I don’t own an iPod (I bought an iRiver instead precisely because of the ogg support). Seeing this post though makes me want to go out and buy a stylish iPod just to put RockBox on it.

Thanks to the Lossless Audio Blog for bringing this event to my attention (even though I don’t live in the Boston area). I’m very curious about these alternatives to the standard Apple software and would love to hear from people who are using RockBox or iPodLinux.

And the, now, obligatory haiku:

Can you hear the sound –
The thrash of a song bird’s wings
in a small white cage

Google’s new Reader –
feeds, like email, are better
when sorted by source.

Who do I think I am… Matsuo Basho? Far from it! Still, this is fun.

So, I tried the Google Reader when it first came out and, well, was extremely underwhelmed. I’m a fan of Google’s search, Google Maps, GMail, Google Calendar, etc. but their Reader did not interest me at all. With the release of their new Reader, I’ve taken another look (and things are very different this time around).

The reader is so good, in fact, that I’m moving from Thunderbird (which I use for RSS) to Google Reader. This will probably have a ripple effect because I stopped using my old mail reader, Evolution, so that I could use Thunderbird‘s RSS reader (Evolution doesn’t, to my knowledge, have an RSS component).

I’m going to give it another week or so (just to make sure), but can imagine moving back to Evolution for my email in the very near future. I should say I have nothing against Thunderbird. This decision is also, in part, because my place of work is installing an Exchange server sometime soon.

One of the things that I’ve never liked about web-based news readers is that they give into the endless stream of feeds without trying to provide any organization (e.g., sources are just ‘tags’ on a post). The new Google Reader gets it right, in my opinion, by treating feeds more like email. The source is more important than anything else when I consider whether I want to read something; having my feeds categorized by source makes my life much easier.

Yes, currency is important but I’d rather read an older post of a blog I value highly than the most recent post from a blog in which I’m just mildly interested. Hooray Google for getting this right… it makes all the difference.

Other nice features include the ability to auto-mark something as read and to be able to star something as important. It is not clear to me how long starred posts remain available to me (it would be nice if they were available for as long as I want them to be — I’d give up a little of my Gmail disk space for that).

One thing the new Reader doesn’t have (which would be nice) is the ability to filter feeds. There are one or two feeds that I have a filter on so that I only see the relevant (to me) posts. I haven’t found this feature yet with Google Reader (Thunderbird does have this option). This aside, I’ve been wanting to move more towards a web-based RSS reader and I think, now, I’ve found one that works for me…

In the process, I discovered a link to an old Slashdot story on A9. What was more interesting than the A9 story itself, though, was a simple Firefox trick (mentioned in the /. comments) that I’d been unaware of up until now (or, if I ever was aware of it, I didn’t recognize its usefulness). It seems that by assigning a keyword to your Firefox bookmarks you can provide a quick and easy way to search sites on the web (well, sites that take a simple HTTP GET as their search initiator).

So, for instance, if you want to add a shortcut to search Google from your location bar, create a bookmark named Google Search with the URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s Next assign that bookmark the keyword ‘g’. This way you can type “g unalog” (without the quotes) in the location bar and Firefox will send that search to Google, returning to you the results of that search.

How very convenient. What I think is neater though is that I can search Unalog in the same way. Unalog takes a search in the form of: http://unalog.com/search?q= If you bookmark that, add a %s to the end of that URL, and assign the keyword ‘u’ to the Firefox bookmark, then you can search Unalog directly from within Firefox by typing “u google” into the location bar — this will search for links related to Google in the Unalog database.

Up until now I’ve been going to the Unalog site first and then searching. This saves me a big (unnecessary) step. What is also nice about Unalog (since I’m on the topic) is that I can do fast fielded searches as well. For example: “user:ksclarke AND (Gnome OR tag:swt)” returns a nice set of resources — I can limit by date, by bookmarker, by tag or title (see search hints for more options). Hooray for Unalog; hooray for Firefox!

Today I’ve been using a gDesklet that hooks Rhythmbox to Audioscrobbler. That works pretty well and is nice eye-candy, but using gDesklet is pretty resource intensive just to get that bit of functionality. At first I started exploring gDesklet because their plugins look so nice, but sitting on the desktop puts it behind everything else. Most of the time I’m on the computer I have all my workspaces filled with maximized programs. Viewing the Rhythmlet (or any other desklet) would mean minimizing all the apps in a workspace. Of course, I don’t really need to see it; I just want it to update my scrobbler account, but surely that can be done without all the extra desklet infrastructure.

The Audioscrobbler functionality is something that really should just be integrated into Rhythmbox. I’ve subscribed to their mailing list to see if there is any work being done on that at the moment. I’m not even sure if they have a plugin architecture. The author of RBScrobbler should be able to use his/her work to integrate that functionality into Rhythmbox if its authors are interested in that. Also, I’m going to check out the source and poke around a little. It is stored in the Arch revision control system. I don’t know much about that so I’ll need to learn about that too.

The one slight problem is that the Rhythmbox plugin and Gaim seem to be slightly out of step. When the plugin is enabled, Gaim crashes. Well, more specifically… when the plugin is installed, and the “set away message” is enabled, Gaim crashes. I need to report this to the plugin people. Their site says it works with the previous version of Gaim so something might have changed with the release I have.