Monday, January 31st, 2005
Late new years resolution
I expected january to be a slow blogging month with lots of exams and whatnot, but in the end it turned out even worse than i anticipated.
So here’s a late new years resolution for 2005: write more, edit less. For most of my posts i spend more time editing than writing (yes, i wouldn’t believe it either). Shows how much i suck at editing.
I know that this isn’t of much public interest, just trying to get the blogging juices flowing again.
Is this broken? How so?
If a system which is meant to keep out of your way can’t be kept intact during increased workload and requires maintenance after crunchtime, it most likely isn’t working. Considering this my handling of e-mail, bookmarks, incoming files and subscriptions appears to be inherently broken. Time to rethink…
Thursday, January 27th, 2005
Giver or receiver?
Warren Ellis made my day (once again). Don’t click if you’re a batman fanboy.
Tuesday, January 25th, 2005
Life feeds
January exams kept me offline for awhile, hopefully i’ll find my way back soon. In the meantime, here’s something for the cybervoyeurs out there, two more life feeds just in case you can’t get enough of me: this feed (courtesy of audioscrobbler) delivers the last 10 tracks i’ve been listening to. If you’re interested in what last.fm thinks about my musical tastes, here’s my last.fm profile.
The second personal feed lists stuff i wanna do, service provided by everyone’s favorite folksonomy of three weeks ago, 43things.
Saturday, January 15th, 2005
Giving up control
I’ve recently discovered stormgrass.com after gibarian kindly informed me that he had added me to his blogroll. It’s a very nice weblog by a fellow viennese student and wordpresser, so if that’s your kinda thing, check stormgrass out.
A few days ago gibarian voiced a common concern i can heartily empathize with:
I for one don’t like to “outsource” my website’s content. Now, I know that many people don’t enjoy the comfort of their own paid webspace, so uploading pictures on another service is really not that bad. But if I used pictures I stored on flickr on my website, I’d always be concerned about what happened once that service breaks or simply vanishes.
Having switched from my own hacks to del.icio.us and flickr for linklog and photolog respectively i figured i might write a few words about my reasons for this and why i trust these services with my data.
Bluntly, it all boils down to convenience. I’m a very control-freakish person when it comes to my personal data and sometimes i could kick myself in the head for being how i am, but even the anal retentive reach a point where they have to give in to the lures and temptations of the better. del.icio.us and flickr are both several orders of magnitude better than anything i could come up with in the limited time i devote to blog-caring. Basically i gave up a wee bit of control but gained lots of time that i can invest in actual writing rather than code-fiddling.
del.icio.us is the brainchild of Joshua Schachter and according to its disclaimer currently in “pre-pre-alpha”. This being the nonprofit project of a single person puts a user in the somewhat hazardous situation that the service might fold anytime. On the other hand it has also grown an incredible userbase of 40k-something people and lots of linky-love and endorsements from the blogosphere. This kind of outreach and publicity is just too big to simply throw away. If you have a success like this on your hands, you don’t just drop it. The only real danger to del.icio.us i can see right now is funding, and from what i’ve seen in the past bloggers have some serious loose cash and are willing to burn it for a struggling nonprofit online venture if the need arises. I expect del.icio.us to stick around for the foreseeable future simply because there’s no immediate danger for it to close shop. And even if it should go away, leeching a full backup of your del.icio.us bookmarks is as simple as one api-call like http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all.
As for flickr, they have Cory Doctorow on their advisory board, one of the biggest, baddest copyfight/commons pundits out there. Any media company with Cory on board has about as much online-cred as possible.
I’m currently using a free account at flickr and there’s always the risk of having features cut on a free account. This happened to me in the past when yahoo mail suddenly dropped pop3-support on free accounts, which pissed me off no end. They still hold several hundreds of my e-mails hostage. But while i wasn’t willing to shell out the cash for a yahoo mail account, i can see myself paying for flickr if the need ever arises. Until then i’ll enjoy the free ride, right now their free offerings are good enough for me.
Sure, when flickr’s or del.icio.us’ servers go tits-up things will get a little messy in the sidebar. On the other hand, my photos will still be available if my own site burns to flaming pieces, as will my bookmarks.
Boy, this came out a lot more verbose than i had expected…
Tuesday, January 11th, 2005
Mac mini
When i first saw the mac mini, two thoughts came to mind: “Finally a worthy successor to the cube” and “eat that, shuttle!”.
Sunday, January 9th, 2005
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
There have been some major changes to this site recently (details here). If you’re reading this in your rss feed aggregator it might be necessary to update your subscriptions.
- If you’ve subscribed to the main feed of engadgeted.net (e.g. http://www.engadgeted.net/feed/ and flavors like …rss2/ and …atom/), just ignore this post, nothing changes. This feed will remain in place, but from now on won’t contain daily links from the linklog or moblog posts. A combined feed is no longer offered. Gladly my logs tell me this is the majority of subscribers.
- If you’ve subscribed to the weblog-posts-only feed of engadgeted.net (e.g. http://www.engadgeted.net/archives/category/weblog/feed/ and flavors like …rss2/ and …atom/), please change your subscription to http://www.engadgeted.net/feed/. The old feed won’t be maintained much longer.
- If you’ve subscribed to the linklog-only feed of engadgeted.net (e.g. http://www.engadgeted.net/archives/category/linklog/feed/ and flavors like …rss2/ and …atom/), please change your subscription to http://del.icio.us/rss/christoph. The old feed won’t be maintained much longer.
- If you’ve subscribed to the moblog-only feed of engadgeted.net (e.g. http://www.engadgeted.net/archives/category/moblog/feed/ and flavors like …rss2/ and …atom/), please change your subscription to http://flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=44124409010@N01&format=rss_200. The old feed won’t be maintained much longer.
- If you’ve subscribed to the comments feed of engadgeted.net (e.g. http://www.engadgeted.net/comments/feed/ and flavors like …rss2/ and …atom/), just ignore this post, nothing changes. This feed will remain in place unchanged.
I’m genuinely sorry for the inconvenience.
Metasite bla
I made several changes to this site (again). Having the linklog and moblog intertwined with the rest of the posts seemed like a good idea in the past and it works quite well for kottke.org, but for me, it doesn’t. Somehow breaks the flow of the main column. Besides that my moblog hack sucked anyway and mirroring links from del.icio.us is kinda superfluous.
So from now on, linklog and photolog reside in the sidebar, powered by del.icio.us (+rss digest) and flickr respectively. Both are magnificent webapps and serve my needs far better than anything i could come up with and if you haven’t done so already give them a try, you might be pleasantly surprised.
I also tweaked the sidebar layout a bit: the sidebar houses two floating divs, one contains site navigation elements, the other contains linklog and photolog. In narrow windows the linklog and photolog *should* appear beneath the navigation menu. In browser windows somewhere beyond 1024 pixels in width, the linklog and photolog *should* appear to the right of the navigation window (just play around resizing your browser window and it should become a little more obvious what i’m trying to convey here).
This has only been tested in safari and firefox(mac) and i half expect this little trick to break internet explorer in terrible ways, but honestly i couldn’t care less. If you’re still on this piece-of-crap browser all you can expect from me is pity. If you’re on a reasonably modern browser (no, netscape 4 and ie 6 don’t count) and things are still broken for you, please drop me a line so i can try to fix it. To those of the anal-retentive variety, feel free to poke around the site and tell me what i’ve broken in the transition.
The redesign also caused some major changes to the rss feeds, i’ll post more information about that in the near future.
Saturday, January 8th, 2005
I, for one, welcome our new robotic pet overlords
Ces coverage has started a ddos attack on my gadget-absorbing synapses. The usual suspects report from the frontline. I’m almost at the point of throwing away my god-given gadgetlust. I fully expect macworld to make this most unfortunate condition go away.
The only thing from ces tickling a faint response so far was wowwee’s announcement of robosapien v2 + robopet with added autonomy. Something shiny and rechargeable to keep me company without the tedious feeding and pooping.
Creative Commies
[...] I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises.
Everyone’s writing about cnet’s Bill Gates interview with responses by the usual (commie) suspects all over the blogosphere. Of course i can’t resist chiming in.
Up until now i thought that Bill is a kinda-ok-guy, that he just came out of the 80s on the wrong end of the open source/commons spectrum with a few billions and a nice monopoly under the belt and now has to bend over for shareholders. But this statement - just stupid beyond comprehensibility.
Another gem from the interview:
We need to keep IE the best.
People keep saying that Steve Jobs emits a reality distortion field. Reading this interview i got the impression Bill Gates lives in one.
Get your creative commies shirt here or here, via boingboing.