Tag Archives: productivity

Social Networking, Software

Tracking conversations with Twitter

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Twitter just unveiled a new feature that allows you to track any word when it comes up in a public Twitter conversation. You could, for instance, instruct Twitter to let you know every time your name comes up in a conversation, or your hometown, favorite band, or latest trend you’re tracking.

Currently, tracking only works through Twitter’s web and IM interfaces, which turns out to be a good thing.

This is how I’ve set up tracking:

  1. I use Twitter on my Mac through Twitterrific, which -as you will see- allows me to keep tracking results separate from my day-to-day twittering.
  2. Set up an IM account for Twitter. This will allow you to access the tracking functionality and receive results through your IM software. I use AdiumX and Twitter messages me through my gmail chat account.Twitter IM Setup
  3. On your Twitter friends page, set Notifications OFF for all users (so their messages won’t show up on your IM and get lost amid tracking results). You’ll still get all their messages through Twitterrific.Twitter Notifications Setup
  4. Using your IM software, send a message to the Twitter IM bot with tracking instructions. If, for example, you want to track any mention of Google’s stock ticker (GOOG), then simply send the message “track GOOG” to Twitter. You’ll immediately begin receiving updates, via IM, of any public Twitter conversation where the term “GOOG” comes up. The great thing about this is that your normal Twitter conversations will remain free of this additional message traffic.Twitter Tracking
  5. Once you see something interesting come up in your tracking results, you can use “whois username” to find out more about the person behind the post, and “follow username” to begin following this person on Twitter.
  6. If you decide to stop tracking a certain term, simply send “untrack term” to Twitter, via your IM software or the web interface. Send “track” to get a list of search terms currently being tracked.

It just occurred to me, while writing this post, that you could set up a nice stock tracker using this system. Simply enter the ticker symbol of whatever stock you’re interested in and see what the Twittersphere spews out. I’m gonna try it out and see what people are twittering about my favorite stocks.

What about you? How are you using Twitter’s tracker?

Digital Media Strategy, Rest and Relaxation, Social Networking, Software

33 Fun Things to Do With Your Photos Online

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Now that you’ve got yourself a digital camera, what can you do with all those wonderful photos? Here’s a list to get you started:

Organize and share them:

These services allow you to upload your photos, share them with friends and family, tag them, make slideshows and send them out for printing:

FlickrFlickr – Owned by Yahoo!, Flickr offers both free and premium services. You can tag your photos, add comments to any part of an image, create sets, collections, slideshows, print out photobooks, postcards, snapshots, etc.


ZooomrZoomr – Think Flickr, but map centric. Zooomr offers nice photo storage functions, closely integrated with geotagging (placing your photos on a world map) and e-commerce (selling your photos) functions.


SmugMugSmugMug – SmugMug is a wonderful website for storing your images. It’s fast, well supported, and offers plenty of sharing options, including making photos private and password-protecting them. There’s even a special offer for Yahoo Photos customers who are looking for a place to store their now orphaned images.


PhotobucketPhotobucket – Photobucket also offers tons of features including easy options to share your images online (particularly useful for bloggers and photographers sharing their photos in online discussions)


Shutterfly – Primarily a photo-printing business, Shutterfly also lets you store your photos, create photobooks, postcards, share your photos, etc.

Fix them:

These services will let you upload your photos and edit them online. Useful if you don’t have an image editor on your computer, or when you need to quickly edit a photo while at a cybercafe.

PicnikPicnik – I was impressed by this one. Picnik will even let you play with their software without creating an account (Scrapblog will too), a clever way to let you try Picnik without forking over your personal information. Slick looking, fast and powerful. Worth trying, even if just for fun.


LookWowLookWow – Java-based online photo editor. Will let you apply effects to an image, undo, compare and save.


SnipshotSnipshot – Another really good looking online photo editor. Not as powerful as Picnik, but worth trying.


PhixrPhixr – Has a nice set of tools, but took forever to load.

Create:

MyPictrMyPictr – Quickly create image thumbnails for online social networks. Upload your photo, crop the area you want to keep (usually your face), choose the network you need your photo for and MyPictr will spit out your image in the proper size and format.


QuickThumbnailQuick Thumbnail – Great when you need to quickly resize an image. A useful feature will resize your image to several sizes at once (i.e., 25%, 50%, 75%)


ePassportPhotoePassportPhoto – The Internet equivalent to a passport photo booth, it will format your picture so that it can be printed and cut into six passport-ready photos. No more paying $8 for 19 cents worth of prints. Make sure your photo is passport-worthy before uploading.


BigHugeLabsBigHugeLabs – Do almost anything with your Flickr images. Calendars, frames, print-out projects… too many to list.

Fun:

ScrapblogScrapblog – Online scrap books. A wonderful service by my Miami friends. You can give Scrapblog a try without creating an account (you can create an account later and recover your trial project). Connects directly to your Flickr account, so using your existing images is very easy. Amazing flash-based interface will leave you wondering what else is possible on the Internet. Let your inner Martha Stewart run wild.


Spell with FlickrSpell with flickr – A fun service that will turn any word into its Flickr image letters.


PhotagiousPhotagious – Online Slideshows, themes, editing, text, unlimited uploads. Should probably be listed under “Organize and share them” but their slideshow functions are in a league of their own.


RiyaRiya – Although it’s been transformed into a “visual search engine,” you can still access their original image storage and sharing service. Riya’s technology will let you search for items containing similar items to a reference image. It will also let you identify a person in an image and find additional images where that person appears.


PikiStripsPikiStrips – Turn any image or images into comic strips, with text balloons and special effects. Look through the earlier examples uploaded into the system for the better quality stuff. It seems the latest ones are mostly people making gang signs.

Map Them:

You don’t need a GPS to map your images online, though one certainly helps. These services will let you identify the geographical place where each image was taken and show them on a map.

PanoramaBuilder Build panoramic images by stitching together your photos. Now you can pan around a place as if you were (almost) there.

3cim Virtual ToursVirtual Panorama Tours on Google Maps – A list of panoramic images overlaid on Google Maps. Mostly used for real estate.


PanoramioPanoramio – Map centric photo storage and sharing. Geotag your photos, correct photos others have wrongly placed. Panoramio photos are regularly uploaded to Google Earth so that other Google Earth viewers can see them by activating the Panoramio layer.

Make real stuff:

Your digital images don’t need to stay trapped inside your computer (or the Internets’ tubes). Make books, posters, postcards… almost anything you want with these links:

MpixMpix – Photobooks, Cards, Magazine covers, greeting cards, calendars, bookwrap, tickets, puzzles and statuettes (these last ones you HAVE to see… worth every cringe-inducing penny!)


QOOPQOOP – Photobooks, postcards, mugs, stickers, canvas prints, mini photobooks, shirts, hoodies, mousepads, calendars, greeting cards, etc., directly from your photo storage account. Works with most popular photo storage sites.


FlattenMeFlatenme – Create customized children’s books with your little rascal’s image in place of the book’s hero or heroine.


RasterbatorThe Rasterbator – An application which creates rasterized versions of images. The rasterized images can be printed and assembled into enormous (or smaller, if you prefer) posters. See website for details.

Improve your technique:

Microsoft Research Group ShotMicrosoft Research Group Shot – MSR Group Shot helps you create a perfect group photo out of a series of group photos. With Group Shot you can select your favorite parts in each shot of the series and Group Shot will automatically build a composite image. Erase someone in the background, fix faces with eyes closed, etc.


Fascinating! Content Aware Image Resizing – An amazing image resizing algorithm. Watch the video and rest easily knowing that the scientist behind is already working with Adobe on the next Photoshop.

Improve your photos with classical artImprove your photography with classical art – An interesting technique that uses traditional classical paintings to correct the light and color of your photographs.


Automator Actions: Photoshop Automator Actions v3.5 – If you’ve got a Mac and Photoshop, these scripts might make your photo-editing life a bit easier.

Manage your digital images on your computer:

These programs will help you manage your entire photo library on your PC or Mac. Most will allow you to do minor editing, cropping, resizing, color correcting and printing. Easily upload your images to your favorite online photo storage service.

PicasaPicasa – PC/Linux photo management, also includes online photo sharing for anyone with a Gmail account.


iPhotoiPhoto – Mac photo management. If you’ve got a recent Mac, then you have iPhoto installed already.


Apple Aperture – Professional photo management for Mac.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – Professional photo management for Mac and PC.

Updates:

2007/10/01: Make that 34 Fun Things to Do With Your Photos Online. Abhiram Sarat of flauntR sent me an email highlighting their quite promising online photo apps:

flauntRflauntR one-click effects – Online photo editing and effects. Includes uploading from your computer or flickr account and is nice enough to include sample images to play with. You can try out the apps (currently PhotostylR and PhotoeditR, soon PhotoprintR) without registering.

Digital Media Strategy, Marketing and SEO

The Real Reason Apple Slashed the iPhone’s Price

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The moment Apple announced a $200 price cut on the 8GB iPhone, the blogosphere lit up. The early adopters, feeling betrayed by Apple for slashing the iPhone’s price just two months after it’s debut, raised enough of a racket to get Steve Jobs to issue them $100 Apple gift certificates. The financial analysts took Apple to task, reading the price cuts as a sign of weak iPhone sales, sending the stock down more than 5%.

Missed by all was the real reason Apple slashed the iPhone’s price.

Let’s face it. Any moment now Already, users will be able to can unlock their iPhones with a simple software tool (click here to see a video of the iPhone unlock process from start to finish). Apple intends to capitalize on it… and a cheaper iPhone is precisely the way to do it.

Apple could engage in an arms race against the unlockers, but that would simply create ill will against the company. Relocking the iPhones through software updates would simply create hordes of angry users. Suing the unlockers is another possibility, but the law seems to be on the side of the phone owners (so far).

Apple has simply decided to join the party and lower the iPhone’s price so that, once the software hack is out, everyone can and will buy an iPhone.

How AT&T takes this is another story. They do, after all, have an exclusive arrangement with Apple for two years. They’re still the only ones able to offer Visual Voicemail and iTunes activation. Whether that’s enough for users to prefer AT&T remains to be seen.

What do you think?

Software, Usability

OS X Tools: All you really need to know about GREP

Ever need to look through an endless file list to determine if a certain file is there? Cross-eyed from looking at a ps listing to find the one program you want to kill? You need grep.

And if you’re on a Mac (or a Unix/Linux machine) you’re in luck.

There’s a million ways to use grep, but this one will quickly show you how powerful it is (and it’s probably all you need to know).

Suppose you need to shutdown a particular program… one that doesn’t show up on the Activity Monitor. You open the Terminal application, type “ps -A” and watch in awe as a million lines shoot by your screen, trying to figure out which one corresponds to the program you wish to kill.

Instead, try this the next time:

Let’s pretend you need to shutdown a particular application that’s not responding (or doesn’t have a Quit option). I’ll use mozy as an example. Instead of going line-by-line looking for the one that includes mozy, you simply type this command:

ps -A | grep -i mozy

and you’ll get the following back:

24293 ?? Ss 0:03.52 /usr/sbin/MozyBackup

24449 p2 R+ 0:00.00 grep -i mozy

Now all you need to do is issue the following command:

sudo kill 24293

to shutdown the application.

What you’re doing is simply taking the result of the “ps -A” command and sending it, using the “|” operator, to the grep utility, which will search for any occurrences of the phrase “mozy” (the -i option makes the search case insensitive).

Do you have any other uses for grep? Any other useful utilities? Leave your comment below.

Software, Usability

Mozy Backup Inconsistencies

6 Comments

I’ve been using Mozy Backup on my Mac for a while now. It apparently works invisibly in the background which is good (hassle-free) but also quite dangerous if things don’t go as expected. I haven’t had the need to retrieve anything from Mozy’s online backup -though my friends tell me it works really well, but today I encountered the following conflicting dates which I’m hoping Mozy can explain:

According to Mozy’s online gauge, my last backup occurred 8 days ago:

Mozy Backup’s Online Gauge

But according to Mozy’s desktop application, my last backup was 3 days ago:

Mozy Desktop Status

So, which is it?

Software

Quick Guide to Configuring GnuPG on your Mac (OS X)

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This is a quick-and-dirty guide to installing and configuring GnuPG (PGP) on you Mac. If you want a more detailed guide, explaining every step, visit http://fiatlux.zeitform.info/en/instructions/pgp_macosx.html

For a detailed explanation of how PGP works, visit the Getting Started page of the GNU Privacy Handbook at http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/c14.html

For a nice tutorial on selecting a strong passphrase, read http://fiatlux.zeitform.info/en/instructions/passwords.html

Step 1: Download all the necessary software

You’ll need to download the following software (or packages) which will allow you to create encrypted messages on your Mac, import and export encryption keys, and configure everything through a GUI (Graphical User Interface).

Mac GnuPG

GPG Keychain Access

GPG Preferences

Step 2: Install and configure

Double-click on the Mac GnuPG file you downloaded to launch the installer. Launch the “GnuPG for Mac OS X 1.4.7” package (this was the version at the time of writing this article) and follow the instructions to install GnuPG on your computer.

Launch the Terminal application and open a command-line window. Type:

gpg --gen-key

and follow the instructions to generate your keypair. Choose “1” for the kind of key (DSA and Elgamal), “4096” for the key size, “0” to make your keypair valid indefinitely (if you think your key should expire after a certain length of time, you may use the following code: 2 for 2 days, 3w for 3 weeks, 6m for 6 months, or 12y for 12 years).

For your User-ID, enter your name, your e-mail address (this is the address you’ll use to send and receive encrypted emails) and an optional comment. You may use the optional comment field to state an opinion (“Live Free or Die”), to further identify yourself (“Company Name”) or however else you see fit – just remember that the comment field will be tied to your User ID and will show up in your public key. Enter “0” to okay all the information.

You must now enter your passphrase. Your passphrase is the one thing standing between your private key and anyone keen on misusing it or learning your secrets, so choose it wisely.

  • Do not use ordinary words that appear on any dictionary.
  • Do not use the names of your loved ones, hated ones, pets or family members.
  • Do not use personal dates such as birthdays or anniversaries.
  • Do not use short passphrases.
  • Use upper- and lower-case letters.
  • Use numbers.
  • Use punctuation marks.
  • Use something you can remember.

For a nice tutorial on passphrases, read http://fiatlux.zeitform.info/en/instructions/passwords.html

You must now enter your passphrase twice (it’ll be hidden from view) and generate your keypair (it’ll take a long time).

Congratulations… you’re now ready to communicate securely (well, almost ready).

Now install GPG Keychain Access and GPG Preferences.

GPG Keychain Access will let you manage your private and public keys through a nice GUI interface. It also allows you to manage your contacts’ public keys, import and export keys, and publish your public key to a key server.

GPG Preferences installs into the System Preferences panel and lets you select the key server to use to search for public keys. If someone sends you an encrypted messages, you’ll need to know their public key to decrypt it. They can send you this key or you can search for it on a key server (if they published it).

Step 3: Configuring GnuPG to work with your applications

Ok, so now that you have GnuPG installed and a keypair, you need a way to use GnuPG from within your applications.

The following applications will let you seamlessly use GnuPG:

ABKey

ABKey will integrate GnuPG with your Address Book, adding fields for public keys to every address card.

GPGMail

GPGMail will let you encrypt, decrypt and sign messages from within Apple Mail. It’ll automatically recognize if a contact has a corresponding public key.

GPG DropThing

GPG DropThing allows you to encrypt and decrypt chunks of text and files through a drag-and-drop interface.

Enigmail

Enigmail will let you encrypt, decrypt and sign messages from within Thunderbird, Mozilla or Netscape email.

EntourageGPG

EntourageGPG will let you encrypt, decrypt and sign messages from within Microsoft Entourage.

EudoraGPG

Eudora GPG will let you encrypt, decrypt and sign messages from within the Eudora email program.

FireGPG

FireGPG will let you access GnuPG functions from within the Firefox browser. It’s great if you use Gmail for email as it’ll let you encrypt and decrypt messages from within Gmail and even adds buttons to Gmail’s interface to access common encryption functions. It’s still a little buggy, but works well enough.

Sometimes, FireGPG’s options dialog takes forever to appear or won’t appear at all. You need to indicate the path to the GPG executable file. If the options dialog does not appear, simply type “about:config” on a new tab, filter on “firegpg” and change the following keys:

  • Set “extensions.firegpg.specify_gpg_path” to “true“.
  • Set “extensions.firegpg.gpg_path” to “/usr/local/bin/gpg“

and restart your browser.

That’s it… you’re now ready to send and receive private messages.

If you want to send me a private message, look for my public key on the key servers. My email address is “granier” at Google’s Gmail service.

Feel free to add comments, suggestions or corrections via the comments form below.

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Ratings Analysis

New Tools for Tracking NBC vs. CBS at YouTube

TubeMogul, the awesome online video traffic analysis tool, now (finally guys! 😉 ) offers embeddable charts, as well as a number of new social features.

Here’s the latest month of YouTube data for NBC and CBS, showing NBC’s continuous lead over rival CBS.

I’ve set the chart to show data from May 13 to Jun 12, 2007 – but you could just as easily set it to continuously auto-update and show the last thirty days.

TubeMogul – Empowering Online Video.

Software, Usability

How to get the new Google Analytics interface

This may not work for everyone, but it worked for me… so I’m sharing it with a “your-mileage-may-vary” license.

Google recently updated the interface for Google Analytics. As usual, not everyone gets the upgraded interface at the same time, as Google likes to roll put their upgrades incrementally.

I track three different accounts through Google Analytics and only two of them were upgraded to the new interface (and of course, those are the ones I don’t really track on a daily basis). So here’s what you need to try:

The Hack:

Under the traditional Google Analytics interface, your URL will look like this:

https://www.google.com/analytics/
home/report?rid=<some_numbers_here>

Under the new Google Analytics Dashboard, your URL looks like this:

https://www.google.com/analytics/
reporting/dashboard?reset=1&id=<some_numbers_here>
&scid=<some_numbers_here>

So what I did was simply edit my URL to look like this:

https://www.google.com/analytics/
reporting/dashboard?rid=<some_numbers_here>

Simply replace “/home/report” with “/reporting/dashboard” and hit enter.

Let me know if that works for you!

Usability

New Look

2 Comments

Well, finally… the blog has a new look. Everything seems to be working, but do let me know if you find any gremlins. The original theme (Subtle, with Subvert style) comes from Glued Ideas, but needed a lot of customizing to get some things working. I installed a local copy of WordPress on my MBP and replicated my blog with the help of several articles I found online and lots of elbow grease. Upgraded the server to PHP5 and WordPress 2.05. Some minor cosmetic details will be taken care of shortly, but meanwhile I hope you enjoy the new look and functionality.