RSS Reader - Newzie

Quickr and Connections have an untold number of rss feeds enabled to allow people to access content from other apps. Due to the large number of feeds i was following I needed a decent rss feedreader.

Newzie is the latest one I've tried an it seems to be quite good.
It's quite pretty to look at - I may be a bit shallow there.

Flock

I've been trying out the firefox based Flock browser - In short...it's very good.

It hooks up to several social networking sites, which is a major use as there can be so many of them. One thing I'd like to see added is support for the Google OpenSocial type networks network.

There's an opportunity for someone to create an extension to Lotus Connections as well

Blogged with Flock

Lotus Notes 8 - importing RSS feeds from OPML

If you use RSS feeds to follow various news sites you will probably end up using an RSS feedreader of some description. If you are an expert in your field then it's good to be able to share your RSS feeds with colleagues so they can learn fro the same sources.

The OPML file format is used to transfer RSS feeds between readers.
Lotus Notes 8 has an RSS feedreader, however there is no obvious method to load an OMPL file.

When you load the Notes 8 RSS feedreader for the first time there is a button to "subscribe to preset feeds". This actually does load an OPML file called "presetfeeds.opml". This file is held in the C:\Notes\framework\rcp\deploy\extras directory .

Just rename your new OPML file to presetfeeds.opml, place it in the C:\Notes\framework\rcp\deploy\extras directory, (after you've backed up the original of course), and click the "subscribe to preset feeds" button. All your new feeds should appear.

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Musicmesh

Musicmesh is a pretty good site that allows you to search for an artist and navigate around to different similar artists. When you select a CD cover the track listing is displayed to one side and if you click on a track the relevant video plays from YouTube.

KeyJNote

I've been feeling envious of a few colleagues with apple macbooks lately. They are simply stunning to see and use. My old windows laptop seems like a poor unfit cousin by comparison. Seeing Keynote running on the Mac is an experience.

Well.... there is something called KeyJnote.

Keynote displays your presentation once it has been saved as a pdf.
They quality of the images and transitions onscreen is really pleasant to look at and blows away ppt and simpress.

The best part is being able to highlight a section and then zoom into it, and using TAB to find the slide you want, and of course the cool effects.

The downside --- it runs from the command line on windows...
"keyjnote.exe my.pdf".

Don't let that stop you - it's really worth the effort. Or of course - go buy a macbook.

Expanding the size of a VMWare disk

My friend Neil needed to expand the size of a VMWare disk from 10GB to 20GB.
Initially the idea was to rebuild the VM image, however there had to be a workaround.

We found it "here"

As the disk was the system disk we needed to follow the special instructions in the comments. "To do the system disk you will ned a second virtual machine. Mount the System disk on another virtual machine and a second disk, run diskpart on the disk and then shutdown the machine. No start up the original machine and voila you now have a larger system disk."

Bless those MCPs.

How to hide a factory

I watched a documentary a couple of years ago where they showed how the british army used a stage illusionist to hide artillery in plain sight in fields on the south coast of england during WWII.

The results were impressive.

This is better

How to hide an entire factory