The movies are all ones that I would want to keep during a normal spring clean. Of course they are. They’ve survived many a clean, and many a move. Where they aren’t, they are ones that Karen loves. They have been taking up space, and space in a London apartment is at a premium.

None of them have been watched in this flat.
None of them have been watched at our last flat.
None of them have been watched at the flat we lived in before that one.

That flat before the last one on that list was the last one we lived in where we had a DVD player. We got rid of it during the move, because we watched DVDs using the Playstation, and didn’t need a separate player.

The Playstation was abandoned during our last move; we no longer played games on it, and only watch DVDs once a year, at Christmas. And computers have DVD drives.

Well, my computer has a DVD drive. Karen’s doesn’t. New laptops tend not to.

It’s strange to watch DVDs become obsolete — and we have been dragging these around, packing them, moving them, unpacking them, putting them on a shelf. Repeat.

No more, old DVDs. No more.

Goodbye.

Pulse.

Pulse seems decent — a free news aggregation/RSS site. I’m not terribly fond of the way it categorizes things into newspaper-like sections (News, Sports, Technology, Style, et cetera), nor am I entirely clear on how to re-organize things in a manner I’d like. That said, it’s easy to navigate and read, on both my PC and mobile, so here we go …

Offline support

We’re now checking this first, since it seems to be the hurdle where everybody falls down. Does Pulse do offline support?

Yes.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Now, it’s not perfect — it seems that images, other than thumbnails, are not downloaded. And the app has managed to eat 1.77 GB of 3G data over 48 hours (compared to < 0.5 GB used by my current reader, over the last 30 days, which does offline support including all images in the post). But the text is there. THE TEXT IS THERE! I can actually read things.

Of course, not things about photography, or most humour blogs (which tend to be photo-heavy) or anything with important graphics. But given that this is light years ahead of everything else I’ve tried, I will say thank you, pulse.

Importing Google Reader Settings

While having something functional is a wonderful step in the right direction, I follow a lot of things on Google Reader today. And while starting over from scratch seems well and good, it’s also probably just a big pain in the ass; after all, I have not once been tempted to unsubscribe to every single RSS feed and start over again.

Luckily, pulse has a dead simple importer. Couldn’t be easier.

Of course, much like offline mode, this isn’t perfect. It pulls in all your feeds, but doesn’t distinguish between read and unread posts … so everything is unread.

That blog that was taken down in 2010, and is now well forgotten? Well, you never unfollowed it, sir. So all those posts are sitting there to be read again.

Additionally, pulse sorts your RSS feeds from Reader into categories. But not useful ones. They are Uncategorized, Uncategorized 1, et cetera. It’s up to you to reorganize them into something useful.

How?

Beats me. The only way I can find to move something from one category to another is to delete it from the first category, and add it to the second.

This, of course, is pretty damn useless. It would seem simpler to print out a list of blogs I subscribe to, and add them in Pulse myself. I would avoid the whole zombie-blog problem that way, too.

Adding new feeds

Another key element to an RSS feeder is adding new content, and removing old.

Removing a source is dead simple — click the X. Confirm.

Adding a source is more complicated.

Pulse is clearly imagined as a news aggregation tool. So it defaults to the giant blogs (BoingBoing, Buzzfeed) and traditional news sources (BBC, AP). These are simple to add.

RSS feeds are supported, but clearly an afterthought. There’s a search box, and it seems to find things pretty well, but it feels like it could be a little bit hit and miss.

The final verdict

Pulse seems the same across the board: Functional, but flawed.

It does everything that I want of an RSS reader, but there are flaws in every aspect — whether it’s the organisation of content, the offline support, the data usage, or adding content.

That said, it moves ahead of Feedly today, into the pole position. Ticking all the boxes, however poorly, is better than missing some.

But I am very much hoping it doesn’t stay in top spot.

Google is shutting down Reader. So, like everybody else who uses it, your intrepid blogger is looking for a replacement. We are, however, having trouble finding things. Particularly ones with offline support.

We smacked down Feedly and The Old Reader, on the basis of a lack of offline support. But they seem to be better than NewsBlur, which has just enough offline support to make you feel properly ripped off by their subscription fees and lack of a decent user experience.

So we have moved on to netvibes. Which I’m not sure how to spell properly. If you go to the site, your tab will read “Netvibes”, but your screen will say “netvibes”, with “net” in white and “vibes” in green. It’s all very confusing.

There’s one point down.

Netvibes almost got a short, one line review, thanks to not having an app (like Old Reader), but their FAQ says this:

The version for smartphones is available on iPad, iPhone and Android. It has a reader view, an offline mode…

Offline mode? How does that work?

Ah. It doesn’t.

Next?

I thought it was going to be far less time, and a very short review. The first thing I saw when registering was this:

Luckily enough, this doesn’t – or, at least, didn’t – actually prevent the creation of a free account. It might by now, however, so a try-before-you-buy option for NewsBlur might no longer exist.

It did for me, though. So I can continue with the review …

Setup

The basic setup is easy — importing your Google Reader settings and installing the Android app are both simple.

NewsBlur has built-in facility to easily share blog posts you enjoy with other users, and a learning mechanism which allows it to filter the material you enjoy to the top of the list. It’s hard to say if the latter is working — free accounts are limited, and I’ve not had much time to “train” the reader.

Look and feel

Using the service is where it starts to go downhill.

The “framed” look of the main site seems dated, and it’s a pain in the ass to read a site on the main website. This is simply because the “down” arrow key moves the reader to the next article. When I’m not using a mouse — which is pretty often when I’m just sat there reading things — it becomes horrendously annoying.

The mobile app doesn’t allow the saving of stories for later, or to adjust the NewsBlur‘s learning, though it does allow export to Evernote, for items I want to view later.

Offline support is better than Feedly — the NewsBlur app seems to download text (but not photos) for a handful of blog posts when it connects to the internet, allowing some reading to be done offline. It’s not enough, however, and the lack of photos is troublesome, given the number of photography blogs I follow.

But the main problem is this:

The app crashes, regularly.

And I don’t have a bizarre setup — a Samsung Galaxy S3 running CyanogenMod 10 should arguably be the best supported Android fork out there: the most popular hardware with what is essentially a stripped down to vanilla open source Android OS.

The bottom line

Unlike most of the options, NewsBlur operates on a paid subscription model; users are expected to pay for access to the service.

With money changing hands, however, a certain level of quality is expected. The browsing experience in NewsBlur, however, is worse than any of the other options tried so far. Using it would mean, literally, spending more to get less.

This is unacceptable.

Based on this, the reigning champion of the solutions tried so far is Feedly. Our criticisms still stand, and we fully expect to find a better option.

But NewsBlur ain’t it.

You’re in luck though. Every single website on the Internet is telling you about the top alternatives. Every. Single. One.

They generally look like this one by Lifehacker, who have probably published another dozen articles almost exactly like this since Google’s announcement, and will probably publish a dozen more before Google shuts down Reader on July 1st.

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we aren’t going to make a list. But we do need to find ourselves a new RSS reader. It has to sync between machines. And it has to have an app that handles offline reading.

That’s it. Nothing too fancy.

So we’re combing through all these recommendations, and actually trying them out. After a few days, each one will get its own post here on the Big Bad Blog, and we’ll see how it compares against the frontrunner. Once we have a potential replacement.

First up …

Feedly

Feedly seems to appear on every list that’s out there. And no wonder – it’s pretty sweet.

• It syncs a single account across all your devices.
• It’s pretty.
• You can import your Google Reader feeds with a single click.
• It’s pretty.
• They have a no-effort solution for handling the closure of Google Reader.
• Have we mentioned that it’s pretty?

The Android app is also quite nice — one of the best RSS reader apps I’ve used. It’s not just gorgeous, but intuitive, and looks like it has plenty of additional options to help organise your feeds.

But.

Before I got to configuring these, I got on the tube to come home this afternoon, and this popped up:

Seriously, feedly? No offline support?

I checked the available settings. Nothing.

No offline support is simply a dealbreaker. The internet is not available on the London Underground. Nor is it available on airplanes. And while it’s available in foreign countries, it’s really damn expensive through a phone.

Offline support, Feedly. Offline support.

What’s next?

The Old Reader was going to be next, as I had seen various recommendations, but not only does their mobile app not include offline support – it does not even exist.

So tomorrow will be Newsblur.

Newsblur charge a subscription fee, so will have to knock the socks off the competition, but all these services are certain to be experiencing scaling issues from the influx of people seeking an alternative to Google — a combination of deterrent (ie, cost) and cash influx from new users is certain to help that.

So I have high hopes, Newsblur. Don’t disappoint. I need a frontrunner.

last.fm

As many denizens of the Internet might know, last.fm broke early in the week.

Once upon a time, this would be something I might not have even noticed, but since last year’s Android Music Adventure experiment, I have become quite the last.fm enthusiast. I now use the service to track all the music I listen to, to discover new music (which is mostly music that has somehow gone missing from my library in the move from tape to CD to MP3), to listen to music at work, and to keep track of statistics on what I listen to.

Yes, I like statistics.

At the end of the day, I can listen to music using my phone or the library on my home computer (which is what I mostly do anyways). But it broke. Which sucked.

giffgaff

Of course, having last.fm broken doesn’t necessarily matter if you can’t connect to it. And when I was mobile, I couldn’t connect to it.

Why? Giffgaff went down.

That isn’t exactly fair, of course — giffgaff is a “virtual” mobile network, meaning it runs on another company’s hardware. And that company, O2, had a major network crash, which lasted for approximately 25 hours.

The phone

Of course, having your mobile network broken doesn’t mean much if your phone is not working. And mine has developed a fault.

The down volume button doesn’t work.

If this sounds like a small problem, it’s because it should be. But for some reason, this triggers my phone to go into Safe Mode in Android Ice Cream Sandwich. There seems to be no way around it. I’ve tried a stock ROM, and all sorts of other ROMs. None of them work.

What does work is going back to Gingerbread. But after half a year of using Ice Cream Sandwich, it feels like being back in the stone age — I have grown accustomed to many of the Ice Cream Sandwich features.

The plan today is to stick with Gingerbread until Jelly Bean is available for my phone — hopefully later this month. Then hope that Jelly Bean will play nice with slightly broken hardware.

If it doesn’t, then I will have a dilemma: I want my next phone to be compatible with a 4G network in the UK, but those don’t exist yet. Do I limp along with Gingerbread until then? Or upgrade my phone early?

And if I upgrade, to what?

My first thought was the Motorola Atrix HD. I’ve like Motorola phones in the past.

But for some reason, Motorola — who are owned by Google — lock down their Android phones and don’t ship with the latest version of the Operating System. On the other hand, Google branded phones by Samsung (who I no longer trust to build robust hardware) are easy to root.

Colour me confused.

In any case, I apologize for missing your call this week.

This time, they’ve gone and changed your email address for you. Luckily, it’s easy to fix.

Alternatively, delete your Facebook account.

What the fuck?, is my immediate reply.

I click on the author’s name, and come to her bio:

When she isn’t basking in the New York summer swelter, Allegra lives in Los Angeles. She’s completing her bachelor’s degree at the University of Southern California …

OK. Finishing a bachelor’s degree. Around twenty years old, probably … born 1992(ish). She doesn’t remember living without the Internet. Makes me feel old, but is ultimately understandab-

… where she is studying Cinema-Television Critical Studies and Multimedia Scholarship.

Wait. What was that, Allegra? You’re studying motherfucking cinema?

Want to “imagine” life without the Internet? Watch a movie that was released before you were born. Or maybe some old TV shows. There are lots of them. Some of them are good. What the fuck are they teaching you in your Cinema-Television courses at USC, anyways?

For most of us, though, we don’t have to imagine. We just need to remember.

Now get off my internet lawn.

In the year that followed, I grew to seriously love this phone. It has been rooted, tweaked, screwed up, nearly bricked, and updated ad nauseum. Whenever I feel I want a “new” phone, all it takes is some research and some time to set it up with a new ROM and/or launcher and/or launcher theme, and it’s ready to go.

And then on Friday, it gave me some very, very bad words:

Safe Mode.

I do not know why, or how, but my dear Nexus S booted up in Safe Mode on Friday morning, and it would not leave.

There are various instructions on the web for leaving Safe Mode. All were tried. I rebooted. I removed the battery. I booted with the up volume pressed. The down volume pressed.

Eventually I completely wiped the phone and installed a stock ICS ROM. Problem “solved”.

And it’s a good thing, too – I very much do not want to buy a new phone right now; anybody who willingly upgrades their phone right now is a bit of a fool.

The reason? 4G.

Waiting on the Fourth Generation

My wife bought the latest version of the iPad. She bought the “4G” model – or what was being called the 4G model at the time. Now Apple markets it as WiFi + Cellular in the UK.

Why? Because we’re backwards here. While the rest of the developed world uses LTE (or other competing) technology to have a so-called 4G network (these standards actually fail to meet the 4G standard, as a general rule), the UK is lagging behind in having these faster networks. In fact while the latest news indicates that progress is “speeding up”, you will still see a conspicuous lack of a schedule for the introduction of a 4G standard to Britain.

And until the technology is rolled out, nobody knows the version of the standard that will be used. So any device that might be designed to handle a 4G (or 4G precursor) technology would not necessarily work on a British solution.

So I’m glad that I did not have to buy a new phone this past weekend – I’m hoping to hold on to my little Nexus for a little while longer. I’d suggest you do the same.

If not, you probably remember it as the day Wikipedia went on strike.

The campaign against it – culminating in an “Internet blackout” which featured sites such as Wikipedia – lead to the abandonment of the legislation, meaning that we can all continue to include external hyperlinks on our own sites, without fear of being blacklisted in America.

But what of consequences? An elected politician – Lamar Smith (R-TX) – actually introduced this legislation, and tried to push it through without debate. It’s difficult to see this as anything other than a betrayal of the people he is purported to represent. How can he be held to account?

The answer, of course, is to block his re-election. It so happens that there is a Republican primary occurring on May 29th in Texas.

You may be able to vote in the primary. (I can’t – I’m neither American, nor in Texas.)
You may be able to vote in the election. (I can’t – I’m neither American, nor in Texas.)
And you may be able to donate to the campaign to defeat Lamar Smith. (I can’t – I’m not American.)

So if you’re a Texan, an American, or in possession of a green card (in which case it’s apparently OK to contribute to political campaigns), the Big Bad Blog encourages you to vote with your wallet and/or your, um, votes.

For me, this plea is all that’s allowed.

The legislation failed, but legislation fails all the time – there are no consequences to it. SOPA deserves consequences. Please help deliver them.