Tuesday, June 10, 2003

In making the switch from Radio to Movable Type, I needed to find a replacement for my News Aggregator. I tried several - including Amphetadesk and NewsGator - before deciding on NewzCrawler <http://www.newzcrawler.com/>;. Some of the key features that make NewzCrawler a superior aggregator over the others: RSS Autodiscovery. It serves as an agent that monitors websites I'm visiting through my browser. If it sees a site with RSS autodiscovery turned on, a pop-up window appears asking if I want to subscribe to the feed. This is exactly how it should be. Organization of feeds by category. Rather than have a list of feeds I'm subscribed to, I want to segregate the feeds into categories. I set up folders in NewzCrawler for Politics, Technology (KM & General), Friends, Law, and others. Feeds are now sorted into those folders - allowing me the ability to easily focus on just the topics I'm interested in. Search news items. NewzCrawler allows me to search across all feeds for words I'm interested in. (Kind of like a Feedster <http://www.feedster.com/>; for my hard drive.) Manual update and scheduled update. Radio only let me check once/hour for new items, and if I wanted to update in between the scheduled interval, I had to shut down Radio and restart. NewzCrawler not only gives you complete control over how often you want to update, you can also do a manual update (right click on the feed or folder and select "update"). Newspaper. This really extends the functionality of the feeds grouped by folder. If I just want to see what items are new in the politics folder, I right-click on "Politics" and select "Make Newspaper". It then rolls up all new items and presents them in a separate window so I can quickly scan all new items. If I prefer to scan new items by individual feed, I can do that too. Drag and drop. If I'm visiting a website that doesn't have auto-discovery turned on but does have an RSS link, I can just drag that link to NewzCrawler, which will then start the new feed subscription wizard. Takes a lot less time than manually adding in new URLs for RSS feeds. Blog This. Whenever looking at an item, I can click a button and it will automatically pull up a new post window. This uses Movable Type's API so that posts are made directly to the server; MT handles the formatting and uploading to the weblog site. There's a few rough edges. NewzCrawler has crashed on me a couple times. It doesn't always seem to remember that it's already seen an item in the aggregator (although, in its defense, this could also be a result of poorly-formatted or maintained RSS feeds - I don't know). On the balance, this is a quantum leap up from my prior aggregator, and is certain to improve my ability to monitor multiple feeds for various weblogs. Posted by Rick Klau at May 5, 2003 11:10 AM 6:04:44 PM

Ambient Devices, a start-up in Cambridge, Mass., is producing devices that display limited information that can be understood with a glance. [New York Times: Technology] 4:54:54 PM

Larry Lessig isn't just fighting excessive expansion of copyright law, he's proposing a well-balanced alternative. If you care about the future of the Net, go sign the petition to reclaim the public domain. [Werblog] 4:33:38 PM

PDAs Casio PF-3000 A new digital calculator from Casio that does more than just add up your expense reports - it'll also let you ditch your rolodex. The PF-3000 doubles as a personal organizer, and has 961 bytes of memory that can be filled with phone numbers, addresses, and notes. If you need the extra storage space, there's also an optional 2K memory module available. Cellphones Motorola DynaTAC 8000X cellphone From Motorola, the first commercial portable cellular phone to receive FCC approval. The DynaTAC 8000X, which weighs just 28 ounces, works on the new Advanced Mobile Phone Service that's being rolled out, and has an LED display, memory to store thirty "dialing locations," and enough battery life for 30 minutes of talk time and eight hours of standby. Retail price: $3,995. Laptops/PCs GRiD Compass 1101 First clamshell laptop compter. The Compass has a black magnesium alloy case, a gas plasma display, 384KB of memory, and for hacking while on the road, a lightning-fast 1200bps internal modem. Home entertainment Sony CDP-101 CD player First digital music player, which instead of albums reads "compact discs" where the sound is encoded as digital bits rather than as an analog signal. Sony is billing these new compact discs as having "perfect sound forever": they're supposed to have higher fidelity than LPs and be immune to the scratches and warps that mar vinyl collections across America. Digital cameras Canon HOMIC Prototype of new still video camera from Canon. The Horizontal MemoryChip Integral storobo Camera, or HOMIC, uses solid state memory to store its images, and was created by German industrial designer Luigi Colani. Peripherals The Microsoft Mouse Microsoft takes a cue from Apple's Lisa computer, and releases its first mouse, a new input device for graphical user interfaces. The Microsoft Mouse was created to work with their new Microsoft Word word processing software, and will set you back a cool $195. Portable audio Sony WM-10 Walkman The smallest portable cassette player yet, Sony's new WM-10 Walkman features Dolby noise reduction and is only slightly bigger than a cassette itself. Music isn't going to get any easier to carry around than this. [Gizmodo] 4:32:21 PM

Bacula, authored by one of AutoDesk's founders, Kern Sibbald, has a Web site featuring a blood red logo and the motto "It comes by night and sucks the vital essence from your computers." Don't be put off by Sibbald's humor here as Bacula makes some commercial backup solutions look feeble. Bacula is a client/server design built and tested on Red Hat Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD. In addition to these servers, the clients run on Windows 98 to 2000, Irix, AIX, Darwin and OpenBSD. In operation, a Director program triggers client file demons (FD) which pull selected files for backup and send them to a storage demon (SD) at the server. The authorization mechanism is encrypted, as are the transfers between the FD and SD. As a example of the professional aspects of this package, the documentation is better than average. An extensive list of features is available at http://www.bacula.org/html-manual/state.html. Initial setup is logical, and a simple configuration is not difficult. However, the powerful capabilities of the software require some care in setup. All backup information is stored in a database; SQLite and MySQL are currently supported. Bacula includes the capability to store to a tape pool, read bar code labels, and reuse tapes automatically as backups expire. It also supports backup to disks and handles changer mechanisms automatically. Bacula serves everyone from one-person operations to large corporations. Now you have no excuse except sloth to have a reliable backup system. Once set up, operations are completely automatic except for changing tapes and adding new client systems. Backup nirvana is here. 2:43:58 PM

Leaked minutes provide an insight into the success of Apple's online music service. "The notes also provide an insight into how Apple deals with record industry.  It treats everyone the same way, rather than giving preferential treatment to the major labels with the big stars.  The independent music representatives were told they would be offered the same terms as bigger labels and have the same team looking after their tracks.  According to the notes, Mr Jobs said: "We have to be more efficient, though. We're not going to deal with 200 lawyers." "Everyone is going to get the exact same deal. It's not negotiable. It's take it or leave it." [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition] 12:27:56 PM

The software giant's founder, Bill Gates, unveils a new package designed to give the firm a stronger foothold in the cable TV industry. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition] 12:24:25 PM

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