GM drives Hummer-branded laptop

You read me rant about how stupid I think SUVs; I espically detest the Hummer, it is truly for those people who have more money then brains (hold on! how did that happened!)

Anyhoo, this laptop is a whole different story. Again, not for the average Joe, but its really sweet with all the built in connectivity, GPS, etc. Check out the handle! Why has no one else thought of this before?

Paul Thurrott’s Vista vs Tiger

Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: Windows Vista Beta 1 vs. Mac OS X “Tiger” (Part 1)

Hmm, I wonder what Paul Thurrott uses to get that Microsoft ass taste off his tounge?

Wish had this back when I was learning Chemistry.

AJAX Periodic Table of the Elements

Maybe I would have scored better grades!

Cruel Joke

I saw this today when I was trying to re-download WMP-10. I guess it takes time for all the marketing traces to disappear from the internet.

My Rio Carbon’s scroll wheel was busted and I just got a replacement a couple of weeks ago. Wheew! And that too, after the warranty had expired a month before I made the call.

The problem with Bloglines

Starting out, let me say that I think Bloglines is great! Simply magnificent really! I have no idea how they make their money but since they have be acquired by Ask Jeeves, I am hoping that they will be around for a while.

What I like about Bloglines is that I can read my subscriptions in any ol’ browser. Of course, its a pain to have to read each of the blogs in one go (since all pending articles are marked as read when you select the subscription)

Having to work out in the field for a week, I was severely behind on my reading; and that OCD thing would not allow me to just mark everything as read and start with a clean slate. So began my search for the shiny new tool.

I have seen quite a few RSS aggregators in the past but this time, I was looking for something very specific. Something that would sync with my Bloglines account (preferred) or some other online service. This is so that I can read my subscriptions without the tool if need be.

My travels on the internet lead to me to FeedDemon. And BlogBridge.

FeedDemon, now owned by NewsGator (I used NewsGator many moons ago, but ditched them when I dumped Outlook), is super slick. It does everything I (think) I need. I didn’t like the fact that Firefox would pop over it everytime I opened a link from FeedDemon in external browser but setting browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground to true solved that. I love the way I can blog (splog) a post in BlogJet or wBlogger directly from FeedDemon, all formatted nicey-nice and all. There are certain blogs that I may not necessarily read but do archive using EverNote; the newspaper like view is fantastic for this, way better than doing it on Bloglines in a browser.

The only gripe I have right now about FeedDemon is that it seems to mark all the posts as read on Bloglines as soon as it synchronizes, which means I would now have to read all those posts on this machine. I can’t go home and pick up where I left off. Unless I synchronize the cache; that should work but I haven’t tried that yet (the cache is just the folder where it stores all its stuff and if I copied that tree over to another computer it should let me pick up where I left off on the first computer – then sync. back – yada yada). The only other inconvenience is that the sync with BlogLines is not 2-way, therefore, in order to add more subscriptions I have to leave the warmth of FeedDemon and go do it in a regular browser, then come back and re-sync the BlogLines subscription, sort of like an IMAP subscriptions, select folders, that kind of thing. And of course I hate them for using IE as their browser component

BlogBridge. Lets just say I am intrigued by it. It is not as polished as FeedDemon and it doesn’t support Bloglines, but it does come with a similar service from BlogBridge. I don’t know what their business model is so I don’t know how long they will be around. BlogBridge lets you create some cool live feeds based on searching either your own subscriptions or popular online services such as Technorati, Flickr, etc. And it has integration with del.icio.us so that you can tag to your del.icio.us account straight from BlogBridge.

I don’t know whether BlogBridge synchronizes on a post by post level, I’ll check that from the home computer later this evening. Since its pure Java, it is cross platform.

Finally, FeedDemon is $30 while BlogBridge is free. And FeedDemon, if you buy now, comes with a 2 yr. subscription to NewsGator. And on their 1.6 Beta page, they don’t say anything about BlogLines so I wonder how much they will support it in the future. If I stick with BlogLines or move to NewsGator, I can still read my subscriptions the old fashioned way online. I can’t find any way to do that on BlogBridge.

So, er, FeedDemon it is. Now excuse me which I whip out my trusty old credit card

High-Tech Laundromats

High-Tech Laundromats : Gizmodo: “For example the laundry rooms in the dorms at the University of Louisville are offer students the option to connect to a website online to check the status of their wash or dry. The system can also send an email or text message to the student when their cycle is done”

There is such a thing as too much technology!

Finally! Some decent camera phones!

Sharp Builds 3-megapixel Cameraphone Bits

I wonder, would it be better it they tried to put a cell phone into a camera rather than the other way round? No matter, finally it looks like the rest of the world will get decent camera phones. Of course, the US will have to wait until the carriers here have squeezed every last dime out of the subscribers usng the older technologies before they bring in the new stuff.

Vaio R. I just pee-ed myself…

Sony Vaio R – Pirates Only

Apparently Sony has been outsourcing their R&D team from somewhere in the Caribbean lately which is how they came up with the name “R” for their new line of computers. Unfortunately lead designer Jack Sparrow could not be reached for comment due to what his rep calls “swashbuckling and pillaging.” What Sony is telling us however, is that basically the R line will destroy anything else. Being a Type-R computer, expect lots of ricer kids to be going to CompUSA to get fake Type-R stickers for their PCs. Don’t be fooled though. The real Type-R has everything you could want. The fact that you can burn SACDs with it alone is pretty cool if you ask me. Aside from that, it’s available with a Pentium D 820 (2.8Ghz) CPU, 1Gb of RAM, a 256Mb GeForce 6600, a DL/RAM DVD-multi-burner, a TV tuner and 320Gb of HDD space. Wow. Expect it to retail for 1500 Euros ($1844 USD).

Sony Vaio R, the audio/video monster [Akihabara News]

Here comes Linux

This is the battle cry from the Linux camp!

Microsoft abandons its customers AND copyright to kiss up to Hollywood

Yet more GMail goodness

Found this over at Lifehacker, thanks for the tip!

Grouped Email Addresses in GMail

Although there is no built-in feature to create group lists in GMail, there is an easy workaround. Click on Contacts (left-side menu) and choose Add Contact (top right corner). Enter a name for the group in the Name field. Then in the Primary Email field start inputting the addresses of group members. Here is the trick: leave out the first and last brackets. This is how you should do it (substituting the appropriate email addresses):

Then Save the address. Once you save it, you can see that GMail puts a bracket around the list of addresses. You can try it out by clicking on Compose. Next time you want to send a note to this group, just start typing in the group name and the address list will come up as an option.

Creating a Pseudo Address Group [Jim's Tips]
Related:
How to import your Hotmail contacts into GMail

[Posted by Eszter]