Funcoder Technology Blog

Just to let you folks know that if you open www.funcoder.com on your iPhone then you will get a nice clear iPhone interface to read the posts.

Thanks goes to http://iwphone.contentrobot.com/

This was a real challenge for me as most of my day is spent being a tech geek and so I mainly read tech blog.

I racked my brain to think of not only some theme that was not something I looked at every day but also something that would interest me.

After spending a few minutes Goggling for some ideas, I finally came up with Airline Pilots.

Flying is something I have always been interested in but never taken up as a hobby. Fortunately my brother-in-law owns a plane so if I get the urge I can pop out for a fly around with him.

I think the coolest job in the world, apart from my own, is being an airline pilot. So I thought there must be pilots out there that write their own blogs and Flight Level 390 by Dave not only reports on his flights but you get a taste of what he sees out of his window with some photo shots.

The second blog to search for was about Mind Mapping, a cool technique to taking notes and remembering key information, created by Tony Buzan. Mind-Mapping.org have a blog full of useful information at http://www.mind-mapping.org/blog/.

Number 3 is about living in Spain. Sometime in the future my Wife and I would like to move to some improved weather and slower pace of life. I found Eye on Spain an informative no fluff look at living in Spain, the highs and lows.

Next we move away from earths gravitational pull and and head to Mars for the Mars Rover Blog. Read up to date information and see the latest images from this incredible robot.

Finally, I had to select something with a smidgen on tech in it, so http://www.cookingforengineers.com/ is my pick. As a software engineer its great to see a blog that gives us some cooking tips that only engineers would understand.

I have tried a few RSS readers, both online and offline and have finally come to love Shrook.

I can’t remember how I found this cool FREE app, but I remember the reasons. I was testing out NetNewsWire but was unhappy with the interface (this includes the Beta 3 version).

The way I use RSS is I skim through the posts until something attracts me. If it’s reasonably short I will read it, otherwise I want to put it to one side until I have time.

Shrook has a great and simple way to deal with this for me. I create any number of Scrap Books which I can then drag a post into. Simple as that.

Shrook has other great features like integration with Growl so I get cool little bubbles telling me about new posts. They have done this nicely by just showing the feed name and how many new posts had just been captured.

Another feature is that Shrook can detect when a RSS feed URL is being redirected somewhere else, like Feedburner. It will then prompt you if you want to change the feed URL to this location. This makes sense as you will get speed improvements over redirection.

I am still getting to know this product more but I am much happier with it over other products, especially the interface that keeps the clutter to a minimum.

Get in the mix with Robert Scoble and the camera on his head:

UStream -Mix07 with Rober Scoble

I found The 4-Hour Work Week interview with Tim Ferriss very interesting, enough to add his book on my Amazon want’s list.

Recommend you give the interview a read.

Thanks Glen….