I’m curious too. Cristian Vidmar: I’m curious: how many channels do *you* aggregate? [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo’s Weblog]
Here are my numbers:
214 Feeds in Radio
44 Feeds in NewsGator
plus
5 Cartoon feeds
1 comment feed from my blog
1 trackback feed from my blog
3 of my own RSS feeds to monitor them
Looking at the stats, some of those feeds look to have gone dormant long enough to warrant weeding them out. You can see my Radio subscriptions here.
Wrist-mounted catapault watch.
The Catapault Watch fires BBs and similar projectiles from your wrist. Link (Thanks, Samari Chop!)
[Boing Boing Blog]
Do you think there's still time to get one for Christmas? Check out the rest of the site – Backyard Artillery — as well as related sites trebuchet.com and mangonel.com
On Planning…. On Planning…
Planning is an unnatural process; it is much more fun to do something. The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression.
– Sir John Harvey-Jones(heh, heh) [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]
Yes, indeed.
User Friendly. Meryl does the dance of joy! User Friendly now has an RSS feed among a few others. Just waiting for Joy of Tech to join the RSS revolution!… [meryl's notes]
One more item switched from my having to browse to appearing in my aggregator.
Marc Barrot is testing a beta of version 2 of his activeRenderer tool for “Radio” weblogs. I've been using version 1.4 for quite a while here and I'm now testing version 2. Expect to see some minor glitches in formatting here as I figure out how to take advantage of version 2's more extensive use of stylesheets.
Lots of nice new features.
Meet the new team at UserLand. Scott Young is CEO. [Scripting News]
Good news at Userland. Let’s hope this gets some more resources behind some great technology.
One hot design book. Here’s a new book that’s making the rounds: Universal Principles of Design. Mike dropped by my office a couple days ago to show it to me, after having heard about it from Victor (who heard about it from Adam). The buzz may well be justified. Here’s a blurb from Amazon
Universal Principles of Design is the first comprehensive, cross-disciplinary encyclopedia of design. Richly illustrated and easy to navigate, it pairs clear explanations of every design concept with visual examples of the concepts applied in practice. From the “80/20 rule to chunking, from baby-face bias to Occam’s razor, and from self-similarity to storytelling, every major design concept is defined and illustrated for readers to expand their knowledge.
[IDblog]
Looks fabulous. Ordered.
Jaron Lanier tries to get his arms around the issue of software scalability.
The reason we’re stuck on temporal protocols is probably that information systems do meet our expectations when they are small. They only start to degrade as they…
There was a time when I thought Lanier was just a flake with a good PR agent. Then I had the chance to listen to him speak at length about the deep challenges of technology development. He’s still in the tail of the distribution on a number of dimensions, but the quality of his thinking and insight into the opportunities and challenges of technology is in the right tail.
While checking out Lanier’s current thoughts on software, you might also want to look at his “One Half of a Manifesto.”
Here’s something highly cool – a new site (new enough to still be in beta) called 10,000 eBooks has collected together the Project Gutenberg text files of public domain books and converted them to Palm, HTML, PDF, Rocket eBook, iSilo, Doc, Plucker and zTXT formats. iSilo is my format of choice for everything I buy from Fictionwise, so being able to download PG that way is a big plus for me. Since King Lear is on my list of books to read anyway, I’ll download it from here in iSilo format, rather than suffering through the typical ASCII formatted Gutenberg file. I had been considering an ongoing project to read Edward Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire volumes, and I can get all them formatted nicely and read them comfortably on my Handspring in my favorite format. Very nice.
Link found via TeleRead.
For those of you who, like me, are ever fearful of being caught with time on your hands and bereft of reading material.
Arthur C. Clarke on Information Pollution. Castolari writes “Here is an interesting interview of Arthur C. Clarke and his views on regulating communications, as well as what he sees as the past, … [Slashdot]
Insight and perspective from one of my favorite authors. Here’s my favorite comment:
We are now faced with the responsibility of discernment. Just as our ancestors quickly realised that no one was going to force them to read the entire library of a thousand books, we are now overcoming the initial alarm at the sheer weight of available information and coming to understand that it is not the information itself that determines our future, only the use we can make of it.
It comes down to exercising judgment. Clarke has it and thinking about what he has to say is worth the time.