Your oddity of the day…a site full of Robert Downey Jr pinups.

(via Pinup RDJ)

[poll=7]

According to the blog readability test, this site is readable at the elementary school level.

Somehow, I believe them.

-Dave

It’s like free money…only not quite as good.

-Dave

So I decided to do my own.

The Above the Aether 404 page in all its glory.

Enjoy.

-Dave

The second option is for when I’m feeling lazy.

-Dave

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Now playing: Glenn Miller – American Patrol
via FoxyTunes

Whether you think it’s crap or fantastic, let me know. Also, let me know if you ever have technical problems with the site. I think I fixed the right sidebar problem in Internet Explorer 6 & 7. Hopefully the sidebar is showing up in the correct position at the top of the page now.

-Dave

My goal is to get down to less than 100. This will take some work, because I really enjoy the subscriptions that are left. These 132 feeds fall into he following categories:

apple
business
design
development
geeky
google-related
people
photography
podcasts
productivity
technology
web2.0
wordpress

I could probably get rid of the “podcasts” category and just use iTunes for that, but I like knowing when some of my favorite podcasts are released without having to start up iTunes. Gahhh…I’m torn.

There will be much gnashing of teeth durning my next round of cuts.

-Dave

P.S. – I added a new weather widget to the right column because the old widget broke for some strange reason.

I’ve recently played around with Yahoo Pipes, a feed aggregation and manipulation service provided by Yahoo, (here’s a yahoo or wikipedia explanation of the service) to manipulate some of my iTunes feeds to more easily update my little green Shuffle. You see, I have a handful of feeds I drag into my Shuffle on a regular basis. Normally I would create a smart playlist in iTunes and add a bunch of podcasts to it and life would be all bunnies and tulips. However, I’m a little picky and need to eliminate PDFs from the feed (since some podcasts include them and my Shuffle can’t dispay them). I also only want podcasts that I haven’t listeded to yet (with a play count of zero) in ascending order of release date (so I can listen to them in the correct order).

Here’s where the iTunes “smart” playlists fall down the stairs before prom night.

As far as I can tell, when creating an iTunes playlist you are able to add multiple actions (or filters) to the list; however, you are forced to select a single boolean operator to affect all the actions in the list. I can select “or” to act as the operator or I can select “and.” I don’t get the option to select an operator for each action in the list. Bummer.

It is at this point that my smart playlist has smeared her make-up and fallen down the stairs in her prom dress.

This is when Yahoo Pipes shows up at the door smiling with a giant pink corsage and fresh condoms.

Since I have a yahoo account (for del.icio.us, flickr, email, etc.) by default I also have a Yahoo Pipes account. I logged in and aggregated all of the (13) podcasts I wanted on my little green Shuffle and created one feed to rule them all. I then took that feed and added it to the iTunes “smart” playlist along with the other filters (“never been played” and “no PDFs” and “ascending order”).

Badda bing. A dynamic smart playlist that includes all my favorite audio feeds and no PDFs and no episodes I’ve already listened to and all in ascending order of release date.

If you have a need to aggregate, manipulate or filter feeds of any sort, you might want to consider using Yahoo Pipes.  It uses a drag and drop interface that makes the whole experience very simple.  I haven’t really cracked the surface with Pipes yet, but it seems like it can do some amazing things.

There…now wasn’t that interesting?

-Dave