Keep Your Contacts, Easily

November 3rd, 2006

Plaxo

Between high school, college, graduate school, work, and, well life in general – you’re bound to meet a lot of people. Business cards get lost, emails get changed, phone numbers come and go, and screen names get forgotten. Not anymore.

Plaxo is a company started in 2001, devoted to keeping people’s contact information current, and in the hands of people you think should have it. In addition to Address Book integration (on OSX), and Outlook integration (on Outlook), it has a really nice website that is quite easy to use. Other features include mobile phone integration and Gmail contact import. Plaxo is great for the business world, as well as just keeping in contact with your friends. It allows you to send out your updated contact information to all of your contacts, as well as request them to confirm the contact information you have for them.

Plaxo

You might say well I keep my contact information updated through sites like Facebook, etc. Facebook used to contain a feature that allowed you to download your friend’s contact information into the vCard format. Now that’s all gone. Plaxo is now the best way to keep your contact information up to date.

The first thing I thought of when I first heard of this site was privacy issues – are they going to share my information with anyone? Rest assured, Plaxo upholds a strict privacy policy and is completely secure to hold your contact information. Currently it has 15 Million+ members, and its growing significantly every day.

I highly recommend you guys check Plaxo out, and add me as a contact (eugene AT gordin DOT net).

Moving Pictures

October 31st, 2006

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Have you ever wanted to combine two of your photographs, or images, or pictures into one? Now there’s a really simple way to created animated pictures from up to 10 of your images – Gickr.com

The site lets you combine any two of your images into an animated GIF, quickly and easily (and lets you determine the speed of the animation). Its a pretty useful tool, even though it tags the upper left corner of your image with gickr.com. The site is pretty well done too, with a simple user interface and nice clean graphics.
Check it out!

dance.gif

PS If you want an example, here’s one I just made from two pictures my senior year in high school. I don’t have any idea why I would make any of those motions, but entertaining nonetheless. Enjoy.

PPS Yes, I used Gickr for the image for my post about iLike too. 🙂

A New Look!

October 31st, 2006

Welcome!

As you can tell, interesting finds has a new fresh look. I’ve been wanting to upgrade the site’s look for a while now, and I finally finished.

You will see little updates here and there in the coming weeks, but the overall design is now finished. I tried to go for a more clean look, adopting a two column structure to help you navigate the site quicker and easier.

I would love to get some feedback, so be sure and fill out the poll on the right, and if you have any questions/comments/suggestions leave them in the comments!

Thats all for now – enjoy!

Faster FireFox 2.0 (For Mac)

October 29th, 2006

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Firefox is quite a universal application (no pun intended). With limited exceptions, it can be run on Windows or OSX, regardless of Intel or Power PC processors. However, Firefox for OSX can also be optimized for each specific type of processor, greatly improving speed and reliability.These builds also can add Aqua form widgets to Firefox, making forms show up in OSX-style instead of how they show up regularly.

Now that Firefox 2.0 has been released, here are the optimized builds for Power PC and Intel Macs, courtesy of Beatnik Pad. The optimized versions are provided under the name Bon Echo, since the Firefox name (and icon) cannot be used for non-Mozilla releases.

G4-optimized Firefox 2.0

G5-optimized Firefox 2.0

Intel Mac-optimized Firefox 2.0

Thanks again to Beatnik Pad for these! Note: If you have any problems with certain web pages not recognizing your browser as Firefox, be sure and check out this page (its a simple fix). Enjoy!

iLike Music

October 26th, 2006

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Today’s interesting find is iLike.com, a music social networking website devoted to helping you find new music. I realize that if you read Mike Went West at all, you remember my VolumeSessions post about last.fm, a site that is devoted to finding new music, but iLike.com has several distinct advantages over last.fm, despite the fact that iLike.com is still in its infancy: it went public on October 25, 2006.

iLike.com provides a sidebar attached to you iTunes window, which currently provides recommendations based on what you’re listening to (both song clips and full songs of free mp3s), tells you what your friends are listening to, and lets you access your iLike.com profile. The iLike iTunes sidebar hides either into a compact tab accessible at any time, or it can hide completely and run in the background. This is exactly the type of application transparency that is missing in the official last.fm player – the sidebar is non-obtrusive, well designed, and hide-able.

The site is also extremely well designed (and in Web 2.0 fashion), and allows you to connect to users based on your iTunes library, playcounts, and overall musical preferences. Since the site is just starting, its features are being implemented almost daily, and though the site is quite functional and interesting currently, there’s a whole lot of features on the way. My plan currently is to continue using iScrobbler for Last.fm and the iLike sidebar in the backgroun until iLike grows in both userbase and features, and then switch over.

Very cool interface, very cool site. Check it out, create an account, and be sure to add EGordin as a friend :).

A New Approach

October 25th, 2006

So I realize that I haven’t posted in more than a month, which has led me to re-examine the structure of this blog. If you look at the length of the blog posts, they seem to be getting longer, which I feel has discouraged me from writing more regularly.

The site has also changed in its direction a bit – I started this blog to share with others my “interesting finds” on the internet. However, the old posts seem to be more tutorials (I’ll call them “Spotlights” from now on ) rather than a collection of cool things I’ve found around the web. I do think that these tutorials are important, and I do want to continue to blog them, though not as often as I have in the past.

Therefore, I’m going to start a new posting time-frame, trying to post at least (though not limited to) once a week, but with a little shorter length. Hopefully this system will work a little better and also provide you guys with more cool finds faster.

As far as the longer “Spotlights,” here are the ones that I plan on posting in the coming months: GreaseMonkey, The Microsoft Office PC to Mac Switch, Early Adopter’s Syndrome, and whatever else I can think of.

In the mean time, let me know what you think about my new approach, my “Spotlight” ideas (including any you’d like to see), or anything else you might want to share with me!

The Sophisticates

September 20th, 2006

I’m not sure if I’ve blogged about this before, but once a month I get to contribute to one of my favorite blogs out there, Mike Went West. My monthly contribution is called VolumeSessions, where I am to intertwine the worlds of music and technology.

This month’s VolumeSessions is about Smart Playlists in iTunes – what they are, how to use them, how they can change your life, etc. Check out the post and check out Mike’s site in general – he knows what he’s talking about.

Oh and why is this post called The Sophisticates? You’ll just have to read the post ;) Enjoy.

Let Information Come To You

September 20th, 2006

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As I’m sure you guys probably know by now, I read a large variety of websites on a daily basis, scouring the web for all that is new and interesting. However, of this large variety, I used to frequent the same 30 websites everyday, jumping from site to site after reading the new articles, and then checking back throughout the day for changes. This process was extremely inefficient.

Enter RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and RSS can completely change how you browse the internet. Basically, RSS technology allows websites to offer feeds, or a up-to-the-minute list of articles, that people can subscribe to. Each time someone posts something on an RSS-enabled website, that article is added to the website’s RSS feed, and a notification is sent out to any subscribers.The beauty of RSS is that the notification doesn’t merely say that something on the website has changed – the notification is the headline and a portion (if not all) of the article itself. These RSS notifications can be gathered from almost all of the websites by any number of RSS Readers (or aggregators).

Some RSS readers are browser based, some are web-based, and some are program based. Below are some you can check out:

Web Based:

Browser Based:

Program Based:

OSX

Windows

Personally, I use Google Reader and I love the simplicity, labels, Google Account integration so I highly recommend that one, though there are other very good RSS readers out there. In fact, you can see all of my subscriptions by subscribing to this link, or sign up for Google Reader here.As time passes, more and more websites add RSS feeds – news sites, fashion sites, technology sites, law sites, music sites, library sites, and blogs (of course), pretty much all major sites have feeds that you can subscribe to. Any site that you see has icon above somewhere on it, has an RSS feed you can subscribe to. You can even have your RSS News feeds come to you in a newspaper format!RSS is a very efficient way to browse the web, and I highly recommend you take advantage of it.

Incidentally, if you want notification every time I have a new interesting find, subscribe to this link ;) . Happy Browsing!

An Update That Updates

August 25th, 2006

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First of all, I’m back from Europe now, and I guess from Southern California too, so I should be posting regularly again.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about absolutely must have Firefox Extensions, including Adblock. Well, little did I know but development for the adblock extension stopped a long time ago update: has split between a number of different authors, and now a better version was available: Adblock Plus. It has tons of bug fixes and added features, of which my favorite is subscriptions (note: as KNK points out, there area few different choices when it comes to Adblock, I however use Adblock Plus).

Basically, instead of importing a list and then slowly shaping it to fit all of the sites that you visit, you can subscribe to a list that someone already has and keeps updated. This way, everytime that person updates their filters, you automatically get the updates too. Very cool stuff and I have my list up for all of you to subscribe to if you’re interested. You can find it here (for a direct link, see my post in the comments).
I cannot stress how much better the internet is with adblock plus (and firefox for that matter), so I highly suggest you guys check it out.

Everyone Needs an Assistant

July 29th, 2006

Update: I have posted about a tool that is a little better than Keyword Assistant. You can find that post here.

This post is for all of the Mac users out there, so those with a PC should look to Google’s Picasa for something similar, but I have little experience with that program.

Last year, I started the long arduous process of tagging my photos in iPhoto. What is tagging you ask? Tagging is the process of assigning keywords to each photo. For example, I try to tag each photo with at least the people in it, as well as the place it was taken, etc. So now your question is, why would you waste your time doing such ridiculous things? Photo tags allow you to easily search your library for any person, place, or thing that you might have tagged earlier. Also, the tags are indexed in Spotlight, so any type of search does yield iPhoto photos that are tagged with the matching criteria.

Here is the problem: iPhoto’s tagging system is far from advanced, and has a user interface that

iphotoKA.jpg

makes it difficult to be productive. Here’s the solution: Keyword Assistant. Keyword Assistant is “a plugin for iPhoto to make keyword management easier. The main feature, pictured at right, is an auto-completing text field for assigning keywords. This is much faster than using the built-in keyword panel.” Using Keyword Assistant, I was able to tag my 8000+ photo library much quicker and easier, since a lot of my keywords were the same and only required typing one or two letters for it to autofill, well, automatically.

Unfortunately, from what I can tell, Ken Ferry (the Keyword Assistant developer) has fallen off the face of the earth, so we actually do not have a Universal Binary version of Keyword Assistant, nor do we have one that works with the latest iPhoto version. However, thanks to this link, you can get the program to work quickly and easily with some simple tinkering. Hopefully either Ken will update the program or Apple will revamp its iPhoto keyword interface – either way we have a working solution in our hands.
I highly recommend tagging your photos, and if you decide to accept that recommendation, look into Keyword Assistant – it will make your tagging lack of life much easier.

PS I’m off on a Northern European cruise so this is going to be my last post here until I get back on August 15th. However, if you are curious as to how my trip is going, I will have a daily blog which you can find here. Happy Tagging!

items of interest
my journal

this is my technology, a collection of tips, tricks, and goodies that I find on the web.