blog.mignault.net

NetNewsFired

My continuing NetNewsWire woes (no link, only working software gets links): this morning manual feed refresh just stopped working. I choose refresh all and after a few seconds the action completes and nothing has happened. Not only that, NNW is practicing a particularly nasty form of lock-in: it won’t export my feeds correctly to OPML. I read about 500 feeds or so, and when I export, whether I export to all in flat format, all in groups format, selected in flat or selected in groups, it manages to export only 181 of those files. Pretty good way to make sure I don’t switch to another newsreader, eh? Not only this, but according to this bug report, this has been an open bug for better than a year. I have always liked the feel of NNW and it has been a good piece of software in the past, but this kind of sloppiness for a paid product is unacceptable. The NewsGator “sync” has been awful from day one. About the only thing I’ve liked about it is that my additions or deletions from my feed list have also been synced, although like every other aspect of this software, it’s done it inconsistently. As soon as I can figure out a way to cleanly (and completely) export my OPML from the program, I’ll take my feedreading elsewhere. BlogBridge is looking damn good at the moment.

UPDATE: Ironically enough, I can export all the feeds from NewsGator online. But this is crazy: what if I didn’t have a NewsGator account? I’ve reimported everything back into Bloglines, and I’m trying out other RSS readers. I’ll post more about this when I’ve had some time to play with them all a bit. Until then, I’m just using Bloglines for now. It at least works.

Speak

IDEA – The International Dialects Of English Archive

The International Dialects of English Archive, IDEA, was created in 1997 as a repository of primary source recordings for actors and other artists in the performing arts. Its home is the Department of Theatre and Film at the University Of Kansas, in Lawrence, KS, USA; while associate editors form a global network. All recordings are in English, are of native speakers, and you will find both English language dialects and English spoken in the accents of other languages.

Found via Ruminations. Interesting listening.

New ‘bent

I recently got interested in recumbents. My wife happened upon a Cannondale Bent in mint condition at the local thrift shop. It was selling for 399, which is 1200 less than it’d cost new. So we bought it. I rode it a bit, and was amazed at how good it felt. Only thing was I discovered that it was the smaller size frame. So I sold it, and bought a used Burley Jett Creek off eBay. I’ve been taking short rides around the neighborhood to get used to it. But it’s really really comfortable, and I think I may be hooked. But hill climbing is going to take some work and some serious spinning. I am not nearly as souplesse as I should be.

Technorati Tags: cycling, ‘bents, recumbents

Meters, software, and Macs

Via VersionTracker, I found a new type 2 tracking program for the Mac called Type2Tracker. It looks really great, but there’s one big problem: I can’t import my meter data into it. I’d have to enter it manually and that’s a deal-breaker for me. I know of only one other program that will import data from a number of popular meters, the Body Journal, from a Canadian company. It also looks pretty good, but it’s not aimed specifically at diabetics. My guess is that the meter manufacturers, all of whom sell software packages themselves (for Windows only), aren’t too forthcoming with the specs necessary to write a package for the Mac. If anyone knows of one, I’d love to know. I ended up getting a OneTouch UltraSmart. Highly recommended.

And while I’m on the subject of meters, why isn’t there a LOT more technical innovation in glucometers? There’s an awful lot of us diabetics out there – why aren’t we getting meters with Bluetooth interfaces and web capabilities? How come I can’t press a button on my meter and have it sync up with the diabetes software on my Powerbook? Why can’t it send my results wirelessly to my doctor? Is it ageism – would the companies be doing this if diabetics were mostly people in their 20’s (although since new cases are being diagnosed increasingly younger, that may yet be the case)? Why isn’t Apple designing a meter? The iBleed? It could also play music!

Technorati Tags: apple, diabetes, tech, type2

Desperate cry for help

Please, someone stop me from installing Kubuntu on my unbacked-up, unpartitioned Windows box on the Friday before a long holiday weekend. Man, is it tempting.

Update: Well, I managed to control myself, but I am thinking of doing so this week.

Yet more NNW woes

Recently I wrote a post about switching to Newsgator syncing when using NetNewsWire. I was not too happy with it then, and I am even less happy with it now. Because it doesn’t work. My setup is a Powerbook at home and a G5 tower at work, and I’d be overly generous to describe the syncing as “spotty.” Items that I know I have marked read at work show up again at home, and vice versa. I have been assiduous about making sure to send changes both ways, but it just isn’t working. When I can find some time, I intend to go through the tedious process of re-importing my Bloglines settings. It’ll be tedious because for some odd reason, NNW doesn’t import groups from an OPML file (or at least the one I get from Bloglines) – everything just gets dumped into the top level, which means I will have to spend an enormous amount of time resifting everything into folders. Sigh. If only I had waited another day.

Technorati Tags: blogging, geek, mac, nnw, rss

They call it football.

USATODAY.com – A worthy goal for soccer:

Perhaps the rest of the world is happy with the game as it is and don’t care whether Americans fall in love with it or not. Despite the writer’s attempts to head off the “ugly American” label by twee jokes, he is the definition of the term.

Technorati Tags: soccer, stupid

More on NNW syncing

Well, neither of the reasons in yesterday’s post were right. Bloglines syncing started working for me again yesterday morning. However, in the meantime I had switched over to NewsGator syncing, and at the moment I am not inclined to switch everything back again. The Newsgator syncing, though, is annoyingly slow. There’s a very long delay when you start the sync, which I assume is due to Newsgator authentication. Once it starts syncing, the speed is acceptable; but on the whole it feels much slower than Bloglines syncing did. The synchronization itself also seems somewhat buggy. When I synced this morning from home, I saw a number of articles that I had read from work yesterday.

Is this the end?

Started up NetNewsWire 2.1 this morning. I’ve been using Bloglines syncing ever since it was introduced. I signed up for a NewsGator account during the beta, but since Bloglines syncing appeared to continue working, I kept using it.

Until this morning. Every time I try to refresh all, I get a sheet asking for my Bloglines login and password, which I keep entering, and it keeps asking. No joy. It’s not that Blogines is down; I can still access it fine over the web. My suspicion is that either NNW no longer works with Bloglines, or more likely, that Bloglines is blocking requests from NNW, figuring that they don’t want to support the competition. Either way, it’s time to do an OPML export and switch over to syncing with NewsGator. Sigh.

Web bugs out of ALA now

I received an email yesterday from ACRL’s president that a membership survey would be sent out today. What I didn’t expect, and certainly didn’t appreciate, was the little surprise in the email. Gmail had blocked the image, and I clicked display image, expecting it to be a logo or some such decoration. Imagine my surprise when the image placeholder simply disappeared. Suspecting the worst, I looked at the source, and there was an image tag for a spacer gif, its href festooned with its very own little tracking id param. That’s just wrong, and is the very kind of invasion of privacy we should be fighting in the profession. I’m less inclined to answer the survey now; as a recent new member, this doesn’t bode well for ALA in general.