Wired magazine is giving away a Wired CD produced under a Creative Commons license with their November issue. The CD is featuring The Bastie Boys, who appear on the cover of the magazine, among others include Gilberto Gil and David Byrne.

I’m only afraid that the CD may not be available with the magazine here in Saudi Arabia. The magazine usually arrives lately and it won’t be surprising to see some pages ripped off by the censorship devils of the Ministry of Disinformation.

I knew there was some Arabic blogs out there, but I wasn’t paying much attention because programmers and designers, who did not have much to say to the world, made most of them. They were trying to play with Movable Type and other things. That’s all.

This is not changing. It’s just that one of them called Pixelog.net, linked to my blog and wrote it is worth reading. For my surprise, the guy titled the link with “The Saudi Greeks Are Coming“! I think he meant “Geeks” but, am I a geek? Please, tell me I’m not!

Regarding my post about feeds readers, I received an email from Nick Denton, Kinja’s president, who was surprised to know that Kinja could not read some feeds, asking me to give him some examples.

Therefore, I decided to re-log in to my account at Kinja, and give it another try. I discovered that I made some mistakes when I used it for the first time few months ago. Nevertheless, Kinja was functioning properly this time.

However, I still cannot understand the technology behind Kinja. During my email conversation with Mr. Denton, he told me that Kinja could read all blogs “whether they have RSS or not.” “We parse the HTML, looking for patterns in the code,” he added. So, according to his email “RSS is nice, but not essential.”

Kinja asks you to enter the URL in the “example.com” form. This sounds interesting and easy-to-use. However, this will not work unless you enter a famous blog (i.e. Kottke.org). When you try to do the same with some relatively unknown blogs (i.e. Mahmood’s Den), this method will not work. In this case, you should enter the URL of the feed itself, instead of the generic blog URL, and then everything will go smoothly.

I may forgive Kinja for such a thing because they are still in Beta. But I think they should work on it to improve their product. I like Kinja because they have a clean neat beautiful design, and it is really easy to add/delete any feed. Moreover, I like the way Kinja use to show the latest post from any of your feeds on top, just like a blog.

I’ve been using Bloglines for couple of days now, and it looks faster than Kinja in aggregating the feeds. Something I hate about Kinja is the delay in adding new feeds. However, I prefer it over Bloglines because the latter use frames. I hate frames.

Kinja is good, but it is far from being perfect. There is much to do and work on before release of Kinja 1.0, and I think they can do it.

The PhDs at Google labs used to produce us some of the most interesting stuff on the web. Google News and Google Desktop Search are two good examples. However, the wildest ideas for Google come from a secret army of hackers who work on the API to make some smart, weird and sometimes useless apps. Here are my favorites.

Cookin’ With Google

Many leftovers in your fridge and you don’t know what to do with them? Type ’em all in the search box and Google will bring you all the possible recipes!

Banana Slug

Google is great. But sometimes, just like any other search engine, it could disappoint you and give you no results to your inquiry. Banana Slug adds a random word to your search from one of nine categories to obtain some results hoping to make you less frustrated.

CapeMail

Web pages look ugly in most of mobile phones screens. A faster and easier way to search the web from your phone is sending an email to google[at]capeclear.com with your query in the subject line. Few seconds and you receive the results in your inbox.

When I started reading blogs I had a short list of blogs to check on every once in a while. Few months later, and the list is longer and the time needed is much more than I have. What to do? Turn to feeds reader.

As I’m using different PCs at different places at different times, I thought a web-based feeds reader would be perfect. So, I started using Kinja, from the nanopublishing pioneers Gawker Media. It has a cool design, but it has a major problem. It is not supported by most of the blogs I read. It is a shame that Kinja can’t read the more popular forms of feeds.

I gave up Kinja. I started using Feedster. Unlike Kinja, it supports the popular feeds, but it has a poor design, and it may refuse the addition of new feeds with no obvious reasons. I decided to give up all the web-based feed readers and turn to something else.

I read that Firefox 0.9.3+ could run as a newsreader. I already have 0.9.2 and I was not intending to update it until the release of version 1.0. Because Firefox has a weird problem. Whenever you update the browser, you have to reinstall all the extensions and themes, which is something boring and time-consuming.

As I had no more choices, I clicked to Google to look for a free feeds reader. And as usual, Google has the answer. FeedReader is an open-source lightweight feeds reader, and it’s free. However, I liked the way of Kinja that shows the latest posts of different blogs at the same page.

I’m now waiting for the release of Firefox 1.0 at November to try out its newsreader. If I did not like it, I think I’ll stick to FeedReader.

It has been more than two weeks since I watched TV for the last time. Before that, I was watching some promotions on MBC for a new series called The Road to Kabul starting in Ramadan. I was not so interested until I read this week that MBC, in addition to four other channels, stopped the show.

MBC said the reason was that the producer of the series, Qatar TV, refused to deliver the rest of the episodes to MBC. Qatar TV told the press that the work at the series was not completely finished. However, Talal Awamleh, the executive producer said the complete series was delivered to Qatar TV.

Nobody knows the exact reasons for such a decision by Qatar TV, and they did not made any statement about it. Talal Awamleh told the press he received some threats from some unknown groups through the internet, but he did not take any of them seriously.

The Road to Kabul is about the Afghani jihad against the Soviets, and the role of Arabs in that war. Who do you think is behind this? Is it Taliban fans in Arab World, or some Arab governments? Or is it somebody else? What do you think?

Can you guess who’s who form this 8-bit celebrities collection? Want to know more about it? Read this.