Monitoring Dyer with ChangeDetection.com and Bloglines email subscriptions

Dyer is an iconoclastic historian journalist who, purely to spite me, refuses to create an RSS feed so I know when to visit his news page.

I may have him now.

My Bloglines feed reader supports "email subscriptions":

You can create an unlimited number of special Bloglines email addresses that are tied to your Bloglines account. The email addresses show up as subscriptions in your My Blogs page, and email sent to those email addresses appears as new items.

When you create a Bloglines email address, a subscription is added to your account. If you unsubscribe from that subscription, the email address becomes invalid and mail sent to it will bounce.

Email subscriptions are great for announce-only or broadcast mailing lists that don't provide RSS feeds. They are also useful as temporary email addresses.

To rename or move your email subscriptions, use the 'Edit' link under the 'My Feeds' tab.

I created one of these disposable email addresses for a new feed I called "Dyer" and stored it in the usual place I keep journalist feeds. Then I went to "ChangeDetection(tm) - Monitor any web page for changes" and set up a monitor on Dyer's 2008 article page.

Any changes, in theory, now trigger an alert -- almost as though Dyer had a real feed in place. Of course I only get an alert -- not the text. Still, that's all I need.

I'll update this post with news on how it works. In the event that the Dyer email address starts collecting spam it's trivial to remove it.

Sandisk 2GB microSD kit is impressive

I bought JR.com's Sandisk 2GB microSD Mobile Memory Kit

This thing is impressive. $25 for a 2GB micro-SD card, smaller than the proverbial fingernail. The kit includes a mini-SD and an SD adapter for the micro-SD card. The latter works in our camera, the card itself is in our BlackBerry*.

The combination of Google Checkout and J&R was likewise an excellent combination.

* I'm much less impressed with the BB, but that's another story.

Update 2/5/08: Amazon has 4GB versions for about the same price, and 2GB versions for about the price of lunch. Cue hysterical laughter, this is ridiculous.

Selling a cell phone without eBay: SecondRotation strikes out

SecondRotation is a classy looking site for selling devices -- cell phones, PDAs, digital cameras. One can get a better price on eBay (though I prefer to avoid them) or Craigslist, this site has the advantage of simplicity and convenience.

I may give it a try.

Update 2/26/2008: Didn't work.

I sent them my RAZR, but they neglected to include directions on ESN termination. This is well known to people who trade in phones, but not to the rest of us. Even though our Sprint relationship had ended, and even though the phone no longer works, the "ESN is still active". They sent an email offering to recycle the phone, the link to respond didn't work (programming error on their site). I was able to find the form to request the phone be sent back to me, then I'll see if I can get Sprint to remove the ESN lock.

How annoying. If Second Rotation really does return everything I won't ding them, but they really could have done a better job providing guidance on ESN unlocking.

Update 3/23/2008: After some prodding, SecondRotation returned the Motorola RAZR. It wasn't locked and I sold it on Craiglist. It has occurred to me what a great scam it would be to offer to buy phones, then claim they were locked, then offer to dispose of them for free. I am going to assume, however, that the phone was either transiently locked or that SecondRotation made a simple mistake. In the future though I'll use SR as a way to help price items I want to sell, but Craigslist is a much better option.

Headset adapters for 2.5mm cell phones - a problem

I bought a two "HOSA" 3.5mm to 2.5mm headset adapters -- they cost almost $9 each with shipping.

They don't work with Emily's BlackBerry -- we only hear sound on one channel.

I then checked the BB site -- they sell their own adapter. Alas, an Amazon reviewer found the same problem with BlackBerry's own adapter!.

Extremely annoying. I wonder what the iPhone does.

2/4/08: I had slightly different results testing on a Nokia 6555b. I also noted that the Bose Communications Kit comes with four different 3.5mm to 2.5mm adapters -- each for different phones. So a 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapter may have to phone specific.

Google Apps: Integration in the Start Page header

Google Apps consists of a set of loosely coupled services that can be more or less assigned to a custom domain name. The current set includes email, calendaring, very crude web page authoring and serving (limited file services), and Google Docs. There are also less well known mobile services for Google Apps.

It's great only because it's free. Mostly it's unfinished. It's not at all obvious how one provides users with any kind of unified view of available services.

Turns out, you're supposed to edit the header of the "start page" associated with every Google App custom domain -- for example: MN Sepcial Hockey Personalized Start Page.

Yep, the header. The gadgets don't quite do the trick.

It's very crude, but it's at least understandable.

I do hope Google returns to Google Apps one day. They're only half-way to a 1.0 release ...

Aperture 2.0 is MIA

This week's photo show was the obvious place to introduce Aperture 2.0.

No luck.

Macworld | Creative Notes | PMA notes: Whither Aperture?

...More specifically, the topic is: “Where’s Version 2.0 of Apple’s image management and editing app?” With the the show starting this morning, it seems pretty clear that we won’t see anything announced this week, and the disappointment I’m hearing is pervasive."

With each passing week it's more likely Apple is exiting the high end photo market.

Google BlackBerry calendar sync, the family calendar, and BlackBerry comments

We've had my wife's BlackBerry Pearl for about a week now. Some recent discoveries:

• The predictive keyboard text entry is slow for writing, but might improve with time. It's very tedious when entering usernames and URLs. I need to learn a shortcut to switch out of predictive mode into the standard multi-stroke letter selection.
• A Graffiti One (original Palm Pilot) text entry solution with predictive word selection would really be much better than this keyboard and would use space far more effectively. Sniff.
• The original Palm had hundreds of fine touches that mde working in the small 160x160 display efficient and even enjoyable. It's early, but I don't see anything like this on the BlackBerry.
• The AT&T personal BB service includes what I think is their "push" email. We use this instead of AT&T's costly instant messaging. We use Google's BB Gmail client for work with traditional email. We haven't tried Google Talk on the BB ... yet
• When I enabled the BB email I was directed to "att.blackberry.net" for a web interface. Ooops! Turns out that's not enabled for personal accounts. I've run into a few of these glitches. [1 - see update]
  

Our latest experiment was with Google Mobile's BB Calendar sync

Get calendar alerts - Using your BlackBerry� smartphone's native calendar, you can now access your Google calendar even when you don't have network coverage and be alerted for upcoming appointments with sound or vibration.

Always in sync - Your Google Calendar stays synchronized whether you access it from your computer or your phone. You can add or edit entries right on your BlackBerry� smartphone or on your Google Calendar on the web...

I was indeed able to configure a connection between our family Google Apps domain calendar and the BB. It's very slow to sync however, even with only a few test posts on the calendar. I wonder if this will turn out be a toy. If it works I might make another try to sync Outlook with Google Calendar, though I don't think there's been much improvement on that front.

We've not tried Google Talk yet.

Update 12/30/08: In the midst of a Blackberry debacle I finally figured some of the odd story with http://www.att.com/blackberrystart. AT&T doesn't document this at all. Most users don't need to know about this because when you first connect the phone to the network AT&T auto-configures the push email that's the only interesting feature of their "Blackberry plan" (which is otherwise a generic data plan).

Anyway, if you navigate to the BB Pearl app for "Blackberry Setup", then "Personal Email Setup", you will be taken to an AT&T web page for configuring your email account. Here you set up a password for your account. In the midst of these screens, as of 12/08, there's an option to "create a username". If you do that you will be asked for a password. Be sure to have the password for your email setup already, because you'll be asked for that too as part of this setup.

Once you do this you can go to http://www.att.com/blackberrystart and the username and password you entered via the phone will allow you access to a very limited page for configuring your BB email. The only novel function on this page is you can define email "filters".

I suggest you ignore this "feature", it's not worth the bother. Still, it's good to know what that absurd web page was supposed be for.