Jul 31
How-To Guides David
facebook, feed, news, status, Twitter, update
If you use Twitter and Facebook, you may use the Twitter Facebook application for sending your Twitter updates to your Facebook status. Depending on how much you post to Twitter this might be somewhat noisy to your Facebook friends .
There’s a compromise! Search Facebook for an application called “Selective Twitter Status” and install it (make sure you remove the Twitter app straight afterwards though!). This application will scan your Twitter feed for updates, and only add tweets that include the hash-tag “#fb” to your Facebook feed. In practice, I’ve found this to be a little slower at updating Facebook than the official Twitter application, but this shouldn’t be a problem.
Jul 30
Website Updates David
Quick blog post to see if my TwttierFeed is correctly set up to with the Selective Twitter Status Facebook application!
Jul 29
Personal David
3g, bandwidth, internet, mobile, vodafone, wireless
Ethernet unplugged
Recently, my home router broke down, and for reasons that don’t need going into here, it would be a week before I could replace it. This left me with the prospect of only having internet access via a Vodafone PCMCIA 3G data card which I had as a free gift when I bought my laptop in December 2005. It’s a fairly slow modem, and I was paying by the megabyte (although finding out how much per megabyte I’d be paying became a whole other problem for another blog post).
I received this free 3G modem with my laptop.
This meant I had to use all those bits of bandwidth carefully. My data rationing was unplanned, and required some quick thinking about all the things I use and have running automatically. The interesting thing was to see what I immediately went without, and the things I felt I couldn’t do without.
First of all, most obvious, no more media. Primarily, this addressed streaming media Spotify and Youtube, but it also meant I had to go without my podcasts too. Many audio podcasts are easily 40MB or more, and video podcasts can easily eat up 500MB. The next thing to do was all my internet dependant back ups. Most importantly my off-site backup to Jungledisk had to be stopped. Then I had to cancel my background tasks that would download backup copies of my PIM data and this very website.
The things I found I couldn’t do without were E-mail, Twitter and Facebook. These represent just about all of my communication and social interaction on-line. Although, compromises were available. For e-mail, using my e-mail application rather than web-mail cut down on some precious bits. Then, both Twitter and Facebook have mobile sites, which are available to desktop browsers, they helped a lot. The only full-blown best-on-broadband sites I needed were for things like ordering my groceries for the week.
In the end, I called Vodafone, and in all the time I’d been on their connection, I’d only consumed approximately 250MB, for the whole week. I could have done better, but I didn’t think it was bad at all. There is more to tell about my Vodafone mobile connection, but that’s for another post!
It’s been a long time since I’ve been on a dial up connection, and since I’ve been on broadband, I’ve never had to ration myself to only using so much data. The expereince of limiting everything I did really showed me how important high-speed/broadband internet is. Without high speed, and unmetered access, almost everything we do would be impractical. Never mind the luxury of streaming Youtube and the like, but even the ability to download new software and updates would really limit all of us, and would make the internet a more dangerous place by virtue of less security updates getting where they need to go.
Jul 27
How-To Guides David
camera, digital, e-mail, flickr, micro sd, photography, sd, sharing, upload
An Eye-fi card
If you’re really into photography and sharing your work on the web, then you’ve probably heard of the Eye-Fi SD card, which not only stores your photos but transmits them to the web via Wi-Fi, all from within the SD card itself. It really is a very smart solution.
Micro SD card with a Micro SD to SD adapter
Although, if you don’t want spend the money, or you know you’ll be beyond the range of a WiFi hotspot, I have a simple alternative for you. You’ll need a mobile phone with a Micro SD card slot and a reasonable data plan.
Rather than using the standard SD type card in your camera, buy yourself a 2GB Micro SD card, along with a Micro SD to SD adapter. Using this adapter, loaded with a Micro SD card, makes no difference to your camera. When you’re ready to post your photos, simply take the adapter out of the camera, and the Micro SD card from the adapter and slot it into your phone, then connect to the internet via your 3G connection. Once you’ve done all that, simply locate the files from your camera in your e-mail or browser, and start uploading!
Jul 24
How-To Guides David
firefox, security
Okay, so we all know we can check where a link is going to send you by hovering the mouse over it and looking at the status bar of your browser (you did know that didn’t you?).
So that’s one tool we have to defend against phishing, although what about web forms? Firefox doesn’t show you where you’ll get bumped after clicking on that submit button.
Well, with this add-on, now you can! FormFox will display the target URL of a form if you just hover your mouse over the corresponding button.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1579
I’ve also found out that this functionality is built-in to Internet Explorer 7 too.
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