eugene gordin

I’ll be honest, I’m not the biggest environmentalist. I rarely recycle regularly, I drive an SUV, I’m just not “green.” However, I think I might be well on my way, since this semester I worked on a project which improved the accuracy of the Consumer Footprint Calculator, originally created by Christopher Jones.

The calculator lets you input various parts of your lifestyle (vehicle you drive, housing type, etc), and see what kind of green house gas emissions you’re creating with your lifestyle, and how you compare to the US and World Averages. My group’s improvements have not yet been implemented, so I actually wanted to share another interesting find with you along these same lines.

The find is called BeGreenNow, and it is a very well designed, similarly themed website devoted to helping people realize the impact they have on the environment. The site even helps you offset your emissions by purchasing Carbon Offsets. There is also a social networking aspect to the site, so if your friends also have accounts, you can see how your lifestyle compares to theirs. Its all very well done and very easy to use. Check it out here!

Everyone should have a domain name. I’m a huge advocate of having domain names for families (such as gordin.net), as well as for individuals (such as eugenegordin.com, which you’re currently enjoying reading). Therefore, for all of you Windows users, Microsoft is offering free domain names for you, providing at no cost:

• Free domain name and web hosting
• Web site design tools
• 500MB of web storage
• 25 email accounts
• Web site reports
• Search engine advertising tool

This is quite a great deal (things are just better when they are free), so I highly recommend the windows (and Parallels) users check it out here. Also, according to the good people over at DownloadSquad, if you decide to cancel your hosting with Microsoft, you still get to keep the domain.

For all of you non-Windows users, NameCheap is where I get the majority of my domain names for my webhosting company ($9 per year). That said, if you are looking for non-Microsoft hosting, I know a guy who can help you out :). Enjoy.

I’m a big fan of Gmail. I’m a big fan of iPhoto. However, if I want to email my pictures from iPhoto with Gmail, I have to drag them from iPhoto to my desktop and then go to Gmail and browse for the file and then send it.

All of that isn’t necessary anymore with the help of a little plugin called iPhoto2Gmail, which allows you to, well, send pictures from iPhoto to Gmail believe it or not. It works through iPhoto’s File–>Export function and lets you login to your Gmail account and attach the selected photos to an email you can write in that same window (see screenshot).

If you use iPhoto and Gmail, I highly recommend this plugin. Its donationware, so if you like the work, be sure and donate (there’s a Paypal link on the site)!

Today’s useless but interesting nonetheless find is a screen saver called Fenêtres Volantes that makes your windows fly. I could go into greater detail, but that pretty much sums it up. Its a cool little animation, so check it out here.

Oh, and why from nothing you ask? Unless you are using an old type of monitor, the screen saver is nothing more than a pretty picture.

To go along with the new sidebar section I added today that lets you see all of the posts associated with your operating system (if that’s what you are looking for), I thought I would have a post dedicated to the Windows users. With that said, here goes:

Have you ever wanted to know how to turn off those pesky start-up programs that seem to just pop up when you start your computer. If so, there are two places that you can find (and disable them). The first place is in the start menu: Start –> All Programs –> Startup. While this is the logical place for your startup items, it by far isn’t where the majority of them are.

You can find more startup items by going to Start –> Run and typing “msconfig” without the quotes. This will bring up a window with a few tabs. If you click the Startup tabs, you will see the programs that are set to run when your computer starts. Be extremely careful when unchecking items in this tab – you could mess up your computer. Therefore, a good rule of thumb is to not uncheck any program that you do not recognize.

That little trick has helped me get rid of spyware and program annoyances in the past, so I hope it helps you too. You can find more windows commands here.

PS: My goal is to post both Vista and Office 2007 reviews sometime this year for you windows users, so be on the look out for those!

I was going to write one of those cheesy here’s what I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving, but geekify it a bit and write about what techy things I’m thankful for. But I’m not going to.

Instead, I think I’ll be thankful for free speech, with a little web 2.0 goodness mixed in. I’m talking about Standpoint, a website that allows you express your beliefs in a number of different ways.

You can state whether or not you agree with a variety of beliefs that other have submitted, or you could also submit your own custom beliefs, and people can comment, agree, disagree with what you said.

Its a pretty interesting concept, with the beliefs ranging from “Morality is not strictly religious- many atheists have very exacting moralities” to “Firefox is better than Internet Explorer” to “Ninja pirates are superior to everything.”

I think this site is perfect for days like today, when you’ve got nothing to do, and want to learn something / argue with someone / be heard / etc. Either way, check out the Standpoint, you might just like it. Happy Thanksgiving.

A Keyword Manager that is. Today’s interesting find has occupied my time for the last two days*. I wrote before about Keyword Assistant, the tool that helps you tag your photos in iPhoto quickly and easily. Two days ago, I was perfectly happy with my 12,640 photos tagged with the people in them, places they were taken, etc.

Now, with Keyword Manager, you can tag your photos not only quickly and easily, but logically too. Keyword Manager allows you to create not only keywords, but also subkeywords, and labels them as such. Let me demonstrate with a simple example.

Lets say I have the photo you see on the right. With Keyword Assistant, I would merely tag this photo with the tags: Me, Joey, and Newport Beach. Seems simple enough. However, with Keyword Manager, I have assigned the keyword “Newport Beach” under the categories of “Orange County” which is under “Southern California” which is under “California” which is under “USA.” The other two tags for this photo have similar catagories for them which you can see below.

Why would anyone in their right mind do any of this, you ask? With this leveled (hierarchical) structure, I can search my entire photo library for all of the pictures that happen to be taken in the USA, in California, in Southern California, in Orange County, or in Newport Beach. Its pretty amazing. You can see the whole set up below.

Keyword Manager lets you tag your photos VERY VERY quickly, and with an incredibly nice user interface (I’m a big fan of the transparent black bezel). The program costs $19, but if you use the Promotional Code VT-542U845 (US) and VT-542E845 (EU), you can get it for $12. Its highly worth the money! Find more information about it Keyword Manager here.

Update: The benefits of keyword hierarchy in more detail are in the comments.

If you’re anything like me, you only use map sites to get directions to take you from one place to another. Don’t get me wrong, they are amazing for that, but there’s SO much more.

My absolute favorite mapping site is Google Maps however, purely because its just so intuitive (nevermind good-looking). If I want to see a bit to the right of the current view on the map window, I just drag the map within the window. No page reloading, no nothing. It’ll even give you traffic on your cell phone! Its brilliant.

However, Google Maps are even more brilliant than that. You see Google allows application developers to use their maps for other purposes. You can find out where the cheapest gas is near you. You can find out where there are housing listings on Craigslist. You can create a map of your Facebook friends. You can even complain about that one red light that never turns green!

There are tons of different applications for Google Maps, so check them out!

I was a Windows guy for the majority of my life, right up until I received my first Mac Mini two years ago. Throughout the whole time that I was a Windows user, the only time I would find out little tricks to help me do my day to day tasks was when a new version of Windows came out, and they had added new features.

OSX on the other hand, seems like more of an onion to me, the deeper you dig, the more layers you find. Such is the case with these helpful hints for OSX. The people over at Apple Matters did a great job compiling this list, and the people in the comments also have helpful things to add. Note: if you have a single button mouse/trackpad, where it says “right click,” substitute with “control-click.”
Some of my favorites are below:

• Press the Tab key in Exposé to cycle through open applications.

• Press the ` key in Exposé to cycle backwards as per the previous tip. ( ‘ is the key Tab and left of the 1 key).

• Press Command-Q to close applications when command-tabbing. This is possibly the fastest way you’ll find to close several applications in quick succession.

• Macs with remote controls can be put to sleep by holding down the play button on the remote.

• To select a block of text, click the start position, then Shift-click the end position – this one is awesome.

• We all know Command-shift-4 to capture a selection of the screen, but don’t forget pressing the Spacebar will toggle between selection mode and select whole window mode.

• Hold the Option key will clicking the Zoom button (green button, rightmost of three in the top left corner of windows) switches the zoom state of all windows in the selected application.

• Option-click the minimize button minimizes all windows in the application – and makes for a really cool animation (hold the shift key too if you want to slow it down to see it more easily).

• CTRL + Scroll wheel on the mouse zooms in on the screen, then move the mouse around to move the screen around.

• Option + Delete will delete a track in iTunes regardless of where you are, library, playlist, or otherwise (this one is really helpful)

You can find the entire collection of tips and tricks here. There are a couple more cool tricks I found over at Silver Mac including one about a third Minimize effect for the dock called Suck. Check it out here.

I browse a lot of websites. I’ll admit it. Sometimes I find that there is one simple way to improve a website – one minimal change – that could make it so much better. A button here, a link there. Luckily, this is where my love for Firefox Extensions comes in – the GreaseMonkey extension allows you to change pretty much anything about a website’s look, feel, or function through user scripts.

Its best illustrated with an example. I am an avid Gmail user, and find the email service very functional and simple. However, I don’t understand why they didn’t include a Mark As Read button for the inbox. It’s just asking to be there, but its not. Here’s where GreaseMonkey comes in – once GreaseMonkey is installed, I simply look for a Gmail Mark As Read Button script at Userscripts.com, a site devoted to collecting GreaseMonkey scripts.

Here’s a list of GreaseMonkey scripts that I have installed currently:

• Google
• Gmail Mark Read Button – see above
• Gmail Signature Float – Floats your signature above replied/forwarded message instead of below (default)
• Gmail+Google Reader – Integrates Google Reader into the Gmail Menu (this is for sure going to be incorporated soon into gmail)
• Google Calendar Wheel – Allows calendar scrolling via mousewheel or two-finger scrolling
• Hide Gmail Ads – It hides Gmail ads.
• Facebook
• Facebook Autologin v2 – no more having to press login despite having your login information saved
• inYOfacebook – allows you to see people’s enlarged profile picture in search queries (very cool)
• Facebook EZ Poke – no more poke confirmation page – it all happens with the click of the EZ Poke button
• Last.fm
• Chart Changes – Places a +/- value next to songs, artists, or albums tracking week to week changes
• Artist Fan Rank – lets you know when people are in the top fan ranks for artists, songs, or albums
• General
• Greased Lightbox – Adds lightbox functionality to links that point to images. Very cool.

The vast majority of those scripts came from Userscripts.com, which has a large collection GreaseMonkey scripts you can search through. Its a great resource, and the key to adding website functionality that you have always wanted. There is also a variety of sites that have discussed the best GreaseMonkey scripts out there.

My suggestion is to install GreaseMonkey, check out the scripts that I use and see if they are beneficial to you, and then search for the sites you visit on Userscripts.com. GreaseMonkey can be an amazing asset, and its quite easy to use to boot! Enjoy!