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Roll Your Own Digg: Coming in Six Months

Jason — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 03:27:33 +0000

Tips: Change the default width of “column view” in Finder (Mac OS X)

Jason — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:53:39 +0000

I’ve always been really frustrated by the narrow widths of the column view in Mac OS X’s Finder. I’m regularly widening them to see more of the file names, and wishing they stayed wider when I open the next one. So, today I searched for a solution.

In Mac OS 10.4 [and greater] the default width of the Finder’s columns can be changed by option-dragging the column handle to your preferred width. When you close the Finder window and open a new one it will open with the columns sized as you indicated.

Change default column widths in Finder (Mac OSX) from Jason Glaspey on Vimeo.

It’s so easy to do, it’s almost frightening.

Original tip found here.

Wordpress for the iPhone

Jason — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:02:41 +0000

This is a test/ review of the new iPhone app from wordpress. It will be short since I am writing it from my iPhone, but so far, set up took less than a minute and I’m already composing. This is fantastic. It’s also COMPLETELY intuitive. Everything has been right where it should be, and the options are clear and concise.

At the moment I’m trying to add an image. Not completely obvious I guess, which is contrary to my last point. Oh well.

Update: It seems that when you’re typing in the body of the post, you only type. After you hit Done, you can then add an image (either from the camera or from the library), set a timestamp, edit the categories, etc. Then, you just hit publish.

The photo above was taken from my iPhone of the iTunes App Store showing the Wordpress App. Special Note: The image was resized automatically, and automatically linked to the larger version of the image. This is also fantastic. I imagine someday you’ll be able to set preferences for the way this is handled, and what the thumbnail size is (for easier and more seamless integration into different themes), but for now, this is a fantastic 1.0 piece of software and I’m thrilled to have it in my arsenal.

Domain Shortcut Helps Type URLs in Your iPhone More Quickly

Jason — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 07:07:59 +0000

This is truly an awesome feature and I’m really glad Lifehacker posted about it. This is honestly one of those things that make reading a bunch of websites worth it sometimes, as it just made my iPhone experience so much happier.

First, in Mobile Safari, just hold down the .com button for a second to see other domain options (namely .net, .edu, and .org). Second, when the keyboard has the @ symbol but no .com key, you can hold the ‘.’ (period) key to get the same domain shortcuts…

Read the whole story here.

Mininova Adds Remote BitTorrent Downloads

Jason — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:47:00 +0000

I’m always looking for simple ways to set up some remote bittorrenting of files, as well as having my home media server quick on the draw to download something I want. I already use Mininova quite a bit anyway, so this very well could be the tool I was looking for. So simple.

Popular BitTorrent tracker Mininova has unveiled a new bookmarking feature that makes it easy to start a BitTorrent download on your home computer from anywhere. The new feature works by creating a personal RSS feed of all of your bookmarks. Since most popular BitTorrent clients support subscribing to an RSS feed of torrents, that means that each time you bookmark a torrent on Mininova, your BitTorrent client will automatically start downloading it.

Read the whole story here.

3 Resources for Web Designers

Jason — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 06:28:04 +0000

This is an awesome list, with some serious tools once you start looking into them. I’ve already spent the past 30 minutes following a rabbit trail that started from clicking on just one of these links, which introduced me to tons of really neat tools, sites, and resources I had never heard from… Great find.

Cheat Sheets for Front-end Web Developers is a roundup post from Six Revisions. It offers pointers - with excerpts - to 23 different cheat sheets covering HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Skout is an old-fashioned portal site. It offers hundreds of categorized links: fonts, color tools, icons, stock photos, tutorials, tools, JavaScript libraries…
Konigi is directed at user experience designers, with showcases of excellent design and interfaces as well as useful graph paper for manual wireframe sketching.

Read the whole story here.

Magnets Kill the Cell Phone Speaker Buzz

Jason — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 06:28:04 +0000

I do hate the cracking and buzzing noise that my speakers constantly make when my iPhone is nearby. I noticed I never had that problem with Verizon (non-GSM, if I’m correct). But my years of AT&T kind of made me just think it was the way it has to be. Now, I’m going to try adding these beads and see if that quiets the noise my speakers make when my cell phone is next to them.

Do your speakers buzz and crackle whenever a new text message or call is about to come in on your nearby cell phone? … Tape the ferrite bead to the cable of the offending speaker, and the magnet should provide enough passive frequency suppression to do away with the horrible buzzing and popping.

Read the whole story here.

iPhone 2.0 to include secure erase

Jason — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:24:32 +0000

Unlike the present “Erase All Content and Settings” feature in the iPhone Settings, the new version “will wipe data in similar fashion to the ‘Secure Empty Trash’ function of Mac OS X, by which all data is deleted, unlinked, and then overwritten several times to make it irretrievable by even the savviest of recovery tools.”

Read the whole story here.

Share Almost Any Blog Post in Google Reader

Jason — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:49:21 +0000

This is Awesome. I’ve been wanting a way to quickly share and blog about things for a while now, and Google Reader made it easy to share things I found, yet that didn’t help me for things that I wasn’t subscribed to. Enter the best bookmarklet ever.

Google Reader’s sharing feature is very cool, but it’s limited to your subscriptions. If you find an interesting post and you want to share it with your friends without subscribing to the feed, Google Reader is not very helpful.

Read the whole story here.

Top 10 Useful Bookmarklets

Jason — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:49:21 +0000

I love Lifehacker for assembling things like this. Among the tools that made their list is YubNub, a tool I’ve been meaning to check out for a while now. I think today might be the day.

Having a good set of bookmarklets on your browser’s toolbar is like having a web-savvy Leatherman handy—you can take them anywhere, use them in many situations, and they just simply work. A bookmarklet is a little different than a plain old bookmark—it’s a snippet of JavaScript that can perform all sorts of magic on the web page you’re currently viewing.

Read the whole story here.