Yes, somewhere along the line…I became a geek. I started using multiple computers, not just between home/work/school/etc., but even multiple computers at home. (Though, I mainly use my MacBook for all my casual web-surfing needs these days at home…) I was always annoyed by having different bookmarks on the different computers I used, which meant frustration when I had to remember which computer I bookmarked that useful such-and-such on. I wanted a way to have a centralized webpage for my bookmarks and hence could access from wherever I was. So, inspired by an entry on 24ways.org, I created one. It was my little pet project, and it was good…

Then I found out that someone else had already done the same thing and they had done it better. Enter del.icio.us. (Ooh, the pretty pretty tag-clouds! Yes, my tag-cloud is quite delicious indeed…) Tags are such a simple concept, but oh-so effective. It just makes so much sense to have a webapp where you save bookmarks and can assign arbitrary tags to each entry. del.icio.us then makes it very easy to navigate around your list of links by tags, even providing nifty "easy" URLs like http://del.icio.us/tduckles/madison, which shows me everything I've tagged with "madison".

Even better, people out there have written even slicker tools to access and navigate around your del.icio.us bookmarks.

I really dig the whole web-based RSS aggregator/reader thing. For the past year or so, I've been using reBlog on my Linux box at home. It had it's quirks, but it was great to use.

Enter Google Reader. Being the show-off's they are, Google has created a fantastic RSS reader web-app. I've ditched my home-based reBlog setup for using Google Reader for all my RSS feed reading needs. Here are the things which really won me over:

I finally succumbed to recommendations of friends and picked-up the Firefly TV series on DVD…and it definitely didn't fail to impress. It's the best sci-fi show I've seen in a long time. It reminds me of ST:TNG in some ways, in so much as it's very character-driven, with engaging characters who are developed very nicely. I would certainly recommend it to any sci-fi fans who haven't had a chance to see it yet.

The fan community for Firefly seems to be alive and strong, and it looks like a fan-compiled Firefly documentary is on the verge of being released. I'm still debating picking it up… I know I can get fanatical about some things, but I'm not sure if I'm too that point with Firefly yet. I certainly wish that the TV series hadn't been cancel mid-1st- season.

http://www.donetheimpossible.com/

Like many people these days, I use RSS feeds to keep up on news from various feeds. But, with some of the higher traffic sites, since the RSS XML file only keeps the last 40 headlines or so, if I don't update the feed every ~12 hours, then I'll miss some posts. Since my iBook has been on the fritz lately, I've just been leaving it on 24-7, so I was able to have it auto-refresh every few hours.

This weekend, I was suddenly struck with the idea that it would be cool to have an RSS reader with a web-interface, and the RSS fetcher could run as a crontab job. This has the benefits of being able to be accessed anywhere, and to fetch new posts automagically, without needing some desktop computer somewhere to handle that.