[Will Hunt]

I simply refuse to believe that this isn't a joke!

[Will Hunt]

It's a 1st of April. Thank fuck.

[slackline]

Google Music is working well here, handy way to back up almost two decades of Essential Mixes too as its song number rather than fixed MB.

[slackline]

Explore the Grand Canyon

Gallery

[slackline]

Google Fibre...



 

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

Sweet, Speedtest are going to have to start measuring their ping speed in Microseconds!

[tomtom]

Thats pretty cool... as I can get LTE (just) at Home, I've upgraded from orange to EE with a view to ditching Karoo (Hulls monopoly BB provider) - and was getting this last night from 1-2 bars coverage...



Downloads about twice as fast, upload 10 times.. compared to my broadband. As I only had 2 days left in my billing cycle, I blew all of my allowance until tomorrow with a 200mb upload to skydrive   - which only took a couple of min (very impressed..)

[slackline]

[tomtom]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/06/google-glass-threat-to-our-privacy

Interesting item on C4 news yesterday or the day before - about the real danger of all this free data is it being held in one place: Thus giving the one place (i.e. google or facebook etc..) inordinate power. The chap (big hairy man - apparently some sort of web guru who used to argue for free everything..) was arguing that data should have a monetary value (all data) in order to prevent this happening. Thats a really bad summary but reminds me of the Bacon quote "knowledge is power"

[slackline]

In a similar vein I read this last week and Falling Down linked to this article on Twitter earlier today.

[AarenAce]

Very nice and useful comments from all members. Thanks

[Paul B]

Google axe its RSS Reader:
http://mashable.com/2013/03/13/google-kills-google-reader/

maybe I'm behind the times but social media doesn't really replace a feed in my eyes, although this article:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/13/google-readers-death-is-proof-that-rss-always-suffered-from-lack-of-consumer-appeal/

makes a fair point. Am I the only one (apart from slackers, obviously)?

Feedly are promising a seamless transition for users onto its own back-end.

It begs the question, is relying on Google for services generally a bad idea (i.e. what will they axe next?).

[Bubba]

Some alternatives here Paul.

Because it's been posted on Reddit, sheer weight of traffic has apparently brought them all down but in a couple of days they might be worth evaluating...

[slackline]

It begs the question, is relying on Google for services generally a bad idea (i.e. what will they axe next?).

Given we pay them nothing they can do what they want, just as Yahoo! have done repeatedly (most infamously with scrapping Geocities).

I used to like Google Notes, but that got scrapped and rolled into Drive, but I don't want to use a Word Processor to keep track of little things.  I now use Org Mode for Emacs and the very handy MobileOrg (and bothered to purchased the payed version to support continued development).


Feedly syncs nicely with Reader at the moment, so thats a smooth transition, all I hope for is a version for Opera (but I've no problem firing up Firefox for reading, and the Android version is great these days).

[mr__j5]

I've always just used 'Windows Live Mail' as my feed reader and accepted that it isn't synced between machines.

I think that the trouble is that most normal internet users may read blogs, but have no idea that they can collect them all up into one place and see when new articles are posted on them.

[Jaspersharpe]

I don't really get this stuff but does anyone else use Flipboard?

Sounds like a similar thing, collating new posts/articles on stuff you want read all in one place, and it's a really lovely thing to use on a phone with a decent screen.

Edit - forgot the link https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=flipboard.app

[Paul B]

Feedly syncs nicely with Reader at the moment, so thats a smooth transition, all I hope for is a version for Opera (but I've no problem firing up Firefox for reading, and the Android version is great these days).

I'd given up with Feedly as it didn't work too well on my phone (granted my phone is now quite old technologically).

It just surprised me that not enough people use Reader (or are continuing to use reader) to make it worthy of maintenance. RSS feeds are really useful and social media (which people are pointing to for its demise) doesn't really do the same thing in my eyes as it pushes articles that are more 'liked' than others etc. when I'd like to read everything that comes from a source (or get the chance to). I wonder what they're suggesting/advocating as a replacement or alternative service (if anything)?

[slackline]

@Jasper : Not used Flipboard, sounds similar, but from reading the description with less control as you "pick a few topics" and it then decides what to present you.

@Paul : I stopped using Feedly a while back for the same reason, but checked it out on the phone after an update and its much improved.

I'm also migrating all the Reader subscriptions to Opera Mail Reader too (as I sync Opera between computers anyway and Feedly for Opera may take some time).

[Jaspersharpe]

No you can customise it to include any site you want too.

Oh and I just saw they have tweeted that you can transfer all your Google Reader RSS feeds to Flipboard.....

[Paul B]

@Paul : I stopped using Feedly a while back for the same reason, but checked it out on the phone after an update and its much improved.

I'm still on Froyo ( ) so I doubt there's a suitable update but I'll take a look.

[slackline]

Ah, thats probably the cause of it not looking so great.

On the plus side transition will supposedly be seamless with Feedly.

Had a second, look and tried Flipboard Jasper, and its nice, but the downside for me is that its phone only.

[mr__j5]

A selection of alternatives:

http://www.zdnet.com/goodbye-google-reader-here-are-five-rss-alternatives-7000012604/

[slackline]

Google Mountain Enthusiast

[slackline]

Atari Breakout

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

Ace.