Entries Tagged 'Technology' ↓

Why should you care about appearing smart on Twitter? Because the people who hire, promote, fire, date, marry, and divorce you will all read your tweets (updates) at some point. It’s always a good idea to put your best foot forward. Why not do the same on Twitter? Why not make an effort to appear as smart as you can?

A “visible IQ” is a short way of describing the sum total of everything I can point to and say “see, this person [you] is really smart.” As a reader scans your latest tweets, they get an impression of you. You might seem smart, funny, thoughtful, or perhaps even boring, hateful, and sloppy. Twitter makes it easy to seem less intelligent than you truly are for 3 reasons:

• No context – You don’t get to explain yourself.
• Real-time pressure – Everybody is updating NOW!
• Sloppy status quo – Nobody else cares. Why should you?

If you’d like to take some practical steps to make sure you’re doing everything you can to seem smart, try these tips to boost your visible IQ on Twitter:

1. Abandon Predictive Text (T9)

Don’t let your cellphone complete any texts being sent out as a tweet. It might seem like a good idea to let a bit of software choose how you complete your words. But only if you’re willing to be seen on Twitter as apathetic and sloppy. When you’ve only got 140 characters to make your point, every letter of every word needs to be in the right spot if you want your point to hit home.

2. Write Just For Twitter

Posting tweets from Facebook and myriad other social platforms initially looks like a good idea. It actually makes you look like you’re lazy and don’t care much for your audience. Instead of blurting blurbs to the nearest platform and letting RSS spread your thoughts, give Twitter some dedicated attention. After all, didn’t you want to add a few words of extra context to your Facebook status? Take advantage of that extra space! Take Twitter’s space restrictions as a challenge to write particularly brilliant 140-character pieces. Genius!

3. Sidestep Stoner Syndrome

Every complex thought reduced to 140 characters will end up sounding like it was pulled from a hookah. That brilliant thought you had earlier today about how the world could learn a lot just by watching ducks swim? You didn’t seem smarter when you tweeted it. You sounded like you were really, really high. All those inspirational quotes about failure being nothing more than success wrapped in bacon? They make you sound high. This isn’t your fault. Not at all! You can blame it on Twitter’s 140-character limits and our common human tendency to say as many profound things each day as possible. If you focus on sharing your perspective on simpler ideas, you’ll seem insightful and perhaps even witty.

4. Mark Quotes Clearly

If you must quote others, clearly mark the quotes as such. Otherwise, you’re in a prime spot to look like you’re trying pass off other’s words as your own. What’s worse, you might tweet an unmarked quote that seems funny or ironic to you at the time but it may come off as stupid or immature to readers. Look smarter by giving credit and using quotation marks “quote.” for tweets you didn’t come up with yourself. Hopefully others will do the same and you’ll get additional attention for the brilliant tweets you’ve been crafting!

5. Share Only The Best Content

You may have been told that you must share everything your friends are sharing if you want to be a good community member. The quantity of sharing is up to your personal beliefs. The quality of the things you share, however, isn’t up for discussion. If you share low-quality content, you look like an idiot. It doesn’t matter if your best friend published an article. If the article is terrible, you’ll not only damage your own reputation but that of your friend by sharing the article. If you want to be seen as an intelligent and savvy Twitter user, focus on sharing quality.

What tip would you add for Twitter users looking to look their very best for possible employers? (or life partners!) It’d be great to know what you think a smart tweet looks like. Link to your favorite in a comment!

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I'm an editor here at Stepcase Lifehack. I know the value of long walks, good books, joyful repartee, and a well-made martini. Say hello in the comments here, find me on my blog or hit me up for a follow on Twitter.

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Ever since I started at Lifehack in mid-2007, we’ve compiled year-end lists of the best web 2.0 applications to come out in the previous year (here’s my list for for 2007 and Joel Falconer’s for 2008). The development of ever-more-complex software accessed online via a web browser is a huge boon for personal productivity, since it offers an increasingly nomadic workforce “always-on” access to the data, documents, and software they need. At the same time, low-cost and free online services offer an affordable alternative to costly office suites, collaboration tools, and graphics programs, especially for the vast majority of us who don’t need 90% of the functionality of an MS Word or an Adobe Photoshop.

This year I searched in vain for 10 great new apps to fill my list. Don’t get me wrong, there are some fantastic contenders. I’m particularly enjoying TeuxDeux, a new to-do list app that lets you schedule tasks on particular days and view your whole week at once. And of course Google’s Wave has everyone enthralled, even if nobody’s quite sure what it’s for.  We also saw evolutionary improvements of webware classics: apps like Remember the Milk came out of beta, Google Docs and Acrobat.com added presentations, and some services, like Nozbe, released 2.0 or higher versions that revamped functionality and/or interfaces.

But by and large 2009 saw few new web applications that really stood out. So rather than try to compile a list of new web applications, I thought I’d take a look at the changes across the field of web programming that are transforming web applications from “gee, neat” proofs of concept into genuinely useful  tools. These are the trends that are changing the Internet into a platform for getting work done, often in surprising new ways, and if it’s still too soon to move everything online (I’m writing this on MS Word 2010, for example), these trends are at least moving us towards that future.

1. Export

2009 was the year that web programmers realized that holding their customer’s data hostage wasn’t the best way to build brand equity. Instead, a growing number of services are offering easy ways to get all your documents, images, videos, or other data out of their applications. Just as important, they’re doing this using standard formats that you can use elsewhere, making it much easier to switch to another application, share with others who use different tools, or make a meaningful evaluation of a service. Google’s Data Liberation Front is helping to make this a priority at Google, for example with the addition of Google Docs’ new “Export All” function which allows you to download your entire work history in the format of your choice, and setting the standard that Google’s competitors will have to reach to remain competitive.

2. Synchronization and Sharing

In addition to exporting data all together, the ability to share data from one application to another is finally starting to take off. Developers are realizing, finally, that users often have multiple streams of data that they need to be able to access in one single place (such as calendar data from several sites), and vice versa – that we often need to access the same data in several different places (like sending a status update to several social networking sites). In 2009, the promise of RSS and other data feed standards (e.g. Atom, iCal) finally started to be realized, with services like Twitvite offering one-click methods of inserting events into various online calendars. Likewise, numerous services have released plugins or widgets to access their data from other online apps, like Remember the Milk’s integration with Google Calendar. The centralization of authorization for various services using Facebook Connect or Sign in with Twitter, and the increasing adoption of the authentication standard OAuth, are finally starting to fulfill the function that OpenID was supposed to perform, allowing easy and secure transfer of data and login credentials between sites.

In addition to swapping data between online apps, a growing number of apps are bridging the divide between online services and the desktop by allowing access though and synchronization with desktop programs. Google’s Sync Services synchronizes calendar data and (on some platforms) contacts with desktop applications like Outlook and Apple’s iCal, although until contact synchronization is universal and they add task synchronization, it’s utility is limited for most users. At the forefront of the web/desktop integration movement is Twitter and the dozens, if not hundreds, of applications for every platform that have added layers of functionality to the service using its API. Twitter’s API has raised expectations for every other online service, and it won’t be long now before applications that don’t offer APIs simply cannot compete with those that do.

3. Maturity

The lack of new applications to get excited over is counterbalanced by the stability, security, and usability of apps that have been under development for 2, 3, or more years now. As a few applications in each area have come to dominate, it’s become harder for new applications to break in, but the existing applications have become better. Just as importantly, the business practices of the companies behind these services have improved (somewhat). New Twitter users experience nothing like the almost daily downtime that plagues the service just a year ago. Acquisitions are handled much more smoothly, with Google’s graceful transition from Grand Central to Google Voice setting the tone (and their graceless handling of the recent acquisition of collaboration tool and Wave rival EtherPad quickly set right). Although privacy concerns are still unsettled, with companies like Facebook repeatedly having a hard time fighting the temptation to exploit their users’ data for all it’s worth), new standards for privacy and security are emerging, and companies that violate their users’ expectations that their data will be backed up and kept private are being called out and avoided.

4. Hidden technology

One sign of the maturity of online applications is that the technology used to create them is increasingly invisible. Applications no longer feel like Ruby on Rails applications, or advertise their “AJAX-y” interfaces as a feature. In large part, this is a triumph of design over engineering; frills like text boxes fading slowly out of view are being replaced by more immediately usable, and useful, design. This means the engineers can focus on what they do best: getting stuff to work better.

5. Social

It’s almost impossible to conceive of an online application these days that doesn’t forefront sharing, collaboration, or integration with social tools like Twitter and Facebook for publishing and commenting. The pinnacle of this trend is, of course, Google’s Wave, which as thousands of early adopters have discovered, doesn’t do much of anything until you start adding your social network. New applications like Aardvark (which allows you to pose questions to targeted members of your social network) are focusing on refining this process, allowing for greater control and selectivity over which parts of your social network are most relevant to particular tasks.

6. Mobile integration

There’s an app for that! With mobile phones edging ever closer to the dream of the portable supercomputer, the promise of “access anywhere” has come more and more to mean “access from my smartphone”.  While web-enabled phones are generally up to the task of accessing online applications directly via their browsers, the small-screen experience of websites designed for widescreen desktop monitors usually isn’t very satisfying. Increasingly, every online application worth its salt is offering mobile apps for iPhones, Blackberries, Palms, and Android phones, the best of them – like Evernote – making good use of smartphone tools like voice recorders, GPS, and photo and video capabilities.

7. Location, location, location

GPS is following the path digital cameras took a few years ago – practically everything has one. Mobile phones, cameras, cars – can it be much longer before media players and pens come with GPS built in? The ubiquity of GPS – and GPS-alike services using cell tower triangulation – has made location-sensitive search and other applications possible. So you can find the nearest coffee shop, search for the lowest gas prices in the area, or have your shopping list served up to you when you walk in the grocery store’s front door. While services like FourSquare seem to have little function besides cluttering my Twitter stream with notices that some people go to the donut shop waaaaaay to often (I’m sorry, I meant to say that people have obtained really, really important titles of distinction based on their frequent patronage of places of business), it’s easy to see the potential of services like this. (Although as noted above, we’re still working out the privacy implications.)

8. Online storage and anywhere access

As services open up their APIs, online storage becomes more useful. Where your Box.net or SkyDrive accounts have been, up to recently, closed silos that allowed you to upload and download files and that’s about it, today they act as repositories of files you can access through other services. Box.net files can be opened with, worked on with, and saved from Zoho applications, meaning that working on a single document from several locations is not just possible, it’s practical. Also, online services are drastically increasing the amount of storage they offer; services that just a year ago offered storage measured in megabytes not offer 10, 25, 50, or more gigabytes, meaning that you can back up, share, or use your entire Documents folder.

9. Automation

Two of my favorite online applications are Live Mesh and Dropbox, neither of which I actively “use”. They’re just there, doing their thing. For example, I have a Dropbox folder I share with the Stepcase home office in Hong Kong; if I need a file, it’s just there, and if I make changes, they automatically get them. Same thing with Mesh – everything in my laptop’s Documents folder is “meshed” to my desktop, so anything I create on the go is just automatically waiting for me when I sit down at my desktop. Google Sync works the same way on my Blackberry – I add an event on Google Calendar, or a Contact in Gmail, and a little while later it’s just on my Blackberry. This is the revival of “Push” technology, and we’ll see more and more of it as online apps become mainstream – or they won’t become mainstream.

10. Ubiquitous Internet

This isn’t a quality of online apps as much as a quality of the real world in which we use them, but it’s an important factor nonetheless. Wifi is nearly everywhere, and high speed cellular Internet is just about everywhere wifi isn’t. This has already changed the way people use the Internet – such as the location-sensitive apps I mentioned above – and will continue to do so.

That’s how 2009 looks to me, anyway. What emerging trends have you noticed that have made online applications better or more useful? And what do you think is on the horizon – what will I be writing about at the end of 2010? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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Christmas is just over a week away, and no matter how organized you are, I bet there are a few people on your list that you just can’t figure out a gift for. In the spirit of giving, then, I offer these suggestion – each of which is, as of 12/16, available to ship in time for Christmas. (All prices are in US dollars.)

Kindle It’s no secret that we’re fond of the Kindle ‘round the Lifehack halls. A single device that can carry a library of books, magazines, newspapers, and blog content? What’s not to love – and what could be more Lifehack-y? This year, the Kindle got improved battery life, PC and iPhone companion apps (with a Mac app on its way), native PDF support, and a big brother in the form of the Kindle DX. If you really love someone, you’ll get them a Kindle! (You reading this, dad?) ($259; $489 for the DX)

Flip MinoHD Shoot incredible-looking high-def video with this camera that’s so tiny you’ll never have a reason not to carry it along with you. With 8GB of built-in memory, you can shoot up to 2 hours of video; downloading to your PC is as easy as plugging in the flip-out USB jack. ($229 list; on sale for $199 at Amazon right now)

Lilliput Mini USB Monitor This 7” monitor is so cool I can’t even stand it. Powered entirely by USB, the monitor sits next to your main monitor to hold… well, whatever you want. Photoshop tools, Windows gadgets (or widgets, or whatever they’re called these days), your todo list, notes, your media player controls – I’m sure your loved ones can think of something to do with the extra real estate. Works with Windows PCs or Intel Macs. ($79.99)

D-Link DIR-685 Xtreme N Storage Router You know what’s ugly? A wireless router, that’s what. Who wants that thing sitting on their bookshelf or entertainment center? Well, this router solves that problem with a built-in 3.2” digital picture frame, showing off your favorite photos as it serves up your web pages and print jobs. Oh, by the way – you can also add a 2.5” hard drive, making it into a network-attached storage drive that can backup files from all the computers on your network, or act as a media server sending music and video to any PC, Xbox, PS3, or other plug-n-play device on your network. You’re forgiven if by now you’ve forgotten that it’s still a router. ($249.99 list; $214.17 at Amazon)

Logitech V550 Cordless Laser Mouse for Notebooks I’ve been using one of these for about 6 months now, and I’m absolutely in love with it. It’s on the large side for a notebook mouse (which is good, since I’m on the large side for a person) but still quite a bit smaller than a typical desktop mouse. The USB dongle is literally a USB plug and about 1/4” of electronics, so it doesn’t stick out of the side of my notebook and get in my way. The scroll wheel is a hefty metal job which you can press down on (hard) to release a clutch that lets it roll freely – so you can shoot up and down long documents with the flick of a finger. The scroll wheel also tilts left and right (which I have set to go “back” and “forward”, which is AWESOME for web surfing) and a little button behind the scroll wheel can be set to your choice of about a dozen different functions. Some kind of secret Santa’s elves technology allows it to go for a year on a single change of batteries, which ain’t half bad! ($39.95)

OGIO Hip Hop Messenger Bag I’ve been lusting over this bag at my local Best Buy for a while (‘cause I’m fly like that!) but can’t convince myself I need yet another shoulder bag. (Yet. I’m weak, I’ll cave eventually). Made to hold a 15” laptop (and I just happen to have a 15” laptop…) this messenger-style bag has about a million pockets and sleeves to hold just abut everything – pens and pencils, airplane tickets, your media player, a water bottle, a kazoo (what, you don’t carry one?), a Yeti, tractor tires – everything! (OK, maybe not quite all of that; still, it’s impressive.) Available in a bunch of colors (there are several listings, you might have to click around to find the one that has the perfect color for your geek sweetie). ($45.99)

Powermat The dream is here – wireless charging! Just set an iPhone, Blackberry, or other device on the Powermat and it charges wirelessly, using the power of children’s dreams (I assume – I’m a little fuzzy on the science). Of course, you also need receivers for each device, so here’s the deal: get this for your spouse with a receiver for their phone, and you know, just happen to order an extra one that fits your phone, and it’s like a double-Christmas just for you! ($99.99, plus $30/receiver)

Swiss+Tech Utili-Key The perfect stocking stuffer, this key-shaped (and key-sized) multi-tool opens to expose a Phillips-head and flat-head screwdriver, a super-tiny glasses screwdriver, a bottle opener, and plain and serrated cutting surfaces. Naturally, it slides onto your key-ring so you have everything you need, any time you need it. I bought a stack of them for all my family members who scoff at the idea of carrying a Swiss army knife. ($7.95)

Crush It, by Gary Vaynerchuk Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibraryTV shares the secrets of his success in this slim, accessible volume. In two words: CRUSH IT! Find your passion and just go for it, all out, no excuses. Of course there’s a little more to it than that, or it would just be an inspirational poster. Perfect for anyone in your life facing the consequences of the economic downturn, or just looking for a little more meaning in their lives than pushing papers for the next 30 years. ($19.99 list; $11.69 at Amazon)

Men’s Underwear Repair Kit What could be more productive than getting every last bit of use out of your underwear? The Men’s Underwear Repair Kit contains iron-on patches, replacement elastic, safety pins, white-out, and 32 pages of instructions – everything you need to get years and years of wear out of your tighty-whities. ($10.95)

Got any special gift ideas of your own? Share them with us last-minute shoppers in the comments!

Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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Outlook is a well-established presence on the business desktop, providing millions with their email, calendar, contacts, and tasks. It’s such an institution, in fact, that when Microsoft radically revamped the Office suite’s interface in 2007, it left Outlook largely unchanged.

Although it’s big and sluggish, there’s no denying that Outlook does what it’s supposed to do. Not quickly or with style, but consistently and effectively nonetheless. The thing is, though, that we have moved beyond just email as our major form of business communication. In the increasingly real-time and social world, a big ol’ email client seems a little… old-fashioned.

Xobni is an attempt to bring Outlook into sync with the socially-networked world. Available in a free and paid “Plus” versions (the paid version offers advanced search capabilities and calendar functions), Xobni adds a new pane to your Outlook window packed with information about the sender of whatever email you’re currently viewing or the contact you’ve selected.

Working with Xobni

The image to the right is what Xobni looks like on my system. I’ve selected one of my own emails from the “Sent Mail” folder and obscured some of my personal information, of course.

At the top is a “business card” view with my phone numbers and email addresses, as well as my title and the company I work for. Below that is a graph of how many emails I’ve sent and received to and from this contact (which is me, which may be why the numbers are odd), but that’s just the default – the five buttons above that chart allow me to select different functions. If I click the orange button, I get actions I can perform relating to the contact – make an appointment or send an email, in this case. The other three buttons open the contact’s LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter profile. (You can pick and choose several social network functions – other options that I did not choose are buttons for Skype and Hoovers company search.)

• LinkedIn gives you their location, current company and title, and number of connections, plus a link to their full profile.
• Facebook gives you your contact’s “Wall” and a link to their profile.
• Twitter gives you your contact’s status updates, plus buttons to view their profile and follow them – you an also post updates through Xobni, though it’s far from a replacement for a full-featured Twitter client.

Basically, the top of the Xobni window is devoted to information about your contact. The next part is about your relationship with that contact.  The “Network” part is the most mysterious to me; according to their website, Xobni analyzes the “From:”, “To:”, and “CC:” fields of incoming emails to determine who among your contacts the sender also has some connection to. For instance, if I have the CEO and the CFO of a company in my address book, and I get an email from the CFO that’s CC’ed to the CEO, Xobni knows that the two are connected.

“Conversations” condenses all my previous exchanges with that contact into threaded discussions. Click on a discussion and you can read the messages in the thread, see who was involved in the conversation, and pull out any files exchanged. (You can also hover the pointer over a discussion and a pop-up will preview the first few messages in the thread.) A slider at the top allows you to move from the first line or two of each message to full messages. Click a message in the thread and the message itself opens in the Xobni bar, with buttons to reply or forward, or to open in an Outlook window.

Finally, “Files Exchanged” is what it sounds like – a list of every attachment the contact has ever sent you or that you’ve sent to them.

At the very top of the Xobni window is the search bar, allowing you to search both contacts and email messages. The results are broken into 5 categories: People (contacts with your search term in their name, company name, email address, etc.), Messages (any email with your search term in it), Files Exchanged (any attachment with your search term in the filename), Appointments (any appointment that includes your search term; this is technically a “Plus” feature – clicking an appointment returned in search in the free version will open an upgrade pitch), and Tasks (again, any task with your search term in it).

Verdict: Is Xobni useful?

Xobni helps uncover a great deal of information, most but not all of which is particularly useful. I can’t imagine what use it would be to know that a particular contact tends to email me in the afternoon more than the morning, but it’s kind of interesting to look at. The social networking features are the most useful part, I think – already I’ve discovered profiles for and added on LinkedIn and Twitter a client that I’ve just started working with.

Much of the usefulness of Xobni is hampered by the fact that, like Outlook itself, it’s fairly slow and resource-intensive. For example, it took nearly a minute hovering my mouse over a discussion with 24 messages in it for the pop-up to populate with message previews! Searching takes significantly longer than Google Desktop’s Outlook plugin – and even longer than searching the whole desktop from the Google Desktop sidebar.

Now, that could have just been my PC – it’s a few years old, with a 2.4 GHz Athlon x64, a gigabyte of memory, and Windows XP with Office 2007. Hardly a speed demon! But a search for “Xobni” on Twitter reveals that I’m hardly alone in finding Xobni too slow. Here’s a sample of messages just from the last couple of hours:

• “all xobni did for me was sloooooow down outlook. didn’t keep it long.”
• “installed xobni… again… we will see if my laptop can handle it this time”
• “I had xobni. it’s heavy, and not really effective or accurate. had many issues with that.”
• “Xobni is a Really good product but occasionally it stalls outlook for a while.”
• “my biggest problem comes when I try to read the conversation between some of my contacts with xobni.”

To be fair, there are positive mentions, too, like this one from an obviously pleased user:

• “I’ve been using Xobni since around Feb. 2009. Kind of hooked on it. “

(Incidentally, the Xobni team is quite active on Twitter; comments about Xobni are often replied to by @xobni within minutes!)

Xobni creates its own index of your email, so it definitely needs a lot of resources. It is possible that it’s not Xobni’s fault that it tends to be slow – perhaps Outlook, as big and ponderous as it is, just isn’t a good platform for third-party applications – but it is Xobni’s problem. While it provides some useful information and functionality, especially related to social networking, none of the information it provides is worth waiting for, especially if I can get the same information quicker just by Googling it.

People with older machines — or lower-end new machines — just aren’t going to get much out of Xobni. If you have a more powerful computer, though, Xobni might well be worthwhile. Fast searching, threaded discussions, and social networking interface all make Xobni a useful product, provided you don’t spend time waiting for it to respond.

Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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aNobii.com is a cataloging and social networking website for booklovers. On aNobii you can catalog your book collection on a beautiful wooden shelf and meet people with similar reading tastes. aNobii has an international following with information on over 10 million books, including 200,000 book reviews spanning 15 languages.

aNobii has just released an iphone app, and we’ve had a chance to try it out. The bottom line: this is the best iPhone app for booklovers we’ve seen so far.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the features that set aNobii apart: Continue reading →

One of the more useful aspects of Twitter is the ability to quickly broadcast images, videos, and other media to your followers, making it an effective “mo-blogging” (mobile blogging) platform. Twitter doesn’t have this ability built in, though; sending pictures or video clips to Twitter requires using third-party services like TwitPic. Most Twitter clients will automatically upload images to these third-party hosts and add a link to your tweets, making the whole experience rather seamless.

This is a pretty good solution for casual sharing, but if you’re using Twitter as part of your personal branding efforts, or if you’re serious about the media you’re distributing, you might want more control over how your media is stored and displayed online. TwitPic and the other services don’t offer much in the way of page customization. They also scatter your content over several sites.

Then there’s the Twitter API limit, which limits access to only your last 3200 tweets. Assuming you’re sharing things on Twitter that are more important than what you ate for lunch and what cute thing your cat just did, you might worry about losing your online history as you build up past the 3200 mark.

Having discovered too late Twitter’s API limit (I’m almost to 3700 tweets at the moment), I decided I didn’t want to risk my images and other posted material becoming difficult to access – although much of my Twittering is purely personal, my stream is an important part of my online professional presence, and I want to make sure it’s not only archived but accessible moving forward.

Enter Posterous. Posterous is a lifestreaming service that sits somewhere between Twitter and a blog in terms of features. It’s not really intended for essay-like blogging, but rather for capturing images, video, web links, and thoughts quickly and easily. What’s important here is that you can post via email or even SMS message, and it can be set up to automatically forward anything you post to Twitter, Facebook, and a number of other services (including your own blog). Using Posterous, I can create a permanent record of the images, videos, audio clips, and other material I post to Twitter, and I can do so in a customizable, brandable space that offers me far more control over my content than I have with services like TwitPic or even Twitter.

Here’s how to set up and use Posterous as a home for all your tweetable media.

Set up a Posterous account

An unusual thing about Posterous is that you can’t just go to the website and sign up – you create an account by using the service.

1. Send a photo, video, or just text email to post@posterous.com.
2. Within a few minutes, you’ll receive a confirmation email with a link to your newly-created site. At the moment, your post is it’s own stand-alone site. Click the link that allows you to change your password.
3. Posterous assigned you a username based on the username of the email address you sent your first email from (the part before the @ sign). Change that to whatever you want your site’s URL to be (it will be “username.posterous.com” where username is whatever you choose) and enter a password.
4. Now go to the “Manage” screen and start customizing the site.
5. Click “Edit this site” to change the name of the site and add a theme under “Theme and customize my site. If you know CSS and HTML, you can create your own theme. Also, you can upload a header image to really brand your site.
6. If you really want to get fancy, you can set up your Posterous site under your own domain name; follow the instructions on the “Edit” page.
7. You can also enter your Google Analytics Domain ID to track visitors using Google Analytics. Follow the instructions on the “Edit” page.
8. Click “Edit my profile” to add personal information and upload a photo of yourself.
9. From the “Manage” page, click “Manage emails and phone” to add other emails and your cell phone number so you can post from them. I recommend adding your main email address and your phone’s email address (if it’s different from your main email).
10. “From the “Manage” page, click “Autopost to Everywhere” to add your Twitter account and any other accounts you want to post to via Posterous. You can add Facebook and other social networks, image-hosting sites like Flickr and Picasa, and your own websites, among other services.

Now you’re set up to post to Posterous and have those posts forwarded automatically to Twitter (and wherever else you choose).

Post images, videos, and other media via Posterous

1. Add an address book entry to your contact manager for Posterous. Add both the main email address, post@posterous.com, and the SMS short code, 41411.
2. Anything you email to post@posterous.com will be automatically forwarded to all the services you’ve set up under “Autopost”. The subject line will be the title of your post at Posterous and will make up the body of your Tweet, so limit yourself to 130 characters (to leave room for the shortened URL to your post).
3. Posterous automatically resizes images to fit your theme. If you send multiple images, Posterous will create a very nice gallery so that all of them can be viewed within the main post. Videos are embedded in a Flash player, as are MP3 files you send to Posterous.
4. If you might only want to post something to Twitter, Facebook, your blog, or elsewhere, add one or more of the following email addresses to your address book entry:
   • Twitter: twitter@posterous.com
   • Flickr: flickr@posterous.com
   • Facebook: facebook@posterous.com
   • Tumblr: tumblr@posterous.com
   • Any other blog: blog@posterous.com
   • Posterous only: posterous@posterous.com
5. You can post text-only entries through the SMS number. Type “POST” (without the quotes) and enter up to 110 characters.
6. If your email program adds a signature line or a “Sent via” line, you can make sure that doesn’t get added to your post by typing “#end” (without the quotes) at the end of the text you want in your post.
7. You can also add a “Share on Posterous” bookmarklet to your browser for one-click posting from the Web. Any text and images you select before clicking will be posted (and you can add your own text as well). If you don’t select text, Posterous will scan the page for likely “excerpts” on the page, which you can scroll through until you find the part you want to post.

Drawbacks

While I think there are a lot of benefits to tweeting this way, even for regular text tweets, I have to admit there are also a few drawbacks. The most notable is that you have to remember to limit yourself to 130 characters (or less) in order to accommodate the link to your Posterous page. As if 140 characters wasn’t short enough!

Another drawback is that you can’t post through your favorite Twitter client – you have to use email or SMS to get your post to Posterous. In effect, Posterous becomes your Twitter client – but only for posting.

Finally, many Twitter clients offer previews of images on the more popular image- and video-hosting services. Your followers won’t be able to preview your images on Posterous in their Twitter client.

Obviously, I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, but you should be aware of them before taking the plunge yourself. If Twitter is not just a pastime for you, but a real part of your business or professional life, this is a way to take a lot more control over the content you post to Twitter.

Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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It’s about that time for me again: my desktop is a couple years part its prime and my laptop just died (no display, no hard drive activity, no wifi, and a recent history of turning off suddenly for no good reason – those are all bad signs, right?), which means the near future holds a new PC for me. Which means a blank slate on which to impose my computer-using will.

Setting up a new computer goes through five stages:

• Denial: I’ve got a new computer. Nothing can go wrong now!
• Anger: No, I don’t want to subscribe to AOL. No, I don’t want Norton updates. No, I don’t want a 60-day trial of Office 2007. There are HOW MANY security updates?!
• Bargaining: I’d do anything to be able to use this thing!
• Depression: I’ve been uninstalling Norton components for 17 hours now. If I have to restart the PC one more time, I swear I’ll kill myself… All I want to do is update Twitter!
• Acceptance: OK, let’s install some good stuff now!

Once you’ve installed all the updates, uninstalled all the crapware, entered your wifi password, and set your screensaver, it’s time to make that shiny new PC do stuff, and for me the doing starts with installing a pretty fixed list of free applications.

Continue reading →

For most people, a wireless router is just a way to share your broadband Internet connection across the several computers and wifi-enabled devices  in your house. Your router is not just a point of connection to your cable or DSL modem, though – it connects every other computer and device in your house in one big network. With not much work at all, you can easily take advantage of this to make home-wide backups simple, to centralize your music collection, to share household files and services, and even to operate computers on other rooms. We’re used to going over the Internet to share resources on other computers, but all the Internet is is a gigantic, industrial-strength version of the network in your own home.

A quick overview of your home network

Your router is a simple device, really – all it does it bounce data from one computer to another. When I upload a picture from my laptop to my Picasa account, for example, my laptop requests a connection from my router, which accepts the connection and requests the file, which my laptop sends. Then the router readdresses the data in my photo to the modem, which readdresses it to a router on my broadband provider’s network, which sends it out onto the Internet bound for the routers at Picasa. (OK, I’m simplifying a little, but that’s the basic gist. All I’ve really left out are the order of priests who chant the holy invocations that run the Internet.)

Out on the Internet, every computer has an address, a crazy number that looks like this: 74.125.127.147 (that’s Google’s homepage, if you’re wondering). On your home network, every computer has an address, too – a crazy number that looks like this: 192.168.10.4 – the last two digits being anything from 0 to 255. On the Internet, the URLs we’re familiar with (google,.com, lifehack.org, etc.) are aliases for those crazy numbers – their secret identities. The crazy numbers are the “IP address”, the location of the computer we’re looking for. On our home network, we’re stuck with the crazy numbers (for now – in a moment I’ll show you how to replace them with more memorable addresses.) 

To find out the IP addresses of the computers on your home network:

• On Windows, open a command line (Start > Run and type “cmd”) and type “ipconfig” – several lines will come up, including your IP address.
• On Mac OSX, look under your system preferences.
• On Linux, use your magic telepathic powers to mind meld with the machine. When that doesn’t work, try “/sbin/ifconfig” at the command line.

Now, unless you got fancy when configuring your PCs, your router technically assigns a new IP address to each computer when it logs onto the network. In practice, I find that routers tend to assign the same IP address to the same PCs pretty consistently, but to be certain you can go into your computer’s network settings and copy the IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway in, giving each computer a permanent IP address.

Here are some things you can do to get more out of your fancy home network:

1. Centralize content to one main computer

I have a desktop PC that’s on all the time that I use as the central “hub” in my home network. Because it has the biggest hard drive in the house, I use it to store all my documents, media files, photos, and everything else. Most files Are opened from and saved to that single My Documents folder; if I need a file on another computer – for example, if I’m going to be working on something while traveling with my netbook, it gets saved to a Windows Live Mesh folder and automatically synced back to the hub whenever I’m online.

You don’t need any special software to open files from or save files to another computer on your network – not usually, anyway. Even on mixed networks, most contemporary operating systems include software to allow them to communicate with other OSes. I find that even streaming audio and video across my home network is hitch-free – so I can watch a video on my netbook in the bedroom even though the file’s on my desktop in the living room.

2. Backup like a superstar

Since everything important is on one computer, I only have to backup from that computer. All new files are copied to an external hard drive from that computer every night using SyncBack. For redundancy, I also backup that computer to Mozy. The My Document folder on my two laptops is mirrored on the hub computer using Windows Live Mesh (which means they’re also backed up online at the Windows Live Mesh homepage).

3. Run a server

Since I do some web design from time to time, I have a webserver running on my home network – on the hub, naturally. Installation is simple: download XAMPP, run the installer, and you’re done. XAMPP installs Apache, the industry-standard web server; MySQL, the industry-standard relational database; and PHP, a scripting language. I also have a Rails server running on the same computer, from when I was using Tracks, a Ruby on Rails-based GTD app.

So, for instance, let’s say I’m working on a new website. I create a new directory in the “htdocs” folder in the XAMPP directory and install Wordpress into it. Then, from any computer in the house, I can type “192.168.10.4/newfolder” to work with Wordpress, just like I’d installed it on the Web. That looks ugly, but to be honest, I don’t type all that: I type “olympus/newfolder” into my browser, because I’ve modified the hosts file – on which we’ll talk in just a moment.

4. Use any computer in the house directly with VNC

Let’s say I’m on the couch and I want to check something on the desktop but I don’t want to get up. Easy – I fire up UltraVNC and voila – the screen from my desktop appears on my netbook (well, some of it – I have a 20” widescreen on my desktop and a 9” screen on the netbook, so I have to scroll around a little to see the whole screen…).

UltraVNC is free, open source, and simple to use. Download it and install it on every computer. It will install both a client, for viewing other computers on the network, and a server, for sharing the host computer’s screen with others. To view another computer’s desktop, run the VNC client, enter the IP address of the remote computer, enter the password, and that’s it – you can go full-screen and it’s like you’re sitting right in front of the remote computer.

Here’s one thing I use this for: Olympus, my hub computer, is right next to the TV (thankfully it’s a really quiet computer) and has TV-out. So I run Hulu Desktop (or other video) on the hub, in full screen mode, feed the image to my TV via an S-Video cable, and use my netbook as a remote control using VNC to access Olympus’ desktop. Perfect.

5. Edit your hosts file to give your networked PCs easier-to-remember names

If you do a lot of network stuff, you’re going to get tired of typing “192.168.100.114” and the like. It would be much better if you could just use words like you do on the Internet, right?

You can do that easily enough by adding entries to your computer’s hosts file. Normally when you enter a URL into a browser, the computer sends out to your ISP’s DNS servers to translate that word into an IP address, but first it checks the hosts file – if the hosts file gives an IP address, it skips the DNS lookup on the Internet. What this means is that you can assign the IP addresses of your computers names that are easy to remember, like “minerva”, “mercury”, and “oracle” (those are computers and devices on my home network – I”m sooooo clever!).

To change your hosts file:

• Go to c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\ on Windows 2000 and XP Pro or c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\ on Windows XP Home and Vista and open the file called “hosts” in Notepad (or another text editor; in Vista, you have to run Notepad as an administrator).
• Open Terminal.app on Mac OSX and enter “$ sudo nano /private/etc/hosts “ without the quotes.
• Go to /etc on Linux and open the file “hosts”. Most likely.

There should be a line that says “127.0.0.1 localhost” – don’t touch that. Below it, start entering lines like this for each computer on your network: [IP address]<tab>[Desired name]

So, for example: 192.168.10.2 olympus

Don’t forget the tab between the IP address and the new name.  Notice I skipped 192.168.10.3 – that’s the computer I’m writing on now, and if I want to access it from itself, I just type “localhost”. Now, when I type “olympus” int  the browser window, it connects to that computer. Since XAMPP is running there, I get the home page for Apache – which I could replace with something of my choice, but I haven’t.  If I want to run Tracks, which runs on port 3000, I would type “olympus:3000” into my browser.

6. Share a printer

It’s stupid to have a printer attached to every computer in the house. Instead, I have a single laser printer attached to the hub, and I can print to it from any PC on the network – as long as the hub computer is on, which it always is. (Technically, because I have a networked printer, I could plug it directly into the router, but the router’s up near the ceiling and I don’t want another cable hanging down, so I connect it to the hub PC instead). Although I don’t currently have a color inkjet for photos, when I did, it was connected to the hub PC too.

To share a printer, just go into the Printer settings on the computer it’s connected to, right-click, and select “Sharing…”. Turn on printer sharing. Now, go to “Add printer” on the other PC, and search the network for your printer. If all goes according to plan, your computer should install teh drivers from the host computer, and you’re set. If it doesn’t go well, you may need to use the install disc or download te drivers from the manufacturer’s website, and follow the instructions for installing a network printer. (It’s more complex on OSX and Linux, but google “share printer” and your operating system’s name and I’m sure you’ll find easy enough directions.)

The End

Do you have cool network tips to share with your fellow Lifehack readers? Share your network setup in the comments!

Dustin M. Wax is the project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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Although I am a professional writer and blogger, although I keep up with the latest tech trends, although I am, might I say, something of a geek, I do not iPod. I don’t even iPhone. This is not a political nor even a religious position, it is simply the Way That It Is.

When Microsoft released the Zune, I scoffed. Until one day, I sauntered past the Zune display at a local Mega-Duper-Mart and, out of the corner of my eye, caught a glimpse of a sight so hideously ugly, so repulsive in all its aspects, that I stopped dead in my tracks. The Brown Zune. Truly glorious in its ugliness, the Brown Zune features design that puts Soviet prison designers to shame – a squat, brick-like shape sheathed in a brown exterior whose ugliness is only increased by the green highlights when the light hits the device just so.

I had to have one. And that dream came true one happy Christmas morn when I opened my present from my then-girlfriend – pure Brown Zuney goodness.

To be honest, it’s not at all a bad media player. The desktop software is pretty good, if a little resource-hungry; the sound and video are great; the device’s interface is at least as good as any other media player’s interface (yes, including iPod’s) – all in all, I’m happy with my Zune.

Except for one big thing. Although a firmware update some time ago added audiobook functionality to the Zune, in its infinite wisdom Microsoft decided they wouldn’t add it to the desktop software. Instead, Zune users need to use third-party software – Audible’s for Audible audiobooks, Overdrive for everything else – to transfer audiobooks onto the Zune. I am not an Audible member, so I haven’t really used their audiobook manager, but I do use Overdrive quite a bit. Unfortunately, it’s a little weird, especially when it comes to deleting audiobooks from your Zune.

One thing neither Microsoft nor anyone else has seen fit to make easy, though, is how to get audiobooks from non-Audible and non–Overdrive sources onto your Zune. Maybe you have an audiobook on CD that you’ve checked out of your library, or one that you own. Because of licensing issues, it can be difficult and in some cases impossible to find those files online – and in any case, why should you re-purchase an audiobook you already have in your possession, just for the “privilege” of listening to it on your Zune instead of on 18 CDs?

Now, you can rip the files and install them like any other music file, but you’d better listen straight through, because you won’t be able to resume playing from wherever you left off. You can also rip the files and edit the ID3 tags, setting the genre as”Podcast”, which will put all the files onto your Zune as a podcast, allowing you to stop and resume – but in my tests of this technique, the files came out in a random order that was useless. Since many audiobooks have tracks every 2 or 3 minutes, you can end up with hundreds of files for a long book, and searching every few minutes for the next one when you’re barreling down the freeway isn’t exactly a relaxing way to enjoy a book.

Fortunately, there is a way to make the Overdrive audiobook manager work for you and, with a little work (not a lot) you can rip audiobooks to your Zune, and remove them, quite easily. Here’s how.

Using Overdrive with Overdrive Audiobooks

The Overdrive Media Console is used most often by libraries for handling DRM’ed, time-limited audiobook downloads for their clients. My library, for instance, offers audiobooks for a three-week “Checkout”, during which the title is unavailable to other patrons. It’s not the greatest thing ever, but it’s a fair-enough compromise between publishers and rights-holders who would prefer people buy books and libraries and their patrons who are committed to the free exchange of information.

When you check out an Overdrive book, you download an ODM file to your hard drive which is opened by default with the Overdrive Media Console, which will download the actual book. Once it’s on your computer, you can listen to it in Overdrive, or transfer it to a device. To install it on your Zune, connect your Zune and then close the Zune software (which will probably open when your PC detects that the Zune is present). Now, simply select the book you want to transfer (unfortunately, Overdrive Manager cannot transfer multiple titles at the same time) and hit the “Transfer” button, which will open the Overdrive Transfer Wizard. The Transfer Wizard will find the Zune, then ask you which parts you want to transfer over—usually, you’ll select “All”, hit “Next”, and wait; when the files are all transferred over, click “Finish” to return to the Overdrive Manager.

Deleting audiobooks you’ve already put on your Zune is… well, it’s weird. If you delete the book from the Overdrive Media Console window, it deletes it from your hard drive, but not from your Zune. So don’t do that. Instead, you want to select the book and, in a stunning break with intuition, click “Transfer” as if you were going to put the book on your Zune. Wait for the Zune to be detected, then deselect all of the parts of the audiobook in the Transfer Wizard. Hit “Next” and wait for the Transfer Wizard to do it’s thing – think of it as replacing the files that are on their with the no files you want. Hit “Finish” and the audiobook is gone from your Zune.

Creating Audiobooks from Your Own Mp3s

If you have your own audiobooks that you’d like to listen to on your Zune, you’re going to have to do a little prep-work, essentially fooling Overdrive into thinking you have an “official” Overdrive audiobook. You’ll use a couple of pieces of free third-party software to make this all work.

1. Rip the Audiobook

First of all, if the audiobook isn’t already converted to mp3, you need to rip the audiobook. I use CDex for this, although you can use any ripper, even the one built into Zune. To save space on your Zune, you can greatly reduce the bitrate from what you’d use for music – the spoken voice simply isn’t all that complex. 128k is more than adequate for most audiobooks – 64k will sound perfectly good, even. You can also rip in mono, cutting the file size in half. If your mp3 convertor has a setting to optimize for speech, use it – it will make sure that the least data loss occurs in the richest parts of the human voice.

2. Merge the Files into One Big File

This step is not strictly necessary, but when it comes time to delete files (see below) you’ll be glad you did it. Use an mp3 merging program – I like mergemp3, which is free and easy to use – to combine all of the files in your audiobook into one giant mp3 file. This is much easier to work with – some long books take up 25 or more CDs, each with 10, 20, or more tracks – that’s a lot to keep track of! Using mergemp3, you just select the folder where your files are, hit “merge”, select a file name and a place to save the file, and wait a few minutes. Make sure you save the file to its own folder – this will be important in step 3.

3. Create the Guide File and Transfer with Overdrive

Now you have a great big mp3, but you don’t quite have something the Zune will recognize as an audiobook. What you need is a WAX file, which is basically the meta-information that defines the mp3 (or mp3s if you did not merge them) as an audiobook. To create this, download the Zune Overdrive Wax Creator. Before you run it, tough, go online and find a picture of your book’s cover and save it in the same folder as your ripped audiobook (make sure it’s in JPG format).

When you run the Wax Creator, it will immediately ask you to choose the folder where your audiobook’s files are stored. Find it, click next, and wait – the program will scan the folder, create a file listing all the mp3 files in the folder (which is why you want just the audiobook and the cover image in the folder), add the cover image, and open the Overdrive Transfer Wizard. Now, you can transfer the file just as you would any normal Overdrive audiobook.

Delete Audiobooks with Overdrive

What you’ll notice when you make your own audiobooks is that they don’t show up in the Overdrive Manager like “proper” Overdrive audiobooks do. And if you try to delete them the same way – by running the Transfer Wizard and opening the Wax file for your audiobook, then deselecting the files associated with it – the Transfer Wizard will give you an error.

So how do you delete your audiobooks? If you haven’t updated to version 3 of the Zune firmware, there’s a registry hack you an use to mount your Zune as a hard drive, allowing you to browse the directory structure and manually delete the files. This doesn’t work for people with up-to-date Zunes, though.

All is not lost, however – you can still fairly easily remove your audiobook files from your Zune, using Overdrive. To do so, initiate a transfer and click the “Advanced” on the screen that pops up after it’s detected your Zune. In the new screen, click the “Browse” button, which will open a new window allowing you to examine the contents of the Audiobooks folder on your Zune. Drill down to the folder containing the book you want to delete and right-click it – there’s only one option in the right-click menu, and that’s “Delete”. Select it, cancel out of the Advanced options, cancel out of the Transfer Wizard, and you’re done.

Hopefully Microsoft will add better support for audiobooks  in the next version of the Zune Desktop – ripping audiobooks and listening to them on your Zune should be at least as easy as ripping music CDs to your Zune, which the Zune desktop software does automatically (it will even set that as the default action to take when you insert a CD, if you let it). Until Microsoft comes to its senses, though, it’s nice to know that you don’t have to carry a box of 26 discs and a CD player to listen to your latest audiobook. Like me, you can fly your Ugly Brown Zune with pride!

Header photo courtesy of yngrich via Flickr

Dustin M. Wax is the project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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