Show Us Your Model Trains

via wired.com

Big deja-vu here! I think every man in his 30s or older used to have a model train. I played with Fleischmann "Piccolo" (N-scale 1:160) trains in my youth. I still have them and my own kids, although a bit young, love those little jewels. Time to unpack them and shoot some pictures, I guess!

iPhone 3G(s), push notifications and podcasts, here's how it could work

The iPhone 3G and 3GS are wonderful devices. The iPhone OS3 is amazing. But the implementation of podcasts is still not very good. And that's an understatement.
 
The way it works now is that users subscribe to their beloved podcasts in iTunes and sync their iPhone with it. However, iTunes biggest flaw is that if you do not listen to the podcast for a while (actually: do not listen in iTunes, it doesn't see that you listened in the iPhone), it stops updating. Yes, you can manually open the iPod function in your iPhone, go to Podcasts and push "find more episodes".
 
That's fine and dandy, but it needs the user to check if there's a new one or not. Cumbersome. Not to mention there's a 10MB limit on podcast downloads over 3G. But that point is moot compared to the other issues.
 
There's been a podcast app for the iPhone for quite some time: RSS Player. You can subscribed to RSS podcast feeds and it will download to your iPhone. I love the app for the ease of subscribing and downloading podcasts but I really dislike it when it comes to user friendliness. But the major no-no is that it cannot run in the background, like the iPod can. That's not the developer's fault, it's that Apple won't allow these background processes. When I'm on the bike or scooter, I like to pause, skip, control the iPhone using the mic button on my earbud cable. Not possible in RSS Player. Once you click the mic button, the iPhone starts the iPod function .. Closing RSS Player along the way. Stupid.
 
So, here is a proposal I'd like to see imlpemented on the next OS update, for a NATIVE podcast experience that works:

  • The user subscribes to podcasts in iTunes (or iTunes.app on iPhone)
  • The subscription data is stored in your iTunes account, so it's available online (and could eventually be downloaded as an OPML file)
  • The Apple iTunes backend systems send out a PUSH notification to the iPod application on the iPhone if there's a new episode for download.
  • The user can then open up the iPod app and download the episodes. 

 
The "old school" iTunes syncing is still available, with one small adaptation that the podcasts don't stop updating when not listened in iTunes. Any subscription updates are stored in the cloud, instead locally on your mac/pc. So you're always up to date whereever you listen.

[NL] WNF moet zich niet zo aanstellen

Het WNF vind zeeschildpad a la Den Blijker smakeloos. Dit kopt de Telegraaf  vandaag. 

Wat is er verkeerd aan het klaarmaken en eten van gekweekte Schildpad?
Het mag in het wild dan wel een beschermde diersoort zijn, maar als het gekweekt wordt, en zo te zien ook nog eens goed behandeld, is er toch geen enkel probleem als je met respect en lokaal ter plekke (!) zo een dier klaarmaakt en eet?
 
Het vangen van gekweekte forel hoor je niets over. Maar ja, die zijn niet beschermd en zien er ook niet zo schattig uit he.
 
Het WNF moet zich eens meer concentreren waar de echte problemen zijn:
de massa bio industrie, het nutteloos vervoeren van varkens, etc.

Niet alleen maar op knuffelbaarheid!

Posterous now imports your old blog

Hurrah!
 
In aug 2008 I switched from blogspot to Posterous. On my blogspot blog I
had about 132 posts. I went to Posterous, and never looked back. Almost
forgetting the blogspot place. Today, Posterous announced they can import your old posts and merge it
into the Posterous blog you want.
And lo & behold, it works, dead-simply!
 
I now went from 47 Posterous pages to 61, and the timeline goes back to
May 2007. Great work guys!

I wished I new "back then", otherwise I would've kept all my blog posts (since 2000) :-)