Jeremy Zawody wonders what percentage of subscribers to his feed use Bloglines.

Out of curiosity, I checked my FeedBurner stats and got some numbers. The top three most popular aggregators among my subscribers are Bloglines at 28%, NewsGator Online at 19%, and Firefox Live Bookmarks at 9%. The rest use one or more of the following - the Windows RSS Platform, Google Desktop, NewsGator Outlook Edition, Safari RSS, FeedDemon, MagpieRSS, Omea Reader, RSS Bandit, Sage, SharpReader, and Thunderbird. A couple of people are using aggregators that FeedBurner doesn't recognize.

The fact that Bloglines and NGO take the top spots doesn't come as a surprise to me. I've used both (I use NGO these days), and found them to be the most responsive and reliable web-based aggregators out of the ones I've tried. There are a bunch of fancy new AJAX-based aggregators out there too, with new ones coming out every so often, but most of them are still lacking quite severely in performance and responsiveness in my experience, especially when handling a large number of feeds. It's also not surprising to me that the top two spots are both taken by web-based aggregators rather than desktop applications. More and more people are starting to use multiple computers (one at home and one at work, or a desktop and laptop, for instance), sometimes even running different operating systems, and using a web-based aggregator gets rid of the pain associated with keeping feeds in-sync across multiple machines.

One of the things that just never felt quite right to me was the quality of font rendering on my Linux setups. I've tried poking at nearly every setting in the GNOME fonts panel, but there was always something amiss.

Today, I stumbled onto what I think is one of the best tweaks for Ubuntu that I have ever seen. The patches were dead-simple to install, and the whole process only took a couple of minutes. And then, when the system came back up after the reboot, there was a look of utter disbelief on my face. It looked like someone had gone and replaced the laptop's screen. The fonts looked absolutely gorgeous!

If you have an Ubuntu box and an LCD display, you really want to install these patches...now. And if you're using another distro, find a way to do the same. Trust me, your eyes will thank you a million times over.

When the first beta of Google Talk was released almost a year ago, I put up a first-impressions post, particularly emphasizing the superb quality of the PC-to-PC calls feature. Unfortunately, Mac and Linux users were out of luck, since the official client was (and still is) for Windows only.

Last evening, I installed a copy of Tapioca on my Ubuntu setup to test it out. Tapioca is an IM client for Linux that includes libjingle support, which allows users to make voice calls to other Google Talk users. I called my brother in New York, who was using Google Talk on Windows, and establishing the connection was as quick and painless as using GTalk itself. The latest beta of Jabbin, another Linux client, apparently also allows you to do the same.

Now someone just needs to show the Mac users some libjingle love soon. I hear the Adium guys are cooking something up.

T-Mobile USA released an official ROM upgrade for the MDA that includes the Messaging and Security Feature Pack (MSFP) for Windows Mobile 5.

One of the coolest features included in MSFP is Direct Push, which keeps your Inbox, Contacts, Calendar and Tasks always in-sync with the data on your Exchange 2003 SP2 server. What that means is that if you send me an email right now, it should appear on my cellphone within the next 10 seconds, no matter where I am, as long as I have a cell signal.

I installed the new ROM over the weekend - a completely painless, five minute task. I didn't need to backup anything even though the device was going to get erased because all of my data, including my phonebook, sits on the Exchange server and is one sync away. It's just such an incredibly seamless experience.

This week, Ron Avitzur visited Google for a tech talk to tell us about the origins of Graphing Calculator 1.0, the math application he developed, and that Apple bundled with the very first PowerPC computers more than a decade ago.

It's a fascinating, humorously-told story of two software engineers who evaded Apple's building security and worked without pay for several months to deliver something that they were passionate about. Definitely a story you should read and enjoy.

What's really cool is that even today, about 20 years later, Ron continues to work on Graphing Calculator full-time, adding new features, fixing bugs, and taking advantage of new advances in technology. :)