Syndicate
Craig sent this ages ago, and it came up in a conversation I was having with some family a few weeks ago. I’m not exactly sure how I ended up in a conversation about camels being hit by trains, but it was annoying that I didn’t have a link to the very event I was trying to describe.
While the whole thing isn’t terribly funny on it’s own - for some stupid reason, the addition of a speech bubble is … pretty hilarious.
Brent shared a pretty funny image from failblog about someone asking about a “video rental store for books”.
If you don’t feel like going and checking out the link, here’s the post:
was just thinking. my sister does -alot- of reading, and spends like $1000 a year on just books alone. most of them she reads once then never looks at again. is there any kind of like … video rental store but for books? would make things alot cheaper, plus once one person has read one the next person can get enjoyment from it etc
Okay. That’s pretty funny. So, I sent it around, and got a very wonderful reply from someone who shall remain nameless:
The humor of that unfortunately escapes me, but at least I’m not too afraid to admit it. The idea in that post sounds good, though finding a decent implementation could be fun.. Maybe NetFlix for books or something could work. Not that I’d wanna build that company. I’d actually worry about germ stuff like people excreting in undetectable quantities on their books and infecting my NetFlixBooks mail router monkies with some kind of flu. lol.
And that, my friends, is what we call an Epic Failure.
Geeks have a secret, and they haven’t been spreading the word very well.
Visiting websites is so 2005!
Think about how you use the web right now. Let’s say you like to follow a few blogs and you like to keep up on new movies at Rotten Tomatoes. You read your news from CBC.ca, and you watch the hockey headlines at NHL.com.
If you’re typical, you visit your sites daily. If you’re bored, you visit Hourly. Compulsive? You scour the site for the last thing you read, and then read everything after that. If you’re busy, you forget to check for a while. If you’re busy AND compulsive, you have a problem!
What if you’re smart? What would you do?
Some smart people thought about that, and came up with a solution - Syndication. Why waste time going from site to site? Take everything you care about, syndicate it into a single stream, and just check that. Enter RSS.
RSS stands for a few things, so just call it Really Simple Syndication. Have you ever seen this icon? 
It’s a link to an RSS Feed. RSS lets you see what’s new on a website, without actually going to the site.
When you add all of your favorite sites to an RSS reader (like Google Reader), you create a single stream of everything you care about. I think Google Reader is the best, and all of us at SE have been using it for a while. It acts like email, so every blog post, news article, or flickr photo shows up as a new ‘message’.
Just like your email, you can organize items & feeds into folders, tags, and stars. Google Reader remembers what you’ve read and what you haven’t, so to keep up with everything you care about, you just fire up reader, and go!
Google Reader (or aggregation, in general) is revolutionary. It’s one of those things that won’t make sense until you use it. So trust me, and give it a try for a week. The more you use it, the more useful it gets, and once you start surfing this way you’ll wonder how you lived without it.
Here are some tips to get you started:
Good luck!
This is a great site for backgrounds.
“Social Wallpapering, a community effort to classify, rank, and distribute high resolution images for use as computer wallpaper.”
This is just fantastic. Need some wallpapers? Grab ‘em. Have some you want to share? Post them.
Well, it’s no secret that there isn’t much support for some serious gaming on Linux. Actually, the whole open source community hasn’t really come together to build some decent games.
I find this pretty interesting, as the community has excelled in so many other areas.
One of the most impressive tools that the open source community provides, is called Blender. It’s a 3D animation and rendering app. I think it’s awesomely powerful, and quite easy to use, once you get used to their UIs.
Blender has paired up with Crystal Space (a 3D engine) to start work on a seriously impressive 3D game. The group that’s doing this is calling the project “Apricot“. What’s awesome about it, is that they’re pre-selling DVDs of the game they’re going to make. About the DVD:
Expect on the DVD the complete game, all content in Creative Commons Attribute, video blog material, and clear examples and/or tutorials for how to extend the game, add levels, change characters, and so on. Early purchasers of the Apricot game will get their names credited on the game intro and final credit roll.
I only read up about this last night, and that sucks ’cause the deadline to get your name on the credits is Feb 1st. I highly recommend checking out the site and donating to the cause.
The main goal of this project is to ” improve the open source pipeline for professional game creation“. I think that’s awesome.
