Listomania! My Reading List and Gadget Compendium

tl;dr

Those of you interested can check out these lists of what I've been reading and what gadgets I'm using (and have used).

The Long Version

My Reading List

One of my resolutions for 2010 was to read at least one book every two weeks. Having kept track of everything I read, I figured I might as well share it - hence Reto Meier's Reading List. Some observations from reviewing the list:

• Favourite Book: Music for Torching by A. M. Holmes.
• Most Read Author: Philip K Dick accounted for 4 of the 23 books I read in 2010.
• The Kindle Effect: I read 6 books in 2 months on Kindle versus 17 in the 9 months before.
• Hardcover versus Paperback: 12 hardcovers, 6 eBooks, 5 paperbacks.

I'll continue to update this with new books as I read them -- hopefully at a rate of one every two weeks.

My Gadget Compendium

I often get asked which gadgets (Android powered or otherwise) I'm currently carrying around. These days the list seems to change every month or so, so for easy reference I've put together Reto Meier's Gadget Compendium.

I'll update it whenever a new gadget gets slightly less top secret, or something gets retired from the active lineup. A couple of observations from looking at my current lineup and the honorably discharged:

• Rate of Innovation: From 2 phones in 5 years, to 5 phones in two years since the G1 was released in 2008.
  
• Size: Everything (except my Netbook) has gotten thinner, lighter, and sleeker. There's also a distinct movement away from physical keys / buttons -- my SE P910i had a qwerty keyboard, dial pad, and a 5 function scroll wheel, my Nexus S and Galaxy Tab have only power and volume keys.
• Connectivity: The only pieces of old kit with a mobile data connection where the phones. Now the only gadget in my bag without 3G is my camera. Which reminds me, I must pick up an Eye-Fi card.

With a broader variety of Android devices scheduled for release this year it'll be interesting to see if they replace or augment my existing collection of portable gadgets. I'd love to replace the netbook for a Chrome-powered variety, but I'm not sure I can imagine writing a whole book without Word so I'm not sure if that's on the cards.

iGoogle

If you've stopped by the Google Personalised Homepage today, you've probably noticed it's been rebranded and is now called 'iGoogle' (which is what the '/ig' stood for).

Philipp's Blogoscoped has the skinny, and you can read the official Google blog post here.

The take-aways are:

• You can create simple, "no programming required", homepage gadgets using their gadget wizard.
• Localised support for multiple languages and locales (22 around the world in fact) -- so http://www.google.co.uk/ig will give you your iGoogle on the UK Google domain.
• iGoogle has been Google's biggest growing service.

Live Cricket Map Homepage Module Updated

I've finally gotten around to updating the World Cricket Map Google Homepage module.

I'm now including almost every cricket match played in the world above club level, so now you can follow Internationals, Twenty20, women's internationals, and your domestic sides battle each other for glory with the World Cricket Map on your Google homepage. The latest release uses version 2 of the Google Maps API, so there's better imagery, more road maps, and it works properly in IE.

If you've already got the moduleo n your homepage you don't need to do anything, you should already be seeing better results.

It's been a while since I looked at the Google Hompage Module code, turns out there's been some big improvements since then. Of note is analytics support using Google Analytics. If you've written a module add the analytics code and see how popular your gadget is, and where it's popular. I had no idea that over 100 people were keeping an eye on the cricket with my humble module! Now I feel bad for not improving it sooner -- maybe I should look closer at supplying live scores...?

Also of note is the much enhanced Scratchpad that works as a real-time web-based development environment for you modules. It makes development and bug fixing a breeze and I can't recommend it enough.