This is getting annoying… There are a number of news aggregation sites that pull from feeds from other websites or just link to posts on their sites. This is fine, in that I can hit one website and then see headlines from a number of websites.
However, I’m starting to notice that aggregators are aggregating from other aggregators. For example, Updates.com pulls from XMLMania.com which in turn grabbed a post from NewsForge which finally pulled a story from Computerworld New Zealand. Four freaking clicks just to get to the story I was marginally interested in reading. How is this better than just going to all the main sites?
So, I caved and decided to buy a Mac Mini. Rather than standing in line for an hour or more on Saturday, I decided to go ahead and buy one online — something I probably had to do anyway, since I wanted to upgrade the Mini to 512 MB of RAM and a SuperDrive rather than the ComboDrive.
Mind you, I ordered the Mini on Thursday or Friday (it was late, could have been either…), but it isn’t scheduled to ship until around February 18th. That’s about a month.
The money is one thing, but if I have to wait 30 days to get a computer, it better be damned good.
Finally got ’round to adding a new stylesheet. I cheated and used one from the WordPress Styles page (this one is Dark Fire by B. A. Khan…) rather than rolling my own. I just don’t get excited about tweaking and tinkering with CSS and my Gimp skills are rather sad, really… spending a day bit-twiddling just to get my blog to look spiffy isn’t high on my priority list.
If you’ve browsed through the technical section in the local bookstore, you’ve no doubt seen a ton of the “teach yourself ____ in n days” books (where “____” is some technical subject, and n some arbitrary length of time…). I’ve been thinking of doing something similar with a blog. Maybe a “learn Linux in 365 days” blog or “learn Perl in six months” blog or something like that.
Any interest in such a thing?
How do you take notes?
That’s a serious question, because I’m trying to find a way to manage a bunch of notes that I’m taking on various topics as I’m trying to hone my Perl coding skills. (Such as they are.)
In college, I was a copious note-taker. In “easy” classes, I rarely consulted my notes after taking them. The mere act of writing down the information helped me remember it. In more difficult classes, I’d type my notes up to make reference cards in QuarkXPress and then re-read the notes before tests.
I rarely write anything on paper these days, so I’ve been trying to find a good, open source tool that allows me to manage my notes in an effective fashion. So far, I haven’t found the perfect tool. I may get around to writing it myself, but that’s after I write a few other apps that I would like to use…
I’ve tried a few apps that are good for a few things. I liked KnowIt for doing interviews. It was a handy app that made it easy to keep track of interviews when I was working on stories for NewsFactor. Not so fond of it for doing actual notes on Perl. Also, I just built the latest version on SUSE 9.2 and it doesn’t seem to want to allow text input…
Suggestions, comments?
Spent part of today installing AmphetaDesk again, then deciding it wasn’t really worth the trouble, since it hasn’t been updated since 2002, and it seems unlikely that it will be revised in the near future.
Now I’m playing with aKregator. It has some nice features, integrates well with Konqueror and is pretty speedy.
I’d like to be able to use Firefox’s built-in “feed as bookmark” feature, but Firefox doesn’t have an easy way to add feeds that aren’t advertised in a site’s headers. Perhaps in a future release…
So close, and yet so far…