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Wget local copies of your online research (del.icio.us, digg or Google Notebook)
Using the command line tool wget, you can download the contents of a page of del.icio.us links, diggs or public Google Notebook automatically and efficiently to your hard drive.
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Exclusive: Screen Shots And Feature Overview of Delicious 2.0 Preview
check back soonThe preview shows a substantially different interface than the currentDel.icio.us site, and a number of new features.
Author: Aditya
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links for 2007-09-20
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Online bookmarking dilemma
I have been facing the problem of which online bookmarking service to use for quite some time now. This is due to the fact that I have the StumbleUpon and Google toolbars installed on Firefox, and also have accounts on deli.cio.us, blinklist and digg (and possibly some others which I can’t remember right now :-). Too diversified for my own good you say. Well my thoughts exactly. So, if you have any suggestions or comments be my guest.
So let me do some old fashioned analysis on this subject. First off lets list my requirements:
- Convenient to use from browser (few steps to bookmark page)
- browser extensions/bookmarklets to bookmark and tag pages – Brw Extn
- tags suggestions or better yet auto tagging for known pages (a la StumbleUpon) – Tag Sugg
- Easy to search through bookmarks and tags – Easy Search
- Sharing of bookmarks – privacy settings per bookmark – Share
- Post to blog/other service on a timed basis (something like daily/weekly bookmark lists) – Timed posting
- Proper public Atom/RSS feed of bookmarks – Pub Feed
- Import/export bookmarks – Imp Exp
Googling for a comparison of these services gives me this Read/WriteWeb article from about a year ago, but it’s missing Google bookmarks. Looking at the list, diigo does seem interesting though. A shot at Mashable turns up an article on a list of 50+ social bookmarking sites – so much for consolidation. However, furl and bluedot do look interesting (and I have heard of them before) – save copies of the page along with the bookmark hmmm…. sounds a bit like Clipmarks. Looks like we have 2 new candidates for the lineup. So here’s the final lineup for the comparison: StumbleUpon, Google bookmarks, deli.cio.us, diigo, furl and bluedot. Now onto the comparison table (based on my experiences with some of the services, the 2 articles I mentioned and information on the sites) – column headings based on requirements list above:
Service Brw Extn Tag Sugg Easy Search Share Timed posting Pub Feed Imp Exp StumbleUpon Y Y N Y N Y N Google bookmarks Y N Y N N N Y deli.cio.us Y Y Y Y Y Y Y diigo Y Y Y Y Y Y Y furl Y N Y Y ? Y Y bluedot Y ? Y Y ? Y Y Looks like we have a tie in the feature comparison between deli.cio.us and diigo. I’ve tried deli.cio.us before, but diigo does seem quite feature rich and promising. In fact diigo seems to support posting bookmarks to rival services. On the other hand, deli.cio.us is quite well known and supported almost everywhere (wordpress.com even provides a widget), and I have found people posting their bookmarks to their blogs on a weekly/daily basis (possibly using technique like this). Then again diigo is a lot easier to type when making a review :D. It was reviewed favourably on cnet.
Jokes aside, let me try out diigo for some time before I make the final (I wonder if there’s any such thing as “final” ) decision. Now only if there was some way in which I could get my shipment of bookmarks from StumbleUpon to diigo somehow.
To round things up, just a few notes on some of the other services:
- StumbleUpon is still quite good, especially for its “channel surfing” ability, but it’s not the best suited to be used as a bookmark manager. Also, the bookmarks feed does not seem to be supported on some sites twitterfeed and tumblr. So, sharing this way is ruled out for the time being (it does work with Google Reader which supports sharing)
- Google bookmarks is also quite easy to use through the Google toolbar, but there’s no way to share the bookmarks or set their privacy. They did add the missing Import/Export feature sometime back, so we could expect the feature set to grow. Also, there is not much integration with other Google services like notebook, browser sync etc, which makes the service seem a bit orphaned right now.
- I’ve tried blinklist, but the problem with that was the browser bookmarklet which didn’t load properly all the time. So, it failed at the basic level itself.
Update (20/9/2007-4:00pm IST): I’ve started using diigo and imported my bookmarks from deli.cio.us, which is a built in feature, and also installed the diigo toolbar on Firefox. The bookmarking and highlighting feature seems to be working properly, with the ability to post simultaneously to deli.cio.us and other such service (as a backup). However, the daily blog posting doesn’t seem to be properly implemented (getting error messages – seems to be done using Ruby on Rails) yet. So I have set up deli.cio.us for this, and the posting seems to be working properly.
Update (21/9/2007-10:25pm IST): Google has added a shared stuff service which allows you to share websites with others. It is not integrated with Google bookmarks at the moment, but the email feature is linked to your gmail account, plus there’s an RSS feed. So, 2 of the missing features in Google bookmarks (sharing and public feeds) could possibly be taken care of by this service.
- Convenient to use from browser (few steps to bookmark page)
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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
One of my friends pointed me to the article “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” by Richard Hamming after I had sent him the link to Richard Hamming‘s talk “You and you research“. The article itself is quite thought provoking and makes you take a different view at Mathematics, something which we take for granted.
He presents the evolution of Mathematics quite beautifully – how various parts like algebra, number system, geometry came into being, and how they fit into the world as abstractions of what we observe around us. Now only if we could get Maths to effectively abstract the stock market ;-). Maybe Warren Buffet could give us some pointers on that with Buffettology.
On a side note regarding the talk by Richard Hamming, it is also quite thought provoking and makes you think about what you want to do in life, and setting your priorities accordingly.
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Ideas and boiling liquids
How do you capture and subsequently flesh out thoughts/ideas that come to your mind? After all, they are like boiling liquids, i.e., vaporize unless you manage to capture them. This is one of the problems I have wrestled with quite often. Lots of interesting thoughts come to my mind, especially at odd times (while traveling, before going to sleep etc), of which quite a few should have ended up on the blog.
The problem has been sustaining the thoughts and then giving them a more comprehensible form which can be shared with others. After all, not every thought is going to lead to Archimedes’ Eureka moment, and such means of propagating ideas can be more or less ruled out. It is also too bad that we cannot collect our thoughts directly into a pensieve and experience them later.
So what choices are we left with to condense and collect the ideas before they vaporize entirely leaving no residue behind? Well, there are quite a lot of ways we can put down our thoughts, ranging from recording voice messages on the phone, making notes on some electronic device (phone/PDA/computer) to just going for the simple, cost effective pen and paper method. However, this only gives my thoughts an added degree of permanence, and not the form in which they can be readily shared. They are still too abstract (something like bullet points) to be readily comprehensible to others.
The final mile (putting everything together in a coherent fashion) is probably the hardest, and this is what ultimately determines the fate of the thought – whether it gets published in the blog (or any other equivalent sharing medium) or remains confined to the draft bin. Of course, depending on the kind of thought/idea there may be a tougher journey ahead whereby it gets realized or implemented, but that’s another story altogether.
So, in effect, the thought cycle is quite a lot like oil exploration. A thought which passing through your mind is similar to striking oil, with a lot of initial enthusiasm. Then you need to drill down further to explore (put down your thoughts) or just ignore the occurrence. If you do drill down, you then have to extract and purify so that it can be distributed (as petrol, diesel etc in case of oil).
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Than vs then usage
This has been one question that has been striking my mind in recent times while going through various blogs and comments. The usage of “then” instead of “than” in many articles used to strike me as odd, but doing Google searches to clear up the grammatically correct usage didn’t turn up any results. However, I finally found an answer through a Lifehacker post which directs to a wikiHow page that clears up the issue. To put it simply, than is used to indicate comparison while then is to indicate time.
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Minimum font size in Firefox like in Safari
One of the (new?) features I found when I installed the recently released Safari for Windows was the ability to set a minimum font size. This is quite useful when very small font sizes are used on sites. However, Firefox is my primary browser, and I was not aware of any similar functionality for minimum font size till I came across this post on Mozilla Links. Apparently, the minimum font size can be set in Firefox through Options->Content->Fonts & Colors (Advanced)->Minimum font size.
Setting a minimum font size could create problems in certain cases – mostly with the page formatting I think. But, it is still useful to have this setting. Also, as per the post Firefox 3 is supposed to bring the ability to remember the zoom level (adjusted using Ctrl+/-/mousewheel in most browsers) for different
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The data: URI scheme
The data: URI (RFC 2397) allows the inclusion of small data items like images, text etc inline. It is quite useful for embedding small bits of data into scripts, as no external source needs to be referenced. In fact, I had come across the data: URI through a Greasemonkey script named Smilize which substitutes the usual smiley texts with images (embedded in the script using the data: URI).
There are a few sites which convert small images, html etc to the data URIs. There is one major drawback with the usage of the data: URI – it is not supported in Internet Explorer. So, for the time being its utility is mostly restricted to Greasemonkey and Opera scripts, till IE support is available (maybe in version 8?).
P.S.: I came across a new addon for IE 7 – IE7Pro – which provides userscripting functionality plus some other features like Ad blocker, mouse gestures etc. -
Computer resistant game
I was going through the wikipedia page for Deep Blue (which I had followed through one of my feeds), and came across the game Arimaa (official site). The game was apparently developed by Omar Syed following Garry Kasparov’s defeat at the hands of Deep Blue. The game layout is quite similar to chess, and is played on an 8×8 board, but with different looking pieces, and different rules and objectives. There is also a wikibook for the game, plus a downloadable program.
Omar Syed designed Arimaa as a game which would be difficult for computers to play well, and there is a prize (valid upto 2020) for the first computer program which defeats a top ranked human player. The results so far have been quite convincingly in the favour of human players so far (2004-2007), with even low ranked players dominating the computer challenger.
One of the reasons behind this could be that not too many challengers are lining up. Another reason is likely to be the usual brute force approach used in chess programs does not work too well in this game due to its design.
So, for now we can easily say machine smart, but humans smarter.
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The real story behind the space pen
The story of NASA spending millions of dollars to create a pen that worked in space for their astronauts, while the Russians just opted to use pencils, is often cited as a KISS example. However, it turns out that it’s just that – a story, and not the reality.
I first came across the actual story behind the space pen in the Geek Trivia article of TechRepublic. Apparently, both the Americans and Russians opted to use pencils initially, but turned out to have several problems due to the tips breaking off, and their flammable nature (in the high oxygen environment). NASA did opt to use mechanical pencils initially, but they were pretty expensive (almost $130).
In the end both parties started using the space pen developed by the Fisher Pen company which was a lot cheaper ($2.39 after a bulk discount). The research behind development of the pen did require around a million dollars, and patented in 1965. But, this was done by the pen company and not NASA. Also, if you are interested in buying one, it costs around $50.
There is also a detailed Scientific American article on the space pen which appeared last December.
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Push starting a train
We have seen people push starting their cars and other vehicles, but trying the same on a train is not what one would expect to hear. However, this is the exact news I came across in today’s paper (link to online article). In this case, the train was left stranded in a neutral zone (with no electricity) when one of the passengers pulled the chain and halted the train. However, to get the train up and running, a few hundred passengers pushed the train about 60 metres to the nearest live point. Now, this is something you don’t hear too often.
