links for 2009-02-14

• Pulsar: Satellite Radio on OS X
  Nice app to play Sirius XM radio on your Mac.
  (tags: mac osx music satellite radio)

BLOG MOVED: blog.bryanselner.com

OK, I took the plunge and left WordPress.com today. My blog from here on out will be posted at http://blog.bryanselner.com. Please update your subscriptions.

Also, please let me know via email if you see any issues with the new site.   

links for 2009-02-08

• iWeb FAQ: How to get Google Webmaster Tools to Verify
  (tags: mac osx google iweb webmaster)
• Automator: Add Google Analytics Action
  This Automator action runs through a locally published iWeb directory and adds your Google Analytics code to the .html files. Then you can publish those files to your site via .Me or other site.
  (tags: mac osx google analytics iweb automator)
• Skype 2.8 Beta for Mac OSX
  Apparently new in this version;
  - Screen sharing: Show someone what you’re seeing with desktop sharing.
  - Improved video and audio: You’ll really see and hear the difference with enhanced video and audio quality.

  We use Skype extensively at work and it's my lifeline to the team when I'm working from home.

  (tags: mac osx skype beta im instant messaging)
• iPhoto2Gmail Adds Gmail Support to iPhoto (via Lifehacker)
  Send directly from iPhoto to Gmail. I haven't tried out yet on iPhoto '09.
  (tags: mac osx email gmail iphoto photography)
• TinyURL Bookmarklet
  Create a TinyURL for Twitter by simply clicking on this bookmarklet in your toolbar while viewing the webpage for which you want to create a TinyURL.
  (tags: twitter tinyurl bookmarklet)
• Rowmote: Mac Remote for iPhone
  The one hardware failing of my MacPro desktop at home is that it doesn't support an Apple Remote. Rowmote might be the app workaround for that feature gap. You run a helper app on your Mac and a $0.99 app on your iPhone. It basically functions the same as if an Apple Remote were in range.
  (tags: mac osx remote apple iphone control rowmote apps)
• Picasa for Mac
  While I was on vacation, I played around with Picasa a bit. I found it basically usable and straightforward, but the GPS/Location tagging feature doesn't really work on the Mac yet.
  (tags: mac osx library photos picasa photography)
• From Del.icio.us to WordPress or Blogger: How to automatically post daily links | PaulSpoerry.com
  A howto on automatically posting your daily bookmarks from Delicious onto your WordPress blog.
  (tags: blog delicious wordpress post blogging bookmarks)

Blog upgrades: Bookmarks & Twitter

I’ve finally gotten around to adding my Twitter feed to the blog (took all of 5 minutes). I have also tried setting up Delicious to auto-post my new interesting links daily; we’ll see how the latter goes.

Upgraded to iPhoto ‘09

I’ve upgraded the laptop and desktop to iPhoto ‘09 (yay for family plans.) So far I like:

• “Do not copy files to iPhoto library” checkbox: I don’t know if that was there in ‘08 or not, but was always a pet peeve of mine about iPhoto. I manage my photos via the file system first. (I need a good way to keep them in sync though…)
• GPS/Map integration: pretty straightforward to tag locations, although I hit a strange bug where it thought I was not connected to the Internet even though I clearly was and could search for locations just fine.
• Faces: This has failed for me so far… crashed when I tried to do it on my laptop; I haven’t yet tried again to do on my desktop machine. The way you have to train it is a little funky.
• Send to Facebook: I’m not sure from the UI what this really does. I think you can only send an event to Facebook instead of just a couple selected photos in the event. That would be a strange choice though, so it can’t be right. Will have to try it out. [Update: Tried it. It does just send the selected photos, not the whole event.]

So far, it was a worthwhile upgrade from the previous version. Though if you aren’t going to use the Faces or GPS/Locations features, I wouldn’t bother.

Update: Faces works just OK out of the box; it takes a fair amount of training to really start accurately tagging faces correctly without help. Interestingly it seems to think I look a lot like my father and my friend, Kristian, as it keeps trying to tag me as them. It also doesn’t seem to do well with children as it has yet to suggest her name on her face — even after 20+ photos manually tagged (faced?) with her.

Windows 7 Fusion

My first attempt to install the Windows 7 beta in a VMWare Fusion image failed. When it got to the Windows 7 install, I think it couldn’t find all the right drivers to get itself going. I’ve recreated a new VMWare image and hopefully got all the necessary drivers and OS updates in place first this time. I plan to give it another shot.   

I’ve heard such great buzz about 7 over Vista that I’ve just got to see what all the noise is about myself.

Windows-L Lives! (Mac Version)

Where have you been all my (mac) life, LockTight? One of the couple features I’d been missing from Windows since switching to Mac has finally been addressed. I always used the Windows-L hotkey to lock my machine when I walked away from the keyboard; a habit I picked up in my days at Microsoft.

Given the wrist problems I had from keyboard and mouse use, I try to be as keyboard centric as I can. Thus I need a key combo to lock my PC so I don’t have to mouse over to do it. Mac OSX doesn’t have a hotkey to lock your computer or switch it to the login screen. There’s no way even to set one yourself via the normal OS.

Along comes LockTight. This preference pane add-on is single-mindedly focused on serving that one purpose and nothing else. The only bummer about it is that it requires you to hit two modifier keys (Option, Command/Flower, Ctrl, Shift) along with an alphanumeric key. You can’t just remap Flower-L to be lock.

I’ll live with having to retrain to Flower-Shift-L; at least I can do it from the keyboard again.

(Thanks to Lifehacker for the reference)

Minty Fresh

After a couple other folks have talked about and recommended Mint.com, I decided to give them a shot today. What else ya going to do when snowed in except pay your bills?

I used to be a Microsoft Money user for many, many years and overall was pretty happy with the way it handled things. When they started syncing with their website though, it got problematic to keep things correct. Since I then moved to Macs at home, I stopped using it and have been without budget/finance software since.

Mint was pretty unbelievably easy to set up. Within 15 minutes, I had all my accounts setup and showing their current information in Mint, including on my iPhone. (Time to finally set a passcode on that thing I guess.) Their startup experience is pretty slick and competes as world class to pretty much any I’ve ever seen. We’ll see how they hold up with repeat usage, but so far, I’m very impressed at both the UI and the integration.

Workaround for Kindle and Amazon’s Wishlist

I still don’t understand why Amazon doesn’t support Wishlists for their Kindle. I realized tonight that their new Universal Wishlist feature allows for a solid workaround. Here’s how:

1. Go to the Universal Wishlist page
2. Add the browser button
3. Go to the Kindle book you want to add to your Wishlist
4. Click the “Add to Wish List” browser button

Voila! You’ve now got that book on your Amazon WishList. Handy for keeping everything you want in one location.

it really is silly still though that I can hack around the limitation this easy, but yet Amazon doesn’t just add the button directly. Anyone have an idea why they don’t just add it?

Ecto plug-in for Twitter

I’m loving Ecto more and more. Turns out there’s a Twitter plug-in for Ecto which means I can be lazy and not twitter my posts.

Update: turns out the instructions aren’t obvious so my first post: FAIL.