Gadget Wisdom » Lifestyle

Information Overload – Trying to Reorganize A Workflow

Guru — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 05:52:07 +0000

In January of 2011, I wrote a story on the subject of Organizing Your Workflow with Instapaper and Pinboard. This was in response to the announcement of the impending closure of Xmarks(which later did not close), and the announcement that Delicious was shutting down. This had brought me to Pinboard. Pinboard is currently available at a rate of just over $10 for a lifetime subscription, plus $25/yr for an Archival Account. At the time, I used Instapaper, a Read It Later service, as a holding pen for stories, which I later archived in Pinboard. In April of 2011, I announced the move to Read It Later(now Pocket). There were many good reasons for this, however, the refresh from Read It Later to Pocket made service lean more toward the visual. Which brings me to May of 2012, where I once again pondered the subject, right after I read Clay Johnson’s book, the Information Diet. At the time, I vowed to get my information overload under control. Here we are, March of 2013, and…it is worse. I finally declared bankruptcy on Pocket(Formerly Read it Later). I exported everything I was most definitely NOT Reading Later, and sent it to Pinboard. There [...]

The post Information Overload – Trying to Reorganize A Workflow appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Running Personal Services on a Low End VPS

Guru — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 21:26:08 +0000

For those of us who like to tinker with client/server software for personal or household, there are many good options. You can use a Raspberry Pi as a server, for example. You can use an old computer. Both of these would have services running out of your home or business. But, as we are an increasingly mobile society, you might not have good upstream bandwidth, or your ISP may block ports into your home. So, that is where a low-end VPS offering comes in. We chose ChicagoVPS, which offers a $12/year 128mb VPS, with 10GB of storage space and 100GB of monthly bandwidth. That is more than enough for personal use. They offer three locations: Chicago, Buffalo, or LA. There are similar services averaging around $12-15 a year. This is not the sort of service where you expect a lot of reliability. The service has had some hiccups, but as long as you backup and take adequate steps you should on any service, there shouldn’t be any problem. On a 128mb instance, I have Tiny Tiny RSS running, as well as ZNC, and a few other random services that I only use for my own personal interests. What do you [...]

The post Running Personal Services on a Low End VPS appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Reader Refugees – The Death of Google Reader

Guru — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 20:26:59 +0000

It has been a long two weeks since Google announced the death of Google Reader. This left many people scrambling for new solutions as the clock countdowns to its shutdown on July 1st, 2013. There are many alternatives out there of various types. Feedly, for example, has been working on a Reader alternative that uses the same API. The service is also working to offer more Reader like features to welcome the over half a million Reader Refugees. They seem very determined to be the new Reader, and are even welcoming those interested in their API-compatibility to enable their applications to keep working. For me, however, this was too fancy. Most of us who are interested in replacing Reader emphasize text. We want the experience of a newspaper, not a magazine. Most Readers use the traditional Inbox style of receiving, akin to email programs. The information is the most important part. For this, I skipped over TheOldReader, which was designed to mimic the original Google Reader design, and went straight to two open source projects. Newsblur Newsblur is the brainchild of Samuel Clay. In addition to the standard Inbox display, it allows [...]

The post Reader Refugees – The Death of Google Reader appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Reflecting on Life with a Chromebook

Guru — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:05:28 +0000

A week ago, we announced a product review challenge. Spending time with a Chromebook to see if it could be our daily driver. Let’s review the conditions of our challenge. We’d use the device in lieu of our primary productivity machine. So, we’d still have our Android phone for what we used it for. So, it wasn’t the ‘only’ thing used. Let’s go over a few areas… Mail Most mail services have a webmail option, so this isn’t an issue. We use Google Apps mail for our primary address anyway, which is browser based. Social Networking We’ve never been able to find a Twitter client we really liked anyway, so using web based ones wasn’t any better or worse. Facebook and Google Plus are web-based anyway, so no difference there. Chat and IRC There are no good Chrome extensions for IRC. But most IRC servers have a web client. Will do in a pinch. For chat, we tried a few options. The Chat by Google extension is nice, but only supports one account. We have two, a personal and a business account. So we tried Imo.im, Trillian, etc. Imo.im, nicely, supports desktop notifications. Productivity We usually use OpenOffice for simple [...]

The post Reflecting on Life with a Chromebook appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Taking the Chromebook Challenge

Guru — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 16:27:07 +0000

The Gadget Wisdom labs has recently acquired an Acer C7 Chromebook for testing purposes. The C7 has a list price of $199 and offers an 11.6″ screen, a Celeron processor. The hard drive and memory are upgradeable. It’s competition in the Chromebook space is the $249 ARM-based Samsung Chromebook. But, while the Samsung is sleeker than the Acer C7, it lacks the possible benefits of a x86 processor and upgradable components if you want to hack the thing. But, why buy a Chromebook(other than the compelling price for a secondary system), even if you want to hack it to pieces? Many people live in their browser anyway, so why not have a computer that lives entirely in the browser? So, that is a challenge we’re prepared to try. We’ve been setting up web-based equivalents of our standard daily programs, and will be trying to live with ChromeOS only while our primary machine gets a clean install of the latest version of its OS. Will we last a whole week, which is the goal? Or is ChromeOS only good for trips where all you want is a browser? How does it compare to our experiments with the Asus Transformer, which is [...]

The post Taking the Chromebook Challenge appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Back to Thinking About Podcasting Studios

Guru — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 06:29:09 +0000

Audio equipment has a special passion for us for some reason. None amongst our numbers are musicians per se, but the interest remains. As you may know, the Android Buffet podcast is also a project of the Weneca Media Group, the unofficial parent of Gadget Wisdom and a few other sites. Much of our sound equipment collection is based on serving the needs of that podcast…and actually consists of three basic studio models. The Home Studio – This is a permanent installation…well, as permanent as we get The Mobile Studio – This is the single-person mobile studio, designed to fit in a carry-on bag. The SELF Studio – Used only once, at the SouthEast Linux Fest, this was enough equipment to do a multi-person show live. Everything continues to evolve each time we assemble it for a trip. The requirements we have are simple. A co-host and/or guest, coming in over the Internet. A mostly live to tape performance…editing a podcast is a pain…so we quickly gave it up. Live audio streaming. Video sounds like a lot of fun, at least as fun as doing audio. However, the amount of work and cost required to do video is exponentially higher [...]

The post Back to Thinking About Podcasting Studios appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Equipping your UPS – Planning

Guru — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 06:44:50 +0000

Hot on the heels of discussing emergency power for mobile, it is time to discuss thoughts about Uninterruptable Power Supplies(UPS). These battery backup devices use heavy-duty batteries to power your electronics in the event of failure. When power is lost, it automatically powers using the batteries. The first rule of UPSes is to always get ones with a removable/replaceable battery. You can get replacement batteries without much issue, although manufacturers would obviously prefer you replace the unit. Our current favorite simple UPS for home use is the APC BE550G. This is an 8 outlet 550VA UPS. The green feature is a master outlet, which turns controlled outlets off when the master device is off. This is also a great green feature for various surge protectors. <asa>B0019804U8</asa> However, the basic UPSes may have trouble with some power supplies, so mileage may vary. The issue is voltage regulation, and pure sine waves(necessary for Active PFC power supplies). There are more expensive UPSes, and more full featured ones. There are advantages to voltage regulation and purer power, but for some devices, it doesn’t matter. Also, there are some issues with APC. We had used Belkin for a while, but had longevity and design issues. [...]

The post Equipping your UPS – Planning appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Give the Gift of Emergency Power This Holiday Season

Guru — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 07:20:38 +0000

Last month, Hurricane Sandy hit hard in the New York area, in many places that hadn’t seen devastation of that level in half a century. Many people lost power and internet for days. Many people lost more than that…and our sympathies go out to them. But, while we fortunately came out of it without any serious issues, it as given us a lot of time to think about emergency preparedness. The need to prepare for the unexpected. One of the coolest devices we saw being used during this was the BioLite CampStove. This is a small portable camp stove that, when stowed, is the size of a water bottle. It uses twigs and other simple fuel, and can not only cook, but provide USB charging. The company took to the streets during the power outages to offer power and a warm drink. The list price is roughly $130 direct, and the money is partially used to fund a larger version used in third-world countries. Most people will need to handle an outage of hours or a perhaps a day or two. A long extended outage does happen, but in most areas is not as common. In the case of New [...]

The post Give the Gift of Emergency Power This Holiday Season appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Shrinking Your Electronics by Thinking Embedded Systems

Guru — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 20:24:25 +0000

Electronics are getting smaller. People don’t have desktops in as large a number as they once did. Many have laptops, netbooks, tablets, etc. This is an area we’ve been thinking about a lot lately, mostly due to the flood of inexpensive systems on a board, led by the Raspberry Pi. The Pi is a computer the size of a credit card, and the commonly sold version includes RCA video, HDMI video, two USB ports, and an Ethernet Port. The entire assembly is powered by a microUSB charger of the sort bundled with phones and other electronics. The GPU onboard is capable of blu-ray quality playback. There is no built in drive, the OS is loaded off of an SD card. You can hook in a USB drive, but not as a boot drive. There is a special version of Fedora, Debian, and even an XBMC port to turn the Pi into a full-fledged media center Now, this won’t be taking the place of a full-fledged PC for many things, but the Pi, and some of the competing devices are perfect for ‘embedded system’ type functions. An embedded system is a computer system designed for specific control functions within a larger [...]

The post Shrinking Your Electronics by Thinking Embedded Systems appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Feed Changes

Guru — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 05:05:51 +0000

To All RSS Subscribers: Due to the recent uncertainty regarding the future of Feedburner, we are removing all redirects to Feedburner. All links on the site will now use local feeds. If possible, please update your subscriptions. If not, the Feedburner feeds will continue to be maintained for as long as Google continues to offer the service, but we feel that self-hosting all feeds is the more prudent long-term move. Feed: http://www.gadgetwisdom.com/feed/ Related articles Feedburner on the Rocks?(onecoolsitebloggingtips.com) Is Google Feedburner Shutting Down?(quickonlinetips.com) Using Feedburner? Time to Look at Alternatives(blogher.com) Why, How and When to Quit FeedBurner(socialfish.org)

The post Feed Changes appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Amazon MP3 Drops Linux Support, Adds DRM-Lite

Guru — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:58:41 +0000

As we’ve previously mentioned, we’ve been redoing our music collection. Now, after weeks of part-time ripping, and some cleanup, it is time to upload the music to various sites, as a test. Amazon has discontinued its music downloader for Linux and is no longer allowing Linux users to download the .azw file for use with a third-party application. The AZW files are used to download an entire album when purchased. This occurred concurrently with the rollout of their new Cloud Player product, which included one other fun feature. DRM. Not on the file level. Amazon proudly sells DRM-free MP3s, but to upload or download albums, you need to authorize your device. You are allowed a maximum of 10 devices, you can deauthorize a device and the slot will reopen thirty days later. This includes Android devices. If you don’t do this, you can only download albums one track at a time. We wanted to see who else was pointing out that this is a DRM-like feature, and came up with an interesting analysis of same by The Leisurely Historian. His theories are: (Comments are ours) Compromise negotiated with music labels over cloud player – This seems the most likely. But, [...]

The post Amazon MP3 Drops Linux Support, Adds DRM-Lite appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Send Once, Read Everywhere – Kindle Everywhere

Guru — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 22:10:51 +0000

Earlier this week, Amazon launched the Send to Kindle Browser Extension for Chrome. This adds to the Kindle ecosystem by allowing you to send web content to your Kindle, and choose to read it, or archive it for future use as part of the Kindle Personal Document Library. Amazon continues to try to build the ecosystem of the Kindle. There are several third-party applications that had similar functionality, and multiple read it later services. But, one of the brilliant moves made with the Kindle is that it is completely platform agnostic. Amazon may make a Kindle Fire, and the e-ink line of Kindles, but they have desktop apps, mobile apps, a browser based reader, and continue to add functionality to the ecosystem completely independent of any hardware. This is all part of the plan. People may complain about the walled gardens of certain closed systems, but if you can use your content on everything, then that is as close to open as you can get without actually being so. Personal Documents was a good move on Amazon’s part, because it allowed reading of any document. People had been side-loading their own content anyway. Some even bought a Kindle and only [...]

The post Send Once, Read Everywhere – Kindle Everywhere appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Mandatory PSA: Secure Your Digital Life

Guru — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 04:24:08 +0000

Every tech pundit out there has been talking about the heartbreaking story of Mat Honan of Wired and how hackers used social engineering to gain access to one of his accounts, and the chain reaction results. One of Honan’s problems stemmed from how his accounts were daisy-chained together. `The recovery email for one account led to another, account names on different networks were consistent, etc. Figuring out how to mitigate this requires some thought. We have multiple email accounts, and it will probably require some diagramming and planning to figure everything out there. Then there are passwords. We admit to people all the time that we don’t even know half our passwords. We use a two-pronged attack on this. One is the open-source, multi-platform app KeePass. KeePass offers a password vault stored as a file, encrypted using a single Master Password. All of the passwords in it are generated by the program and impossible for most people to remember. We also use Lastpass as a service. Lastpass has a plugin for every browser, offers one click login, form filling, and more. The basic service is free, but the premium version adds mobile support and additional features. We’re not using half [...]

The post Mandatory PSA: Secure Your Digital Life appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Ripping Music Revisited

Guru — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 03:41:53 +0000

Amazon MP3 Tech Support is useless. Of course, as friendly as Amazon is, they have been consistent useless to us. From insisting our package would be delivered when UPS insisted it had been delayed to the latest, asking us to email log files repeatedly to an address that sent back it did not accept incoming emails…and it was apparently correct as we’re still waiting. At the beginning of the month, we wrote about Amazon upgrading Cloud Player. It prompted us to break out our music collection and try uploading it. Now, we’ve gone back and forth about cloud based music, having tried the now defunct mp3tunes, Moozone, Google Music, and Amazon Cloud Player. We’ve also bought a lot of DRM-free MP3 files from Amazon during sales. Amazon is great at sales. So, it made sense to give Amazon a shot, as they’ll store anything you buy from them for free. Their new model is $25 a year for more song space than we can use, and a good amount of general file storage. If only they had full Linux support and/or an API. But we hope this will come soon, at least for the Cloud Drive. So, we uploaded the entire [...]

The post Ripping Music Revisited appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Amazon Cloud Player Updates – Matches Competitors

Guru — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 04:16:00 +0000

We’ve had a long road in cloud music. Back in December of last year, we compared the limitations of Google Music to that of Amazon MP3. At the time, Google won. The Amazon web player was not feature filled, the Google Music interface won, for ability to enter metadata, among other things. But that has changed. Amazon announced a new revamped cloud offering. The most significant innovation is one that iTunes already offers, and that Amazon will now as well. Amazon will scan music libraries and match the songs on their computers to their catalog. All matched songs – even music purchased elsewhere or ripped from CDs will be made instantly available in Cloud Player as 256 Kbps audio. Cloud Player now allows editing of metadata inside the player, a feature Google has had for some time. Amazon Cloud Player is expanding to the Roku Box. And, unlike previously, music purchased prior to the announcement of Amazon Cloud Player will now be available in your box. This was always a pet peeve, as Amazon knew the music was purchased…you bought it from them. The new Cloud Player offers two options. Cloud Player Free – Store all music purchased from Amazon, plus 250 songs. [...]

The post Amazon Cloud Player Updates – Matches Competitors appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Mixing up the Workflow and Avoiding Overload

Guru — Fri, 04 May 2012 22:38:47 +0000

This is not the first time we’ve talked about our workflow. It has evolved over the years. Our workflow currently consists of a Read It Laterservice and a long-term bookmark archiving service. When we started, the Read it Later service was Instapaper. We adopted Pinboard as the long-term archiving service. It is nice to know all the reference material we might use is stored for later use. We later moved to Read It Later, which has recently rebranded as Pocket. The problem is we have 11,000+ bookmarks in Pinboard, and near 3000 in Pocket. Just reading all the stuff we need to learn to keep informed is a challenge. Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet discusses this problem, and makes a large amount of suggestions on the subject. He refers to the idea as infoveganism. This is not to say we totally agree with Mr. Johnson, but we see the point that information overload is a problem. Last year, Ars Technical posted an opinion piece titled, “Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity.” Perhaps RSS is but so is the alternative, social media. Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, etc are all sources of often repeating information. Who can keep up [...]

The post Mixing up the Workflow and Avoiding Overload appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

The Asus Transformer as a Productivity Device

Guru — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 04:47:08 +0000

Last time on Gadget Wisdom, we were asking the question of whether a tablet can be your primary computer. After we wrote this, we headed off on a long weekend with only an Asus Transformer. This is the original Asus Transformer TF101, not the newer Transformer Prime, but the concept is basically the same. If you want the benefits of a tablet, with the option to produce longer form content as needed, this is a perfect choice. The tablet is wonderful for consumption of content. There are not enough tablet apps for Android, but there are enough to make us optimistic for the future. Let’s go over a few of the apps we’ve started to use… News Reading Reader HD (Free Version, Ad Free Version) – The best Google Reader app for Android tablets, in our opinion. The developer is very responsive with bug and feature requestss There are a variety of magazine style news readers that draw from a variety of sources. Even Reader HD offers a magazine mode. We hope the promised version of ReadItLater Pro for tablets arrives soon, but the current version is adequate. Word Processing/Document Creation We have yet to find the best document suite [...]

The post The Asus Transformer as a Productivity Device appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

The Responsive Developer

Guru — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 07:02:28 +0000

Twice in 2011 we had the pleasure of attending a speech by Jon Hall, who is the Executive Director of Linux International. In both cases, he told a story of the early days of software, about companies that were small enough that the service department was the programmer himself. As these new small startups, and this 1-2 person software companies spring up to make mobile apps, or cloud apps, or what have you, you have the same situation. You can contact a developer of a mobile app, in many situations, and get them to work with you, or have them seriously consider feature requests. The developer of Poweramp for Android, a popular music player, was recently on Twitter asking people for feature requests to consider, for example. We recently have had a lot of luck in this regard. We emailed a developer, and they looked into an edge case issue to see if they could address it. We made another suggestion of another, and today they sent us a beta to test and give our opinion of. And these are mobile apps. Most mobile apps are less than five dollars, more are less than ten. That a developer is willing [...]

The post The Responsive Developer appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Choosing a Cloud Photo Service

Guru — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:17:29 +0000

How things change over the years is astonishing. A few short years ago, the idea of storing so much of your personal information on remote computers would be worrisome. In fact, the ability to get all that information in the cloud would be limited, with slow internet connections. Now, everything is Cloud Cloud Cloud. Now, as we mentioned before, never put all your eggs in one basket. always keep copies in multiple places. But backup services are a separate issue for another day. What we were looking for in a photo service was not what everyone was looking for in such a system. Some people want their photos to be social. Flickr,, for example, states that its mission statement is twofold…to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them, and enable new ways of organizing photos and video. There are tons of great images on Flickr, and it has a great community if your goal is creating a community around photo sharing. There are a lot of serious photographers on Flickr who want to share with other serious photographers. Flickr offers a free service, and a $25 a year Pro account. The Pro account gets [...]

The post Choosing a Cloud Photo Service appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.

Firefox vs Chrome

Guru — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 05:27:19 +0000

We’ve just recently returned to Firefox after some time with Chromium, Chrome’s open-source brother. In the time since we’ve left, Firefox has iterated so fast. In the last calendar year, it has gone from Version 4 to Version 9. It did so mostly by eliminating minor version numbers. Every version is now a major version. Over the last year, there have been a lot of changes. Firefox 4 was the first to bundle Firefox Sync, which syncs browser settings. The speed of Firefox has increased sevenfold, and the memory usage, a common complaint about Firefox, is down 50%. The Browser Wars are an arms race to see who can make their browser faster. Recently, Chrome overtook Firefox for the first time. But it has issues, despite its features. Chrome creates a separate process for each tab, which protects against any single failure bringing down the whole browser. However, this can have pros and cons. Both Firefox and Chrome have reputations for memory issues, although Firefox is more famous for this, the two browsers use more or less memory at different times, because of this design. Firefox has made a good push to reduce its memory usage. While our situation might [...]

The post Firefox vs Chrome appeared first on Gadget Wisdom.