Facebook: Changes to the newsfeed filter

Just came across a neat little change on the newsfeed. Previously whenever you would get these annoying updates from spammy applications like "farmville" or "bestfriend" and the likes you could hover your mouse over to the top right corner of the message and a hide button would appear. Clicking on it would allow you to hide that application or hide that particular friend completely.

Now what you have is a hide button, clicking which you get the message " _____ has been hidden from your News Feed..." with an Edit options link. On clicking the Edit link you have options to customize your newsfeed, remove or add friends change the maximum number of messages you get in your feed etc.

This is a step in the right direction. As before there was no way to reduce the number of messages received from some friends with whom you weren't necessarily in touch with. This could lead to further narrowed down filtering options for users to customize the feed. Maybe even to the extent where messages from particular friends which contain certain words should be filtered out. A scenario where this could be useful would be if you have a certain friend who you follow but he msgs excessively about girls or computers then his messages could be filtered by these words.

Hopefully some day there would be an option to export your newsfeed to view it in an external rss reader :P

Spare External HDD

So my Compaq C700 died on me last week. The lcd was dead and the vga port didn't send out any signals to the external monitor. So I ended up ordering a Lenovo G550 from Newegg. Got a great deal, 395$ !!

Now I have the problem of moving stuff from my old 500 GB drive to the new laptop. I have an external drive (Western Digital passport portable 320). So my thoughts are to open that one up and replace the drive with the 500 GB drive. I am not sure how or if this would work.

The other idea I had was to somehow connect the HDD to my router so I could access it without connecting it to the computer with a USB drive. Looked at various USB to Ethernet adapters. But these seem to be solutions built for old computers with no network card installed and wanting to connect to a router. And none of these could be connected to the HDD as it takes in a micro USB.

Even if I could find a micro USB to Ethernet adapter this idea won't work. The problem is to work as a network drive the hdd needs to be a mini computer on its own. Hence there are these expensive NAS boxes and enclosures available online.

So now I have landed on Addonics NAS Adapter which is an enclosure in which you can put in your external 2.5" laptop drive and make the necessary connections and connect it to the router. With some additional software installed (the install guide is provided on the site) you have a cheap NAS solution.

The other option is to go for a customer product from DLink (DLink2). There are pre-built NAS boxes you can buy from Buffalo or Western Digital, but these are expensive solutions.

Will update this post once I have executed either of these strategies and got my old data on the new computer

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