As far as I can tell, Google Reader hasn’t been updated in ages. Nothing (or close to it) has changed for the last months, if not years. It seems to be, for better or for worse, a finalized product. And if they say the use has been declining, I’m guessing that there isn’t even a storage or server use problem. So, what has its team been working on?

I really don’t get it, but then again, this is and has always been a free product, so we can’t actually demand anything from Google other than a clean way to export our feeds, which they already provide.

Now the future. And this is the part that worries me the most. For me, RSS has always had its own and rightful place in my social activity on the Internet. I don’t (usually) mix it and I totally feel that it’s a completely different ball game from things like Twitter or Facebook. They have a different purpose, but they perfectly complete each other.

RSS is my curated news^[1], Twitter and Facebook is everyone else’s. And I value each one differently. But I have to say that RSS has played a larger role on my daily on-line activity. I might not check Twitter if I’ve been having a very busy day at work, but I always check my RSS every once in a while. And for RSS, Google Reader has always been the weapon of choice for me.

I don’t use it directly, but it’s the basis of my feed collections since Reeder (which I use on the Mac), Flipboard (which I use on the iPad) and Byline (which I use on the iPhone) all access the Google Reader API directly. And this provides the bliss of my RSS management: if I read in one application it syncs to all other applications.

But what now? Sure, there are alternatives, if you like to use them directly. But what if, like me, you use it through third-party apps? Will they all agree on one single service? Unlikely. Will they all dispute the 1st place now that Google Reader is stepping off the podium? Most definitely. And there goes my RSS management bliss: synchronization.

Well, I may be wrong^[2]. Let’s just wait and see. July is still a few months away and the Internet always finds ways to surprise us. But I’m feeling less than optimistic about it. At least, I’m not reacting like this other guy that apparently is entering a real spiral of raging hate:

(via @pedromelo)

1. Yes, I use Yahoo Pipes to customize most of my feeds
2. Fingers crossed

I decided to test it again and close the lid. To my surprise, the usual flashing light on the macbook didn’t flash at all. It just remained steadily lit. At first, I thought it was some hung app that was causing this so I decided to close every app and check if there was some process using the CPU heavily, but that wasn’t the case. I even tried rebooting and still that didn’t solve the problem. I checked the power settings and nothing pointed to it being the responsible for the sleep mode prevention.

After some googling I ended up discovering this neat command that allows checking the state of your power settings:

pmset -g assertions

This command displays a summary of power assertions. And according to the documentation: “These assertions may prevent system sleep or display”.

It’s worth a shot. This was the output:

Assertion status system-wide:
 PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep 0
 PreventSystemSleep 1
 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep 0
 ExternalMedia 0
 UserIsActive 0
 ApplePushServiceTask 0
 BackgroundTask 1

Listed by owning process:
 pid 477(helpd): [0x0000000c00000226] 00:54:25 BackgroundTask named: "com.apple.helpd.sdmbuilding"
 pid 1621(InternetSharing): [0x00000008000017bc] 00:00:02 DenySystemSleep named: "com.apple.InternetSharing"

Bingo! Internet Sharing! I totally forgot about it. Since I’ve been working with the Raspberry Pi lately, I had setup the mac to share its Internet with the mini computer. But I forgot to turn it off. And it makes perfect sense that it prevents the computer from sleeping because it’s sharing the resource that it may be currently used by some other computer.

After turning Internet Sharing off it all went back to normal. Just decided to share because it might happen to someone else.

However, if your browser of choice on the Mac is Safari you’ll most likely see an error when trying to access a website with WebGL-based content. This is because Safari does not support WebGL by default and it is not that clear how you get it working on the Mac. In fact, the extension is “hidden” in the Safari settings and you need to perform this two-step process to activate it:

• First got to the “Preferences…” menu and in the “Advanced” tab check the option “Show Develop menu in menu bar”. This will add a new menu at the menu bar with the word “Develop” on the bar. Shocking, I know!

• Then in this newly added Develop menu, choose the option “Enable WebGL”, et voilá!

Mind you this does not work for Safari on Windows. To view WebGL-based content on Windows, you may want to consider using Chrome or Firefox.

I’ve been using Tweetbot since it first debuted on the iPhone, then on the iPad and finally when they started letting users try out their alpha version for Mac OS X. It may not be the best or the most complete Twitter client out there but it’s definitely the most suitable for my needs and tastes. When I saw the amount at which they decided to price the app today, I wasn’t shocked or surprised, I simply recognized that the time for the first victim of Twitter’s asinine hate towards third-party apps has come.

It’s easy to understand: because Twitter has decided to introduce a user limit on third-party apps, Tapbots doesn’t have the potential to capitalize on their development over time as more users would buy their app at a smaller price. Instead, since they already know the maximum amount of users they’re going to have, they needed to price their app in a way that that maximum amount of users would be enough to cover the costs of development (and some). And because of that, everybody loses.

What really disturbs me is Twitter’s position on this matter. If it wasn’t for third-party apps, Twitter wouldn’t be where it is today. It’s true they need to fuel their website’s traffic to monetize their platform but to piss on the group of people that made it possible, it’s just dumb. For me, once my Tweetbot beta version app’s token expires, I’ll probably stop using Twitter on a regular basis (I loathe their website and I still don’t know if my use of Twitter justifies buying a $20 app) and just use Mountain Lion’s native features to post and receive mentions/messages.

Apple is well known for having developed great products that are well ahead of their competitors but the simplicity of Time Machine is just amazing. It’s one of those awesome features that you wish you never have to use, but you’re glad it’s there to help you when you need it.

Sure, you can connect an external disk to it and browse videos, music or pictures in it but that wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. What I wanted was for the RPi to sit on a corner connected to the TV and the local network and seamlessly access the content over the network. Unfortunately, I couldn’t put these to work:

• For some reason, the official XBMC remote app for the iPhone is unable to find the RaspBMC instance and connect to it. Even if I put on the details by hand, it still doesn’t connect. The web interface works, though, but it’s a complete rubbish.
• Can’t connect the RPi to iTunes home sharing  (it works fine over the iPad or the iPhone, just not on the RPi).
• Since Mac OS X Lion introduced a new (proprietary) implementation of SMB server, XBMC (and consequently RaspBMC) is unable to connect to any SMB shares you may have, thus rendering it useless for accessing content on your Mac. Sure, there are a lot of fixes around, but almost all of them fix one thing and break another.
• AirPlay isn’t working either, I tried it both on the iPad and the iPhone. Basically, the iPad detects the AirPlay instance on the RPi but when I click on it to transfer the viewing to the television, although the iPad tells me that “this video is now playing on AirPlay…”, nothing happens on the RaspBMC side.

So, until I’m unable to fix these things, I won’t call the RPi as a media server experience a success. Not yet.

View of Sintra’s palace from my home using my telescope and the iPhone.

Walter Isaacson – Steve Jobs

My Review: I have conflicting opinions about this book. On one hand, it was great to come to know more about the life of such a prominent figure in the technology world as Steve Jobs, his personality, his goals, his quirks and what drove him. And the first part of the book is great for that. You get an interesting insight of the person he was, what led him to be such a driven person with a difficult personality but with an astute sense of taste and fashion towards the technology world. On the other hand, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Isaacson disliked Jobs and that is subtly shown throughout the book (especially, the second part) where he makes no effort to avoid describing Jobs as a petty man that most of the times acted as if he was a child with a tantrum. Sure, that may be true and I definitely believe that Steve Jobs was an extremely difficult person to work with. But isn’t it also true that everything Jobs touched, turned to gold? He led a garage-founded company into the company that fought the giant IBM. He bought a division of Lucasfilms special effects company and turned it into the leading company in the world for computer animation. He picked up Apple when it was near bankruptcy and led it to be the highest-valued company in the world. So he must have been doing something right. He deserves some credit for that, doesn’t he? At least to say that he had merit in choosing the people he worked with.

My Rating: 4/5

Jeff Lindsay – Dexter is Delicious (Dexter #5)

My Review: Having read the previous 4 books about the character that inspired the TV Show Dexter, I decided to pick up the series and read the remaining two books (so far). But this one was a total disappointment. The story was quite boring and cliché, plus Lindsay decided to use the very trending topic of vampires (not real ones, of course) that also happened to be cannibals and didn’t really help improve the story. Also, I still couldn’t decide if the constant witty remarks of the Dexter character are simple traits of his social-ineptitude and naiveness or just excessive sarcasm. Either way, I didn’t like it. Also, this was the first book after Debra (his sister) had discovered his “hobby” and so I was really looking forward to know how that would pan out (considering that is how [SPOILER] the tv show ended the last season). But it really wasn’t a big part of the story. And in the end, you can’t shake the feeling that Dexter got away clean from the huge mess he got himself into without really doing anything and just by being a huge lucky bastard.

My Rating: 3/5

Jeff Lindsay – Double Dexter: A Novel (Dexter #6)

My Review: Now this one was a pleasant surprise, at least compared to the previous book. Much darker and mysterious. The story delivers a different take on the Dexter series, one in which Dexter is now the one being hunted by a prey not that different from him. It still suffers from some of the aspects I pointed out in the previous book (the Dexter character is too naive sometimes, to the point of being dumb) but at least this one has a richer story with interesting developments.

My Rating: 4/5

Arthur C. Clarke – Rendezvous With Rama

My Review: This was one of those science fiction classics that I never had the opportunity to read. And since this year I decided to (try to) read all the classics that I never actually read before, this one was probably as good as any to start with. What a great choice I made. This book has everything you’d expect from a great science fiction novel: mysterious settings, unknown elements, stuff that stirs your imagination and a lot of food for thought. The end can be bitter-sweet, but it is only a reflection of the arrogance of humankind and the self-centric idea that we are alone in the universe. Fully recommended.

My Rating: 5/5

Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games #1

My Review: This book was a mere curiosity. I had seen the trailer for the new movie a few weeks back when I went to the cinema and when I noticed it was based on a novel, I decided to have a look. The formula used is not new, but it mostly works: taking place at a post-apocalyptic America, a Big Brother-like fight-to-the-death game where the contestants are lottery-drawn teenagers from the districts that lost the war against the “Capitol”, the story develops through the eyes of one contestant in particular, Katniss Everdeen. And the choice of the author to use the first person approach works quite well because it creates a stronger connection between the reader and the girl and you’ll end up feeling as lost as her by not knowing what’s happening with the rest of the characters on the book. Unfortunately, as I said, the formula is not new and the story ends up being a bit too easy to predict. Sure, there are some twists but you’ll spot them miles away.

My Rating: 4/5

Related: What I’ve been reading, Vol. I, II, III and IV

When I publish something through the iBookstore, am I the copyright holder of the book’s content?

Why was this question so important? Because, If the creator of the iBook is in fact the copyright holder of the book’s content, he/she can then publish the same book in other formats to reach out to other “readers”. If not, that’s a more serious issue because then authors are “stuck” with Apple’s format and cannot publish their books in more “widely-accepted formats”.

At the time, this was not clear in the iBook Author’s EULA. Rather, the wording in the EULA suggested that Apple was not only the owner of the format of book (.iBook) but also of the book’s content.

This raised several concerns to authors (as pointed out above), which is only natural, but now Apple has decided to make the EULA quite clear and stated the following:

If the work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service) and includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, the work may only be distributed through Apple, and such distribution will be subject to a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary); provided, however, that this restriction will not apply to the content of the work when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author. You retain all your rights in the content of your works, and you may distribute such content by any means when it does not include files in the .ibooks format generated by iBooks Author.

I think authors can relax now. Basically, Apple is saying: if you want to sell iBooks, you can only do it through the iBookstore. If you want to sell your own e-book (with the same content as the iBook as long as you don’t use any of the same files in the iBook) somewhere else, you’re free to do so.

• Select Text in Quick Look Windows – This one has bothered me for quite some time, but I’m glad there’s a solution for that. It’s perfect for when you need to copy a snipet of text or code from a document and you don’t want to bother opening the clunky editor just for that.
• Always show the Outbox on Mail.app – This together with this will do the trick.
• Enable Full Screen Support for All Apps – Pretty self-explanatory
• iCloud Documents in OS X - If you need to create iCloud-stored iWork files on OS X, here’s the tip.
• Share Files between Mac and Windows – I also used this tip to share a DVD that for some reason was not working on my Mac DVD drive.

You’re welcome.