asides

RSS Madness

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This is a site update. I’ve added a pretty slick feature to Trotz.com, a set of (for now) four headline aggregation pages, implemented with the spiffy PHP program ‘zFeeder‘. Listed on the left rail of most pages of the site under ‘B L O G R O L L’, these pages assemble RSS feeds from some of my favorite sites. It’s a whole lot easier to check out these sites here, and visit headlines I’m interested in. Check them out, and let me know what you think.

The categories include:

DailyGeekOut: Sites like BoingBoing, Engadget, Gizmodo, TheFeature, Screenhead, etc.
News Feeds: Includes feeds from CNN.com and SI.com (where I work), The New York Times, The Boston Globe, etc. Easy way to glance at the top news of the moment.
Mac News: As a big Mac-geek, I need my daily dose of Mac news, tips and rumors. So here it is. Macslash, TUAW, etc. Good stuff.
MCE Feeds: I’ve been fooling around with Windows XP Media Center Edition for a while now, so this page lets me keep up with The Green Button, various Microsoft employee blogs, and hardware/software news from the gadget sites.
Continue reading RSS Madness →

technology

The Best Media Center That Isn’t

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Guest columnist Ross Rubin blogs on Engadget today that despite Apple not calling the Mac mini a media center device, it has all that in spades. DVD-player? Check. Rip, Mix, Burn? Check. Ken Burns hi-res slideshow effects? Check. Add on a USB TV tuner, and this thing is your TiVo on steroids. Rubin suggests the mini is a stealth MCE. The apps in iLife are all that a user is looking for when they want to access their media (movies, music, photos), and of course, there is the elegance factor. He also talks about the possibility that Apple is waiting to enter this market for a true media center once the CableCard standard is settled. That’s a great point – you should see how my IR blasters are scattered around with my MCEs, TiVo, etc. Anyway, others have blogged about ‘mini as media center’, but I think he hits the nail on the head here.

Sports

Opting out of the Swimsuit Issue

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tx_nemcovacover.jpgThe New York Times Richard Sandomir reports today (free registration required) that subscribers to Sports Illustrated can call a toll-free number to skip the annual Swimsuit issue and instead extend their subscription by one issue. SI management is quoted as saying that this has always been the policy – but the mag decided this year to post a message in their pages stating this explicitly. So far, 25,829 have opted out. That’s 0.8% of the magazine’s stated 3.2 million subscribers. When the policy wasn’t publicized last year, a total of 21,065 skipped the issue.

asides

Google: Just Say ‘nofollow’ to Comment Spam

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Google blogged yesterday regarding a new initiative they are leading with the support of the major blogging software developers to implement techniques to block comment spam. This will be achieved through the use of a ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ tag in links. This will ultimately reduce the value of spamming our beloved blogs and hopefully stem the tide of these efforts. Until this is implemented, I’ll still rely on the wonderful MT-Blacklist plugin. It rocks.

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