Feedity + Pipes = Awesome

When it comes to tech stuff, I'm the kind of person that is all about trying new things ... the problem is that I usually need a reason for it.

I discovered Yahoo! Pipes a little bit ago, but never had a real reason to do anything with it. Well, I did, but I guess it didn't quite work the way I had hoped.

My fiancee is actively pursuing employment and regularly monitors 50+ sites (mad kudos because I had no idea she was monitoring so many). Offering to make our lives a little easier, I turned again to Yahoo! Pipes.

For those of you not familiar, Yahoo! Pipes allows you to take data and do all kinds of interesting things with it in the form of mash-ups. For example, someone took a Craigslist feed of apartments and the data from Google Maps and fed it through a pipe. The result was a list of the apartments along with their locations on the map. The possibilities are endless, especially when you combine that with data that is dynamic.

Now, Yahoo! Pipes doesn't exactly have the shortest learning curve. So, naturally I scoured for tutorials. Now I bring you to 'Feedity'. Now, if Yahoo! Pipes has a short learning curve, this one is just a wee bit longer. The genius of Feedity is that you can specify areas of a web page that you want to have transformed into an RSS feed. It does the rest.

What does that mean? I'll tell you what it means - we don't have to search 50+ pages anymore. The listings come right into an RSS reader (like Thunderbird) or in my case, my Google account where I view all of the listings at once. See the pic:


Even if you think taking the effort to do something like this is pretty ... dorky, you still have to appreciate that it's pretty neat.

Until next time ...
-D

Virus Lock Part 2: SATA Drives

Earlier in the year I did a blog on the wonderful contraption of Virus Lock. I had to retire the device because I've moved on to SATA drives and this is only for IDE drives.

Back up for a second - the concept for the Virus Lock is that you are able to have two different machines in one tower ... two hard drives separated by a physical switch that allows only one (or both depending on the setting) hard drive to receive power at any point in time. This is an excellent solution for back-ups or for just having two machines (be aware of licensing restrictions).

Well, I've recently resurrected this hardware contraption. Why? Because I recently discovered IDE to SATA power converters. What a wonderful thing!

Until next time ...
-D

Virtual PCs Part 2

In March I did a blog about Virtual PC 2007. I'm going to revisit that briefly because there are some updates that I'd like to add to that. For starters, I discovered Virtual Box and had a chance to go at it. It too is free and open source and worth looking into for a variety of VM needs. I really like the idea of having a Linux box of some kind and having a guest OS.

I really like the idea of setting up a machine ... doing whatever to it (software speaking), but upon rebooting, it's back to its good ol' original self. Case in point, a number of years ago, I became victim to a virus delivered by email. It was one of those that when you open it - BAM! It got me good. I like the idea that - okay, I have a virus ... kill the virtual machine without saving the instance, and do again. It's like getting a chance to reroll the dice in a board game. More than likely, I will never have to use it, but I really like the idea of it.

Until next time ...

-D