FriendFeed is a handy site that consolidates all your friends activity on blogs, flickr, and social networking sites.  You create an account and link it to all your favorite sites.  As you use those sites, FriendFeed picks it up and generates a nice stream of what you've been up to.  Then, your friends can subscribe to your friends streams, thus giving yourself a nice, one-stop feed of interesting content from your friends.  It's like twitter, but without, well, all the twittering.

In fact, if you're reading this, you probably saw it via my FriendFeed via Facebook.

The problem with FriendFeed is that the feed also contains your own activity.  Seeing as I generally don't drink & surf, I remember everything I've done.  I only want to see what my friends are up to.  They're far more interesting anyway. 

Enter my Pipe.  It takes your FriendFeed and filters out you.  Sort of like the opposite of a mirror - it shows you everything but yourself.

To use it, go here, enter the RSS feed URL from the Friends tab of your FriendFeed account, run the pipe, then click the RSS button in the "Use this Pipe" section of the page.  That should get you subscribed to your new feed via my pipe.

Enjoy!

And, if you want to follow me around on FriendFeed, by all means do.

Now, take this and combine it with Jenova Chen's ideas on game design, namely that games should be appropriately easy for novices to play, but organically offer much more for hard-core gamers, so that both feel satisfied.  For example, when a hard-core gamer strolls in to a virtual room, he'll walk around the perimeter, checking every nook & cranny for a secret level or something cool.  Meanwhile, an intermediate players will walk through the same room, very much the same way they would in real life - glance around a bit, then get on with what they were doing.  Thus: design your game to be cool for those just strolling through (hard enough & visually interesting enough to intrigue them), and hide all the little goodies & badies in only places hard-core gamers would look.

Similarly: design any product for the intermediate.  Don't dumb it down assuming everyone is a beginner, because most will find it useless.  Similarly, don't throw in every feature that every advanced user might ever wish for because you'll overwhelm the majority of the population (this is why I believe most open source apps never make it to the mainstream; if you don't believe me, believe Walt).  The right thing to do is to design for intermediates - keeping the design clean enough that beginners can accomplish the few things they want, and put expert features in places where only experts look - e.g. plug-ins. 

This is why I think having a great plug-in architecture is key to any software product - it allows you to design for the intermediate, leaving the app usable and useful.  Experts can and will add all the crazy functionality they want in plug-ins.  The beauty of this is that they write the plug-ins.  You don't have to invest in developing and testing those advanced features. 

Of course, this only works if you design your app with a sufficiently advanced plug-in architecture that plug-ins can add cool functionality.  Firefox nailed this.  Unfortunately, most of Microsoft's recent apps that support plug-ins only do so in a very limited fashion - e.g. Windows Live Writer (only content insertion, no way to modify app behaviors). 

• Transom's tutorial


• The Technology School of the Future - no kidding. That's it's real name. They have several tutorials.

According to these, the Split and Time Shift tools are your friends for doing multitrack edits. If you're doing an interview, you'll probably need to break each segment up onto it's own track, shift them around until you're happy, then collapse them into one track and continue. It's not as flexible as Pro Tools & such, but it's free.

So, I've decided on a new rule: all my boot drives shall henceforth be RAID 1 volumes. The downtime is much better: Hardware replacement time is just a few minutes and I can work off the laptop during the RAID rebuild. That time savings is well worth the extra $100 for a duplicate drive. (I tend to use small drives for the boot drive, then big drives for a separate data volume).