Whether creating content is your job or just a hobby it's useful to follow and interact with your various online communities.  Most webapps send email notifications to let you know when someone has favored or commented on your content but that can be overwhelming.  Here's a trick I use to stay current with site activity without the email clutter.  Turn off email notifications and subscribe to activity feeds instead.

This is a list of apps I currently have installed on my Android phone.  I'll try to keep the list up to date but if you want real-time updates follow @KylesApps on Twitter which uses AppAware to automatically tweet my app activity.

Update

2010-06-07

I've decided to provide a link to my appbrain page instead. It won't have my opinions but it'll be up to date.

View installed apps on Appbrain

This was supposed to be a post about how much better my new hard drive case performs than my old case but I couldn't get the new case to work.  So, like any curious geek I poked around to see if I could find out what was wrong even though I have very little knowledge of electronics engineering.  What I came to find was the shoddiest craftsmanship I've seen in a modern electronic gadget.  The reseller (not manufacturer) who sold the device through Amazon UK promptly issued a full refund so there's no hard feelings toward them.  The reseller told me not to send the defective unit back so I decided to prod a bit more and blog about it.

My friend Paul tweeted about a new URL shortener like bit.ly and is.gd but with one major difference.  The domain for this shortener is only 2 letters "t-o" and they're not separated by a dot.  The link to the shortener was posted as http://to./ which appears to be an invalid link since it has no top level domain (com, net, org etc.) but low and behold, it worked.

Here's another unorthodox post but it's a subject very dear to me, local Hawaiian food.

I dislike email forwards since it's usually some lame inspirational message or joke but this one was a gem.  Attached to the email was an interesting cookbook with an awesome title, "Aunty Marialani's Go Cook 'em!". 

Download the cookbook

File removed. See update below.

Most readers from Hawaii will recognize the name but for those of you who don't, here's the video clip from where the title comes.

The TWiT Network has pretty strict rules about profanity across all channels including the netcasts, chatrooms and the TWiT Army Canteen. There are usually moderators lurking the IRC and microblog but once in a while some profanity gets through the cracks.

After having gotten fed up with Gnome I decided to try XFCE as suggested by most of my Linux-using Twitter friends and I must say, it's a huge improvement.  One thing I missed though was Gome-do's dock launcher.  While I could install Gnome-do in XFCE it would install a ton of required packages and also requires compiz to look normal.  Instead I decided to create a simple and fast dock launcher that needed no extra packages.

Today Twitter rolled out the new "lists" feature to the remaining tweeters who were not already part of the beta and at first glance it's clear that Twitter lists will drastically change the way we view our social network.

It's not uncommon to see advertising on the sides of trains in Japan but it is rare to see one that's been completely covered in ads. Update: According to my friend @euphorythm, when a train's exterior is covered in a single company's advertising they say it's been "hijacked".