Saving RSS bandwidth

Hack the Planet weblog as a post about different service offering to save bandwidth for users and webmasters. Of the two listed on that post, I think that the most promising is RSScache.com. RSScache.com is a web proxy that supports rss feeds.

Another blog linking service

I Hate My Cubicle!!! had a post about BlogLinker.com, which is a blog linking service. The way that it works is that you add web sites to your url list. Then, in addition to that url appearing in your list, your url will appear in their list, if they have also signed up with BlogLinker.

This is an interesting way to get traffic to your website.

HitMaps down

In this post, I mentioned HitMaps. It looks like their service is going through an upgrade. Adding new users and counting for existing users has been suspended, until the upgrade is complete.

Azureus

I have been playing with BitTorrent for a little while, and Azureus is a great cross platform client. It is written in Java, and it runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It allows you to quickly download large files quickly, by using a little bit of everyone's upload bandwidth.

eBay to RSS feed

In August, Boing Boing had a post about a eBay query to RSS feed service. I just started to use rssauction.com, to keep an eye out for parts for my 1993 Nissan Sentra. It is pretty cool, since you can see the new auctions in your rss aggregator.

Wireless X10 light switch

Our son's room does not have an overhead light, so I install this wireless X10 light switch. It has been working great, except it gets reprogrammed periodically. This switch gets programed by pressing an hold the buttons for a few seconds. Since our son is tall enough now to press the buttons, he reprograms it regularly.

Get TV shows via RSS & BitTorrent

Engadget has a good article on how to setup BitTorrent and RSS to automatically download video content as it becomes available.

I have gotten these instructions to work on Mac OS X and on my RedHat 9 Linux computers

xname.org

XName is a service that provides primary and secondary DNS servers for people with their own domain. These services are free, but they do ask for a donation if you like the service. This is good to have in case your primary DNS server is not available. You will still be able to potentially get email and web traffic.

XM Radio Online adds Mac support

MacCentral has a post that mentions that XM Radio adds Mac OS X support to their XM Radio Online. It looks like it will support any platform that can run Windows Media Player 9.0 or newer. This is pretty cool, as I listen to XM Radio driving to and from work, and now I can continue to listen when I am not in my car.

GearLive

If you are trying the websites like FreeiPods.com or FreePhotoiPods.com, GearLive is a way for you to trade your referrals. When you register, you can list all of your current open offers. You also list all of the offers that you are eligible for. Then you can search for all of the people who can help you fulfill your offers.

10x10

10x10 is a website that has an interesting way to display the news. It shows a 10 x 10 grid of photos for the top 100 news stories. When you click on an image, it will take you to news story.

IM Smarter

IM Smarter is a interesting service, that works with most IM protocols. It is a services that keeps a log of all of your im, so you can search through them later. The more interesting features are:

1. Set up reminders


2. Create blog entries directly from your im clients

Blocking a blog spammer

I have been noticing that there have been requests to my blog, with the referrer of "http://12.163.72.13/". One of the interesting things about these requests is that the whole url has been converted to lowercase. (Which means that they were only seeing the main index page, and not the page that they indented.)

After I searched for that referrer url on Google, I found this post. It looks like this is a signature is for a blog spammer. Even though they did not successfully post any spam comments, I decided to blog these requests.

Updated MetaWeblog support in plog

I have updated the changes that I mentioned in a previous post, to better support the metaWeblog API in plog. The new file is here. In order to use it, remove the .txt extension and place it in your plog directory.

ecto

I have been playing with an xmlrpc client for posting to my blog. ecto is the best client that I have seen so far.

It is client that supports any weblog system that uses any of the standard xmlrpc APIs. With this appliication, you can create new entries, as well as manage the existing ones.

Crazy Rabbit

Here is page with an pretty cool flash animation.

Zinio.com

Zinio.com is a pretty cool service. Instead of having physical magazines delivered to you home, you can not have some magazines delivered to you electronically.

The electronic versions of the magazines are probably rendered from the original source material. Some of the interesting benefits of the electronic versions are:

1. The urls become true hyperlinks


2. The content is searchable


3. It is very easy to retain an archive of the content, without taking a lot of physical space


4. It is possible to send articles to people you know.

Added metaWeblog support to plog

In a previous post, I mentioned how I was having problems getting ecto to work with plog. Since plog only implementsthe Blogger API, this does not have all of the features that I was looking for. I extended the xmlrpc.php file to include a partial metaWeblog support.

Smart night vision

Autoblog has a post on Honda's new smart night vision system Not only does it allow the driver to see at night, but it will automatically identify pedestrians that are going to cross the path of the car.

ecto and pLog

I have been trying to get ecto to work with pLog,
in order to post from my Mac. I have been not been able to get it
to work completely. When I load the existing posts, it puts the
titles of messages into the body section. Also when creating new
messages all of the message body appears in the title section.

HitMaps

HitMaps is a web site that will plot the location of the visitors to your web site on a world map. It works by having you include an img link on your web page. Then they map all of the unique ip address requesting the image. Then once a day it regenerates the image.

Here is the map for paulstimesink.com:

Remote for AirPort Express

Keyspan has come out with a remote for the AirPort Express. It plugs into the USB port of the AirPort Express, and it send the commands to the Mac playing the music. It will go on sale in mid-November for $59.99

Now someone should come out with a USB lcd display. This would show the track information about the playing tracks.

Hashcash

Hashcash is an interesting method that can potentially stop spam. Hashcash adds X-Hashcash: headers to email messages. The generation of the headers will take some CPU cycles, so it is not feasible for spammers to put this header into each of their email messages. On the receiving end, it is a very inexpensive algorithm to validate the header.

This has been built into SpamAssassin 3.0, so if people start using these headers SpamAssassin will give these messages a lower spam score. Here are the instructions for SpamAssassin

FreeiPods.com

I signed up with FreeiPods.com. They are giving away free iPods if you sign up for an offer, and you get 5 other people to sign up as well. They make their money from the referral fee from the companies that give the offers. There are a couple of web sites that have investigated this, and they have found that this is legit. (Engadget story, Wired News)

Here is the link to sign up.

Spam Poison

I found this website yesterday that is supposed to help combat
spam. Spam Poison is a web site that you link to from your web
pages, it has links to pages that have a bunch of fake email
addresses. This is supposed to fight spammer is two ways.

1. Spam web crawlers will waste time on these web pages


2. All of these fake email address will waste the resources of the spammers

I am not sure about how effective this web site will be. I would
assume that the spammers will just not crawl hosts in the
spampoison.com domain.

DSM-320 MediaLounge

Dlink has a network media player. The MedialLounge will play music, photos and videos on your TV/entertainment center. It has a pretty good list of media types that it supports (Audio: MP3, WMA, WAV; Image: JPEG, JPEG200, TIFF, GIF, BMP, PNG; Video: MPEG1/2/4, AVI, XviD)

I realy like the form factor, but I don't like the fact that they only have Windows software. Maybe they will release the protocol, and some one will come out with a open source server software.

Lowrance iWay

Lowrance has come out with an auto GPS system. They are known for aviation and boating GPS systems. It has a lot of pretty cool features.

2. 20Gb hard drive


3. built-in MP3 player


4. Adapter for hooking it up to the car stereo

It is listed for around $800, so it is around the same price as the TomTom Go. If this can be mounted on the dash, this would be very cool.

iCruze

Monster has come out with a iPod to car stereo adapter. It connects the iPod to the CD Changer port of the car stereo. I am assuming that the iCruze represents the playlists as CDs, so changing CDs on the head unit will probably change the playlists on the iPod. This is supposed to show the track titles on the head units that support it. Maybe it is using CD-TEXT for that.

Mac OS X DAV copies

I noticed something interesting a couple of days ago, while doing a
copy of a large file to a WebDAV server. It looks like the Mac OS
X Finder first it caches the file to the local disk, and then during
the "Closing file" state, it actually transfers it.
I wonder if this is done to help problems with the connection.

TiVo and Vonage

I have been having problems getting my TiVos making phone calls over the Vonage phone line. I have changed one of my TiVos to use our ethernet network, but our other one does not have Home Media Option (It is a TiVo/DIRECTV box). Vonage has posted some instructions about how to get this to work. It has been hit and miss for me. Some of calls work and some don't.

Another USB sound device

A while ago, I wrote a post about Turtle Beach coming out with a USB audio device that has analog and digital outputs. On November 15th, Miglia is coming out with a similar device. Their HarmonyExpress is pretty much the same type of device as the Audio Advantage Micro, but it doesn't support true AC3 DTS output. Also, it costs over twice as much as the Audio Advantage Micro, at $70.

a9 toolbar for Firefox

A9.com has released a toolbar Firefox for thier search engine. It brings some of the functionality of the a9 website into the browser. For example, it makes it easy to perform searches again.