Idea: CalendarBurner, like Feedburner for calendars
28 Oct 2008
As most geeks in my circle of friends, I am known to buy hardware slightly more often than the average Joe. I have 3 Wifi routers at home (just gave away my 4th one), I have more than 2TB of hard disk storage, split out over half a dozen of PCs and devices, and I have more USB cables than teeth. But hardware that makes me *really* happy, that is uncommon. Don’t get me started on failing hard disks and non-functioning printers. So let me tell you about this new piece of hardware that I bought: the iPod Touch.
That is, the stuff I install on a new Windows PC. Since I need this list several times a year, why not make a blog post of it. As you will see,I have a more than average interest in video (conversion) and sysadmin (SSH/FTP). The links typically go straight to the download page.
I was thinking about this the other day. Piracy is really big for CDs and DVDs. One of the main reasons is that both media are so easy to digitize. Pop in a CD and in 6 minutes you have everything in MP3 files. Converting a DVD to XVID takes a bit longer and is slightly more complex, but not that much. Once they’re (unprotected) files, you can swap away. But books, we’ve always bought them in analog, paper form. Digitalizing meant scanning them, and that was just too much work.
I’ve been experimenting with Twitter a couple of times, and one of the results, the FM Brussel Live playlist twitter bot, seems to be rather popular. I get a couple of subscriptions per day. But recently they’re almost all of the form [name of girl][number of 2 – 4 digits]. This is what they look like:
I’m getting old, I guess. This ad campaign annoys me. For those who don’t understand Dutch: if you take a Dodge Journey for a test-drive on the Father’s Day weekend, and make a baby on the back seat, then you have a chance of winning a car.
Because I needed it and I couldn’t find it: a tool to embed a Lightbox-based photo album viewer that uses an RSS photo feed as its input. It uses SimplePie RSS library, the Lytebox Javascript photo viewer, and RSS ‘photocast’ feeds from e.g. Flickr, Picasaweb and Smugmug.
It can be found here: tools.forret.com/lightbox/
An example: using the RSS feed of my favorite Flickr photos:
I was born near Roeselare, in West-Vlaanderen, and every now and then I go back to my roots. I drive over Gent and Kortrijk and on the way I’m always curious to see what kind of advertising the guys from TVH have put up this time. For they are clearly guys, in the TVH marketing department.
One of the most popular pages on this blog is about a storage device that has a lot of enemies and few defenders, the SC101. It’s Windows-only, uses a proprietary filesystem and when (not if) it starts crashing, just say bye-bye to your data. The product didn’t do much good for Netgear’s reputation. So when Netgear offered me the opportunity to test a real NAS solution, I agreed. So they sent me the ReadyNAS NV+.
