I was pleasently surprised to find that Opera 9.5 beta2 for Windows Mobile has a lot of the features of the full browser. In fact it can be difficult at times to persuade websites to provide their mobile friendly version. There's a probem with the layout in Bloglines, which is ignored by PocketIE, but Opera shows up. There's an unclosed (center) tag which leaves all of the content centred. m.beta.bloglines.com/feedtree So a little work with Opera, it's big brother allows site specific CSS overrides. So created a file called override.ini in /Application Date/Opera 9.5 Beta/ Opera Preferences version 2.1 ; Do not edit this file while Opera is running ; This file is stored in UTF-8 encoding [Overrides] bloglines.com [bloglines.com] User Prefs|Local CSS File=\Application Data\Opera 9.5 Beta\mystyles\bloglines.css Created a subfolder mystyles and bloglines.css @charset "utf-8"; /* Stylesheet for bogines.com */ center { text-align: right; !important } /* the yellow background was a test to see if this realy works */ body { background: yellow; } Relaunch Opera, and we have bloglines with our custom styles. More examples of style overrides at http://userstyles.org I think the syntax of the override.ini file allows many of Opera's settings to be customised on a site by site basis. Not experimented with this yet, but I would not be surprised if you could turn off javascript, or stop downloading images for specific sites using this override file too.

Interesting talk and workshop from piCETL. (Physics Innovations Cene for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Open University) They have developed a series of interactive screen experiments in Physics. These differ from interactive computers simulations, in that they are based on highly interactive videos and photos of real experiments. This means students take real measurements from photos of a real experiments They are being used by OU to help students prepare for residential courses, to teach skills and introduce new equipment. They have been funded as part of a UK Higher Education Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, so they are enthusiastic to have people trying out the resources with their students, and to get feedback http://www.open.ac.uk/picetl/activities/details/detail.php?itemId=4612203073f3a They also reported positive expeience of students using a virtual oscilloscope simulation to learn about and practice using lab equipment. http://www.virtual-oscilloscope.com/

Some headings to write and expand on later * remembering to develop services for the loosely connected world * repurposing twitter and jaku : formal and informal tools for near real time response and feedback in education * text messaging services - bridging the instant-message-vs-email generational gap) * rss in moodle, for providing offline-able services * e-portfolios vs myspace and facebook. Teaching about positive profile creation

Here's a quick guide on creating your own filtered view of facebook status updates for your news reader.

I got an email from a friend of digitalkatie about facebook and twitter.  Apparently the constant stream of status updates via twitter into facebook is overwhelming his use of the facebook status RSS feed.  There is a nice solution using yahoo pipes without needing any real programming.

You might want to take a look at pipes.yahoo.com.  They provide a nice gui based

process building tool which allows you to set up a chain of processes to take action on combinations of RSS feeds and web pages.

1. Login using a yahoo id, create a new pipe.
2. Copy the the address[1] of the facebook RSS feed into a new 'fetch feed' block. 
3. Add a new  'filter block' and connect the fetch feed to the filter block by drawing a line between the bottom connector on the fetch and the top one on the filter block.
4. You could enter some text in the filter block - choose to block ANY items with ' is twittering: ' in them.
5. Now connect the bottom of the filter up to the 'pipe output' block. 
6. Save and 'run feed' to view the results.  (No need to 'publish it' or to rename the feed)

Buttons on the results page will allow you to add it to My Yahoo, Google Reader or other feed readers using the orange RSS 'more options' link.

I'm using the filtered feed in Bloglines and finding it quite useful.  There is no point in seeing the same messages twice as I read twitter on my phone or on the website.

Holidays always make me think about packing online media. It's a time to copy across working files, email, and new music to the laptop. I have become a bit of a fan of services which store data and make it accessible through a browser. * Google for email and calendar * del.icio.us for bookmarks * Bloglines for blog reading At home I can switch between desktop machines and mobile devices both at home and work and know that I will have access as long as I have a browser with an internet connection. Packing for holiday means that I might have to manage without. How can I prepare my windows mobile phone for the prospect of only having an intermittent connection? In theory Google Mail now has imap, a mail protocol designed with exactly this sort of scenario - keeping folders and emails on a sever in sync with an intermittently connected client. Unfortunately window mobile mail client isn't quite up to the job, and deals with imap slowly with timeouts. Fortunately WebIS have FlexMail 2007 which does the trick nicely. For blog reading I am using Egress by Karl Hessinger (GarishKernels). This picks up my subscription list and unread items from Bloglines. I've brought over calendar information using OggSync. And I am currently typing this using a commercial blog service Typepad, because of it's nice offline mobile client. And for some reassurance that the PCs at home and work will still work when we return, some backups were needed. Carbon Copy clones the complete Mac hard disk, and Cobain Backup to selectively backup the important bits on each of the windows boxes.

Ewan recently mentioned finding friendfeed useful, if occasionally overwhelmed by twitter posts. Usefully it does roll up multiple posts into one entry where appropriate. 

Friendfeed offers a nice way to provide a composite feed which summarises a list of when and where your friends have posted new content elsewhere on the web.   It is sort of like an outward facing Facebook newsfeed.  Instead of just providing a list of actions within the facebook service, this draws on any web2.0 services which you post. It can provide a composite list of what you or your friends have been up to and where they have been posting recently. There are so many places where people may be posting that it can be difficult to keep up, and spot and add new feeds for everyone. 

Bother, I had spent a long time programming and linking up a cunning sequence of yahoo pipes to do exactly this job

 

EDIT: fixed the link to my friend feed and also posted a new item about filtering facebook to remove twitter.  Wonder if this will help ewan's problem?

It would be nice to have a bit more control over which messages are forwarded to my phone using twitter. Spam is fairy easy to avoid, but other kind of unwanted message come from a probem with twitter only having one stream of messages per user. 

I can see the use for clients like twhirl and other desktop clients to allow you to post and read in more flexible ways.  It would be nice to be able to do some more filtering and selecting online.  I can see an idea for an automated filter and repost tool, create a filtered or composite twitter feed to add to your friends to stay in touch if their usual feed is a bit busy.

It would be nice to be able to be a bit more selective about what you read and send using text messages. I find the text based interface the most useful one, but lacking in some selectivity.  You can follow or nofollow - that's it.  What if I want to follow everything except 'new blog post' twitters for example.  I hope paying for text message quotas may drive some development in this area.

It may be useful to look at other microblogging services like jaku, following their acquisition by google

Enjoying being able to stay in touch while travelling (although trying to avoid the urge to download my work emails).  Bit of blogging, photos and twittering.

I'm really enjoying being able to post and track microblogs using twitter, sending small quick updates to people by web, text message and status messages. Kate seems to be having fun doing this too.

Also heard from Kal this morning that he has just finished his exams, and was waiting expectantly for answers - so we got in touch to cheer him up Tried to get Louis to giggle down the phone. Not sure what else he got back from the request for a distraction via twitter.

EDIT: Congratulations Kal on passing the exams

On the sighty more annoying side are the start of the spam twitter accounts. An account called googlenoticias started following lots of people yesterday.  Of course the spamming only works if I reciprocate and choose to follow it in return. Mildly irritating.

Also previously have had a more targeted approach from companies using Twitter.  One of which was writing about and promoting training 'courses' for schools including brain gym!

On the other hand, seeing how twitter can be used socially in zefrank's colorwars has reminded me how much more fun it is to use it socially.  (On our way down to centreparks we joined in playing Bingo over twitter - Kate for c0ff00team and myself for redteam.  Colo(u)r wars has already divided the family.

It really seems that twitter is more interesting when used as part of a conversation rather then just a one way stream of consciousness.  Ask a question, or comment back to someone.  It's much more than just a way to update your Facebook status.

Some odds and ends from people who like developing small but interesting apps: * SMS vote counter by Dave Glover, could be nice for teaching, education and conferences wanting small scale votes without needing to outsource. * Wiki for pocket pc and desktop bLADE wiki, developed by Dale Lane (who also released a nice del.icio.us plugin for pocket ie Other random other links: * Stephen Fry writes an interesting blog, and knows his mobile device history * mms over email - NueMMS which relies on pktpix who forward emails to (phonenumber)@pktpix.com via MMS * cool web design for a Microsoft conference (via BinaryJam (not that I'll have an interest in coding using silverlight), but the website header is nice. (and I note that it works in Safari, Firefox and IE -- unlike the web app framework that the conference is all about) In other news, our "music" playing neighbour has been a lot quieter ever since a visit from a rather grumpy Louis, to explain in detail why he doesn't really like European dance music and drum and bass. He was quite persuasive in the only way he knows how. * xkcd on dealing with noisy neighbours * xkcd on grapefruit, and a response: grapefruit on xkcd (via Nielsen Hayden).

Suffering a little from twitter overload. It's been fantastically useful over the last few months, leading up to the birth, and the first few weeks with a new baby. However my stats over 3-4 weeks : only 15 out of 207 text messages in my inbox were real text messages. The rest were all messages received from twitter. Added to this were three facebook wall messages via the Mobile App and a couple of notifications from T-Mobile mean that the imaginary friends are definitely winning here. My new problem is that when I hear my message tone[1], I tend to ignore it. This means that the handful of real text messages are sometimes being ignored. Perhaps I could switch off text notifications while I'm at a computer, and start to use twitterific or instant message connection to twitter properly. The other plan is to make the phone treat twitter texts differently. Lots of ways to have contact groups have different ringtones on Windows mobile, different text tones seems to be more complex -- seems you need to hook in and receive new SMS events and do your own notification. Software to try to apply rules / message tones depending on sender: * SmartSMS Filter Lite from Palmary Soft * smsOrganiser from zedSoft * Text Message Manager from DBG Soft Oh and ContactCM mentions something about this for their next release. Surely there must be an easier way of implementing this. [1]: note to self - don't use PhoneAlarm to have loud repeated reminders on every SMS delivery when leaving your phone in the same room as your pregnant wife. This can be hazardous to both your and your phone's health