This is my first blog post using Windows 10. I’m pretty OS agnostic. I have a slight preference to Mac OS X, but dang near everything is on the web and in the cloud these days, so OS barely matters anymore.

I wish Apple made a desktop computer for me. I have two nice Dell 24″ monitors. I don’t want my monitor built in like an iMac, I’m not spending $3000 on a Pro, and I’m not buying a two-year-old Mini. So that means I had to build my own.

I built my computer last month, because my old one was getting really long in the tooth. It was originally a Hackintosh, running Mac OS X on it. It’s relatively easy to install Mac OS X on a PC if you buy compatible parts. It worked great, except for a few problems, but those few problems drove me nuts. So I thought I would give the Windows 10 Technical Preview a shot. Screw Apple, if they don’t make decent reasonable desktop computer, I guess I will go back to Windows.

I really like Windows 10 so far. I always try out beta operating systems as soon as I can. I was running Vista and 7 both a year before their actual releases. I tried Windows 8 early, and I learned I didn’t want anything to do with 8. So far I think Microsoft is doing a good job keeping their every other version being good streak alive. I have yet to have a single problem with 10. I think the Technical Preview is pretty solid.

I’m actually getting excited for Windows again, and I’m a little worried for Apple. They just don’t seem the same without Steve Jobs.

I’ve been mostly on Feedly since Google Reader shut down. I tried most of the options out there, but at that time, Feedly was the best. Today I switched to Inoreader. Nothing wrong with Feedly, but Inoreader just seems faster, and I like the cleaner interface, and it has every option I could imagine I would want.

With the switch I figured I should do some house cleaning instead of bringing a bunch of dead feeds with me from site to site. I literally have never cleaned up my RSS feeds. I have well over 1000 feeds in my OPML, some dating back to 2000 that have long been dead. I have just moved my OPML file from site to site. From way before Google Reader even existed to now, way after Google Reader has gone away.

In doing so, I’m really seeing a blast from the past. So many bloggers, people that I read for so long that I felt like I knew them, are just gone. I guess I haven’t really missed them, it’s just a little sad to see either nothing at their domain, or a link farm. Sometimes I miss the good ol’ days when people actually blogged.

Thanks to the heart bleed scare, I thought it was probably time to update all my passwords. There is no way any sane person is going to change all their passwords like me. I had some free time at work this weekend, so I thought what the hell. It literally took me ten hours to update all my passwords.

I am now officially annoyed as fuck by stupid password policies. There has to be a better way. It would be so nice if there was a service like Last Pass that along with storing your passwords, made it easier to change them. It’s a pain in the ass searching around sites to find where to change the password at, and then finding out your password won’t work because it’s too long, or contains special characters, or doesn’t contain special characters. Come on people, we need to standardize this. I have a nice algorithm that allows me to have long unique passwords for each site, but only works on 90%, of them because of these stupid policies.

Another thing that drives me crazy is the hiding of the passwords. Why do you have to hide them from me? I couldn’t tell you how many times I typed my password it wrong twice and locked myself out of my account. I believe Warby Parker was the only site that had the option to show passwords in the clear. 99% of the time we don’t have anybody looking over our shoulders. Just provide us with a checkbox to check for the 1% of the time when other people can be looking over our shoulders and we need our passwords hidden.

It’s no wonder why people use crappy passwords. It’s 2014. We need easier tools to manage and change our complex passwords already. And no, I’m never going to log in with Facebook. Quit asking me.

Maybe I should just use monkey123…

I suffer badly from FOMO, the fear of missing out. Technology has made it so easy to never miss anything. All my TV shows, podcasts, blogs, and news sites are constantly pilling up with great content for me to consume. While I love it all, sometimes I feel like I’m just getting through it to get through it, and not enjoying it.

This week I’ve done a little experiment and tried to use Flipboard for all my news. I have always loved Flipboard, but it never really worked for me. I’ve always felt I was missing out on something, so I still had my nose in my feed reader. I’ll never give up on my feed reader for blogs, but I’m trying to wean myself away from reading news in my feed reader.

So far it’s been great. It’s taking me less time to get through my feeds, and Flipboard seems to turn up some great articles I never would have found otherwise. It’s kind of magical how it pulls stuff out of my social networks and filters the news so I don’t miss anything important, or at least that’s what I’m trying to tell myself. I don’t think Flipboard is saving me much time, it’s still a bottomless time sink, but I think it’s a more enjoyable way to read my news.

So Google Reader died Monday. Is RSS dying? I sure hope not, and don’t think so. I’ve heard many people say they gave up on RSS reading and now just read Twitter. That just doesn’t make sense to me. Twitter is great for what’s going on now, but how do I catch up with what’s been going on after a long day at work? Sorry, but I’m not scrolling back fourteen hours on my Twitter feed. Hell, I seldom scroll back an hour.

The other day I was trying to remember when I started reading RSS feeds. I know I started with a desktop app, and mostly used it to keep up with all the blogs I was reading. I remember wishing news sites had feeds so I could read my news that way, but none of them did. Gradually more and more sites got RSS feeds, and that’s pretty much how I’ve been consuming the internet for as long as I can remember. If your site doesn’t have an RSS feed, it doesn’t exist to me.

Once I got internet access on multiple computers and places I switched to an online reader. I think NewsGator was my first and then I switched to Bloglines. I remember when Google Reader was first launched. It sucked at first and took a few years before it was good enough to make the switch. I lived it Google Reader for years. It wasn’t flashy, they rarely added any decent features, but it was always reliable. The best thing Google did was to allow third party apps to connect to their services. That was one of the reasons I bought an iPad the day they came out. My RSS reading finally became enjoyable in the mobile space. It’s so easy for me to keep up with my 1000s of feeds now because any spare minute I have during the day I can whip out my phone or iPad and read some feeds.

I was a little shocked when Google announced that they were shutting down reader. I guess I had a hard time believing that “nobody” was using a service that I was using constantly twelve to eighteen hours a day. I wasn’t worried though. I was excited because I knew other companies would step in and have products that were better and actually work on them and evolve them over time. Many did, and I tried most of them, but for now Feedly is my choice.

Feedly has most of the features of Google Reader that I used, and works with Newsify, which is a great iOS app. I made the switch, and didn’t skip a beat. Long live RSS.

Happy Towel Day!

So over the weekend I played with a few different RSS readers, and so far Feedly is winning. I couldn’t try Newsblur because they closed their free accounts. While I’m more than happy to pay for an RSS reader, I need to know if it’s the right one before I’m willing to pay. I was also unable to try The Old Reader because of their long import queue. My OPML file was also too big for them to import all my feed. That was also a turnoff.

I hated Feedly’s look when I first tried it, but I was able to customize it quite a bit too make it “less pretty” and more useful. When it comes to RSS readers pretty usually just gets in the way. I just want the articles, and I want to be able to browse them fast. Feedly uses the same keyboard short cuts that Google Reader uses, and that’s a must for a reader for me. I was able to get through my feeds almost as fast as I could with Google Reader. They still have a few UI problems, but I have a feeling Feedly will figure it out. I think they understand this is a huge opportunity for them. Right now they are still using the Google backend, but they say they have their own clone of it that they are ready to use once Google Reader closes down.

On thing they must add for me to make the switch is a way to export my OPML. I’m sure they will add one, they aren’t stupid. They probably don’t have one now because they are using Google’s backend. A way to export my feeds is an absolute must.

The one thing I’m worried about is their iOS app. Once again they made it pretty, and I don’t want pretty. My iOS reader of choice is Feeddler. It’s fast and full of export options. I can quickly run through my feeds sending some to Instapaper, Evernote, Readability, Pocket, Pinboard, or where ever want to handle posts that I’m interested in.

I’m hoping that Feedly understands that there are many different kind of reader apps, and everybody has their favorites and they allow third party apps to run on their backend like Google did. I believe it would be huge if they do that. The feed reader service that becomes the backend for all the great mobile reader apps will be the winner.

Feedly is in the lead now, but I’m curious what Digg is going to do. they said they are working on a reader too. I’m pretty excited about the future of RSS readers. Somebody is going to be innovative and blow Google Reader out of the water, and make us wonder why we loved it so much. Who is that going to be?

So I’ve been playing around with Vine over the weekend, and I kind of like it. Vine lets you create, edit, and share a six second video. It’s actually more fun than it sounds, and people have been very creative. I enjoy seeing more than just pictures from my Twitter friends.

Vine does have some annoyances, but I’m sure they will be fixed with time. I don’t like that it’s like Instagram was and has no website. I wish there were more sharing options. I hate that it’s iPhone only. Vine does just dump the video into your camera roll, so you are free to share it wherever you want. I’m currently just dumping them onto my Tumblr.

I like that you can find your Twitter users to add them, but that feature currently isn’t working for me. I’m following over 1,000 people, and I know more than three of them are using Vine. I hate that Facebook took that feature out of Instagram. I don’t want to have to add all my friends every damn time a new network comes out. Apps like this should all be able to import your Twitter and Facebook friends. I don’t look at my Instagram feed anymore since I can’t keep my Twitter friends synced up with it. Because of that, Instagram is almost dead to me. It’s just one of the many reasons why I hate Facebook and barely use it, and am looking for an Instagram replacement.

It’ll be interesting to see if Vine takes off. It has so many similarities to Instagram that I could see it taking off. Than again people might be overloaded with similar services.