One geeks thoughts on the geekeries of the world.
Archive for the ‘Software’ Category.
I’ve been embroiled in this constantly recurring debate over whether or not PC gaming is dead or dying. This entry is not about that continuing discussion, but rather a related idea that came to me while in the shower today. No, I’m not lying. I actually thought of this in the shower. Continue reading ‘A Nothing Emulator’ »
Over the weekend I rebuilt the software on my computer. I reinstalled Windows XP, as is necessary once in awhile. Windows for me now is just a Steam machine, so hopefully it will be a long while before I do this again. Luckily the legally free key I got in college is still good, and I didn’t even have to call in to MS to re-activate. Two things were finally fully confirmed for me during this install. First, Windows performance does indeed degrade over time. The older the install of Windows is, and the more it is used, the slower it gets. Secondly, a completely unpatched Windows XP is wicked fast. Every layer of updates you apply makes it slower. But I guess you have no choice if you don’t want to be hacked to bits. If you have Windows only to play single player games I highly suggest you disable all networking and use the original unpatched XP.
So I no longer have a single primary computer like in the
college days. I still got the main home desktop. But I also got the work
laptop and various other terminals which I work from. Also, I use the aircard
on the train. All in all I needed a newer better RSS reading solution than
Firefox live bookmarks, which have suited me just fine until now. I knew about
this thing my friend used called rawdog, but since I had nothing better to do
I made my own.
With the advent of sites like The Hype Machine, del.icio.us tags like for:joshua and RSS feeds on torrent sites I think it is time to get rid of the M3U and other playlist formats in favor of RSS. It would take so little effort to take existing media players and add RSS playlist support to them. I’m imagining a world where everyone stores their playlists in RSS and shares them so people end up listening to music by aggregating the playlists of others and listening to cool music as people discover it. This looks like the direction we’re headed, let’s move there faster.
Anybody who’s anybody in the social software scene knows about del.icio.us. And anybody who knows del.icio.us has probably see the incredibly popular link to grat.uito.us. Most of the time when I see new social software thingies I say “wow, that’s neat”. Then I might use it a little, and think of all the possibilities for it. But overall none of them really keep me using them for extended periods of time. Orkut had a stranglehold at first, but it faded fast. Facebook was extremely interesting for about two days, then it fell of the chart. del.icio.us gets extremely light usage over long periods of time, at least from me. I subscribe to the popular and ritscc RSS feeds from del.icio.us, but I rarely post something there.