A blog from the perspective of Vlad, a modern-day techie. The content includes elements of design and tech. trends, with a strong emphasis on the beauty of simplicity.
Do you use Google Reader or Netvibes to read all your news? I do, and they are both missing one critical feature. I have 2 news sites that I always keep up with that have no RSS feeds I can subscribe to. What can you do? Before I found out about Feed43 I had to the sites manually. So I go to their main page, this is the first thing I see:
Your favorite site doesn’t provide news feeds?
This free online service converts any web page to an RSS feed on the fly.
With a little bit of tinkering (about a 1/2 an hour), I was able to configure my very own custom RSS feed to subscribe to in my news aggregator. Sure, it requires a little knowledge of code, but their instructions were pretty good. I love how specific the tool gets, letting you extract even the smallest snippets of information and make the feed as usable and good looking as possible.
Check out the two feeds I created and feel free to subscribe:
The music industry whales are putting our internet service providers under pressure by constantly making laws and regulations about how they need to monitor their traffic for pimple-nosed kids downloading the latest Jay-Z album from their favorite BitTorrent site. Who pays for the new filtering equipment though? The ISPs do, and I think that’s lame. The RIAA doesn’t understand that the Internet isn’t a government-controlled utility that can be shut off, it’s a collaboration of private networks controlled by the private sector. In other words, we do what we want. So what does Jerry Scroggin from Bayou Internet and Communications do? Ask them to put their money where their mouth is, and of course, they don’t really want to stop piracy, they just want to rob more people with their crazy lawsuits.
Scroggin said that he receives several notices each month with requests that he remove suspected file sharers from his network. Each time, he gets such a notice from an entertainment company, he sends the same reply.
“I ask for their billing address,” Scroggin said. “Usually, I never hear back.”
I still tend to think that I suck at taking pictures. The reason I got into photography is because my dad and I invested in a fancy camera. The pictures I shot were so bad we thought the camera was defective. We compared it to our point-and-shoot side by side. All my stuff was blurry and out-of-focus. Then I discovered what the little M meant on the dial on top of my still-smelling-fresh Olympus DSLR. I quickly realized that in order to get a better shot than the point-and-shoot camera, I had to do some tweaking. Read the rest of this article »
Today is a very important holiday, and it deserves a post. I didn’t post on my birthday, on Christmas, or on any other holiday, because in comparison to this one, they’re not important.
So, here it is, thank you brave men and women, served or serving, dead or alive, every single one of you is responsible for my liberty.
Our soon-to-be President Barack Obama is already showing his support on http://change.gov. I like this bit from the site specifically, it’s definitely an encouraging and very true quote:
“When you choose to serve — whether it’s your nation, your community or simply your neighborhood — you are connected to that fundamental American ideal that we want life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness not just for ourselves, but for all Americans. That’s why it’s called the American dream.”
We know that the English language is dying, it has been dying for the better part of a century. George Orwell (Animal Farm) wrote about it in the late 40s. Here’s what Oxford researchers think are the most annoying phrases today:
1 – At the end of the day
2 – Fairly unique
3 – I personally
4 – At this moment in time
5 – With all due respect
6 – Absolutely
7 – It’s a nightmare
8 – Shouldn’t of
9 – 24/7
10 – It’s not rocket science
I agree with mostly everything on that list, but if I had to make a personal top 10 of useless jargon, it would be the following: Read the rest of this article »
Wired just had an interesting post about airport security. We know that they check our shoes and make us throw out our toothpaste for our own good, but is it actually stopping terrorists? Read the rest of this article »
