A new year, a new wordpress version

I figured it was about time I updated my Wordpress software. 2.7 has been out for a while but I didn’t feel the need to upgrade since 2.6 was working very well for me. I recently had to set up a new blog for a new site I’m working on, so obviously I downloaded and installed 2.7. All I can say is WOW! The admin UI for 2.7 is stunning in its design and incredibly easy to use.

Perhaps it’ll spur me to blog more

One of things that I absolutely love is the new plugin installer. Now there’s really no need to go outside of the admin UI to do pretty much everything I need to keep my site up to date. It does that mean that good ol’ Cyberduck might start to gather dust though!

iPhone Stop Motion movie

So I got a little bored in a meeting this week. One of the new guys I’m working with, Lee, had brought in a bunch of art supplies for a design meeting and I got a bit carried away with the play-dough! The result was this short iPhone stop motion movie. It’s not exactly ground breaking, but was pretty fun to put together. The final movie was created in iMovie, which was ridiculously easy to use.

Bowled Over from Todd Papaioannou on Vimeo.

“There is no charge for awesomeness!”

I got a chance to see Kung Fu Panda the other day. It was way better than I had expected, especially from the trailers I had seen. Jack Black was great as the voice of Po, the main character. The opening dream sequence has to be one of the best written scenes I’ve heard in a long time! And it’s where the title for this post comes from. Apparently I am not the only one to think so. Shame I can’t find a really good t-shirt with the quote on it. There are a couple of there, but they kinda suck. Still, apparently someone’s making money off it. Good luck to them!

A new family addition: Sienna Grace

The newest addition to our family recently arrived! Sienna Grace, born on 24th July at 9:36 PM. You can find out more details at the Family blog, and with more pictures and videos of how we are all settling in to our new lives.

Apple Cinema Sleek

So my crappy old monitor finally died. Well, it wasn’t that bad, it was a pretty nice flatscreen LCD, but it was dated. And only 19″ wide and after having my HD TV for nearly a year now it’s been quite depressing to have such a limited monitor.

So.. (what a hardship!) I was forced to look for another this weekend. But of course I didn’t have too look far. I’ve had my eye on the Apple Cinema displays for a while. They are by far the most sexy monitors out there. Exquisitely designed with tremendous color and brightness. Sure, there are probably some with better specs for hard core fraggers/gamers, but I don’t need that anymore. I just need some clean stylish lines.

Given the amount of space I have at home, I went for the 20″ version, which is now running in widescreen mode at 1680 by 1050 pixels. Not that huge really when you compare it to what I could do with the 30″ version. But then again, the price at $699 is just great! And I don’t need that much screen real estate at home anyway, at work is a different matter though!

Technorati Tags: apple, cinema, display, technolust

Jira Issues on my desktop

Since I seem to have committed to the Yahoo Widget Engine (see my earlier post about RSS Readers) I thought I’d see if there was anything that could help me keep track of my JIRA issues. Of course there is! The Jira Issues Widget by shinetech is just what I needed. And it’s almost perfect. I can easily see what my open issues are (or use any other filter for that matter), and click through and update them in about 30 secs. The only thing I don’t like about it is the amount of real estate taken up by the header and the footer. They could be made a lot smaller and more subtle. Still, can’t complain too much eh?

Technorati Tags: jira, yahoo widgets,

Yet another RSS Reader

YARR! Sounds like some open source project name. Hmm.. got me interested. Amazingly, no one has taken it. But I digress. Yes, I’ve added another RSS reader to my arsenal. But weren’t you happy with MultiNewsReader I hear you cry? Yes, very happy. But I only have so much screen real estate, and there are only so many blogs that I really want to track with that model. I’m more than happy to subscribe to lots of others and not check them that that often. Enter FeedReader. Very slick, allows me to handle multiple feeds and displays them in a visual style that I’m used to. i.e. similar to Email.

Things I really like about it:

• I can configure exactly how many articles I want in my archive so when I get more than that older ones drop off. NewsGator didn’t do this for me.
• It does the “outlook”esque pop up very nicely, but of course I can turn that off too
• It’s free. Hey, shouldn’t that be at the top!

So I think I’m done with RSS feaders now. If only I could be my BluePulse reader working on my phone, I’d be in heaven.

Technorati Tags: rss, readers

Scrybe – the last organizer you’ll need?

Jason Clark has a write up of an awesome new organizer. Having watched the video I might just be tempted to finally ditch my Outlook calendar. I tried that with Google Calendar but couldn’t quite make the switch. Not that Google Calendar is great but it didn’t quite meet my needs. I don’t _just_ need a Calendar. Scrybe is a step beyond that though, allowing you to do a lot more when organizing your crazy life. Links, lists, syncing, grabbing notes from your web travels right into your organizer. And the best part? Offline mode! Now that’s a killer feature.

Widgets for your phone

Stumbled across Bluepulse during my travels. I think I found it here, but I can’t be sure. It’s an interesting idea that basically brings MIDP widgets to your phone. Now, I’ve been looking for something like that for a while.  I use my phone a lot to satisfy periods of MicroBoredom ™. But reading CNN is getting a little bit passe. I wanted to be able to catch up with my RSS feeds. Now I can!

Note: I initially had some difficulty getting Bluepulse to work on my RAZR on Cingular. This article has details of how to make that work.

And the RSS Reader Winner is…

For a while now I’ve been trying to find the perfect RSS reader for me. I’ve tried having the feeds integrated with my email client using Newsgator, but that didn’t work. The feeds all ended up in their own folders and I just never bothered to scan those folders. Then I tried using Sage from within FF while I was hacking the ZP RSS support. Again, that didn’t work because I needed to make an effort to open Sage and scan the actual feeds for new items.

What I was really looking for was an unobtrusive system that would periodically flash into my field of view and let me decided whether that was a story that I wanted to read. Something that came extremely close was the News plugin for Trillian. Oh so close! But it only supports RSS 0.91, which is a bit limiting.

OK, that’s not a bad approach I thought, what else is out there? Enter RssReader. Very close to what I needed, it does flash up a little notification window that disappears after a while. Thing is, I’m a bit of a UI snob, and that pop window is just ugly!

So recently, I stumbled across the Yahoo Widgets (not to be confused with the Yahoo User Interface library!). I’d played with Konfabulator before but it never really stuck. I guess second time it hit the right spot. And then my journey really began! Who would have thought finding an RSS reader that could handle multiple feeds and display them in a sensible manner was going to be that hard. There are close to 400 RSS readers listed at the widget gallery, but only a handful do multiple feeds. Most are preset to grab a feed from “insert your favorite feed here”. Quite annoying. I must have churned through about 20 of them looking for the right one. In the end, I settled on MultiNewsReader. Yes, I know that it doesn’t actually pop up a notification window like I wanted, but I can run on open all the time, and the tranparency in the black mode is just right so it blends into my background. From time to time I glance at it and a suitably interesting story grabs my interest and I can launch straight to it in my browser.