Filed under: Text

Filed under: Text, Social Software, web 2.0

10+ super geeky ways to use Twitter

by Lee Mathews Jun 16th 2009

Using Twitter doesn't have to be a shiny, web 2.0 experience if you don't want it to. There are plenty of ways to tweet like a true geek - from your command line to your Excel worksheets. Who needs an Adobe-air powered client? Not you!

If you've got another geeky way to tweet, share it in the comments!

PowerShell to Twitter, PoshTweet, or Out-Twitter - Sure, PowerShell provides an easy-to-use scripting environment that is also flexible and powerful, but why not use it to do something really useful like announce your breakfast menu?

Twoogie - I'm not sure which was cooler - Stephen J. Cannell yanking the sheet of paper out of his typewriter, or Doogie Howser, MD clacking away on his PS2 to complete another journal entry. We'll go with Doogie, since someone has wrapped Twitter up in a Neil Patrick Harris-approved applet for us (Not really. In fact, it might eventw piss him off a little.)

Hide it in SpreadTweet - Elliott Kember caused quite the ruckus when this little gem appeared a couple months back. Not really "certified geeky" since it only hides your activities visually. Your transmissions can, of course, still be logged by Big Brother.

Tags: geeky, twitter

Filed under: Internet, Text, Blogging, Office, Productivity, Web services, Freeware, Browsers, Web

After the Deadline polishes your writing online

by Jason Clarke Jun 16th 2009

While some modern browsers include built-in spell checkers, and some operating systems include built-in spelling and grammar checkers, there are people out there using operating systems and browsers that do not have these features.

If you're looking for some help with your writing and don't have access to Microsoft Word or a similarly-powered word processor, there is a solution available on the web called After the Deadline. The site (at the memorable URL polishmywriting.com) offers spelling and grammar help, and even writing style suggestions.

Tags: after the deadline, after-the-deadline, AfterTheDeadline, api, demo service, demo-service, DemoService, grammar checkers, grammar-checkers, GrammarCheckers, microsoft word, microsoft-word, MicrosoftWord, rich text editor, rich-text-editor, RichTextEditor, spell checkers, spell-checkers, SpellCheckers, spelling, style suggestions, style-suggestions, StyleSuggestions, word processor, word-processor, WordProcessor

Filed under: Text, Blogging, web 2.0

Don't blame Twitter for trending fail, blame dumbass Tweeters

by Lee Mathews Jun 11th 2009

Plenty of blame has been placed on Twitter for so-called failings in trending topics. Yesterday, Anna at Jezebel had enough of #urahoe, saying it was "Proof Of The Stupidity Of Twitter Trending Topics." Yep. That particular trend is a fine showcase of idiocy - despite the spelling, those messages were definitely not referring to gardening tools. Just ask Pimpbot.

Wait, what's the complaint, anyway? That trends used to provide some kind of deep insight into the collective consciousness of the Internet? Well, the Internet called, and it said it wants to screw around and play dumb games like #3wordsaftersex and #robotpickuplines. Yes, even I've engaged in the odd game of hash-tag.

When the Jezebel post says "Thanks, Twitter, for bringing us first #liesgirlstell, and now trending topic #urahoe," what they really mean is "Thanks, Twitterers."

Twitter is the arena. We can't blame them for the combatants who show up to the 140-character battles of wits completely unarmed.

If you're trying to use Twitter as a tool, there are plenty of good search apps out there. Retweets are another good way to find out what people are buzzing about.

But trends? Forget it. The fact is that Twitter is overrun with social white noise, and that's not their fault. It's ours.

Tags: twitter, white-noise

Filed under: Text, Education

Wordnik: don't call it a dictionary

by Jay Hathaway Jun 8th 2009

Wordnik is a bit like a dictionary, in the sense that it collects words and their definitions, but it aspires to be more than that. Users contribute example sentences, audio pronunciations, images from Flickr and more, so you can really get a good idea of how and when a word is used. There's also a thesaurus-plus "related words" feature, which shows not only synonyms and antonyms, but other words that are used in a similar context.

Wordnik isn't exactly Wiktionary, but it does accept user contributions of just about anything you can think of about a word. The combination of images, audio and contextual clues would also seem to make it a better dictionary than most for non-english speakers, and its library contains a weighty 1.7 million words. Since it's laid out better than most dictionary sites, and also incorporates definitions from some of the better ones, it wouldn't be a bad move to replace your current favorite online dictionary with Wordnik.

Tags: audio, definitions, dictionary, wordnik, words

Filed under: Fun, Text, Social Software

Ficly is Ficlets 2.0: super-short bursts of collaborative fiction

by Jay Hathaway Jun 7th 2009

A couple of years ago, there was a site called ficlets, a home for collaborative fiction stories put together in super-short 1024-character bursts. Ficlets was great, because anybody could jump in and add to a story in no time at all, and some interesting work grew out of it. When Ficlets disappeared, the active community it left behind had no place to go.
Until now. Ficly, from the creators of Ficlets, is like an updated, upgraded version of the original idea.

To participate, you just have to log in with Google, Yahoo!, Facebook or OpenID, then find a story and write a prequel or a sequel in 1024 characters. Your piece doesn't have to stand alone, it could just flesh out a character or place, or start a new scene for someone else to finish. I'm looking forward to reading some of the stuff coming out of Ficly, and speculating that maybe the evolution of print-on-demand services will play well with it. It would be too cool to have a long story you helped write shipped to your door in book form.

Tags: collaboration, ficlets, ficly, fiction, stories, writing

Filed under: Text, Productivity, Web services

J.ot Down is a simple, sharable online notepad

by Jay Hathaway Jun 3rd 2009

There are a lot of ways to take quick notes and share them online. Some, like Google Docs, have large feature sets and require accounts. J.ot Down is at the opposite end of the spectrum. It lets you type, share and save, and that's about it.

Going to the site opens up a new note. From there, you just type. There's no formatting with fonts, colors or styles, and no HTML support - just typing. When you pause, J.ot Down will autosave your document and give you a permalink you can use to share it or come back to it. You can also manually save.

That's the entire feature list, as far as I can tell. It's amazingly lightweight, and makes a good substitute for stickies or notepad docs when you're not on your home machine.

Tags: document, j.otdown, jotdown, notepad, notes, text

Filed under: Business, Text, Apple, iPhone

Eucalyptus eBook reader recovers from silly app store rejection

by Jay Hathaway May 25th 2009

Eucalyptus, a gorgeous eBook reader for the iPhone, was initially rejected from Apple's application store for the most absurd of reasons. See, Eucalyptus' extensive library of great literature comes from Project Gutenberg, an open source book project, and one of the books in Gutenberg's library is The Kama Sutra. Apple apparently objected to this during the review process, despite the fact that other approved readers like Stanza and Amazon's Kindle can also access the book. So can Apple's Safari browser, because Project Gutenberg's books are all available through its website.

Fortunately, this mistake didn't stop Eucalyptus from eventually making it into the app store, where it's now available for $9.99. Buying the app gets you an extremely slick UI, great page-turning animations, and an organization scheme for books that works a lot like iTunes does for music. I actually totally buy into the Eucalyptus marketing pitch, which is that, for the price of one book, you can have 20,000 books in a great-looking reader.

Tags: app-store, Apple, books, ebooks, ereader, eucalyptus, project-gutenberg, rejection

Filed under: Text, Office, Productivity

FocusWriter helps you write by blocking distractions

by Brad Linder May 22nd 2009

Sometimes it's hard to make yourself hunker down and write something, whether it's an important email, a lengthy diary entry, or a report for school or work. It's just so easy to take get distracted by email, instant messaging, or Minesweeper.

There are a handful of word processors and text editors designed to give you a distraction-free writing space by blocking out everything except for the words you're typing. for instance, Dark Room shows you nothing but a black screen and green text, giving you that matrix/old school computing vibe.

But if you want something a bit more modern, and with a few more controls, you might want to check out FocusWriter. By default, FocusWriter opens in full screen mode. But if you scroll your mouse over the top of the screen a toolbar will appear allowing you to exit fullscreen mode, adjust your preferences, save, rename, or print a document.

FocusWriter isn't by any means a full fledged word processor. There's no spell checking. And there's no formatting. You can't embolden, embeggin, or center text. All you can do is write. If you need those features, you might want to invest in a heavy dose of discipline rather than a distraction-free text editor.

[via instant fundas]

Tags: dark-room, focuswriter, text-editor

Filed under: Text, Utilities, iPhone

Amazon's Kindle iPhone app gets a big update

by Jay Hathaway May 21st 2009

I haven't been shy about expressing how much I love Amazon's Kindle iPhone app, and I love it just a little bit more now that it's update to Version 1.1. The addition of an iPhone-optimized Kindle Store made the iPhone experience a bit more like a real Kindle, but the updates in version 1.1 make the app feel more iPhone native. You can now rotate to landscape mode, like you'd expect in an iPhone reader, and there's also a new color scheme available.

The rotation feature is definitely handy, especially since you can turn it off when it would be inconvenient -- when reading in bed, for example. As far as appearance, the old black-on-white layout is still available, but a less bright option has been added in the form of a dark brown-on-sepia theme. It's a bit easier on the eyes in low light. No revolutionary changes here, just small fixes that make an already-usable app that much more pleasing.

[via Daring Fireball]

Tags: amazon, iphone, kindle

Filed under: Security, Text, web 2.0

ZZOMG, Twitter Porn Names is a phishing attack

by Lee Mathews May 12th 2009

You've got to hand it to the shifty jackal that came up with #twitterpornnames. It's a brilliant display of two things. First, is underscores the power of trends on a social site like Twitter. Second, it clearly illustrates just how unaware people are as to the nature of scamming on the Internet.

What the hell is #twitterpornnames, you say?

It's a game that someone started on Twitter. You're supposed to announce your made-up name along with the hash tag and share in the LOL-fest. If you're paying attention, you'll notice just how stupid participating in the "game" could be.

See, the formula provided to create your name just happens to match some very common security questions to help people reset their passwords. Pet's name. First teacher. Street you grew up on. See the pattern?

It's bad enough that users have been taken in, but some have been so blind as to announce their exact formula along with their name. At least if they hadn't done that there would be a little guessing involved, but now it's been handed over on a silver platter.

Remember kids: don't take candy from strangers, and don't hand out your usernames and passwords - or the means to reset them - to the entire population of Twitter.

[via PCWorld]

Tags: passwords, security, twitter, twitterpornnames

Filed under: Text, iPhone

Buying Amazon Kindle books from an iPhone just got easier

by Jay Hathaway May 12th 2009

Amazon's Kindle app for iPhone is a great alternative to purchasing a pricey Kindle device when you've already invested in an iPhone, but it's still not quite as streamlined and easy-to-use.

Amazon seems to be changing that as quickly as it can, though, with the launch of an iPhone-optimized Kindle store. The new store still isn't part of Kindle itself, but it can be launched with the app's "get books" icon.

This seems like a small thing, but it's a big win for iPhone Kindle users, and possibly for Kindle book sales. As nice as it is to have your purchases delivered by WhisperNet to your iPod or iPhone, sometimes you're not at a computer, and trying to buy books from an iPhone in Safari was an aggravating experience until now.

Business Insider points out that Apple is planning new eCommerce features that iPhone developers will eventually have access to. Amazon might be able to use that to handle sales from within the app, making it even closer to the real Kindle experience.

Tags: amazon, app-store, books, iphone, kindle

Filed under: Design, Text, Freeware, Open Source

Font Squirrel offers 300+ quality, free, commercial-friendly fonts

by Lee Mathews May 7th 2009

Finding free fonts on the net isn't really all that hard - the list of sites offering gratis typefaces is a pretty one. Good quality fonts? That's a slightly shorter list.

Good quality free fonts that can be used commercially? That list is even smaller.

Thankfully, the good folks behind Font Squirrel have worked their tails off putting together a large collection (currently 338) hand-selected typefaces that may be used in all your projects, both personal and professional.

Fonts are broken down into the usual families like hand-drawn, grunge, serif, and typewriter. There's a search box as well, helpful for quickly checking whether or not the Squirrel has a specific font.

I was pleased to find Mirisch, one of my favorite Ren and Stimpy-esque fonts.

Tags: fonts, typefaces, typography

Filed under: Internet, Text, Search

Is Twitter's search finally going to become a Google Killer?

by Lee Mathews May 7th 2009

In the recent past, "realtime" has become one of the most overused buzzwords around (right up there with "social" and "community"). And nothing realtime has been more talked about than search.twitter.com.

It's been touted as a Google killer, though in it's present state Twitter's search is an entirely different beast. For one thing, it currently only indexes their own content. That, however, is going to change soon.

Santosh Jayaram, former Search Quality VP for Google has joined Twitter as VP of Operations. According to Jayaram, a couple big changes are coming to search that will make it much more of a killer than it is right now.

First, Search is going to start crawling links that appear in tweets. Let's face it - there's not nearly as much important information in someone's 140 character message about a web page as there is on the page itself. Crawling the sources Twitter users are buzzing about will add much needed context to Twitter's index.

Second, a reputation system is going to be created - and it will no doubt take a lot of work to get it right. The goal is to downplay less valuable tweets (like retweets) and emphasize more worthwhile content.

Will these changes make Twitter a real Google killer? Probably not, but it's certainly going to make the tool much more useful and relevant.

[via WebWare]

Tags: twitter-search

Filed under: Text, Social Software, web 2.0, Web

Tweet Grid is a no-login way to monitor multiple Twitter searches in realtime

by Lee Mathews Apr 30th 2009

Most desktop Twitter clients have a decent built-in way to monitor search topics, but they'll all cut into your API allowance. While I've never run into that problem myself, I know that it does happen to some people I follow. One way to free up some calls? Use Tweet Grid to monitor search terms.

When you land on their site, you'll first select a grid layout. You can choose anything from 1x1 to 3x3 on the main page, though once you're inside you can switch to experimental layouts like 2x5 and 1x10 to keep tabs. Pro tip: 1x10 doesn't work so well on a smaller display. Four columns is about as much as I could squeeze out of my laptop's 1280 horizontal pixels.

To limit the textual overload, you can choose to display only updates in a certain language and number of updates to store in each box (last 5, 10, 20, etc.).

Tags: search, twitter

Filed under: Design, Text, Web

Quickly preview all your installed fonts online

by Lee Mathews Apr 30th 2009

Looking for a fast, easy way to preview the fonts you have installed on your computer? It doesn't get much easier than visiting Flipping Typical.

Head over to the site and within seconds it will render a table of all your typefaces. Initially the preview text will read "flipping typical," but you can delete it and enter whatever you like. To swap the primary font at the top of the page, simply click on the one you'd like to view full size. You can also switch the previews to bold and italics via hotkeys (control-b and control-i respectively).

Flipping Typical should work just fine on Windows and OSX with just about any browser except IE6.

Tags: fonts, typography

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

View more Time Wasters