End of the year wrapup

It’s that time of year again! My end of the year wrapup. I kind of wrote one last year, but not really. All this year I often thought about doing one this year, and what I would put on it. Music, software, hardware, whatever. The definitive guide to being definitively awesome. It’s my list of the things that I lived off of this year. I wanted to get this down and out before Christmas and then soon thereafter, my wedding in Vegas. So I’ll just throw them down and have a little writeup for each. Stick with me here. You’ll thank me later.

Software
RSS Bandit
   For the second year in a row RSS Bandit gets to be my newsreader of choice. I didn’t go choosing this one willy-nilly, either. I’ve tested tens upon tens of newsreaders in the past 525,600 minutes. OmeaReader, Sharpreader, RSSreader, Awasu, FeedDemon, GreatNews and others were all tested. After each, I ended up coming back to RSS Bandit. Maybe i’m just used to it, I don’t know. Sometimes it hogs cpu time. Sometimes I say “I wish there was something better”, but there just isn’t. I’ve looked.

OpenVPN
   I’ve implemented VPN technology into my personal lifestyle this past year. As something used in the professional world for years, I figured it was time to take advantage of the idea. I use it to create a private network between all machines that I use so I can map drives, remote desktop, whatever needed wherever I am without all services being open to the internet. I never liked having RDP open to the internet, and now I no longer have to. It’s not easy to setup from scratch, but I have it working quite well. By default it uses private/public certificates. That kind of sucks for a personal setup. I wanted to log on and off whenever I liked, from wherever I liked without going through the crappy process of cert creation. I set it up to authenticate against PAM, and now all is good in the world of OpenVPN. Enjoy.

wBloggar
   I’m using it now to write this. It’s a quick and easy blogging software that probably works with whatever system you currently use. It has lots of features, but is still quick to jot down on.

Firefox / Thunderbird
   My tag team Web browser and Email client. I love them both. There is absolutely no reason to use any other browser anymore, seriously. There’s even a plugin for Firefox where it will load a page using the IE engine if needed (Like OWA and crap like that). And thundirbird is what I use to manage and read all my email for both personal and business accounts. It also does RSS and Newsgroup reading.

Winamp
   Yup, I still use it. And so should you. Close Media Player/iTunes right now. (Shut up. I know I want a mac. I’ll deal with that when I get to it. There is a macamp or something, I think.)

SpamAssassin
   Runs 24/7 on my mail server. I’ve had Real-ity.com now since 1997, so a lot of spam robots have had time to harvest my email address. With others using the domain as well, it’s got worse and worse. In about 18hrs yesterday I recieved 357 emails total. 304 were spam. (And a lot of the legit email comes from automated scripts of mine, not from the internet). SpamAssassin does a pretty good job of making email usable again.

NewsBin
   DISCLAIMER: You might accidently do something illigal with this app.
Anyway. This app is a great program for downloading binaries from newsgroups. It takes nzb files from Newzbin (see below under services) and other such web sites. I get music, movies, applications all kinds of stuff with newsbin as my download manager. It has a great feature where it monitors a directory for nzb files and if it finds a new one loads it up and starts downloading it. I have it setup so the IRCers can DCC me a nzb file and then newzbin will load it up. I have good stuff before I even know that I downloaded it.

BitchX
   Nuff said. If you know, then you know.

Others that should be mentioned that I use almost daily:

• irfanview – THE image viewer application for me.
• Filezilla – Free FTP app I use at home and work.
• Gaim – Cross platform, cross protocol IM client.
• PuTTY – My ssh client of choice for home and work.

Hardware
The Event EZ Bus
   I don’t know how I would had got around this year without my Event EZ Bus digital mixer / Audio Interface. I’ve used the crap out of that thing between being a Podcaster (TheCabin’s r33tcast), and working on my new Real-ity material. All things audio would had been a lot more difficult without this device in my arsenal. No longer produced, but can sometimes find them used.

The iPod
   Oh the iPod. How do I love thee. Let me count the ways. Let’s not, but let’s talk pawd. The iPod has changed my life. Seriously. The device that I once dubbed “A piece of proprietary crap” is now a beautiful addition to my life. Due to it’s integration into iTunes (I don’t like iTunes, btw) I can parse it’s database for entering into Real-ity Audiotrack, a system I build this year to track, rate, and follow my listening habits. At the end of each week if there is new artists that i’ve never listened to before, it emails all my friends about them because they should check them out too. This is possible because of my iPod. Otherwise i’d just be tracking data from music I listen to on the PC. And I listen to a lot more audio on the road then sitting in the chair. But i’ll shut up. If you have one, you know what I mean. If you don’t, then you probably don’t want one. I hated them. Then I liked them. Then I got one. Now I love them.

The Palm Treo 650
   I guess. I mean, it’s my cell phone. But to be honest, i’ve used it a lot less this year. A year ago I had all kinds of fancy schmancy software running on it to track and organize my life between clients and projects. This year i’ve been mostly at one place at once time and didn’t need to deal with time tracking, credentials and the like. However, the one app on it that is my Killer App is…
      ChatterMail. My mail client of choice for the second year in a row. It supports IMAP IDLE, just like desktop applications. So you’re always connected, and you get the mail the second it shows up in your Inbox. Take that and shove it up your RIM, Blackberry kids.

Music
I must admit. Not a lot of new music I stumbled upon to this year compared to past years. I blame it on me not working directly with Frank anymore, to be honest. However, here’s my list of music that I did come across this year that is new to me, and i’m glad I found it.

• Out Hud
• 
• VHS or Beta
• The New Pornographers
• LCD Soundsystem

And that’s really about it. The music i’ve listened to the most:

• The Postal Service
• Nine Inch Nails
• Beck
• VHS or Beta

For more details check out my service, Real-ity Audiotrack that tracks everything I listen to.

Services (stuff I pay for)
Allofmp3.com
   For the second year in a row AllOfMp3 has been my primary source for downloading music. You pay for the size of the files. Better quality, a little more money. It’s still less than $3 for a lame—extreme vbr mp3 encoded album usualy, though. And you can’t beat that. Dirt cheap. No DRM. Is it legal? I guess it’s legal enough for me.

NewzBin
   Service that indexes usenet newsgroups for binaries and creates nzb files for you to load into an application like Newsbin (see above). They do a good job, and the price is just pennies. You pay for how many weeks you want to use.

Web Sites / RSS Feeds
The good old interweb. Feeds and pages are combined here, since the sites I like usually have an RSS feed with it. I find it important being in the IT field to be on top of the tech news of the world, so I try to read as much as I can about related topics. You never know when someone will come up to you and say “I’m thinking about getting this odd chinese hello kitty cell phone for my daughter, what do you think?” and I can say “It’s a great device. Rated 8 out of 10 stars. Runs Windows Mobile Smartphone edition and has a 2 megapixel built in camera.”

• Engadget - The best gadget news anywhere. Cell phones, toys, games, mp3 players, computers, everything. Check it.
• Slashdot - I dislike it more every day, but it can’t be touched when it comes to geek news.
• The Register – UK Tech news
• Freshmeat - New open source software.
• Digg - OK. Here I go. Digg mostly sucks. But one out of 30 posts or so is something useful and different from any other feed that I monitor, so I keep subscribed. This usually amounts to odd Google video, stupid blog posts and the like. I swear it’s full of 12 year olds, but it is what it is.
• Ain’t It Cool News – Breaking geek movie stuff.
• TheCabin – The engine that runs my personal journal site. It was redesigned by AJ, Bob and I this past year and it’s a very nice journaling platform.

Podcasts
Of course I listen to podcasts. That’s nothing new this year, I started listening in October, 2004. I don’t really listen to anything new, really. In fact I probably listen to less podcasts than I used to. But here’s my standards, for good or for awesome:

• Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code – It’s daily. It’s random. Is pisses me off sometimes. It’s my “Going to work show” much like any morning radio/drivetime content. Couple tunes, couple laughs, some technology.
• The Chris Porillo Show (sometimes)
• The Dawn and Drew Show – I hate that show. Why do I listen.
• This Week in Tech – A great weekly technology show from some of the old TechTV people. recommended.
• The Engadget Podcast – Weekly, and awesome. The first podcast I had ever listened to 3 hosts prior.

I’ve got away from The Slashdot Review. It was only 10min long, but it was every single day and I didn’t have time to listen to it anymore with the longer format shows I had queued up. I’ve tried listening to some other shows too, this year, but ultimately I unsubscribed. I like having enough where it’ll fill the time needed, but not more than that so I won’t be able to listen to it all.

And I think that’s all for this year. There’s probably a few things I forgot, but not all that much. Let me know if I have any broken links or anything. Do check out some of the reccomendations!

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