The Glade 4.0

I'll start.

RSS feeds
The only point i can see do this is to ruin my daily ritual of manually checking the 3-4 webcomics I read. Why would i want to do that? Typing www.dilbert.com (typing is faster than using favorites, too) is not exactly hard, and is part of the ritual, even with an RSS feed I'd feel like I'm missing something by not going to the website.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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Ooh, I LOVE RSS feeds, especially on sites I don't visit often. Allows me to "catch up" on all the news I missed, without having to page through 4 or 5 pages before I start reading. Google Reader is my homepage.

I still don't get twitter. People's lives just aren't interesting enough to care about reading them in 140 character posts. "Ate a chicken sandwich for lunch, now going for ice cream". Yeah, that's great.

I don't really get RSS feeds either. They're...OK, I guess? But I'd rather visit the website. I'll give 'em another shot, though.

I think there's a real misconception about Twitter. It's really not built primarily from minutia of uninteresting lives. It becomes (not to wax too poetic about it) somewhat transcendent of the medium...the forced conciseness of the posts and the ubiquity of access allow for the user to become so comfortable that the initial feeling "oh, this is superfluous, what's the point" that it moves past that quickly and into a realm of real insight and humor, and becomes a great news aggregator. It's also great for "live-to-web" documentation of events. It's also an incredibly successful social networking tool...when selling my second-gen Kindle, I posted about it on Twitter. A "for sale" bot immediately picked it up and retweeted it, and within ten minutes of my initial post, I had a hit from a guy in Chicago who was interested. I'm not here to evangelize about it, certainly, but I do think it's often given an unfair shake from non-users. I was the same way for a long time. *shrug*

As for one I personally get all "get off my lawn, you kids" about...mice with more than three buttons.

I understand you're a big Apple user. It's a huge step for you to grasp the appeal of even a two-button mouse.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I often like the shape and feel of mice with lots of buttons, but i only ever use the three buttons.

As for twitter, i've surfed it on occasion, more as a curiosity thing, to see which celebs follow which other celebs, etc. But I don't really care what they have to say, nor would I ever care to use it to tell other people anything.

Facebook i despise, but it's not because I don't get it. I just absolutely loathe this concept of people posting everything about themselves online.



My homepage is Google. Just plain www.google.com. It may be somewhat redundant now that there's a search bar at the top of every web browser, but I still prefer actually going to the search page. Somehow i once accidentlly ended up on some customized google page, I hated it.

I don't read any news websites. Not regularly, anyway. Any news I read, i was probably linked to directly.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I don't use the Apple mouse. Can't stand the thing. It's pretty much the only hardware miscalculation that I've seen from them, but it's a helluva misfire.

This is the best. mouse. EVAR.

you've got a PS2 adapter on that mouse, Farsky. What are you plugging it into, an abacus?

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Nah, that's not mine, it's just the only accurate pic I could find. The others don't have the little rubbery Logitech logo in the center.

This is the one I'm currently using at work.

Maüs!

I love RSS, I use it on my personal site on Sharepoint at work for everything personal and business-related.

Apple, never got it, never will. PC Junior to me. I even bought a MacBook Pro and was so turned off by the software and operating system that I wiped it and threw on XP

Vista and/or Windows 7 - XP runs my games and media center. I can't find any compelling reason to upgrade.

Ipods/Standalone MP3 players - one more piece of junk in my pocket since any decent cell phone works just as well and has the benefit of stopping the music when you get a call.

ereaders (kindle, Ipad) - I just prefer books, the scent, the feel, turning pages, bookmarks.

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"Like"

In the spirit of the thread, I don't really get RSS, either. And it's not even like my attitude towards Twitter -- Twitter, I can conceptually understand, and even recognize the appeal for in some circumstances. I simply don't have the time to wade through and find Twitter channels that I consistently would care about. I need some kind of Twitter screener or aggregator, that picks out the highlights for me and is attuned to my tastes. Seeing people I know comment on tweets they find germane, approaches this on a small-scale basis, like when Skee and I would be sitting in line at Dragon*Con, and he'd laugh and recount the tweet posted by one of the guests we were about to see. RSS, though -- is it really that hard, if I want to stay current on something, to check the site? If it's content that appears infrequently, it's easy to check and say "hey, that's new" or "okay, nothing new here." If it's content that happens constantly, then the RSS feed for that site is bound to become yet another deluge of information overload that I don't need.

As for the Kindle/nook/e-reader of choice, Hop: If it's e-ink, it's a fantastic alternative to ink and paper. I love the feel and experience of ink and paper myself, as well as the comfort of having a nice bookshelf stocked with a collection of entertaining/informative reads. In addition, books themselves offer a handy way to cross-reference; it's infinitely faster to flip through a book scanning for a quote, or some foreshadowing you think you remember as you run across a later reference. However, e-readers offer a very valuable asset: portability and durability. Paperbacks are similarly portable, but aren't as durable. They'll bend, corners will wear, pages will get ragged, covers will deteriorate. Hardbacks are terrible on the portability front. And e-readers offer the ultimate in portability: they remain equally portable even as the volume of reading material increases to huge proportions. I can take a veritable library on vacation with me, when I know I'm guaranteed to spend several hours in an airport and will probably finish the book I'm reading. And with an e-reader, I don't have to commit myself to what I'll read next.

More things I don't get:

*LCD e-readers. Eye strain, even on good/bright ones!

*The drive to socially network. I'm on Facebook now (*sigh*) and I still have no desire or impetus to update my status more than a couple times a month. I don't have anything of any particular import to say, and nobody cares about the minutia of my life, despite millions of Facebook/Myspace/Twitter/Blog vectors that seem to think otherwise. Wanna know the fastest way to get put on my ignore list? Make multiple posts a day about how awesome a Mom you are for taking your kids to the playground last night, and how they are the most cherished thing in your life. I don't care, and I don't care that you're so insecure about it that you feel like you need repeat it to the world over and over. It's like the old, tired cliches about slides from your vacation from the 60's or whatever, where everybody hates it when people whip them out, but is too polite to say anything.

*Custom, contact-specific ringtones. My phone tells me who's calling when I look at it, and I have a hard enough time noticing my ringer as-is, without having to try to think, anytime I hear any vaguely musical series of tones, whether or not that's one of the ways my phone can sound. One ringer for incoming calls, one for incoming texts and email, done.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Also love.

This is still the mecca of mousing to me (I use the side buttons constantly, everything from browsing to WoW to TF2).

I've got the same mouse, Darkroland. I like it pretty well, though it's a little short for my tastes, and I'm thinking of replacing it with one of their updated G5-derivatives. I use mouse 4 and 5 occasionally as forward/back in my browser, and for some button-intensive games, but that's about it and I don't generally feel a need for more buttons.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I don't know if I could ever go back to a mouse without the GODWHEEL. Let's hope logitech keeps that around.

The G9 is definitely for more of a fingertip/claw grip style. If you're a full palm grip type person, it is not the mouse for you.

I also love the adjustable weight.

Yeah, I'm a palm gripper. And I think I coined the term Godwheel in my review of the G9 here.

A little while back, they updated my trusty G5 (which got replaced for the G9, because it was the second mouse to feature the Godwheel -- I discovered the Godwheel on the Nano) to a Godwheel and Laser featured version on the G5 body, which has essentially fit my hand like a glove for nearly a decade now.


I keep putting it off, wondering if they'll iterate their Darkfield tech to a higher resolution and drop it into the G5 body (my desk is glass at home, so I'm stuck using a mousepad), but I think I've given them enough time that it's not immediately forthcoming.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

On the topic of mice, this is gonna sound weird but I miss the old ball-driven ones. I was actually nostalgic for the days of cleaning kharma off the rollers. Guess I'm crazier than I thought lol.

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I've replaced the zen of cleaning mouse rollers with the zen of cleaning mouse glide-pads.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Hopwin misses his balls?

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

RSS feeds, don't get them either, I like to visit the web sites of anything I follow.

Tablets, the latest craze, I owned one years ago, they suck, end of story, they are either a full desktop OS meant for mouse/keyboard use or a phone OS, which is optimized for, you know, phones, and I don't see the appeal of an over sized phone that isn't a phone and can't make calls.

Wireless keyboards, now ok, for a media center PC sure, otherwise why? they are laggy compared to normal wired keyboards and require batteries, and since your keyboard doesn't move like your mouse there is no point in them, sadly most of the cheaper keyboards that aren't just a simple 104 key keyboard with no extra controls like media controls are wireless now.

Twitter, I use Facebook, Twitter seems like Facebook minus features, don't get it, don't want it, don't use it.

Twitter holds no appeal for me as a user, but as a consumer, I do enjoy it sometimes:

Steve's still got it!

RSS feeds have their place.

For example you can configure an RSS feed of a custom search of Craigslist for a particular item you might be looking for.

Saves a lot of time browsing an otherwise un-interesting site.

i don't think i've ever even looked at craigslist.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I would probably like RSS feeds more if I could understand them, I am useless without a tutorial. Damn technology.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

RSS is really simple.

...

ahem.

Have you given RSS a shot? I use Google's, mainly cause I already have a Google account and they make it really easy.

I could live my life without RSS if I had to, without suffering much withdrawal, but I like it and use it for webcomics and a few other things.

Here is a 65 second how to use guide for Google Reader from Google itself. It won't change your life or anything, but I do think it's simple enough that you can give it a go.

And man, there are so many things I could otherwise list in this post. I think that's more a habit of my being cheap though than anything else. I started school recently with a bunch of 18-20 year olds and they were shocked to find out I didn't use Facebook, for example. Shocked! Not mild surprise. They couldn't believe it.

Crazy stuffs.

Logitech Mice ...

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