After I wrote the post about NewsFire organization, I had the idea of having bloggers somewhat “tag” eachother, or just spread and give away their RSS feeds. This in part comes with inspiration from a post by Glenn Wolsey, where he was asking people to email him their OPML files from NewsFire.

But, for this, it doesn’t matter what RSS reader you use, as long as it can export feeds. I know many RSS readers have this function, along with the ability to import these files. While you may not want to import them all, as some might not interest you as much as others, you could still discover new feeds and websites.

Here are my feeds, I hope you enjoy them.

If you have any suggestions for new feeds, or want to share your own, leave a comment or write a blog post sharing your feeds too.

Many of you who read the blog probably use RSS Feeds to subscribe to the content. For those of you who have Macs, I recommend NewsFire for all your RSS feed needs. I’m not going to go into detail why, but it’s easy to use, small, lightweight, and just works well. If you don’t like NewsFire though, there are more options, such as NetNewsWire, Vienna, NewsLife, or even Safari’s built in one. But, as I use NewsFire, I have some things about it that I want to share.

Folders
If you have a lot of feeds like I do (If I like the blog, I bookmark it and add it to NewsFire), and while some people may get rid of feeds that aren’t updated anymore, I don’t. For a couple reasons: With folders, I don’t see the feeds, and for blogs which often go on un-scedualed hiatuses (such as my own), I give the benefit of the doubt to the blogger. But, not only does it keep my from having to keep me from deleting feeds all the time, it cleans up NewsFire and allows lots of feeds to be in there no problem.

Smart Folders
Along with folders, smart folders are another handy ability in NewsFire. Some people use more, such as the ones seen here like “Submit to Digg”, but I just use a flagged one. I often come upon digg stories that I imagine would be long, or posts on blogs that are interesting but I don’t have the time to read at that point. I flag them (command-L), then read them later.

Clusters
Whether you choose to cluster groups or smart feeds, clustering comes in handy. As I like the look of clustered groups better (instead of the bubble, the background is blue), I cluster my groups together and have my smart feeds at the bottom.

Those are some of the tips I find most useful in NewsFire, and I hope you like them. If you have any more suggestions, leave a comment.

Many of you will have heard this by now, but there is a very large scandal regarding a number that can be used to crack the encryption on HD-DVD disks. It started on a forum a few days ago, where one member managed to crack it, apparently accidently. It was posted to Digg, but it was promptly deleted and the poster banned. From here, it gets complicated. I hope this post can help both me and you understand. I’ll also provide links to what hasn’t been deleted, if I can find them.

How It Went

Although this post may stop it from becoming a thing of the past (which many Digg users hope it won’t become), I think that this post is a good recap of all the parts of the scandal.

What do you think of this? As usual, sound off in the comments.

Edit: Wow, the story Kevin Rose submitted and blog post he wrote currently 27,570 diggs. Even more than the iPhone story, which used to have the most diggs.

Yesterday, the Shiira Project released a new version of their browser called Shiira. This new version is 2.0, and is a large improvement over the old version, and the 2.0 betas. It is a nice browser, and although a bit unstable, is still really handy and really nicely designed. To show what I like about Shiira 2.0, I decided to make a list of things I like about it, and the things I don’t.

What I Like
Full-screen Mode: My favorite part of Shiira is the ability to have the browser take up the whole window with a handy navigation panel at the bottom. It is an improvement on such abilities on Windows, and looks really nice. I used it to present a website for school once, and it worked great. Click here for a screenshot.

Heads-Up-Display: Another thing I love is how the history and bookmarks are in a Heads-Up-Display, which makes it really easy to view. It also separates it from the real browser, which makes viewing history a lot easier then in Safari (I hate how you have to hope you don’t move your mouse out of the menu when looking in your history in Safari, it’s challenging). Click here for a screenshot.

PageDock: The PageDock, which is located at the bottom of the screen, is basically the tab bar in Safari souped up. It shows a preview of the page, the name, allows you to close a tab and add a new one really easily. Click here for a screenshot.

Tab Exposé: As I was writing up this review, I saw a little button that I never clicked before. When I did, I was pretty amazed. Like Exposé, which shows all the windows on your desktop smaller, next to eachother, and dims the background to make it easier to focus on the foreground, Tab Exposé shows all the pages in the browser in the same way that Expose does. Click here for a screenshot.

What I Don’t Like
Importing Bookmarks: I tried to import my bookmarks from Safari, by using the bookmarks bar from Safari, and dragging them to Shiira’s bookmarks bar. But, as you probably imagine, that didn’t work. I don’t see a way to do it, and it doesn’t include a menu option to import bookmarks.
Edit: Okay, I figured it out. If you enable Safari bookmarks in the prefences, go to the shelf, and drag them into the folder Bookmarks Bar (with the icon). Then, move one of those around, or do something within the folder Bookmarks Bar, and it should refresh itself. If it does that, it works.
Edit 2: Nevermind, when I quit and restarted, it cleared the bookmarks bar. It seems to not be writing the preferences.

Can’t Change Download Folder: This will probably get fixed in the next release, but while there is an option to change the download folder, but it isn’t enabled. This means that it always downloads to the Desktop, which bugs me, because I use this tip from Deskpopp (I did it already, but they already wrote about it, so I’ll just link to them). I hope they change this soon.

Overall Bugginess: This is always in this browser, and if it wasn’t buggy, much more people would use it. This occurred in the betas, and although people would think it would be fixed by the final release of 2.0, it wasn’t. It crashes a lot, some things don’t work. I may submit bug reports eventually, and I encourage you to submit bug reports too.

Beauty
Besides all that, isn’t it just beautiful?

Even though it’s a great browser, and has been making progress, I’m sticking with Safari. I’m used to it, and I just like how it works. I can’t judge for you though, so download it yourself, and sound off in the comments on what you think. Anyway, I hoped you like this (my first!) review.

PS: If anyone was wondering why the GUI looks different, I’m using this theme, with Shapeshifter.

Apple released yet another iPod today, an updated version of the iPod shuffle. What makes it so special, though, is that they added colors. The colors added include pink, orange, green, blue, and silver. Along with the colors added, the new headphones that were previously only packaged with the new Nanos and Videos have been brought to the Shuffle, and they are nice. To check them out you can head here, and to buy them check out the store.

In other Apple related news, the amount of profit that Apple makes on the the iPhone per sale, which was previously estimated at 50%, may be closer to 20%. As shown here, you can see some of the reasons why they aren’t making as much money as people previously thought. The main reasons are the cost of the touch screen, shipping, marketing, and research and development.

Windows Vista was also released recently. For Windows XP users, it’s a pretty nice upgrade, but until it’s used in many places may not be worth the purchase. I’ve looked at it and used it while it was in RC1, and liked what I saw. Most applications worked, the GUI looked nice, and is an overall nice operating system to me. From the viewpoint of an Apple “fanboy”, you could say, I think it’s a big improvement, and may use it in the future.

Another cool bit of news is a newly discovered savant, someone who has a mysterious or even genius skill in a mind that is otherwise limited, Daniel Tammet. The special thing about this savant is that he has no obvious mental disability, and can describe his thought process. He memorized Pi to 22,000 digits, showing his extraordinary skill in math and numbers, but has trouble remembering faces and other broad things. He said that while he can’t remember faces well, he can remember the details of someone, like the tie they were wearing or the number of buttons on their jacket. To me, this is really interesting and cool, and want to see more of him in the future.

For all you would be bloggers or writers, who want to do some writing but don’t know how to I have a quick recommendation. Instead of going to blogger or some other platform like that, I recommend you use Wordpress, like I do. You can start off with a blog hosted by Wordpress, or you can find some hosting and manage it yourself.

The main reasons I use it is because it is easy to use, easy to manage, and easy to make it look nice. There are an abundance of free themes out there for Wordpress, which you can tweak, or use as is. Plugins also make it easier to use, with things like what you are Digging, and your Flickr stream. You can have multiple authors, easy to manage sections, and much more.

I encourage you to check it out, and head here for more information.