His Memory of Light
Sep 26 2007 Wed
1:08 am PHT
2007: September
On Web-based Feed Aggregators
Sep 24 2007 Mon
2:49 pm PHT
The previous post on Bloglines and Google Reader brings me up to a another topic, that of feed reader lock-in. Both Google Reader and Bloglines support the export and import of feed subscriptions via the OPML standard (that’s how I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader in the first place). This means that both aggregators do not lock-in customers. Nominally.
Bloglines vs. Google Reader
Sep 24 2007 Mon
2:48 pm PHT
I had been using Bloglines as my feed reader/aggregator since 2003 before I completely switched over to Google Reader a few months ago. I tried Google Reader early last year but it didn’t stick with me then. What made me decide to switch now? I got sick and tired of the way Bloglines marked every unread item as read when selecting a feed. If you neglect to check your feeds for a while and one of them adds tons of new items, you’d be forced to invest a lot of time to catch up on that feed if you don’t want to miss anything.
Stellarium
Sep 19 2007 Wed
3:31 pm PHT
When I was reading blog entries and comments about the (Night) Sky in Google Earth, I came across several references and comparisons to other similar applications. One of these is Celestia (Wikipedia), which I raved about three years ago, and a program called Stellarium, which I’m going to rave about now.
Ratatouille and The Simpsons Movie
Sep 17 2007 Mon
7:30 pm PHT
After all of those techie posts, let’s go to the lighter side and make a couple of belated movie reactions to the last two animated films I’ve seen: Ratatouille, which is about a rat who wants to become a chef, and The Simpsons Movie, the much-awaited movie version of the popular animated TV series.
100 Sights in Vista Pinas
Sep 16 2007 Sun
2:27 pm PHT
Yay! I have finally reached the 100-sight milestone on my secondary blog, Vista Pinas, where I take you on a virtual tour of Philippine-related locations in the Philippines and around the world via the satellite imagery found in Google Maps.
Google Maps Adds Philippine Roads
Sep 15 2007 Sat
10:22 pm PHT
Last month, Yuga is lamenting the lack of street maps of the Philippines in Google Maps. Well, Google announced via their LatLong blog that they have added street maps for 54 countries including the Philippines. Previously, only Thailand and Singapore had street-level maps in Google Maps in Southeast Asia. Well, excited I checked out Metro Manila in Google Maps and came out extremely disappointed. See the screenshot below.
My Google Search Positions
Sep 15 2007 Sat
7:26 pm PHT
I was idly looking through my blog’s stats in Google Webmaster Tools and came upon this list of top search queries that led to my site:
The Deck: An Ad Network
Sep 11 2007 Tue
6:31 pm PHT
Advertising on the web is here to stay, and that’s a fact of life. Otherwise, there’d be a whole lot less free services and content for us to read. In exchange for free access to a whole lot of websites, we have to accept that most of these websites will have ads.
WikiPilipinas is Not an Academic Philippine Encyclopedia
Sep 07 2007 Fri
3:16 am PHT
Nope, that title you read above is not a critical opinion. It’s a statement of fact enshrined in WikiPilipinas’ Policies and Guidelines. As Mr. Gus Vibal, the founder of Filipiniana.net and WikiPilipinas, has said, WikiPilipinas is envisioned to be the one-stop-shop for all things popular and Pinoy. There you can find articles like the “Cutest PBA Players” or “Top 10 Philippine Female Movie Villains”, which while definitely are interesting to read, is of dubious value in an academic context. Hence the “not an academic encyclopedia” description.
Todoist
Sep 05 2007 Wed
2:54 pm PHT
Markku once talked about false productivity and asked for suggestions. I commented by explaining my organizational system consisting of scattered to-do lists and organizing mechanisms.
OpenStreetMapping My Neighborhood
Sep 01 2007 Sat
6:10 pm PHT
Ever since I discovered that the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project expanded their coverage to the whole world, I was excited to map out my neighborhood since I saw that my area is still virgin territory yet untouched by Philippine-based OSM contributors. You can actually add data on the site itself using their Potlatch web app. It’s a slick Adobe Flash-based application that provides a rudimentary, yet powerful map data editor and can directly show Yahoo! Maps satellite imagery for tracing streets. The other popular way of adding data is via the JOSM Java-based desktop application. JOSM is intended for power users and serious OSM contributors.
