Archive for the Technology category.
As you know I love Twitter. OK there are some things i find annoying, the lack of groups is one.
The main thing is the lack of uptake amoungst my “real” friends and colleagues. OK, this is in part due to the short sightedness of most customer sites using WebSense or proxy rules to block it. I have just been further depressed by Twitter Local a great site that shows you the geographocal location of tweets. I have seen similar sites on the macro scale, for example: TwitterVision gives you a world map with tweets appearing all over it.
Twitter Local works at the other end of the scale, you give it a location and a radius and it shows you “local” tweets. So, why am I depressed: I can only find two other twitterers within 5 miles of me!
tweet tweet
Fact
I rarely “surf” to random sites any more, any site that wants my attention must have an RSS feed that I can put into Google Reader.
Fact
I am intrigued by the social networking sites, a few are listed here. LinkedIn is one that I can see the point of.
LinkedIn have recently introduced an RSS feed for my network updates, so it ticks both boxes. What’s the downside? I’m not sure what it is. It could be that LinkedIn is a work/professional focussed network rather than personal. It could be the immediacy of the updates from my colleagues. It’s strange but I feel crossed between a stalker and a voyeur in a way that I just don’t get from feeds from other sites.
I have found myself using Google Documents more and more over the last few months.
One of the areas that was severely lacking was the ability to share parts of that content.
That is all changed now with Google Gadgets.
For example, for my training I had resorted to n HTML table on my training page http://www.rossgoodman.com/fundraising/training/ whilst not difficult it is not exactly elegant.
Now I am recording my times in a Google spreadsheet and using two gadgets, one to show a tabular list if the data and another to show an interactive time series chart, the same as is used on google finance.
Cool Huh !
I have just fine tuned my working environment and have come up with the ideal setup.
OK the monitor heights are a bit wonky but I very rarely span monitors, I like to have discrete items open in each and focus on one monitor at a time.
In this picture I have outlook split between monitors 1 & 2, thunderbird between 2 and 3 and firefox crossing all 3.
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I treated myself to an external flash for my camera, specifically a Nikon SB-800.
This allows me to play around with having the flash off camera. Mucking around produced the photo above, which also gives a sneak preview to the “face fungus” which I am currently cultivating.
As you may or may not know, i love the concept of openid which allows you to have a single authorisation location for multiple sites (including this blog). It also allows you to have a single profile page. It has just scared me the number of places where my profile photo may be, I’m going to spend the next hour seeing how many places I have put it!
OK, in 1 hour I have found 16 discrete sites, and I have not even started with the forums that I frequent !
One of the core principles in Flickr is having the ability to mark any photo that you see as being a favourite.
This page http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/surf.php from Big Huge Labs lets you explore this concept further. Choose a contact, one of your own or just a random person and it will display some of their favourite photos.
Click on one to see it large. It then joms to the owner of the large photo and shows you their favourites and so on, and so on and so on……..
This is such a simple concept and so addictive.
You have been warned !
I have just “finished?” my first twitterbot!
If you send it a direct message with part of the name of someone who works at Eclectic it will send you their contact details as a return direct message.
The API is very straight forward, only my lack of bash skills slowed me down.
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I first heard of OpenID ages ago.
You can read more about it here
I have now added a plugin that makes this site OpenID aware.
If you have an openID then feel free to use that to sign up, otherwise you can continue to use standard user names and passwords.
The list of other sites that use OpenID is growing here, long may it continue to grow !
I have started to have lots of issues whith the Yahoo toolbar for Firefox.
As a travelling consultant who regularly flits between home, office and multiple client sites and multiple PC’s at each site it is a boon to be able to access my bookmarks especially at any PC I use. For YEARS I have been using the Yahoo Bookmarks service, and since it was launched I have been using the Yahoo Companion or Yahoo Toolbar.
Recently it has stopped showing me my buttons on the toolbar:
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I finally figured out how the e-mail works on my mobile phone.
I could always receive messages on my phone but I could never reply or send.
It was an off the cuff remark on a forum post that triggered the lightbulb moment. I can only send via my ISP’s mail server if I am connected via my ISP! Obvious with hind sight !
All I have to do is send all my messages via the Orange mail server.
Works a treat!
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