Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra - Some Velvet Morning

I’ve become slightly obsessed with this song  I have no idea what it’s about (probably nothing), but the sound is haunting.

Here are my top five albums of 2011.  As my life gets crazier I find myself listening to fewer and fewer full albums.  Also, I think online services like Spotify, Rdio and Grooveshark actually make the situation worse, allowing me to sample an album for a short time before being distracted and moving on to another one.  

These are the albums that I found time to listen to and stuck out as ones that I wanted to come back to again and again.  Missing are some favorite bands of mine (Radiohead, The Decemberists, Wilco), but a great part of being music fan is discovering new music.

Without further ado…

1. Bright Eyes - The People’s Key
2. King Creosote & Jon Hopkins - Diamond Mine
3. Radical Face - The Family Tree: The Roots
4. Bon Iver - Bon Iver
5. The Head And The Heart - The Head And The Heart

Archer Avenue - Open Your Eyes

Before Richard Edwards started Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s he was in a small Indianapolis band named Archer Avenue.  The guy can’t miss. So talented.

Lightning Dust - Antonia June

Typhoon - “The Sickness Unto Death” and “The Honest Truth” from NPR/SXSW

Two Gallants - Threnody (Live)

Typhoon - The Honest Truth

Okay - Tragedy

The Decemberists - My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist

Devendra Banhart - Sight to Behold (Jools Holland)

Damien Jurado - Ohio

When I created freshnews back in college I never thought I’d still be working on it eleven years later. The idea came out of a legitimate need to aggregate news. There weren’t any news aggregation sites on the internet because RSS (or RDF as it was called back in the day) wasn’t being published by anyone. If you wanted to aggregate a site you had to scrape the HTML, a brittle process for sure. That’s how freshnews got it start. It was a collection of a lot of little, custom scripts that parsed the HTML of all the tech news sites I liked to read each day. The original scripts were written in perl, but were soon converted over to PHP.

Now, eleven years later, internet news has come a long, long way. Aggregating news is now a fairly simple process thanks to RSS and there are a TON of good options to keep up with this news. I half expected freshnews to die a slow death because of these sites, but something amazing happened. People kept coming. I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised since I also continued using the site, but I’m a bit biased for obvious reasons. I think the thing that people continue to like about freshnews is the speed at which they can browse the news. Google Reader is a fantastic product, but I know first-hand that it can eat up large chunks of my time if I let it. freshnews allows you to quickly browse headlines and open the few that look interesting. Tabbed browsing has made this a really smooth process. 

There have been a few complete re-writes of the code that runs freshnews.org over the years and today I’m releasing yet another. The goal of this re-write was to polish some existing features and add a few new ones. Also, I wanted a reason to play with rails 3.0. Many of the features were added in response to user requests on http://freshnews.uservoice.com.

User Requests

• Custom Colors

freshnews used to allow the user to pick from a few different themes, but that was removed on a previous re-write of the site. There wasn’t a great reason besides laziness on my part. Well, they’re back. We’re starting with just a few themes to pick from, but I’m very willing to add more based on user requests. I’m not a designer, so feel free to send me mockups if you are looking for something in particular.

• Word Filter

A few people asked for a way to hide news that they didn’t care about. Are you an Andoird user and loathe seeing all the hoopla surrounding a new iPhone release? Well, you’re in luck. You can just add the word “iphone” to your filter and never see another headline with that word in it. Add as many or as few as you like. You can always delete the filter when you realize the iPhone is a far superior device. ;)

• Password recovery

Not an exciting feature, but a handy one at times. There’s now a way to recover/reset your password if you forget it.

Other New Features

• Mobile View

If you’ve ever tried to view freshnews on your mobile phone you’ll know that it was a challenging task. Smashing the normal page down to fit in the mobile browser made everything so small you constantly had to zoom in and out. With the new site, your mobile browsing experience should be much better. Instead of smashing it down to tiny text, we simply stack the news boxes on top of each other. You can see this effect by dragging the size of your desktop browser to be very narrow. We hope this allows you to actually use the site on your mobile phone. I can’t guarantee that it will work on every mobile phone, but if you use a webkit-based browser you should be good.

• More Sign In/Up Options

You can now sign up for or into the site using your twitter or github account. This is handy if you’d rather not remember yet another username/password. Let me know if you’d like to see other options here.

• Improved Feed Re-Ordering

The old site allowed you to re-order feeds on the “Customize” page, but it didn’t do it very well. It stacked them all vertically and would stop working at times if you added a feed from the “Available” column. The new site improves this process quite a bit by actually showing you the feeds in a three column arrangement. Dragging the sites around quickly rearranges the other feeds so you can see exactly how they’ll be arranged on the front page. You can also drag to/from the “Available” column as much as you want.

• Customized Number of Headlines

Previously you could view any number of headlines you wanted from each site as long as that number was ten. Now, you can enjoy many other numbers with this new option in the “Customize” section. Warning, loading 25 headlines from 30 different sites can make for a slow-ish page load.

Changes

• No More Open ID

There’s one feature that I added a few years ago that I thought users would LOVE. This feature was Open ID and it turns out that no one cared. Only a small percentage of users actually ever used this and now it’s going away. Good riddance! 

• No More Anonymous Customizations

Guests used to be able to customize the site without logging in. Behind the scenes it was a bit of mess to support as there were a ton of temporary accounts to deal with.  I decided that it would be MUCH easier to drop support for this going forward.  By adding the 3rd party authentication options, signing up/in should be a very quick and easy process.  Please let me know if there are other services you’d like to sign up/in through.

Upcoming Features

I really want to build the site that you, the freshnews community, want to use. There are a few features left on my list that I hope to implement soon. Search is one of these. freshnews used to have a full-text search feature, but that turned out to be a bit wonky and I was forced to take it away until I got time to get it all sorted out. That day will be soon.

Another feature that I plan to implement soon is PubSubHubBub support. It’s a funny name, but really handy.  This will allow the page to update in near-realtime for sites that support this protocol.

Finally, I hope to start building a few other topic-specific pages. While the front-page of freshnews will continue to be a nice assortment of tech news, I think it would be nice to have a few other pages dedicated to specific tech topics. I need you to tell me what those should be. A specific programming language? Gaming? Mobile news? Other? I’m interested to hear what you have to say. Leave a comment here or post on the uservoice page.

I hope you enjoy the new site. It’s been a lot of fun to build and I hope you’ll continue to let me know how you like it.

Thanks!

Eric Bachmann performing “Bruce Wayne Campbell” by Okkervil River

Most people people post a top ten list of their favorite stuff from the previous year.  Not me.  I’m not nearly as “with it” musically as I used to be and I’m lucky to listen to thirty full albums over the course of a year.  I feel like at top ten list would be a bit watered down due to lack of options.  So, with that in mind, here are my top FIVE albums from 2010:

1. Lost In The Trees - All Alone In An Empty House
2. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
3. The Tallest Man On Earth - The Wild Hunt
4. Cloud Cult - Light Chasers
5. Guster - Easy Wonderful

David Rawlings & Gillian Welch playing covers of Method Acting (Bright Eyes) and Cortez the Killer (Neil Young). Love everything about these two. Enjoy!

When we first decided to go to Spain for a month I knew using my iPhone to the fullest would be an issue.  I love my iPhone 3G and use it continually for directions, podcasts, twitter, weather, etc., etc., etc.  After some brief research I found that international data plans through AT&T are a complete rip-off.  They give you 20-50 MB to use for an entire month. Wow, thanks for that option AT&T, but I’ll keep my money and find other ways to use my phone without your help.  Here are the ways I found to do just that.

First, you’ll need to remove the SIM card from your iPhone.  This isn’t an absolute necessity, but it ensures that your phone won’t rack up any unexpected charges while out of the country.  I popped my SIM card out before our plane to Spain left Atlanta and didn’t put it back in until we arrived back in Atlanta a month later.  With your SIM card removed you’re now ready to figure out how to access valuable data in other ways.

Mapping

My biggest concern about using my iPhone in Spain without a data plan was the lack of maps/directions.  I use the built in mapping application all the time in the US and felt like I’d be wasting an awesome feature of the iPhone if I didn’t use it overseas (when I need it the most).  I did some research and found out that the GPS receiver in the iPhone works just fine without a SIM card, you just won’t be able to see the map since it relies on Google to pull the images.  With this in mind, I started searching for iPhone apps that had map information built-in that would take advantage of the GPS signal.  I found two promising looking apps that had maps of Spain built-in:

1. Navmii GPS Live Spain - $4.99 (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/navmii-gps-live-spain/id366487155?mt=8)

2. Navv Iberia - $24.99 (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/navv-iberia/id389764871?mt=8)

I couldn’t really test these apps out until I got to Spain, so I bought both in the hopes that one would work well.  After using both for a month I have to say that they are far from perfect, but both proved useful at different times. Both suffer from confusing interfaces.  If you’re used to using the built-in mapping application on the iPhone, then you’ll be very frustrated with the unintuitive interface in both of these apps.  With that said, they saved our butts a few times when our other directions fell apart.

Our normal navigation technique while driving was to first get directions from Google while we had wi-fi in our hotel.  Then, email those directions to myself and get them pulled up via email on my iPhone.  That would give us a nice portable way to view them while in the car. We didn’t have access to a printer, so this was the best option.  Unfortunately, these directions would often fall apart quickly after missing a turn on a roundabout, leaving us completely clueless in the middle of Spain.  This is when we’d resort to the unintuitive interface of these mapping applications.  I think Navv Iberia was the one we’d normally try first.  Once we figured out how to use the app, it got us back on our route without too much trouble.  It includes a turn-by-turn direction feature, which worked pretty well for us.

Quick tip: remember that GPS requires a clear path to the satellite to receive a signal, so using it in a big city is often difficult.  The tall buildings will block the GPS signal, so be careful not to rely on it too much.

Wi-Fi

Obviously the main way you’ll access the Internet without a data plan on your iPhone is via the built-in wi-fi.  I found that my iPhone 3G had a weaker wi-fi card than my laptop.  Often I’d be able to get a decent wi-fi signal on my Macbook while my iPhone wouldn’t be able to see the network.  I wish I would have brought my Airport Express to strengthen wi-fi signals in situations like this.

The apartments/hotels we stayed in had unpredictable wi-fi access, so I downloaded Jiwire’s “Wi-Fi Finder” iPhone app (http://www.jiwire.com/iphone) to help find hotspots. This came in handy a few times when we needed access.  Just be sure to download the offline database of hotspots while you do have wi-fi.  This option is built into the app and is handy for obvious reasons when you don’t have wi-fi.

Quick tip: try to find iPhone apps that store information locally.  This way, you can load up with data when you do have wi-fi access (load your twitter timeline, RSS feeds, email, etc.) and read the content later when you have more time to spare.

Running

We were lucky enough to stay within walking distance from Retiro Park in Madrid.  This is a huge park with a nice running track around it.  I use RunKeeper on iPhone to track my runs and hoped that I could use this without a SIM card.  Sure enough, it worked fine with just the GPS signal.  It would store my runs in the app and then I could upload them to the http://runkeeper.com website when I had access to wi-fi later.  Worked perfectly.

Runkeeper Free (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/runkeeper-free/id300226023?mt=8)

Wikipedia

The thing I missed most about my data plan while in Spain was the ability to look up information about the places we would visit.  My first instinct when looking at a 2000 year old Roman aqueduct is to read about it on Wikipedia. The first week or two I would often pull out my phone to do just that before realizing that I didn’t have access to the Internet.  I thought there must be a way to get access to all of Wikipedia offline since they publish their raw database for anyone to use.  Sure enough, there was an iPhone app with all of Wikipedia pre-loaded:

Wikipedia Offline - $8.99 (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wikipedia-offline/id378348813?mt=8)

This app compresses the database down so it only takes up a few gigs of room on your iPhone.  The downside of this is that it makes searching incredibly slow.  It honestly would take over a minute at times for search results to show up.  I accepted this downside and embraced the fact that I had all of wikipedia on my phone.  It worked very well for me.  The one big issue with this app was that parts of some entries were just missing. It was frustrating at times, but again, I was just happy to have all of this info on my phone.

Translations

Another crucial app that we used was a Spanish-English dictionary.  Obviously there are plenty of paper books that would work for this as well, but we didn’t want to lug around books if we didn’t have to.  So we went with this one:

Spanish-English Dictionary from Accio - $1.99 (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spanish-english-dictionary/id331233703?mt=8)

It worked well for us.

Calling/Texting

We didn’t have to worry about making/receiving calls on the iPhone because we took a seperate, unlocked Motorola PEBL to use for this purpose.  We bought a SIM card from a local phone store and used that phone exclusively for calling.  I know you can unlock the iPhone for this purpose as well, but I didn’t want to go through all the required steps.  I already had the unlocked Motorola, so I just went with it.

Also, we used Google Video Chat quite a bit to keep in touch with family, allowing us to eliminate quite a few phone calls.  Had we really wanted to use the iPhone for calls we could have just used the Skype app.

We didn’t text at all while in Spain, so we didn’t have to worry about finding a solution for this.  Had we wanted to text we could have used any of the free texting apps in the iPhone App Store, including the recently release Google Voice app.

Conclusion

Our trip to Spain was awesome:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brycethornton/sets/72157625387441102/ 

I’d highly recommend you go for yourself if you ever get the chance.  I think if I had to do it again I’d still go without a data plan.  My only suggestion would be to make sure the places you stay have RELIABLE wi-fi.  Many places we stayed CLAIMED to have wi-fi, but upon checking-in we found that it didn’t work reliably.  With a bit of good wi-fi here and there you can make an extended overseas trip into a very enjoyable, well-connected vacation.  Enjoy!

Do you have any other tips for traveling overseas without data?

My Morning Jacket - Golden

Sufjan Stevens - Too Much (From Jimmy Fallon)

I’m not sure what to say about this performance.  It certainly was entertaining!

Tiny Desk Concert - The Tallest Man on Earth