I was quite unsatisfied with the RSS feed of this site. I prefer feeds that contain the full post and not just excerpts. Thankfully a short googling found a solution.

I also pipe the feed through Feedburner now. This will hopefully catch some quirks and adds the possibility to use RSS 2.0 enclosures. If you are already subscribed, you have to resubscribe using this URL to get the enhanced feed (if you just want the full text, you probably don’t have to do anything). Let me know if anything breaks.

We will do another episode of our radio show Nerd Alert tomorrow at 13:00. So if you are in the Hamburg area tune in to FSK at 93.0 FM. There should also be a stream available.

iPodder started out under the name iSpider before its name was changed to iPodder. It is usually called “iPodder Lemon” because of its program icon.

The original iPodder was an AppleScript hacked together by Adam Curry. I have never seen it. It is probably still available on the net, but from what I heard the code is not pretty. Nevertheless Adam’s code was an excellent proof of concept, which jumpstarted the podcasting genre and the development of more podcast aggregators.

The first open source iPodder was written in Java and is still under active development, now using the name jPodder. Furthermore there is iPodderX, a commercial podcast client written exclusively for the Apple platform.

Mostly everybody agrees, that naming the program (and consequently the hole genre) after Apple’s popular portable music player was a rather poor decision.

The iPodder team just released the first beta of their 2.0 version. It is available for Os X and Windows with a Linux/BSD version in the near future. It is written in Python and uses wxWindows. And it is open source.

I haven’t had jet the opportunity to thoroughly test it, because my iBook is still in the shop waiting to get fixed, but I did install it on my office laptop which runs Windows XP. The first impression is very good. A lot of requested features have been implemented: You are able to check only selected feeds, downloads can be postponed, paused and resumed. The ipodder.org directory is integrated in the GUI and the program provides basic tools to manage the storage of the actual files.

I still miss the possibility to read the show notes of the podcasts in the aggregator’s GUI. This feature would be very helpful, especially for managing the podcasts, i.e. deciding which files to keep and which files to delete.

I also haven’t found a possibility to automatically change the ID3 tags of the files (I like to set the music genre to “podcast”. This allows comfortable creation of smart playlists and exclusion of podcasts from music only selections). This might be a design decision though, because changing the ID3 tag (and thus altering the file) breaks bit torrent file sharing, a distribution method a lot of podcasters use.

So get it and submit bug reports. Now.

I can’t help it. I have to sing along. I have to do the dance. I have to get a webcam.

This is even better than "Why you should never put your picture on the Internet". Thank you Joi Ito.

deleet: Makes 1337 5p34|{ somewhat more readable

[Jesse Ruderman's bookmarklet pages]

Following the first wave off positive excitement about the rel=”nofollow” tag, which Google introduced to fight comment spam, a couple of critical minds voice their opinion.

Independent from the question, whether “nofollow” is a good or a bad idea, this discussion shows again the immense power of Google. Pagerank seems to be an accepted fundamental basis of the modern internet (comparable to e.g. hyperlinking).

There is a little known (and hard to use) feature in IE that forces the browser to transform all persistent cookies into session cookies (which are only kept in memory and therefore get deleted when the browser terminates).

This post on the web application security mailing list explains how to activate and configure this option (which requires the creation of an XML-file).

So if you are stuck on Internet Explorer and value your privacy: start tossing those cookies.

Russel Beattie hacked a little service for mobdex to deliver public domain books via rss (one or more pages per day).

Many of us are too busy to read classic books out there, instead choosing "page turners" or books that are more applicable to our every day lives (like a some new marketing book). But we do have time to zip through our aggregator daily, right? So by taking a 500 page novel and distributing it, a few pages at a time, via RSS, we could read a new book in a month or so without even trying.

I have just started to read "A Tale of Two Cities". At the pace of one page per day, I should be finished by summer 2006.

[ranchero.com]

Every time I have to sign some stupid receipt, my signature never looks the way it is supposed to. After reading this I stopped worrying about it.

[The Quiet Earth]