reading

The world is full of feed readers. This one's claim to fame is its portability, but there's more to like than just that aspect.

Portable FeedReader offers a nice interface with three vertical panes--one listing the feeds, the second listing the titles of the selected feeds stories, and the third serving as a viewer. Although the panes width can be changed by clicking and dragging, the viewer pane is a bit narrow to comfortably read a typical Web page story. Our testers preferred the Open in Browser option to actually read a story. Unfortunately, doing so opened a … Read more

Here's an oldie but a goodie. Feed Rinse is a super simple and user-friendly way to tweak RSS feeds before subscribing to them in your favorite reader tool.

With it you can pick which authors or keywords you want to exclude, giving you complete control over what ends up filling your feed reader. For example, on Webware's RSS feed you could very quickly choose to only get posts about Google (which is possible on our main site using tags), or a handful of keywords at the same time.

As Martin over at Ghacks points out, you could accomplish … Read more

This Firefox extension should appeal to anybody trying to minimize bookmark and open tab clutter. Read It Later gives you a one-click option for saving the links and keeping track of which ones have been read. It also now sports deep integration with Google Reader, adding little check marks next to blog posts. Clicking one lets you mark it to read later on.

When you first start the extension, it will prompt you to install the two Toolbar buttons that are used to control the extension and manage your reading list. Users can also control adding bookmarks to their reading … Read more

Firefox Extension Read It Later pushed out a big update on Thursday which adds deep integration with Google's Reader product. With the new version installed, a little check box shows up on the left of every single feed item, which you can simply click on to mark for later reading. Previously the only way to do this would be to open up the actual site from Google Reader, then click the Read It Later button.

To make going through that list of saved stories more manageable, you can now sort it by PostRank--a service we checked out back in July. … Read more

Keeping up with multiple RSS feeds can be tough. Yeah it's really simple, but that syndication bit is what always gets me. Google has introduced a fresh way to analyze both when blogs you subscribe to are posting and when (and if) you're actually reading them.

The data is represented with simple colored bars, with the blue being post time and the red as the time you typically get your reading done. You can dig down even deeper and split up the monthly data by the time of day, or day of the week. The results can be … Read more

Our No. 404 fanboy Dee Wren takes time out of his busy filming schedule to bring some positivity to our Monday morning. After revealing some news about the upcoming Google Android release tomorrow, we talk about the weekend box office, touch on Facebook porn, and make an overall attempt to shade ourselves from Jeff's rays of hate (unsuccessfully). Happy Monday!

To make up for all the lives we've ruined with The 404, we invite our buddy Dee Wren into the studio to pimp his philanthropic project, From Us With Love. It's a nonprofit organization that supplies aid to children in South Africa and Dee is helping to shoot a documentary on their efforts to send a group of them to Australia for the Homeless World Cup. We'd love for you to contribute as much time, money, and resources as you can to their foundation. The best part of this endeavor is that For Us With Love is already corporate-sponsored, so the full 100 percent of your contribution will go directly into the project, no filters. It's a very noble cause, please check out the Web site and do what you can to help!

It smells funky in the studio today, and it isn't just Wilson eating ravioli for breakfast. John Funk of Winnipeg, Canada, one of our favorite 404 listeners, joins the show to talk about Frank's Red Hot, the Buzz Out Loud hijack and hockey. The eh's and aboots abound!

Dan the Mantern here. On today's show we discuss celebrity sex tapes. From Paris Hilton to Austin Powers star Verne Troyer, it seems like everyone who's anyone has made a naughty film. Apparently, a spyware program has been circulating a phony link to an NSFW video of Barack Obama. No offense, but does anyone really think that Obama would have a sex tape? I really pity the fool who clicks the link only to find their hard drive infected by a virus. Even if the video was real, do you really need to see that? We wonder if the world would be as keen to see a Sarah Palin video or, dare I say it, a John McCain sex tape. If there is a recording of McCain taking care of his "executive privileges," I'm sure it's on 8 millimeter and you'd need your own hand-cranked projector to view it.

Human life as we know it is over. The way things have been going for us around here lately, that may not be such a bad thing.

Scientists at England's University of Reading (Reading is the sort of place where scientists are really cool) have created a robot which is controlled by cultured rat neurons.

In short, a robot with a rat's brain. Or, as some might call it, a politician.

Curiously, these scientists are very clear about what they are trying to achieve. They want to know how memories are stored in a brain made out of … Read more

A robot using biological brain matter from rodents to control its movements is helping researchers learn more about human neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, according to University of Reading researchers in the U.K.

The robot represents a multidisciplinary effort within the University of Reading, whose team includes Kevin Warwick, head of Cybernetics in the School of Systems Engineering, and Ben Whalley, pharmacist and professor in the School of Pharmacy.

The neuron culture being used to control the robot operates from what is essentially a sophisticated, temperature-controlled Petri dish with electrodes called a multi electrode array (MEA).

The MEA, in which the delicate brain matter is kept in an incubated environment and fed, consists of 60 electrodes. After about one to two weeks of growth, the brain matter is mature enough to start learning and use the MEA to communicate with the robot. The MEA both stimulates the brain matter by sending electrical signals to it and responds to the electrical impulses sent out by the cultured neurons.

"We feed them every couple of days, a pink liquid with nutrients not too dissimilar to what the Olympians might drink for energy," Warwick said in a phone interview. "It keeps the neurons alive and allows them to grow. Within 24 hours they make connections. Within a week there is a brain-like activity. If you stimulate one electrode you get spontaneous firing. We then use that basic operation by linking it up to the robot body."

The electrical output from the brain received by the MEA is transferred to the robot via ultrasonic sonar. The sonar signal causes the robot's wheels to move forward, left, or right, depending on the signal. In return, the brain is sent signals to stimulate it when it nears an object in the hopes that it will respond to avoid colliding with it.… Read more