I've had a minor gripe that has been growing for quite some time. I don't like reading blogs via a web browser anymore - RSS is where it's at. I have a small collection of blogs that I didn't have a RSS feed for and I tossed those links into a Bookmark folder called Blogs. Every day or so I'd do an "open in tabs" on the Blogs folder and get as slew of tabs with these archaic blogs in them. However, lately it had been growing and Firefox got slower and slower to handle this operation. Today I declared I was going to "fix" it once and for all. I did so mostly - although I have a handful of blogs that simply don't HAVE a RSS feed. I suspect those are going to wither away though lack of caring on my part.

So, there were three main categories that were a problem.

1) Blogs that had RSS feeds but no visible link to them. In the html of the page they list a feed and Firefox finds that and gives me a cute little "Live Bookmark" icon in the address bar. The thing is I don't read RSS feeds in Firefox, I read them in NetNewsWire. Blogger.com sites seem to do this often. (I should not this is not the feed's fault - it's a design flaw in Firefox.)

SOLUTION: The Firefox Feed Your Reader extension. Now when I click that icon it tosses the feed over to my registered feedreader and life is good.

2) NetNewsWire doesn't like some Atom feeds (particularly only from Blogger.com or LiveJournal). I don't know why, they seem OK when I open them manually in a browser.

SOLUTION: If the url is in the format http://username.blogservice.com/atom try manually editing it to http://username.blogservice.com/rss - seems to work in every case.

3) I have friends who use LiveJournal to "lock" entries so their blog is only visible to authorized friends. I understand the motivation, but it's annoying because now to see them I have to open a web page and log into LiveJournal (which I don't use personally).

SOLUTION: Loosely based on the information here but slightly modified. The mechanism as  described is kinda cruddy, because you have to store your LJ password in a URL, presumably plaintext. In the case of NetNewsWire you can do better. Enter the following URL for the subscription http://www.livejournal.com/users/username/data/rss?auth=digest and obviously replace username with the LJ account you want to read. The first time NetNewsWire tries to access the feed it will pop up a dialog for a username and password. Give it your LJ account and it stores the password in the Apple keychain, where it is safely encrypted.

Those three tricks deleted 8 links from my "Blogs" folder - cutting it from 13 to 5 links. One of the cut links was the LJ "friends" page which was 5 other pages rolled together meaning I moved 12 blogs that  annoyed me a little every time I read them into RSS where they belong.

BONUS TIP: I have my feeds organized by topic mainly. So there's a folder for "Writing" a folder for "Games", a folder for "Tech Blogs" and so forth. I realized that this was slowing me down because there are several blogs that I only lightly skim. They are prolific (many entries per day) and low interest (in that I only read a small percentage of the entries on any given day). They still have value to check but I tend to blow through them much quicker than blogs where I want to read each entry. I realized today that this trips me up because one of those skimming blogs is in the Tech Blogs folder and gets mixed in with the other tech blogs so I have to shift back and forth between reading and skimming as I review entries.

No more! I moved all the "Skimmable" feeds into their own group at the bottom of the list. So Tech Blogs now contains tech feeds that I probably want to at least process the subject. Slashdot, Version Tracker, Netflix New Releases and other feeds that I only glance out quickly all go at the bottom and I can review dozens of entries just by scrolling the titles quickly. 

technorati tags: software, LiveJournal, web

Battlestar Galactica cannot be trusted, it seems, to actually push the envelope. I was very disappointed by 2.11 and 2.12 (the Resurrection ship episodes); I thought it would push the show into an interesting moral place if the "good guys" actually did "bad" things in pursuit of their goals. The speech about "deserving" to survive from Adama, despite a stellar (as usual) performance by Olmos, rang very hollow. BSG has become, to me, a show that constantly walks right up to the line, looks at it, looks at the viewer, and backs away again.

alg: Hi, interwebs. The problem with my laptop

I've been fighting this analysis for most of season 2, but I give up. I just watched the season finale of Battlestar Galactica, and it was terrible. Awful. Like "Let's take everything that makes this character who she is and ball it up and throw it away." bad.

I've been unhappy with several episodes in the second season (especially the "second half" of the second season - and what was that about anyway?) - I think they've begun to focus on syndication and making each episode a single capsule that stands on its own - which is very different from season one where each episode was a beat in an overall dramatic arc. But I still thought it was the best TV running right now.  I don't have much confidence in season 3 right now. They can redeem it, but that was just . . . bad. I can't explain what I didn't like without getting into spoilers, but as you watch the finale just ask yourself - is that the same Kara Thrace we've seen for two seasons now? I don't think it is, I don't think the whole episode holds true to the rest of the series.

 Very disappointed.

 

technorati tags: Battlestar_Galactica, TV

Magic's October 2006 large set, code-named "Snap", is called Time Spiral.

Announcing Time Spiral

  Hurrah! For those keeping score, this is not my novel. Time Spiral is the first novel in the block trilogy (codenamed Snap). My novel is the second in the trilogy, and the name has not been announced, thus I will continue to call it Crackle when I'm out with my homies keeping it real, yo.

But this is the beginning of the block, so anybody who plans on reading my novel will want to pick up the corresponding book for Time Spiral. I give it a hearty recommendation anyway, it's a good read!
 

technorati tags: Magic:TheGathering

OK, so yeah it's been a while.  Partially because I've just been super-busy on the wordsmithing front, and part of it was once I skipped most of February, it seemed to make sense to skip all of February. Don't ask me why.

But anyway, yeah I'm back. I have a few things to talk about. Buckle in! 

technorati tags: journal

What matters is this: an application, in and of itself, should never install an extension that modifies the system or otherwise diddles the runtime environment of other applications, without the express permission of the user. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Daring Fireball: Smart Crash Reports

This article is long, and it's sort of technical. But read it anyway, it's good to understand. But if you can't follow it at all, I'll cut to the key bit:

That might still be a bit tricky for some users. With a strong dose of caveat emptor, here's my step by step version.

1) Open a terminal window (it's in Application/Utilties if you live in the dark ages. If you run Quicksilver open Quicksilver and type in "Term" or so until you find it. Or put it on your dock and aspire to be a real Unix weenie someday. :-))

2) Enter the following: cd ~/Library

3) Enter the following cd InputManagers

4) If 3) doesn't work you probably need to create the folder. mkdir InputManagers will do it. If 3) worked then skip to 5)

5) Enter the following: ls

6) If 5) returns this text "Smart Crash Reports" you already have it. If you know what you're doing at the command line, then delete the folder.  (Full disclaimer - that's what I did - a rm -rf command. If you don't know what that means, I'm not going to tell you. If you do know than you don't need my help - RTFA beeyotch!) If you don't, let me tell you the safer way to trash it (using the Finder). Open the Finder. Go to your home folder, open the Library folder, and then inside there is the InputManager folder. Drag the folder named Smart Crash Reports to the Trash. This will junk it, but the next time you run whatever really ill behaved app it will reinstall it. Continue on to lock your system down. If 5) did NOT list the folder then continue to 7)

7) Back at the Terminal window enter the following: touch Smart\ Crash\ Reports

8) If you didn't do step 6 open the Finder window and navigate as described. Once you have a Finder window in Library/InputManager then select the file there named "Smart Crash Reports". Hit Apple-I (for Info). Click the "Locked" check box. Close the Info window, the Finder window and the terminal app. Now you are protected from "silent" installation of Smart Crash Reports.

Bonus note: If you have anything else installed in the InputManager folders you've got some other crazy thing running about. Apparently this is the same mechanism that PithHelmet uses. It sounds pretty clunky to me, but I Am Not A Mac Programmer. If you have something else in that folder and you don't recognize what it is . . . well that's bad. Drop me an email and we'll see what we can find :-)

technorati tags: OS_X, software