Using some magic sauce, Flickr determines the most interesting photos posted to the site each day. These photos are addictive to look at. Oddly, Flickr doesn’t provide an RSS feed for them. Flickr user steeev wrote a screen scraper to generate a feed, but it seems to be broken. So I just created one using the Flickr API.

Until Flickr makes an official feed subscribe here: Flickr Interesting Photos Feed

Here’s another homemade ski video from the archive. This one was made the year before the epic one I posted earlier. It’s only about 3 1/2 minutes, but don’t worry, there’s plenty of shaky footage and cheesy transitions.

Watch the video on Google Video or YouTube.

Wiretap - A Bottle of Seltzer (11 MB MP3) From 2006-05-19 with host Jonathan Goldstein.

Subscribe to the Wiretap Podcast.

I went to the nearby Apple Store to check out the new MacBook today.  I only got to use it for a couple minutes.  I’d have to try it in different conditions to see how the new glossy screen deals with glare.  As you can see in this picture, the glare is definitely visible.  The new keyboard is sort of retro looking.  The keyboard on the old iBooks had tendency to be “mushy”.  The new one is rigid and consistent for all keys.

The employee keeping an eye on it said they received an early shipment which was sold out.  But they then received a second shipment.  Plenty of the second shipment were still in stock.

Wiretap - The Lothario (11 MB MP3) From 2006-05-12 with host Jonathan Goldstein.

Corin and I saw Catie Curtis perform at, “The Center for Arts in Natick“. on Friday night. A couple more photos in the gallery.

More fun from Feed43. I just quickly created some RSS feeds for Blockbuster’s online DVD rental service (their Netflix clone).

The feeds aren’t perfect, and they may break soon if Blockbuster changes their page, but until then, if you are a Blockbuster Online subscriber here you go:

• Blockbuster - New In Theaters
• Blockbuster - New Movies Released on DVD
• Blockbuster - New on DVD
• Blockbuster - Top Online Rentals

I haven’t owned a game console since the Super Nintendo. But the Nintendo Revolution Wii actually looks like a fun way to waste time. Mostly because it reminds me of my fond memories of hours spent playing the original Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and Zelda. It will not only have new versions of each of these games, but you’ll also be able to play the originals on the system. And of course the fact that, unlike the PS3 and the XBox 360, you don’t have to sell a kidney to afford one, makes it reasonable for those of us that don’t obsess over video games. My only serious hesitation is that playing the Wii apparently makes you look really goofy. (photos from the official Wii website.)

I was a little skeptical that a light up frisbee.  I thought it might just be a gimic. However, the flashflight rocks. It is a 185 gram light up frisbee that uses LED and fiber optics to glow brightly for easy catching. I chose the disc-o which changes colors, but it is also available in red, green, and blue. Now it just needs to stop raining.

Over the years I’ve written dozens of perl scripts to scrape HTML pages and generate RSS feeds. Then I tried RSSxl which was pretty kludgy and lacked features. Recently, a few others have come out including FeedYes and PonyFish.
But none worked very well. They weren’t flexible enough, or the interface was poor.

Feed43 is the first to impress me. It is fairly powerful allowing you to match any number of different elements on a page and then create a custom template for output. The interface is also excellent. You do need to read the documentation, but after about 10 minutes I was creating RSS feeds to my exact needs.

The Feed43 developer is committed to keeping the service free and make money by having a premium service with extra features. The only down sides that I’ve run into so far is that the feed only gets updated every 6 hours which his fine for pages that rarely change, but much too infrequent for pages that get updated constantly throughout the day. The regular expression matching is also a bit limiting. Instead of full regex support, it has reduced matching to a handful of tags. So far, I’ve been able to make it work, but on nastier pages that need complex matching, I suspect youd’ run into a dead end. For instance, I don’t how it deals with greedy matching.

Here’s a few screenshots of the process to make a feed of the Brattleboro Reformer front page news headlines:

Step One: Enter a URL

Step Two: Write the (ir)regular expression to match your elements (title, link, description)

Step Three: Extract your elements and verify you’re getting what you expected.

Step Four: Make an output template. This one is quite simple, but you can get as fancy as you wish… putting multiple matched elements in the title, link or description.

Step Five: Preview your handywork. Optionally give the feed a pretty name, password protect it, etc.

Step Six: Subscribe in your feed reader of choice.

Wiretap - Mr. Helpful (11 MB MP3) From 2006-05-05 with host Jonathan Goldstein.

Update: I originally set up the link to use Coral Cache to reduce bandwidth consumption. Someone reported the link didn’t work for them. Another said it was cut short. So I’ve updated the link. Try again if you had any trouble. -jared

Everyone on the internets these days are doing the mentos and soda pop eruption experiment. A couple weeks ago we picked up some supplies so Corin could do it in her physics class. We used mint mentos and generic cola. With other videos on the web, the soda shoots 10-20 feet in the air. Our first try was very disappointing in comparison, only going 4 or 5 feet into the air. Apparently any type of mentos and soda should work. My only theory is that the heavy wind we had that day somehow diminished the height.

The CBC today expanded their podcast line up.  Unfortunately, Wiretap is not included.  Several of their other podcasts are also “best of” which I’ve never understood.  Podcasting is for people who like the show, but want to time-shift. Just give the listener the original show.  Maybe a “best of” in addition to the full show.  WNYC does this with Studio 360, and it is often so boiled down that it is unlistenable.