DigitalHobbit

Up till now I’ve never really gotten that much into social networking applications. I joined Tribe.net about 3 years ago but haven’t really checked in for 2 years. I steered clear of MySpace so far…

But yesterday I went on a bit of a social networking spree and decided to sign up for a few services: Facebook, Bebo (2 former coworkers of mine are at Bebo now), and the recently launched Pownce (I don’t have any more Pownce invites, but you might find this post useful – it worked for me).

I’m not done setting up my profile in all of these sites, and at this point I really don’t know which ones (if any) I will end up using on a regular basis. It’s too early to talk about my initial impressions, but I’ll probably blog more about this topic later.

If you’re reading my blog and want to add me as a friend, please go ahead. I’m “digitalhobbit” in all three sites.

Here’s a cool way of using Google to find MP3s. Essentially, it’s a simple matter of using a query like the following:

intitle:index.of "mp3" +"Keyword" -htm -html -php -asp "Last Modified"

(replace Keyword with the name of an artist, song, etc.)

There are a whole bunch of similar (and other) Google tricks on this website.

Update: The following two websites further automate this process:

• G2P
• ExploSeek

Ever since Yahoo announced to buy the social bookmarking service del.icio.us about a week ago, it has been plagued with instability. More often than not, I get an error message when I try to access the website. At the time of this writing I am getting the following error: “del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we’ll be back as soon possible.”

I realize that the announcement of the acquisition must be causing a lot of extra traffic for del.icio.us, and I hope that they can figure out a way to recover from this soon. Several months ago I have started to use del.icio.us as my main bookmarking application, mostly to facilitate sharing bookmarks across various computers, platforms, and browsers, both at home and at work. I realize that several alternatives exist, such as de.lirio.us, but I would prefer to continue using de.licio.us (unless of course Yahoo manages to screw it up…).

Update: Apparently del.icio.us is currently recovering from the aftermath of a power outage that hit them a few days ago. They are posting status updates and other info on the del.icio.us blog.

Google has just released a beta version of their RSS Reader. I gave it a quick whirl, but so far it hasn’t blown me away. In typical Google style, the layout and UI is nice and clean (and very similar to Gmail). Contrary to other aggregators (such as Bloglines), Google Reader only displays a single post per page, rather than a whole list of posts. It provides keyboard shortcuts to easily navigate between posts. Interestingly, Google Reader currently doesn’t display any ads, although I’m sure that will change once this service reaches the final stage. Contrary to some reports from other users, I was able to easily import my Bloglines blog list by exporting it as an OPML file and importing it into Google Reader, while preserving my folder hierarchy.

This new service definitely looks pretty nice and works fine, but for now I’m sticking with Bloglines. I find their UI more efficient (for example I couldn’t imagine catching up with a few days worth of Slashdot postings one article by one and much prefer reading all of them on a single page). But it’s probably worth keeping an eye on Google Reader to see how it evolves.

It looks like Google has launched another service without much fanfare. Gmail’s “New Features” list modestly advertises the new service as “Personalize the Google homepage”, but it looks pretty much like a full featured portal. You can choose which content to display on the home page. Available choices include Gmail (top N messages), weather, stocks, bookmarks, news, arbitrary RSS feeds, search history, and more.

I’m not quite sure if I like it, even though it could undoubtedly be useful. But after adding a few blocks of content to the site, it starts to feel a bit cluttered (particularly in contrast to the extremely lightweight standard Google homepage). I can’t help but think of Yahoo, which started out as a simple Internet directory and later exploded into the portal it represents now. Yahoo now offers many great services, but these come at a cost of navigatability (is this a word?). I hope Google doesn’t go too far in that direction. Interestingly, Google does not mention the word “Portal” anywhere in context with the new personalization feature.

I think I’ll play with the new home page a little over the next few weeks and see if it grows on me.

Gmail just keeps getting better. I’ve been using it for about half a year now, and I’ve been extremely satisfied with it. But a few days ago, they added another very useful feature: It is now possible to associate your Gmail account with one or more other email addresses (verification required) and specify those in the “From” field when sending emails. You can specify the default address in your settings, but you can also conveniently change this using a drop-down on a per message basis.

I use Gmail for all my personal email, but my canonical email address that I give out is a digitalhobbit.com address that simply forwards to my Gmail account. I also have an older forwarding address that I still monitor, as well as a couple of throwaway forwarding addresses that I use to sign up at various websites but that I could get rid of fairly painlessly when the amount of spam becomes too high. Now I can finally have the proper address (ususually my canonical digitalhobbit.com email address) in my “From” field instead of having to put it into the “Reply-To” field. This is particularly important for some mailing lists that require the proper “From” address, which has been bugging me recently.

The name may sound a little dirty, but Greasemonkey is a superb Firefox extension that acts as a decorator and allows you to customize the look and feel as well as the behavior of any website you visit by means of custom Javascript files.

If you know Javascript, you can write your own scripts – or you can take advantage of the large number of user submitted scripts. Some scripts are generic and act on any website, while most scripts apply to specific websites.

Greasemonkey already solved my main Gmail annoyance: Gmail, in line with the idea of archiving all email and not bothering to delete any mail, does not offer a convenient Delete button or keyboard shortcut. The Gmail Smart-Delete Button Greasemonkey script addresses this very elegantly and offers both a context-sensitive Delete button and a corresponding keyboard shortcut. Very nice!

I have not tried it yet, but according to this article, Podcasting is really taking off and supposedly already reaching 6 million adults in the US.

For those of you who are not familiar with this term, here’s the Wikipedia definition for “Podcasting”.

One of the original Podcasting websites, iPodder.org, has a huge list of available Podcasts, ranging from different styles of music to audio blogs and all kinds of other topics.

This could be just the right thing for my 30-minute commute to work every day. I think I’ll start by checking out the Slashdot Review Podcast.

A little over a week ago, I switched to Gmail, and I’d like to report that I’m very happy with it so far. It is very fast and easy to use, and ideal for accessing the same email account from several different computers (such as my workstation at work, as well as my desktop and my laptop at home). Labels are very nice as well. They work pretty much like folders, but since Gmail organizes email by conversations, a label will automatically be applied to an incoming email if it represents a follow-up to a previouly labeled conversation, meaning that you can simply hit “Archive” once you’re done reading the email. Also, Gmail does an absolutely astounding job at presenting a conversation and cutting out quoted text, regardless of how exactly the quoting was accomplished.

Today I noticed a “New Features” link, alerting me to the fact that Gmail now supports email with rich formatting (although this feature is apparently still being rolled out and may not be available to all users). I tried it out, and it works as advertised. Very nice!

After changing my personal emai strategy over the weekend by switching to Gmail, I was motivated to change the way I handle email at work as well. I am currently using Ximian Evolution 1.4 (which has recently become Novell Evolution) on Linux, but I am not quite happy with it. Similar to the way OpenOffice tries (and only superficially succeeds) to emulate Microsoft Office, Evolution emulates Microsoft Outlook. I certainly does a decent job, but at least the 1.4 version that I’m currently tied to has quite a few quirks. My main gripe is the calendar functionality, which is severely lacking, particularly when dealing with meetings or recurring appointments. Evolution 2.0 may solve some of these issues, but due to the Evolution’s tight integration into the Gnome desktop, this upgrade would entail upgrading Gnome as well as X, and these upgrades are not officially supported for our Redhat Enterprise 3.0 workstations and therefore not feasible at this point.

I really like Mozilla Thunderbird as an email (and news) client. Unfortunately, it does not include a calendar feature. The Calendar extension (which is the Firefox / Thunderbird plugin version of the standalone Mozilla Sunbird project) attempts to fill this void, so I decided to give this a shot today. However, I was not able to get it working in a satisfactory manner. The calendar is not properly integrated into Thunderbird, but shows up as a separate window. I was unable to open appointments (i.e. iCal attachments sent via Evolution) in Thunderbird. The only way I was able to view an appointment and enter it on my calendar was by manually saving the attachment and then explicitly importing the appointment using the calendar. This is obviously much too tedious and not feasible. I was also unable to accept a meeting request and notify the meeting’s originator by email. This is too bad, particularly since the standalone calendar application itself looks pretty promising.

To be fair, the calendar extension (as well as Sunbird) is only at version 0.2. It will certainly be worth keeping an eye on this, as Thunderbird + Calendar could be a very good alternative to Evolution once this integration works properly. Until then, I guess I’ll keep using my old version of Evolution.

I’ve been thinking about a better email strategy. About 8 years or so ago, when I was still using my university’s email account, I signed up for a forwarding address from Bigfoot (which at the time was still free and without any limitations). This allowed me to keep using the same email address until now, even though the actual mailbox that it was pointing to changed numerous times when I switched ISPs, domains, etc. Bigfoot introduced their own webmail service later, which provided a decent way for me to check my personal email at work, for example.

However, there are several problems with this approach: (more…)

A while ago I mentioned GmailFS. I still have not had a chance to try it, but now that I use Linux at work there’s even more reason to give it a shot.

A similar tool now exists for Windows users: GMail Drive. Definitely worth a look.

I wonder how much effort Google will put into disabling these tools. I guess it depends on how much they catch on. Apparently they have already modified their login procedures, breaking a previous version of GMail Drive. It certainly would not be wise to rely on Gmail storage for anything other than email, but it could be convenient as a temporary transfer mechanism. Then again, so is CD-R or USB Thumbdrives…