Natural Blogarithms

1. JediWPMConcentrate (Windows)
   If any of you read Lifehacker you saw this come up last week.  There was apparently a little “toy” application (WPM Tray) that would track your typing speed down in the system tray. It would display your current typing rate in words per minute. I’m not exactly sure what time span it averaged the rate over but I was surprised to learn that when I am typing these blogs I am in the 70-90 wpm range. That was quite a surprise. I remember in high school competing in the typing contest but I thought my skills as a typist had waned greatly over the years but apparently I have been playing around with this blog stuff that my typing rate is back up. Anyways, the application here is combined with an other app JediConcentrate (an application focus app). So what does this get you?
   
   

   Something really cool. Basically, once your typing speed passes a certain threshold (the default is 40wpm, but you can change it), every window but the one you’re typing in fades to black - the point being that once you hit a certain typing speed, JediWPMConcentrate acts as a sort of “bloodlust” mode for your typing and focus. Once you drop below the typing threshold, the background fades back to normal.
   – Lifehacker

2. Juice, the cross-platform podcast receiver
   Within the last week, I started looking closer at using my IPAQ to download and listen to podcasts (or netcasts, as I prefer to call them, thanks to Leo Laporte). There are several out there that I have been wanting to listen to and had not really found an efficient way to put them both on my laptop and my Pocket PC. This is definitely the software I recommend for subscribing to podcasts on a desktop or laptop. However, since I also want this on my IPAQ, the feature I like most was the automatic playlist creation. I could open Windows Media Player after downloading the podcasts of my choice and there would be playlist that I could then sync to my IPAQ. Now, I know all you Apple people out there know that this is a streamlined process when using iTunes and an iPod, but I always do things the hard way, uh, I mean, the Microsoft way. Pure habit.
3. FeederReader, podcatching software for the PocketPC
   I am very pleased with this utility that allows me to import my OPML file from Juice and while connected either through a sync cable, or via wireless, I can download my favorite podcasts directly to the IPAQ. Since this is almost exclusively where I want to listen to my podcasts I prefer to skip the middle man (Juice) and download straight to my IPAQ. This software, once I understood how to use it, worked perfectly for this. I can tell it exactly with podcasts to download, meaning that it doesn’t have to automatically download every single one that I am subscribed to every time I connect. I am addicted to tool tips in the windows interface so there was a learning curve with this software. Several of the buttons didn’t make sense to me as to what they did. I actually had to read the user’s manual, but once I did, it functioned perfectly.

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