|
|
March 16th, 2010
-
- I’m a dabbler. Always dabbling. I have no qualms about handing over my username and password to any webapp that looks useful / worth 5 minutes of my time. As a result i have A LOT of member accounts all across the internet. Most of these new sites or services get tossed aside, either immediately, or in time. But a few persist. These are the web apps that are really using web technology to make life easier and fore fun to live. Yes, a website CAN do that!
-
- In an attempt to try and brain-dump some of my workflow i’ve decided to write a series of posts on my favorite web apps and how they have touched my life…
  HARVEST — The single best business expense i’ve made has been my subscription to Harvests time-tracking and invoicing web app. I use Harvest to log ALL my time spent working, coding by client and project as i go. Then, when it comes time to invoice the client, a couple clicks generates a professional-looking invoice, and a couple more to send the invoice off to the client, No paper, no postage. They include an option to receive Paypal payments on your invoices, if you’re into that.
Harvest has also recently gotten off their duffs and released an official iPhone app that is just a delight to use! The old un-official app never quite synced right, so i would end up with timers running overnight. If only those were billable hours.… *sigh*
One great tip i heard from a fellow Harvest user was to set up your workday in Harvest, create a timer for each task you plan to accomplish that day. As you complete a task, stop the timer and just start the next one, like a chess timer.
Another productivity tool that has become more and more useful is
 Dropbox - Too lazy to reach into your pocket to pull out your flash drive? Then you need Dropbox! This little swiss army knife is little more than a secure, personal, 2GB flash drive that lives on the net. Where it gets interesting is the companion software (available for Mac, Windows, and Linux) which makes your Dropbox folder appear as a folder in your Home directory. Just drag & drop. Love it!
I even have mine set up to allow me to trigger downloads on my home computer from anywhere. Very cool/handy.
If you want to check out Dropbox, consider using my referral link, as we will both get a nice little storage bump on our accounts 
Please feel free to share your faves too. i’m always interested in new and cool web technologies so share in the comments!
March 9th, 2010
It’s not as if you asked, but here are my latest delicious links, from February 16th through March 9th:
- Slinkware –Ummm, this is so dang cool. So i set it up on my desktop at home, and then later i’m at the coffee shop on my lappie and i need a file i know is still sitting in my downloads folder. I fired up Slink and was effortlessly connected to my home network. Shared drive, the printer, even Screen Sharing worked perfectly, as if i were sitting in my living room. So sweet. So easy.
February 2nd, 2010
It’s not as if you asked, but here are my latest delicious links, from December 30th through February 2nd:
- Send a FAX by E-mail –
Yes, thats right. SEND a FAX by EMAIL! No registration, no cost. Just follow the easy instructions on the page. I love this, it’s like the blu-ray version of BETAMAX.
- The Card Game — How Visa, Using Fees Behind Its Debit Card, Dominates a Market — Series — NYTimes.com –
This detailed look at the world of credit/debit cards is a must read for anyone who uses a card to pay for anything. Ever.
The system is broken and will never get fixed if we don’t even know that it’s broken because it’s too damn obfuscated to make any sense out of it. But it sure is convenient.… Just remember: Convenience is expensive.
- 10 Tax Deductions Freelancers Can Make | FreelanceSwitch –
Some of these are common sense, some are not. But worth the short read if you are a freelancer.
The comments are lively and informative as well, some extra pointers in there too.
- Virtualization: Windows on a Mac –
this has been a hot topic as droves of Windows devotees cast off the dogma of an ancient regime and begin adopting Macs. RobG lays out a comprehensive guide here covering the 3 major players in Mac virtualization, including how to pick the right one for you, in-depth looks at each one, caveats, suggestions, and more. Very useful resource if you are just getting into the wild, woolly world of OS virtualization.
I just started playing with Parallels 5 and i really like the Coherence mode that allows me to run Windows apps as if they were just another Mac app on my machine, seamless, unobtrusive, and COOL!
- Save MySQL! » Customers pay the bill –
Whether you know it or not this has much to do with the neutrality of our internet. Free software is used to run MOST of the internet. And MySQL is a big part of what makes that possible. It puts the “M” in LAMP.
The acquisition of MySQL by Oracle would be nothing short of monopoly. Oracle DBs are the industry standard. MySQL is the scrappy open-source alternative that won’t go away. If Oracle acquires MySQL you can be sure that it will finally go away.
- Move Your Money –
A worthy New Years Resolution: Move you money away from “un-failable” banking giants and into your community.
December 25th, 2009
 READ THIS: Important instructions on getting PRESENTS…
You lucky, lucky people! You don’t even know.
Merry everything to everyone, and i truly mean that.
Because i am feeling so generous i’ve gone ahead and made presents for EVERYONE I KNOW (and even some folks i don’t know, i’m sure)!
To claim your own gift simply click through to the Two Thousand and Fine page of my site, there you will find more info and links to download your gift(s). Feel free to download one or all of them, whichever sounds most appealing to you really.
December 16th, 2009
It’s not as if you asked, but here are my latest delicious links, from December 7th through December 16th:
- Dive Into HTML5 –
Great reference material on HTML5. If you’re into that sort of thing.
- WhoSampled — Discover and Discuss Music Samples and Cover Songs –
This is actually a really cool music-nerd website. Search songs, find the samples, listen to the original tracks, listen to the sampled version, simultaneously if you like!
To test it out i simply did a search on DJ Shadow, what ensued was a couple blissful hours of digging through youtube videos, old soul & R&B recordings, and in general losing myself in the sounds. Time well-spent if you ask me.
- 10/GUI –
A thorough reexamination of human-computer interaction. Including where we’ve come from, where we are, and one very intriguing proposal for how we move forward.
If you are in any way interested in how humans interact with machines, this video will be interesting to you.
December 6th, 2009
It’s not as if you asked, but here are my latest delicious links, from November 25th through December 6th:
- Browse fonts | Typekit –
Typekit brings together the @font-face CSS selector and freely available open-source fonts to allow the REAL webdesign to begin.
Typekit serves up the font files to your website in a secure way, and ensures that you won’t be inadvertently violating any IP rights on fonts that you are using, OR insecurely serving them on your site for other to steal.
The web interface is slick, there are a bunch of good typefaces to choose from (even for the free version of the service), and there’s even a couple wordpress plugins for Typekit already. So what are you waiting for?
- Myths & Misconceptions About Grid Systems –
Are you a designer? Do you grid? A relevant article on AisleOne discusses some myths & truths about grib-based design (for print OR web) and offer resources and examples.
I especially like the fluid grid resources.
- Making A Glove Work With A Touch Screen –
A handy instructable (pun intended).
I do hate having to remove gloves to fiddle with the iPhone. If i can find some of this conductive thread i may try this one.
December 3rd, 2009
It’s official, Google has taken over the internet.
If you missed the news, or just don’t care, Google announced the launch of their new DNS service. In their own words, you could think of DNS as “the switchboard of the Internet”. The move to offer this new service is a vertically integrated move for Google to control yet more bits of your overall interneting experience.
Recently, the Googs has publicly proclaimed their interest in making the internet a faster place to be. The introduction of Google DNS seems to be a step towards making that a reality. What—reality? Well, i was curious to see how the Google’s new DNS servers measured up to existing DNS providers. So i fired up namebench and plugged the Google DNS server addys into it. Here’s what i got:
 DNS Response Time Graph Highlighted are the Google servers. Not too impressive, huh? Contributing factors to this data are my admittedly crappy Qwest DSL connection, and location. But even so, it looks like the service is not running at top speed just yet, so hold off on switching your nameservers. Perhaps with time the server response will improve?
 Google DNS Server Test The above screenshot shows test details for the Google DNS servers. Of note from this data are the “shares cache with” lines in the right column. These are DNS servers that have essentially been subsumed by the Google’s new DNS servers. Dwarfed, overshadowed, gobbled up.
If you are interested in testing the Goolge DNS servers from your own connection here are the nameserver addresses to use:
Easy, right? I’ll give them that much. You can use the previously mentioned namebench, which tests your existing nameservers or any you provide against others in your area as well as big ones like OpenDNS and UltraDNS. If you’re CLI inclined then a simple traceroute will show you every hop from your ‘puter to the WWW and everything along the way. Like this:
$ traceroute -v 8.8.8.8
You can also perform a traceroute using the Network Utility app included in OS X (it’s in Applications/Utilities).
December 1st, 2009
 It’s December 1st. Let the year-end retrospectives begin! For the rest of 2009 we will be hearing all about the top 5, 10, 100 everythings of 2009. And who better to kick that off than the undisputed keepers of our collective awareness: the Google.
The Google Zeitgeist is the compendium—boiled-down, condensed, and pre-digested—of the years hottest trends across the internet, based almost entirely on what we are searching for at any given time. Check out trends by category or region, it’s fascinating. A true vox populi for the internet age.
For me personally, this years Zeitgeist has succeeded mainly in making me feel incredibly out of touch with the mainstream (srsly, who IS Taylor Swift?)
via the Official Google Blog
November 25th, 2009
 A study in extremes? A marketing fad-wagon? A good idea?
Promising a “vacation in a bottle” or an “acupuncture session in every can,” makers of anti-energy drinks, as they’re known, say that after bailouts, foreclosures and Ponzi schemes, Americans nowadays would rather chill out than tweak out. To help us do so, they’re spiking their new beverages with ingredients such as chamomile, melatonin, and valerian root — all known for their supposed calming effects.
To be sure, there are definitely some benefits to offering modern humanity more ways to just calm down. Introducing the mainstream to plant medicines such as valerian root and kava kava root are also pluses as I see it. However, these treatments need to be more widely understood and used if we hope to break our toxic dependence on western medicines “treat the symptom, not the disease” disease.
As anti-energy drinks gain in popularity we’ll surely begin to see ever more research on the compounds that give the drinks their mellow. This will lead to warning labels, conflicting health advice from competing drink makers’ marketing departments, and fear-mongering of potent plant-based medicines such as valerian and kava. Further, there have already been studies which have proven that kava lactones, the active ingredient in kava kava can be damaging to the liver (made worse if combined with alcohol!) . This research just underscores the importance of using these herbs in their whole state, rather than extracting the potenet lactones and divorcing the medicine from the complex of vitamins, minerals, and flavinoids that mitigate and balance these strong medicines.
Melatonin is also being used in these drinks, and while melatonin is a naturally-occurring hormone in our brains, it’s the one that regulates our sleep. Messing with the bodies equilibrium by introducing added doses of hormones, amino acids, etc. can have all sorts of undesired effects (i.e. insomnia).
Ultimately, i am of the opinion that this newest trend in beverage marketing will be the most destructive yet. These products WILL be abused because they are mind/body altering substances and people seems to really love that shit.
via Daily Finance
November 18th, 2009
It’s not as if you asked, but here are my latest delicious links, from November 14th through November 18th:
|
|
