Category Archives: Tech

Feed Wrangler: my new Google Reader

4 Comments

Like so many others, I was mildly outraged (and more than a little anxious) when it was announced that Google Reader would be “discontinued” on 1 July.

Of course I was fully aware that its $0 price tag made me the product, and that relying on ANY Google service was asking for trouble (Google’s “discontinuation” of useful features and products is legendary). But I hadn’t been able to find an equally compelling RSS reader. As of early 2013, nothing else existed.

Thankfully, a vast array of options have emerged since Google’s announcement, and I’m happily settling in with Feed Wrangler.

My selection criteria?

  • Cloud-based, i.e. automatic syncing of feeds and read posts across multiple devices.
  • Supported by Reeder and Mr Reader, to enable comfortable reading on my iPhone and iPad. Planned support in these apps was OK if a decent mobile reading interface was provided in the meantime (Feed Wrangler has its own iOS apps, for example).
  • Respectable browser-based reader, for when I’m able to catch up while on a desktop/laptop.
  • Dead-easy setup, so I can comfortably recommend it to less tech-savvy friends.
  • Not free, not expensive. No ads, minimal risk of discontinuation without notice.
  • Attractive. Nice mobile app icons, clean branding, intuitive UI.

Based on all of these, I settled on Feed Wrangler. Others have reviewed it in detail (props to Federico Viticci for this especially thorough review), so I won’t do that again here. But if you do switch to Feed Wrangler, bear in mind that your Google Reader folders won’t appear. Similar functionality is available under “Smart Streams”, but you’ll have to create these from scratch.

Still, I’ve been using it for about two weeks and am loving it!

“What rankles about Google is their hypocrisy”

“What rankles about Google is their hypocrisy”

While I’m wearing my Google-hating hat, here’s a Daring Fireball piece that adds another piece to the puzzle. My favourite bit:

But those statements from Jobs and Ive are not absurd. If they’re not the absolute truth, they’re at least truthy. Whereas Larry Page’s pablum regarding Google not being pitted against other companies is farcical.

You’ll need to click through for the context.

Mounting local filesystems in cygwin

If you’re an OS X/Linux geek who also runs Windoze, cygwin is probably installed on at least one of your computers. (On the other hand, if you have no clue what cygwin is, you’re allowed to skip this one.)

I use cygwin for occasional access to GNU utilities like find, and for rsync-based data replication between computers. Given POSIX permissions don’t map to NTFS permissions, this can be problematic. By default, when cygwin writes to NTFS volumes it replaces any existing NTFS permissions with new ones that replicate the effect of POSIX permissions. This is fine for cygwin-only parts of the filesystem, but if you like your NTFS permissions (including, say, ACL inheritance and propagation) and don’t want them to be butchered, you’ll need to mount your filesystems with the noacl option.

Unfortunately, noacl slows down cygwin’s filesystem operations by a factor of… well, lots. I’ve been enduring this for a while now, but I’m glad to have finally found the cause. With noacl enabled, cygwin can’t efficiently determine the executability of files, so it has to read the first few bytes of each file to figure it out. This slows stat down immensely.

The solution? Add exec, notexec or cygexec to your filesystem mount options. These instruct cygwin to treat every file on the filesystem as executable (or not executable). With this line in /etc/fstab, I’m golden:

none /cygdrive cygdrive binary,posix=0,user,noacl,exec 0 0

Should Microsoft iterate?

1 Comment

Should Microsoft iterate?

It’s pretty much a given that major Microsoft product releases follow the release-first fix-later model these days (e.g. Vista → Windows 7, Windows 8 → Windows 8.1).

Should they adopt Apple’s “don’t-even-announce-it-until-it’s-RTM” approach, or would Google’s “launch-it-in-beta-and-fix-it-on-the-fly” be a better fit?

Click through for Owen Williams’ take on what Microsoft’s current approach is costing them, and what their options are. (via Svbtle)

MacHeist $9.99 bundle (not a sponsored post)

1 Comment

MacHeist $9.99 bundle (not a sponsored post)

App bundles come and go, but this is the first one I’ve actually sprung for, and if you’re a Mac user, you might want to too. I’m picking it up for xScope and Fantastical, but a couple of the other apps look interesting too.

It doesn’t hurt that 10% of bundle sales are donated to charities. And extra apps are unlocked for all purchasers when sales targets are hit.

Clicky clicky!