Aussie Geek Podcast #016 :: Field of Dreams
Welcome to this weeks dose of geek. A fantastic show and full of great stuff. There is a bunch of exciting stuff happening around the place and we are having a fantastic year and we are pleased you could join us. As someone tweeted just tonight “It is great to be a part of the clan!”.
So welcome old and new listeners. As usual here are the contact details and the show notes.
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Show Notes
Welcome
Tech News
- OLPC Hits a few Snags
- Apple Dumps the All or Nothing Upgrades
- Adobe and Apple are Talking Flash
- Google to Support MLab
- WD Introduce New 2TB “Green Drives”
- Mozilla Supports Open Audio and Video Format
- IE8 RC1 Released
- Keith Covers Another Missing MP3 Player *snicker*
- Swiss Police Bust Weed Crop with Google
Applications
- TweetDeck: Adobe AIR Twitter Client
- HDHacker: Back up and restore a MBR (scroll down the page for this one)
Firefox Extensions
- Ghostery: One for the paronoid
- SearchLoad Options: Adds some nice functionality to search in Firefox
Sites and Services
- Domain Pidgeon: Get ideas and buy unique domain names
- YTPodcaster: Create feeds from YouTube (site down when we recorded)
Promo Spot
Feedback
Farewell
Featured Music
Field of Grey
“Disgraced” (mp3)
from “Warning”
(Spectra Records)
Buy at 
About the master boot record on the hard drive. I remember the times when I was keeping Red Hat 7.2 Boot Disk just to set my hard drive correctly for one/two OSes. The Windows tools were pretty poor comparing to what linux offered. The order of the installations was very important because you could lose access to linux. I think MS did this thing on purpose thinking that theirs should be the only OS on your drive. Flashed your MBR and happily ran only Windows.
As for TwitterDeck, I seem to be the only person that is using the web interface. I kinda like it and I have my browser open all the time so I just switch tabs and hit refresh. TwitterDeck is too big for me. Maybe I use twitter in a different way, but the page refresh times as enough for me and I prefer to give my screen up to Skype. The client I actually like is @spaz, http://funkatron.com/spaz, maybe because you can switch views with the keyboard. Twhirl was getting on my nerves with the enforced notifications. I had to turn them off every time and there was no permanent setting to get rid of the sounds right from the start. Spaz has a number on the icon in the dock like Thunderbird does, so you know there are new Twits without anything popping-up.
The thing that keeps me away from using a Twitter AIR client the most is no spell-checker! When you’re typing in Safari you get a red line under the misspelled word. With all the clients you’re on your own.
I remember I was very hesitant to use Twitter like Mattoid. I recently tried convincing my friend to use it, but he told me it’s not serious enough to read when someone is brushing their teeth. I told him the idea behind Twitter are the conversations with random people you wouldn’t know otherwise. Facebook doesn’t give you that. You have few friends who you can phone anyway (at least I use Facebook like that).
Anyway, Adobe AIR is brilliant. It’s true Flash is everywhere. Too bad it’s also driving lots of ads on the net. The recent inventions like playing movie trailers with sound on some sites before you know what hit you is no attractive future for the iPhone either.
Thanks guys, keep it up!
Re Keith
Just be glad he’s not wearing a radio mic =)
Try Chirp for Twitter. It is pretty good.
Just tried TweetDeck - not bad. I actually only just installed Adobe Air today to try Twhirl, will have to test both out.
As for flash, if you want to know how much there is try running FF addon NoScript. It will only run flash on sites if you allow them, I’ve been running it for a while and after setting up usual sites it’s not too bad.
Or you can go ultra safe and run your browser in Sandboxie http://www.sandboxie.com/
@Raf Great comment mate - thanks for taking the time and the effort.
As far as I know I think that TweetDeck has a built in spell checker. It is not that AIR apps are not capable of doing it - just not something that has been high on developers list of features. After all AIR is still pretty new. I am guessing that the other consideration is the fact that ppl use short hand and the normal spelling rules don’t apply.
Take home is that you have to use twitter the way that works for you. There will be clients that everyone loves but then there are apps out there that work best for some and not others. Whatever works for you.
Thanks Howard for dropping a comment and the suggestion!
Awesome to see the blog comments rolling in thanks.
@Skribe - smart arse
Update on Flash for the iPhone - No flash for you. http://www.pcworld.com/article/158712/flash_on_iphone_hopes_dashed.html
Hmmm YouTube has done RSS feeds for ages: http://au.youtube.com/rssls
I like Twhirl as it takes up less screen space than Tweetdeck and I don’t have enough people I follow to not be able to sift through the good tweets.
3rd iTunes review left… my 2schooners one was published within a day, the AGP one still isn’t there. Oh well. I’ll try again!
Anyway, got to go, no wee break this week and I’m desperate.
@Tom True YouTube has had RSS feeds for ages - but not accross the whole of YouTube - Not for particular publishers, searches, pages as defined by the user.
The only way to subscribe to a channel is to subscribe via email and that sucks.
Nope, you can subscribe….
to a particular user:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/INSERTUSERNAMEHERE/uploads
to a particular tag:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/videos/-/INSERTTAGHERE?client=ytapi-youtube-browse&v=2
or a text search:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/videos?q=INSERTTEXTSEARCHHERE&client=ytapi-youtube-search&v=2
Yeah Tom I know you can get RSS by malforming links - but it is not a “feature” it is not something they offer. For the average joe this is beyond A. Their understanding and B. Their desire - they see the email subscription and go for that. It is crap they don’t provide more broad supported and easy to subscribe methods. Even the hack is a PITA. Why can’t I just go to a users page and grab the RSS feed?
You should be able to. I don’t understand why you can’t. That is the point that I was making in the show.
Fair enough. Actually I thought I’d first come across the RSS feeds from an icon on user pages. It turns out there isn’t one, but Safari sniffs out the feed address and displays its RSS logo in the address bar. Plus one for Mac.
Pic here: http://skitch.com/tom125/bdmmr/youtube-techcrunch-s-channel
Another vote for TweetDeck. Been using it for over a month now and I find the Groups feature really useful. I’ve got a Tech group and a Blogging group with all the people whose tweets I don’t want to miss. Then I just dip into the rest when I can.
But a word of warning. Don’t close a Group column before you close TweetDeck or you’ll have to redefine the column next time you open the program. Just leave the columns open.
Hi Aussie Geeks (and canadian),
I’ve changed from Twhirl to TweetDeck a few weeks ago and there’s no way I’m going back. The ability to have groups and, mostly, to search terms that I’m interested in and have that listing almost real-time in a separate column is just fantastic. I’ve had a few probs though: sometimes replies or DMs just won’t refresh or some will be “eaten”. In any case, a great application.
I would have been up and running on sunday morning you know… Unlike Herne who was probably surfin ProN .. again.
It’s nice to see that knightwise is still up and about, been quiet lately. Waiting for a new rant from you as mine was pretty lame.
Tweetdeck ?
http://sulleh.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/capture-thumb.png
That link is a 404 KW
I finally got a twitter account, don’t think I’m using it to it’s full potential and I’m using tweet deck and that works vary well.