devolute.net

ReadItLater for Firefox

ReadItLater transformed the way I waste time online. I’ll rephrase that: it let me be more productive with my unproductively. Let me explain: Unfortunately I live in the real world (with a real job/boss) and this means that if I spot a 1hr long video on BoingBoing (about creative commons banana mash-ups being beaten by the police, or whatever) during my lunch, then I can’t sit there watching it all afternoon. Nor do I want to be mucking about e-mailing home urls to myself. What I really needed was a icon in Firefox I can click, that will save a page for later when I get home… or when I have more time to spend on such frivolities. That little icon was provided by ReadItLater. All it does it synchronize a bunch of ‘I’ll get round to this later’ links which you can save choose to visit later, when you have time. This plug-in has expanded onto the iPhone and a dozen other platforms. You can even view your list online, which I find handy when I have a moment to waste alone with just my S60 Nokia for company.

It’s simple, but very handy and the author has just released version 2.0 which brings some visual refinements that mean it’s all very polished. I love the new icons. Find out more at ReadItLater.

I use a 3rd party MSN client. In the old days, I used Trillian, then MirandaIM and now Pidgin for the PC/Linux and Adium for the Mac. Both those clients give me the ability to use many different networks (ICQ, Facebook IM, Google Talk) at the same time using just one client. Plus I don’t have to tolerate the horrible adverts and pathetically large memory footprint of the official MSN client.

Today, presumably because they hate us, MS decided to change the protocol of their instant messaging network without telling anyone. This left many who use non-crappy clients without the ability to talk to their (usually less tech-savy) MSN friends. The reasons for MS doing this are unknown, but probably something to do with MS’s unwillingness to give any sort of control to OpenSource projects and those who believe that the MS products are inferior to the close-source alternatives.

Still, I have been given a fix for Pidgin at least (thanks Ed!). The plug-in based architecture of Pidgin allows a different MSN integration in the form of msn-pecan which, at the time of writing, allows previous service to be resumed. I think both Aidum and Pidgin teams are working on fixes for their clients. Now begins the work of getting my friends to use a rather more reliable IM network!

edit 12 Jan 9.10am: Due to the good people at Adium, it was a screw-up rather than an attempt to screw users. Everything is now back to usual it seems.

Videolan media player has been a life-saver for digital video viewers. I’ve used it for a year or so now and since then I no longer had to one have to muck about with stupid ‘Kazzaa’ codec packs and other crappy codecs and players. Instead, all I had to do was download a reasonably sized media player and it would open any format I could throw at it. It was a blessing and it’s on my Windows desktop, my Ubuntu Laptop and my workplace Mac. It’s never let me down, it’s fast and it ‘just works’ ™.

So now I’m obviously quite sad having downloaded the latest new version (0.9.2) which has had substantial changes. There is a new, ‘shinier’ (read: more messy) interface, bug fixes, support for even more codecs and oh yeah, now when I skip forward through video too fast it crashes. The old VLC never crashed. Never. I recommended it to everyone who just needed a video open now, but I don’t think I can do so anymore. Fingers crossed they fix it, but for now I’ll be downgrading and I think it’s another case of shine-over stability.