Blodget’s Blog

Here’s a little test to see if I can email a video to my blog through
Flickr. I’m attaching a short video file to the email. It’s a
Quicktime movie compressed with the H.264 codec. File size is about
500 K.

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I am loving my new Touch, but typing on it is a pain – the sound of one finger poking. I wish somebody made an external keyboard for the thing.

My 12 favorite things to do with the Touch:
1. Browse the web – it comes with the Safari browser. You can tap twice to zoom into a column of text. It’s very readable and easy to maneuver.
2. Read my RSS feeds in Google Reader. They have a mobile version which works great.
3. Read email. It comes with a Mail program. You can also access your Google mail in Safari
4. Keep a calendar. It syncs with iCal. You can also use Google calendar which is what I do because I’ve combined my office calendar with my personal calendar on Google Calendar. I love the way you can type “Meet with Loraine 1 to 2 on Thursday” and it puts it in the right time on the right day. Very cool.
5. Watch videos. You can watch YouTube videos and, of course, you can watch your movies and tv shows you’ve downloaded in iTunes. To try it out I downloaded a Pixar short “For the Birds” and two Daffy Duck cartoons. Here’s the best part. You can connect the iPod up to your TV and control it remotely with an Apple remote. Next I need to try ripping a DVD.
6. Read books. There’s a free service called Readdle which lets you store up to 20, 5 Mb files on the web which you can read in the browser. Upload Word docs, RTF, PDF, TXT files and it converts them to HTML for instant viewing. You can bookmark your place and come back to where you left off. Very handy.
7. Read Google Docs – word processing, spreadsheets, and PRESENTATIONS. Unfortunately you can’t see them on a tv. The Safari browser doesn’t show up for some reason.
8. Listen to music. Don’t forget it’s an iPod and it can store your whole music collection.
9. View photos. You can sync your iPhoto collection with the iPod and carry all your favorite photos with you to show friends and family. It even does slideshows with music.
10. Look things up. You can check the weather and there’s a mobile version of Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database.
11. Get directions. Google maps works wonderfully.
12. Play games. Turns out there are lots of free games and puzzles that are Web based. You don’t have to download them to your iPod. You play them in the browser.

So, as you can tell, I’m having fun.

iPod Touch

Originally uploaded by jimblodget.

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Google reader just added some new features which makes it really easy to share the things you find while reading RSS feeds or visiting web sites.

First, the new Notes feature adds a button in your browser’s toolbar. Whenever you are on a web page, just highlight some text and click the Add notes button and that text and the link to the page is added to your notes in Google reader. So as an example, while I’m cruising, I find something I want to read later or save to share with friends, I click the button and bang, I’ve saved it.

The next feature is tags. As I’m reading in Google Reader I can add a tag to the item. Items can have multiple tags so the same items can be grouped multiple ways. Items with the same tag can be shared. For example I quickly added the tag “Mac” to some of the articles I found and now I have a public page with all my Mac findings. Check it out:

See my Mac shared items

The cool thing is you can tag your notes. So you can share web pages that don’t have RSS feeds.

This public page has a RSS feed so you can subscribe to my Mac links in your RSS reader or in Safari. As I add new ones, you see them in your reader.

Mac shared items feed

This makes it super easy to share findings in any topic and you can share multiple topics.

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