Generally I like some of the new features added in Hangouts, for example that they included the option to being found with your phone number. Google has mine already as a fallback in case something is wrong with my account, so I don't mind, especially if I'm being asked and have the option to decline. (Google is getting a lot of my data because they ask nicely, but that's something for another blog post.) And there are enough people that have my phone number but might not have my Google account info. There is also the matter of including images and other not text stuff. I didn't expected it, but I enjoy the possibility to quickly send over a pic. And even though XMPP supported group chat as well, Google never implemented it in Talk. But they added the possibility in Hangouts, which is also a nice and useful thing in my book. So they improved in some areas that really needed it to stay relevant.

But sadly they made at least as many things worse:  A small thing, hopefully to be fixed soon, is the missing online indicator on the mobile. Another problem I experienced over the last few days is that there is sometimes a delay: I had chat message notifications in my browser that I opened up immediately just to find a chat message that was send 20 minutes ago. I get that mobile notifications can be a bit flaky sometimes, but my desktop should notify me at once when I get a new message in my instant messenger. I also have the feeling that the mobile app uses lots of resources, but I didn't measure it. It is just a feeling that since I upgraded, I have to wait for my home screen on my android to load far to often. As far as the more integrated messenger experience is concerned they failed so far: This YouTube video  shows how inconsistent it works with video chats.

All those things might be fixed in the future, there is nothing fundamentally wrong. But I think the worst decision they made is switching away from an open protocol to their own closed one. Google had been very good in the past with public APIs and open protocols so that external developers could connect to their services. But it feels like they are turning their back on all of that, especially in their newer products. Google+ still has no way of using external clients (I for one would like a "one client for all my social networks" solution and only Google is stopping that) and now the messaging solution is turned from open and federated to completely closed. (So far, but given that Google+ is without external apps for about two years now, I wouldn't hold my breath as I tried after the Google+ launch.) This past openness always made me recommend Talk. I knew if I used Talk, I could also communicate with my old contacts from Jabber (XMPP) and in theory with the help of transports even other networks like ICQ or MSN. Every chat solution I used with the exception of XMPP and therefore Google Talk forced you to make your friends use the same network as yourself to be able to communicate with them. Or switch over to theirs. If somebody told me before Hangouts they don't like Google and don't want an account, I could tell them to use any server listed here (or even run their own) and we could still communicate. I know it would have been hard to implement the new features in compliance with XMPP, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm afraid that Google loses their openness. With the Google Reader fiasco Google lost a lot of trust and I'm growing more suspicious ever since.

Sure I'm going to use Hangouts and I hope they'll improve at least the functional problems mentioned above. I'm still very involved in Googles infrastructure and I still trust them with lots of my data. But my trust in their openness, doing no evil and the quality of their services is damaged and I'm unsure if they'll ever get it back as it once was.

• Very good import from Google Reader (OPML import and export.)
• Nice clean AJAX interface, as well as a mobile interface and mobile apps.
• Keyboard shortcuts.
• Easy installation, requires PHP&MySQL.
• Multiuser support.
• Plugin support.
• Multiple language support
• Filtering and scoring, I'm quite curious if I find a cool use for that feature.
• API to access it with other services, for example desktop clients

Installation is quite easy, the official documentation should be sufficient to get you going. After installation you might want to do one or more of the things I did:

First I got my Google Reader data imported: Export your feeds from Reader and extract the subscriptions.xml from the archive. You can upload it to ttrss in the settings dialog under feeds, OPML. Next I activated some plugins under settings and plugins. I activated the Google+-sharing plugin and the mail plugin, but there might be others that could be useful to you. After that I installed a plugin for Chrome to be able to subscribe to feeds directly from the browser. Install the plugin and open the plugins settings to add "http://yourservername/public.php?op=subscribe&feed_url=%s" as a service. Firefox users might want to check this article instead. If you prefer a more Google Reader like interface, check in this forum, there are lots of CSS snippets going around that try to accomplish that.

And I guess that's it, ttrss is filling the hole Reader left quite well for me. My workflow hasn't changed much and the differences might prove to be valuable additions in the future. I'm very curious what kind of plugins the new users create and what more they are going to do with the API. What are you using as a feed reader now?

Screenshot of selfoss with the special source to get the full article in the heise feed

Update: I switched to Tiny Tiny RSS, which already has far more features I wanted, I also blogged about my experiences.

Since Google Reader announced that it is going down, lots of articles describing alternatives came up. I wanted to host my own RSS-Reader for some time so this was the final reason to do it. Since I couldn't make Newsblur work on my own host last time I tried it, I tried selfoss which is a great deal easier. Here are my first impressions of selfoss:

• Nice user interface, even on my android phone.
• Got keyboard shortcuts very similar to Google Reader.
• Not only RSS sources but some special sources to get full content of sites that only have a teaser in their RSS feed.
• The article text is divided into three panes much like a newspaper.
• Easy to install (only PHP needed, MySQL optionally.)
• At the moment there is sadly no way to read by feed, only by category or tag. Hope this will be integrated in the future. I would like to be able to have a view just like in Google Reader, where I can view whole categories but also a single feed from the category. But I'm managing by creating categories with only one feed in them.
• I'm also missing an option to automatically mark an item read when I open it.

So selfoss isn't a perfect solution for me, but I might try and add some of the missing features myself and I bet after todays news more user will use and therefore enhance it. If you just want to install it on your hoster without MySQL, it is really simple. To let it run in my Ubuntu server I had to enable the rewrite and headers modules and create a cronjob for the updates:

Update: If you are running on a Debian with default settings or get a 500 server error on other distributions, try to add "AllowOverride All" in your webserver/vhost config. (source)

I'm running it with MySQL and authentication with this configuration file (config.ini in the selfoss directory):

You cannot map all keys, because the TV keeps control of some of the keys like volume control or switching source. I put all the keys that I might want to change (and that can be changed) into my config file and set them up or deactivated them. (The red button was always trying to load the PVR addon, which I don't use at the moment.) The config can be found in ~/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps/remote.xml, which you usually  have to create manually. It overwrites the default config in ~/.xbmc-current/xbmc-bin/share/xbmc/system/keymaps/remote.xml. You can check out the default config for inspiration, but you should only add your changes to ~/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps/remote.xml since they might be overwritten otherwise. There is also a list of actions you can use on the XBMC-wiki.

This is how my config looks like at the moment:

I tried to emulate my TVs return/exit behavior with opening the shutdown menu on exit. The important context menu action is on the yellow key (since it is labeled with "C" on my remote) and I put the info action next to it on the blue button. I also switched some other stuff around, but you don't need it really. The important buttons you need (which mostly where mapped in the default setting) are cursor keys, ok, back, play/pause/stop and the context menu. Then you should be able to control your XBMC very well, everything else are shortcuts like the info button or the button to toggle if you saw a video already.

Now I switched to XFCE 4.10 with a gnome-session for keyring and nautilus, which I prefer to Thunar. (This german tutorial was helpful in achieving this.) I added a dock with Avant Window Navigator and changed a few key bindings. Now I'm nearly happy, there seems only one thing missing: I would like to have AWN react to Win+1...9 like the dock does on Unity or Win7.

This is how my left screen looks like. I think optics are nice and it is a useful more traditional setup than the unity stuff.

Today I went through my things looking for a device with composite video output, since that is (in 2012!) the input the display in my Seat Altea XL understands. The only and yet so fitting thing I could find was my Raspberry Pi. I installed Raspbmc (an XBMC specially prepared for the Raspi) on an sdcard, plugged the audio and video cables into the car, added power through a 12V adapter in the car and booted away. The result can be seen in the pics at the end. The Raspi doesn't need much power (~0.7-1.0A), stays cool and has no movable parts, making it perfect for usage in a car. Of course if you don't connect audio to the car, you can just use headphones instead so you could watch something in the back while listening to music on your cars stereo. (Preferably deactivate sound on the speakers in the back, but that isn't a problem.) Next thing on my list is a remote. I have a ATI/X10 USB remote lying around somewhere, that is supposed to work out of the box.

Mein erster Kontakt mit getDigital-Produkten vor ein paar Jahren war eine Fußmatte, "There is no place like 127.0.0.1." Die liegt immer noch bei uns vor der Tür. Aber letztens hab ich eine eine andere Fußmatte für Geeks in die Finger bekommen. Die hat weniger Netzwerkbezug und ist mehr für Leute, die den ganzen Tag Katzen-Videos bei YouTube gucken. Oder halt auch nicht, weil die Musik im Hintergrund geschützt ist und hier wegen den Gema-Bestimmungen nicht gezeigt werden dürfen. Stattdessen sieht man das zerknischte YouTube Logo und "Dieser Bewohner ist für Dich nicht verfügbar."

Die neue Matte ist deutlich besser verarbeitet als die alte. Nicht, dass die alte schlecht wäre, sie sieht nach 2 Jahren immer noch gut aus. Aber die neue ist 1cm dicker (insgesamt 1,5cm) und hat kräftige Borsten aus Kokosfasern, die sicherlich besser Dreck aus den Schuhen entfernen werden. Ich dagegen werde jedoch weiterhin die alte Matte nutzen solange IPv4 noch überall genutzt wird. Und falls ich jemals IPv6 an meinem privaten Internetanschluss bekommen werde, werde ich auch nach einer neuen Matte bei getDigital gucken. So wie es im Moment aussieht, wird das jedoch noch leider dauern.

Google wanted to structure "Events" in three phases. Firstly before the event in the planing stage: Date, place (with integration into calendar and maps of course), RSVP (you can invite people without Google accounts as well) and I guess discussion. It is nothing you couldn't do via mail, but getting directions with one click and having everybody included into the discussion (nobody forgetting to answer to all recipients) is a nice bonus. All in all, the first part is of course a necessity, but done good.

The second stage is during the event. You can activate "Party mode" on your smartphone and all your images you shoot during that time are automatically added to the event. I don't really see the big use in this, I could just upload my photos later. Since everyone who could see the images is at the event, there is no need to look at photos in real time in my opinion... Seems useless to me, but maybe I'm missing something here.

What I liked was the third phase: Afterwards everyone can upload all of his photos to the event and all participants (and only participants in the default setting) can see them together chronologically. Thats a sooo simple but nice thing. Normally if you get photos from friends after an event, they are usually numbered differently to yours, so you would need to (hopefully automatically) rename them into some date-time thing to mix them with yours or just leave them in the separate folder. In Events you can seen them all, but you can also filter by author if you want to see only photos a specific friend made. This is something I look forward to. I just hope there will be a download feature as well, because even though I like to have a few pictures online, I always want to have a copy on my hard drive.

I still have to find out how it works for people without a Google account, but I guess they get an RSVP mail with the details and a link to RSVP. But I think thats a good enough solution.

During the streaming of the Google IO keynote yesterday I thought this is an unnecessary and dumb feature. And maybe it is unnecessary (especially for people like me, where a lot of friends don't have Google+ accounts or don't use them), but it is surely not done dumb. Instead Google put some thought into what might be useful and did it in an visually nice way as well. Looking forward to using it for a few occasions. (Videos and more on Googles official Events page)