My Google Reader replacement

June 4th, 2013 | Posted by tonyscha in Technology - (0 Comments)

So recently google announced it was going to shutdown Google Reader. I am sad to see this go as its in the top 5 Google services I use. After much frustration with corporate America (Google in this case), and not have any power as a consumer over this, I decided to skip using the other commercial RSS replacements, and I turned to the open source community. After reading all the tech websites with suggested RSS reader replacements, I found out about tiny tiny RSS. I installed the web application on my linux webhost and used my domain, and imported my google reader subscription.xml file that contained all my feeds. It was fairly easy to setup (about the same work as setting up a wordpress blog from scratch), will work as long as I provide the hosting, and has a large community. One item I did have to do was find a couple of plugins to enhance the user experience. The two plugins I installed were Next-Prev toolbar and videoframes, which allows embedded videos (such as youtube) to be displayed. There is some configruation options that allow you to configure when it should update the RSS feed, the only complaint I had was you need the ability to run server side commands to make it automatic, however if you leave the webpage open in a browser, it will update when open. I might create a script to run from my home computer to open the website every 10 minutes so when I browse from my mobile device, it contains the latest data. One last thing I needed was a mobile app which is available on the google play store for $1.99. The mobile app is worth the price.

If you are looking for a Google Reader replacement, I highly recommend checking out the tiny tiny RSS website and setting up the service for yourself.

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Sick but not Sick

November 21st, 2008 | Posted by tonyscha in Technology - (0 Comments)

What a week, I almost stayed home 3 full days of work for Alexis,  the first day was pink eye, then Thursday she had a fever, so I had to stay home with her for 24 hours. On Tuesday Kayla and Abigail were both sick. I have been fine so far, knock knock on some wood. Everyone is feeling better now.

Tonight we went  Christmas shopping… spent way to much money, atleast the toy’r’us people have jobs. Its crazy when you have to buy Birthday and Christmas presents for two kids at the same time.

I was trying to tell Kayla what I wanted for Christmas, so I will put it here because she will never read it… hehe

Orange Box

Rubix Cube… even if I will never figure it out

and probably anything technology related but I can only think of 1 thing, a cell phone.

On the technology side of things, I installed WIndows XP on my Desktop. Kayla made fun of me, but I wanted to be able to play games hehe. But I can claim I want to program in c# which is much easier under visual studios. I still have linux installed but I haven’t used it yet.

Also Xbox updated their dashboard… I am unsure of I like the changes. I wish I had netflix, so I could checkout the netflix player. But when I have a HTPC it doesn’t really matter. Check out the new xbox experiance here.

Also for you gmail users, check out the themes.  The terminal theme is my favorite.

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Just another blog post

October 14th, 2008 | Posted by tonyscha in Personal - (0 Comments)

Wow times have been crazy, The Dow dropped how many points last week, then went up over 900 today… The only benefit I have seen out of this crazyness, is the price of gas dropping, its 2.89 now, atleast here in Iowa. Another 21 days or so, and the presidental election will be over, which I am sure we will all be glad to find out if our favorite candiate was elected. OH and Kayla thinks she needs a new computer… but I think she just needs to install linux on it. She also think she needs a Wii, I dont think I can waste my money on it again. She wants We Cheer, a cheerleading game. I think the real reason she wants the game, is to she relive her high school days. She claims she like to dance. This will be left as an unanswered question.

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Digsby on Linux via Wine

September 28th, 2008 | Posted by tonyscha in Technology - (3 Comments)

Well heres my issue, I used digsby on windows, but since switching to a full linux desktop I dont have that luxury anymore. Since then I have been using pidgin which gets the job done. So I tried to use wine and digsby but that didn’t turn out to well. Well after piecing information from the web, I figured out how to run digsby.

First off, I went ahead and updated to the newest version of wine which isnt in the ubuntu repositiores. I am lazy and dont like to recompile code just so I can run the latest and greatest software on my linux box, so I figured out how to add the wine website to my source list. I found this page http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb, If your using ubuntu 8.04 just do the following, else check out the website.

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add –

sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

enter your sudo password, and you should be done.

Now time to update to 1.1.5, you should be able to use apt-get install wine, I went ahead and just used the updated manager by going to System->Administration->Update Manager

In the meantime download digsby for windows

Now install digsby by running it via command line (wine digsby_setup.exe) or double clicking and run through the setup.

After its installed, login to digsby, and setup up your email accounts.

The only issue I had at first was when you double clicked on someone name it would not bring up the IM box. Well to fix that go into digsby Tools->Preferances->Status and uncheck the box that says “Hide new conversation windows”.

It was as easy as that… Do you like digsby and have you tried it out in linux.


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Dropbox for linux

September 5th, 2008 | Posted by tonyscha in Technology - (0 Comments)

Dropbox finally made there linux release available to everyone, if you have an invite or already a member you can download it from this link http://www.getdropbox.com/beta. There is a fedora (rpm) and Ubuntu (deb) install for x86 and x86_64. I installed it, and it started to sync up my files that I uploaded from windows. They even have the source code available if that is more your liking. Below I included a few screenshots so you can see the real deal.

Here you can see after you install it and right click on the dropbox icon.

Here is a screenshot of the folders that it synced up

And the overall screenshot of how it displays on the desktop

I uploaded these photos to dropbox to see if everything works, and it did as expected. This release seems to be fairly good. The only complaint I have is the Icon is a little small which can be seen in the third photo.

Here are the links from dropbox

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/68834/Blog%20Test/dropboxrightclick.png

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/68834/Blog%20Test/dropbox%20folder.png

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/68834/Blog%20Test/dropbox.png

If you have had the chance to test it, Drop me a line  and tell me what you think.

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