Translated feeds in Google Reader

Two pictures say more than thousands of words, so check out how you auto-translate feeds in Google Reader, this time enabling me to follow the Chinese social aggregator site sr.ju690:


... aaaand... voila! :


Of course, it works also for less exotic languages than Chinese, such as if you want to follow a Swedish or Estonian site but don't read the language.

Also, seriously, check out the extremely easy-to-use translation tools for 1-click translations from your browser's toolbar (it has opened the non-Swedish Internet for my parents) and the excellent translated search.

Pipes plus feeds merged burning

Finally I have gotten around to doing two things: Feedburning my blog RSS feeds so I can see how many are subscribed and reading, and creating a personal plus-feed.

The first is done easily by visiting Feedburner, signing up, giving it the URL of your blog, create the feedburner feed and then modify your blog's settings to point at the new feed according to the instructions given. Nothing too hard. I should get myself into Technorati one of these days as well. However, what it it may mean is that I would love for you to re-subscribe to my blogs! If you are currently subscribed to my blogs in Google Reader or another blog-management tool, please subscribe to these new feeds (and we'll see if Blogger gets things right sooner or later as well):

• UncleCJs nerd-blog
  
• The Emigrant blog
  
• UncleCJs plus-feed

Secondly then, Christian Rudolf suggested me that instead of spewing URLs randomly, I should do like Doktor Spinn and market my "+1"-feed (a way of indicating something you like, you give it a point) as a great distillation of the mess out there on the web. Fine, but first I needed to put together my three different outputs of goodness then, my shared items in Google Reader, and pages tagged "cool" and/or "recommended" by me on del.icio.us. Yahoo Pipes did the trick, just sign in there with a Yahoo ID and you're good to go!:



Here's the end result: pipes.yahoo.com/unclecjpipes/plus (which I'd love for you to subscribe to at feeds2.feedburner.com/unclecjplus)

Finally, if you don't understand a thing of what I mean by "subscribe" above, please please please watch the video Google Reader in plain English beloew, your online life will be better with it and it's extremely easy to do:

And don't let the "blog-stress" grab you, remember that your blog reader should be "like a river of fresh water, from which you may drink now and then whenever you feel like it". Just let it flow.

Swedes have a few vowels to spare (any serbian buyers?)

For comic effect regarding the Swedish language, I told the following story:

A Finn and a Swede were arguing which ones mother tongue sounds more beautiful. Since they couldn't find any solution they asked help from an english linguistic, who asked both of them to translate the following poem by Percy Shelley into their own languages:

"Island, island, Grassy island, Grassy island's Bride."

It was the Finn's turn first. He translated:

"Saari, saari, Heinäsaari, Heinäsaaren Morsian."

Then the Swede translated:

"Ö, ö, Hö-ö, Hö-öns Mö."

I recorded myself reading that, check it out here.


Admittedly, I did that to have an excuse to experiment a bit more with Audacity, a great open source multi-platform sounds editing tool. It is fairly easy to use even though you of course have to get to understand some basic sound editing concepts (there are great tutorials for the program), then it's just rock'n'roll. Record or import, give it a few seconds of just background noise to analyze, remove the noise, crop the clip, amplify to normal levels and export to mp3. Very simple.

PS. Speaking of open source and free software, TestDisk saved my ass the other day, when Boot Camp Assistant deleted the opposite partition it said it would. TestDisk rapidly analyzed my disk and recovered the original filesystem like a charm!

This is a mobile blogging test

This is a mobile blogging test.

Just set up mail-to-blogger, save the addres you have set in your address book, sync addresses with phone and send blog posts as MMS (SMS to email works or not too?) to that email address at blogspot. Edit posts afterwards as needed. MMS costs a couple of EEK as I have realized through my dear friends at MoYuMe, but I think it may be worth it for the occasional picture report from my life (at least when on vacation or similarly disconnected).