Chris Koerner

RSS OMG WTFBBQ!!!!!!111

I’ve been an avid user of ~~Ranchero~~ NewsGator’s NetNewsWire RSS (Lite) reader. It’s a great app and it has a huge user base. However, as of this evening that has all changed. I’ve found a kick butt replacement that’s a million times better. It’s called Vienna.

Vienna is an open source aggregator that has some cool features.

First, it allows me to archive feeds. This was one of the features lacking in NNW Lite. Feeds would fall off into the void way too quickly. Now I can horde my information FOREVER.

Second, I like the UI more so than NNW. It looks like an iApp. NNW looked very ancient, in a 10.2 vs 10.4 Finder kinda way.

Smart Folders. Holy Cow. I can now create folders with keywords like “silly string” and “brown toed shoes” and any articles that contain those phrases will instantly appear in my silly string and brown toed shoes folder*
Pretty sweet deal.

If you’re a Mac user and you’re looking for a robust and well put together RSS reader, look no further than Vienna. It’s open source (ergo free), has a great feature set, well thought out UI and is capable of importing your subscriptions from NNW. Highly recommended!

*I had to think of something I’d want to filter. Silly string and brown toed shoes were the first things to come to my mind. Kids, don’t blog late.

HALO

A friend wanted me to throw together a quick edit for a poster. Being the nice guy I am I said sure and went to work on the image she sent me.

This is the result:

I wasn’t aware of the photo’s origins until after I sent her the completed work. I feel bad and would like to give the orginal artist credit. The original image belongs to harbaugh79.

How did I find the original artist? Images from Flickr have a distinct filename. They look something like this:

258080280_187bf237ed_o.jpg

If you take the first section of that file name and add it to www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id= you get a complete URL pointing to the page where the image originated. (e.g. www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=258080280) Pretty neat huh?

All my images are gone.

I nuked the dir that contained the images that were in all my previous posts. Unless my host has some magical backup, they’re gone. So for all my old posts you’re just going to have to close your eyes and imagine what I was talking about.

Who let me on the internet?

No, I will not click your yellow button.

Buyers beware!

My father received this rather fishy email from an ebay user wanting to purchase his motorcycle we posted on ebay for him. The weird thing is that my email address is the main contact, as my father does not have an ebay account. We did, however, put his email address in the ebay listing, in hopes that potential buyers would contact him with questions.

“I’m hiding my email for privacy, you can reply using the yellow button.”

Pfffft!

A Very Hungry iTunes

I’m totally digging the new iTunes 7. Every release I geek out of ther changes Apple makes. I haven’t had a single bad experience upgrading to the next version. They just keep making the dang thing better. I like the new Coverflow interface, the super cool album art finder and the greatly improved iPod settings ‘panel’. But there are two things I’d like to mention that detract from such a robust program; the new UI elements, their darker than normal look and the huge memory usage. I’ve found fixes for the UI but have no fix for the memory usage. 🙁
Black is the new Aqua

I don’t care for the BIG BOLD LETTERS used for the header in the Source list. It’s rather distracting. Another issue with the source list is the amount of wasted space between the different groups. But hey! It looks like someone felt the same and posted this hint on macosxhints.com. No more BIG BOLD LETTERS!

What is up with the dark and dreary black and grey UI elements? Where’s the pretty aqua blue? Oh, ok so this is a ‘new’ version of iTunes, we get it. Yeah…So, Paul Barlow to the rescue with his great little Aqua4iTunes app. It replaces that dreary black and grey with nice shiny aqua buttons! Check out his great little beta here.

So far I’ve found fixes for the big things that bother me. Now let’s talk about something I can’t fix. The amount of memory iTunes uses when invoking the Coverflow view.
Feed me Seymour!

Below is a screenshot of iTunes at idle. At this point all I’ve done is open itunes and let it sit for a moment. I’m not playing a song, downloading anything, or updating my iPod. Just idle.

iTunes is using a very comfortable 34MB of ram, no biggie. Now lets turn on Coverflow.

I flipped through my albums for a few seconds and the memory usage increased to 563MB of ram. That’s 1/3 of my total memory dedicated to one single applicaion. Wow. I have a modest library, with about 8GB of music. Ok, so let’s turn off Coverflow and reclaim that memory…

Uhhh..Ok iTunes where’s the rest of that ram? 329 MB is still being used? How do I get that back? What if I close Coverflow, wanting to free up some resources to open another program? I have to close iTunes and reopen it. Groan.

These are minor compared to the other problems I’ve been hearing about. So I’ll chalk this up to a new version glitch/bug/rushtogetitoutthedoor problem. Here’s to hoping this memory monster will one day be tamed. I’ll just be glad I’m not running this on a G4 iMac with 245 MB of ram! Ouch.