Instapaper
Posted: January 29, 2008 Filed under: Business, Cell phones, E-books, Finance, General ramblings, Howto, social bookmarking, Software, Technology, Thoughts, Tumblr, Web 2.0 | Tags: Business, delicious, E-books, Finance, General ramblings, Instapaper, Life, social bookmarking, Technology, Thoughts, Tumblr, Web 2.0 11 Comments »Marco, a co-founder of Tumblr, introduced a new service yesterday, called Instapaper. It’s a bookmarking site with a difference. So many times I’ve come across amazing articles which I’ve wanted to read, but because of time constraints, haven’t been able to. Generally, I’m hesitant in adding these to my Delicious list, which I use exclusively for items that I’ll be “using” sometime in the future. Adding articles that I want to read later to my delicious account doesn’t make sense. Maybe I’m just extra organized, but I don’t like it even if my Yahoo! Inbox is crowded with unread (and useless) emails, even though there is no space limit. Anyhoo, getting back to the topic- You can use Instapaper to add these articles which you want to read later. It serves as an Instant Newspaper, featuring articles chosen exclusively by you 
This is a great tool for people who have long commutes, for students who love to play around with their cell phones in between classes etc. You can open your mobile phone browser and log into Instapaper and catch up on some reading.
Here are some screen shots with explanations:
1. The Sign Up Process is as easy as it can get. All you need to do is enter your Email address or a username. You don’t even need to set a password. In fact, you should sign up for this service just to see the “Register” process in action 
2. This is the Log In page. Like you can see, all I’ve done is entered my Email address (which is not really a secret).
3. This is my Instapaper page. So pretty and white. I’m in love with the way it looks. It even beats WP.com in simplicity! On the upper right side corner, there is a small logo called “Read Later”. This is the bookmarklet that you can drag and drop to your favorite web browser and use it for saving articles. My log in page had three articles when I took the screenshot.
4. If you notice, there is a pink box called “Skip” next to each Article link. You can click that in case you don’t want to read something right away. When I skipped my first item, it landed at the bottom of the page in the section “Recently Skipped”. Here, a new link for deleting this article also appears. So, you can either read it later (in which case it automatically lands under a section called Recently Read) and delete it or mark it as unread (using the green box on the left), in which case it will land up in your ‘Unread Section’ again.
5. I decided to delete my first item from the “Recently Skipped” section. As you can see, the “Unread” section displays the remaining two items.
Simple enough? Now go and sign up for it and you’ll never have to skip another article on the internet.
Edit: All screenshots have been removed because of some privacy issues. Sorry.
Re-Kindle Your Reading Habits…or Not
Posted: November 22, 2007 Filed under: Amazon, Blogging, Books, Business, E-books, Finance, General ramblings, Life, literature, Technology, Thoughts | Tags: Amazon, Black Friday, Blogging, E-book, E-book reader, Finance, General ramblings, Jeff Bezos, Kindle, Life, Technology, Thoughts, Wii 16 Comments »There has been so much of hype about Amazon’s e-book reader, Kindle, that I absolutely had to do a post on it. Yesterday, while I was looking for Black Friday deals on the int
ernet, I happened to go to their website (out of habit) and the way they had placed the ad for Kindle really amused me. The only thing visible in the entire page was that ad. It’s like Amazon is telling us- “Stop buying those paper books that we’ve become so good at selling; look at our new baby!!” I’m a big time admirer of Jeff Bezos, his business antics and Amazon. But this new product has failed to impress me. You almost take a gulp when you read the hefty price tag of $399. That’s quite expensive even though it contains free EDVO (Wireless service provided by Amazon). I’ll tell you why.
Right out of the box, you cannot you any of those free e-books that can be downloaded from the internet. You’ve got to pay $9.99 each for reading newspapers, magazines, some 250 blogs and other e-books that are available for download from their website. There are some that cost less than $9.99 too. So, hardbacks and their siblings paper backs are still extremely popular with your generation. Some of these old hardbacks cost thousands of dollars. You think an e-book will ever be valued as much? No. Not in the near future at least.
Guy Kawasaki says that this is one of the best things out there in the market. (You can watch the video on the product page). He focused more on the fact that you can keep opening it to read updated content from blogs. He is a famous blogger and he’s received a free copy! What about my blog friends who aren’t among those elite 250 bloggers and whose blogs are equally interesting for me? Why would I want to read blogs on an e-book reader? My laptop is a better choice
there. Ditto for magazines and newspapers. I can read them online using my laptop.
My motive in life is to reduce the number of tech gadgets that I would want to carry with me. Actually, if I want to read an e-book (which I seldom do), then I would prefer using my laptop. I wouldn’t want to invest $400 buying an e-book reader. That money would be better spent in buying more physical books. How do we build a physical library with e-books? This concept doesn’t appeal to me.
Another thing- Why are the exteriors white in color? All that handling will make it dirty…very fast.
Amazon is already out of these readers and the new stocks comes in only on December 5, 2007. You can grab yours by December 24, 2007. They haven’t released the figures on the number of readers already sold. Did they under estimate the demand or were they not sure about the success? I think the former reasoning is better, because Bezos wouldn’t have put his foot into a new venture had he not been sure of it. Already becoming Nintendo Wii, huh? Oh by the way, Amazon is giving away Wiis for $79 for Thanksgiving to the first 1,000 lucky customers.
Follow this link to read about Scoble’s take…and see him eat, breathe and sleep Kindle for a couple of days. By the way, those top 250 bloggers are getting 30% of the money you pay while subscribing. Fair enough. It’s their content after all.
I would spend my $399 on some Apple device, to tell you the truth. Either buy the iPhone or the new iPod. That would be money well spent- at least until Apple ungrades its products A G A I N.
What’s in my Laptop?
Posted: January 29, 2008 | Author: Ruhi | Filed under: Cartoons, comics, CSS, E-books, E-mail, Facebook, General ramblings, GMail, Google, greasemonkey, Life, Microsoft, Mozilla Firefox, Programming, social bookmarking, Social Networking, Software, Technology, Themes, Thoughts, Tumblr, Web 2.0, Web designing, Windows Vista, Wordpress, yahoo | Tags: addons, Blogging, browsers, cocomments, computers, delicious, digg, extensions, firefox, flock, General ramblings, greasemonkey, Instapaper, laptops, Life, mozilla, operating system, reddit, senduit, shareaholic, social bookmarking, stumbleupon, Technology, Thoughts, userscripts, Web 2.0, windows, Wordpress | 27 Comments »Amit Agarwal from Labnol recently posted a link to Gina’s article, where she’s listed all the programs that are currently installed in her computer. I have seen many other bloggers prepare such lists too. I spend so much of my time every day, tinkering around with various applications, but have never given them any credit on my blog. So this post is a tribute to all these lovely creatures who improve my browsing experience every single day. It might help you get some ideas or discover some new tools too.
My primary Laptop: Compaq Presario V2000 with Windows XP Operating System
Secondary Laptop: HP Pavilion dv2000 with Windows Vista Operating System
My desire is to own a tablet PC made by Apple. I’ll buy it as soon as it’s released.
I also fester desires of learning how to install a fully functioning Linux OS someday!
Browsers: The social browser Flock- Amazing browser for people who are avid bloggers and social networkers on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr etc. Check out my review here.
Mozilla Firefox version 3 beta 2- Just downloaded it yesterday and I’m in love with their new location bar feature, that pulls out page titles and addresses in two different lines and colors, from your recent browser history and bookmarks!
Here’s a screen shot from the Official Website:
Add-ons and Extensions:
Shareaholic- An extension that lets you submit a page to countless number of social networking sites such as Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Google Bookmarks, Friendfeed, Facebook etc. You can customize the drop down menu to include only those bookmarking sites that you use. You can also email the page you’re viewing. Here’s a screen shot (notice the green button with a drop down list only):
Screenshot: This Flock extension allows you to save webpages (entire, visible portion, selection) and windows (eg. browser, blog, uploader) as .png or .jpeg images. You can save these images to your file system, the clipboard or even send them straight to the photo uploader.
Cocomments: This extension helps me track every single comment that I’ve left on any sort of web page- Be it a website, blog or a channel like Youtube. I get notifications in my browser (in the shape of a small envelope) if there’s a reply to my comment. I find this to be really helpful because the “My Comments” tab at WP.com is very slow and it only shows a certain number of recent conversations. Plus, there’s no other way that I can track my comments left on non-WP.com blogs. All you’ve got to do is install the extension and it takes care of everything!
Here’s a screen shot:
Greasemonkey: What in the world would I Do without this add on?
This is the best thing about Firefox and Flock. Too bad that Internet Explorer people have to suffer! Currently, I’m using the following scripts:
LookitUp2- Quickly look something up in wikipedia, a dictionary or whatever you like (its easy to add custom sites!). The result is displayed directly on the page.
TextareaBackup- Retains text entered in text areas
WordPress Comment Ninja- Respond to comments directly by post and/or email from inside your WordPress dashboard. For WordPress bloggers.
Comment Pre-fill- Fillout comment form fields with a single keyboard shortcut!
Greased Lightbox (v0.15)- Enhances browsing on websites that link to images such as Google Image Search, Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, and deviantART
Userscripts.org Rank By Popularity- When browsing scripts on userscripts.org it will change the icon on the left to show how popular a script is. Very useful for focusing on the best scripts.
Mailto 2 Webmail- Open those “mailto:” links in your GMail, Yahoo, AOL etc. email accounts instead of the default Outlook Express.
Yahoo Pipe Cleaner- Removes most of the HTML markup from Yahoo Pipe run output so that it can be cut-and-pasted into WordPress blogs.
Out of these, my absolute favorite is the WordPress Comment Ninja and the Greased Lightbox (when I’m looking at images and want to see the expanded version, all I do is click on the picture and it zooms out. No need to open another link! Cool, isn’t it?
You can also check out this and this, where I’ve prepared a list for other scripts that are very useful.
GoogleDocs Extension: Great stuff for all you Google Fans out there.
From the official website:
Software Applications:
Pidgin- Log into all chat clients and receive new email notifications and lots of other features.
WinRAR- For opening zipped files
DietMP3- compress your MP3 files
TextPad- Works great for CSS/HTML coding etc.
CDisplay- For reading e-comics
Irfanview- Resizes your images and lots of other capabilities
Apart from this, there’s the usual crap that’s worth not mentioning. I prefer to keep the number of applications running at the minimum and have a fetish for keeping my hard disk neat and tidy.
Some other junk that I found over the internet:
Ten Quickfixes to Make Your Windows Computer Run Faster
DownloadmyLink- Free Megashare/Rapidshare file downloader…no need to wait for 60+ minutes or reset your internet connection.
Senduit: Easily share you files- very clean UI
Instapaper: Bookmark those articles that you want to “Read Later” and might not be “Delicious”.