’s wouldn’t want an ochre jelly miniature for the top of their computer monitor?

Check this out – a new way to make lenses entirely from fluids. No more precision grinding of glass, instead very malleable lenses can be built from a new technique that utilzes two non-miscible fluids and electric fields to manipulate the lense shape. Fascinating stuff – in theory it will enable a new generation of less expensive digital imaging products because the lense systems will be significantly cheaper to manufacture than traditional ground glass lenses. Plus the system uses much less power than traditional focusing systems in cameras, meaning more battery life for your camera. Unfortunately the article doesn’t touch on how precise the lenses are in comparison to existing ones. My guess is they’re less accurate and thus likely to be showing up in lower-end cameras.

There’s a great article covering the how and whys of content syndication and aggregation. It’s a quick read and well worth the 10 minutes or so it will take to read through it. If this doesn’t help you understand why you should be looking into RSS readers and thinking about how you handle your information consumption I don’t know what will. Take a minute and look it over.

So I am just starting to emerge from a post-christmas state of being profoundly broke, thanks in part to the recent Waynflete presentation and a host of ebay auctions I held. Of course this means I’m starting to eye toys for myself again. Today I’m thinking I really want a set of these killer headphones, the ER-6’s from Etymotic Research. Everyone who has a pair raves about them, and I sit in my office 6-8 hours a day listening to tunes on headphones and wishing they did a better job of noise blocking. My birthday is coming up and between now and then I’ll be picking something out for myself – this is the first candidate.

It must get tiresome listening to me ramble on repeatedly about the dangers of using Internet Explorer. But man, once again there is a critical flaw in the code that could compromise your machine if you’re running IE. This one is preposterously dangerous – visit a website with a specially created image on the webpage and BAM, your box is compromised. Folks….go get whatever your favorite flavor of mozilla is and abandon IE. There are more attacks to come along the lines of this exploit too – the leak of MS’s source code opens up a world of potential exploits.

Specifics, in case you can’t be bothered to read the article I’ve linked to – if you’re running IE 5, your machine is vulnerable. If you won’t switch to Mozilla, at least upgrade to IE 6 using Windows Update.

I made a bunch of changes over the weekend to this site. The most visible is the new icon in the URL bar, which you may need to clear your cache to see. It was time for a matching color scheme 😉 The icon is courtesy of Jesse. I also fixed the comment system so that it no longer uses popups, and I eradicated the last tables in use for presentation in the site. It still isn’t quite validating, I’ll get to that eventually. Oh and I fixed the line heights so headlines aren’t running into each other. Lastly, I upgraded MT to the latest version.

Anyway the point of this post is, if you see something broken let me know so I can fix it.

I’ve been talking about bit torrent for a while now. It’s replaced ftp and http downloads for me in most contexts these days, but I’ve had a hard time convincing folks to actually try it out. Last night I conducted a little experiment the results of which should help convince folks they should be using torrents. Epic released the demo of Unreal Tournament 2004 yesterday and half the internet was trying to score a copy. I logged into my gamespy account and got myself in line in the fileplanet que to download the demo. Meanwhile I fired up Azureus and got it going from a torrent on filerush . Long story short, I had the demo on my hard drive and ready to install 15 minutes before my turn had come up in the que at fileplanet. If that’s not enough to convince folks to give torrents a try I don’t know what is.