R7's possibly obvious, possibly revelatory tech guide
No matter how much of an expert someone is, no matter how long they've been immersed in a particular field or how knowledgeable they are about a single subject, they've probably missed some simple stuff along the way; things that a newbie with a dummies guide would learn in the first hour. Likewise, there's people who dabble in something and get overwhelmed by the amount of information, but can really be helped along with one or two helpful hints.
With those two kinds of people in mind (because everyone knows there's only two kinds of people in the world: one kind and the other), here's a list of some of the blogs and web technologies that I've found to be entertaining and helpful in the last little bit. Because in spite of working in the web world for the last seven (!) years, I still learn new stuff all the time.
RSS Feed Readers
If you're not using a feed reader, I can only assume that you also go to the town square to read the news on a post. I use Bloglines, but that's as much out of habit as anything. The Google Reader has gotten a lot better, and my boss swears by Netvibes, which is like the My Yahoo or My Google pages, but with about 1000 times more features.
These things may seem like a pain to set up, but I swear that once you go to a feed reader, you'll start depending on it for pretty much everything.
Blogs
It's funny that there's still tons of people who think of blogs as simply personal journals of dating or parenthood or (*sigh*) "rantings and musings". But there's tons of blogs out there on just about every possible subject. The ones that I get hooked on change every now and then, but there's three that I can recommend highly:
- Life Hacker is a must. It's mostly a tech blog, and that may scare some people off, but the tips and tricks for improving your computer life both at home and at work are invaluable. There's plenty of stuff I discard, but if you spend your day on a computer (and if you're reading this, I'm guessing you do), you really need to get on this.
- TechCruch is definitely more technical, but if you're even remotely involved or interested in the Tech world, go there now. They profile the new web services popping up (and going under) all the time. I'm ashamed that I didn't know about this until about a month ago.
- Deadspin is the best sports blog EVER. I suppose you would have to be at least remotely interested in sports to want to read it, but it's about as funny as writing gets. And some of the YouTube video they post is worth it even if you're not into sports.
My site stats show that the vast majority of you are already using Firefox, but I know that there's a lot of people who assume that everyone uses Firefox and Macs only out of rebellion against all thing Microsoft. Not true. It's by far and away the better browser, if only because of the extensions. I've only used IE7 a little bit when it was still in beta, but it was annoying enough that I don't want to try again until at least January.
If you're using a Mac and you have an iPod and you like stealing music like the dirty little thief you are, you've got to get Senuti, a perfect little program that lets you take music off of your iPod. So grab your iPod, head over to a friend's house, and find yourself with about 20 new albums that it'll take you months to listen to even once. Beautiful.
I've been a little iffy on Pandora. I created a station based on LCD Soundsystem that pretty accurately gives me similar tunes, but the one that I created for Neko Case was full of Leanne Rimes and Shania Twain instead of Nina Nastastia and Jenny Lewis. But if you're getting a craving for something new, it's a good first stop.
Other music sites that I love and have had on the right nav for a while now are the Hype Machine, which just gives all of the mp3s posted on thousands of music blogs, and the 3voor12 Luisterpaal (which I believe is Dutch for "listening post"), which streams entire albums. It's a little frustrating that a loft of the albums aren't available in the States, but there's still lots to find for the tune-curious.
So here's the real reason for this: what are the things you've found invaluable to your web and computer life? What are those things you think that everyone already knows, but you still love? Applications? Blogs? Tweaks? Share it.
5 comments:
Your modern ways confuse me. I still haven't dabbled in the world of RSS. In fact, is there any way I can subscribe to the Areseven Print Edition?
Sorry, Christian. We don't currently offer a print version, but it is available in semaphore and morse code. There is also an RSS feed of the semaphore, which, frankly, was a bitch to code.
I forgot to mention another one of the online apps that I've been loving lately: Google docs. Free spreadsheets and word processing documents that can be shared. Awesome.
Oh, I was gonna mention Google Docs - pretty great, though stick with Excel for more the more complicated stuff (as I found when trying to put a fairly complicated spreadsheet in there - whadda expect though? it's free!).
Google stuff in general pretty much rules - I can't say enough good things about gmail - they've really changed how I use email (and web-based mail) and made it really easy to use on via the phone - which I use all the time. I like Google talk - it's a lot less obtrusive than AOL IM, which I completely got rid of. And then there is google maps and google earth, the latter which I have some beefs with (mostly to do with the parts they want you to pay for), but in general, it's a really nice mapping app.
I love RSS because I've found stuff way beyond blogs and news that use RSS - like job postings and Television Without Pity. I have a bloglines account, but since I'm usually on my one machine at home, I use the stand-alone Feedreader app.
If you're on a PC and have the Airtunes thing, I recommend "Airfoil" (google it) for streaming any audio (not just iTunes) to your stereo. I use it to stream my turntable which is hooked up to my computer speakers to my stereo...which makes the analog and digital gods fight.
One more thing I really like, which isn't really related to this topic (and may not be relevant to many people since nobody seems to have desktops anymore), is using Remote Desktop to connect to/from my laptop and desktop machine at home. It's really nice to use if you have stuff on your desktop but want to work on a laptop and vice-versa. I'm sure Macs have some similar functionality.
Awesome! Thanks, Doug. I may have to talk to you at some point about the remote desktop thing. I could only get it to work when both my PC and my Mac were on the same network. Once you start dealing with IPs...man, I see numbers and panic.
I downloaded Airfoil, actually, because I thought it might be nice to stream Pandora. I just haven't gotten around to paying for it, but I probably will.
Anyone else? Chris, I'm sure you have a ton.
Yeah, it's pretty easy to setup the Remote Desktop when on the same network, but in order to get your, say, work computer to connect to your home computer, you need to open a port on your router to allow the remote connection. This, of course, is a potential security risk (but not that great if you have a good password), but once you do it, you can plug in your home IP address to your work computer, and remote desktop away.
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