feed your inbox with feedmyinbox

Posted on May 29, 2009 by msauers

I must admit that I don’t completely see the point of this service as I see feeds as a replacement for e-mail but.

Let’s say you’ve got that one person that has mastered e-mail but there’s no way you’re ever going to get them to use a feed aggregator. If you can get them set up with feedmyinbox you can have them benefit from feeds but have them delivered to their inbox as e-mail.

Just enter the URL of the feed then your e-mail address and click Submit. Within minutes you’ll receive a confirmation e-mail. Once you’ve confirmed your e-mail address, you’ll receive one e-mail per day containing all of the new posts from that feed.

Find RSS feeds with feedmil

Posted on May 28, 2009 by msauers

In all my years of using, publishing, teaching, and writing about RSS I have yet to be impressed with an RSS search engine. Sure, there’s always been Technorati, Syndic8, and the search built into Bloglines but they’ve all had their individual problems. This lack of excitement ended with my discovery of feedmil.

Head on over and enter a topic but, before you click search, adjust how much you’d like your results to be surprising vs. well known. At first, I’ll just leave that setting at the default for a search on quilting. I’ve received 1351 results, all RSS feeds.

Clicking on the first result you’ll get a boat-load of information about that feed including a screenshot, feed & site URLs, feed type, popularity, update frequency, description, and a tag cloud.

I headed back to the results screen and adjusted my results to more surprising. You can see that my results have significantly changed.

Don’t forget to take a look at the additional sliders down the right of the results page which will allow you to increase or decrease the significance of other keywords that appear in your results.

Windows Vista Service Pack 2 now available

Posted on May 27, 2009 by msauers

Yesterday Microsoft released Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista. So far I’ve installed it on ~~four~~ 17 different computers (~~two~~ 15 x32 & two x64) without a single problem so I’m comfortable recommending that you install it ASAP. There are four links you need to be aware of:

The release notes
The install .exe for 32-bit systems
The install .exe for 64-bit systems
The ISO image which you can use to burn a DVD which contains both the 32-bit and 64-bit installs along with the SP2 for Windows Server 2008.

Make sure SP1 is already installed or SP2 will fail. Installation takes about 20 minutes and will require a reboot near the end of the process.

Backup your Windows Mobile phone online

Posted on May 26, 2009 by msauers

Most of us with Windows Mobile phones end up synching our content with an Exchange server. As great as this is, it doesn’t back up everything. Last week Microsoft released My Phone which, once installed on your phone and an account created online, will sync all of your phone’s content (everything Exchange server syncs plus your photos, documents, text messages and more) into an online account. Once synched you can log into your online account, add and edit your content, and changes will be automatically synched back with your phone. Additionally, should you find yourself with a new phone, just reinstall My Phone and get all your content put onto your new phone.

Here’s a few screenshots of my online account:

Bonus information: The URL that the site tells you to go to on your phone doesn’t always work. To install on your phone, head on over to http://mobile.microsoft.com/myphone/en-us/default.mspx in your phone’s browser.

Visible Tweets

Posted on May 20, 2009 by msauers

This image doesn’t do this service justice. You really just need to check it out. Head on over to visibletweets.com, enter a keyword or two, and click go. Tweets will start animating themselves across your screen. Fades, fly-ins, raining characters, and other animations will make something interesting to look at. I will say this isn’t a way you want to read tweets regularly but I could see setting this up as a way to display interesting tweets to a large group at an event via projection.

Qimo for Kids

Posted on May 19, 2009 by msauers

Here’s an idea on how to use one of those very old desktop computers, try installing Qimo, the first Linux distribution designed for Kid. Since it’s a version of Ubuntu Linux, it’ll pretty much run on anything that you can still boot. It comes with several programs and games for kids three and up. Additionally, “Qimo’s interface has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use, providing large icons for all installed games, so that even the youngest users have no trouble selecting the activity they want.” I’ve got it running in my office and it does work. I can’t say it’s something I’ll use daily but I can see the appeal. I’d love to hear back from someone who’s installed this and left it out for some children to play with.

ITART

The Information Technology & Access Round Table

Monthly Archives: May 2009