Here’s what I’m currently listening to when I can. They’ve been piling up a little bit now that my commute is so short, but last week I had a round-trip drive from San Jose to Fresno so really got caught up :) See last year’s updates at Best Technical Podcasts. .NET Rocks! [rss] Hosted by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell, this is probably the podcast I’ve listened to the longest. As their site says, the shows “range from introductory information to hardcore geekiness.” In particular I really like their “geek out” episodes, most recently: Supersonic Aircraft Geek Out Startups For…
Ever since I launched Tweetfave in 2013, it’s been quietly working away and slowly growing. (For some more of the background, see Brief History of Tweetfave.) An update on the numbers so far: Over 200 users have tried the service, with over 100 still active Over 240,000 favorite tweets have been marked and emailed Here’s a growth chart which shows the tweet count growing at a steady rate ever since we went live. The rate of new users cooled off after that first year but is still growing by a few each month. The growth has basically been some word-of-mouth…
Twitter dropped RSS feeds in early 2013 (Mashable) and never had direct support for RSS feeds from favorites. I still use Twitter favorites as a bookmark or “read it later” service for myself and have been running the Tweetfave service for over 2 years now. Tying these ideas together, I’ve just rolled out Twitter favorites RSS feed support in Tweetfave. How it Works Tweetfave periodically scans your account (using the official API) and summarizes all favorited tweets in an email. Now the system will also update a feed which can be used with other systems that accept standard RSS feeds.…
My friend Jeff Cable was one of the early adopters of the Nest thermostat. At the time we talked a lot about the obvious next step of supporting home sprinkler/irrigation controls. Especially here in California (where we are in a pretty serious drought), having better control over irrigation (not to mention the remote access) seems like the logical next step. Rather than waiting around for Nest, I just bought and installed an OpenSprinkler. OpenSprinkler started out as a hobby kit for makers and they still sell it a variety of ways, from kits to completed units. The software is open…
I was sad to see this week that Yahoo! Pipes will be closing soon. Pipes launched in early 2007, so it had a pretty good 8+ year run. People created some pretty crazy mashups with Pipes. For me the simple ability to combine RSS feeds with some simple logic was very useful (for example: 2014 Tech Advent Calendars). I also recently created some Stack Overflow feed tools for work which will have to be recreated in Python or something similar. The news was part of a broader product update from Yahoo: Q2 2015 Progress Report On Our Product Prioritization. Also…