Techology
(Re)Discover RSS
To continue a trend of talking about ancient applications as if they were new…
I installed NetNewsWire a while ago, liked it, but stopped using it for some reason. On a whim, I thought I’d give it another spin and I have to say I don’t know how I lived without it.
For those that don’t know, NetNewsWire uses RSS which Mark Pilgrim, in his article, What is RSS? describes as:
RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs.
What this means is that you can subscribe to just about any weblog or news site and in your newsreader you get a subject line and excerpt of articles on the Web. You can then click on the items of interest to go the site to finish the article.
What is really great about this is that it behaves like a UseNet newsreader or a mail client. You are notified of updates to sites and it keeps track of what you’ve already read. I’ve found that I’ve been following 40-50 sites on a somewhat regular basis and much of that time is wasted on going to a site that hasn’t been updated or scanning something that I’m not interested in. This is a great timesaver.
The question is whether I will end up monitoring more sites in the same amount of time or the same number of sites in half the time. This is much the same question that arises with TiVo. You either watch more/better TV or you watch less, but better TV. Either way, you get better content. The same with RSS.
Microsoft is not wholly evil
Despite Microsoft’s (completely valid) reputation of forcing bloatware down consumer’s throats, I have to say Excel is a damn fine application. While I don’t keep track of all the competing products out there, nor do I have a clue which, if any, of its features are original to Excel, I (cringe) credit Microsoft.
I realize that I’m talking about the original “killer app” for computers and this musing is probably 20 years too late. But in addition to all of the basic functionality that has been around since VisiCalc, three things make it a great application for me despite its bloated ways, rather than just a necessary one.
- Autofilter. Once applied to the headings of a column, you can then filter which rows are shown based on just about any criteria. For example, only show rows where “category” equals “rent”.
- Conditional sums. This lets you calculate a sum of values based on whether the corresponding values match a criteria. For example, “only sum these ‘amount’ cells if the corresponding ‘paid’ cell for each is true”.
- Conditional formatting. Being the designer that I am, I can’t stand looking at spreadsheets where the only differentiation between values is type and style. With this function you can color the foreground or background of a cell based on it’s value. This allows me to do my best Tufte impression without busting out Illustrator.
There are probably a ton of other features that could be cool if I knew about them. But this is Excel we’re talking about, I can’t wade through all the bloat.
As is the case for just about any musing I write, I end up doing a google search on the topic at hand. Today’s search reveals Spreadsheet History, which includes a factoid that I was not aware of—Excel was first developed for the Mac 512k in 1984 and later ported to the PC. Maybe that’s why I like it so much.
Spam vs. Ham?
A posting over at 37 Signals’ Signal vs. Noise brought to my attention two interesting spam related services: Mailinator and Spam Gourmet. Both perform essentially the same service—they allow you to easily create disposable email addresses.
While both are useful, I find that I just don’t sign up for obvious spam generating sites anymore making this service of questionable value to me. That said, I do get a ton of spam, but they are for email addresses that are “already out there” and ones that I don’t want to give up. Caution with new sites then doesn’t serve me any purpose since I’m already getting about 50+ spams a day on addresses that I’m stuck with for the rest of time.
But that’s where Apple’s Mail client comes in. I have been really careful to never mark legitimate but unwanted email as junk. I would say it has a 95% success rate for flagging spam, and I’ve only had one false positive to date. While the three or so spams that make it through are annoying, they aren’t annoying enough to cause me to come up with a whole new solution.
Though presumably this problem is going to get worse. If the number of spams increases tenfold and the accuracy remains the same, I’m looking at 30 or so in my inbox. That is unacceptable. This makes me want to try SpamSieve, which judging by this interview over at Daring Fireball with Michael Tsai, is much better than Apple Mail.
The arms race continues…
