Google Reader is a great way to aggregate all of your RSS feeds and view them from anywhere. I use it in combination with Yahoo Pipes (see yesterday’s post) to keep tabs on news, tech and some of my favorite comics. There’s also a mobile interface for Google reader for your phone. The two keep in perfect sync, so you never end up reading the same things twice. I also find the add star feature especially useful from my phone. For example, I usually browse my feeds during lunch, and mark several as starred that I don’t need to read immediately. Then when I get home in the evening I’ll pull up the starred items on either my phone or desktop and read them from there.

Yahoo Pipes can take some getting used to. The slogan for it is “Rewire the web.” What it allows you to do is work with RSS feeds to combine or filter them to create your own custom feeds. Instead of having to write your own program in PHP, or something similar, to do this, Yahoo provides you with a nice graphical interface where you literally “wire” blocks together to combine feeds, add filters, and make other modifications that help you create your own custom feed. I use it in combination with Google Reader to read some of the local newspapers. Here are a few of my pipes:

Security Now is a weekly computer security podcast hosted by Steve Gibson of Gibson Research Corporation with Leo Laporte. The content typically alternates between a technical discussion of some aspect of internet security, a recent security threat, or questions from listeners. The content can get technical at times but the conversation between Steve and Leo always helps to make the topics much more understandable.

Firefox is fast, but you can squeeze a little more speed out of it by not having it draw all those ads that are on almost every web page. I use Adblock Plus to keep them from showing up. It works great, blocking nearly every ad and not messing up the page layout. If you do run into the occasional problem with it, you can easily disable the plugin for the particular page or site. On the other hand, if you get an ad that you shouldn’t it’s easy to let Adblock know about it and have it remove it in the future. Once you’ve got Adblock installed, make sure you set it up for a filter subscription, which it will prompt you to do once you restart Firefox. This will make sure Adblock knows about the latest ads and how to block them.

Tips From the Top Floor is a photography podcast. I started listening to it about a year and a half ago. At the time, I wasn’t sure just how you could describe photography tips and techniques through an audio podcast, but Chris Marquardt, the host, does an excellent job. There’s also an occasional video podcast thrown into this feed, but since I listen to most of my podcasts while commuting, I can’t comment on those.