Sinclair ZX Spectrum vs the iMac

ZX Spectrum

Today I was watched the Gadget Show, while cooking dinner. Part of the show includes a section called the technology wall of fame. In the past they have had interesting rivals like the boxbrownie vs the polaroid (instant) camera. However this time around it was the Sinclair Spectrum vs the iMac.

Now frankly I can't believe they even bothered with this because hands down the Sinclair has done more for the computer industry that the imac. Yes the imac was back then pretty, dropped legacy ports in favour of USB ports and made it easy to get online. But the Spectrum started a whole industry, it stretched peoples imagination and creativity. Comparing the two is a joke. You could argue that the imac does deserve a spot in the hall of fame but not at the expense of the ZX Spectrum.

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General linux life would be a bit better if…

Liferea's new opetions

Newsgator would port there software to Linux. Even if they don't, surely someone has build a client which takes advantage of the newsgator api? Nope not a single application on the linux platform. I've gotten so fed up of the whole problem, that I generally read more on my phone or fireup a browser and read it online. I know this is very lazy web but come on somebody, use the newsgator api and give your rss aggregator a huge advantage over all the others in the market. This actually really winds me up because I can't even use wine to run rss bandit and rss reading is not the kind of thing you want to do in a VM. Hell if someone could quickly write a Adobe Air application for this, I'd be happy.

Evernote also fits into the same category as Newsgator. Runs on almost everything else even Windows Mobile and the iPhone but can we get some linux support? Not a chance. Evernote does play ok with Wine but its ugly and very slow, not the kind of thing you want to start up for a quick note or have hanging around on your computer all day. Like Newsgator Evernote also has a public API which could be used to create a evernote client for the linux platform or even something like Air. I'm still liking the idea of some conversion between evernote and tomboy notes which runs natively on the gnome desktop. Then you got the speed and easy of a native app crossed with the flexibility and ubiquity of Evernote. I actually think Conduit could do this with ease, if only I could write Python.

Why is it there is still no decent Blog editor for Linux? I use to use Wblogger then switched to … when still using Windows. Now having tried almost all the linux blogging apps, I settled on Scribe Fire which runs out of Firefox. I was surprised to find there is little in the way of blogging apps on the air platform.

Don't get me wrong I love my switch to Linux/Ubuntu (I say while slowly converting all my Freenas drives to a format which Ubuntu understands). But sometimes I think the talented developers who work on great linux software miss some of the obvious flaws. I did recently found out that Liferea the RSS reader for Linux did include Google sync support with Google Reader which is tempting me over. However when I finally did install Liferea again, I found it included the next best thing to true sync. The ability to sync the OPML file. So at least I got my subscription lists sorted.

Its also worth noting there are loads of applications which are unique to the Linux platform which are amazing such as Gwibber (which if it was a little more stable I would use everyday), Specto and the already mentioned Conduit.

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