Saw with interest the other day that Wired News has started releasing podcasts. Cool. I’ll subscribe.
Got around to adding the feed to iTunes today, and noticed that while it’s an RSS 2.0 feed, there’s no enclosure element. Just a link to the MP3 file.
Whoops. That means their podcast feed won’t work with a podcast aggregator. Meaning it’s not technically a podcast - just a bunch of downloadable MP3 files.
Luckily, we have cool tools here in the future that let us work around problems like this. Like Feedburner. I created a Feedburner feed of the broken Wired podcast feed, and now it works just fine:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/WiredNewsPodcast
Feel free to subscribe to this one, and pass it around to anyone who could use it. I’m not inserting ads or trying to gain anything by it, other than a working podcast feed.
For any of this to make sense, you have to see this post by Thomas Hawk.
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection: What I’ve Been Up to Lately
Go on - go look at it. I’ll wait. I don’t want to leech and inline it here.
See how he made a cool collage image out of the favicon and page title of the pages he’s visited recently? He did it by opening up his history a few tabs at a time in Firefox, taking a screenshot, then pasting them all together.
Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a Firefox extension/hack that could do this automatically? Generate an image/collage of the last n sites you’ve visited, maybe automatically post it somewhere so you could share “where I’ve been lately” on your blog, like a blogroll. Or even get really fancy, and generate an imagemap to turn each of the icons/tabs into a link to the site.
So, lazyweb, who wants to bring us this great, cool piece of software? 
Like lots of WordPress users, I use Akismet to filter out spam comments. It’s worked really well for me so far.
In the last couple of days, I’ve seen a few people comment about how it’s gotten more aggressive, and has been flagging some legitimate comments as spam. With that in mind, I dove into the queue of comments it was holding as spam, and lo and behold, there were several real comments.
I recovered them, and they should be showing up now - sorry if your comment got blocked.
I don’t really know if this is related to Akismet getting aggressive, or if I was just lazy in checking the queue for good comments. When I first installed it, it performed so well that I got zero false indications, so I never developed the habit of checking on the queue. Guess I’ll have to change that now…
I’ve been complaining about the lack of an inline remote control for the new 5G iPods with video ever since they came out - rather, complaining about the fact that Apple got rid of a perfectly good accesory connection that existing remotes (and other peripherals) used.
At MacWorld last month, the iPod Radio Remote was announced, and I just ordered one from Amazon. I’ve been kind of on the fence about it, but I had $20 in gift certificates at Amazon that were burning a hole in my pocket, and that pushed me over the edge.
One of the interesting features is the ability to display RDS (Radio Data System) data, that some broadcasters include in their signal to show the name of the station, artist and song title, etc. I had a Pioneer stereo in my car several years ago (2000-2001) that had this feature, and it was pretty cool. In the age of ID3 tags, we’re pretty spoiled by seeing all kinds of data about what’s playing. At the time, only a few Portland radio stations were broadcasting RDS data, but it looks like quite a few of them are doing so now.
I’ll let you know what I think when I get it, and of course, expect lots of photos.
http://www.apple.com/ipod/
Unusual for Apple to introduce a new product without having a huge press event with weeks of speculation beforehand, but there you have it. Today, they announced the availability of a 1GB iPod nano for $149, to go along with the existing 2GB ($199) and 4GB ($249) models. They also dropped the prices of the iPod shuffle to $69 (512MB) and $99 (1GB).
I doubt anyone is really surprised by this move, but it does make the lineup a little more complete. People who don’t want or need a screen can get the shuffle for cheaper, while people who maybe held off on a nano because of cost now have less of an excuse.
I have to say that the $149 price is tempting. Maybe I’ll replace Rachel’s 512MB shuffle with a 1GB nano…
Steve Rubel points out a feed that will be offering the commercials aired during the Super Bowl this weekend as iPod-friendly video podcast files. Sweet!
I have to take a risk, and admit that I’m not really interested in professional sports, and probably won’t even watch the Super Bowl. Culturally, though, we all know that there are some great commercials that get shown there - funny stuff. Now you can subscribe to the feed, get the video files onto your computer or iPod, watch them over and over, whenever you want, show them to friends, and do whatever you want with them.
Now THAT’s what the digital lifestyle is all about.
Someone is going to be recording the commercials, then encoding them as MPEG-4, and making them available. I wonder what the entertainment industry is going to find to complain about here? “Hey, you can’t do that! We’re going to sue! You’re pirating our, um, wait a minute… You mean that MORE people are going to be watching our commercials? And we don’t have to pay for it? And they’re going to watch them over and over, and show them to their friends? Well, we’re still going to sue! BitTorrent and ripped TV are BAD!!1!one!”
No one who knows me should be surprised…
I’ve read a few things on Chris Pratley’s OneNote blog that have got me very excited for OneNote 12. I’ve been playing with it on my X41 tablet for a little while, but honestly, the thing I’m looking forward to the most is the Windows Mobile version. I’ve poked around a bit on the Office 12 Beta DVDs I got, but I can’t seem to find it.
Is it missing, or am I just not looking in the right place? If you know, let me know! Feel free to contact me off-blog if you wish.
CutMeLoose.com: Ultramobile Lifestyle PCs coming
Rob Bushway, mobile gadget geek extraordinaire, is at the Microsoft Mobility Partner Briefing up in Redmond (I was invited, but couldn’t make it), and grabbed my attention with word of imminent release of “ultra-mobile PCs” - smaller than a laptop or a tablet, but larger than a PDA. Here’s the dirt:
Look for the following devices to be announced very soon
From the slide:
The ideal Lifestyle Ultra-Mobile PCs will be
- wearable
- all day battery life (12 hr on-time)
- $500 msrp
- always on
- connection through 3G
- instant use
- 10”
- Pen based
- full windows based
There will be trade offs of the above featues to hit the $500 mark, but the $500 is critical this new device that will be announced soon. You won’t want to leave home without it – like a cell phone.
I’ve seen prototypes of things like this bandied about at trade shows, etc. They’ve been teasing us with these “mini-tablets” for ages, now. It’s about time some of these cool devices start making it to the market.
Wearable, all-day battery, $500 price tag, and 3G connectivity? Here’s my credit card - which one of you PC OEM’s wants it first?
My friend Dr. Dave Langford made an interesting observation - Internet Explorer 7 (Beta 2 Preview) completely breaks the custom styles that FeedBurner adds to feeds to make them more human friendly, and replaces then with its own style. There’s no option to view the feed with the original FeedBurner style.
This could be a big problem for FeedBurner, and for people who are used to using FeedBurner’s custom style features.
I use FeedBurner for this site’s feed, and I took some screenshots to illustrate the problem.
Here you see what the FeedBurner style for my feed looks like. It uses a simple style, with a little blurb about what a feed is, and a “Subscribe in Bloglines” link. If there were a podcast post on the page, you’d see a link to an embedded player, and you could listen right in the web page.
This is a very basic FeedBurner style - other styles add a lot more options to the feed, and people have come to rely on those features.
However, when viewed in IE7, the FeedBurner style is replaced by the custom style that IE7 uses for feeds, and there’s no option to view the page in its original format - all FeedBurner customizations and services are lost.
I wonder if the IE team will address this? Maybe FeedBurner can figure out a way around it, or at least detect and warn that if you’re using IE7, you’re missing out on some FeedBurner features (the irony of telling someone they’re missing out on features if they’re using IE should be delicious to anyone who’s ever seen a page telling them the opposite - that they’re missing out on features if they’re NOT using IE :-)).
TinyScreenfuls Feed (this blog)
