Macintouch likes the Amazon Kindle

Macintouch has the best and most positive Amazon Kindle Review I've read.

I think Paul Krugman is also a fan.

Interesting comment -- the author felt the ideal audience is people who are running out of book shelf space, rather than people who read books then give them away. (We're more the latter.)

On the other hand the Kindle is Windows centric. The Audible support requires a Winbox.

I'm impressed. I was skeptical about the Kindle at launch time, but it does look like a real success. (You were right Andrew!).

I'll keep an eye out for Kindle 2.0 -- and for Apple's rumored challenger. There are still a ways to go before it passes the four tests.

CEIVA digital photo frames

I've not paid much attention to digital photo frames. The ones I've seen in stores looked pretty crummy.

Then I read in Macintouch that Ceiva has produced an iPhoto plug-in. That's a step above the pack.

It's about $180 for a 7" CEIVA.

There's no CEIVA on my acquisition list yet, but I'll keep one eye open. The CEIVA still has to pass the four tests of acquisition.

OmniFocus iPhone sync - on track?

I've been wondering if Apple was going to give iPhone developers the ability to sync through the dock connector.

I don't know the answer of course, but OmniFocus Sync development is apparently on track.

Yeah, the post doesn't mention the iPhone, but the "redacted" and "censored" and blurred iPhone-shaped icon aren't there to conceal plans to sync with Palm PDAs.

OmniFocus get a tepid Neuberg review, but I'll overlook some rough edges if they get iPhone sync working.

Google Alerts: tracking usenet topics w/ Bloglines email notifications

I've started using Google Alerts to track usenet (Google Groups) posts on topics of interests, and all posts that contain a unique string I attach to my usenet posts as a "tag" [1]. Alert search scope can be restricted to Groups, Blogs, Web, News and (shudder) Video.

Alerts appear in the form of emails however, and that's intensely annoying. I prefer to use email for communication, not as a general notification engine.

The cure is to provide Google Alerts a Bloglines' disposable feed reader integrated email address ...

Bloglines FAQ

...Bloglines free email accounts allow people to receive email newsletter subscriptions within their MyBloglines page. This helps to reduce traffic through your primary email inbox and helps to contain the spam menace. A Bloglines email account gives you a trump card when a newsletter breaks the rules of opt-in marketing. When you unsubscribe from a Bloglines email subscription, the email address disappears. You never have to worry about trying to find the unsubscribe instructions for an unwanted mailing list.

So the results of my alerts show up in my bloglines feed reader as event notifications, which is exactly what I want.

[1] I've done this since the launch of the original DejaNews in the 1990s. My usenet posts contain a unique string as a "tag" (keyword, meta term). I search on the string to find all related posts. The functional result is rather like a blog, but this method worked long before blogs existed.

Gordon's Tech: Monitoring Dyer with ChangeDetection.com vs. Page2RSS

Gwynne Dyer, an iconoclastic journalist and historian, notifies readers of new articles by updating his web page. He typically adds 4-5 articles every 3-7 weeks; the linked articles are the published as .txt files -- not HTML.

Yes, Firefox will render .txt files.

I've been tracking changes with ChangeDetection.com and receiving feed reader notifications through Bloglines email subscriptions. This has been working well, but now Phil Bradley tells us that Page2RSS will create a custom RSS feed for pages like this.

I'm running a side-by-side comparison, after a month or two I aim to return and update this post with my preference.

Update 5/16/08: Page2RSS is really neat ... so far!

Update 5/18/08: A comment on Gordon's Notes also suggests Feedity. Feedity also supports feed merges, Yahoo Pipes does this and more.

Update 6/3/08: On one page I was monitoring Feedity sent me a high volume of false notifications (false positives). On the same page Page2RSS sent me only one update, and that one was correct. So I'm favoring Page2RSS.

Gmail doesn't allow multiple people for one email address

You can't have two contact list entries with the same email address:

Error saving data: Contact already exists with the given email

I wanted to create entries for our baseball players, but the email is, of course, their parents.

Another annoying Gmail limitation. I would really prefer that Google fix their existing products rather than create new ones.

Gmail's Contact Import/Export - designed by Yahoo?

I challenge anyone to deny that Gmail's contact management UI is absolutely dreadful.

We ought to be able to post any one of several valid collections of names and email addresses into a text box and have Gmail chew them up and generate contacts.

Instead we have to craft a .CSV file to load contacts -- and there's NO process for uploading a group membership list.

The secret to the .CSV file, btw, is to fill out the fields on a Gmail contact, then add it to a new list, then export the list as CSV. That's now the template for your imports.

In my case I made a mistake on my first data load. I loaded all my list members -- but with NULL email addresses. The corrected upload was rejected because the names already existed.

Microsoft, lately, does much better web work than this. Heck, the original Gmail contact management/group management UI was far better than the current mess.

Only Yahoo! functions at this level.

Yahoo! must have build Gmail's contact and group management UI.