Make someone’s Christmas by buying them a copy of Nizlopi’s number one JCB Song. Better yet, ruin Simon Cowell’s Christmas by buying many copies, thus keeping the X Factor crap off the top of the charts.

• The JCB Song at Amazon UK

Not can’t – won’t. A new Samsung phone on T-Mobile in the US, that’s quite capable of playing MP3s as ringtones, has had the functionality disabled to make sure users end up paying the carrier for their ringtones.

This sort of thing is disturbing – you won’t even be able to record an MP3 of your own and set that as a ringtone. More and more devices are being made not to be the best they can be, but to maximise someone else’s profits. This is one thing I love about open source software – even if there’s features lacking, at least you know it wasn’t because they were missed on purpose to avoid damaging sales of another product. Like the way the notes feature in Outlook is so unusably bad – if they made it good, people might use it instead of buying Word.

(Thanks to Make:.)

Latest Update: Added link to jkOnTheRun’s audio review of the MicroTrack, and a link to some more resources from the author of the O’Reilly review of it.

Might be for recording your guitar playing, or you might be wanting to make your podcasts sound a bit more professional.

(Only one so far, but we’ll probably come across more such things as time goes by, so I might as well make a general page now.)

M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96

[image:1199] * MicroTrack 24/96 Pocket Recorder reviewed by O’Reilly – sounds like a nice little device. Probably not what you’d be looking for as a first recorder, but if you want to make things sound a bit better, it does sound pretty nice. (Thanks to Gizmodo.)

• Mobile Recording Resources – when the above linked review from O’Reilly turned out to be more popular than expected, David put together another page of links to useful resources on recording – worth checking out if you do any of this.
• Review of the MicroTrack from jkOnTheRun – as JK mentions in the comments below.

(Another short one to start out – will keep building it up.)

• Angela Booth’s Article on Building a Copywriting Pracrice a client at a time. A few useful tips, that all hinge on getting that first client – once you’ve done that, you can use these ideas to leverage that into a business.

There’s a lot of debate over this issue. Just to make my side clear, PigPog outputs full feeds and partial – no ads in the partial, but some in the full feed. So I’m slightly ‘full feed’ of centre.

Full What, Now?

RSS Feeds. Very briefly, for those who don’t use them (yet), an RSS feed is a small file located on your web server that other people can grab to find out what your latest content is. The difference between it and the main index page for your site, or a ‘what’s new’ page, is that it’s in a standard, machine readable format. (Well, one of an annoyingly wide range of different formats, but that’s a whole other argument.)

You use an RSS Reader program (or online service like Bloglines) to go and get these files, and keep track of what’s new. The advantage for you is that you can track every bit of new content on a hundred or more sites, without having to spend hours visiting them all and trying to remember what you’ve already seen.

The argument we’re looking at here is down to two choices…

• Your feed contains the whole of your articles, so people can read them directly in their RSS Reader, and don’t have to bother visiting your site at all.

…or…

• Your feed contains a short ‘teaser’ for each of your articles, with a link for readers to click on to go to your site to read the whole thing.

The Choices

Full Feeds

Outputting full feeds has a few advantages…

• Readers usually prefer to read that way. They get to see things quicker, and with the formatting their RSS Reader applies, not your choice of fonts and colours.
• More actual reading. If they don’t have to make an extra click to get to your content, they’re more likely to read it. You want people reading, don’t you?

Partial Feeds

There’s advantages to this side too – that’s why it’s a difficult question…

• Readers reading your content in their RSS Reader probably won’t get to see your ads, so they don’t make you any money. Making them click through to your site means they might click ads.
• Content theft via RSS is a growing problem – people set up a page that automatically grabs contents from RSS feeds and posts it as their own. Not nice, and you don’t want them doing it to you. If you only output a teaser to your RSS feeds, the most they’re likely to steal is that teaser. If they don’t link it to your page, it probably won’t make much sense anyway.
• Bandwidth usage. RSS is starting to account for a large percentage of the bandwidth used by most sites, and this is likely to get worse. Outputting full feeds uses more bandwidth than partial. You can get around this to some extent by using FeedBurner to cache your feed.

My Conclusion

In the end, giving our most loyal visitors the best reading experience is more valuable than the fairly small risk/cost of content theft. The fact that they’re not seeing ads doesn’t matter too much either – the sort of people who use RSS tend to be the sort of people who don’t click ads much anyway. Anyway, since we’re adding a full feed rather than giving just full feeds, we can potentially change in future if it seems to be destroying our chances at huge profits

Your Conclusion

Your conclusion may vary. If your bandwidth is limited and you don’t want to go the FeedBurner route, you may find yourself pushed more towards partial feeds. If you’ve actually been hit by content theft through your RSS feed, you might be very tempted to switch it to partial content.

Your subject area will make a difference too. If you’re dealing with ‘normal’ people, they may well not mind too much either way. If you’re dealing with hardcore geeks, you may find lots of readers just won’t subscribe to partial feeds.

In the end, you have to make your own decision, and I can understand people going either way. I think full feeds are right for us, though, and I’d be wary of upsetting regular visitors for the sake of trying to stop someone pinching your content.

Some time ago, my dad bought me a Medion GPS system (an MDPNA 200S), and it worked nicely enough as a GPS. We’ve not used it much recenly, as we can get to and from Sam’s work pretty nicely without GPS, but it works well enough when we need it.

When he originally gave it to me, he’d included a sheet of instructions for accessing the underlying Windows CE OS, but I never got around to trying it. With an assortment of PDAs lying around, it didn’t seem too useful.

I got a new bag the other day, and whilst finding a home for the GPS unit in the new bag, thought I’d give it a try. Found the instructions here…

• Customizing the Medion PNA 150 at GpsPasSion forums.

…and tried it out. The only thing I had to do differently to the instrutions at the start was copying the ShowTaskbar program into the startup group at the beginning so I could switch back to the registry editor after the Medion software had jumped up to the front.

Now I have a Medion GPS that starts up to the Windows CE desktop rather than Medion’s intro screen…

[image:1259 size=small]

The most useful part, and the main reason I wanted to try this, is that eReader seems to work fine. Once you’ve got the machine starting up to a desktop, install from the PC as usual, and it appears in the Start menu.

[image:1260 size=small]

If I’m going to carry it around anyway, it might as well be able to read books as well as navigate, and with more software available, I may find other uses for it yet too.

Anyone left to buy for?

Well, there’s still time to get your orders delivered through Amazon.

Amazon.com

If you order from Amazon.com (to US addresses) you can get Christmas deliveries even if you don’t order until December 22nd, but you’ll have to pay for Guaranteed Accelerated Delivery. Today is the last day for free delivery to get there.

Amazon.co.uk

For orders from Amazon UK (to the UK) you can get Christmas deliveries for free up until December 18th, and up until December 20th if you pay for First Class delivery. Free delivery is available on any order over £15. The threshold for free delivery does change from time to time, so it’s best to check first.

Even Later?

If you manage to miss even these dates, you can still get away with orders for eMailed gift certificates, and from Amazon.com you can still send magazine subscriptions.

Another sunset snapped from the car – pulled up at traffic lights this time.