Super (Ultra)-powered links

• New York Times Article Skimmer: http://prototype.nytimes.com/gst/articleSkimmer/, a prototype article reader provided by the Times itself. This is the best way to read it online IMO
• Readability: Go here to retrieve your customized bookmarklet: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/, it’s a proxy that filters out all the crap (adds, graphics, pulsating flash applications, …) on a webpage you’re trying to read and makes the main text actually readable.
• Note in Reader: Link: Click on your shared items in Google Reader and look on the left hand sidebar for the bookmarklet you can drag to your bookmark bar. surf to a page you think is cool, click the bookmarklet, and the page gets shared along with your shared Google reader items, with a note and comments.

Facebook, no facebook

I gave in and started a new facebook account, under cover. Now I’ve deleted it again because I realized it’s stupid to be on facebook as your dog. It’s too bad that facebook is such a good organizational tool especially when one has so many friends who only check facebook and never check their email.

What alternatives are there? Start a listserve / google or yahoo group? A meetup group? Mass text messages several times a week? That seems expensive. I also feel a little guilty for being the only one not on facebook, so why should everyone adapt to my preference?

More bandwidth experiments

Update to this post. Another common internet activity and the bandwidth it consumes:

• Watching Star Wars in a terminal
  ~ $ telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
  Ave. 2.85 KB/sec

Bandwidth experiment

Since my internet has been slow lately, I decided to do a little experiment and see how much bandwidth is used while doing various internet activities.

Here’s a plot over 10 minutes of three things (in this order):

1. Listening to music on somebody’s myspace page
2. Watching a (MP4) video streamed by castfire
3. Watching a YouTube video