Notes on the Death of Google Reader
So everyone’s going apeshit over the impending death of Google Reader. Can we keep a bit of perspective on this please?
– We loved and used RSS before Google Reader, and we’ll continue to love and use RSS long after it’s gone.
– Google Reader is just another RSS client. OK, its community integration features were unique, but as a pure client, there always have been, and will always continue to be, lots of far superior alternatives.
– This has nothing to do with “the death of open standards.” Nothing is happening to the RSS standard, for godssake.
– What do you expect from free software? A lifetime commitment?
I’ll grant that the big problem here is that Reader has become the default backing store for other clients. In fact, my favorite RSS client by far, Reeder, uses Google Reader as a storage and sync mechanism. Hopefully, Reeder will act quickly to enable other aggregators to fill that role, or to let us add feeds independently of a central aggregator. If it doesn’t, I’ll find one that does. Because, after all, that’s what all RSS aggregators did before Reader existed.
It’s not that big of a loss. RSS lives.
Thank God they spared Orkut.
Update: Reeder has already stated that they’ll live on after the death of Reader.
Here are 50+ Reader replacements either working now or on the horizon.
Reclaimed Wood Coffee Table Build
A couple of months ago, a neighbor in the middle of a house remodel stacked a ton of wood in his driveway, free for the taking.
I’d been thinking our coffee table was long-in-the-tooth — legs squeaked every time we touched it, and not very mobile – wouldn’t it be great to have it on casters so we could wheel it out of the way to play Kinect games?
Decided to have a go at building some furniture.
Continue reading “Reclaimed Wood Coffee Table Build”
Schwinn Breeze
Shot on the UC Berkeley campus. Ground level.
Schwinn Breeze
1920s Banjojele
Just walked out of 5th String in Oakland with a 90+ year old instrument – a 1920s banjolele, with a wonderful nasally jazz sound. Thinking of the rooms it has played, the vibrations that have moved through this wood! Built like a tank, too. Maker unknown – lost to history. My first antique instrument.
A couple people asked for sound samples, so here you go – the first compares the banjolele to a modern Kamaka soprano, the other is just a few Velvet Underground riffs.
Amanda Palmer: The art of asking
So, so good.
“The act of crowd-surfing is like the act of couch-surfing – you fall into the audience.” -Amanda Palmer
Crestmont 4/5 Sound Science Fair
Wonderful watching and hearing the fourth and fifth graders explain their audio science projects this morning – such a broad topic, and every kid had a completely different take. Recorded some random audio samples this morning while meandering from theremin to echolocation demo to analog amplifiers to oscilloscope to homemade stethoscope to foley demo… the variety was fantastic.
For a taste, start the audio, then start the slideshow and choose the Full Screen option.
How to Get Lat/Long Coordinates from iOS/Android
Recently I needed to obtain the specific coordinates of a point on the earth’s surface, and didn’t have my hiking GPS handy. Turns out you can do this pretty easily from iOS using either Apple or Google Maps, neither of which reveal coordinates directly. This technique assumes you can get to a desktop computer later, and should work just as well with Google Maps from an Android device.
1) Using Apple or Google Maps, press and hold on the location until a pin is dropped. Tap on the pin’s details to find its “Share” feature, and send the new location to your own email address.
2) From your desktop computer, click the link in the email you receive to open it in Google Maps.
3) In the browser, right-click on the pin and select “What’s Here?” from the menu.
4) The Location field in Google Maps changes from a human-friendly rendering to lat/long.
Presto!
Of course, there are any number of 3rd-party apps you could use to get coordinates directly from the phone – this is assuming you don’t have one of those and just need a quick solution.
Miles Takes a Wrong Turn at Kirkwood
After a couple rides on the bunny hill, Miles and I ventured up a longer lift, where M promptly took a wrong turn and headed down a hill he wasn’t ready for and took off like a bat out of hell. Doing his full pizza, but running on the edge of control. I was scared as hell, but he held it together!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5Ts65ZnLA8&feature=youtu.be
Tim O’Reilly, Barack Obama and Me
Kind of floored when this message arrived in my inbox today – Tim O’Reilly (one of my life heroes) tweeting at the president and mentioning me in the same sentence :)
The Salon piece is excellent, BTW:
Drones are on the “wrong side of historyâ€