A couple of months ago I received word from a faithful reader that my RSS feed wasn’t up to snuff for use in some readers like Firefox’s “live bookmarks” feature. As a result, I looked into improving the feed and did so a little while back. I didn’t really post an update about it because, well, I just plain forgot.

After fixing the blog’s feed, I took another look at this “fancy shmansy” RSS stuff and inadvertently got hooked. Just like when I discovered tabbed browsing a while back, I don’t know how I read web sites before using RSS.

At first I thought about describing in detail why I’m so hooked, but instead I’m going to keep this short and just say this: if you aren’t already using RSS, try it. Instead of re-typing the same URLs again and again every day for your favorite sites, subscribe to some feeds and use RSS to its maximum effectiveness. I’m hooked!

Some lessons I learned over the last couple of laptop iterations (avalanche and rockslide):

• Size and portability are probably the highest priority
• I can sacrifice a little bit on the portability side if the hardware performance is a bit better
• Linux compatibility is quickly becoming a bigger deal for me. I don’t quite have the patience anymore to put in tons of effort to get my damn card reader to work
• Glossy screens have a lot of “pop” but the glare is really annoying (a universal truth at this point, I think)
• No one should be afraid of running 64-bit linux. It works like a charm.
• You don’t need a 32-bit chroot to use Flash
• Averatec laptops are cheap and on the surface that’s no big deal given the specs they tout, but they won’t last nearly as long as some of the more established brands.

Did I mention that rockslide is an “N Series” laptop? That is, I bought it with Ubuntu pre-installed. No Windows Vista!

A couple of months ago I noticed my laptop, called avalanche, was starting to behave erratically. That is, on wake-up from hibernation or just a cold boot-up the BIOS would randomly choose a different boot device.

I spent a chunk of time checking out my hard drive connection and making sure the guts of my system were doing all right through visual inspection and software tests (hdparm, SMART, etc.). In the end, I can pretty much chalk the problems with the thing up to the BIOS itself.

At this point, I thought to reflash it, but I was also coming to the realization that maybe it was time for this one to go. It wasn’t just the BIOS issue though. The built-in wireless has also been on the fritz for far longer than I’ve had the BIOS issue. In the end, I was upset at the useful lifespan of avalanche.

Avalanche is an Averatec 3715EH1. It’s definitely a budget laptop, but I got a lot of bang for my buck and it was compact. That being said, I did probably get exactly what I paid for in that it started exhibiting problems sooner than the old Dell I had before it (and which I still use in a backup sort-of role).

About a month ago, I bought a new Dell laptop to replace avalanche. I agonized a lot about what I wanted in a new laptop and ended up getting an XPS M1330. It’s not quite as a light as avalanche, but it is thin (not Macbook Air thin, but pretty thin).

I’m pretty satisfied so far, not to mention all of the hardware in it works pretty much out of the box with Debian. I’ll post more on some other laptop lessons I learned later. Oh yeah, I named the new one rockslide.

If you read this blog, you probably know me and therefore probably have been to several of these sites (by virtue of us having at least something in common). All the same, I figured I’d put a few of these out there just in case you missed them, or don’t visit them as often as maybe you should. If you’ve never been to some of these, you might find them interesting/useful:

• Top Left Pixel (I just discovered this one recently)
• Post Secret (Just like that book everyone reads at places like Urban Outfitters, but updated with new content about once a week)
• Google Sightseeing (Don’t wait for digg or slashdot to point you to a cool location on Google maps, browse through a ton of them yourself)
• Anime News Network (Ever been curious about that one anime title everyone is talking about? ANN’s encyclopedia is second to none when it comes to series, movies, and OVAs. Even Wikipedia would be jealous)
• Newsarama (All the comic book news you could want, ‘nuff said)
• Kotaku (The self-titled “gamers guide”. This site tends to have some of the most hilarious bits strewn in there with up-to-the-picosecond news about gaming)

Enjoy!

There have been a couple of interesting blog entries out there lately on the stratification of social networking sites. In particular, Myspace and Facebook have been pitted against each other. Over at ZDNet, Steve O’Hear had an interesting piece on how the two sites are targeted at different demographics. Steve makes some pretty interesting points, mostly about the differing business models between the two sites. Myspace is very much the vehicle of the traditional media conglomerate, namely Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. In my opinion, you can see it in the sites design, it’s incredibly ugly. It looks like the kind of sites people used to make circa 1994.

Facebook is the poster-child of Web 2.0 thinking. It’s still a start-up, owned by the original creators. The Facebook folks recently released an API to allow anyone to develop “applications” for their site. Between it’s comparatively more open development model and slick Web 2.0 looks, Facebook seems to be attracting a different crowd.

Interestingly, I read another blog entry today from Danah Boyd who did some research on the class differences amongst Myspace and Facebook users. Both of these entries, but Danah’s moreso, have caused quite a lot of discussion on sites like Digg and Slashdot.

Despite being a strictly Facebook guy myself, I can definitely see the division amongst different groups between the two sites. I wonder where this trend will take us over the next few years.

During my usual browsing of Slashdot, I found what is perhaps the best comment on the site ever. In a discussion about metaphors for the Internet, the point was brought up that calling it a highway is a bit inappropriate. Read the comment to see why. It’s absolutely hilarious.

What’s the deal with all of these exploding laptop batteries these days? Dell, and Apple apparently are having problems with these things, and now Lenovo too? This is really starting to get hilarious.

What’s more hilarious, Virgin Airlines and Qantas are now banning Dell and Apple laptops on their flights (according to TWiT at least, a decently reputable source) due to these exploding batteries. Sheesh.

Just wanted to give a shout out to the newest member to the world of online journals, my buddy Gautham. Happy blogging dude!

My new favorite video. According to Jim it’s a classic, but I was too much of an Internet n00b to know about this one until he showed it to me. Thanks again Jim!

“Monkey hate technology, robot hate the monkey…”

A couple of people have asked me to provide some sort of RSS feed of my blog. It turns out that Blosxom has always provided that feature. I just didn’t realize it. Point your aggregators here. That should be an RSS 0.91 feed. Leave comments if you’re having any problems.