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6 min read 02

UofWinds 403, Week 2 2025: Inoreader, Watch Duty, In C


Good morning. I'm sitting in the study's reading chair under the thickest blanket. Beside me, the window and blinds are leaking cold air and the soft light reflected on yesterday's covering of snow. I'm trying out a gift that my son received this past Xmas: an aroma diffuser that is currently softly gurgling, glowing, and adding a stream of steam with a light undertone of citrus to the room. To be honest, the smell is confusing my senses more than soothing them.

Next week, we will have an electrician who will be properly electrifying our garage so it will have the capacity to hold a future EV and support solar panels. My city refuses to invest in our transit system and so I am also predicting that there might be a future e-bike in there as well. Friends in Ontario, a heads up that that this might be a good time to start planning some energy efficiency work and to electrify everything you can.

I have nothing to say about Meta in this issue. While I wouldn't go as far to say that I have left Instagram, but I would say that if you would like to re-join me at Flickr, you can see how my new hobby is progressing.

Inoreader


Inoreader is the best RSS reader for most people. So says WIRED. And I agree. I've been using the software since late December and it has done so much to improve my regular internet and news consumption habits. (It's much better than Feedly).

RSS stands for “really simple syndication.” It's a protocol that allows an RSS reader to talk to your favorite websites and get updates from them. Instead of visiting 10 sites to see what's new, you view a single page with all new content.

There are two parts to RSS: the RSS reader and the feeds from your favorite websites. RSS has been around awhile now, so there are a lot of very good RSS readers out there. Most of them feature built-in search and suggestions, so you don't have to go hunting for feeds yourself. You just might discover some cool new sites to read...

... Inoreader offers a well-designed interface, good search and discovery options, and a nice set of features that are beginner-friendly and offer plenty of advanced functionality for power users. There's a web interface as well as iOS and Android apps. The reading experience is good, with a clean, uncluttered design for both the web and mobile apps. Web users get keyboard shortcuts and plenty of customization options. Inoreader handles more than just RSS feeds—you can add email newsletters, Facebook pages, X searches, podcasts, Telegram channels, even Bluesky feeds.

I used to use the open source selfoss on Reclaim Hosting which worked and it was free, it was also limited and slow. With Inoreader, I can subscribe to my local newspaper's headlines and filter out all those having to with local hockey. More importantly, I can use the software to get updates from the websites that update regularly but don't offer an RSS feed, like my local radio station. With an RSS reader, I can get news headlines directly from the news sources themselves and not rely on search and social media platforms where Canadian news is actively suppressed by a variety of actors. You might want to use the free version, but I found that I don't mind paying for a product that I use daily and removes ads.

Inoreader offers a free (with ads) account, which is good for testing whether the service meets your needs. If it does, we recommend the Pro account ($7.50/month, billed annually), which brings more advanced features and support for more feeds.

In this day and age, we need platforms that give can us the most up to date information and not crucial news that has been filtered through an algorithm to maximize user engagement and time spent desperately looking for local real-time reports.

Watch Duty


If you are on West coast, you are probably already very familiar with Watch Duty.

Watch Duty is a service, not an app, powered by over 150 volunteers – firefighters, dispatchers, and first responders – who diligently monitor radio scanners and other official sources 24 hours a day to send you the most up-to-date information.

From Gizmodo: Watch Duty App Creator Says He’ll Never Pull an OpenAI :

Watch Duty was created in 2021 by John Mills, the founder and CEO, who was inspired to build an app after experiencing frightening wildfires in 2019 and 2020 near his home in Sonoma County, California. Mills, a tech entrepreneur who sold his company Zenput a few years ago, said he couldn’t find the information he needed online and was doing extensive research on who would have the most up-to-date info. Mills evacuated his property during the Walbridge Fire in 2020 and decided he needed to take action.

“I spent day and night for eight days just up all night listening to radios, digging through the internet, and just realized this was a broken, broken problem,” Mills said. “And a lot of the people who got me through that fire are actually now employees of my company.”

Mills said those people guided him through his issues and it took him about six more months before he realized that the same people who helped him were the key to this problem—because Watch Duty isn’t just one guy who coded an app, though Mills did that himself. It’s a team of people who actually make the thing work. Watch Duty covers 22 states and has 15 full-time staff, seven of them reporters who provide updates on the app, and dozens of volunteers.

“Surprisingly, it only took us about 80 days to get [Watch Duty] off the ground,” said Mills, noting that it’s a pretty lightweight app. “The key was really the reporters themselves, the radio operators, right?”

There's more reporting on Watch Duty from The Verge and The Guardian. And at the risk of repeating Mills quote above, please take note that it isn't the technology that makes the app work, but volunteers and experts connected together and working together for a common good.

In C


Is it a cliché to reach a certain age and suddenly find yourself immersed in minimalist post-classical music? Like, I thought I was only one of a few dilettantes with an esoteric taste in New Sounds, only to hear Ezra Klein say in a recent podcast episode about taste:

And one of the experiences that kicked this off for me actually happened a little bit across the show in the past couple of years where I really wanted to develop an appreciation for classical music. And I really threw myself at it. And I talked to people, and I read books, and I listened to the music. And it took a long time — it was like 10 months of really pushing at this.

But what worked for me was when I tripped almost accidentally into more kind of modern post-classical, Steve Reich and Philip Glass and now Carolyn Shaw and Nico Muhly, and a bunch of people like that, and some of the more modern experimental electronic work. And all of a sudden I found something that I liked, that nobody had given me, that I just found through work.

And it wasn’t that the other stuff was bad and this was good. It’s just that, for a variety of reasons related to me, this created a reaction. It created a very strong sense. It was a piece of work by Peter Gregson and some co-musicians, these set of quartets. And one of them — it’s like “II: Warmth” is I think the most beautiful piece of music I’ve virtually ever heard. And it’s strange. And not everybody who hears it feels what I do, but I feel what I do.

Look it doesn't matter if it is a cliché or not. Maybe most of you already know about Terry Reily's In C, but on the off-chance that you have not, I want to tell you that this is your lucky day; you are one of today's lucky 10,000:

Born in 1935, Terry Riley is an American composer and regarded as one of the founders of minimalism. His influences include both jazz and Indian classical music. Riley’s composition In C, written in 1964, is often regarded as the first truly minimalist work. In C is made up of 53 cells and can be played by any combination of instruments and voices. The performers can even choose how many times they repeat each cell, which gives them greater autonomy.

My favourite In C is currently the version by cellist Maya Beiser. I'm currently exploring other versions from this list of other interpretations found on Bandcamp and I plan to go deeper by reading about and listening to Africa Express Presents: Terry Riley's In C Mali.

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