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  • LiveJournal RSS Celebration

    The other day over on #joiito i was whining about how I wished I could get friends-locked posts in the RSS feeds on LiveJournal. Luckily LJ user crschmidt was there to let me know that it was possible. In general, the link to someone’s feed on LJ is http://www.livejournal.com/users/[username]/data/rss. The problem is, it only shows you public entries. So, in order to get friends locked entries, you need to send along your LJ username and password and tell LJ what kind of authorization method to use. The end result looks something like this:

    http://[YourLJName]:[YourLJPassword]@www.livejournal.com/users/[username]/data/rss?auth=digest

    Note that this will only work in RSS readers that do the right thing with urls that have login information in them. But it works in NetNewsWire so I’m happy. While I still have my friends page, this means I now have access to all my LJ friends in the same place I read other blogs.

  • Apple Blows It Again

    So Apple has information up about their new iPod and I’m kind of pissed. A few years back I’d bought a 20GB iPod, right before the release of the one with the dock. I didn’t mind not having the dock, but it quickly became apparent that Apple was going to ignore their older iPods. They got just enough updates to make things run better, but none of the new features like on-the-go playlists.

    Fast forward to a month ago when I bought a new 40GB iPod. It doesn’t bother me much that they now are $100 less. I’ve had things like that happen to me all the time. What bugs me is that all the new iPod features announced today are only available for the new iPod. I’m afraid they’re going to stop adding new features to this iPod. The even more annoying thing is that many of the new features don’t seem to be hardware based features. Features like Multiple on-the-go playlists, tweaking playback speed, and one click shuffling are not things that I’d expect to need new hardware to do. Bah, thank you Apple for screwing me over again.

  • iTMS Weirdness

    Yes, it’s the day for me to comment on iTunes. Has anyone else noticed that they have stopped saying that albums they have are only partial albums? Or is this a bug over there. I noticed in their RSS feed that they had a bunch of stuff by The Cars. In the RSS feed it indicated that it was the full album, yet when you go to iTMS there are only five songs from it listed. The even weirder part is they have a ‘add album’ button which is $9.90. Yes, $9.90 for five songs that would be $4.95 bought individually. I think Apple needs to have an iTMS blog for reporting on things like this. Especially since their support page was insanely broken when I tried to leave a message about this.

  • iTunes Lameness

    I love wireless. Lately I’ve taken to sitting out down on the porch during the day when it is nice out. The wireless signal there is great and it’s covered so I’m in the shade (with no glare issues). I’ve also been making use of the music sharing feature of iTunes a lot because of it. Also, since I’m driving between Boston and Hartford a lot I’ve started getting into audiobooks. Currently I’m on the third book in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series and it has completely sucked me in. This morning I sat down to listen to the last part on the porch (something I hadn’t done before) and discovered that iTunes won’t share out audiobooks from audible. What the hell? Audible? Apple? What’s the story here?

  • Airport Express and iTunes 4.6 and What I Think Is Missing

    globalnavexpresshi06072004Apple’s new Airport Express sounds great. It’s one of the things I’ve really been looking for. A nice way to have a wireless repeater that (hopefully) doesn’t kill the network speed. Everything else is just really good icing. Mini base station, great. Printer server, great. Streaming audio receiver: great. AirTunes, which is part of iTunes 4.6, here’s where I think they missed slightly. You can only stream to an Airport Express box. I would have loved to have seen the ability to stream to any other box running iTunes. Yes, there is music sharing, which is great, but I can think of times when I might want to be just streaming to a laptop. Or both a laptop and an airport express. I live in a fairly good sized house and maybe people in multiple places want to be able to tune in.

    I think Apple also needs to come out with some kind of stereo/AV component for listening to music and viewing photos (and maybe even movies) on your home theatre system. Something that works like TiVo’s Home Media Option (which is now included in the TiVo subscription instead of as an add-on), but more tuned to how Apple does things. It would let you listen to AAC encoded files, and AAC files you bought from iTMS. But it would act more like the iTunes music sharing does. To me, this could be the killer box for Apple. Roku comes close with their products, but it still isn’t exactly what I’m looking for. The one thing I know I don’t really want is a full computer attached to my home theatre system. It just seems like overkill to me when I have a server already that has all that stuff stored on it.

  • Cool Screen Saver

    We would like to provide mysterious suites constructed by random matching of the words and pictures. Enjoy yourselves in the surrealistic world spun by strange coincidence and eternal imagination.
    And run your meditation on what “meaning” represents.

    For those folks with OS X, here’s a very cool looking screen saver called Hotel Magritte. It’s quite nice. He’s also got some other ones up there that look pretty cool.

  • NetNewsWire, Ecto, and The Collegiality Clause

    Brent Simmons posted yesterday about NetNewsWire 2.0’s support for external weblog editors, including my current favorite one: ecto. He also mentions something he’s calling the Collegiality Clause that sounds quite interesting (and shows that I keep missing lots of interesting blog posts).

    Now if ecto would just let me attach a class to an image when I’m uploading it I’d be a very happy camper.