Make use of your old desktop

Laptop sales have never been better, they have beaten desktop sales this year.

Laptops are built for mobility, and that’s how they should be. But if your lifestyle involves dowloading torrents, encoding videos, access to a huge database of songs (which is mostly in your external hardrive), you’d end up using your laptop as a desktop replacement, which sucks.

You should be able to turn the laptop on and off whenever you desire, without worrying about interrupted downloads, or plugging to an external hardrive that contains all your media etc.

This is where your old desktop becomes really handy.

I’ll be making a few posts about how to make optimal use of your old desktop, that makes your new laptop truly mobile. Watch out for this space

Fun with satellite tracking

It seems I’ve hit a gold mine. This website (n2yo.com) lets me track satellites orbiting the Earth in real-time. It also lets you know how many satellites are hovering over you right now.

It’s got tons of satellites to track. For example, if you want to see who, the old Indian spy satellite, TES is snooping on right now, you can track it here. Or probably, you might want to check where the recently launched CARTOSAT 2A is hanging out.

You can track up to 5 satellites at a time.

Have fun!

Have you tried out Yahoo pipes yet?

If you thought site feeds were just for newsreaders and aggregators, think again. Yahoo pipes offers you a tool to mash up different site feeds to generate ‘new’ content.

For example, this pipe lets you pull out images from Flickr based on each news item in New York Times. Cool, isn’t it?

What’s even better is that every pipe is public. That means you are free to clone and edit any pipe so that you could do something similar or build upon the same. I cloned the above pipe to show images from Flickr for every post on my blog. (The Yahoo content analysis module that I used in the pipe is still in Beta, so don’t be surprised if the images are way off.)

It’s been a while since Yahoo! came out with something edgy. Would Yahoo Pipes bring back the lost glory? Only time will tell.

If you have no idea what site feeds are, and want a brief introduction to how they came into existence, check this video out:

CoComment

Unfortunately many blogging platforms (Blogger being one of them) don’t publish feeds for comments. There’s no way to track comments unless you have a way of reminding yourself to periodically visit that post to check for new comments. This is laborious and irksome. Moreover, if you post occasional comments while on your daily visit to random blogs, it’s all the more difficult to retrace your path back to check if someone else has responded to your comments. You may bookmark those posts, but you would still need to check each and every bookmarked post.

Even if we did have comment feeds (like in wordpress blogs), subscribing to them through a newsreader can sometimes be quite overwhelming, especially if the blog gets a lot of traffic.

Blog comments are as important as blog posts. They bring out the diversity of opinions on a particular topic. We have email clients for checking mails, Aggregators for checking blog updates; we need a separate tool for checking comment updates.

Thankfully we have a solution in the form of cocomment. From their website:

coComment helps you

• track all comments you make on blogs and other comment enabled platforms
• track the comment based conversations you are involved in, as well as those you want to follow as an observer

Keep track of your web based comments and conversations. You don’t need a blog to find this service useful! As a registered user, whenever you leave a comment on a compatible platform (see here for the ever growing list of platforms we support) coComment will automatically begin tracking the resulting conversation stream – updating you whenever someone adds a follow up comment. If you don’t make a comment, you can still have coComment track a comment stream if you are interested in following the discussion as a reader.

Just what I needed!

Tools for convergence in Blogging

“But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling, like dew, upon a thought produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.”

Lord George Gordon Bryon
English poet (1788-1824)

But beyond similes and metaphors, there lies a domain that bloggers are increasingly becoming aware of — the domain of multimedia. Picture hosting services brought in Photoblogging. Then came video and audiohosting services. Podcasts and Vlogs took over. Bloggers now see a completely redefined medium to express their thoughts in many more ways than one. The blogosphere is now experiencing its own version of multimedia convergence. Following are some free tools of the trade:

• Odeo and Gcast provide free podcasting services. You can upload an audio clip or record your own, and link to it for free.
• Youtube and Google Video allow you to upload video clips for free, and embed them in your blog.
• You can use Audacity, a high quality open source audio editor, to edit and polish your audio clips.
• Proprietary software like Windows Movie Maker, or open source software like Kino can be used to edit video content.

Having talked about the tools, I’ll end this post with a sample use:

The opening sequence of the Maricham song in Rahman’s newly released album JoK sounded very similar to the background score of a scene in Rang De Basanti (which was done by Rahman himself). But for this statement to be seen as a fact, I need to show exactly what I mean. Youtube and Odeo to the rescue:

The Rang De Basanti scene:

Opening sequence of the Maaricham song:

ps: The only thing I hate about these services is that they make use of proprietary Flash, but I can live with that as long as they don’t upgrade to Flash 8 or 9

New Section – Asides Besides

If you notice, there’s a new section “Asides Besides” added in the sidebar. This is because I faced a weird problem. I often came across interesting pieces of news which I want to share (Amit Verma calls it “news filtering”), but couldn’t post them on the fly. Partly because of I was busy or I didn’t have any immediate opinions about them at that point of time. As a result, many such interesting news pieces, that could have been archived, got lost.

Fortunately, Matt, the creator of wordpress, had faced a similar problem, and provided a smart solution: Asides. He explains this in his post:

The format of a weblog dictates its writing. There is no getting around this. Ever since my redesign I’ve had these big important titles that—as a writer—are intimidating. Everything I write has to be worthy of its 32-point Dante banner. This was a deliberate to force myself to put more thought and effort into my entries and it has worked; some of my best writing has been since the redesign. It has been stifling as well. To express what I want to express these days I need something more dynamic.

Asides are just like any other post. The only difference is that they don’t show up as “usual posts” in the main blog. Instead, they can be compartmentalized in to a separate location — sidebar section “Asides Besides” in my case. This is in a way better because the main blog would now be some what uncluttered.

WordPress launches widgets

[tag]Wordpress[/tag] [tag]widgets[/tag], something that you must have experienced if you had blogged at wordpress.com, is now available for full version wordpress users. It has a highly configurable dynamic sidebar that could be now modified without writing a single line of code. The configuration menu uses AJAX that allows easy drag drop of widgets.

On the flip side however, I think people would have to rewrite most of their plugins in widget form, as including a dynamic widget side bar renders the old sidebar useless. So in case you have lots of customizations done in your wordpress sidebar, you might have to wait till all your sidebar plugins are “widgetized”.

Final blog move

So finally I have my own space. That was inevitable. The journey from Blogger.com to WordPress.com and then to a full version WordPress server spanned around 2.5 years. I moved from Blogger.com to WordPress.com for the sake of categorization, and then from WordPress.com to a personal WordPress server for the sake of customization.

The journey was something like this:

blogger.com->wordpress.com->blogger.com->wordpress.com-> personal wordpress server

You can imagine how many times one would have had to change the blogrolls . But now, at least for a year, the move is permanent (Unless I want to lose my money by canceling the domain)

What I would be writing now is an account of the problems I faced while shifting from WordPress.com to a personal wordpress server. It may sound a bit technical.

Ironically, although WordPress software offers importing posts from other hosts like blogger.com, MT and Livejournal, there’s no such importer for wordpress.com. Hence, I had to sift through gazillions of forums and find a solution.

The solution involved using the RSS importer plugin and importing the RSS feed of my wordpress.com blog. The process was smooth, even the categories were preserved. However, comments couldn’t be imported using that process. So, another workaround was needed. For importing comments I used this script. It worked beautifully, the comments got imported. But the only glitch was that comment count still showed zero for all the posts. And no solution was reported in the wordpress support forum. I tried a bit of hit and trial, and found a work around. Now all the comments are visible and properly counted. I did the following:

1. Manually update the comment_approved field for all the imported comments to unmoderated through a SQL query.

2. Approve all the unmoderated comments from the admin panel.

This can also be achieved by making a slight change in the import script (I wish I had done that before, but I had no way of knowing that beforehand).

The blog move is now successful and official

technorati tags: wordpress, wordpress.com

WordPress.com problems

Darn! I’ve a lot to crib about. WordPress.com is behaving a bit erratically nowadays. The dashboard never loads completely, rendering the WYSIWYG editor completely useless. Their server was down for one full day without prior notice. This is a sign of irresponsibility. I hope wordpress.com guys resolve the problem soon.

You guys might wanna add my old blog in your blogreaders, as I would be occasionally regularly posting there whenever wordpress.com is not accessible.

Update:

It took 2 hours for this post to actually show up in the site. Nothing in the dashboard was working. It seems my posting frequency in the blogger blog is gonna be more than I expected. Great

Technorati Tags : wordpress

Linux system overhaul

My old linux partition was gathering dust; and so that it doesn’t feel like a sautan, I went on to update it. I upgraded my Ubuntu installation from Hoary to Breezy — took about 3 hours on a T1 connection . Ubuntu is a nice debian based distro, but the debian community has been slow in updating their repositories with the latest Firefox; repositories are still stuck with old Firefox 1.0.7. I had to use a backdoor method to get Firefox 1.5 installed and integrated. Firefox 1.5 seems to be running much faster than 1.0.7, although my linux system is well tweaked in other aspects.

Unlike Windows, there are a number of good desktop blogging clients for Linux (most bloggers are geeks eh? ). GNOME has its own blogging client, although it lacks a spell check — something I could never do without, and lacks support for categories. I’m currently writing this post using BloGTK, which compares with the best, even with the commercially available ones. Do give it a try.

WordPress.com may allow custom templates

Scobleizer says:

Oh, while we’re talking about WordPress, lots of people are asking how I got my custom design. That’s actually a preview of a new feature that’s coming to WordPress.com soon, says Matt Mullenweg (he did my custom theme). Thanks Matt, keep the good stuff coming!

Great! Some of our complaints are going to be addressed. I can’t wait to put my own banner pic. Though I didn’t like this discrimination on the part of WordPress.com folks.

Update:

WordPress.com is now offering two brand new templates: regulus 1 and neat! 0.01.

Great!
technorati tags: wordpress.com, template

Second hand impressions on Yahoo mail beta

I stumbled upon a video demo of the much hyped beta upgrade for Yahoo mail:

(5mb Quicktime, from Gus Muller’s blog, thru Vincent’s blog)

Yahoo folks are yet to respond to my beta tester’s request. So I don’t have any first hand experiences to write about. However I did manage to find some descriptive reviews(with screenshots). Brad writes:

Gmail is suddenly looking a little clunky. The new Yahoo! Mail is a sleek, finely wrought piece of interface design. The overall look is an Outlook-styled, three-pane window with folders in the left vertical pane, headers top right, and a message preview pane below the headers. Thus, Yahoo! becomes the first major e-mail provider to keep the Inbox in view while reading a message. That alone is news, but it’s not, in my opinion, the biggest news.
Read More

Looking at the screenshots, review and the video, it seems that beta upgrade would lack the most important feature: threaded view. The threaded view, also called as conversation, is a real convenience, as it helps in clubbing messages and responses into one thread, thus reducing the clutter in the inbox. This feature is particularly helpful when you are subscribed to e-groups. In that light I would like to disagree with the reviewer, who finds Gmail’s inbox view “chunky”. Moreover the beta upgrade continues to follow the traditional folder structure, a concept outdated by the newly introduced labels by Gmail. All said, the interface for beta upgrade is indeed clean and attractive. Incidentally, the annoying Yahoo flash ads are absent in the beta upgrade. Hope they stick to that when they go public. I’d write more but I’ve to use the interface first Yahoo folks, you listening?

Clip it!

Takes the concept of bookmarking to the next level.

It often happens to me: I visit a page; find something appealing; bookmark it; and when I visit the page later, I forget why I bookmarked it in the first place. This tool allows you to conveniently clip sections of a webpage. A boon for forgetful bloggers like me.

technorati tags: clipmarks, bookmarks

Flock stuff

I had been noticing this ‘abc’ button on the Flock blog editor for long. Clicking on it did nothing. However all of a sudden it started working — showing spell check errors! Great — now the blog spell check is working. I had also felt the absence of an HTML view in the blog editor. But it has been there all the time(see pics).

 

Most of my complaints seem to have been addressed to. The only thing remaining is the inability to add categories on the fly. I could do this from wordpress panel.

technorati tags: flock, blog editor, spell check, wordpress