Uploading some images to Flickr right now using FlickrExport for iPhoto. Obviously, it doesn’t handle video yet, so I’ll have to do that on the website. I’m curious if I’ll ever use YouTube again? Also, will Apple provide support for Flickr videos on the Apple TV? And perhaps iPhone?
Archive for the 'Tech' Category
For all you Leopard users out there, here’s a handy trick to use Quick Look from the command line.
Leopard ships with a command called ‘qlmanage’. The -p option shows a preview of the file passed to the command. In the terminal, type the following:
qlmanage -p thefile
You can extend this by creating the following shell script:
#!/bin/bash
qlmanage -p $1 >& /dev/null &
The >& /dev/null prevents output from displaying, and the & runs the process in the background so a new prompt displays on the terminal.
Save this script as an executable file and store it somewhere in your PATH. I recommend naming it something short like ‘ql’.
(Note: I stored mine in a home bin folder used for custom-made scripts).
You can close the Quick Look window with the mouse (the conventional way), or close it in the terminal by getting the pid from the ps command and using kill [pid].
Using the ql command in Terminal
Closing the Quick Look window using the kill command
This feature is really handy for me because I spend a lot time in the Terminal. Many times I encounter a file such as an image, pdf, word doc, etc. that I’d like to briefly preview.
Before I discovered this, I would resort to opening Finder and navigating to the same directory to preview the file. Being able to do this all from Terminal is a real time saver!
[UPDATE]
A better solution is to use “$@” (with quotes) instead of $1 in the script. This will allow multiple arguments and wrap quotes around each one to account for spaces or other odd characters in the filename. Additionally, providing multiple arguments creates a slideshow in Quicklook.
#!/bin/bash
qlmanage -p “$@” >& /dev/null &
Google Earth’s Hidden Surprise: A Flight Simulator: Google Solitaire and Minesweeper are the next logical steps.
I use NetNewsWire as my main RSS reader on the Mac. Until recently, I had a hard time keeping up on all my feeds. However, I recently employed 2 tricks to greatly improve my productivity for perusing my feeds and finding the gems.
Tip #1: Flatten the Feeds
For the longest time, I tried hard to keep my feeds categorized: Apple, Tech, Blogs, Flickr, etc. Ultimately, this required too much cognitive overhead.
Where should I place a new feed? Does it need a new category? Where was that other feed I want to read? Under Tech? Blogs? etc…
The solution: Flatten the feeds!
Having one long list of feeds sorted alphabetically has been a huge help. Now I don’t have to think twice when I add a new feed, and I can easily scroll up or down to find a particular feed I want to read.
Tip #2: Create a hot key on the mouse for “Mark All As Read”
NetNewsWire has the Cmd-K hotkey for the “Mark All As Read” feature. This is useful for quickly committing RSS suicide. Additionally, it prevents you from having to increment through each story one-by-one to mark them as read.
I took this one step further by mapping my middle click mouse button to Cmd-K for the NewNewsWire app. I did this using the SteerMouse driver for the Logitech VX Revolution mouse.
Now I never need to lift my hand off the mouse. I can quickly scan through and mark off all my feeds at an olympic gold-medal pace.
Bonus Tip
I use the Combined View layout in my feed reader. The left column shows all the feeds, the right columns shows all the stories and the body text. This is in contrast to the Traditional and Widescreen Views, which require an extra click on the story headline to read the actual text. Not really a tip, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
[tags]NetNewsWire, rss, feed reader[/tags]
Skype Offers More Explanations and Reassures that All is Well: The Skype outage is somewhat analogous to the JetBlue clusterfuck earlier this year. Both companies took a hit, exposing vulnerabilities in their infrastructures and inconveniencing multitudes of users. However, they both have been spinning their mishaps into positive outlooks:
- Improve and strengthen back-end infrastructure to prevent future catastrophes
- Timely PR opp to reinsure user confidence and regain trust
- Compensations: JetBlue offered free flights (I think?), and Skype offered an extra week of free service.
Bottom line: The outage may ultimately help Skype propel forward if they keep playing their cards right. It’s the “1 step back, 2 steps forward” type thing.
Apple’s iWork Package Is Elegant but Wimpy Compared With Office | Personal Technology | Walt Mossberg | AllThingsD: A questionable review that misses some key points: iWork is a native app whereas Office still doesn’t have a universal binary. (You’ve had more than 2 years already Microsoft… you’ve missed your chance). I personally find Numbers much more attractive and easier to use than Excel, and am relieved that it does away with the “advanced” shit I never use or need to know anyway. Did you really dedicate three whole paragraphs positively reviewing Numbers only to ultimately berate it for not having pivot tables and thus labeling it “wimpy”? That’s lame.
FBML 1.1: Facebook is employing a simple technique to combat deceptive applications. They’ll start using CSS visibility instead of fbml logic to control content display to the profile box.
What this means?
No more exclusive content!
… at least in user profiles. If you can see it, then so can I. It doesn’t matter who has what app installed anymore.
A few months ago I would have argued against this move. However, after initially launching the White Stripes app, we realized having exclusive content in the profile box was lame. It’s best to contain exclusive content within the canvas pages, and to lure more users to your app by showing whatever teaser content, branding, or interactive elements in the profiles.
Good timing for the update btw. Schools are back in session.
[tags]facebook platform fbml[/tags]
Under what conditions does an advertisement become spam?
This could have been a great discussion/debate for this year’s Gnomedex. Unfortunately, most people seemed to focus on the Winer-Calacanis drama instead, and not the key underlying issue that ignited the public feud.
I can list a few conditions:
- Personal space - Advertisements through email are often diagnosed as spam. We treat our email as our own personal space over which we control what comes in and what goes out. Conversely, a flying-banner ad over the beach is not a personal intrusion, and thus doesn’t conjure much negative reaction.
- Target audience - Ads are meant to reach out to a certain demographic. Spam will try to reach whoever.
- Reiteration of message - While some ads are frequently occurring, they are often well-placed and cleverly thought through. Spam, on the other hand, will repeat itself ad infinitum.
- Sponsorship - Ads are usually the result of a sponsorship. It’s why we expect commercials on tv, magazines, etc. Companies invest good money for product placement. In this case, spam are free-loading ads.
- Deception - Phishing, slandering, plagurizing, etc. are usual trademarks of some spam.
- Perspective - The most important factor here. Maybe that email selling viagra is valuable to someone? Not to me, but you never really know.
I am really surprised that no one from Gnomedex07 has focused on this actual topic at hand. Instead, most people seemed to pick sides and focus on the feud.
Mahalo is an interesting concept, and I would have loved to learn more about what decisions went into defining what Spam actually is. Note: this is not an endorsment for Mahalo, as I feel it has some short-comings (e.g human bias and resources).
It’s somewhat ironic when the product itself is declared a violator of the very thing it is trying to eradicate.
[tags]gnomedex,gnomdex07[/tags]
I haven’t written in a while and let my blog get a little stale. Granted, I’ve had way too much going on between starting a new job (kinda), moving to LA from SD, traveling, and everything in between.
I just upgraded this site to WordPress v2.2.1. Before it was running v2.1.2. Although we are extensively using Drupal at work with the aim of building an internal platform of sorts, I decided to stick with WordPress for my blog for a few reasons:
- I’d like to stay familiar with WordPress since it’s one of the largest open-source php/mysql projects in the tech world.
- It’s easier to setup and maintain a WordPress blog.
- I didn’t want the hassle of exporting all my content into Drupal.
Being said, it was a bit tempting to drink the Drupal “kool-aid”, so-to-speak. We are working with some of the best Drupal folks in the community, namely Bryght and Firebright. Additionally, I’ve leaned a lot about the Drupal framework, worthy modules, themeing, etc. Logically speaking, rebuilding my own site in Drupal would help to solidify my Drupal tech know-how and retain that knowledge.
However, at the fear of “putting all my eggs in one basket”, I’d like to keep my horizon broadened, so WordPress it is!
Btw, I am posting this from Ecto. This seems like a very sweet program, and could make blogging much easier.
Twitter allows you to broadcast ’status messages’ about yourself to a group of friends and followers. It’s an ancient idea (technically speaking, think AIM away messages), but it’s recently taken off in a big way.
I personally don’t find it all that useful. My phone pings me enough times throughout the day from all the emails I get. I don’t need to add SMS to the mix, especially when most of the messages are trite and meaningless.
On a side note, I think Twitter would be a killer app if it could generate ad-hoc social groups based on contextual and/or geographical awareness. I would love to send or receive “serendipitous” messages to/from buddies (or strangers) if we were looking to partake in a social event (hit a bar, catch a movie, hang out, etc.), or if we were unknowingly in close proximity to each other. I worked on a project like this a few years ago at UCSD, and unfortunately it never amounted to much given it was primarily a proof-of-concept research project. However, it seems that no one else has really tackled this issue, so maybe it’s worth resurrecting?
That being said, I feel Twitter is at best a self-serving vehicle for people to leave egocentric status messages, and nothing more. It basically reminds me of Facebook’s status feature. They both accomplish the same thing, just through different mediums. Twitter publishes externally to SMS and blog widgets, and Facebook publishes internally to user profiles and mini-feeds.
Self-serving? Egocentric? That sounds fun!
When I’m on the road and want to publish a message about myself, I’d like to use both services. Why deprive one community of my personal where-abouts and such (even when nobody gives a shit anyway)?
There are a few ways to do accomplish this:
- Update status on Twitter and propagate message to Facebook
- Update status on Facebook and propagate message to Twitter
- Have a “wrapper” application send messages to both Twitter and Facebook in parallel
Options 1 and 3 are ruled out because you can only update your Facebook status through their website. However, option 2 is possible by using Facebook Mobile and Twitterbook.
Facebook Mobile allows you to browse Facebook on your phone, providing pretty much the same functionality as a conventional web browser. Most importantly, you can update your status from anywhere, as long as you have a data connection.
With Twitterbook, you need access to a web-facing server to host the twitterbook.php script. (Mine is at srhaber.com/twitterbook.php).
On your mobile phone, create a bookmark for both Facebook Mobile and your Twitterboook install. Anytime you update your Facebook status, browse your phone to the twitterbook script to propagate the message to Twitter.
Browsing to two webpages sucks, I know, but… it saves you from otherwise sending an SMS message (Twitter only).
Note: This trick obviously works on computers as well, but it’s more fun when your mobile. 
Shaun Haber
