iPodder 2.0 beta vs blogmatrix

Via Adam Curry. There is a new version of iPodder lemon edition. Its in beta but looks like a massive improvement on the old classic ipodder 1.14. There are some screenshots of the windows and mac versions here. I have downloaded the beta which is a 10.5 meg by the way… I dont know if I will try it out because I have recently switched over to using blogmatrix jager for both my rss reading and podcasting. I was tempted with Sparks! too but I installed it at work and got fed up with the lack of rss reading at the time. Now maybe a good time to upgrade?

Anyway, I may see what new in ipodder 2.0 and compare the features with Jager, if Jager wins I'll donate some money for sure, specially if the delicious linkage is going to do something like AmphetaRate, smartmobs sums it up. Maybe this could kill Digg which I like but dont have time to mess with, plus I'm using del.icio.us all the time now, so I'm glad to hear blogmatrix are using del.icio.us. Talking of Blogmatrix heres somethings which i'm crying out for in rss readers generally.

Ok subscriptions! What on earth are developers thinking about? Yes you can import and export OPML 1.1 great but what about synchronisation? Jager does sync subscriptions but you only have 2 options. FTP and bloglines. I dont have a FTP server running and really really dont want to go down that route just to keep my ipaq, laptop plus workstation at home and work all sync'ed but it looks like I may have to. The other option of using bloglines is good and I'm at the moment trying to remember my password for my old bloglines account. I really dont want to loose the cubicgarden username. Anyway back to jager, please please include a webdav option so anyone with a mac and idisk can use that for storage of opml. Another thing which my pocketRSS and RSSOwl do which I have not yet found is a real subscription method. All my OPML is online and I usually add RSS feeds to the OPML directly using Webdav or locally then get pocketRSS to update the subscription which pulls in all the new RSS feeds without effecting the others already in place. This also works in RSSOWL if you set it up correctly however there thinking of removing the feature in favour of the jager ideas. Updating the OPML in Jager seems to involve unsubscribing to all the feeds which is easy but then dragging the OPML back in again. Yuk!
Another ignoying thing for me, is there any podcast software which supports RSS 1.0 enclosures? I kinda of expect with Danny Ayers post it would start to happen.

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The service at the wireless point

I was listening to Dana Blankenhorn on The Impacts of Persistent Distributed IT at Accelerating Change. He suggests that we do not have a platform for this decade and that wireless (wimax and wifi) could be it. He states the simple but actually quite obvious fact that we use wireless to access the internet. So everyone is cramming the pipe beyond the access point and not using the actual wireless in ways we are only just starting to see.

And honestly it all makes sense. Wireless has effective bandwidth from 3meg (802.11b) to 100meg (WiMax 802.16). Why not use the wireless point as a platform? Dana suggests Linux is the key for this and he's not wrong. For example, I saw this linksys wireless router ages ago which can be hacked to put linux on it. Yes thats great but wheres the use in just having linux on it? Yes I know you could install anything you like on it but besides a webserver I've seen little else. Till a while ago when the Xlink guys released Xlink Kai station for the WRT54G. Which means you can route traffic for playing multiple player games on the free xlink network with just a xbox and one of these. (yes i have talked about it before, but highlighting whats possible when you think about wireless as a platform).
Yes limited example but a interesting none the less. I would like to see zeroconf aka rendezvous better known as multicast dns services happening at the wireless level. I mean its ideal because the automatic discovery nature makes roaming around wireless points a joy. And before I go, lets not limit wireless to one point. With Mesh networking it should be simple to extend the range and the users to the service. Lets also not forget machine to machine services would benefit from mesh technologies.

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Windows 2000 reinstall list

Ok I didnt give up, I just got a point where I had to make a decision. Yep thats right, I'm back to using Windows on my main workstation. Its dual bootable with Hard drive installed Knoppix /images/emoticons/laugh.gifebian) but honestly its pretty messed up and almost unrecoverable. Anyway, I decided that I didnt want to go back to Windows XP Pro just yet so installed a old version of Windows 2000. And spent the next few days installing this huge list… Inspired by Bill de Hora

Zone Alarm
Windows 2000 Service Pack 4
Windows 2000 updates
DirectX 9b
Tons of Hardware Drivers
Java 1.42_06 (was tempted to install 1.5)
AVG
PSI
Firefox
Thunderbird
Wbloggar
BlogMatrix Jager
iTunes
Winrar
Azureus
FFmpeg
VLC
ActiveSync
Audacity
Quicktime
GIMP
DVD Shrink
DVD Decrypter
Mpeg2Schnitt
Windows Mediaplayer
DrDivx
Audioscrobbler plugin for iTunes
Irfanview
Nero
CCXstream
Skype
KeePass
Partition Magic
Acrobat Reader
Xlink Kai Evolution
Ad Aware
Open Office
Xmpeg
Inkscape
XMLSpy
Putty
WinSCP
Resin
Smart FTP

What I'll be installing soon…
Icecast server
Zoe
Textpad or Uedit
Opera
Winamp
Mozilla SVG build
SDP
Matroska Pack
Atomix Mp3 or Virtual DJ
BS player
Blogwave
Spike
VNC
Remote Desktop server/client

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The Evolving Personalized Information Construct

Its back again, freaky Epic future. Just in case you missed it before, its about the future of news media and is a look back from 2014 where the New York Times has gone offline and Google is the number one news provider. All presented in a Museum kiosk style.

But in addition to my post last time. This weeks show web talk show has a detailed discussion around the ideas in the flash movie, as well as the audio of the movie. Well worth the 43mins of listening. Links to the Windows and Real Streams as well as Mp3 download.

Even though the movie is a work of fiction, its actually very freaky and not that far fetched. I mean a place where every participates is something the internet community has been pushing for quite a while. However the devil is in the detail, participating should always be something you choose to do, not just automaticly pushed into. Some interesting points in the movie, which I wanted to talk about more.

Googlezon finally checkmates Microsoft with features the software giant cannot match. Using a new algorithm, Googlezon�s computers construct news stories dynamically, stripping sentences and facts from all content sources and recombining them. The computer writes a news story for every user.

Even though this is very hard to imagine in practice, I can see how this is possible if were expecting even more structure news content. The set of technologies which help make this ver possible is XPointer, Xlink and Xbase. With Xpointer for example, it would be easy to pull paragraphs of a certain criteria out of a xml stream and recombine them into something more interesting, with a different slant or even out of context. Talk about disruptive technology?

2006 � Google combines all of its services – TiVo, Blogger, GMail, GoogleNews and all of its searches into the Google Grid, a universal platform that provides a functionally limitless amount of storage space and bandwidth to store and share media of all kinds. Always online, accessible from anywhere. Each user selects her own level of privacy. She can store her content securely on the Google Grid, or publish it for all to see. It has never been easier for anyone, everyone to create as well as consume media.

Dont even need to go into depth with this one, just look at what Gmail has done to webmail. There were lots of concerns for privicy but it seems google have got away with it. Blogger is another stratagic placeholder for the googlegrid. Microsoft are really playing catchup just launching msnspaces recently.

The �Evolving Personalized Information Construct� is the system by which our sprawling, chaotic mediascape is filtered, ordered and delivered. Everyone contributes now � from blog entries, to phone-cam images, to video reports, to full investigations. Many people get paid too � a tiny cut of Googlezon�s immense advertising revenue, proportional to the popularity of their contributions.

Amazon and Google have been in the micro advertising game for so long now, people actually make a ok amount of money off google and amazon advertising. Honestly they may have saved the online advertising world back in 2001 with there simple and effective adsense and amazon associates thing.

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At long last, a new style for the garden…

Just incase your one of the 50% who read cubicgarden.com through RSS only, you might have missed the style and layout change of cubicgarden.com. I've adopted the popular Asual theme and tweaked it into something more tasty for myself. As I write this, I am not finished yet. I need change the fonts and the sizes to fit with the cheq background. I'm also planning print and presentation stylesheets for myself, so I can easily do a presentation of an idea from my own blog entries. I'm hoping to push out a stylesheet switcher for those who do not use Firefox or Opera browser. So at least you can change the background to something more readable (sorry I have excellent 20/20 vision and can read off the cheq without a problem). This also gives me a chance to get much more creative with CSS and maybe play with Aural stylesheets which should work in Opera 8? Talking of which, its interesting Opera is following Apple by trying to win over the education market first.

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Some new manifestos….

A couple of manifestos which I've been reading recently…

From the gaping void blog

[The ChangeThis blurb:] “You've read the Cluetrain, now Hugh MacLeod brings you The Hughtrain. A manifesto on brands, blogs, and the now of advertising and marketing.”

P2P manifesto Via Howard Rheingold's Smartmobs.com

P2P is unstoppable
P2P is positive for companies
P2P is positive for the market
P2P is good for users

All the readers can create their own P2P Manifesto, free to edit this original P2P manifesto.

The idea is to then collect on the blog all the different P2P Manifesto's releases, to create a good knowledge base point about P2P issues.

Howard Rheingold's own Mobile and Open: A Manifesto

Only a cockeyed optimist would forecast an open, user-driven, entrepreneurial future for the mobile Internet. This should not prevent us from trying, however. Sometimes, envisioning the way things ought to be can inspire people to work at making it that way. That's what manifestos are for.

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Social software silos

Tim Idenifies the major problem with social software silos.

One thing that interests me in terms of is the fact that there are many sites offering social applications (different services rather than duplication) and it struck me that it would be really cool to have a sort of 'meta-social'software' service, that would aggregate all your social presence on the web into one place. That way you could take your blog, del.icio.us bookmarks, IM accounts, flickr photos, friendster profile, url and email (along with any other personal data) and make it accessible all in one place, meaning you only have to give out one userID to people, which would allow access to all these things.
Microsoft's solution is a great effort in that it tries to integrate all these services, but the fact that you have to buy in to using the same product for everything concerns me slightly; – it would be nice if integration was possible over multiple services. This should be possible with something like RSS, but to my knowledge has not yet been done. (Presulably a level of cooperation between teh providers of social web services would be needed, and since not all of these services are open source, this is probably fairly unlikely.)

Some thoughts on the issue myself, first I saw some information about LID – lightweight identity and I've been thinking about the whole issue myself. Recently I adopted the use of Keepass which is a open source light weight password manager. To have pretty much all my internet and computer passwords in an advanced 256bit encrypted, twofish algorithm database, makes you think twice about personal information. I mean for example I'm playing with Microsoft Wallop, using flickr for my public domain photos, relaying music taste to audioscobbler and busy weaving bookmarks and metadata for del.icio.us. But each one bar audioscrobbler I would say are pretty much deadend when it comes to getting personal information out. Not only that but what about all the other information which is generated from mass aggregation? Would be good to share that information with the people actually creating it wouldnt it? By the way I have not heard Doug Kay talk about Attention XML for ages now and digital identity was discussed by the gillmor gang a while ago. The reality of digital identity raises its head when thinking about social software, shame none of them will even take my foaf profile? Not to say that is the ultimate aim of digital identity and interopable social software.

Miles dropped me and Tim a email pointing towards the new Technorati Tags. And honestly I'm pretty impressed with the tag feature, I just wish there was a meta standard for blogging which would beat using the rel attribute in a link. The better default option of using the categories of blog entries is actually quite a good idea because it requires no extra effort from the blogger and its retro active, which gives technorati lots of data to analyse, if they have not done so already. Anyway to celebrate the technorati's step up in the aggregation market here's a couple of good examples.
Technorati bubble
Technorati ipaq tag | Bill Gates | Socialsoftware | Hacking | Xbox | Silicon | Flickr | xbmc. Now if only we could get this in xml?

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podcasting on mobile devices

[11:41:08] miles> Saw some interesting stuff recently on podcasting and 3G phones
[11:41:17] myself> oh yeah?
[11:42:41] myself> i saw there is a smartphone ipodder client now – http://www.ipodder.org/directory/4/ipodderSoftware. but directory is messed up so i cant see the url
[11:43:35] miles> What the “What is?” – um, yes. Forget whose blog it was. Suggesting that podcasting might make sense with a 3G phone. Imagine a service that would download your podcasts for you, allowing you to retrieve them conveniently with your phone or other digital gadgets – not using something like iPodder: the service provider handles all of that work. You get the content you want all in one place.
[11:44:03] miles> A sort of podcast aggregator
[11:44:05] myself> humm now thats interesting
[11:44:18] myself> found it by the way – http://www.equin.co.uk/ipoddersp/
[11:44:32] miles> It makes podcasts more viable, too, because the podcasters wouldn't get soaked for bandwidth
[11:44:53] myself> yeah and orange and the like will enjoy being in the loop
[11:44:53] miles> Cool!
[11:45:13] myself> i've not used pocketrss2 with 3g yet
[11:45:20] myself> but that would work too
[11:45:27] miles> Exactly – they can make money off it, and profile their customers' tastes too
[11:45:41] myself> ah now thats true
[11:47:59] miles> http://archive.scripting.com/2005/01/11#podcastingMayBeTheirKillerApp
[11:48:05] miles> That was it, I think
[11:50:17] miles> It's because the American low-end telephony approach isn't shiny enough – but this would work better for a 3G service than a low-end GPRS phone. Plus you could do more with a modern terminal
[11:51:45] myself> yes, this handset i'm using has streaming and very tightly intergrated mediaplayer

[11:52:24] miles> Spot on. If it had MP3/OGG streaming support it would be perfect /images/emoticons/happy.gif

So I go off and try and test downloading and streaming content on my phone. The results are not good. First finding a nice easy to type feed. http://www.di.fm will do. Ok great, page will not load on my phone correctly. Try http://www.shoutcast.com. Not much better, so i resort to typing in the direct url. Works but does not know what a *.pls or *.m3u file is Unsupported content type. Ok so I try going to the direct mp3 file. I get this error – HTTP Error: 413 Request too large. I think I'm going about it all the wrong way, maybe the media needs to be embeded into a page or be in a special format. So I go to the Orange world home page and check out the film clips in the 3g highlights section. As expected there is an option to download and to stream. With both, it swiches to the mediaplayer and asks to download or prepares the stream. Have to say the stream is good, only 5 secs wait before it started playing. Hummmm, so I need to look at what there using in that wap page to launch the mediaplayer. The link to stream is http://wap.orange.co.uk/downloads/index.wml?rm=buy&id=9937media_id=20013&version=gp80s&sid98bddc0e8231 and the download is http://wap.orange.co.uk/downloads/index.wml?rm=buy&id=9937media_id=20013&version=gp94&sid98bddc0e8231, but I think you need to be on there connection for it to work?

Anyway the other thing I wanted to point at was the link to ipodderSP I sent to miles about a podcasting client on the smartphone. I gave up my SPV to my wife so I just missed out, but wow ipodderSP looks like just the job. For now, i'm quite happy listening to podcasts on my ipaq than anything else but i'm happy to see even more podcast clients coming to the pocketpc.

more to come….

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More sanyo s750 fun?

I've been doing my research on the 3g forum just recently. Some things of interest.

From Frazzel

The video calling is good as it lets you play back a video to someone your talking to also while on hold you will see windmills and hear some chillout music. Very different!

Not yet checked this out because everyone I know on 3g is using 3 (the company). I think I may know one person on Vodafone Live 3g but no one on Orange 3g. Hey talking of which is it actually possible to do cross network video calls yet? Or do we have to go through the whole interop thing for the 4th time now?

About those Bluetooth problems I was having, well I got them still and Jonstatt sums up the problem. The bluetooth implementation is nowhere near as good as Sony Ericsson. You can only have one bluetooth profile selected at a time whereas the Sony will auto select the right one.. I tried the sync option as described here but decided to just export vcards out of outlook then copy them to the sd card. When in the s750, it will let you import them with no problems. It seems generally people are sending back there sanyo phones which I may do if I can not setup bluetooth dialup within the next week. There is some light however, some people have got it working with the ipaq, mac, a toshiba laptop and even a pc. I got a feeling the last two are pre service pack 2 pc's and I'm going to make a long call to orange about my 3g ipaq dialup connection!

Its 4am, and I've finally got the ipaq to dialup GPRS and 3G over Bluetooth with the Sanyo S750! Actually this is now the 6th time i've done it. Whats the settings I'm using? First thing I've pared the two using the headset method described here. Then I'm using *99# to dialup orange and no modem string of any kind. Now to be fair, I did once get the dialup to work with the string at+cgdcont=1,”IP”,”orangeinternet” but not consistently like the no string option. I'm now currently trying to work out why it didnt work before. Other things I noticed, I always have to dialup via the ipaq bluetooth manager otherwise it never works no matter what i do. The baud rate seems to work best on 57600 rather than 115200 and wait for dialtone slows the connection process down alot. I've also just been playing a little more and found +cgdcont=1,”IP”,”orangeinternet” works, but not as well as no extra modem commands. I really need to post this on the 3g forum soon.

I was trying to test the speed of the 3g connection and I can not find one tester which doesnt use javascript of java to complete the test. I really want to know what kind of speeds are possible using this 3g connection now. Which also reminds me to check to see if I get 50meg of 3G data too? By the way, if your interested in the quality of the 1.3 megapix camera check out these two great shots. Yep he's a lady killer…

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Future conference choices

Which one would you go to? and of course, how would you justify it?

Doors of perception 8 in New Delhi, India – 19-26 March 2005
O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, America – 14-17 March 2005
SVG Open 2005 in Enschede, Netherlands – 15-19 August 2005
The World Wide Web conference 2005 in Chiba, Japan – 10-14 May 2005
XTech 2005 (use to be XML Europe) in Amsterdam, Netherlands – 25-27 May 2005

Well if I can finally find time to write my SVG paper before the looming deadline of Feb 1st 2005, I would get a huge discount into SVG open 2005. (By the way, my new Sanyo S750 plays SVG). I was planning on a presentation on the Art and Design, Data Connection or Evangelism & Specs tracks. Even if I miss out on the paper call, I'm still going to create some kind of promotional animation showing off SVG at its best and hopefully projected on to the white walls of the university. Back to the subject, if worst comes to worst I'm going to pay for the conference because its so close, flights and sleeping arrangements will be cheap and its an excuse to go back to the netherlands again.

Update, thanks to Joel. I'm going to submit a paper to XTECH 2005 on behalf of BBC World Service about RSS. My main push will be about publishing RSS in 35 different languages and then how were publishing extra metadata to help build a better picture of the content. I'll also touch on how were able to service 3 different types of end points with the same content. Should make an interesting but challenging talk for those involved in the xml world. I wish BBC News lots of success with there paper, and honestly think if both papers are accepted this would be great for the BBC. You only have to look at the line up for Emerging technology to see how diverse and forward looking the BBC is.

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Bill Gates: Free Culture advocates = Commies

copyleft russian flag

From BoingBoing.net

In an interview on news.com, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates described free culture advocates as a “modern-day sort of communists.”

Q: “In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, 'We've got to look at patents, we've got to look at copyrights.' What's driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?

A: “No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.

And this debate will always be there. I'd be the first to say that the patent system can always be tuned–including the U.S. patent system. There are some goals to cap some reform elements. But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we've had the best intellectual-property system–there's no doubt about that in my mind, and when people say they want to be the most competitive economy, they've got to have the incentive system. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future.”

Ok this damm right offensive, where does he get off saying the free-culture movement is sort of like the communists movement. I cant wait to hear what others say about this part of the interview. I'm glad the Bill Gates is worried about free-culture, but this kind of misunderstanding leads to fear and stupid reactions to something quite normal. I mean come on now, you seriously think having a flexable IP system which allows the long tail to be productive is some what anti-captist? Get real! Jon Udell discussed the propsal of the long tail, opensource, creative commons and free-culture in the case of audio recently. And i'm sorry but none of the thoughts sounded communistic in anyway. (some more on the longtail here)

Anyway, I hope Lessig reminds all of us that were so above these silly comments. And that free-culture, creative commons, archive.org, open-source, free software, the creative archive are all part of what makes the internet great and Bill Gates needs to get on now or catch up later.

Update, more views about Gates outburst, while the list grows in blogdigger
Gates Calls Patent Reformists “Communists” from of all places xbmc blogger
Gates brands IPR opponents Communists a link from planet Mozilla
More Gates “Creative Commies” propaganda from boingboing
And what I've been waiting for, lessig replies to Bill Gates. As expected, he takes the moral highground and reminds Bill that he should once in a while engage in a conversation with his own employees. Ow, what a stinger in the tail.

Ok last few comments on the topic now. This weeks Gillmor gang also covers Bill Gates comment but Robert Scoble is in the Hot and uncomfitable seat. Its well worth the listening to, I am suprised that Doc Searls doesnt take it too seriously, i mean I dont and do. Anyway whats really interesing is Miles comments. He pointed out that Bill Gates is surrounded by Yes people who wouldnt dare say anything out of turn (I mean listen to Robert Scoble when Dan asks for his view). And its not even Bill Gates talking, its Microsoft's Shareholders view of the free culture advocates… And in that we are done for now.

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Sanyo S750 is now with me

Sanyo S750

At last, I made the switch to the Sanyo S750. Generally, I'm quite impressed with the operating system and the phone. Its the first phone I've seen which has a decent copy and paste function. Email was a easy as pie to setup, i was tempted with using gmail but decided to stick to hotpop for now. The screen is so slick and beautiful that I cant bear to take off the plastic cover. I still cant believe it has the same rez as my ipaq! The T9 seems very good and allows for multiple languages. I'm glad to say it records all its movies in 3gp format and you can save pictures in either jpg or 24bit png which is amazing! By the way the camera quaity is great and puts my spv to shame. Sanyo really thought about the phone and included simple things like unlimited video recording on to the SD card, ringtones in many formats and unified inboxes for all messages.

However its not all good. First thing I'm having a huge a problem transfering my contacts via bluetooth and infrared from my spv2 and ipaq. It will do one contact at a time which sucks when you got 250 contacts needed to be synced. I really dont want to do it via my laptop but it looks like may have to export vcards from outlook or use the software on the cd. I also tried to hack the settings for orange network sync into the phone so I could use the orange sync option. But it simply refuses to work.
Another thing which is related to bluetooth contacts problems. It seems the Bluetooth only accepts one request then hangs up and kicks you back to the home screen. What this means is, if you want to sync multiple contacts it will simply hangup after the first one sent. The bluetooth also seems to be only on for a certain period of time (maybe to reserve battery life, which is pretty damm good so far). What this means is I need to tell the S750 to get ready to dialup or recieve a item before the event. This sucks big time when using my ipaq. I'm very use to just dialing up with my phone still in my pocket. There has got to be a way around this problem!

Anyhow, other things I've found. Mobile SVG support works but I need to explorer it more. The browser is a openwave xhtml and wap 2.0 browser and its pretty good, but I would rather have Opera thank you! There seems to be no way to have more than one email account on the phone, and I never saw an option for imap just pop3. USB storage mode is useful, because it turns the phone into a USB keychain, but only if you buy the optional usb cable. Not seen this option on any other phone, oh plus the phone does accept sd cards higher than 256meg, I put my 512meg in without any problems. You just got to create folders like a digital camera.

Formats supported by the phone out of the box
Documents [/Sanyo/Media Album/Documents] – SVG (.svg, .svgz), vCard (.vcf), vCalendar (.vcs), vNote (.vnt), Text (.txt).
Melody & Ringtones [/Sanyo/Media Album/Melody & Ringtones] – AAC (.3gp, .mp4), MIDI (.mid, .midi), Voice (.amr), MP3 (.mp3).
Videos [/Sanyo/Media Album/Video List] – Mpeg4 (.3gp, .mp4), H.263 (.3gp, .mp4)
Pictures [/Sanyo/Media Album/Picture] – PNG (.png), GIF (.gif), Bitmap (.bmp), Wireless bitmap (.wbmp), JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg, .jpe)

Generally its a good phone but needs alot of hacking to make it a great phone. I'm just worry if its actually quite hackable and if people will.

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PocketRSS 2.0 is out

Following on from my podcasting with only pocketrss 2.0 entry. Happyjackroad have released version 2.0.1.6 which is the gold version for anyone to listen to. Users of 1.42 can upgrade for free, which is good stuff. Enjoy!

PocketRSS 2.0 screenshots

Features
ability to use Today Screen plugin within PocketBreeze – not much use to me, but very cool today screen plugin none the less
database storage for faster feed viewing/searching/history archiving – yeah beats flat xml files for speed.
simple Feed content management – Yep simple but also advanced and fully featured
namespace/xml mapping feature for advanced users – Seriously crazy feature, which few desktop readers even do
custom view modes (including dynamic, keyword-based views) – yep nicely natrual aggregated views
Feed Wizard to easily add/find new RSS Feeds – includes feedster search and pulls opml files off the web, which few desktop readers do still
support for “stylus-free” viewing /images/emoticons/laugh.gif-pad optimized) – Ideal for reading in a crowded london train
feed item control (read,unread,locked,delete,etc.) – yep very cool
ability to download full article links for offline viewing – bit hit and miss but useful none the less
ability to download audio content (aka podcasting) – No other client does this on the pocketpc yet, enough said!
support for WM2003 SE landscape mode (and VGA) – I dont have a WM2003 SE device so I cant test it
improved network connections – Yep its good
overall new look-n-feel – Didnt like it at first, but love it now.

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IMDB webservices, when amazon when?

I was listening to a podcast today from Jeff Bezos at web 2.0, and I heard Amazon were developing there webservice more. So I zoomed over to the Amazon webservice blog and nothing except typepad users can now get there wishlists. Which generally pissed me off and I dropped a bad temper comment, which I wish I didnt. However I did look around for the Alexa and IMDB webservices and instead found this and this which made me feel a whole load better.

Just got home from work and Jeffrey Barr dropped me a email, next time I should think before I comment, as I've now been told!

Hi Ian,

Thanks for your comment. The Wishlist content is available via our
API. For example, here is a REST request to retrieve my personal
list

The “1G7V8WTVT8NPP” in this request is the Id of my wishlist. You
can use the Customer Content search to locate any public wishlist,
like this

Using the same API you can also get to a list of all content
(lists, reviews, and so forth) created by the user.

Does this answer your question?

Jeff;

Well yes it does, I cant help but feel this wasn't very clear at the time when I was looking at the Amazon webservices. Anyway thanks Jeffrey for the quick reply, and i'll be using it.

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