If your feed URL is http://www.christopherprice.net/feed/ then you’re all set. If not, you need to update to that URL.

I’ll keep the old FeedBurner setup working, but you may be delayed by as much as several hours to get news. Yeah, it’s my personal blog, but still, I’m someone that always likes to have the fastest path to a news feed.

When I signed onto FeedBurner, it was hailed as a rocketing startup that promised faster, more reliable feeds… with monetization that the blogosphere didn’t offer at the time.

Since then, Google has gobbled up the company, and I have to say… it’s not one of Google’s finest hours. The transition to AdSense in-RSS ads has been a dismal failure, and the product has languished under Google’s monolithic oversight.

Hopefully Larry Page’s “cutting the fat” campaign will give Google some added attention to products like FeedBurner. I really do hope that will happen, but this is long in the making. I noted quite awhile ago my intent to disable Google services that have been languishing… this is merely making good on that commitment.

However, I will say that I am disappointed at the pricing that has emerged on other web sites (here’s just one for example).

At double the pricing for Amazon’s Cloud Drive, I can’t say I’ll be using iCloud. For $120/year I get unlimited storage on CrashPlan, for up to 10 computers worth of storage in my house. Other online backup services combine online backup with mobile app access to all your files, at one low monthly price.

What about communication? Calendars? Etc? All freely supported on Google Apps. Which, I might add, is still free for up to 10 email addresses worth. At the current free Google storage rates, that translates to 75 GB per domain name… and domain names cost only a few dollars a year.

I hear the argument all the time that these cloud services are different than raw storage, they make lives easier. Granted, I don’t think iCloud should compete with the “unlimited storage” shared hosting solutions. I think that’s unrealistic.

That said, I think cloud solutions do have to compete with services like Google Apps and Windows Live. If I can store documents via email, if I can manage them in a Gmail view, and if I get 25 GB free from Windows Live SkyDrive… what am I paying for with iCloud?

Of course, there’s the freemium argument as well. People will get “hooked” on iCloud with the first 5 GB, and then want more. And they then won’t want to move. Sorry, I don’t buy it. I think people will get more tech savvy as their 5 GB get used up, and ask even more technically-inclined people for a way to keep the free file bash going.

That may work for Apple too, but it’s far from a cost-effective solution. iCloud may be the best cloud out there, but in terms of bang for your buck, I don’t think it’s there yet. Not with the pricing that has been disclosed, at least.

And, as you may have noted, PhoneNews.com will be suspending the display of advertisements from Google AdSense.

We took a careful look at CTIA this year, and it wasn’t an easy decision to not send anyone. However, short of a few 3D Android phones, the news will be pretty mild this year. It may be the least newsworthy CTIA in terms of proportions since we started covering CTIA expos.

Based on those factors, we decided it wasn’t the best idea to attend CTIA over on PhoneNews.com. So, I won’t be there and nobody else from the team will be either. You can bet safely that coverage will continue of anything that develops of note at the show.

My point to this post is that, like elections, Google changes have consequences to small publishers and large alike. PhoneNews.com is intentionally sitting this one out to shift our resources to overcoming inequalities in the new PageRank system, and to better realign towards direct advertising.

There are a lot of angles to the debate of the last Google shuffle, but I’m avoiding that fray in this post. Clearly, those who ignore those changes and continue with business as usual, are the businesses that are most likely to fail.

In the end, taking a step back this year will help us be better than our competition, despite unfair bonus points that some search engines may be giving them. And, it will allow us to continue doing what we do best; give people into phone news, the best phone news possible.

So, just update your Google Analytics tags if you aren’t using the latest generation. That appears to be the cure-all. Mkay?

It’s free and open to the public. I know it’s short notice, but click over to the MechaWorks blog post to see the details.

I’ll be sure to post notated slides afterwords at least, and possibly video if we can pull that off too.

It’s actually quite impressive, especially considering Apple won’t let folks author QuickTime X plug-ins.

I do have to take this moment to warn Apple that 2014 could very much be like 1984, and Flash Video could easily unseat QuickTime at this rate… when app makers like VLC cry foul, you know something is on the wrong track.

A great torture test for FLV GPU Acceleration is the 2010 Cadillac SRX commercial…

It appears this problem is mostly limited to anyone (and everyone) that pulls up Google while traveling to Puerto Rico. When you travel, Google loads up the in-country version of Google Web Search. When you travel back home, it’s supposed to realize you’re back, and switch back to the default launguage.

I believe the problem lies in that Puerto Rico is both English and Spanish, so Google doesn’t realize when you travel back to the mainland, that you’re in a different American English territory. As such, the options to reset the default Google.com (per their help page), all fail.

Unfortunately, deleting the Google cookie is the only way to work around this that I’ve found consistently successful. And, since web browsers are now made to be overly-simple in handling cookies, I’ll spare you the 20 step guide and tell you to just erase all cookies and you’ll be back to normal. Hopefully Google will offer a help page, with an option that does this just for their own (broken) cookie.

I personally don’t think ICANN should have issued Puerto Rico a nationality suffix in the first place (since, well, it isn’t even a state), as more and more of these similar issues are sure to pop up, as the internet continues its perpetual growth…

Google Chrome and Android share a common browser platform and screen drawing API.
Google Chrome OS uses the same on-screen drawing system as Chrome and Android.
Google Chrome OS is Linux combined with Chrome.
Android’s Dalvik apps can run on any Linux OS.
Google Chrome OS could easily run Android apps.

Yes, people have ported Android for netbooks. But, Google doesn’t care… either way, Dalvik gets onto people’s desktops, and Google’s home team is being called up to the plate (instead of Microsoft or Apple). And, as long as Google remains the driving force behind the platform (read: cash infusions)… it doesn’t matter if you use Android, Android Netbook Edition, or Chrome OS.

Google 101: Dalvik is the application platform that Android apps run on. It’s a modified version of Java. Contrary to popular beliefs, Android apps typically are not Linux applications. Linux is primarily used behind the scenes, to load the Dalvik environment for applications.

Really, Google wouldn’t care if you ran Ubuntu with Android support. Why do you think Google keeps encouraging Ubuntu contributions, and helped write the prototype Android compatibility layer for Linux?

Eventually, they’ll all be one and the same. Enjoy, from your friends/enemies at Google.

For the third time, in a single week, I’ve had an international buyer back out due to shipping. They didn’t run the shipping calculator until after purchase. Then, when they realize that shipping from the U.S. is a raw deal for them… they proceed to email me, backing out of the auction.

Now, before this, a bidder backing out was rare. The vast majority were scammers, who were easily identifiable.

I’m not an eBay store. I don’t run an eBay business. I simply use eBay mostly to get rid of the tech junk which I have no use for. This is getting out of hand… because buyers know there’s next to no penalty now for bidding like crazy.

Think about it. The worst that can happen to a buyer now is a non-paying bidder strike. No matter, all they need to do is get about 10 positive feedbacks for eBay sellers to feel at ease. And, NPB strikes wear off much faster than the negative-to-positive ratio of feedbacks.

Why did eBay do this? To triple the value of a listing fee. If you have to re-list an item, you have to pay listing fees all over again. eBay doesn’t care if they have to refund the final auction value two, three, even four times. They still get their cut in the end, now with multiples of the listing fee.

In the end, I think eBay will lose from this. Sellers will be much more hesitant to tack on extras. I used to put Featured Listing ($19.95) on my big-ticket auctions (MacBook Pros, etc)… I sure won’t now. A bidder now has twice the power to back out of a deal, with little-to-no reprisal. I’m going to make sure my listing fees are as low as possible because of that.

So, eBay sellers, enjoy paying listing fees endlessly. Enjoy re-listing items and watching them depreciate in your hands. Google, Google, where for art thou Google?

Why is this? Well, Google is deploying the Gears setup inside of /Users/yourname/Library/Cache (or, ~/Library/Cache as we commonly denote the path as).

Well, this isn’t really a good place for Google to store Gears data. I can see why they did it… after all, all Gears does is cache files, and the logical place for cached files is… the Cache folder! Wouldn’t it be great if other Mac developers thought with such clarity.

However, with Gears, you don’t want that data wiped out easily. When it is wiped out, you have to go back and re-approve each site to use Gears. Typically, savvy users may clear a cache after a major Mac OS X update (say, 10.5.5 which was released yesterday). Clearing a cache isn’t necessary… I don’t want people to think that they have to. But, if you’re extremely tech savvy… some of the tinkering around that you do, can cause the cache to become a problem. Hence, normal users are fine, but enthusiasts may want to clear their caches.

Worse, tech savvy people are the most likely to install Gears. Hence, the people most likely to use Gears… are the most likely to clear caches as well.

My suggestion would be to move Gears data to ~/Application Support/Google/Gears as that would avoid the problem. Alternatively, a future version of Gears probably should save true cache data inside of ~/Library/Cache while keeping the approval data in the new folder I just suggested. That way, the next time you run your browser (after clearing a cache), Gears would just re-download/update the cached files automatically.