For several years now, the trend among geeks has been to abandon the RSS format. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to queue up and serve content from the internet.
Source: The Case for RSS — MacSparky
Geeks might not like RSS, but it’s an essential tool if you monitor news or need to stay up to date with developments in a subject area.
An RSS feed is a way of listing online material. There’s a feed for this site if you’re interested. It sends out a short headline and an extract for each new post. That way you can stay up to date with everything published here without needing to constantly revisit the site to check for updates.
Separate feeds
Some big sites break up their news rivers into separate feeds. At the New York Times or The Guardian you can choose to read the technology news feed. At ZDNet you can pick subject feeds or selected a feed for an individual journalist.
Sometimes you can also roll your own niche feeds from big sites by using a search term to get a list of all stories including a certain key word.
The beauty of RSS is that it is comprehensive. It misses nothing. If you go offline for a week you can pick up where you left off and catch up immediately.
The alternatives are social media sites like Twitter or Facebook. They are nothing like as comprehensive or as easy to manage.
Tweets go flying past in a blur on Twitter.
All the main social media sites manage your feed. They decide what you see. This means you can miss important posts as they get pushed out of sight. That doesn’t happen with RSS.
In his story David Sparks says you need to be on Twitter all the time to catch news. Make that: you need to be on Twitter all the time AND staying more alert than most people can manage.
Universal feed
The other great thing about RSS is the format is so universal. It can be as simple as raw text. You can read it on your phone, tablet, computer or anywhere at any time. You can suck it out and place it on your own web site, for instance.
There are RSS readers built into browsers, mail clients like Outlook and other standard software. Or at least there were. I haven’t checked again lately. Feedly is one of the most popular readers. This is both a website and a series of free apps. You can pay a little extra to extra features such as an ability to search feeds, tools for integrating feeds into your workflows and so on.
Not long after becoming a technology journalist I met Adam Osborne.
Osborne invented the portable computer. Let’s be honest, his computer was luggable.
We borrowed one for review.
It was obvious a portable computer would change everything. It set us on the path to the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy phones.
Osborne was a visionary, even if he wasn’t a good businessman — the company went bust after two years.
One thing Osborne said struck a chord at the time: “Adequate is good enough”.
No fannying about
He meant engineers should get a product to the point where it was adequate then send it out the door, no fannying about making it perfect.
It’s a philosophy software companies like Google and Microsoft built fortunes on. Apple, on the other hand, fannies about making everything perfect.
Android works on the adequate is good enough premise. Netbooks were adequate for most users. So was Windows. The fuss over Windows 8 comes down to the simple idea that for many users it isn’t adequate and therefore not good enough.
Good enough
If you’re not a power user, a gamer or an Apple addict you can pick up an adequate and, therefore, good enough, laptop for well under $1000. It’ll do everything you throw at it and then some.
There should be enough change from $1000 for an adequate but good enough phone. It may not have the latest features, but it’ll meet the needs of all but the most demanding users.
None of this is an argument against buying great kit. It’s your money: spend it how you like. But remember most of the time, you don’t have to break the bank to buy tech gear.
I wrote this for the Sydney Morning Herald in 2007. It’s now a piece of history.
If smartphones haven’t killed off traditional handheld computers yet, the day can’t be far away. Sales of non-phone Palm and PocketPC devices are stagnant or falling. There’s been nothing much in the way of new hardware for a couple of years.
Sure, but something huge was on the way.
This is a pity. I’ve found my $500 Palm T|X to be one of my most productive tools. It goes way beyond managing my contact file and calendar information.
My word, what low expectations we had in those days.
The T|X has a 3.8 inch 480 by 320 display. While you wouldn’t call it large, it’s half as big again as the screen on most smartphones.
But tiny by today’s standards.
It makes reading text, browsing web pages, viewing photographs and even watching movies a better experience than squinting at a smartphone display.
Which was true at the time.
The 128MB of built-in memory doesn’t sound much by today’s standards, yet I’ve got a dozen or so applications running on my handheld and scores of stored documents. If I need more memory, I simply slot in an SD card.
That sounds even less now.
And we’re not talking about any old documents. The T|X comes with a bundled version of Documents To Go, an application that allows you to read and, in a limited way, edit, Word or Excel files. It can also be used to read .pdfs, making it the nearest thing to an electronic book.
OK, this looks a bit daft today, but at the time the T|X was a realistic ebook reader.
The T|X’s best feature is its built-in WiFi. When I’m travelling around the city, I stop for coffee where’s there’s a free hot spot and catch up on emails. Sure you can do this anywhere with a smartphone – but the bigger screen makes a difference.
WiFi is still wonderful.
I use WiFi to sync my Palm with my desktop before leaving home and then reverse the process when I return.
This was a novelty.
The T|X isn’t perfect, text entry is clumsy and the battery won’t make it through an extended working day if the wireless is switched on. Yet, all-in-all, it manages to better the specification of smartphones in most departments. When I’m on business away from home I carry a smartphone and a T|X.
No doubt a phone manufacturer will marry the features of the T|X with a smartphone before much longer – judging by the announced specifications Apple’s forthcoming iPhone could get there first.
And the rest is history
**Originally written September 2021. **
At the Guardian Haroon Siddique writes Home computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair dies.
Sir Clive Sinclair, the inventor and entrepreneur who was instrumental in bringing home computers to the masses, has died at the age of 81.
His daughter, Belinda, said he died at home in London on Thursday morning after a long illness. Sinclair invented the pocket calculator but was best known for popularising the home computer, bringing it to British high-street stores at relatively affordable prices.
Many modern-day titans of the games industry got their start on one of his ZX models. For a certain generation of gamer, the computer of choice was either the ZX Spectrum 48K or its rival, the Commodore 64.”
My first brush with Sinclair was as an A-level student in the UK. Before he made computers, Sinclair designed a low-cost programmable calculator.
It fascinated me and, thanks to a well-paid part-time job, I managed to buy one. From memory it could only handle a few programmable steps, but it was enough to make complex calculations.
My second job after university was working as a reporter for Practical Computing magazine. I started in January 1980 and quickly became familiar with the original Sinclair ZX80 computer.
Later that year I went to the launch of the ZX81 and met Sinclair for the first time. Over the next few years he became a familiar face.
That modest, clunky ZX81 computer changed everything. Before 1981 was out, the publishing company I worked for started Your Computer magazine which focused on small, low-cost home computers. For the first few issues I was staff reporter on both titles.
The next two years were a wild roller coaster ride. An entire industry emerged and I was in the centre of it.
ZX Spectrum was Sinclair’s definitive product
For me, Sinclair’s most important product was the ZX Spectrum. It was flawed in many ways, but it could do enough to spawn a generation of entrepreneurs and get thousands of young people into computing. I still have one in my attic.
By the time the later Sinclair QL appeared, low-cost computers with decent keyboards and storage were pushing out the minimal, low-cost options Sinclair specialised in.
By now Sinclair was Sir Clive. My last brush with his business was the ill-fated C5 battery powered vehicle. It failed and Sinclair faded from sight, later the remnants of his computer business were picked up by Amstrad.
My main memories of Sinclair were his enthusiasm and his ambitions to build devices that anyone, regardless of budget, could afford.