Fnord.

I’ve been using Firefox 3 since it came out, and still can’t make up my mind about it. It’s still got a bit of an alien feeling about it, due to emulation of stuff like buttons, but the plugins are wonderful.

(Scribefire & AdBlock especially. The new PDF viewer is essential, too.)

I had to reinstall 1Password, but that’s no biggie, not hard to do. (Preferences in 1Password has an option to reinstall browser plugins.)

On the minus side, Firefox appears to be incompatible with the bookmarklet for Asaph, which is a major problem. I love my microblog, and the ultra-quick-posting ability of Asaph is addictive. Hmm.

Via TTAC, a bumpersticker I’d be too timid to display but admire nontheless:

A variety of pictures, mostly from the iPhone, of my 3-day SC trip. Silver Legacy hotel, somehow I got a 25th floor room for $69/night, quite the view!

Anna, still in pre-six-month vampire mode, ready to go outside. (The watch is a Citizen Promaster on loan from WatchReport.com. Nice.)
Life is good.

Killing time at the mall.

Chuck just forwarded an email to me, from a colleague of his asking about RSS, readers and justifications. I’ve been an RSS junkie for some time, so I thought I’d take a stab at it.

You can find a full definition of RSS here on Wikipedia, but let me take a stab at a users’ view of it.

RSS

RSS is a method for combining web updates into a single program. As a user, this lets you scan more of the web in less time.

A way to eliminate hitting reload on a site to see if they’ve updated since were last there.

A concept as hard to explain as a web browser

From another point of view, RSS lets sites tell people easily when content is added or changed. This means that Joe User can add these so-called ‘feeds’ together into a stream of news that they (theoretically) care about.

In practice, it works pretty well. Sites publish RSS (or Atom, see the Wiki article for details) feeds, users use a reader of some sort to view them, and if a story interests you then you can read it.

Sites publish either ‘full-text’ or abbreviated feeds. For example, the New York Times just publishes headlines and a sentence. If you want to read the full article, you have to load the link (which the reader makes simple.) Many blogs publish full-text, where the RSS item has the entire story plus links to pictures. I much prefer full-text feeds; that’s what I have for this blog.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of my preferred newsreader, a Mac-only product called NetNewsWire:

It has various layouts, this is the one I usually use. RSS feeds are grouped into user-defined categories on the left. In this shot you can see some of mine:

You can see I have some feeds (NYT, Washington Post, some others) in ‘News’, a few local ones in ‘San Diego news’, and so forth. The point is, you can group them however makes sense to you and not me. Which I do.

Generally, I sort feeds by how much I read them. News goes at the top, then local stuff that might affect me, then associated high-perceived-value blogs into ‘low update rate’ (named for infrequent blogs) and then topics of interest. Such as watches. (Shameless plug, there).

On the far right, you can see a number of vertically-stacked thumbnails. NetNewsWire has tabs, and this is showing all the links I’ve followed. This is essential in my opinion. When reading an RSS feed, I just hit enter on the one I want to read, and NNW opens them in tabs, in the background, where I can peruse them at leisure. If you have to ‘click, read, hit back’ each time then RSS would be a lot less useful.

Here’s a screenshot of reading Boing Boing, which shows the embedded web browser and full-text feed. Click for full-size:

This shows a lot of the features I like. Note that user-defined groups of news read super easily, where you just hit spacebar to advance screens and skip to next unread news item.

All of this adds up to a system where I can efficiently learn and read far more than I could with my previous system of bookmarks and tab sets. I still have a tab set that I open in the morning, but the news part of that (as opposed to weather and comics) is migrating to RSS very quickly.

I think that’s the part I’d like to emphasize: Not so much the underlying technology, but what it gets you: An easier way to keep up with what interests you.

There’s a couple of follow-up essays I will write if anyone’s interested, on RSS readers, finding feeds, sharing them, web aggregators and such. We’ll see how this one flies.

Wipbox (odd name, that) promises to ease the selling of stuff on ebay. Better price research, checklists, etc. (Also for craigslist).

Haven’t tried it yet, but a lovely idea.

… both data series give a decent read on the amount of must-sell inventory out there.

And it’s certainly out there. Even though job growth remains positive, monthly defaults are now occurring at a pace not seen since the darkest days of the last housing downturn. Foreclosures appear to be close behind. Both sets of numbers have risen far more abruptly than they ever did during the 1990s bust.

Moreover, there’s little reason to believe that these numbers will improve anytime soon.

It’s always risky to extrapolate, but it looks like those of us renting locally might face higher rents and then lower house prices.

All, gallows humor.

From the reliably-interesting English Russia blog, pictures of a desk made from disks and chips. Check it out, very nicely done.

From the NY Times:

FREE INTERNATIONAL CALLS You can now call any of 50 countries from the United States, free. Talk as long as you like. You pay only for a call to the access number in Iowa, which is 712-858-8883; if you use your cellphone on nights or weekends, even that’s a free call.

There’s no contract, no ads, nothing to sign up for. At the prompt, press 1 for English. Then punch in 011, the country code and the phone number. The call rings through immediately.

Fine print: In some countries, you can reach only landlines, not cellphones. And in part because FuturePhone’s lines have been flooded, its success at placing calls is not, ahem, 100 percent.

But it’s hard to argue with “free,” which, according to the company, it will be until at least 2010.

I haven’t tried this, and I suspect that the NYT mention will saturate them, but it’s perhaps worth a try. The other one that caught my eye was this:

As you inspect something you’re tempted to buy, dial 888-Do-Frucall (888-363-7822; leave off the last two L’s for — well, for now). When prompted, plug in the bar code on the package. After a 10-second ad, a voice is usually successful in identifying the item by name (“Luv’s Diapers Value Pack, 208 Diapers Variation — not available used”), and provides the prices from three sample online stores.

Simpler than surfing with a smartphone, worth adding to the addressbook.

Update 7/23/07: Looks like its gone down, sorry…