Google Reader has started reporting subscribers properly and the difference in feed stats is noticeable. Above are my stats from the past Monday. 105 subscribers with the biggest group coming from Firefox Live Bookmarks (excluding the Other group.)
Now the stats from yesterday:
Not a big jump in subscribers, just to 117, but Google Reader now has the majority (excluding Other.)
I will keep an eye on it over the next week as subscriber stats change quite a bit day by day. Feed stats are actually quite difficult to understand. For instance Google Reader hits my feed once and reports the total # of subscribers to FeedBurner. But Firefox Live Bookmarks is a bunch of individual Firefox browsers being fired up and hitting my feed one by one. I wonder how good FeedBurner is at leveling it all to report meaningful stats.
As for Google Reader’s jump it is not surprising. Google Reader has no competition.
Tom Raftery pointed out the new Parallels RC3 release which now has “Coherence” mode. It is strange but very useful seeing Microsoft Windows applications floating on my Mac OS X desktop. They are running in a Parallels VM but have been “detached” from that desktop and allowed onto the host desktop as separate windowed applications. It makes flipping between Internet Explorer 7 and Safari while doing web-development a breeze. The installation was painless and the speed is impressive.
Another interesting feature is that Parallels can now run your Bootcamp partition in a VM. Very useful. Now I can save on VM and partition space.
Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is terrific. I haven’t had my heart pounding that much during a movie for many years now. So go watch it. I am going to go rewind the DVD and watch it again. Just brilliant.
Always trying to be innovative, before summer we hope to offer Movies and TV show to users as digital downloads, so you decide to get the DVD, or download to the PC.
Interesting. Could we soon finally have a usable, legal movie download service in Ireland?
The first two episodes of Studio 60 just aired on TV3 and my faith in Aaron Sorkin has been redoubled. What a genius. It was great to see familiar faces from The West Wing too. Danny and Josh were two of my favourites and they look set to be as good in this series.
It has that same feeling I first got when I watched The West Wing. That feeling of “This is a TV show? My God, TV can be good, really good.” Excellent production values, snappy dialouge, complex, interwoven storyline and no punches pulled.
So finally, something I can look forward to on telly apart from just Top Gear on Sundays.
(Studio 60 is on TV3 at 10pm every Thursday. Watch it, tell TV3 to keep it.)
Snap Preview has taken onboard all the feedback and revised their widget. They let you customise the look of the widget but more importantly the widget can be off by default and the user has to turn it on.
Nice one Snap, this allow those who like your service to keep using it while not annoying the rest of us. Thanks.
I just saw an interesting new feature from Sky, the satellite TV provider. You can program your set-top-box on your mobile phone. So if you are away from home and hear of an interesting show you can whip out the mobile phone, find the relevant show and set it to record. Presumably the Sky mobile server then communicates with your set-top-box at home.
A simple but useful idea. I wonder how much mobile phones will come to be remote controls for all manner of other fixed devices? I wouldn’t mind being able to SMS my car to turn on the heating 5 minutes before I get into it.
This is tougher than trying to buy a house I tell you. My trusty Nokia packed up a few days ago and since then I have been scouring the interwebs looking for the perfect replacement.
Up till now I have bought mobile phones that did two things and only two things; voice calls and SMS. Up till now that is all I wanted out of a mobile phone. Phones that included a camera, MP3 support, PIM features and such were off my list.
Things change though as the project I am working on has taken a mobile focus. I have begrudgingly realised I had better get with the new century and get an advanced mobile phone.
So far every device I have looked at is compromised in some way. The nearly perfect looking Blackberry 7130g doesn’t have WiFi. The well featured Nokia E61 looks a bit bulky to slip into the back pocket of my jeans. The Sony Ericsson M600i has no WiFi. The Nokia N91 has everything but it is bulky and is more a multimedia phone than a work machine. With sluggish performance the Nokia N73 is out.
There is one phone though that is ticking the right boxes, that is a decent size and it passes my aesthetic test; The Nokia E60.
It has two problems though. Not terribly important but it takes RS-MMC memory cards, why Nokia why? More importantly is that no Irish network operator has one. I can only get it from one of the “SIM free” mobile shops and it will cost me near to €400, which is a bit out of my budget. I am on O2 at the moment but if one of the other networks provides this phone I would swap without hesitation.
So, what phone do you recommend? Here are my thoughts on the ideal phone:
Fast. The software has to be fast, anything that looks swishy but takes 5 seconds to get to the SMS screen is out.
Fits in my back pocket.
Looks and feels good. So many phones feel like they were made from cheap plastic, especially the slider-phones. I like clean, simple lines with a solid, well built feel.
WiFi, 3G and GSM.
Email (POP3 preferably) and IM (Jabber/GTalk mainly).
Memory from 64mb and preferably expandable.
Good screen.
QWERTY keyboard like the Blackberry 7130g does it, sharing one key for two letters.
I took a 40 minute walk home in the rain yesterday evening after the shocking France vs. Ireland Six Nations match. To swing from the joy of Ronan’s 4 point gap-making penalty in the third-to-last minute to the gut-dropping try in the second-to-last minute by the French is an intense experience.
Either team deserved to win that match. Based solely on the first half France were brilliant but a Rugby game is 80 minutes long, not 40 and Ireland earned respect by clawing back. Games with 1 point differences are always great and this was a great game, best of the Six Nations by far.
Croke Park was a big part of the game too and having been there once myself I know it must have been a thunderous experience. Well done to Ireland for moving forward in that regard. Ireland should beat England in two weeks time at Croke Park and that will be a magnificent sight.
The fourth player in the game was not to blame, for he refereed very well for 90% of that game, but the two decisions against Ireland were felt very hard. What if? What if.
I feel like a dirty sales type as I just put my WebTwoZero.com domain up for sale on eBay. My sales pitch needs work
At that price I’ll see if anyone bites. If not I’ll go back to my original plan of actually developing something on it.
