Category — Technology

For a geek like me! Check it out: Google Shell

Some sample commands you might want to try:

i stefan klopp
t german english die eier von satan
l burton hockey
p fauquier, bc, canada

Now if only I could integrate this with my normal unix shells. I suppose I could also boot it up in Prism or use Grease Monkey to change the colors from black on white to be more like my shells of white on black.

At work we often joke about when Google will become evil. They are growing larger and larger every day, with cool new products being launched practically monthly. Most of these products are web based, or tie your computer somehow to the web. There are growing concerns that Google could present privacy issues for its user base. Think about it, Google could know everything about a persons life. With access to your email (if you use gmail), your searches, what’s on your computer(local search app) and every website you browse (if you use their accelerator). What is probably more shocking though is that since they are a US firm under the patriot act at any time they would have to surrender information to the US government. While this is true with most of the web, it seems things are slowly becoming more centralized as Google continues to dominate the marketplace. With Google Maps you can track locations of the closest cabs to your location, or zoom in on satellite images of your house. It is just a matter of time till the start tracking people’s movement. “I wonder where my son is?” “Well find out online with Google people tracker!” Now that Google is a public firm I think it will be a lot harder for them to retain their image, and not fall over to the dark side and join the ranks of the Microsoft’s… Maybe I am just being a little paranoid…

You have probably seen them around on many websites, usually with a link on the bottom page or the side of a page. When you click the link you see a bunch of tags around the content you were just viewing. Most people probably think that what they are seeing is not for them and leave the page writing off RSS as something for geeks. Well you are wrong if you think that, RSS feeds are for everyone. What are they if they ARE for me you might ask? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it basically allows you to syndicate content from a site somewhere else. On first glance you might think this would only be applicable to people who have websites, however in reality it is actually most useful for everyday Internet users. Through the use of RSS you have the ability to view the news/information/updates from your favorite website at a centralized location. It means that you do not have to visit 6 news sites and hunt through your bookmarks every time you want an update on what is happening in relation to the things that matter. For example I use RSS feeds in conjunction with My Yahoo. I main yahoo page features articles from the CBC, Vive Le Canada, The Sky I Scrape, the BBC and many others. The beauty of it is you can read the content you want to read.

So how do you use RSS feeds? Well there are many ways, I said above I use My Yahoo, so that is one option, however there are also many RSS readers which act like an email reader except that they download your RSS information rather than emails. To show you how simple it is to use RSS I am going to walk you through adding the content from this website to My Yahoo.

First of all you need to have a My Yahoo account, which if you have an yahoo email account means you should have a My Yahoo account. Once you have gotten a My Yahoo account go to the website you want to syndicate content from and find the link to the RSS feed. Usually it is called RSS feed or Syndicate this site or something similar. Click the link to make sure the feed is working (you will know this by seeing a bunch of tags (otherwise known as XML) around the site content), then copy the URL from feed.

Next you will go to the My Yahoo account and sign yourself in. Once you are signed in you should see along the top of the page an Add Content link, click it. On the Add Content page beside the search box you should now see an Add RSS by URL, click that link. On the next page paste the URL of the RSS feed (for this site it is: http://blog.kloppmagic.ca/feed/rss2/) into the text box and click add. You will then be taken to a page that confirms the feed you wish to add, to complete the add of the feed simply click Add one more time and that is it. You now can view the latest content from my website in your My Yahoo account.

Through the use of RSS you now have the ability to view the content you want to view rather than what a news site thinks you should view. Here are a few RSS feeds I think are worth subscribing to:

Full list of CBC RSS feeds: http://www.cbc.ca/rss/
Partial list of BBC RSS feeds (at the bottom): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3223484.stm
This Timeless Moment: http://blog.kloppmagic.ca/feed/rss2/
Vive Le Canada: http://www.vivelecanada.ca/backend/vivelecanada.rdf

If you come across some good feeds be sure to post them here!

Audioscrobbler is a website that tracks what music you listen to. By simply register as a user and installing a tiny plugin your music application will send the song information of what you listen to, to this website which logs it for you. After time the website will display users who listen to the same music as you, recommend other bands that are similar to the ones you listen to, and also allow others to listen to streaming radio based on your musical tastes. It is a pretty wild system and can quite quickly show you what music you listen to most. Also all the information they collected is collected under the creative commons license, which makes them even cooler.

All right, so you might be asking how do you go about setting this up so it monitors what you listen to? Well it is really easy. First step is to go to: http://www.audioscrobbler.com/signup.php and signup for an account. Once you have registered an account (which doesn’t require your email address!) the next (and last step) is to go to this page: http://www.audioscrobbler.com/download.php and download the plugin for your media player. The plugins are very lightweight so don’t worry about it taking too much space or memory. Once you have the plugin install you are good to go. Next time you open your media player you will be asked for your username and password to login to your account and then your music will start getting logged. If you do signup for an account add me as a friend (at http://www.audioscrobbler.com/user/kloppster/ just click the little icon top right), I can never use enough friends!

Lastly the other cool thing about Audioscrobbler is that they are developing (and have developed) web services for this website. This allows you to syndicate your content on your website, or even do things like control your radio station. An example of this is on this site on the right panel under the pictures, I have a listing of my last 10 listened to songs. Cool hey? I think so.