It’s funny how certain topics seem to show up around the web about the same time I’m thinking about them. Sometimes there’s a common trigger, but alot of times there isn’t. Here’s some of both (and some of neither).<\/p>\n
First off, a handy tip I picked up looking at someone else’s del.icio.us<\/a> bookmarks- if you prefix a tag with an asterisk, it will appear at the top of your list of tags. I use this to maintain several categories that stay at the top of the page, including toblog, <\/em>toread, and *tobuy. Once I’ve blogged\/read\/bought the item in question, I just remove that tag (or occaisionally the whole bookmark.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Here’s one I forgot to blog: on Oct 10, I *toblog-marked the RadioShark<\/a> from Griffin Technologies (makers of the ultra cool Powermate<\/a> and iTrip<\/a>). It’s essentially a TiVo for radio, allowing you to record live radio and play it back later (perhaps on an iPod). When I saw this, I thought it might help with the problem of finding something good on the radio at a random time of day. Within a day or two, I learned about Podcasting<\/a>; by Oct 15 I had blogged about it<\/a>. I don’t even own an iPod (yet), but I rarely listen to the radio anymore. I do have a stack of 20+ CD-Rs in my car, full of already-listened-to podcasts. <\/p>\n<\/li>\n Several days ago, I wrote about losing my Bloglines ‘unread’ metadata<\/a>. I had over 3000 unread items, and I ended up deciding it was probably a good idea to start fresh anyway. The very next day, Jeffrey Veen wrote about conciously making the decision to clean up his unread RSS count<\/a> in his desktop aggregator. He wrote of “literally hundreds of subscriptions haunting me each day; a bright red counter showing unread posts creeping up into the thousands.” <\/p>\n Dave Winer then commented on Jeffrey’s post<\/a> on his own blog, delivering the alarming news that “so many people are using RSS the wrong way.” Sorry, I just don’t see it. RSS is a content delivery mechanism. It is optimized for certain uses and usage patterns, but it is at the core a way of delivering information. The right way to use information is what ever way that information is most useful to the consumer. For me, I want to see everything. I may not read it all, but simply filtering everything brings me some degree of awareness of what I skipped.<\/p>\n Having said that, Dave does have a point. His vision of the “right” way to use RSS is not without merit. He wrote:<\/p>\n It’s not like email. Let the river of items flow through your queue, scroll over them with a scroll bar, and don’t let the software tell you you’re falling behind. Your time is what’s valuable, there’s no value to the items you didn’t read. If it’s important it’ll pop up again. RSS is not email. Don’t sort them out into little boxes that you have to go to….<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n There are probably some feeds I subscribe to which I could apply this model to, and should think about doing so. On the other hand, there are feeds for which I never want to miss any content. Just last weekend (prior to losing my unread counts), I caught up on Tim Bray<\/a>‘s feed- over 200 items dating back over 6 months. I never should have let it go unread so long, but I knew it would take me time to catch up since I like to read everything. The limitations of the Bloglines interface (reading unread items in a feed is all-or-nothing) are also to blame. But I’m glad I did catch up. I learned a lot about many intersting topics, got a recommendation for a book which I’m now reading<\/a>, and discovered<\/a> Magnatune<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Security, in many forms, has been on my mind ever since I recently re-read Cryptonomicon<\/a>. Data security, communications security, and backing up of important data. One of these days, I’m planning to write a series of articles about some of the things I’ve done to get more secure (but not today). One of the things I haven’t yet done is get serious about backing up my Powerbook. I should know better- I’ve been on the wrong end of a horrible crash before, including one that was potentially career-limiting. To say I got religion about backing up work stuff is putting it mildly. At home, I’m not quite so diligent.<\/p>\n So I was pretty interested when I read Mark’s take<\/a> (at BoingBoing) on an OS X backup solution called SuperDuper<\/a>. Looks like it could be just the thing, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. Jeremy Zawodny wrote about improving his backups<\/a> across all of his systems. He’s now using SuperDuper for his Mac. <\/p>\n<\/li>\n I can perform my backups onto my 120GB external Firewire harddrive, but Jeremy has built a Raid-5 backup cluster on a Linux server (same link as above). This got me to thinking (again) about LaCie’s Bigger Disk<\/a>, now available in 1.0 and 1.6 Terabyte<\/em> sizes. They aren’t exactly cheap, but just look at it: You can get 1 TB of storage in a portable, 5 1\/4″ 2U form factor on a Firewire 400\/800 interface for $999 list (10-15% less if you shop). A terabyte for under kilobuck? Wow. <\/p>\n<\/li>\n Thinking of my Firewire Drive and the Bigger Disk then got me thinking about the Linksys NSLU2<\/a>, a USB2.0-based Network Storage Device. Plugin a USB2.0 Harddrive, turn it on, and it becomes a Samba server on your network. What makes this \u00c3\u00bcber-cool is that like its cousin the Linksys WRT54G wireless router<\/a>, it’s a little Linux box, and much<\/a> cool<\/a> hacking<\/a> is already going on. It’s a shame that it only works with USB2.0 drives and not Firewire. And of course, today’s hack-a-day<\/a> hack was on how to use the linksys nslu2 as an itunes server<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/li>\n Jumping back to Neal Stephenson’s Cryptomonicon… I’ve been wanting to read his Baroque Cycle, which expands on Cryptonomicon, but several hundred years in the past. Due to a long standing policy of mine, I won’t start the triology until all three books are published (yes, I’m a Robert Jordan fan). Seems I won’t have to wait any longer<\/a>. Looks like I missed the early October release of book three<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/li>\n Which reminds me, I’ve really got to put together my Christmas list. <\/p>\n<\/li>\n Speaking of lists, the Markdown original of the post has a list of all of the links. Twenty-eight. Must be a new personal best.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n\n