Actually Posting Tech Stuff

So I know that you all are probably looking forward to reading a few facts on my visit to France. Well, I kind of intended this blog to be my daily blog as well as my posts for tech, so those who don't want to read this post can either close out of this window or read it clutching their head whilst making tortured noises. It's really up to you.

Recently I came across a few items thanks to my newest obsession: Google Reader. I have to admit, I had tried it out for a while and it never really made sense to me until I actually started following multiple blogs: up until then, the only blog that I checked frequently was Make: Magazine. After needing to consume more internet material thanks to an absence of actual internet, I decided to, in my twenty minutes of daily internet, save all of the content I possibly could from every tech blog I could find. After getting hooked to said tech blogs once we found a wifi network we could access from our house, I needed a way to constantly check them all in one place. So I tried out Google Reader, and from there I discovered a whole array of things that I've been missing out on.

First to come was Gnome-Do, a utility which I absolutely have no idea how I missed. Gnome-Do provides you with an interface to search for files, create calendar events, play music in your Rhythmbox library, manage tasks on your Remember the Milk account, post to Twitter, and (my personal favorite) install new applications with apt-get. But that's just the tip of the iceberg; Gnome-Do comes with a plethora of plugins that enable you to interface with a whole variety of other resources, and it even has a dock mode to let you imitate the famous OS X staple (except said staple does not include a do-it-all search feature). The downside: It's only for Linux, and the plugins, from what I can tell, are not third-party but rather developed by the Gnome-Do team, so development of new plugins is really up to them. Still, it really is quite an amazing feature, and I've never been so happy with my Linux system.

Also, after browsing Google Reader for some time, I began to get a bit tired of the interface. For one, I was tired of skimming everything with my down-arrow-key held down to find some content that I actually wanted to read. Also, there was no way for me to be able to share the links on Twitter or Facebook. So when I stumbled across Feedly, a Google Chrome extension / Firefox add-on, I was instantly hooked. Feedly takes your Google Reader, Twitter, and Flickr accounts and merges them all into a start page, allowing you to see all of your content at a glance. When you click on an item, it expands to show a preview, which you can either open into a new window or preview the actual webpage in the same window. Thanks to Feedly, I can now tell you what is latest in Fail.

Finally, the last thing I wanted to talk about was Springpad. Whilst browsing Lifehacker, I stumbled across a positive post concerning a certain piece of online organization software called Springpad, and I decided to try it out. Springpad is essentially a single place for you to put everything: contacts, calendars, to-do lists, products, books, bookmarks, wines, and all kinds of other stuff. You can use these different data types in different ways: for example, a to-do list for a bunch of wines, a shopping list for various products, etc. The really cool part is that it pulls various information from the web concerning the various items you post: Springpad might add an Amazon purchase link to a product you list, or a review concerning the wine you're currently interested in. It also lets you organize everything into apps: categories with specific layouts to help you get more organized, for instance, a school planner you can fill with various books, or a trip planner complete with events, packing lists, ideas, and even an itinerary created from the various addresses you've linked to the aforementioned items. My only gripe is that while it does integrate with Google Calendar, the synergy ends there: It appears as its own calendar, doesn't pull existing events, contacts, notes, tasks, bookmarks, or anything else from your Google account, and doesn't synchronize with other popular organization services like Remember the Milk. But it's still in beta, so it's likely that such features are down the road.

So that's pretty much it. To those of you that have read this without wanting to, I will now give you an update on France: Not much is going on, but we have managed to buy a car-turtleshell that will let us ride with more space and ever-increasing dorkiness. But we bought a van to begin with, so I guess we should have expected that. We're off to Rome on the 31st, and we're going to meet my grandmother and my aunt there to go family-tree-hunting with the Mazzeis. Also, as you all may have read, I now have internet in my apartment, so message me! Well, that is, if you can stand the 7-hour time difference.