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Fun with Instapaper

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In the course of reading and assembling topics to write for Gadget Wisdom and other sites, we come across many different articles we may wish to reference later. Which means, as there are never enough hours in the day, we end up with stuff we need to read or review later.

You can bookmark the site, as we did, but keep doing that and you end up with a very crowded bookmark list with things that stay there long beyond their usefulness.

Recently, we decided to try Instapaper as an alternative. We set up folders for our categories, and a pull down menu of bookmarklets that save the current displayed URL into them. We use Google Reader to read blogs, and it offers a Send To function for stories that will send them right to Instapaper.

On the Android, we are recommending Instafetch, as the paid version supports folders, unlike the free Everpaper. If you want to save money, of course you can move things into folders later.

If you don’t have the desire for any apps, you can forward emails with links directly to a special Instapaper email address. Or, our personal favorite, email your Instapaper articles as a Kindle book to your Kindle for reading.

Instapaper is not new, but being as we just started using it, it seemed worth a a bit of a review. Try it out. And if you have thoughts for improving our workflow, send them on along.

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Published on October 28, 2010
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Xmarks to Shut Down

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XMarks is a service that offers cross-platform and cross-browser bookmark, password, and tab syncing. We’ve been using this service since it was Foxmarks, many moons ago. However, now, after four years, they have announced the discontinuing of service in January of 2010.

We’re not sure what we’ll do, as we tend to switch between Chromium and Firefox, using Xmarks to keep the two in sync. At this point, we suppose we’ll have to abandon one or the other. Firefox offers Firefox Sync. Chrome/Chromium offers sync to your Google account built in. Tough decision. As tough as choosing a browser.

Todd Agulnick, Co-Founder and CEO in a farewell blog post, thanked users, investors, and colleagues for their loyalty and signed off in true geek fashion, quoting Douglas Adams, “So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.”

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Published on September 27, 2010
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Calibre and the E-Book

Calibre is an Ebook Management Platform. Originally started in 2006, it has grown, with a team of dedicated developers from a small project to get content onto a reader to myriad of options.

  • Library Management – Calibre manages e-books stored in it for you, including options to sort, tag, comment, etc. Supports the downloading of metadata.
  • E-Book Conversion – Supports all major formats(full list here) including EPUB and MOBI. The conversion program supports rescaling font sizes, automatic detection/creation of chapters/table of contents, and insertion of metadata at the start of the book.
  • Syncing to E-Book Readers – Supports a list of devices it can sync to(Full list here) and automatically chooses the best format for the device.
  • News Ripper – Downloads news from websites/RSS feeds, formats it into an e-book and sends it to the device. Supports full versions of articles, not just summaries. Pre-supported sites include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, etc. You can create custom ‘recipes’ for other sites and use them, even upload them to share with others.
  • Built in E-Book Viewer
  • Content Server – Calibre supports acting as a web server to access your collection using a web browser. Supports email and mobile devices.

Now, this is great if you have an E-Book Reader. Let’s go back to our recent discussion of the Amazon Kindle, with Wi-Fi. Many papers are available for free online. Let’s take the Wall Street Journal, which does charge. The cost of an Amazon Subscription to the WSJ is $14.99 a month. The cost of getting the newspaper is $2.29 per week($9.16 a month) and online only at $1.99 per week(7.96 a month). Personally, while we think charging more on the Kindle is wrong, here’s a way to extract the information using your login and send it to your Kindle.

We did a little test of this feature, and picked a few of their over 200 English news sources(They have additional foreign language offerings). We were able to program it to autogenerate a few choice news sources and send them on a custom frequency to our device as long as Calibre was running in the background. Next, it seems to have a command-line interface, and we’ll have to see if it can run as a cron job on our server.

We have yet to test it, but according to the Calibre forums, the following should work…

ebook-convert <calibreroot>/resources/recipes/nytimes.recipe todays_nytimes.mobi

That should work if set up as a cron job, but e-book conversion, we gather, can be resource intensive. We’ll have more on these experiments later.

Either way, Calibre is available for PC, Mac, and Linux. Why not give it a try?

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Published on September 26, 2010
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Leo Laporte Learns the Value of Federation

Early this morning, famous podcasting personality Leo Laporte, Head TWIT over at the TWIT Network, posted on his Leoville blog a post titled Buzz Kill. Laporte had switched his microblogging over to the underappreciated Google Buzz, which he used to update Twitter. However, he discovered today, August 22nd, that none of his Buzz posts had been public since August 8th. As he puts it,

“Maybe I did something wrong to my Google settings. Maybe I flipped some obscure switch. I am completely willing to take the blame here. But I am also taking away a hugely important lesson. No one noticed. Not even me. …But I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place. I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs.”

You can read the full text at his blog here, but it does emphasize the thought processes we’ve been exploring as we learn about the federated social web. We have had some conversations with Evan Prodromou of Statusnet, among other people, as we try to understand this, and he was kind enough to send along some recommended reading since the last time we blogged about this.

We should own our own brand, and build its value at a site controlled by us. If you have an email address at a domain you control, you may have someone hosting it, but you can move it whenever you like. You have control. If you have your identity, and our email addresses and social media are part of the identity we build online, then the content is in your hands. Social media becomes a means of distribution, rather than a destination.

That is where the federated social web concept comes in. In a federated system, there are distinct entities that control parts of the system, but those parts are connected with agreed-upon rules to make a pleasing and usable whole. The World Wide Web is such a system. Email is such a system.

Statusnet instances aren’t for everyone, admittedly. Ours hasn’t attracted as many connections as Twitter, but gives us access to a different crowd. But what about blogging? Let’s take Gadget Wisdom.

  1. We write a blog entry.
  2. Our RSS feed updates. We use Feedburner to assist with that, but that isn’t required.
  3. We tweet the post to our Twitter account and dent it to our statusnet instance, so people know what we’re talking about. We still own the conversation.
  4. Our site draws in anyone talking about our tweet as comments on the post, thus bringing the discussion back to the blog.

Everything comes back to us. We are integrating social media into our site, not going out and relying on it exclusively. It is part of the reason that we don’t participate in Facebook but we do in Twitter. Twitter and similar microblogging paradigms works as a news delivery system, and can even be an alternative for RSS. Facebook has its status updates as well, but it is part of a bigger system that sees to tie everything together. We prefer to do that ourselves.

In case you didn’t get what we are saying…microblogging, social media, and sites such as Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, Google Buzz, etc should be a content delivery and enrichment system, not a content creation system. Now, we disagree with Leo that they are “an immense waste of time.” We just believe that he should change his approach to social media. Let’s all bring our identities under our control.

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Published on August 22, 2010
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Fun with SIP, Android, and Free Dial-In Numbers

Sipdroid 1.0.7 on a HTC Hero mobile phone
Image via Wikipedia

SIPDroid is a free VOIP client for Android that uses the standard SIP protocol. The VOIP calls will go over the data connection, be it 3G or Wi-Fi, and thus not affect your minute count.

According to their FAQ, it “uses G.711 A-law to transmit voice which needs about 80 kBit/s in each direction. This corresponds to a total of 1.2 MB per minute. A video call needs approximately twice as much. When optionally enabled for all calls Sipdroid uses GSM codec to compress to about 30 kBit/s in each direction resulting in a total of 0.5 MB per minute.”

You can use a + in a phone number in order to indicate to the Android device to use the secondary as opposed to the primary choice. You can set either the phone or SIPDroid to be the primary method of dialing. Emergency calls will always go out over the phone line.

SIPDroid prefers you set up a free or paid account at PBXes. This allows you to have all the advantages of a PBX and is already set up for connecting calls anonymously to Skype and GTalk. You can, if you use them, set a feature that will, if the data reception is bad enough, transfer the call to the phone’s cell number. You need to set up a gateway to the traditional telephone network(PSTN) from the PBX for this to work, however.

For services like dialing onto the regular phone network, you do have to pay money. But not to SIPDroid. To a VOIP provider(more on that at some point). PBXes also offers a paid account with additional features, such as a better voice codec and support for more lines.

If you don’t want to go out on the traditional telephone network, you can use the five extensions offered in the free version to talk to other people logged in(only 2 simultaneous conversations at a time, however).

Since we didn’t want to pay any money for a test, we opted to sign up for a free number with IPKall. They offer dial-in only numbers in the 206, 253, 360, and 425 area codes that will auto-forward to a SIP account you designate. We had some issues as we tried routing a call from them to PBXes and then to a phone on a wi-fi connection logged into the PBXes server. A few times it didn’t seem to connect, and when it did, there was some lag. But it was free and when it worked, it was clear. We also experimented with SIPGate, which offers a free dial-in phone number as well.

We could see a lot of potential uses for this technology. VoIp is nothing new. We’ve played with it before. But, think of the possibilities. A little private network your phone can always be connected to that will alow you to communicate airtime free? Let’s go a step further. We know of someone who lived on a college campus with good wi-fi coverage and considered having an iPod Touch and Skype or such instead of a phone.

As public wi-fi and open wi-fi becomes more available, and with fewer people calling and more people using data…we could imagine a future where people opt for a data only connection and the occasional SIP call. The possibilities are endless.

And we’ll have more on playing with SIP later.

Published on July 25, 2010
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So You Want to Only Use One Microblogging Service

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Last time, we discussed some of the things we’d learned about Status.net and the OStatus standard. Now, our understanding is far from perfect, but we keep trying to learn more. This is some of our attempt to summarize it.

So, here we are once again looking at how other services play with Status.net. We’ve covered the fact that Twitter doesn’t. Although, since Twitter has an API, a bridge has been created that imports the tweets into your timeline as notices. There is a Facebook bridge as well, but we have yet to test it, as we aren’t Facebook users.

But many sites do support standards that Status.net can use. A service has to be PuSh enabled. OStatus is reliant on the fact that most sites noawadays put out an Atom or RSS feed. The problem is real-time notification. That is where PubSubHubbub(PuSh) comes in. It is a simple extension to RSS and Atom feeds for real-time subscriptions. Basically, the feed declares a URL for the Hub server. Now, instead of the subscriber server/reader repeatedly polling the site to look for updates, it can register with the hub to be notified of updates.

That is how OStatus is built. Each site builds a feed of updates and uses PuSh subscriptions to send relevant updates to other sites, and each site is responsible for pushing those updates to the correct user. The rest of OStatus is also built on top of Atom feeds, including extensions to describe social activities like replies, following, user profile information, etc. As their wiki describes it: “the real beauty of it is that at this point we[OStatus] already have something useful, without anything StatusNet-specific. In fact you can already subscribe to someone’s public Google Buzz feed as an OStatus remote user, and they haven’t done anything special for us!”

So, there is one example. You don’t need to be on Google Buzz. If Google Buzz supports PuSh and OStatus, you can subscribe to their feed. Let’s go a step further:

  • WordPress – All the blogs on WordPress.com have PuSh enabled. If you run a WordPress blog elsewhere, you can set up your site as a Hub using a plugin like PushPress. If you are using Feedburner with Pingshot enabled, PuSh is already enabled and no plugin is needed. Sound useful? Why not subscribe to this blog, which is PuSh enabled, by entering the URL into the Remote Subscription option on your identi.ca/status.net account?
  • Tumblr – We tried the test-tumblr that the Status.net wiki used and that was recognized, but a random Tumblr site would not work.
  • Google Buzz – As mentioned above…we tried a few accounts and it does work. It is, of course, one-way.
  • Posterous – It would allow us to subscribe to a random posterous account we picked.

Status.net is working on some workarounds for additional integrations, but any established site can become PuSh enabled and thus support subscriptions in status.net. With a little extra work supporting the standard, they can support activity streams, replies, and other user events without any change in the user experience, except opening it up to interaction with any other site that supports those standards.

Imagine this a few months/years down the road if people support it. It would be like Email. Anyone can self-host or sign up for a social media account on whatever server they want, but anyone on any other server can communicate with them.

We’re in on the ground floor. We’re on our status.net which imports Twitter and lets us subscribe to any PuSh enabled site. And since we run it, we don’t have to worry about the service being discontinued or falling out of favor, because the next service is likely to be…if not immediately compatible, eventually bridged.

In the meantime, check out supporting PuSh on your site. Next time, we hope to have more to say about WebFinger…or how to tie your identity to a website.

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Published on July 11, 2010
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So You Want to Take Control of Your MicroBlogging

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If you haven’t heard of Twitter, you may have been living under a rock for the last few years. If you aren’t quite sure what it is, then you are not alone. People who have Twitter accounts aren’t quite sure what to do with them, and some people will disagree on the point of Twitter.

Twitter is the most popular example of microblogging, although Facebook, extremely popular, is mostly such a service. Twitter limits updates…or tweets to 140 characters. This limit has made URL shorteners popular. There are advantages to the brevity of microblogging, and inserting URL allows you to elaborate elsewhere. We use it not only to interact with those who share interests, but as a real-time substitute for RSS. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is the standard for subscribing to blogs.

So, although some have agreed with us, it is important we don’t miss important information. Many Twitter clients only go back so far. And your Tweets are held closely by Twitter itself. Twitter can cancel your account at any time…they don’t need a reason. While you can appeal it, they owe you nothing. You aren’t paying for the service.

As Backupify, a service that backs up cloud services to its site for you, and provides them in downloadable form, stated, “Imagine if your phone company behaved in a similar fashion, disconnecting your phone number(s) because it didn’t care for the phone conversations you were having. Of course, that could never happen — and not (just) because of government regulation. You pay for your phone service, so the phone company has a certain financial incentive to care for your business. Facebook, Twitter, and most web apps are free. Zero dollars buys you zero service level guarantees. Never forget that you have access to Twitter and Facebook only so long as it is convenient and beneficial to them.”

Now, we do have an account with them, but we chose a different route. Being open-source enthusiasts, we looked for an open-source solution. We came up with StatusNet. It is a microblogging server written in PHP that implements the OStatus standard. OStatus is an open standard that allows people on different social networks to follow each other. It supports PUSH notification.

Diaspora, if it gets off the ground, is a proposal to replace Facebook with an open distributed platform. Anyone could run the software, thus allowing them to control their user data locally. Their local software would interact with other people’s to form a decentralized social network. It would thus work like an email address. Anyone could host your email…but you could choose to contract with someone to do so, and thus ensure a greater responsibility on the part of the provider, or choose a free option. The idea sounds great, and we wish them luck…

Unfortunately, without interoperability with existing services, it will likely occupy the same space as Identi.ca, the most popular and the original Status.net service. There are a lot of people happily on Identi.ca, but it is not a mainstream product.

We already had an Identi.ca account, but now we are running our own Status.net server. And Status.net supports a Twitter Bridge. It allows you to automatically send your notices to Twitter, send local “@” replies to Twitter, subscribe to your Twitter friends on the service, and import your Friends Timeline. The last is not enabled for Identi.ca, but allows you to import your friend’s tweets into your timeline. So, the Status.net server imports the Twitter data, which means that you have it on a server controlled by you.

Now, running your own server somewhere may be a bit too much for you. So Status.net offers single user instances, as well as private community instances. It is extensible with plugins. So any functionality you want could be built on top of it, or interact with.

Using the open standards it supports out of the box, you can subscribe to people from your status.net account who are on Google Buzz, Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress.com, Livejournal…etc.  140 characters isn’t required. You can set your instance to support 140 characters(Twitter Standard), or more or less than that.

Interoperability will hopefully lead to longevity. Even famous Twitter account ShitMyDadSays, has migrated to a Status.net instance. Having accounts on every single service can be confusing. If you can have an account on one service…and link to people on other services, isn’t that better?

We tried to ask a few questions of the founder of Status.net, in regards to how people were using the Twitter integration specifically, but the question was a bit open-ended, and thus we did not quite get all the answers we’re still looking for. Either way, it’s fun to play with.

More on this to come. In the meantime, any questions?

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Published on June 27, 2010
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Android Should Separate Apps from OS

There is fragmentation in the Android market. Due to carrier approval delays on operating system updates, among other things, the Android marketplace is split between 1.5, 1.6, and 2.1. This means that going forward, unless you want to hack your phone, you may experience long delays in upgrades.

Engadget reported that Google has a solution(via Mobiputing). It plans to unbundle the apps from core operating system. And this makes sense. If a new update to the web browser comes, you don’t have to wait for it to go through the manufacturer and carrier approval process.  Carriers should approve and test the basic phone functionality…integration with the carrier’s network, reliability, etc…all the things we expect of them.

But if Google wants to push out an update to the alarm clock app, or something that won’t change its phone functionality(except at a very high level, ie appearance/organization), they won’t need approval. And customers will be happier. They’ve already done updates to Google Maps, for example, without needing to run that by the carriers and manufacturers.

By decreasing the amount of pieces of the puzzle that are part of the OS and rolling them into the Android Market for updates, we would all get a better experience. But that is just our opinion, we suppose.

Published on April 19, 2010
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Editorial: Find Me a Twitter Client

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Guru is the editor of the Gadget Wisdom blog and the voice of GadgetWisdom on Twitter.

I have gotten addicted to Twitter. It wasn’t my idea. I got onto Twitter to promote the blog, initially, and didn’t think I would have much use for it. But like many Twitter has mostly replaced the RSS feed for me. I want to keep up on what is going on, and I want that information delivered to me.

So all of the sites I used to follow in my RSS reader that offer a Twitter feed, I unsubscribed to the RSS feed. I’m hardly alone in that. There is too much to go through out there. And the nice thing is that in addition to straight blog->twitter feeds, there is some human filtering. If Tweeter A shares my preferences, the things they link to and retweet are likely to be ones I want to know about. That also creates a social element, as there can be commentary/dialogue about these things.

I am also on Identi.ca/StatusNet, also at GadgetWisdom. It is the same philosophy, but has a significantly different set of people, and fewer of the news sources I’m looking for, so I use it less frequently. It does offer a higher percentage of tech people though, so it has its place.

The Gadget Wisdom blog auto-tweets new blog entries, and I do try to comment on what other people are saying to get involved in the conversation. But ultimately, my problem is finding the right Twitter client.

I am a Linux user. The most popular Twitter clients that will work on Linux are Adobe Air based. Adobe Air is nice in that Air programs will work on any OS you can successfully install the software onto. But Adobe software can be difficult, although to Adobe’s credit, they do maintain the software and try to improve it.

I’ve been using Twhirl, which has not been maintained since Seesmic acquired it. Seesmic has its own Desktop software, which they’ve spun off into a variety of other social networking products, including one for Android. Twhirl is not ideal, but it has several features I want. I am trying to find the Twitter client that does everything I want. So, here are my parameters for a Twitter client. Note: This is a discussion of desktop, not mobile clients.

When I return home after a few hours away, I want to catch up on my tweets. This is where the problems come in. For one, with any client, if I don’t leave the client running, then I can only retrieve an hour or two of tweets. What if I’m gone for the day…6-12 hours? Some programs even have a maximum number of tweets they’ll keep even if you do leave it running, causing you to lose some. And even using the web interface, it is hard to go back more than a certain number of hours in your timeline.

So, this is what I want in a Twitter client

  • Lightweight – It’s Twitter. I don’t need it to take up that much memory. I wouldn’t mind if it saved my Tweets locally in realtime. I could afford the hard drive space.
  • Keep Track of Read Tweets – When I go out, or even when I’m in, I want it to keep track of where I left off reading and make sure everything from then on until I return is retained.
  • Prioritize Mentions – When I return, I want to know if anyone said anything to or about me to reply with before I read through hours of tweets to catch up.
  • Multiple Account Support – I have to monitor more than one account.
  • Backup – Why can’t the program save my tweets locally as a backup? My IM client can. Is there a single Twitter client that can do this?

So, let’s take a look at some Twitter clients we’ve tried…We mentioned Twirl, and it isn’t maintained, so we’ll skip it for now…

TweetDeck

Tweetdeck is perhaps the most commonly used Twitter client after the Twitter web interface itself.

  • It uses a column based interface… It has a lot of good features.
  • No Status.net/Identi.ca support
  • Multiple Account Support, but you cannot combine/group information from multiple accounts together.
  • Online sync option, but only for column information, not for position or account information.
  • A dot appears next to Tweets to mark whether or not it is read or unread.

Seesmic

Seesmic Desktop is the most serious challenger to Tweetdeck.

  • Multiple Account Support
  • Either single or multiple column format. Offers a filter/columns to group information from multiple accounts or separately look at each feed.
  • No Status.net/Identi.ca support.
  • No Online Sync, despite the fact Seesmic offers a web-based product.
  • No good way to keep track of your place, except by clearing your read Tweets.

Seesmic Web is an online version of the Desktop client, with similar features.

Gwibber

I needed to cover a native Linux client. I want to love Gwibber. But it has a few showstoppers.

  • Multiple Account Support, including Status.net/Identi.ca.
  • Offers a singe column input, but offers the opportunity to filter the column to a specific stream, ie account, mentions, etc.
  • No way to keep track of read Tweets.
  • No support for Groups or Twitter Lists

A lot of the above is on their roadmap for future improvements, but it isn’t quite there yet. Of course, I’m running the latest testing version for Fedora, which is not the most current. Ubuntu Linux users would have a more current version.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a web based client, and very popular. But it has that same showstopping problem we can’t find a solution for. Keeping track of where we left off.

I’ve looked at other clients, but cannot find anything that works for me. So tell me, what do you use? What works?

Published on March 7, 2010
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You and Your Android

Android Logo
Image by Arvid via Flickr

Recently, several members of the Wisdom family got themselves Android(TM) based phones. We all dived wholeheartedly into the application phone lifestyle. The term smartphone isn’t quite accurate, and the primary advantage of these types of phone are all the possibilities inherent in being able to run applications to do almost anything with them.

We’ve always been fans of the open platform.  For all the wonderful things iPhones can do, there is still a lot of things that are restricted by Apple‘s management policy. In some cases, the Android is perfectly capable of doing those things, but no one has yet written an app for that. But in that regard, the Android will be catching up as its popularity increases. Or so we hope.

But there are adoption problems. A recent survey indicated that 73% of Android users are male. However looking at the numbers, as is sometimes the case in technology, all numbers show a larger percentage of male users. The Blackberry, which has widespread adoption, is not listed. Verizon’s big Android push this year has put the technology, which was previously niche, into the mainstream. Every provider is increasing its Android phone offerings. We’ll be interested to see how the demographics evolve in a year.

Sometime in the near future Android will offer a Flash plugin. And while we find Flash is less than ideal as a platform, its everywhere online. This will spur more Android adoption in the future.

To that end, to celebrate our newfound enjoyment of the Android platform, we’ll be introducing some Android posts here on Gadget Wisdom. Look out for them.

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Published on March 1, 2010
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