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Mayor Bloomberg is encouraging city homeowners to apply for the $400 property tax rebate. The text in the press release is slightly confusing:

Most owners of 1-, 2- and 3-family homes, condominiums and cooperatives who live in their homes are already eligible for the $400 rebate and do not have to apply, but those who have not applied for the rebate have until October 15th to apply by filling out a New York State School Tax Relief Program (STAR) application.

The safest bet is probably to go ahead and file a STAR application regardless. The deadline is October 15th.

There is an added bonus for co-op shareholders: The press release states that checks will be sent directly to the individual owners rather than the co-op. Nice.

Today, Bloglines announced the availability of a webservices API:

The Bloglines Web Services (BWS) let software developers access Bloglines subscription and feed data directly from computer programs. Bloglines uses a RESTful API consisting of a set of URLs, which return data in RSS and OPML formats.

The Bloglines Web Services are currently in Beta test. We are evaluating the usage and results from making these services available, in order to create policies for our full public release…

This makes digesting feeds a bit easier since an application need only speak RSS 2.0 and OPML in order to pull information from BWS. The original site content can be published in any of the feed formats that Bloglines understands, this includes several different versions of RSS and Atom.

Even more exciting for me is the announcement that NetNewsWire and FeedDemon will be using these functions to allow synchronization between their aggregators and Bloglines.

I’ve been an instant messaging fan for years, but I quickly grew tired of having three different clients open in order to connect to everyone. At work I, and others, have been using Trillian and Trillian Pro for some time to enjoy an ad Free, multi-protocol, IM experience. Trillian is great, but it isn’t available for Mac.

So, I’ve been using Fire for the better part of a year on the OSX side. Fire is great. Although, it is missing a couple features I had come to rely on in Trillian Pro. The first one that comes to mind is the way that Trillian inserts the last several lines of IMs to and from a buddy into new chat windows. Fire logs messages, but you have to look at them in a separate file.

A week or so ago, I ran across AdiumX, which is another multi-protocol IM client. AdiumX gives me everything Fire did, plus it sports a few other nice features. The user interface is a little sleeker and more customizable than Fire. The tabbed chat windows are a great addition and really cut down on desktop clutter. The integration with Address Book is also nice, it can display a person’s real name as opposed to their buddy name so you don’t have to remember that Mad$kilz872 = Jim.

Overall, AdiumX gets my vote. Of course, if you are a Windows users, you won’t be able to use AdiumX. In that case, I would go with Trillian over anything else I’ve seen or used. All three of the clients mentioned here are freely available for download. AdiumX is free, but accepts donations on their web site. Fire is also free and I can’t seem to find a place to send donations to the developers. Trillian offers a free basic version, and a slightly more advanced Pro version which is worth the $25 price tag in my opinion.

It has been a busy week at work which equates to a slow blogging week. An updated version of iSubway [iSubway.zip] is available though.

Have a great weekend!

P.S.

Good luck to everyone participating in CM tonight, watch out for the orange nets!

The latest MTA Subway Service Advisories (iSubway.zip) are available on iSubway.

I’ve spent the last fifteen minutes or so trying to figure out why Firefox insisted on “downloading” last week’s information from this site even though it did not exist on the site. I deleted it from the download manager thinking that was the problem, but it wasn’t until I cleared the cache that the right version appeared on my desktop. Perhaps each week’s iSubway file should have a unique filename to prevent this from happening.

Curbed reports that the East Village WTC Mural has been painted over. This has been in the works for some time, they must have been waiting until after the anniversary to cover it.

Now we can all look forward to something equally as tasteful in that space such as an advertisement for Captain Morgan or Target.

The Third Annual ArtBots Show is in New York this weekend!

The Third Annual ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show will take place on September 17, 18, & 19 from noon to 6:00pm at The Mink Building on 126th Street & Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem. Featuring the work of 20 artists and groups from seven countries, the show celebrates the strange and wonderful collision of shifty artists, disgraced engineers, high/low/no tech hackers, rogue scientists, beauty school dropouts, backyard pyros, and industrial espionage that has come to define the emerging field of robotic art. Participants include robots that sketch, carve, float, wiggle, hum, ring, grow, wander, and sing, as well a number of works the form and function of which are not yet well understood.

via Boing boing

The Virtual Window Project is perfect for all those city apartments with brick wall views. Just cover up the existing window glass with LCD panels, hook them up to a PC, and load up whatever view suits you.

via slashdot

The Firefox preview release includes Live Bookmarks. This new feature allows one to easily subscribe to an RSS feed. If the site currently being browsed has an RSS feed and supports auto discovery, a familiar orange and white RSS button will appear in the lower right hand corner of the browser window. Clicking on the button will add the site to the browser’s bookmarks. Very nice! As a side note, the previous owner of firefox.com has donated the domain name to the Mozilla Foundation.

Inspired by piPod, I created iSubway, an iPod friendly listing of MTA Subway Service Advisories. It is very basic, but functional, allowing one to carry the full list of subway service advisories with them. Service advisory updates will be posted here each Friday.

iSubway uses the notes feature on the iPod to create an easy to read, portable list of published subway advisories. Since a lot of New Yorkers seem to carry their iPod with them everywhere, this seems like a natural.

If you use it, let me know what you think.