Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Instapaper

I find interesting content while using my phone, either from my6sense or by finding links on Twitter.  Often, I don't want to read the content on my phone, either because I don't have time, or the form factor of my phone doesn't make it easy to read long content, so I would save it for later reading.

I had used Gmail to save these urls.  I setup a filter to automatically archive and add a "Bookmark" label if the message came from one of my accounts, and it had the "bookmark" keyword in the subject.  This works well, though it the experience going through the bookmarks is not ideal.

The type of experience that I ideally would like would be similar to the New York Times Chrome App, and the Flipboard experience.  These present content in a clean, visually pleasing way.  The closest experience that I have seen to this, for bookmarks, is with Instapaper.

Instapaper is a service that lets you save pages for you to view later.  They have a bookmarklet that you can use to save any page that you are viewing in a browser.  When viewing the list of saved sites, the presentation is a simple list.  There are some interesting features, that I like:

  • When viewing content, you have the option to view a Text-only version, which strips all extraneous formatting.

  • You can have content downloaded in Kindle or ePub format


Monday, December 27, 2010

Auto-import for TripIt

I have used TripIt for a while, as it is pretty convenient way to track travel itineraries.  But, since I haven't had to travel for work in a while, I missed their announcement that they have added the ability to automatically import travel itineraries from Gmail accounts.

This removes the need to forward itineraries to TripIt, but I wonder how it will handle an email being archived before it has been imported into Tripit.







[via Lifehacker]

Monday, December 20, 2010

DoggCatcher

DoggCatcher is a very good podcast application for Android.  DoggCatcher supports audio and video feeds, as well as limited support for rss items that don't have enclosures. There are some features that make DoggCatcher a pretty good podcast application:

  1. You can browse several directories of podcasts, from with the application.

  2. Search for feeds

  3. Configure fetch and deletion settings globally, or for each feed.

  4. Configure download options to conserve battery usage.


The one feature that I would like to see added is to have queue of file that is manually managed.  I would like to be able to manually add content to a list, and be able to manage the playback order.

Seamless Local Control: Integrating WeatherFlow with Home Assistant Across VLANs

I've been pleased with my Home Assistant setup for some time now. One of my main focuses has been achieving local control. This ensures...