Category Archives: General

Have you ever wished you could just have one RSS feed that had information from a number of different sites? You could have a single feed with everything you want concerning a particular subject or idea no matter what or how many sites the information comes from. One service out there called RSS Mix does just that.

For example, consider LIVEdigitally’s three feeds (entries, comments, Flickr). Enter each feed in RSS Mix’s simple text box and hit Create! What you get in return is a new feed that combines all of the information from all of the feeds. Here is the single feed created with RSS Mix for all of our feeds here.

Besides combining multiple feeds from one site, you could also combine feeds from multiple sites on a particular topic. Maybe you’re freakishly obsessed with something obscure like meerkats (I’m not, it was just a random thought). You could setup a feed from Google News concerning meerkats with one from Powell’s Books to keep track of new books on meerkats. Toss them together at RSS Mix and you have a handy little meerkat feed.

Give this tool a shot. If you have tons of feeds this can really make your life more simple.

Not familiar with RSS? Read on…

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Finger-lickin’ good is really the only thing that can be said here. Sure, an optical mouse that straps onto your finger with a standard 3 button array is probably the best way to get your World of Warcraft fix when you’re on the go, since that iBook one-button mouse just won’t do it. But what if you end up with one freakishly powerful finger and the rest of your hand withers to virtually nothing?
Hi, everyone — I’m Patrick, I blog here, and these sort of things worry me.

Here’s something which may or may not interest you but for the hasbro addicted child that I was, I was overcome with glee when I found out about the live action Transformers movie coming out next year. Well, they finally created a website specifically for the movie and can be found here . I have seen various clips of the robots (autobots and decepticons for you experts) transforming and for all intent and purposes, doesn’t look too bad.

I know, I know, I just posted on this awesome new music service a few days ago but they’ve added this new feature called Backstage that I think is worthy of another post.

If you use Pandora primarily to find new music you’ll like and not so much to listen to tunes 24×7 then you’ll love Backstage. Type in an artist and you’ll get a biography and a selected discography. From this page, you can create a station on your Pandora Radio, shoot an email to a friend about the artist or add the artist to your [Pandora] bookmarks for later use.

Want to go a little deeper? Click on an album. You get a great album summary and a complete track listing with samples of each song, a la iTunes or Amazon. And finally, the magic part – a listing of similar albums by other artists determined by the “genome” of the music. Check out my first post for more info on this.

Now here’s where this service gets really handy. You can click on each individual song and get similar music recommendations – all this based on the genome of that particular song. Different songs on the same album will yield different recommendations because each song is different in many specific ways, even on the same album by the same artist. This is great if you like one or two songs on an album and would like to find similar songs by other artists. From here you can also create a station on your Pandora Radio based on this particular song.

Pandora is so much more than a great new way to listen to music – I think it’s a yet-to-be-fully-realized tool that will revolutionize the music discovery process. I’ve added literally dozens of artists to my to-buy list which, honestly, has been empty for quite some time.

If you haven’t tried Pandora out yet I highly recommend it. Build yourself a station or two, listen to some great new tunes, and then head backstage. I haven’t had this much fun listening to music since I got my personal cassette player for Christmas when I was 10.

Oh yea – consider this an official warning – you will get lost in the Pandora database. I once had to hit my back button no less than 10 times to find out how I got myself to Oingo Boingo.

Well, June 15th unofficially spontaneously became Introduction Thursday here at LIVEdigitally.  I want to start by personally welcoming our handful of new writers on board, and thanking them in advance for their future contributions.  This is actually my second foray at bringing in some external folks to participate here.  The first time out we ended up with Jonas, Ryan and Ameer, all of whom were really great to have around.  Unfortunately, it happened in a timeframe where I got so overwhelmed with the six jobs I held at my company that I pretty much vanished for a long while, and they decided to take on new things (which seem to go quite well, way to go guys!).

At Sling we finally expanded to have a large enough team that I could cut down to only working 3 or 4 jobs at a time.  This, combined with my basic desire to write, got me kicked back into gear to pump some life back into the LD.  And as my traffic reports show, a few folks out there noticed and the readership has grown.  So I felt it was good time to build up the site a bit more, and to do that, I need some help.  And while both my mom and dad have written a few comments on some of the articles I’ve written, it wasn’t quite enough for me.

So, it’s a long way to say “welcome aboard”, but I am (always) optimistic about increasing the breadth, depth, and quality of the content you find here.  Expect a lot of new product reviews from the team, as well as their own individual rants and raves on the technology around us.  I hope you enjoy their writing, and let’s see what they have to say!

ps – do you know how hard it is to find a picture of actual lemmings (the animals) on a cliff?  couldn’t find anything that didn’t look like this:

So it’s all over the news already, Bill Gates is stepping down from his post at Microsoft in 2008.

Now last week, Robert Scoble left his position at Microsoft to go join, uh.. some podcasting company or something. Here’s a link to Scoble blogging about Gates leaving as well.

What if, and I’m just musing here, but what if Gates is joining Scoble???  I think it would look a little something like this…

… I thought I would introduce me. My name is Tim (as the byline vaguely suggests) and I’ll be posting on a regular basis. My tech obsessions have no known bounds so you’ll see stuff from every category from me. I particularly love talking about a cool new web service or things like what the world will be like when Google has everything ever written/recorded/discussed in its databases (this actually doesn’t scare me too much – feel free to tell me I’m nuts).

I pre-apologize for the wordy posts – I just like to get it all in there, you know? Cover my bases. My humor can be a little dry and nerdy too so poke fun at will!

And I too have a little web-based service that you may have never heard of, or may have forgotten about: Time Cave. Anyone remember this one? Here’s the gist of the free service:

The idea is simple: drop an email message into Time Cave and tell it when to come out. It’ll stay there for as long as you’d like, within reason. (We wouldn’t want stalactites to dissolve it.) So for days, weeks, months, or even years, Time Cave will hold onto your message. Once the message’s time comes, it’s speedily sent on its way back toward you (or whomever you addressed it to).

Use it as a free reminder service or just to send your future self a kind note. Want to make sure you don’t forget something, whether it’s an appointment or an ideal? Time Cave can help.

I dropped a message in about 3 or 4 years ago but have since changed my email countless times so I have no idea if they stuck to their promise. I just today scheduled an email to myself for June 15th, 2010. I figure this is a good long term test.

I’ll comment on this post when I get the message [hey, you never know] so be sure to bookmark this page if you don’t think you’ll remember to check back. Talk to you in 4 years…

… I’m a man of poverty and poor discernment.

…yyyyeah. It just doesn’t flow, does it?

Regardless, I’m Akela. You may remember me from such blogs as ‘Spirochete Spotlight’ and ‘Soy Sauce Roundup’. This may, however, be the first time you’ve met me, in which case, Hi! I’m happy to join the Live Digitally site, where I hope to entertain, annoy, and perhaps, if you’re very lucky… educate. ‘Cause, you know… there’s nothing that says ‘fun’ like education.

For my inaugural post, I’d like to point to a nifty web-based service that not all of you may know about: yousendit.com.

Yousendit.com is a site that allows you to send attachments of up to 1 gig in size to anyone with an email account. You pick the file, send it off, and your target receives a message in their inbox stating that they have a file waiting. They click on the provided link, the file downloads, and everybody’s happy. Registration for the site is free, and offers Standard and Secure options for delivery. Best of all, they don’t seem to care what you send, though prudence dictates that one be somewhat reserved in your file naming. Sign up now, before they decide to start charging!

Since you will probably be seeing a lot of me over the next little while, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Merv and I will be guiding you through my thoughts and opinions over a lot of things techie. My rambling posts will vary between the good old days of technology (well, for me the good old days mean the 80’s and 90’s), to the plethora of crap available now and, of course, my expectations for the future. Bare with me though as I try to get a hang of this thing.

Any questions, please feel free and I will answer them in the least sarcastic way that I can.

Merv