Ever since Google announced they were shutting Reader down, I’ve been looking for a new RSS reader to replace it. I have since settled on Tiny Tiny RSS, a self-hosted package with a nice, clean interface. It also has a plugin system, which lets me use the Reeder app on my iPhone by having Tiny Tiny RSS emulate the Fever API.

I’m running all of this here on Nearly Free Speech, and I thought I would document the process in case it helps anyone out, including getting Reeder to sync with TT-RSS.

Installation

For the sake of simplicity and easy upgrading, I used a clone of the GitHub repository. As the TT-RSS FAQ says:

I don’t do truly experimental development on it because it’s a daily driver for me personally and my friends who use the same instance, which is why it should stay functional. Actual versioned releases are not much more than tagged trunk snapshots taken at a given date.

Note, though, that cloning the Git repository results in a .git folder that is 80 MB+ big. That’s almost 10 times the rest of my site, and since NFSN charges based on disk usage, that wasn’t going to work. So what I did was clone a copy onto my local computer, then use Transmit to upload the installation, using a rule to skip version control files (#3 in that list), including any system files from Git.

Other than that, installation is straightforward. Upgrading consists of updating the Git clone on your local computer, then uploading any changes (Transmit has a Sync feature that does this).

Permissions

I set everything to be owned by the web group (chgrp -R web * in the TT-RSS directory), and made the cache, feed-icons, and lock folders writable by members of the web group (chmod g+w cache feed-icons lock). This seems to be working fine for me so far.

Setting up the cron task

NFSN recently rolled out scheduled tasks, and I just added the following command…

/usr/local/bin/php /home/public/path/to/tt-rss/update.php --feeds --quiet

…to run every hour (* for every entry) under the web user. This is as frequent as NFSN allows you to schedule tasks, and it’s easy enough to remember that feeds are updated on the hour.

Using Reeder with TT-RSS

When I used Google Reader, I checked my feeds pretty regularly with Reeder on my iPhone. Unfortunately, the developer behind Reeder has yet to include any support for TT-RSS (or any free solution for that matter). Thankfully, someone made a plugin to emulate the Fever API. Since Reeder supports the Fever API, by proxy Reeder also supports the TT-RSS API.

1. Download the plugin from that link.
2. Upload the fever directory to /path/to/tt-rss/plugins/.
3. Activate it in your preferences.
4. Make sure “Allow API access” is checked.
5. Set your Fever API password in the Fever preference pane.
6. Set up your new Fever account in Reeder, and start syncing.

There are pictures in the link for the plugin if necessary. The bold step is the one I missed, and ran around in circles trying to troubleshoot.

Replacing Google Reader

With this solution in place, I haven’t had to log into Google Reader at all. I was concerned about bandwidth usage and disk usage becoming a problem on NFSN, but my bandwidth hasn’t spiked at all, and the only disk usage spike was when I had the 80 MB .git folder in my installation. Once I figured out what caused that spike, my disk usage is actually the same as before I installed TT-RSS.

14 days until May 26.

Oh shit, that kind of looks like SeaTac…

That’s exactly what happened yesterday at Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport, according to KIRO-TV and other news outlets. The fire was first reported on the sixth floor of the garage around 6:45 a.m., and it quickly moved to consume several other vehicles. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but airport officials estimated damage to be around $250,000.

Well, guess I’m living under a rock…

Download it now from the WordPress Plugin Directory. There is an example of the plugin in action on my archives page.

Changelog

• Template tag function has been renamed to smarter_archives
• New filters are available:
  • smarter_archives_defaults — applied to function defaults before user arguments are merged in
  • smarter_archives_where — applied to WHERE statement of the SQL
  • smarter_archives_join — applied to blank string, JOIN statement can be added if desired
  • smarter_archives_months — applied to array of short month names (Jan, Feb, etc.)
• Function output can now be either outputted by default or returned
• Non-breaking space between months is now customizable
• Order can now be switched between descending (default) and ascending

The Hofmeister kink is an automobile design feature seen on modern BMWs and automobiles by other manufacturers [...] which consists of a low forward bend at the C-pillar or D-pillar in the case of touring vehicles or SUV’s.

The kink first appeared on the BMW 3200 CS and the BMW 1500 at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September 1961 and was later named after then-BMW director of design, Wilhelm Hofmeister. Apart from its stylistic effect, the Hofmeister kink is said by BMW to suggest that all BMW models have rear-wheel drive (or all-wheel drive biased to the rear).

(Source: Wikipedia)

Once you know about it, you can’t stop seeing it (especially on BMWs). The picture above is from New Media Campaigns, where there is also more information about the kink.

New video card launches from AMD and NVIDIA are almost always reviewed on hardware less than 12 months old. That’s not an arbitrary decision — it helps reviewers make certain that GPU performance isn’t held back by older CPUs and can be particularly important when evaluating the impact of new interfaces or bus designs.

The downside of this policy is that it leaves a gap in product coverage. Gamers with older systems often miss out on whether or not a new graphics card will be a meaningful upgrade for aging systems. That’s particularly important as the speed of the desktop replacement cycle has slowed.

I recently went through something similar when my EVGA GeForce 9800GTX KO died and I had to replace it. The GeForce GTX 660 Ti had just been released, and all reviews pointed to it being a great deal so I bought an EVGA SuperClocked GTX 660 Ti (which was the same price as the non-overclocked version at the time).

Here is my system apart from the video card:

• EVGA nForce 780i SLI motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Quad, 2.5 GHz
• Corsair Dominator 4GB DDR2 1066 MHz
• Hitachi Deskstar 1TB 7200 RPM

After I swapped the cards out, I was able to turn the settings up in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. But, I ran into a problem: the bottleneck shifted to the CPU. I had to back the settings down a little because all 4 cores of my CPU were maxing out at 100%. I hate to think what would happen if I ran a game like Crysis or Battlefield 3.

The results from the Hot Hardware article were a little more optimistic, but they do show great results. It seems that their old system was still a much more modern setup than mine, which I built back in 2008.

I made this from a desktop-sized version a while back, and I thought I would post them up here. There is a retina size for the iPhone 4 and 4S, a lengthened version for iPhone 5, and a reduced size for the iPhone 3G and 3GS. They’re all available in the gallery above.