Colleague.biz

Mark Paschal's Kit Radio Tool really rocks! It replaces the standard Radio News Aggregator with one that has filters (text, time, span), grouping, date stamping, and color coding. Using the Kit Aggregator it is now possible to subscribe to dozens of feeds, group them by interest category, filter the category by time or key words, and get only a small subset of the thousands of possible articles. This is very nice.

I believe such filtering is critical to effective use of RSS and Aggregators in K-Log environments, where you may need to filter down to key articles that pertain to project- or time-specific topics. Oddly, a search for Paschal's name on the K-Logs Yahoo! Group yields zero results. I would think the other K-Loggers would have discussed this improvement.

Installation is a snap, directions are clear, and after a little experimentation use seems pretty intuitive. Oh yeah, Kit does all sorts of other things like run scripts, search weblogs, change time/date stamps on posts, edit outlines, and probably other things I don't understand. But if it didn't do anything more than give me control over the aggregator it would be a winner.

Paschal also makes Stapler, an RSS generator you can use to create feeds for sites that do't have them. Once you create the feeds Stapler will store them locally, update them, and even aggregate them into combined feeds. Pretty cool.

Another gem found courtesy of [Russ Lipton Documents Radio].

On-line Print Services and Print Patents

7:28:42 AM

comment []

Cafepress.com lets you design and sell swag for your company, your blog, or your company blog. Upload your graphics, pick the product mix, set the price, link back. They appear to produce and sell ad specialities on demand. High margin stuff for them. I don't know about quality. Maybe I'll buy something and see.

VistaPrint of Waltham, MA has a lot of online print goods. Price grid is confusing but looks like 250 4/1 cards for under $30. What is the difference between the different business card levels? And why does the site only support MSIE. Bad.

Frank found a patent they list -- No. 6,247,011 -- and they claim over 1 million customers. Looks like another silly printing process patent.

Update: I found this on while searching for info on the patent Digital-Net and Insty-Prints.

Deep-seated Insecurities

7:17:03 AM

comment []

I like the idea of remote access. I'm gonna do it. Soon. I don't like the security issues. I think I'll have to setup a special machine that runs only the apps I want to access remotely, and has no access to other network resources. I'll have to figure out the stupid Windoze Users and Groups permissions so the machine runs in something less than Administrator mode. Lots of programs don't seem to run well like that. I don't know if that's my fault or the programmer's.

If I do this I guess I'll be a "remote" user all the time, huh? Even from my primary machine I'll be accessing Radio over the network. Wonder if there are any performance issues. I'll have to experiment.

What about a software VPN? Doesn't Windoze have something built-in? It would be nice to have access to my files -- at least a subset of files. Ugh. Document management. Versions. Keeping track. Argh-h-h-h. Must be a better way. Anyone have a suggestion for accessible doc storage? I know X-Drive and all those silly "hard drive in the sky" operations have shut down, and I don't know that I trusted them anyway. I guess putting them in a pwd-protected subdirectory on my web host is about as good as it gets. But then there's uploading, file management, versions, keeping track. Ugh.

Maybe I just share out the D: drive on the host machine, mount that across the network and store my project docs and stuff there. Wouldn't be too hard to have a projects or work folder. Since my other machines wouldn't be on when I was gone there would be no chance of getting to them.

WiFi at Little Airports

7:15:02 AM

comment []

I'm in the Lincoln, NE airport. Why can't they put WiFi (who calls it "wiffy"?) in little airports? Can't be that hard. All the business-user bandwidth hogs would clog it up in a big airpot, but there are only two gates in LNK (can you geuss what they're called?) and only a handful of people sitting here with laptops. We could easily share a DSL or cable line. What about some warchalking at regional airports? Does the FAA really think 802.11 will bring down the flight line? It can't be any worse than cell phones.