Interface news avalanche

While I've been too busy to post, hopefully you've taken a gander at the various DNI RSS feeds. Right? Well, if you haven't been keeping up, the HCI/interface world has been a non-stop flurry of exciting and interesting innovations.

Why all the excitement? Three things.

One, battery technology and device efficiency have gotten to the point where rich media on portable devices doesn't drain the power before you're done thinking, "Hey, I'd like to experience some rich media content right now?"

Two: The lines between every traditional computer category are collapsing all around us. Your phone is a slim client, your ebook reader is a netbook, your htpc is a nettop, your desktop is always connected and serving up content, up is down, down is left, cats and dogs are living together! And all this requires that we think a little differently about how we handle, view, sort, and access our delicious data.

And Three: Ohhhh how much data we have! And it's cheap to store. And for the price of a 14" CRT in 1993, you can grab a high def 60" mega-monitor (okay, you'd have to get it second hand and last year's model, but still...) In other words, we have more sand and bigger sandbox to play in.

So, enjoy!

Feed tweak

Just a note: I'm going to make a couple small changes to the RSS feeds, outlined below:

Papers: Now, Papers will be the only feed with, er, papers (besides Noteworthy News). It will only have papers, no stories. This feed will be purged (items removed) as papers are consolidated into Super Paper Fridays.

Video and Audio: Removing this feed.

'Shared' items (BCI News): Okay, I misunderstood this, somewhat. If you just want everything - every feed without duplicates plus posts on DNI - this is what you want.

'Starred' items (Noteworthy News): This is going to expand to include anything big/important and papers that appear will not be purged with SPF.


Social media note: All DNI original posts are being cross posted to Twitter and FriendFeed, along with each "shared with note" story - shared items that I specifically commented on. This adds a layer of complexity, but it is what it is. Starred items are also cross-posted to Twitter and FriendFeed.

Remember that you can mix and match feeds, too, with Yahoo Pipes. Simple example below (merging 3 of the feeds into a single one):

One more thing...

Papers feed is live, and has been added to the list on the right. Or click here.

Feeds updated (final update on these, I swear!)

I'll update the post below as well, but I have the feeds now finalized, and I'm adding them to the sidebar after this is post is up.

For those of you wondering how I'm categorizing the news items with minimal pain, here's how...

I'm using Google Reader for my usual news reading. To keep from having to type tags, I'm using a free program called AutoHotKey, which is an AMAZING piece of software. Sounds simple, but basically it lets you create simple scripts that can do just about anything. Kinda like Windows meets the bash prompt, but easier to use, low on resources, and a $^$&-ton of really useful scripts out there. In fact, many of the little utility programs that you use right now may have an AHK script equivalent, especially if you got them from Donation Coder. AHK scripts can be compiled into executables, or you can let them run in the background, or you can drop files onto them. Want a script that randomizes your desktop icon placement every 15 seconds? 30 seconds of coding (if you don't know what you're doing).

In this case, I have a simple AHK script that changes Alt+F1 into the "t" keystroke (opens the 'tag' section in GReader), Alt+F2 into "Neuroscience and Bioengineering, ", etc. So, I see something I like, I drop my thumb on the Alt, hit F1, consider the categories it falls into and hit those F-keys, and then Return. My hands don't have to move, except in a few cases (which is why I used Alt+F1 for t, when I could just hit t).

If anything is wonky, please please please let me know.

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The feeeeeddddssssss must be fed!

He we go...

Starting today, the RSS feed structure will follow the structure from this previous post. Old feed items are not being updated, so for everything before today, starred = BCI, shared = technology. Side bar links updated, too.

Categories:

• Starred


• Shared


• Neuroscience and Bioengineering


• Interface and HCI


• Technology


• Science Policy and Perspectives


• Education


• Organization and Efficiency


• Fun and Misc


• Video and Audio
  

Adding a new feed (or 20)!

So, if you have followed/subscribed to the RSS feeds, you know that they are updated several times/day (yes, I am actually doing that manually, and yes, I do read what I mark, except papers, though I read all abstracts). You probably also noticed that I mark a decent amount of stuff related to data analysis junkie related items under the BCI feed, including hard drive tech, CPU updates, and general organization/efficiency stories.

To better serve my dear, dear readers and and reduce the chance of myself developing a schizotypic disorder when trying to find material, I am going to restructure the whole feed setup sometime within the next week.

Site feed:
If you just let your browser or reader autodetect feeds, this is what you get. It is only stories I actually write. If that's all you want, then cool beans. But, there is much, much more available through the below feeds!

Starred items:
Broader implications, greater importance across 2+ fields or specifically to my research/lab/general situation/jobs/etc. This will include some papers, but not all, some tech, but not much (and no more multiple tagging of the same stories on different sites when one happens to add a small detail I find interesting - those will go in my private feeds). I'm hoping this will be a lower volume feed with greater signal-to-noise. High blog topic correlation with low variance is the aim.

Shared items:
My posts and strictly BCI related news items. Other blogs can add Blogger feeds as drop in items, and in general, the 'Shared' designation is meant to be the most topical to the readers. Now it should be. This will include NO papers, only media coverage of BCIs, NISs, BMIs, prosthetics, neural implants, some EEG/EOG/ECoG/MRI, and robotics/material science/neuroethics/neuroinformatics. Tech items will be limited to major, and only major items, like significant architecture changes, wireless transfer, CCD/CMOS advances, and new power/battery tech.

Tag: Neuroscience and Bioengineering
These items are specifically neuroscience related, and will include all papers. Papers will be purged each week in the Super Paper Friday post, leaving only media articles referencing them.

Tag: Science Policy and Perspectives
Political, social and generally interesting science bits. A paper might slip in here or there, but not many.

Tag: Video and Audio
I love the io9 sci-fi site, but they tend to post 20 YouTube clips in a single story, which brings most browsers to a crawl. This feed will contain only video and audio items. This way YOU can enable a script blocker or Flash blocker to read stories as usual, and then quickly scroll through these items. Since there aren't many, maybe 5 per week, you should be able to find stuff fast as long as you don't wait 3 months to look for it.

Tag: Organization and Efficiency
This will be the most 'eclectic' feed, covering data organization (physical and virtual), working space design, neat-o desks, software (like Mendeley and Firefox), notetaking, and other random bits to make life easier.

Tag: Technology
All the techy goodness that I find rockin'.

Tag: Education
Items related to education/PhD life/books/notetaking/etc.

Other feeds and tags may follow, but I think this covers the bulk of the material on the site.