Google Shared Stuff

Google has a new feature, Shared Stuff. My "Shared Stuff" page is linked to on the right of this blog in the Recommended Section. This section will include pages which are not shared in the Google Reader Shared section.

Google Reader Part Deux

In the past few months, I have come to use Google Reader as a source for 95% of my news. Even high frequency sites I have come to accept on the reader as I have better learned to skim the headlines and not read every posting or article. There is now some fracturing of the RSS domain in which some sites give you all the content via the feed so you need not leave the Reader interface, whilst others, usually commercial news outlets, give just a snippet and force you to visit their page to view the entire article. They then can bombard you with adverts, assuming one lacks the appropriate Firefox plugins.

Unfortunately Google Reader can be so useful that it becomes somewhat addicting and time consuming. The more feeds to which one subscribes, the more one feels compelled to read. Technologies are available to distil and repackage customised information from feeds.

Besides the aforementioned sharing ability of the Reader, the Reader finally received a Search box recently which greatly enhances its utility. My shared feed is of course available. I would point to this as the cause of my decline in postings. Many of the things I wish to share with the world speak for themselves in these articles.

Today, on the Companion Page, I have exported and published my current list of RSS feeds. You can import this file directly into your own Reader Account. (More Podcasts to come)

Happy Reading.

More Screens

Most people still use one monitor 17-19 inches for their computing display needs. Quality large screen monitors with good resolution such as the Apple 2560x1600 Cinema display still run an unreasonable 1800 USD. A good solution to increase productivity and ease of use is to add 200 USD 19 inch flat monitors to your display. Going from 1 to 2 monitors yields a vast improvement. My workstation consists of a 8 x 19 inch monitor grid powered by 2 x NVIDIA Quadro NVS graphics cards physically supported by 2 x Ergotron DS 100 Quad monitor desk stands for a combined 10.4 million pixel display for around 2700 USD, or 3800 px/USD. Considering the Cinema displays run at 2275 px/USD, my setup, though somewhat excessive, provides good bang per buck.

When using several monitors in Windows, the programme Utramon (torrents) is an indispensable addition. It extends the task bar to every monitor and adds several other simple but effective multiple monitor utilities.

Hardware Recommendation: Addonics Diamond

The Addonics Diamond hard drive kit offers the highest quality external enclosure available for SATA drives. An optional 5.25" 'Mobile Rack' component allows the enclosure to slide seamlessly into a tower or server even as part of a hot-swappable RAID. As stated on their website, this drive kit makes any SATA drive into a portable data store. The kit works modularly to allow for USB, SATA, eSATA, IDE, or SCSI connexion. Given the quality construction and impressive flexibility, the Addonics Diamond kit is well worth the price.

Google Reader

I have long been an avid user of the Google Personalised Page, iGoogle as mentioned frequently. I have loaded it up with scores of RSS feeds and spend too much time on it. I have known for a while about Google Reader, but never preferred it over iGoogle. Recently though I have been converted, at least for blogs and magazines that update less than five posts per day. High frequency news sites such as the NY Times are better on iGoogle since they clutter the Reader. One of the nice features of Google Reader is the Shared Items which has been posted as a Gadget on the right side of this blog. It has its own syndication too.

*Update* Google Operating System also informs us of a powerful feature of Google Reader to reconstruct feed history not even available on the original site.

Weather

It took me a while to find a decent website for weather. Weather.com is owned by the weather channel and is mostly spam from what I can see. Sadly, this is where I would often go when I needed some weather information. Intellicast.com on the other hand is a great site. No advertising, global content, and readily-accessible multifactor weather forecasts. If you know of some other good weather sites, by all means share with the group.

More on Virtual Machines

The new version of Parallels for Mac has a great new view called 'Coherence.' Windows and the Mac OS can be used as a single integrated environment with both the Windows taskbar and Apple Dock and Menubar accessible simultaneously. Additionally, the Apple Doc now contains all the programmes running within Windows as well as OSX. With a click of the mouse, the Windows or OSX desktops are brought to the front and accessible. One may easily drag and drop files between the Mac and Windows file systems as well. This software greatly increases the value, accessibility, and productivity of both the Mac OSX and M$ Windows desktops.

Another virtualisation software, VMWare, can run a virtual OS from a separate bootable partition.

Google Talk Gadget

While as I have stated before, Google should provide secure encryption for their Instant Messaging and voice link communications, they have taken a giant step forward with the new Google Talk Gadget for the Google personalised page or other Google Gadget capable sites.

Bookmarks

You can learn a lot about a person from their web History or Bookmarks - perhaps too much. I have taken the bold move of publishing mine on the web via the Companion Page.

I did this by exporting my Google Bookmarks with the Google Toolbar and the Firefox Gmarks plugin as suggested by this post. This was still a relatively involved process and as I have said before, Google needs better Bookmarking features with better sharing and exporting capacities. In the meantime though, I refuse to use del.icio.us because it is just too dirty, and as Matt Panaro stated "you share with that many people, you tend to get diseases." As anonymity is important to me, kindly inform me if I did not properly filter out any identifying or otherwise inappropriate links. Now enjoy browsing years of bookmarks and I encourage everyone to publish their own.