RSS, Atom sometimes don’t cut it. “Feeds” for Digg, tech.memeorandum, tailrank and blogniscient are useless.
There are several sites in my news bookmarks folder that I have to visit rather than just reading their feeds. They have feeds, but the feeds are useless.
Feeds from news rank sites are insufficient because you get a flood of entries without being able to discern which entries are ranked higher. When visiting one of these sites, you’ll see a rank metric or ‘important’ items are highlighted in some other way. The same problem exists with news.com and news.google.com. I guess it’s time for a new XML format and a new aggregation feature. Maybe Dave can help? (see TailRank, digg, tech.memeorandum, blogniscient)
Upgrade
I upgraded to MovableType 3.2. Painless, mostly.
Cool stuff today
The ‘Download Embedded’ Firefox Extension looks fantastic. Of course, it wouldn’t be so necessary if players in Firefox didn’t take up so much CPU.
I finally see why everyone is so excited about TailRank. Just like digg and tech.memeorandum, I guess you just have to see it on a good day to recognize how wonderful it is.
UPDATE: I can’t believe I didn’t mention blogniscient when listing blognewsranking sites.
Well, I preordered the XBox 360 in August, but the shortage noise is overwhelming. If I can’t have it, maybe I’ll buy a BlackDog USB powered Linux server – it’s a little bigger than an iPod Nano. If I do get the XBox, though, I wonder if it can drive this OneMonitorToTwoMonitor convertor….
And, uh, GameCube AT AT mod. Sweet.
iPod 5G Video – review
There are dozens of excellent iPod 5G reviews out there, so I’ll just chime in with some quick comments.
The Good:
- Portable Video – I’ve watched over 20 hours of video, including Smallville season 1 (transcoded from DVD), in places I don’t usually watch TV (car repair shop, bed(without waking my wife up – yay headphones, while eating lunch, on the porch, etc).
- The packed-in slip case is very nice. It adds nothing to the weight or dimensions of the unit, but makes it safe to carry the 5G in your pocket with your keys.
- I can watch channel9.msdn.com videos on the go!!
The Bad:
- Battery Life is around 2 hours of video playback – Good thing you can play it while it’s plugged in!
- Easy to scratch screen / no official protectors available, yet.
- 4G accessories are not worthless with the 5G.
- No 30 second fwd/backword skip. This is actually a huge problem.
- No way to insert bookmarks in videos.
- If you stop a video and play another, sometimes it seems to remember where you stopped that first video and other times it doesn’t.
- No built in speaker.
- Almost all video content needs to be transcoded to work on the iPod.
Anyway, I love it.
John Tokash 
