Keeping my dreams alive

Large-Format Phones

Most manufactures of cellphones have discovered they can increase screen size and not lose sales. Of course, there will be limits. A phone can be stretched the length of itself quite easily. This does let the company claim their screen is now “big”. Unfortunately, there is only so much data that actually displays properly in the three-inch wide screen so many insist on.

Stretching the phone lengthwise does not really increase the usable screen by much. The screen is still three-inches or so wide, and still can’t display very many characters across the page. The stretched screen may help those languages reading top to bottom, though. For many of us, our language insists on being left to right or right to left across the page. Turning the phone does not help much, because now we get a full line, but are limited to the three or four lines that are readable on the narrow page.

We are being promised many “big-screen” phones this year. If the phone is about three inches wide, it does not qualify as “big-screen”. It qualifies as stretched and narrow. For those of us that need to increase text size to read it, stretched and narrow is not much better than standard size. It only allows a word or two on each line. When you increase text size, you get to see a sentence or two on screen, if you are lucky. Some must have the text in 12-point fonts. Then you get a half of a sentence or so. Even the 7-inch tablet can be difficult to read at times. If you find the tablet hard to see images and text, think how difficult it is on that phone.

I keep hoping for a 7-inch tablet phone. Unfortunately, every design I have seen called 6-inch or bigger means the phone screen is very tall and narrow. It is still not usable by those needing a large font. Please, help us get the word out to the hardware manufacturers. A 6-inch diagonal screen that is two-three inches wide is still a small-screen phone.

RSS Feed Readers

With the proposed demise of Google Reader, which I have been using for about a year, I had to find another reader that worked for me. After Google decided to kill the google homepage last year and Google Reader this year, I wanted something that is not dependent on Google.

I used Liferea for many years before moving my feeds to Google Reader. It was a simple matter to install Liferea and reset my feeds. Unfortunately, I am using an old Acer laptop with an Intel Celeron 1.73GHz and an entire 1 GB RAM. That doesn’t run Firefox with 6 tabs, Claws-mail, and Liferea smoothly. Anything else I try to open, I have to close one of those three applications. I really enjoy using my desktop fully, and don’t want to close those three programs to edit a file, or even get the file manager to open.

I read many posts about the best replacements for Google Reader. Unfortunately, most of them referred to applications that depend on someone else to make sure they keep their applications up to date with something else. They also are compared to Google Reader, almost contest like, to find the “most like Google Reader”. I do not care if the reader I choose to use matches what Google Reader did. Liferea is lightweight and works well, in most cases. I don’t need to read thousands of feeds, I need to read my selected 20 or 30 instead. Somewhere in that mix of readers, I found reference to a new reader I never heard of. It is called Tiny Tiny RSS. It is being developed by one very dedicated developer.

The problem with Tiny Tiny RSS (ttrss) is you must have your own server to install it to. Unlike most readers, this one gathers your feeds and you use it as the feed host. I am running XAMPP as a development server for my websites. It makes building them much easier when I can test what I do before going live with it. I installed ttrss with XAMPP as my server. WOW! It is impressive. I can log into ttrss from any of my computers, since I network them behind my own firewall and router. Each name I use to login to ttrss can set up their own feeds, similar to any other reader. The fact that they are all using the same application does not make their feeds automatically the same. It lets me read the feeds in a web browser, which I have running all day anyway. I can now read my RSS feeds using my tablet, laptop, or any of the five desktops I have set up. I can set up different feeds on each machine, or the same feeds for each one. I can also allow family members to use ttrss, since they can log into the server from the house.

This is what I am looking for. Easy to use (although it is not simple to get going the first time), usable by any computer, lets me read my feeds as a composite feed, by clicking on one item. I do not want to have to open each feed to read the notices today. If I wanted to do that, I would not bother with the RSS feeds, I could just go to each website instead. Will I stay with ttrss? Time will tell, the developer is a bit overwhelmed with new users at this point. I like the way ttrss works, though, and that is a good sign. I can have my reader open (in Firefox, Midori, Chrome, etc), my browser open with several tabs, and Claws-mail open again. I think it will take something absolutely spectactular to replace Liferea or TTRSS. Either application will do what I need at this time. Of course, I like the way I get to tune ttrss. It has many options to play with, not all of which I have touched. There are advantages to those many options, just as there are advantages to not having to touch options.

I will use ttrss while I am still in Las Vegas. When I return to Idaho, I will install it to my desktop server and then decide if it is right for me. At this time, I am using ttrss and it is working very well for me. I can always install a real LAMP server later, and open a port to the internet for my personal use when not at home. I will not allow such access when using Xampp, though.

For those interested in Tiny Tiny RSS, this could be the best choice out there today. For help getting it up and running, check out this website , which is the website I used.