Awesome Website: Instapaper

Posted on February 6, 2008

Instapaper is a sort of link depot, kind of a del.icio.us lite. It was developed by Marco Arment of Davidville, the company famous for Tumblr and Senduit. The basic idea is that in the course of reading stuff on the internet, you find websites you don’t necessarily have time to read at the moment. Instapaper lets you save them for later reading. And it’s even designed to work with the iPhone, so you can read those articles on the go.

Some may ask, why not use del.icio.us? Well, del.icio.us is more of a social site, and a site for archiving links. Go through your del.icio.us history, I bet you’ll find in the archives, upwards of 75% dead links. That’s what I got. Instapaper marks links as read when you visit them, and lets you easily delete something you’ve read.

Others might ask, why not use your browser’s bookmarks? Well, I’m a man who doesn’t like clutter. In fact, my bookmarks consist of what’s in my bookmarks bar, for sites I access frequently and thus want to get to with a quick key command, and that’s it. Nothing in the menus. And those links are only available in that browser. Not in another browser if I happen to be using it. And not on another computer, so something I save on my MacBook isn’t available on my iMac or my iPhone, or the computer at work. So Instapaper works well for me. Granted it’s not for everyone, but it’s awesome for me.

And as an added bonus, it works well with Safari’s webclips feature. I have an Instapaper widget on my dashboard for quick glance/access to my saved for later links.

All in all, it’s a simple, no nonsense web app. To use it, all you need to put in is a user name. You can put in an email address if you want. You can set a password if you want. But you don’t have to. I like it.

Awesome Website of the Week: Whiteroofradio.com

Posted on May 7, 2007

Disclosure: DB of White Roof Radio fame is a good friend of mine, and once let me stay in his garage for a few months while I was a hobo in southern California.

The world-famous White Roof Radio is a podcast. A podcast with one primary focus. 50/50 Weight distribution Matte BRG paint The MINI Cooper. I know what you’re thinking. “How can they do a whole show about a single car?” But they do do it. In fact, they just posted their 150th show last week. The show is hosted by DB from SoCal, Todd from KC, and Gabe from Chicago. Robert from Toronto is an occasional contributer to the show, the Neil Young to their Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

The show got its start nearly two years ago, when DB was toying with the idea of doing a podcast. Podcasting at the time was a new frontier on the internet at the time. Todd was thinking of doing such a thing as well, and so after a few solo flights, the two collaborated. Gabe was brought in later to do the news, and completed the trifecta. The early shows were troubled by low quality audio, but that was soon rectified when the lads were able to get professional level recording equipment. They eventually settled on their current format, two shows a week with news on Sunday and a topical show on Monday. Robert occasionally contributes a “soundseeing tour” in the middle of the week, where he takes a guest along for their first ever ride in a MINI and records their thoughts about the experience.

The show isn’t just about MINIs though. Other topics often include talk about other cars (sometimes derrisively, sometimes approvingly), the latest Apple release (both Gabe and Todd are habitual Mac users and DB is a recent convert), the weather (to the annoyance of some listeners), and, once or twice a year, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald. These tangents are some of the best parts of the show, lending a lot of humor and fun to what can occasionally be a dry subject.

The show started gaining sponsorship from various MINI parts retailers as it became more popular. Currently the show has nearly 500 regular subscribers to the RSS feed, coming from far off countries such as Greece, the UK, and Australia, and is distributed through North American Motoring, MySpace, and Digg as well as through the main site. The boys hit the big time just recently, when they announced the MINI International had invited them to Amsterdam to cover MINI United, a huge event that happens about every other year attracting over a thousand people. That’s kind of a big deal for a homebrew production to recieve validation from a major corporation. And it’s just plain pretty sweet.

Awesome Website of the Week: Last.fm

Posted on March 31, 2007

I love music. Let it be known. My iTunes library is several dozen gigabytes. My CD collection numbers a few hundred. And on top of that I have a couple of boxes of vinyl albums. That’s why I really like Last.fm. This is a website that has one basic idea, sharing music (but not in the Kazaa Gnutella kind of way), but it really does so much.

The first thing it does is track your music. Pretty much every audio player under the sun is supported (I use iTunes), and a little background app quietly submits that information to Last.fm. Last.fm then takes that information and parses it into charts tracking top artists, songs, albums, everything else. It can then recommend to you stuff that you might like. There are songs for free download, with no DRM. There’s a radio app that lets you listen to just about every artist available. There’s a wiki-type system for each artist, for bios, pictures, tagging, etc.

There’s the social aspect too. You can befriend people, recommend music too them, discuss on forums, track other people, all sorts of stuff. Last.fm shows you your “musical neighbourhood”, people who, based on their listening habits, have the same tastes as you. There’s a quilt thingie, similar to the flash-based Flickr badge but with album covers. And there’s the chart publishing tool, like what’s in the sidebar there.

There’s a lot to explore and find on Last.fm, and it’s a cool way to find music, negating the argument that mp3 players are killing people’s ability to discover new music. It might not change your life, but it’s a fun site to use. And if you do sign up, be sure to add me.

Hottie of the Week: Joanna Rutkowska

Posted on March 28, 2007

I was reading eWeek, as I’m often wont to do when I came across something very interesting. Being a Mac user, I’m interested in rootkits and the like so I can keep up on the latest ways to be smug to PC users, so it caught my eye when I read about something revealed at the Black Hat Conference by a Polish security specialist. It was malicious code that could run from a system’s firmware. This is a bad thing. Wiping and reimaging a drive won’t get rid of the code like normal bad shit, letting it get back into the system. Also, the only way to track the bad shit down is to explore the contents of memory, but to keep the code from doing it’s mojo you have to restart, clearing the contents of memory. So basically, this malicious code can bone you. That’s impressive and all, but what impressed me more was the fact that this wasn’t some pallid, deathly thin nerd in a black Invader Zim t-shirt, but in actuality a very attractive woman. Wha wha?

Joanna Rutkowska is a security specialist for COSEINC, a Singapore-based IT company. She has long been interested in the inner workings of operating systems, and has been involved in Linux kernel programming. She now works on dectecting and developing stealth exploits that can attack XP and Vista via rootkits, network backdoors and covert channels. You can check out Rutkowska’s work at Invisible Things.

(Photo courtesy of Hackinthebox.org)

Awesome Website of the Week: Beerorkid.com

Posted on March 23, 2007

Awesome! Another Awesome Website of the Week! And it’s BeerorKid.com. BoK, or Steve Ramos as he is known in the Journal Star editorial pages and presumably that’s what his wife calls him too, is a fellow Lincolnite, an avid cyclist, a networking guy at the state capitol, and an amateur beermaker. Over at his site, he pledges a pic in every post, and at least 5 posts a day (cept weekends), chuck full o’ random crap. Therein is a collection of youtube videos, funny pictures, assorted hotties, and great links, as well as tidbits of news, Linux stuff, recipes, and just about every goddamn thing else.

It really is a great site, with a good group of players. Anyone can sign up and begin posting there, as I do occasionally, and so do many others. The comments are a great place to hang out, you can tell when I have a particularly slow day at work because I’ll be checking out BoK’s site all day long, and I’ll put in at least five or six comments a day. And that’s about the highest recommendation I can give. It’s a fun lot for sure.

There’s so much stuff there that you can always just click around and find something new. Lincoln stuff, girlie galleries, Ubuntu depositories, christ knows what else is there. It’s definitely a place worth checking out, posting comments to, and signing up to write for. Go to it now

Awesome Website of the Week: 30boxes.com

Posted on March 16, 2007

One thing I’m pretty obsessive about is keeping organized. And 30boxes.com helps me do just that. At its heart, it’s a calendaring app, similar to Apple’s iCal or Mozilla’s Sunbird (or whatever they’re calling it now). But it does so much more than that.

It incorporates RSS feeds, tracking when you post to your blog, to Flickr, del.icio.us, MySpace, and much more. It imports Yahoo! Weather, showing you what to expect for the next few days while you’re planning and posting items. It can even integrate with iCal/Sunbird/any program that operates with .ics, although in a simplistic way. Proper two-way synchronizing hasn’t been done yet. It also lets you share your calendar with a blog badge, RSS feed, and other little tricks. But wait, there’s more! Being a 2.0 web app, it has social integration. Your friends can share calendars, so you can see what they’re up to, what they’ve posted on the internet, and so forth. It basically acts as a big tarball for stuff you and your mates do on the internets.

There’s also a messaging system and a todo list. Another big (yet I hardly use it) feature is the webtop view, which is like a little mini-OS in the browser. They say these things are gonna be the next big thing, but I won’t hold my breath. The webtop view lets you see your todo list, your current day’s events, has a google search box, and adds widgets for Flickr, Facebook, BittyBrowser, and assorted other things.

The calendar system updates using a little command line box (or as DB points out, a “One box”, but I prefer CLI). The One box includes a set of commands to set time and date, automatically email invited people (regardless of whether or not they are 30box users), set reminders, and other neat stuff. Tagging is fairly prevalent as well, and you can choose who sees your calendar, as well as mark specific events as private.

If you’re a person like me that needs to be organized and obsess over dates and times and such, then 30boxes is a great way to do it. Go check it out.

Awesome Website of the Week: Twitter.com

Posted on March 10, 2007

Some o’ yous might look at the sidebar (on the right, take your time) and say “Hey Joshua, what’s that flashy badge there what says what you’re doing?” Well that’s Twitter. Twitter is an interesting way to blath about what you’re doing at any given moment (the posts are called “tweets”), and see your friends doing the same. That’s about it really. It’s sort of pointless, but it’s pretty fun. It integrates with your standard IM clients and your mobile phone, so you can post on the website, via IM, or from your cell, as well as recieve updates to those places. Facebook has a similar feature (that was part of what caused a ridiculous uproar among its users, people don’t seem to realize that if they don’t want their privacy violated, they shouldn’t put their private lives out there; it’s just that simple) although it isn’t as advanced or easy as Twitter. And, as a bonus to OSX users, Iconfactory has a nifty (and free) little app called Twitterrific, that looks good and works great with Twitter. I highly recommend it. The Twitter fan wiki also has a list of Twitter apps, hacks, and so forth that is worth checking out. And be sure to look for me there, my user name is jwiltshire. (I should allow a caveat, the fact that today Twitter has been having some problems that will hopefully be cleared up, and at the moment my Twitter badge has been outputting “Undefined”. Soon, we’ll see.) As it turns out, the “Undefined” problem is a Safari issue and not a Twitter problem. I’m gonna email someone about it.

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