Category Archives: Technology

Feeding the Hand That Aggregates Me

For news aggregator jockeys out there: I’ve just spent the afternoon overhauling the main Subtraction.com feeds (and brushing up on my meagre XML skills). You’ll notice, on the home page, a new little table in the right-hand column which lists links to the XML feeds, available in the standard RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom flavors. They even describe what you can expect in terms of feed content, so there are no surprises. (If you’re looking for a different kind of feed, perhaps one with comments appended, just let me know, and I’ll pass the request on up to the Feed Development and Publishing Department.)

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Second Helpings at Macworld

Mac miniEverything that Steve Jobs announced in today’s Macworld Expo keynote address can be thought of as a kind of second helping. There’s a sequel, like the iLife ’05 suite of digital lifestyle products. There’s a second taste of Apple’s teasing foray into a full-productivity suite, in which the new version of Keynote is bundled with a brand new word processing program under the name iWork. There’s a new, lower-priced version of Apple’s winning digital music player called the iPod shuffle, which almost seems as if it’s being sold as an accessory to its larger siblings. And there’s the Mac mini, which is being pitched as either a replacement for a Windows PC or a companion to an existing Macintosh. In an unexpected way, you could even say that it’s a kind of sequel, too.

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Lose Your Head

The 2005 edition of Macworld San Francisco is next week, and the Mac-focused Web sites are all worked up, as is their wont, over various, rumored announcements that may or may not come during the keynote address. There’s talk of a “headless Mac” in the US$500 price range, and also murmurs (and circumstantial evidence) of a productivity suite called “iWork.” These completely unqualified murmurings have me a little worked up too.

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Voice-over-IP for Dummies

Vonage PhoneSince about 1998, I’ve been using the prepaid calling services at Big Zoo which, for my money, was one of the best long distance deals to be had anywhere: 3.9¢ per minute to phone anyone in the continental United States, and extremely cheap rates for international connections. Given those prices, I would spend as little as US$5 a month (paid through their Web site at my discretion and in increments of US$10) on calls to friends and family scattered around the country.

Big Zoo did require the inconvenience of dialing an 800 number and then entering a PIN to access my account, but I didn’t mind it, especially given that, over the past several years, the service was remarkably reliable. But then the company announced in December that they’d be shuttering their doors at the end of this month due to excessive competitive pressures with which they couldn’t keep pace. Bummer.

The idea of returning to plain old long distance rates as sold by AT & T now seemed ridiculous to me, so I decided to look into Vonage, a leader in the much ballyhooed voice-over-IP market. Through their Web site, I signed up and ordered a home connection kit, which was delivered to me in less than a week. I received it just after Christmas, and tried to hook it up this past Thursday night.

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Keys to the Keyboard Kingdom

Matias Tactile ProLots of people have been singing the praises of the Matias Tactile Pro Keyboard, which bills itself as the resurrection of “the best keyboard Apple ever made.” According to Matias, the Tactile Pro is built from the same “premium keyswitch technology” behind the original Apple Extended Keyboard, which many longtime Macintosh users tend to remember with great affection. That one had a satisfying ‘clickety-clack’ quality that suggested solid construction and a definitive level of responsiveness to typing fingers. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say it had a very macho quality in comparison to today’s more cheaply made keyboards, which are often referred to as ‘mushy.’

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The Hub of the Matter

USBThe USB 1.1 standard, which in theory allows ‘hot swapping’ of scanners, mousing devices, external hard drives etc. without necessitating the reboot of your Macintosh, has always been a frustrating experience for me. With three or four USB devices for each of my computers, I rely heavily on the hubs that I own — two cheap Belkins that I bought at Staples a few years ago — to get all those devices working properly so that I can get my own work done.

But every time I hot swap a device — like my digital camera — I get over-current error messages. And not all of my devices seem to dependably register each time I start up; I regularly have to unplug and re-plug my Griffin iMate-enabled ADB Kensington TurboMouse in order to get my Mac to recognize that it’s attached. The implicit promise of this standard is that working with these peripherals should be painless, but it’s far from the truth.

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Name That iTune

iTunesThe current generation of iPods can be had with a hard drive as big as 40 Gigabytes, and the iPod Photo can be had in a 60 Gigabyte model. If you don’t limit yourself to the storage available in a portable digital music player, you can have an exponentially more capacious warehouse for all of your MP3s on your computer’s hard disk — a desktop computer with a 250 Gigabyte internal drive is not uncommon these days. That’s a lot of music. So it occurred to me this morning, when the chorus of some half-remembered song popped into my head inexplicably and then haunted me all the way to the office, that iTunes and iPods — or whatever substitutes you care to name — still don’t allow you to find that one song that goes something like “Doo de dum de doo…” You know the one I’m talkin’ about?

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Picture Imperfect

iPod PhotoWhether or not I really have a use for an iPod Photo or not is unclear to me, but seeing how I’m in the market for a new one of these things, there’s a decent chance I’ll own one by the end of the year. However, I still have a quibble: I like the fact that Apple is continuing to expand the feature set of its increasingly important digital device, but I’m frustrated by the company’s apparent unwillingness to just go the whole way — how much longer must we wait before Apple just makes the iPod what it so obviously is: a true multimedia portable digital assistant? Most of the groundwork for this is there; all that’s missing is a touch screen screen. With these photo features, the iPod Photo amounts to one big tease. Anyway, all I know is the U2-edition iPod is really dumb.

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The New New NetNewsWire

NetNewsWireFor a few days now, I’ve been using the beta release of Ranchero software’s NetNewsWire 2.0 RSS aggregator. I’d tried it before in its 1.x release, but its relatively straightforward approach to organizing subscriptions left me unimpressed, so I gravitated to the arguably more creative NewsMac, first, and then PulpFiction, which I’ve been using day in and day out for months. PulpFiction, which in many ways remains one of the cleverest pieces of software of its kind, allows a powerful level of control over subscriptions, which is something I really liked a lot. However, though it has improved over time, it unfortunately remains dogged by speed issues and, on my PowerBook at least, regular crashes.

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Smaller, Lighter, Better

Media Reader for iPodThanks to a still-valid half-price deal at Belkin.com, I bought myself a Media Card Reader for iPod last week — so that, during an upcoming trip my girlfriend and I are taking to Italy later this month, we’ll be able to offload photos from my digital camera onto the relatively spacious confines of her 15GB iPod. At its full price, I doubt I ever would’ve bit on it, because it seems like a kludgy solution to the problem of limited digital camera memory. Prices for a one gigabyte flash memory card are coming down, after all, and I’m not sure when I’ll ever take that many photos. So in all likelihood, I’ll eBay the gadget when we’re back and recoup some of the cost.

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