Audible is the internet re-incarnation of books on tape. They have over 50,000 books to choose from. Once you’ve selected your book, you download it and sync it to nearly any portable audio player, or one of thousands of PDAs, smart phones, GPS and other devices that support Audible. Books typically run about $10 to $25 and you can usually get your first one or two for free if you do a quick search for a coupon code. They also offer a subscription plan where books cost around $10-$12 depending on the plan. Even with a subscription, once you buy the book, it’s yours to keep, even if you cancel the subscription. Between audio books and podcasts I always have something to listen to during my commute. Some of my recent reads include:
Category: M@’s Picks
This Week in Tech (TWiT) is a weekly podcast hosted by Leo Laporte and an ever changing panel of guests. The show discusses the week’s tech news. Guests are often former TechTV personalities or technology journalists. The format is a round table discussion where Leo typically gives a summary of the news event and then the panel offers their comments on it.
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.