Category Archives: Google+

Google, google, going

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So Google Reader is google, google going. Pity. I use it almost every day. It wasn’t flashy or fancy, but it did pretty much everything I wanted in a web based RSS news reader. I’ve started looking for alternatives, but so far I’m unimpressed.

I found Netvibes to be a ghastly and overwhelming UI overload of options.

Pulse looked good, but for a product that is supposed to be an RSS reader it was almost impossible to discover how to actually add an RSS feed to it that wasn’t in their standard catalog of feeds. When I did finally manage to add another feed, one that I tried to add just wouldn’t work at all, and another one worked but just looked odd, because the feed items had no pictures displayed.

Any suggestions on what to try next?

[This content was originally posted to Google+]

Security

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From an excellent article by Troy Hunt, where I think he nails the unacknowledged problem contributing to many security breaches on the internet these days …

” We have a security problem on the web, of that there is no doubt. What compounds this is that we also have a bullshit problem. You can see this problem in action every time an organisation talks about being “robust” or “never being hacked” or any other number of subjective, unquantifiable statements that tell you nothing about the measures that are actually in place and amount to little more than marketing speak.”

[This content was originally posted to Google+]

Disappointed by

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Currently disappointed by …

Peter Jackson’s first installment of “The Hobbit” movies. In summary: indulgent, over-long and over-the-top.

The whole plot line and pacing seems to have built on the premise that every 15 minutes there needs to be some epic battle/action sequence regardless of whether it exists in the book. This formulaic repetition is not helped by frequent use of tired Hollywood cliches like “the hero dangling over a precipice hanging by the fingertips” or “the heroes falling hundreds of metres down a chasm amongst crashing wooden structures and then getting up with apparently no injuries at all”.

There are many other disappointments with this film, but the one that confirmed in my mind its sub par rating is Rivendell. In the novel Rivendell is a place of joy, peace, healing and friendship from which the dwarves leave “amid songs of farewell and good speed” – the movie portrays Rivendell as a place of suspicion, fear, doubts, and enmity from which the dwarves have to sneak out in secrecy.

I’ll still see parts 2 and 3 when they come out, but sadly I won’t be looking forward to it in the same way I was looking forward to this first movie.

[This content was originally posted to Google+]

iOS 6.0.2

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I’ve updated my iPhone 5 to iOS 6.0.2 this afternoon and it has fixed the problem I was having with wifi connectivity at home. Yay. Prior to the update the wifi connection kept dropping out and I kept having to go into settings to re-establish it. Now the connection is rock solid.

I’ve not noticed any increase in battery drain that some users are complaining about after an update to 6.0.2.

[This content was originally posted to Google+]