Mike Pirnat

I’ve found my Livejournal “friends page” to be increasingly cumbersome as a feed aggregation and reading service. Liz has fallen in love with Pulp Fiction and uses it religiously. PF is great for reading JL friends–since it can remember cookies, one can see all of one’s friends’ friends-only posts. But Liz tends to live entirely on one computer, whereas I am sometimes at my Mac Pro, sometimes on the hand-me-down Powerbook, and sometimes (okay, usually) at work. This variety of machines is where PF falls down, as there’s no easy way to keep track of what I have and haven’t read across all of them.

And then I remembered that Google had released a Google Reader a while back to solve this problem, so I’ve decided to give it a whirl. So far it’s proven to be tremendously convenient and useful, with the only downside that it’s unsuitable for reading content that is protected or otherwise requires authentication.

What is anyone else doing to make life in RSS-land less painful and tedious?

blogs, geekery, livejournal

Some part of today managed to melt what’s left of my brain, so I settled for skimming rather than chiseling away at my reading, and that has degenerated into a need to close browser tabs and assault you all with another installment of…

My cool flickr-based link du jour is Spell with flickr, which lets you spell words using letter images found on flickr, just like what you see here. Nifty!

Some geek reading: Joel Spolsky on “Great Design” and Michal Zalewski on “Cross-Site Cooking” (potentially dangerous shortcomings of how cookies have been implemented by pretty much every browser).

While we’re on blogs, who would have ever thought Chewbacca needed his own blog? I guess you could consider it a scathing satire of “the blogosphere” (a term I really loathe), asserting that any random bloggish drivel is about the same as Chewy grunting and growling unintelligibly (and you probably wouldn’t be too wrong). It’s really, really daft, but it makes me giggle. What a Wookiee!

Artie attempts to scan your iTunes library, find tracks that are missing album art, and fetch covers from Amazon for you to review and drop into iTunes if they are what you’re looking for. As my iTunes library–currently closing in on the 45 GB mark–continues to grow, this seems like an utterly brilliant solution that will save me much time, hassle, and pain… Too bad it doesn’t seem to like my increasingly ungainly iTunes Library.xml file. Mostly it seems to time out trying to upload or process the data. Your mileage may vary–let me know if you have success!

Which leads me to the obligatory Mac geek section… I have a new favorite browser: Shiira, a nifty treat from Japan that so far seems lighter and faster than Safari and Firefox, and which sports some wicked visuals (I particularly enjoy the page forward/back that peels the webpage away like a piece of paper). I also ran across a pretty good list of must-have Mac software.

Some amusement for the gamers among us: a library of video game endings for those of us (like me) who were too lame to ever finish most of their games, and, when you have eleven minutes to kill, perhaps this short film will help you conquer your “Fear of Girls”. (I’m glad to say I overcame that a long, long time ago!)

Finally, something to get us all ready for lovey-dovey season: SVU Valentine cards. Gosh. Um. Yeah. That’s not creepy or anything.

Next time, I promise some real content, even if it’s lame, or pictures of the cats doing stupid things.

blogs, geekery, humor, links, macintosh, movies, photos, star-wars, video-games