Category archive: technology

Another week, another Twitter app graduates to the home screen on my iPhone. This week's is iTwitter, which might have been round for a while but I only heard of it yesterday when it was incorrectly heralded as the first Twitter app with push notifications (it turns out that IM+ already does that).

I checked out iTwitter, only to be disappointed when I found out that you only receive push notifications if another iTwitter app user mentions or DMs you. If anyone wants to follow me and play with it, I'm @bitful.

The disappointment did not last long, however, as I discovered that iTwitter is an iPhone application with a very attractive simplicity that fits the way I use Twitter on my iPhone very well. That is, I want to do few things, and I want them to be super easy (and work well).

Main functions

The first screen you see is the last you were looking at upon quitting the application after the previous use. I tend to leave it in the 'Home' screen that shows your friends' timeline and only four options:

• refresh
• mark all as read
• delete
• compose tweet

If you tap on a tweet, a few options pop up:

• go to the URLs mentioned in the tweet
• reply
• retweet
• favourite

Very handy if you have large fingers like me and have trouble tapping on tiny icons or URLs.

You need to go up one menu to select, among other options, to view mentions and direct messages. Here you can also start a search, which can be saved and it will then appear on this menu. This menu also lets you access an address book with everyone you follow, and another with everyone who follows you.

Direct messages

The only way I found to send a DM is by tapping on a name in the Following or Followers address book, which involves too many clicks and is also confusing because as far as I know, you can only DM people who follow you. I haven't tried it yet though.

@Reply threads

iTwitter sticks the original tweet (with smaller font and avatar) underneath its reply, which I think is incredibly useful when people reply to you, especially if you tweet a lot and the replies are a simple 'Ditto' or 'LOL'. Unfortunately it only works if you follow the person who sent the original tweet.

Multiple accounts

You can add more than one account but you will have to move up to the top-level menu to switch between accounts. Again, not something I need.

I like this application and will probably stick to it. For the record, lately I have been using TweetDeck on the iPhone, which has a killer feature of displaying tweets grouped by whatever criteria you want. But I have recently unfollowed 40 accounts and I now get everything I want to read, nothing less, nothing more, so TweetDeck was largely unused.

Several months ago I worked on a redesign for this site, that I never put live because although I found it aesthetically pleasing (just a few tweaks to make it clearer and more settled), something was bothering me.

I have known for a long time that I (and most people I know) now blog in a different way from when I started in 2001. I don't need a blog to share links to cool stuff I found, post my photos or write a quick update on what I am doing, because this is now taken care of by (among others) Delicious, Flickr and Twitter.

You can of course subscribe to my Delicious bookmarks, add me as a contact on Flickr and follow me on Twitter. Or, if you like coming to this site, you can from now on dip into my activities by looking my Friendfeed activity in the sidebar.

I have also decided to switch to an automatic blogroll that displays all the websites I have tagged with 'blogroll' in Google Reader. These are my 'must reads' that I always find some time for.

I have removed the list of category and monthly archives from the homepage, and moved them to a dedicated 'Archives' page that you can access from any page on this site, and where you will find all the entries by date and by category, as well as a list of the most commented posts.

Similarly, I have moved some of the content in an enhanced 'About' section, and collected the feeds that you can subscribe to in their own page. Did you know that as well as subscribing to the main entries and the comments feed, you can also access my Google Reader shared items (mostly design ideas and gadgets) and all the entries from the sites in my blogroll? Have a look at the feeds page to find out more.

All the content is still here and there are ways to find it even if it is not linked to from every page. If you are a regular user of this site I'd be very happy if you could leave a comment here to let me know what you think.

Gordon recently pointed out that I have been running the '7 things I did not know last week' weekly post since January 2007.

That's… two years! And possibly the longest I have enjoyed doing something for, which makes me wonder how I managed to do that. I believe that it is because I did not set out to do something special, but shared my innate curiosity with others, via a very simple method.

The process I developed is the easiest I could think of. Whenever I learn something new during the course of the week, I send myself an email. Since most of the time this happens while I am online, this is as easy as sending a link to the page I am on. Most weeks I collect more than seven items, so I rarely have to start looking for ideas.

I have experimented with Gmail filters, labels, custom-made email addresses and saved searches, but in the end I went for the simplest possible solution: when I send these emails to myself, I stick in the subject line a special made-up word that triggers a rule that marks the email as read and archives it. I found it had to be a unique word to avoid false positives coming up in search results. Then, when I am ready to write the post in Wordpress I fire up Gmail, search for that made-up word and find all the notes I sent myself on the subject. Once I have blogged them, I delete the email.

You can use the same system to track anything you like. I regularly use it to capture ideas and notes on the go, and to track the cash I spend and food I eat if I am on a diet. Then, once a week or so, I sit down and report the data if needed, extracting it from Gmail as above.

I hope you enjoy reading my '7 things' posts as much as I enjoy putting them together for you.

Since moving all my personal email to Gmail a few months ago I have been spoiled with the power of Google search applied to messages. For a small price (knowing that Google bots scan every communication I send and receive) I get the pleasure of typing anything in a search field (with as complex a syntax as I want) and finding all the messages have ever sent or received that contained my search string.

Microsoft Outlook, which unfortunately I still have to use at work, is one of those cases where software got so complicated and riddled with options that yes, you can do hundreds of things, but sadly none very easily or quickly. Search is one of them.

Outlook's simple search toolbar lets me down because:

• it only searches within the folder you are in (not within subfolders);
• it only searches content in the subject line;
• if I perform a search, then move to another folder, I lose my search results.

The one good thing about Windows Vista is its indexing and search functionality, but we run XP at work, and unfortunately I am not allowed to install indexing software on my machine, so alas, no Google Desktop.

My solution (more like a workaround really): Outlook's advanced search. I bring it up by typing Ctrl-Shift-F (this opens a new window), type my keyword(s) and press the Enter key. All results appear in a new window (so I can continue working in my main one), and subfolders are scanned by default.

This way you still only look for content in the subject line, but I am happy with that, because I want messages that deal primarily with what I am looking for, rather than mention it incidentally. The problem here is that very often the subject line is not representative of the content, such as 'fruit' or 'Sharing is caring' (real subject lines of non-personal messages I have received at work lately).

Fortunately, Outlook lets you edit the subject line of emails you have received. I therefore recently went through the messages I needed to keep for reference (not very many, I try and delete as many as I can) and added a few keywords to the original subject line, wrapped in brackets to separate them from it. So the subject lines above (real examples from my 'archive' folder) have become 'fruit (character encoding info utf8)' and 'Sharing is caring (uxd brainstorming notes contextual navigation shared drive folder)'. I keep the original title so that if I need to reply or forward the message I can delete my own keywords.

I think I first read about this method on Lifehacker: Make Outlook email messages more searchable.

I have now developed the habit of changing the subject line when I am done with a message and I want to archive it (Ctrl-shift-V, then select the folder where you 'archive' read mail that you keep for reference), and every time I need to bring up old info, I can access it with a few keystrokes.

It feels good and efficient, and yet every time I do that, I wish that I could just use Gmail at work too.

Over the last few months I have transferred most of the my data and tools (email, documents and applications) online. It was not a conscious decision I took one day, in fact I remember resisting it a bit, but in the end common sense prevailed and I figured out that I am prepared to trust third parties with my stuff, so that I can get ease of access and use.

I have not looked back once since. I just took a few precautions: just to name a couple, my Gmail account automatically backs up with Zoho, and I chose to use a paying service (JungleDisk interfacing Amazon Simple Storage) to back up documents and photos once a week.

I have just come across one of the articles that originally sparked my curiosity in putting data out there: How To Live the Cloud Life, by Paul Stamatiou. It is a treasure chest full of tips and links to applications and services that will make it easy for you too to adopt this lifestyle.

The trouble with trying out every single new web application that becomes available (like I do) is that when the market suffers, most of them disappear.

Within the space of a couple of weeks last month I received a handful of emails informing me, dear user, that such and such service is closing (either for good or just until the big cheese that bought it decides what to do with it).

Fortunately, I seem to have stuck with services that are either stronger or more complete (or sometimes simpler, doing just one thing but doing it very well), and that are therefore doing OK. So I am sorry to see it go but I won't miss I Want Sandy because I use Remember The Milk. And I will survive very well without Stikkit thanks to Evernote. And Pownce has never been but a promising but unused sort of Twitter on steroids, whereas the original thing (with all its epic fail whales) is still among my favourites.

I have been dealing with something that needs fixing at work, so imagine my disappointment when I came home yesterday to find that the RSS feed for this blog had been broken since my last WordPress update about a week ago.

I removed some redirects from the .htaccess file and it is now working again and finally showing my last eight posts.

I should reinstall the redirects one by one to find out exactly where the loop was created (in very simple terms, when you ask for page A you get redirected to page B which in turn redirects to page A), but I have to shoot off to work… to find a fix for what is broken there.

I am so looking forward to five days of food, sleep and good company with Dr B.'s family over Christmas, where the most challenging technological task will be switching channels on Sky.

I do not check how many people read this blog and where they come from. If I did, I would have noticed that over three years ago guardian.co.uk linked to my post on 'Ooh matron' from Sheila Pulham's blog entry on TV catchphrases.

I only found out today while checking out broken links using Google Webmaster Tools, which lists external sites that link to your own.

Twitter Charts plots any Twitter user's tweets on a chart by time of the day and day of the week.

Here is the chart for my Twitter feed:

If the time on the chart is right, it appears that I tweet mainly on a Saturday and generally between 6 and 8pm.

Via Micro Persuasion.

So last night I uploaded into Gmail all the old emails I had in Outlook.

It was a very easy task, as simple as dragging them from 'Personal Folders' to the IMAP 'Gmail/All Mail' folder, then doing the same from Sent Items to 'Gmail/Sent Mail'. It took a while, but now all my emails are available online, and I can access them from any machine, including my iPhone.

Why have I done this? Because I like keeping similar things in one place, and because with Gmail's fast and advanced search it is much easier to find what I am looking for.

Email duplication

By doing this, a portion of my messages (those received since I started using Gmail and before I stopped using Outlook a few months ago) have now been duplicated in Gmail. Upon investigation they appear to differ only by some elements of text formatting (extra line breaks), which is probably why software such as Duplicate Email Remover for Outlook failed to identify them.

After a bit of fiddling around, I chose to live with it – Gmail groups duplicates in one conversation anyway.

What if Google goes bust?

If Google loses your email, closes/locks your account, or the service is simply down, you will have no way to retrieve your messages. If that scares you, you might want to keep your Gmail account in sync with Zoho (painlessly via POP mail).

Alternatively, you could see the loss of all your emails as a welcome opportunity to start afresh with a clean slate, like a very wise former colleague of mine said when we were discussing pros and cons of keeping all your data 'in the cloud'.

Two months on, I am still as much in love with my iPhone 3G as the very first day. Sometime I catch myself sticking my hand in my pocket just to stroke its smooth, curved edges.

What I found out yesterday is that it also makes me love my friends more. Let me explain.

I used to occasionally sign emails and text messages with 'Lx' – L for Luca and x for kiss. By the way, why do we still sometimes sign emails and text messages, when the name of the sender is forever embedded in the message itself? I guess it is because they remind us of the days of yore, when letters could be separated from their envelopes (which in turn might not show the name of the sender). Just think of contemporary communication media that are not associated with lost practices – wouldn't it be absurd to sign your IMs or tweets?

The iPhone has an innovative text recognition pattern that auto-corrects words that contain letters positioned near those you wanted to type on the tiny on-screen keyboard. And every time I type 'Lx' it auto-corrects it to 'Of'. True, I can override it with one touch of an x next to the suggestion, but often I forget and send messages like 'OK cool will do. Of' – or 'Speak later. Of' – Of what?

So now if I want to sign a message I will end with 'Lxx', as there is no word that can be typed by jabbing your fingers blindly in that pattern. There you go, an extra kiss.

When I write a blog post, I often spend almost as long looking for good links to complement my point.

I am writing this post with the help of Zemanta, which sits on top of your blogging application and suggests Wikipedia links, maps, homepages that are related to the words you have written.

All the links in this post have been generated simply by clicking on the tags in the WordPress interface and selecting the preferred option if there is more than on. For instance, to link to Firefox I could choose to link to a map, the homepage, the Wikipedia entry or the corresponding Crunchbase page for it.

The linked words withing this post and the group of links at the bottom pointing to related articles were suggested based on this post's keywords, and turned into links with one click.

Zemanta also suggests related images that can be incorporated in your post just as easily but I have chosen not to add any to this post.

If Zemanta manages to integrage my workflow nicely, I could see it becoming an important part of my blogging and could even push me to write more, as it removes the pain of finding and placing contextual links.

I have tested both the Firefox extension and the WordPress plugin and both work pretty wel. The extension is set up in a matter of minutes and it offers the same functionalities as the plugin.

Related articles

• Blogging is a Breeze with Zemanta
• Tools I use: Zemanta
• Rich blog content at the click of a button – Zemanta has gone live!

Yesterday I told you my name. Today I thought I'd show you my face.

I have been fascinated for a long time by people who take their own picture every day and then paste them all together in a video, like 200 Days in 20ish Seconds and Living My Life Faster. So much so that between 1 January 2007 and 29 March 2008 I took a photo of myself almost every single day.

Did I put them all together in a nice movie? Did I bugger. I tried once with Windows Movie Maker but I found it too fiddly. I tried Photoshop so I could achieve pixel-perfect alignment but the task was monumental. I uploaded them in batches on my lucabelletti account on Flickr (don't bother checking it out, there are no public photos now), but the free account photostream only shows the last 200 pics and I did not want to upgrade to pro.

Last March I discovered Daily Mugshot and found that it does exactly what I need. I gave it a few tries, by using a webcam, or uploading a picture from the hard drive, or sending one from a mobile phone, but it was only when I got an iPhone that I found the method that suits me the best: snap pic with iPhone, email to Daily Mugshot, pic appears in my 'mugshow':

I'll grant you it lacks the perfection of manually assembled examples where pictures are resized and perfectly centered, but it was a very easy choice between having 'nothing out there' and 'something that updates automatically whenever I email a photo to it'.

Cherry on the cake: the guy who developed Daily Mugshot is a star (I had a question on how to do something, and he did it for me straight away). Thanks Keith!

I also take a picture of me in underwear (front and side) every month to record my desperate attempts to combat the inevitable sagging that old father time is cursing my body with. Check back tomorrow for those. Er, scrap that actually, I think I'll spare you that one.

Daily Mugshot

When I started writing this blog it was completely anonymous. I wanted it that way, I did not necessarily enjoy it because I wanted everyone I know to read it, but I felt that it had to be that way and that I had no choice.

My first ever web page in early 1999 had all my details on it. It was personal but at the same time since it was entirely hand-coded it was meant to me looked at by potential employers or consultancy clients in the IT business. It had a photo of my cat (a must at that time), it talked about my boyfriend, it even had my home address so people would know where I was based.

I sent all my contacts a link to it, and a friend came back to me horrified that I had published my full address. He begged me to remove it, and I did, and I am glad I did, because at that time the last thing I needed was a stalker.

Fast forward to 2002, when I made up a unique blog name (bitful) and started connecting to a blogging community (the way we use to do it, by linking to each other's blogs, since FriendFeed and Facebook were at the time but a twinkle in Tim Berners Lee's eye). I kept everything separate even when it took a lot of effort, and only disclosed my blog's URL to very close friends. Similarly, I would never post pictures of myself or of my friends on my bitful account on Flickr, and maintained two separate Yahoo! accounts, one for mail, the other for social stuff.

A lot has happened since then. I am probably more comfortable with myself. I also am very lucky to be doing a job I love in an institution I respect, with colleagues I trust. And little by little, the boundaries I had carefully drawn to separate my two online identities became blurred. I have always been much more active online as bitful than as lucabelletti, and I was eager to connect to people as bitful to create connections between them and my online identity.

I have come to a point where I am perfecly happy to feature my name openly on my blog. I feel it is for me a very natural progression, as I cannot see the point of hiding it any longer, and the public and private identities are now one and the same. They serve different purposes perhaps, but they complement each other, as two facets of who I am. I know many people who are still terrified of such openness, and I respect their position, but I know this is right for me now.

And after all, if you search for my first and last name in inverted commas on Google you already get links to my FriendFeed, delicious, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter, and (empty) personal homepage/sandbox for work projects (as well as stuff from other people I share my name with).

So yes then, my name is Luca Belletti, I run a blog called bitful, and you are very welcome to my life.

You know I like to log things about me, right?

Then do you think I would miss the opportunity to record a daily summary of my activities and get pretty charts to boot?

Of course not.

So now you can find out how I am doing and feeling, how little I sleep, if I stick to my rule 'no alcohol on school nights' and if I am still caffeine-free by checking out my Morale-O-Meter:

I have been using Google Chrome (open source web browser developed by Google) for the last few hours, and my initial overall impressions are very positive.

It does not appear to be significantly faster than Firefox 3 or Safari, but that is acceptable for the first iteration of a Beta product.

I appreciate enormously the streamlined look without menus, with just three icons, very limited options and the tabs at the very top. It looks like they took a page from Apple's book of interaction design, and it feels very much like a Google product.

And I absolutely adore the Omnibox, the all-in-one address bar and search bar, in particular its Tab-to-Search feature: just type amazon (or youtube, or any other website name that offers a search functionality) into the address bar, then 'tab', then keywords and you are searching within the site, with auto-suggestions popping up underneath your search as results come up.

If you want to read a full review, which very interestingly compares Chrome to Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 (in which, surprisingly, IE does not come out badly at all), try First Test of Google’s New Browser.

And if you are one of the many people who are worried about Google collecting more and more data about your life, I recommend Preventing paranoia: when does Google Chrome talk to Google.com?

Other useful links:

• download Google Chrome;
• read about Google Chrome on Wikipedia;
• read the Google Chrome comic book.

So yesterday I had enough of squinting at Windows Mobile interfaces, felt seduced by the user experience on the iPod Touch I got last February, decided it was time to treat myself (it's been hard at work during the past ten months), got my PAC from T-Mobile and I got myself an iPhone 3G.

I shall spare you the oohs and aahs (yes, I uttered many throughout the day) and skip to one point: I also signed up for MobileMe (two months free, then 59 pounds for one year, and I can unsubscribe before starting to pay) hoping that it would be the final answer to my eternal quest for perfect synchronisation of mail, contacts, calendars, photos across all devices. The idea is that all the data resides 'in the cloud' and is pushed through to all the locations you want to see it.

Well, I am about to unsubscribe to MobileMe after less than 24 hours, not because it does not do what it said it did, but because I was not prepared to change the way I work to comply with MobileMe requirements: to put it simply, I am a heavy Google user and it is not possible to use MobileMe to shadow your Google accounts.

You can read a more detailed account at MobileMe and Gmail: Pick one or expect frustration.

So I guess it's back to Gmail with IMAP (working very well so far), Google Calendar Sync with Outlook, and a simple Contacts sync with outlook via iTunes.

Although since I'm still paying for the Mail2Web Exchange account I used before switching to Gmail, one day I might try and see how that syncs with the iPhone.

Facebook Connect is an authentication methodology to log into third-party websites with your Facebook credentials.

On Monday Facebook launched The Run Around to demonstrate how it works. It is a sample site where you can log your runs and track your progress, and you can sign on by clicking the Facebook Connect button. Once you are logged in, your Facebook friends using the site will already have been added for you.

I find this very interesting and I'd like more of these in the future instead of having to send out invitations and reconnect to friends on multiple social networks. It is probably not fo anyone who is very concerned about privacy, although I would have to see this in action to have a better idea about this.

If you run, and are one of my Facebook Friends, have a play around at The Run Around too and help me see how much is shared.

More info: See What Facebook Connect Looks Like

Ever since the launch of the Apple Applications store, I've spent most of my free time downloading stuff, playing games and showing off how cool they are to friends and colleagues.

More generally, I've started using my iPod Touch a lot, getting to a point where if something cannot be done with it, I often don't bother doing it at all.

So the only reason for this update is the new WordPress iPhone application. It totally rocks and now I finally feel that this device has truly become my personal computer.

Sadly, it cannot clean our flat. Yet.

In the end last night I (and probably another few hundred thousand people with me) could not get my hands on Firefox 3, so I went out.

I have just downloaded it now (it would be cool to set a record for number of downloads in 24 hours), but I will probably wait a bit before installing it because

• it is always recommended not to install just-released software straight away;
• some people I know are experiencing problems with Firefox 3;
• last time I checked, not all add-ons work with Firefox 3 yet.

If you have installed Firefox 3 and want to revert, you can download previous versions of Firefox.

I will probably download and install the Firefox 3 Portable Edition that can run alongside old versions, until I am sure I want to upgrade for good.

So yes, I went out last night. I never ever go out on a school night these days, so I limited myself to three pints, and yet I am not feeling too good this morning, but fortunately I am going to be staying later at work tonight because I have a Spanish class at 6.30PM, so I can go in later than usual. Ooh I'm rambling aren't I?

Yes, I was saying I went out. And had a very good time with Jonathan, David and Ian at Retro Bar. We saw Dave and Simon and took part in the weekly Pop Quiz.

I expect Jonathan to write about it on his blog today [update: he did]. I hope he does, because all I can remember is that our team came second with 18 out of 21 points. I cannot even remember the name of the team, apart that it was picked by flicking through a copy of Boyz and pointing randomly at some text.

Right then. Coffee, porridge, Nurofen Plus, shower, then off to work.

Today at 10AM Pacific (=6PM London) time, Firefox 3 (with several new features and improvements) is released. If you were planning to try it out, why not download Firefox 3 today, and help set a world record for number of software downloads in a 24 hour period?

A friend asked me last week why he should start using Firefox. I was caught a little off guard and blabbered something along the lines of add-ons, without being able to provide a single example. I might have muttered the word 'skins'. He probably was not impressed, unsurprisingly as it is not the most compelling argument.

Well, I now have had time to reflect, and I can give you the reasons why I use Firefox (your reasons may vary):

• I can select text, right click and search for that text in Google (or any other search engine I select)
• I can dress it up with the classic, elegant and unobtrusive iSafari theme (unfortunately discontinued, and will not work with Firefox 3)
• if I wanted to, I could put it on a USB flash drive and take the portable Firefox version (and bookmarks, and preferences) with me anywhere

Initially, I had switched to Firefox for other features (RSS reader integration, tabbed browsing, multiple engines in search box) that IE has caught up on since.

However, the main reason why I am a very happy Firefox user is the fact that you can expand and improve it as much (or as little) as you need, with the use of add-ons (also called plugins, or extensions). Here are the essential ones I install on every machine I use to help me in my professional and personal daily tasks:

• Delicious Bookmarks (quick look-up and save-to del.icio.us bookmarks)
• Email this! Bookmarklet Extension (right-click to send page via Gmail)
• FireFTP (FTP client)
• FireShot (take a screenshot of the whole page and edit, annotate, email)
• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer (bookmark syncing on two or more machines)
• Gmail Manager (new email alert in status bar)
• IE Tab (one-click switch to render the page in Explorer when necessary)
• Operator (extra toolbar for microformats)
• Remember The Milk for Gmail (integrates task management into Gmail)
• The Tabulator Extension (human-readable interface for linked data)
• Thinger (toolbar management)
• VeriSign's OpenID Seatbelt (quick OpenID login and status)
• Web Developer (very useful tools for developers)

If you are a Microsoft fan, here is how the upcoming IE8 compares to Firefox 3.

And if you want a bit of humour, here is a 'slightly demented' IE vs FF comparison table.

I was underwhelmed by yesterday's second generation iPhone reveal, possibly because most of the rumours (3G, GPS, lower price) were correct and there were no big surprises.

However, I still think I am going to get one as soon as my current contract is over (November, I think). It feels logical today to do that, as I do a lot of stuff on my iPod Touch, (games, web browsing, some email, videos, books) but I also need to carry my HTC Tytn II for 3G and GPS.

Who knows what will be on the market in five months' time though? I like the look of the iPhone, and the interface fits my use like a glove, but I find myself agreeing with the comment below:

'Now, don't tell me guys that the iPhone was a revolutionnary phone : it wasn't, except maybe for its stylish look. And this release is anything but exceptionnal. It basically is a "survival release". Adjust the competition or die. And also adjust the competition's pricing or die.' (comment by Ralph T. on ReadWriteWeb)

Premise 1: I do not really need to access all my internet bookmarks anywhere. Yes it is handy, but I am more interested in investigating and working towards a future where our browsing profile will follow us everywhere (if we allow it to, and when we want it to), and synchronisation of our data and preferences plays a big part in it.

Premise 2: my configuration works for the following set of devices/data:

• home desktop computer Firefox 2 bookmarks
• home desktop computer Internet Explorer 7 favourites
• home laptop Firefox 2 bookmarks
• iPod Touch Safari bookmarks
• Windows Mobile 6 smartphone mobile favourites
• work desktop computer Firefox 2 bookmarks

The objectives are

• to access my full set of Firefox bookmarks on all computers at home and at work
• to access my full set of Firefox bookmarks on my iPod Touch
• to customise Firefox with a different bookmarks toolbar on my home and work computers

Synchronising bookmarks across Firefox installations is very simply done by using the Foxmarks Firefox plugin.

The Firefox add-on Thinger that lets you create multiple bookmark toolbars. I have a 'Work' and a 'Home' toolbar, and configured Firefox to use the former on the office computer and the latter on my personal machines.

The iPod Touch cannot synchronise bookmarks with Firefox but syncs with Safari bookmarks or Internet Explorer favourites . I chose Explorer, this means I need to sync my Firefox bookmarks and Explorer favourites so that the iPod can pick them up. I use the Firefox add-on Syncmarks.

Windows Mobile only syncs the content of the Mobile Favourites bookmarks subfolder. I don't mind it as I don't use my smartphone to browse the web that much, so I only keep a useful subset of bookmarks in the Mobile Favourites folder. If you need to you can sync all your Internet Explorer favourites to Windows Mobile (it involves an additional application and further synchronising).

Complex? Yes.

Reliable? Yes, until one of the elements changes and does not communicate nicely with the others (for instance, I reluctantly uninstalled Firefox 3 RC2 because many plugins had not been updated by their developers yet).

Worth it? Well, yes, if you regularly use several devices and want enjoy a somewhat seamless web experience and keeping stuff organised in one location only. I know I do.

UPDATE (14 August 2008): Syncmarks does not work with Firefox 3, and I have not found an alternative yet. If you do, please let me know with a comment here.

Google Docs lets you link a spreadsheet to a web form. Entries via the web form (by yourself or anyone else that you have sent the link to) update the spreadsheet automatically.

I use it as a food diary: I enter the food and quantity eaten in the form (via any desktop browser, my mobile or my iPod Touch), and the data is entered automatically into a spreadsheet where formulas look up the calories for the type of food, multiply them by the quantity eaten, group them by date and create a chart and a Google Gadget.

The chart is contained in the spreadsheet and can be published to obtain a snippet of HTML code that you can embed in any web page (see the example below charting the calories I have had during the last seven days).

The chart updates automatically within the spreadsheet. However, if you want the data in the chart that is embedded in your web page to update, you need to republish the one in the spreadsheet. Moreover, if you modify the data range, chart type or settings in the spreadsheet, republishing the chart is not enough, you will also need to replace the code in your web page.

The gadget can also be embedded into your iGoogle homepage, in which case it updates without the need to republish the chart in the spreadsheet.

There are still a few issues that either are not available or I have not figured out, but on the whole this method can already be very powerful and extremely simple to set up.

Yes, I know I said I was going to stop tracking my calorie intake. But I started putting on weight, and this pushed me to find the simpler solution described above, that lets me enter data only once and visualise remaining daily allowance and trends instantly.

Last Friday, when I read on Techmeme that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is giving out free one-year subscriptions to publishers, including bloggers, I contacted them straight away motivating my application, and did not think much of it.

Imagine my surprise when later that very day I received an email containing instructions on how to activate my free subscription.

As my readers, now you too have access to full articles on whatever I decide you should learn more about. The articles on individual topics are good if we are talking established, historical facts from the past, a bit less when dealing with very recent topics. For instance, the 998 words on Madonna on Britannica do not mention her forthcoming album Hard Candy, a scattering of which can be found everywhere on the web since yesterday.

However, Britannica puts together Topic Clusters, which are:

'…collections of links to Encyclopaedia Britannica content related to current events. Topic Clusters provide quick access to material online writers may want to use in their reporting and commentary on issues of the day.'

If the link to Madonna above does not work for you, please leave a comment to let me know.

I have recently had a chance to look into Open Calais for work purposes. Open Calais is a Reuters-backed web service that returns semantic metadata in RDF format from text it is given.

So when I heard someone had developed a Calais WordPress plugin that suggests tags for your posts based on Open Calais, I thought I'd give it a go.

And what better time to do so than what has become my regular early Saturday morning rendez-vous with stuff I pick up while I make my way through the web during the week and want to play with.

As I am writing this, at the bottom of the WordPress 'Write Post' page there is a 'Get tags' button under a 'Calais Auto Tagger' section.

If I click on the button now [clicks on button] I get a 'Suggestions: web service, Reuters, RDF' followed by a 'Add these tags' button.

If I click on that button now [clicks on button] the suggested tag is added to the 'Tags' section for this post, and I can add more manually if needed.

I would probably have to throw more data to this to test it fully, but hey, if you are into this kind of stuff this is way cool. There is also a version that tags old content.

Dr B. aspetta un bambino
Dr B. is expecting a baby
Literally: 'Dr B waits-for a child'.

Dr B ordered a new computer and is this morning impatiently waiting for the stork to deliver his new baby. I expect him to spend most of the weekend playing with it.

In the meantime, I shall be installing an additional 500GB internal drive into my machine.

One of these days our computers are going to conspire against us and take over the flat, and we'll have to sleep on the landing.

I still have not got a clue why my RSS feed stopped updating when I upgraded to WordPress 2.5.

However, while investigating I found that the URL for the feed somehow had changed, so I added a couple of lines to the .htaccess file to redirect it.

I also noticed that there was a new version of the FeedBurner FeedSmith WordPress plugin, but somehow the plugins management page in WordPress did not show it, so I upgraded it manually.

I am not happy with the solution but hey, it will do for now. Time to go to work now.

I have lately adopted a very responsible attitude towards backing up the files on my main computer at home.

Every Saturday an automatic backup kicks in. I configured it to be an incremental backup of all my image files (I would be devastated if I lost any of the pictures I have been taking during the last ten years or so).

The automatic backup asks me to label and insert a disc (I use 4.7GB DVDs). And then another. And another yet. Over the weeks I have collected a fair amount of discs that need to be labelled and stored if you ever need to restore any of the files.

Trouble is, 1. it's a pain, and 2. if the flat was to be damaged (fire, flood, magnetic wipeout) so do the backup discs.

I looked around for online backup systems and I chose to use Amazon's impressive S3 system together with JungleDisk (a simple interface that lets you both see your storage as a network drive for ad-hoc manual backups, and set up regular automatic backups if you wish to do so). You only pay Amazon for the storage and data transfer you use every month, and JungleDisk is a one-off 20USD to install on how many machine you need, and comes with unlimited upgrades.

I have started backing up all my pictures – around 15GB, it is going to take some time to upload them all. Once that is done, I will probably stop backing up on DVD but am thinking of setting up a just-in-case additional backup on a local network drive.

Knock on wood, I have so far never had to face the nightmare of losing data because of failing supports. Better not to push my luck too far though.

Whenever I travel I always make sure I have enough stuff to do late at night or very early in the morning when everybody sleeps. I usually take my laptop and get some work done. Sometimes I even read a book – crazy, I know.

I am now at Dr B.'s parents only with an iPod Touch, the gift of Wi-Fi and the last seven days of BBC telly, courtesy of the iPlayer. The video is beautifully encoded and optimised for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and being able to browse and pick stuff I've missed is thrilling.

I fear the number of books I read in a year – already a pathetic single digit – is going to go even further down.

And now please excuse me while I finish watching Pulling.