(Via MacRumors)

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I don’t like the sound of it. Most of my friends’ lives aren’t all that exciting to me.

I don’t have Facebook myself but I’ve seen friend’s and family’s Facebook feeds when they would show me a picture or status message from it. And, I can’t imagine myself wanting any of that on my phone’s home screen.

But, what resonates with me more is Michael Mulvey’s feeling that he doesn’t expect his life to be all that exciting to his friends. I’ve had the same feeling for a while. My two main hobbies (tech and board gaming) aren’t shared interests with any of the people I’d be friends with on Facebook.

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JC Penney CEO Ron Johnson is out and Mike Ullman will rejoin the company as CEO, receiving an annual base salary of $1 million.

I was excited about everything that Ron Johnson did while he was at JC Penney and I was expecting the company to be in a much better position five years down the road. It would have been rough until then, but just walking through one of their partially renovated store was enough to convince me that they were heading in the right direction.

I don’t doubt that he was forced to step down and I think it was the most boneheaded decision the company could have made. Turning around an ailing company isn’t easy and Johnson had what it took to get the job done.

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Because, well, it is already pretty difficult to sift the meaning from the noise from the constant connection. It is even more so when you have to question almost everything you see on it for a day. Life is short. There are better things to do. Ignore it today. It’ll still be here (and, hopefully, back to normal) tomorrow.

This is the best thing I’ve read all day. I’ve always hated the internet on April Fool’s Day and tend to avoid it at all costs.

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Facebook just invited press to an event at its headquarters on April 4th to “Come See Our New Home On Android”. Sources tell us it will be a modified version of the Android operating system with deep native Facebook functionality on the homescreen that may live on an HTC handset. The evidence aligns to say this is the Facebook Phone announcement people have been speculating about for years.

Remember the Helio Ocean?

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But honestly, they couldn’t come up with a better name? “The Vamp” sounds terrible.

(Via Tools and Toys.)

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RSS readers have never really taken off with mainstream users but us internet-savvy types have been using them for the better half of the past decade. It’s a shame because RSS is such an amazing tool and RSS readers allow users to build their own custom newspapers by funneling all their favorite websites into one place for easy reading.

But, Google has decided to shut down Reader anyway because “while the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined.” This seems like a reasonable excuse for shutting down a product but — prepare for the conspiracy theory — what if Google decided to shut down Reader because RSS clients encourage internet users to view the web without advertising?

Why would Google want anyone to use a service that by its very nature encourages users to read the content of websites without ever having to visit the actual webpage? Google makes money when people see Google Ads but very few RSS feeds have any advertising at all and Google doesn’t even offer an option for publishers to place advertising in their feeds. Google decided to kill Adsense for Feeds late last year and with the end of Google Reader in site it’s clear that Google would rather people live without RSS readers.

Google has slowly stepped away from consumer-focused RSS which leaves me wondering how long until FeedBurner gets the axe? It’s been neglected for years and it’s only a matter of time before it falls victim to another round of “spring cleaning.”

I started moving away from Google products about four years ago when I stopped paying attention to FeedBurner’s statistics and started promoting an RSS feed that I have complete control over. Luckily I’ve already moved from Google Reader to Shaun Inman’s Fever so I don’t have to make the switch to a new RSS reader now. I’ve also moved away from Adsense in favor of advertising that is a little more reader-friendly and Google Analytics in favor of Mint.

I think now would be a good time for me to start thinking about moving away from Gmail. I doubt it will happen anytime in the next few years but eventually Google will decide to shut it down or make some fundamental change that breaks something I rely on. Switching email providers seems like an extremely messy task but it might be worth it to ensure that I don’t get cut off with less than four months notice.

First, we intend to bring sync to future versions of NetNewsWire. It’s too soon to go into details about this, but you should know that we recognize how extremely important it is and that it is a top priority for us.

Second, even though we’ve been quiet about it, we have been working on new versions of NetNewsWire for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. We have some great new features and a modern design that we can’t wait to show you.

I doubt that this will be the case, but I’d love for NetNewsWire to support syncing with Fever. But if not, I’m still interested to see what newer versions of NetNewsWire will bring to the table. RSS clients have been stagnant for the past few years and, if anything, Google shutting down Reader has given other developers a kick in the pants to start innovating with their clients.

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So, I was extremely excited about the Apple TV announcement. It was exactly what I had been waiting for — an Internet-connected set-top box that could sync with my iTunes library wirelessly. It was perfect, except, that it wasn’t. The interface was clunky and streaming video from your iTunes library left a lot to be desired. At that point the interface was still essentially a beefed up Front Row. But, I still loved it none the less. It was certainly worlds better than syncing my iPod over USB.

But, time passed and the annoyances became more and more frustrating. Syncing it over Wi-Fi took forever and the streaming performance was so poor that I never even bothered with it.

Apple eventually replaced the old Pentium M-based Apple TV with a brand new, sleeker version that was smaller, faster, and ran cooler than the older model. I received the second generation Apple TV as a Christmas present the year of its release and I initially retired the original Apple TV to the bedroom. I had dreams of hacking it with aTV Flash so that it could output composite video to an old CRT television. But, those dreams didn’t last long. The hack made it even less stable and it was too difficult to read the menus on the blurry CRT. So, back in the closet it went and my old iMac took over as the bedroom television using Front Row as its primary application. And that’s how it was, until this last December when we finally bought an HDTV for the bedroom.

The TV is a 24-inch Philips and definitely isn’t anything to brag about. But, it was an excuse to dust off the old Apple TV for a few months until we inevitably buy a newer Apple TV to replace it. It’s not the greatest piece of technology in my home, but at 6-years-old it gets the job done. It, unfortunately, isn’t capable of playing back some of the higher quality video that I had encoded with the newer Apple TV in mind, but all of the newer TV shows that I record and most of my older videos are still easily playable on the aging device. I really wish it had Netflix streaming, I have grown reliant on it to help fill in when the networks aren’t airing new episodes of my favorite shows, but YouTube can often fill some of that time.

I’m not really in a hurry to purchase a newer Apple TV to replace the original. It doesn’t have the feature-set and trying to stream video from the Mac Mini in the other room can often be a pain, but the vast majority of the time the original Apple TV does exactly what I need it to do. I’m sure I’ll eventually grow tired of some of its more annoying drawbacks, but until then I’m happy using the old Pentium M-powered set-top box to take care of all of my video playback needs.