Oculus Rift Shipping numbers

Google Reader is dead, long live feedly

The problem with web based applications is that when the company kills the product it's gone. With traditional applications you can run it until your computer dies but with web applications you are dependent upon a slew of computers deep in the bowels of a data center usually in some deep rural location at somebody else owns.

Google has recently killed a bunch of applications a few of which I used regularly. They killed Google Reader, they may have felt that Flipboard was a doing a better job or so Google plus centered they decided to focus on it. I can't complain since its a free service and clearly they had a hard time monetizing it. Like delicious before it the internet is a very competitive and there are other services competing for that market. Fortunately Google is an open company so when I migrated to a new service it was not a problem.

Feedly is the one people seem to be recommending and its very nice. I prefer is interface, its more visual and less cluttered. The worry is that companies will start killing their RSS feeds since Google stopped using them. Google does not care since it scrapes the site so it does not need RSS. So a good company idea might be a psuedo RSS feed by a third party that scrapes sites and provides links to the original content.

Can you buy a nice phone at a small cost?

I finally got annoyed at my Apple 3G. It needed to be flashed with firm ware but Apple dropped support for this long ago. So I wanted a new phone

• It had to be cheap under $200
• Have ICS (Android 4.0) or greater
• Have a dual core processor at least 1Ghz
• 1GB of memory
• It would be really nice if it had a Micro SD card and replaceable battery.
• It would be nice if it had GSM sims
• Most important no contract pay as you go with a plan cost of $50

This was hard since the Nexus 4 met some of my requirements but it was sold out Cricket has a Samsung S3 for $329 but it was not available in my market since it was 4G only.

Virgin had a HTC EVO 4G for less $150 and it met 95% of my needs. So I was not GSM and the unlimited plan was $55. So I switched and I've been really happy. I dropped in a 32GB micro SD and I got a great phone. The works with the Google play store and all my music

Cost for the plan over 24 month is $1300 for unlimited everything. So I ate my own advice and went Apple free.

Buying a smart TV is a dumb idea

Buying a smart TV is a dumb move because you are locking yourself into a technology frozen at least six months ago. Here are a few points:

• It cheaper to buy a ROKU or at worst an Apple TV and it going to be cheaper than the extra you will pay for a smart TV. I picked up a HD ROKU for $38, most big box shops are going to charge you that for a HDMI cable.
• There is more to go wrong. The more complex a TV has the more components that can go bad.
• It is highly unlikely that once you buy that TV the vendor going to update the firmware. So those new services are likely never going to be available for your TV.
• Your cable box is dumb when a smart TV talks to a dumb device the TV becomes dumb. A lot of HDTV are still being feed by a coax based SD cable box.
• Unless you are hooking up a blu ray player all your sourcing device are going to look pretty much the same on a $300 HiSense verse a $800 Sony Google TV.
• This market is still in flex and no standard exist for smart TVs. The closes thing you have to Smart TV standard is a company store.

So basically buy the dumbest TV you can with as many HDMI inputs as you can find.