Why I Dumped Digg

Sensational Fanboyism

So many stories that make the front page are based on platform zealotry.  Or stories that have just a tenuous link to Apple, Microsoft, Linux, or politics soon descend into a fanboy fight in the comments.

Old News

I find a well crafted list of blog and news subscriptions gets you cutting-edge news in a more timely manner with much less noise.

Too Slow

Digg, the actual site itself, is so slow.  It takes much longer to load than Google Reader or many other news sites.  While catching up on my feeds I’ll normally open up links I want to look at further in background tabs.  Invariably, Digg links are still loading long after most of the other tabs have finished.

Drama Queens

I don’t care about all the Digg drama.  “OMG TOP USER QUIGGLES HAS BEEN BANNED!!!1111!!!!!oneoneone!!”,  “NETSCAPE DIGG CLONE SHUTDOWN”, “I GET PAID TO DIGG!”.  There is way too much news about Digg on Digg in the form of both stories and comments.  Attention diggers, no one in the real world cares.

300

Fantastic.

 

Fast and lightweight software. Who needs it?

Over on Techcrunch they have this Bram Cohen quote:

“Moving forward behind the scenes, we will continue to develop µTorrent and will be using the codebase in other applications, especially ones where a fast, lightweight implementation is more suitable, such as embedded systems on TVs, cell phones, and other non-PC platforms.”

 When are fast lightweight implementations like uTorrent not suitable?

Link to Techcrunch » Blog Archive » BitTorrent to Acquire µTorrent

YouTube – Building Stonehenge – This Man can Move Anything

Pretty amazing to see what one man can do with some ingenuity. 

Newsweek looks at anti-senescence

 Newsweek looks at recent research on anti-aging drugs.  It’s actually fairly exciting to think about.  I’ve been interested in the field after reading Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near.  Also of interest on the subject is the work of Aubrey de Gray.

Link to Can We Slow Aging? – Newsweek: International Editions – MSNBC.com

Ice Storms

Here’s some pics I took of the surrounding areas after the recent ice storms here in Missouri.  All of these were taken in St. Francois County.

Windows Live Writer (Beta)

Microsoft has released a new product into called Windows Live Writer.  It’s sole purpose it rich editing and composing of blog posts.  As this is my first use of it I can’t tell you how good it really is, but so far it seems completely excellent.

For example, right from the Writer you can insert pictures into the post:

Also of interest you can insert maps right into a blog post:

 


 

(Yes, I know I haven’t posted in a long time…Sooooo busy)

SMT5600 crashes while syncing via WMP10

Argh.  While syncing my music to my SMT5600 the phone crashes after just a few songs are transferred.  The phone will not respond to any button presses.  The only way to recover from this state of affairs is to remove the battery.

WMP10 just shows that whichever song it was copying when the phone crashed is xx% done without reporting any errors.

My search skills have failed me because I am unable to find anyone else suffering from the same issue!

Gizmodo loses it

Here’s Gizmodo’s story:

Rumors: Origami Just a Glorified Media Player with Nasty DRM?

Here’s a story they’ve never run:

Facts:  Ipod Video Just a Glorified Media Player with Nasty DRM, That Can’t Run the Thousands of Windows Software Applications.

Their never ending fascination with Apple becomes more and more tiring as the days go by.  I have a hard time seeing a future for Origami, but I’m sure willing to give it a shot…

New host

I’m currently in the process of changing hosting providers. Hopefully this happens without any downtime. I’ll do a write-up of the process later.