Tuesday, July 01, 2008 RSS Bandit Phoenix

I've been using RSS Bandit as my feed reader for a few years now and I'm a big fan of it. I even posted an article about there here [in 2005], and I like it now as much as I did back then, or even more. The cool thing is, apparently these folk never stopped working on the project and making improvements to the software, and now as a result, there's RSS Bandit Phoenix. This is a new version of RSS Bandit who's alpha installer is now available for download through the RSS Bandit Website. Phoenix has all the old Bandit goodies, as well as a whole bunch of kool and new features that make it even more of a joy to use. So whether you're already a Bandit user or you've never heard of it before, and if you're as much of a feed freak as I am, do check Phoenix out. =)

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 Firefox 3? No Firefox 3?

So today's supposedly the FF 3 download day, but up to this moment I haven't been able to get a hold of Mr. Firefox 3 due to apparent server overloads. I mean, come on, when you get _that_ many people to actually _pledge_ that they're going to download the same thing on the same day, why wouldn't you see to it that they actually _can_ do what you so badly want them to?

What I would like to know right now, is whether any of you, dear readers of this blog, have actually been able to download the oh so popular FF 3. Let me know if you have! =)

Update: Late at night I was finally able to download FF3. What makes me very very happy is the fact that the problem with Silverlight is solved! Yes! Silverlight now works with FF3.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008 Firefox 3 Beta

I guess if you know me or if you've been reading this blog for a while, you probably know that for the past few years I've been a huge fan of Opera, and it's pretty much the only browser I've been using. I did always have Firefox installed for the sake of seeing how my various web pages look in it, and every time there was a new version of Firefox, I did give it a try. But so far Opera had always been better. Why? Because of a lot of cool features that it has. The smallest little things that make my life easier. I like the way Opera handles downloads, I like the Opera speed dial feature, I like the fact that it's toolbars are customizable since I have a habit of making my toolbars as thin as possible [using as little rows as possible], I like the fact that it had lower memory usage than Firefox, and I like it's speed of loading pages. And these are just to mention a very few. So I guess it's now clear what I mean, when I say "I just switched my default browser to Firefox"! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I can't believe I'm saying this, but Firefox finally sold me!
About a week ago I installed the new Firefox 3 Beta. It was just supposed to satisfy my curiosity, but that wasn't exactly what happened. For starters I opened up a bunch of tabs and had a look at my mem usage. Low. Lower than Opera!! Then I loaded a few pages and darn it, this thing's fast! It's now faster than Opera! And unlike Opera it doesn't simply re-display the entire already loaded info from the cash [which in case of Opera, usually means you have to refresh the page a few times in order to see the changes that you just made to your web page]. Then I had a look at the add-ons ... ah well. Speed Dial, only better: tabbed and completely customizable. The toolbars are also fully [and I mean FULLY] customizable, and quite neat, clean and thin. There's also this other add-on that can handle your downlaods and alike in a neat, auto-hidable sidebar. And again, this is only to name a few. It's also the case that Firefox passed the Acid 2 test with no problem, and had a pretty good score in the impossible Acid 3 test as well. And then of course there's the issues that Opera has with handling things like xml pages. If your xml doesn't have a defined style [for example if you're looking at somebody's pure xml APML or something similar], Opera will end up showing you nothing. But Firefox can show you the pure xml with no problem. And I could go on about this for a few more hours, but lets just say that Firefox seems to have finally done it. I'm now very much looking forward to the alpha. Lets see how that one will look like. =)

Tuesday, September 12, 2006 Audio Capture

Since this seems to be the topic of the week, I might as well create a new post and share some news with you. A whole bunch of you have been asking for the soundtracks for a couple of Vantage demos. And it seems like some of you are not much for waiting. :D Anyway, I just captured the soundtracks for "A Simple Way" and "3 Cows Ahead" [click to download]. As for how I did it, well "3 Cows Ahead" is an avi so it's a simple matter of an audio extraction. However, I tried a whole bunch of extractors and played around with whatever options available, but the result is never perfect for some reason. Specially the beginning of this one sounds far from what you hear on the avi. Keep in mind the fact that I'm no audio expert anyway. :"> So if you know of an extractor which could do a better job, please let me know. "A Simple Way" was of course a different story. I came across this demo capturing software called "kkapture 0.01" a while ago (on pouet.net BBS). It's an easy to use application which does a pretty darn impressive job capturing both the audio and the video. So I used this to capture an avi of the demo, and then did the same mp3 extraction. The resulting audio quality is rather good. So...enjoy, and I'd certainly appreciate any bits of technical info that you might wanna throw at me. :>

Update: Wheee! Amoivikos [amv] of ASD has just posted a comment containing some very interesting information regarding a number of great scene tracks. Check it out! Always the best info, does this guy rule or what? :)

Update: Sorry guys, there is no full version of the "3 Cows Ahead" soundtrack. It was never finished.

Sunday, January 15, 2006 digg: Love That Song But Don't Know What It Is?

I just found this article on "digg". Been looking for something like this forever!!
"Tunatic is a software that listen to it and get you the artist's name and the song's title within seconds."
Here u can read more about this software or dig this story.

Wednesday, December 28, 2005 RSS Bandit!

I've been looking for a "good" feed aggregator [aka feed reader] software for quite a while. There are a lot of online aggregatorz and some of them seem to do a good job, but somehow I feel more comfortable with the onez that I can have on my desktop. It'z probably because there'z more u can do with desktop aggregatorz than online onez, plus they're simply faster and easier to use. However, obviously not all the available desktop aggregators are so great! I've used THIS RssReader for quite a while but I've never really been happy with it.
- It'z not compatible with all versionz of RSS/Atom
- For some reason it finds errors in feed formats that really contain no errors (!!)
- It exports the feeds in an XML file that's not compatible with any other aggregators [seemz to contain errorz!] and no OPML outputs whatsoever [so what'z the point of having an export feature like this anywayz??]
- Worst of all, somehow it managez to jump up to about 106MB mem usage in no more than 2 secondz after it'z run!
And these are only a few of it'z problems, but since I couldn't' find any better desktop aggregators I kept using it until today....yes... today I finally found THIS. It'z called RSS Bandit and so far it seemz to be the best one I've seen. It'z:
- Light
- Fast
- Easy to use
- Compatible with all sortz of feed formatz
- Low in mem usage
- Got OPML import & export
And so many other kool features. Plus, I gotta admit, the little bandit smiley face tray icon is cute! So if u're looking for a good feed aggregator too, make sure to give this one a shot.