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:

• - When you set up your account, add some of Google’s recommended sites.
• - Look for RSS links (and icons) everywhere! Don’t be afraid of adding lots of feeds.
• - Drop the compulsion to read absolutely everything. 90% of what’s out there is uninteresting to you.
• - Scan headlines, and read what you’re interested in. I read < 10% of what comes in.
• - Use the shortcut keys
• - Share what you like!

Good luck!

I picked up one of those little eee pc UMPCs mostly as a ‘why-not’, and to my surprise it turned out to be a really useful little laptop. It comes preinstalled with Xandros, which would be a terrific distro for my mom, but Xandros kept me engaged for maybe a day. I mucked around with various distros and ended up with Ubuntu linux running on the laptop on a LVM spread across the internal 4G SSD and a 16G external SDHC card. This was working fine, but I seem to have a penchant for modifying hardware, so I thought to myself “I need a cup of coffee”. Then I thought “My laptop needs the sdhc card to run, wouldn’t it be better if it was on the inside, where I won’t lose it?”

I did some reading, some other folks out there put usb hubs and sdhc cardreaders on the inside of the laptop along with other gear. So my plan was to do this, along with a couple of usb connectors, so that I could put other peripherals inside. These include my usb mouse receiver and (in the future) a bluetooth transceiver. So this is how my escapade started:

Asus with parts that will eventually go inside

So, sitting on top of my little toy are the USB hub ($2 + $6 S&H from Hong Kong) and the SDHC card reader ($1 + $5 S&H). It is tough to beat these prices. You can also see the SD card sticking out of the laptop. This will eventually be inside.

USB hub board

This is the USB hub cracked open. All of the USB connections were removed, along with the barrel connector for external power and the LED, to conserve power.

ASUS motherboard backside

Here is the ASUS ripped open showing the backside of the motherboard. The usb signals going to one of the USB ports was diverted to the usb hub, and then one of the hub’s outputs routed back to the external usb connector. This leaves three extra usable usb connectors internal to the laptop. In this pic you can see the RAM and the Atheros mini-pcie card (wifi). The usb connectors that I wanted to get at are under the wifi card.

New parts

Here are the new parts going into the laptop. On the left is the SDHC reader. The USB connector is removed and the bottom of the board cut down to fit better. Again the LED was removed from this board to reduce power consumption. The USB hub is sitting underneath the mouse pad. Since I am a software guy I insulated the boards with plain old electrical tape rather than Kapton tape which the EE types would use.

Wiring

This is where stuff got hairy. Here is where I diverted the signal from one of the USB connectors. I removed the onboard surface mount resistors in the signal lines ( they are probably 22ohm or 0 ohm I’m not sure, but they are gone now), and soldered in my own signal wires on the leftover pads. The signal wires are 30 gauge, standard wire wrap type stuff. I used 28 gauge for the power and ground going to the add on board. You can see the ground connection on the USB connector on the left. These connection points were really really tiny.

Done for now

This it the finished product before I bolted it all back together: SD Card in the reader, hanging off the hub. Wireless mouse receiver in the space reserved for the addon mini pci-e card. The mouse receiver is accessible from the door on the back of the laptop incase I ever want to remove/change it. Battery life is a little bit shortened, but thats the price you pay for being a geek. Anyway I thought this was fun, and It took about 3 hours from start to finish with mucking around and setting up the bios again after mistakenly disconnecting the battery.

Oh, and this last picture is what I thought was going to happen when I powered on, but this I just a picture of the house when I roast coffee.

What didn’t happen to the laptop