An organized life

I haven’t been post­ing much lately. It’s the sort of thing that hap­pened grad­u­ally. I have been doing a lot on the inter­nets just not in the form of writ­ing for Merde (Prescott Fam­ily dot org, 10/25!!!!). So, in the vein of get­ting back to it, I’m going to bring together a few blurbs I’ve writ­ten from around the inter­net. Lit­tle tiny guys. Hope­fully you will see the con­nec­tions. These closely resem­ble reviews.

I REALLY like Google Reader
I used Safari’s built-in feed reader, but being at school/home/work I wanted some­thing I could use in all the places eas­ily. Voilà! Google Reader. I really, really like it. I think I like it so much because I used (feature-less) Safari RSS for so long. Sea­soned aggre­ga­tors might not like it as much, but it has a lot of fea­tures you don’t see on the sur­face. I’m really just talk­ing about the key­board short­cuts. My faves are j and k, which are next and pre­vi­ous post. And in a close sec­ond n and p, which scan within a post. (Oh! and v, which is used to view the orig­i­nal post). Any­how, some­thing I just stum­bled upon is gu. gu is great for iso­lat­ing a sin­gle feed. Which is a REALLY good thing when Digg and BBC and such are fill­ing up your screen. (Life­hacker has more about the key­board shortcuts.)

buzz­word
Buzz­word is an Adobe prod­uct. It’s an all flash and all web-based word proces­sor, which is good and bad. I am most impressed with font selec­tion. Obvi­ously. I haven’t actu­ally used it to write any­thing seri­ous, more to just play around with, but it seems to have poten­tial. Also, I would like to see more for­mats than Word and RTF. (A note: I haven’t exten­sively tried Google Docs either, so I don’t really know how buzz­word and Google Docs compare).

Browser Choice
I have strug­gled for a long time about browser choice. I like Macs. I like the look of the appli­ca­tions. I also like fea­tures and ease of use. Here’s what I said on 10/6:

I finally have com­pletely given into Fire­fox. Don’t get me wrong. I love Safari. But I’m tired of Safari crash­ing on my bank’s site. Fire­fox is also very open source and can be used on any plat­form (for the part of me that want to use Linux all the time). (Also, I know Safari is pretty open and is based on Kon­queror.) Plus, so many sweet plu­g­ins. I tried Camino, but it’s too close to Safari in the lack of really cool plu­g­ins. Not as many peo­ple use these browsers. I will still use Safari occa­sion­ally, but Fire­fox is my lady now. (Plus FF 2 isn’t as slow as 1.5 was for me.)

…

Also, what hap­pened to Fire­foxy? It seems it hasn’t been updated since 2006 (prob­a­bly the last time I’ve really used Firefox).

Obvi­ously Fire­fox is good for Linux and Win­dows, oth­er­wise I don’t really like it. There, I said it. It’s not Gecko or any­thing like that, it’s just too slow and ugly. On 10/9, I retracted my state­ment saying:

So I’m pretty much sworn back to Camino. It’s so tiny and fast. It makes my heart race. And it’s so damn pretty.

So that’s my choice. Camino. It’s small, fast, cute. It’s really a win/win sit­u­a­tion. It’s uses Gecko, but is writ­ten in Cocoa. “Camino. Mozilla Power, Mac Style” Damn right. (With that being said, I’m not that hard­core. I use Safari and Opera occa­sion­ally, but only for test­ing web­sites. And I haven’t quite deleted FF from my appli­ca­tions folder. But 99.9% of the time I use Camino.)

(Use Camino with Google Reader with Reader Noti­fier.)