Tag Archives

My Favorite Blog Feeds, 2014 Edition

By Tuesday, December 30, 2014 0 Personal , Permalink 2

I like being up-to-date on topics that interest me. The main tool I use to do that is RSS feeds. I use Feedly to subscribe to RSS feeds of information sources that I want to follow (mostly blogs).

While Feedly is available via web and mobile apps, I use the Android app almost exclusively. I might use the web version to organize my subscriptions from time to time, but I do the actual reading on my Nexus 5.

I made it a habit to catch up on my Feedly Must Read list as a filler, whenever I have “down time” (commute, waiting for something, coffee break, etc.). Much better than burning time on Facebook and such, in my opinion 🙂 . I religiously clear out my Must Read queue at least once a week (I estimate it’s currently around 1,200 items per week).

This post lists my favorite RSS feeds, as of December 2014.

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My Favorite Podcasts, 2014 Edition

By Monday, December 22, 2014 2 Personal , Permalink 0

Podcasts are a great way to consume information and entertainment. I use BeyondPod Pro to track, download, and listen to my favorite podcasts.

I listen to podcasts on my Nexus 5 during commutes and when I go running. I estimate this accumulates to around 12 hours per week. The total time is randomly divided between podcasts, audio books, and music. I estimate podcasts get about 5 hours per week. I usually listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed.

This post lists my favorite podcasts, as of December 2014. The list is taken from the BeyondPod Smart Playlist, which reflects the order and precedence of listening.

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App Highlights: Our Groceries

By Sunday, November 2, 2014 0 Mobile , , , Permalink 1

Our Groceries is a super-useful app that keeps multiple lists synchronized between multiple devices and users.

The obvious use-case, as hinted by the name of the app, is sync’ing grocery lists between family members. This apps does it in a simple and intuitive way!

App Highlights is a recurring series. From time to time, I highlight one Android app that I found useful. Feel free to suggest apps for me to highlight, but be advised that I focus on apps that I actually use.

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My Favorite Chrome Custom Searches

By Sunday, July 21, 2013 0 Lifehacking , , Permalink 1

Custom search engines are an awesome feature in modern web browsers at large. This is especially true in Google Chrome (which is incidentally my favorite desktop browser for daily use).

In a nutshell, custom search engines power-charge the address bar (or omnibar), and allow the user to assign keywords for special operations. Custom operations include searching in a specific site (e.g. Wikipedia, or this blog 🙂 ), run some JavaScript, or invoke commands in various web-apps using crafted URL’s (e.g. creating a new calendar event).

See Google’s support for more details.

In this post I describe my favorite custom search engines, as I configured them in Chrome on my computers, including site-specific searches, time-constrained searches, etc.

It should be noted that other browsers have a similar feature with similar syntax, so the same definitions might apply as well. Note that I did not test them on browsers other than Chrome.

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