During the manhunt for the Boston marathon bombers I did this little tweet:
It feels very weird to get 1200 retweets (plus a bunch manual retweets and other copies). Of course I didn’t spot the typo till after I sent it 🙂
During the manhunt for the Boston marathon bombers I did this little tweet:
It feels very weird to get 1200 retweets (plus a bunch manual retweets and other copies). Of course I didn’t spot the typo till after I sent it 🙂
On March 13th 2013 Google announced that they were shutting down Google Reader from July 1st. As a big RSS user I started looking around for an alternative a few days later and settled on using the web-based Newsblur. Now I’ve been using it for close to a month I thought I’d give a quick review.
Before I do the actual review I thought I’d give a quick overview of Why I use a RSS reader. I think Marco Arment put it well when he wrote:
RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites: sites that you’d never remember to check every day because they only post occasionally, and that your social-network friends won’t reliably find or link to.
Which is very much the case with me. I read relatively obscure but interesting blogs that are not massively retweeted or linked to. I read enough of them that it isn’t practical to visit them every day to check for updates (which may only happen every few weeks) and I follow enough people on twitter (145) that I will sometimes skip a few hundred tweets that happened overnight so I could miss a tweet announcing a blog post (assuming I want to follow that persons tweets).
A specific use case I saw is for web comics. Instead of me checked the half-dozen web-comics I follow every day for a new stripe they all appear automatically in my reader.
To switch from Google reader to Newsblur was fairly simple. From Google reader I went to “settings” and then “Import/Export” and exported my information via Google “takeout”. Google then gave my a zip file which contained a subscriptions.xml file and some .json files.
I then setup a Newsblur account. Currently Newsblur offers free accounts and paid accounts. Free accounts are limited to just 64 feeds being active and update less often. Paid accounts cost $US 24/year and have unlimited sites, more updates and some sharing options. Once you create your account you can import you subscriptions.xml (call and OPML file) and you will see you previous subscriptions. After a couple of days using it I signed up to a one year subscription.
If you don’t have an old RSS reader you can just grab RSS feeds from sites you read. Look our for the RSS symbol or use your browser to find the RSS URL of the sites you want to follow.
I found Newsblur’s interface to a little clunky but usable.
The left hand sidebar has my various feeds (the number is how many unread articles are in each) . The main pane on the right has the article I’m reading and the bottom right pane has the list of articles in my current feed (just the one I am reading in this case). The go to feeds you click on the name of the feed on the left and it loads in the right-hand panes.
The interface above shows i follow 141 sites and I have 225 unread articles. The “Ars technica” site (2nd from the top) is an example of a site I’ve used the built-in filtering function with. There are 37 articles I’ve filtered to “good”, 46 filtered to neutral and another 77 completely hidden ones I’ve filtered out. The filtering is fairly simple and works on keywords, authors or titles of articles. Sites which have good tagging are easiest to filter while those that don’t (eg slate.com) are a lot harder. This is a feature that Google reader never implemented and is very useful for readers sites where their are whole groups of posts you want to exclude (eg gaming articles on Ars Technica).
One of the bugs with the interface is that their are a lot of different option menus ( the “cog” at the bottom left, the “cog” in the feed pane next to the feed’s name, right clicking on a feed name) which are a bit confusing. There is even a dev.newsblur.com which has a preview of the upcoming interface . At least once I’ve switched the the “dev” site to fix a setting I couldn’t change in production.
I’m fairly happy with Newsblur as a replacement for Google reader.
A few rough areas
But I think the site is more than usable and getting better and I definitely recommend it to others.
Git For Ages 4 And Up by Michael Schwern
It is not you, is really is complicated
It is easier to understand git from inside out, cause the interface is so far…
Getting started – init and clone
Getting stuff done add and commit
Branching
Commits
Staging area / Index / Cache
Workflow
Working with others
Tags
Rebase
Bunnie – Linux in the Flesh: Adventures Embedding Linux in Hardware
As CPU speeds growth has stall mobile CPUs have caught up with Desktop CPUs
Cost of Mobile CPUs $20 on intro vs $X00 on intro for desktop CPUs
Time spend making a product
Giving Linux a body
Chellenges of Embedding Linux
Case Study: Robot Vision
Case: NeTV
Dev Enviroment
users: delighted; (better UX using CSS 3 in particular and “HTML5” in general) by Adam Harvey
User Experience
Example: PHP website, new version
People expect web interfaces to be smooth these days
Example @font-face
Transitions
Keyframe Animation
Droids that talk: Pairing Codec2 and Android by Joel Stanley
Sophisticated DSP and SDR are within the reach of the LCA attendee skill see
FOSS Speech Codecs
Digital Voice over Radio
Software Radio
How Radio works?
FreeDV on Andriod
Links
The future of non-volatile memory by Matthew Wilcox
NVM Express Standard
PCIe Drives
Post-NAND Era
Programming Model
Linux Assumes page cache
Linux really sucks at sync
Humans suck at sync
Observability
Reliability
Improving error logs
So after a late night hustling people at foosball and swapping rumours about a certain person being ejected from the conference, I managed to leave my key in my room in the rush to get to the opening (although in the end I caught a bus).
The winner of The Rusty Wrench award was Donna Benjamin this year, I liked the way she talked about each of the past winners and got everybody to acknowledge them ( Rusty, Pia, Mary and Kim ).
Think, Create & Critique Design by Andy Fitzsimon
” I’m a drinker with a speaking problem ”
We are all designers
Fundamentals of design
Practices
Tools
Have some common sense
Interactive design
Experience design
Nail the hierarchy of needs
Good design is a process
Failing at life is helps you design
Design for hacker is a great book, if you can stomach apple worship and web 2.0
Bunch of other books..
Vampire Mice: How USB PM impacts you by Sarah Sharp
How USB power Management works
How USB power Mngt does not work
USB Device Suspend Issues
Takeaway:
Challenges with USB device suspend
USB 3.0 Link Power Management
New Intel stuff
Summary
Actual saving is Probably more than you think, especially if you get the whole chain to sleep.
Somebody said “about 4 watts” for SandyBridge
Servers can also save. Options in HP G7 servers. But problems
Getting your talk accepted: write a convincing talk proposal – Jacinta Richardson
Background
Pick Conference you want to speak at
Speaker rewards
Call for Proposals
Write Abstract
Ask for help
Enabling Compute Clusters atop OpenStack – Enis Afgan
cloudman – usecloudman.org
Deploy
Galaxy Cluster
Value Added features
Open Programming Lightning Talks
Adam Harvey
Paul L – The Poor Man’s SANbox
Dave Boucher – Yak Shaving
Tom Sutton – Safe Strings in Haskell APIs
Roger Barnes – poker, packets, pipes, and python
Benner Leslie
Nico – LatProc and Clockwork
Duncan Rowe – Some commands I’ve developed over the years
Russell Stuart – PAMPython
Peter Chubb – When Arduino is not enough
Open Govt Miniconf – Open data panel