TechnoMagicians Blog

I’ve been looking for something desktop based that would alert me to twitter and facebook (primarily) updates on a more realtime basis. It doesn’t do me any good to have Twitter or Facebook pages open in a browser and constantly be checking there. I thought I’d be able to follow Twitter updates within Google Reader but unfortunately they don’t update often enough and the timestamps they pull don’t seem to be right (ie. they are timestamped at the time the feed is pulled in rather than when the post is actually made).

I finally settled on AlertThingy although it still isn’t doing the job 100% like I would like I haven’t been able to find anything else nearly as close to it.

Besides handling Twitter and Facebook it will also grab updates from Amazon, Basecamp, Digg, Flickr, Huddle, Jaiku, Ping.fm, TinyURL, Tumblr, TwitPic, Twitter Search, Yammer and any RSS feed.

So far its been working really well for Twitter and Facebook and a very small set of RSS feeds that I’d like to know about instantly. Facebook and Twitter updates seem to come in within minutes so that is good enough.

AlertThingy still needs a bit of work but so far it works really well. One problem is that the popup notifications don’t stay on screen long enough and it is not configurable. So, I barely have time to read what its about and usually miss it and then have to pull up the application to read the full entry.

Its also an Adobe AIR application so I had to install that for the first time. I really had no use for it before this.

Update: Didn’t think to check IM programs. Looks like Digsby has all this built in but I’m not interested (yet) in changing my IM program. Also Trillian Astra seems to have all this built in as well. I haven’t been too happy with Trillian’s speed with getting that out of beta though. I have a feeling they aren’t concentrating much on the “free” versions of stuff anymore.

Another Update: I found if you are looking for a Twitter only solution TweetDeck seems pretty good. You do need a Twitter account but you don’t need to be following anybody as you can add searches which work out really nicely.

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For those looking for a replacement for BlogChat this TinyChat might do the trick. It doesn’t embed directly on your site and doesn’t show when you are online but still half decent it looks like.

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With their record 6th Superbowl win the men in gold and black are without doubt the greatest NFL football team ever. Its Steelers Nation for good.

My hat is off to the whole organization.

A huge round of applause goes to James Harrison for what I’m calling “The Immaculate Interception”. For those not in the know you can go look up “The Immaculate Reception“.

Immaculate Interception

For a great 15 photos of his 100 yard interception run see this link.

We will always remember Santonio Holmes for all his great catches during the game and of course the most important game winning one:

This was a great image I thought I’d throw in:

Tomlin And Roethlisberger

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It took a couple years but the Steelers are back on track and heading to Superbowl XLIII after taking down the Baltimore Ravens. Still need the offense to step up their game big time as this game was mostly won by the defense with Troy Polamalu the hero.

Troy Polamalu and Steelers celebrate AFC Championship Victory

Santonio Holmes Dives Into The Endzone

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I was saddened to hear that Nortel is filing for bankruptcy protection today. I have fond memories of when I worked for Bell Northern Research (BNR) in Ottawa back in the day when Nortel was actually Northern Telecom and was the manufacturing arm of the operation at the time. The labs in Ottawa and around the world were/are phenomenal working environments and I’ve been meaning to visit the lab on Carling for many years now. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to do that before the whole operation is shutdown for good!!

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Brent has a great write-up on BlogChat so I’ll point folks over there.

Basically it is time to put BlogChat out of its misery and free up some servers that have been providing this service for free for about 7 years. I still remember the first frantic 24-48 hours of development on this thing and the very minor revisions to put it into service. It remained relatively untouched for many many years and still works perfectly fine today. As Brent said “a testament to its simplicity”.

Checkout some of the old posts that Brent points to in the early days here and here. Great memories.

The service will be shutting down within the next 2-4 weeks so those of you still using it please find an alternative.

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Since I rarely watch any TV I’ve cut my cable TV down to the most basic package but even at that I’m wasting some money since I watch maybe 10 minutes of any real TV a week.

So I decided to checkout what I can get with an HDTV over the air (OTA) antenna and a capture card. With a really simple Phillips Silver Sensor indoor antenna and a Hauppauge WinTV HVR 950 USB tuner I was able to grab about 8 stations broadcast out of Toronto. Signals from Hamilton, Buffalo and Rochester stations were too weak to lock onto. But I suspect with a better antenna and possibly an amplifier one could likely tune them in.

This type of setup looks promising and it might in the near future eliminate my cable TV bill completely.

This technology has kind of come around full circle since I was a kid with the old analog antenna’s and terrible fuzzy reception on most stations (those too young probably have no clue what I’m talking about). Its pretty impressive really and the quality of the broadcasts are absolutely superb. I have a friend who has compared the channels received over the air vs cable TV and confirms that they are much clearer than cable. This is due to the fact that the over the air signals are not compressed like they are over cable TV.

Here is a quick screen cap of the software running on my laptop:

WinTV HDTV Screenshot

There are some great sites to checkout:

1. TV Fool – great tool to see what channels you might be able to pickup in your area.
2. List of stations that are broadcast from Toronto/Buffalo areas.
3. FCC list of stations broadcasting or pending approval.
4. Some OTA forums.

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Found this to be very interesting and actually I did notice a drop in spam today.

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Well, I’ve been a long time Bloglines fan for ages but once again it seems to be having problems updating feeds. This is nothing new in the last month or so as pointed out by the x-cofounder here.

I’ve been forced to checkout Google Reader and so far am liking it. At first I thought there were not keyboard shortcuts which is an important feature to me but then found this. You can also get the shortcuts by pressing “?” from the webpage.

Of course I still like some of the things Bloglines allowed me to do that you can’t do easily with Google Reader but there are some things I do like about Google Reader that were not in Bloglines.

I also like the trends thing in Google Reader. I’ve only been using it for a few days so there really isn’t much to trend but I can see it being useful. It can show you what feeds you read most, what feeds are frequently updated, which ones are inactive etc.

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I haven’t had the need to search for anything recently in Google Groups but was doing so today and stumbled upon this. The results not only showed entries in Google Groups (usenet newsgroups and Google Groups) but also posts from a ton of other random forums around the net.

Not sure how new this is or whether Google has announced this as it is the first I’ve seen or heard of it. For all I know this has been a feature for quite some time.

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