Cameron’s Blog

Recently I bought an iPod touch, in anticipation of the “late February” SDK, and I wanted to make my email and my RSS feeds accessible from it, without doubling anything up.

For my email I used IMAP, which allows you to have two or more devices accessing an email account without the pain of reading an email on one device and having the email still show up as unread on the other device. Setting up IMAP on the iPod is very easy, and in Mail.app it is even more painless. Problem 1 solved: I read an email on my iPod touch and it shows up as read on my iMac, or the other way round.

Since upgrading to Leopard I have been using Mail.app for my RSS feeds as well. I really liked the integration with RSS feeds in Mail.app, like being able to send an article to a friend in 2 clicks. Unfortunately there was no easy way to have my RSS feeds in 2 places using Mail.app. My only option was to use an online RSS aggregator like Bloglines or Google Reader. I decided on Bloglines both because it has been recommended to me several times by different people, and because it has an iPhone/iPod touch interface. The only painful part of setting this up was adding all my RSS feeds into it, as it could not import from Mail.app. So now when I want to read my RSS feeds I can either go to i.bloglines.com on my iPod touch or go to beta.bloglines.com on my computer (I found that the beta interface is much nicer to use). Problem 2 solved: I read an RSS article on my iMac and it shows up as read on my iPod touch, or the other way round.

For a while now I have been trying to get onto Facebook, but when I first tried they would not let me join unless I either had a university email address or went to a high school. As home educated student this proved to be a problem, and after looking o the internet I found that the only way to get around it was to either say you go to a local high school or say that you are over 18. So I decided to wait, as I was not comfortable lying about something that would be public. I wrote to Facebook asking if I can use Facebook as a home educated student or not, but I got no reply.

During the months that followed I noticed that almost all the sites I visit on a day to day basis integrate with Facebook in some way, from iusethis to Kongregate and others. About three months after my initial attempt I decided I wanted Facebook, even if I had to lie. I decided to lie about my age as I could choose to only show my day and month of birth, whereas if I lied about my school it would automatically join me into the high schools group, which you cannot unjoin, and will show on your profile page. I decided first to try to sign up without lying just to see if it would work. And it did. Without so much as a warning dialog it let me sign up, log in, and start using it. I went to my profile page to double check that I put the right age, and I was astounded that I had and it had still let me sign up.

I don’t know if it was because of my email to them, or because they have stopped requiring anyone under 18 to be either in high school or university, but I am now on Facebook, without any falsities at all.