I just picked up a Mimo 710 monitor for no other reason than it looked like a really cool gadget and after a couple days am liking it quite a bit. If you're not familiar with it, it is a small monitor that is USB powered and can be set up in portrait or landscape mode.
I recently set it up as a side monitor just for Tweetie and it feels like it was designed just for that app. Here's a couple shots of my current setup.
MessageLabs, a division of Symantec, said today the presence of shortened URLs in spam has skyrocketed over the past few days and now appears in more than two percent of all spam.
Matt Sergeant, anti-spam technologist at Message Labs: “The entire trust model of clicking on the URL is completely broken. You can’t trust any URL on there.”
While pundits have been discussing for a while now how URL-shorteners are highly advantageous to spammers, I was still floored when I saw the chart in this article. Look at the massive spike over the last week of spam that is using URL-shortening services as a technique to evade filters.
Matt Sergeant's comment is dead on - the whole model of "trusting" URLs as an arbiter of quality is going away. Even if the URL-shortening services shake out to a point where there are only a couple big players left who are able to provide some level of trust / protection, the "average user" will not be informed enough to identify what is good and what is bad. This is the start of a whole new round in the spam wars.
Leander Kahney on The Cult of Mac:
MacMedics, a repair shop in Millersville, Maryland, recently serviced a Macintosh IIci, which was on the blink after two decades of faithful service...The machine was putting up funny patterns on the monitor. The client thought it was the screen, but it was actually the main logic board. He’d been using the machine for 20 years — 20 years! — and had no interest in upgrading to a modern Mac.
But the best line of the article has to be:
MacMedics had to rescue the customer’s data. He’d not performed one backup in two decades. And here’s the best part, he had only 2.2 MB of data to rescue.
This story makes me want to find an old Mac gathering dust somewhere, so I can try to fire it up.
Twitter your Flickr
Tweet! Tweet! Tweet! We’ve launched our Flickr2Twitter integration.
Share your Flickr content either via “upload by email” or feature existing Flickr content in your Twitter stream.
If you’d like to Twitter your Flickr then check out the following three FAQs for easy setup and use:
How do I Twitter my Flickr photos?
Can I post to Flickr and Twitter from my mobile?
How do I Twitter from Flickr?
Cool stuff. I am glad to see this go live -- particularly to post via my phone (although a Posterous purist would say Posterous can already do this and more ;)
Don't forget to add the Flickr2Twitter email address to your phone's contacts. Your personal flickr email address will most likely not be easy to remember.
We’ve reviewed hundreds of affordable applications over the years, from tools with just a few key features to complex software that can compete with more-expensive programs. Some of the Gems we’ve found are applications we can’t live without. As a grand finale to GemFest 2009, here’s a list of some of our all-time favorite Mac Gems.
Mac Gems is easily one of the best columns in Macworld.com, and I was excited to see them produce a "best of" list of for Mac Gems. I've probably tried and/or used ~50% of these apps. I will be downloading the rest. You should definitely check it out.
The Maine Department of Education said Tuesday that it plans to expand to high school students a program that has provided Apple notebook computers to all of the state's middle school students for the past 7 years, creating "the world's largest educational technology program of its kind." As part of the deal, the Maine Department of Education announced it has placed an order for more than 64,000 MacBooks for students and faculty in grades 7 through 12, and will place an additional order for up to 7,000 more notebooks in the coming weeks.
I think it's time to go back to school... in Maine.
One of the concerns I had with using Posterous for my blog was ensuring I had my own backup of my posts given the company is still in start-up mode and the content is hosted on their servers. Luckily, they have an API, and if you are a Mac user it is very easy to use Automator to create a daily backup of your content. You can set this up in about five to ten minutes and while it could be more sophisticated (see my comments at the end of this post), this probably works for a majority of the use cases.
Every now and then I need to copy text into my Twitter client app and need to know if I am bumping against the 140 character limit. I wrote this quick applescript to simplify my life. It counts the number of characters in the clipboard and subtracts that number from 140, so you know if your text is too long, too short, or right on target:
display dialog ("Total characters: " & (count (the clipboard)) & "
" & "Remaining for Twitter: " & (140 - (count (the clipboard)))) with title "Character Count"
The best way to use this (outside of using a third-party app that can trigger Applescripts) is to save it to your ~/Library/Scripts folder after you have enabled the Scripts Menu in the OS X menu bar, so you have access to it from any application.
NetNewsWire has been my primary tool for reading news and RSS feeds for awhile now. That said, I never could figure out a good system to deal with streaming or high-volume news feeds given it is designed, as are most RSS readers, around an inbox paradigm. I must have subscribed and unsubscribed to high-volume feeds like TechCrunch or Mashable a half dozen times, only to give up when I saw the unread counts steadily go to double, or even triple digits.
Co-Founder of Onward Search and Onward Healthcare. Big-time Apple fan and a general technology aficionado.
For my online technology journal, visit kenclark.me, but for more info on my work, check out my profile on LinkedIn.
