bitful

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Ho rotto il sito
I have broken the website
Literally: (I) have broken the site
Since I upgraded to WordPress 2.5, new posts do not appear in the RSS feed. True, there have been only three posts, of which two were automatic lists of bookmars, and one was just a dummy post to test the feed. But still.
If [...]

…because a kind soul has alerted me that this here RSS feed thingy has given up its soul.

During the last six months I have developed an interest in social network aggregators (solutions to bring together all activity performed on several sites online, in one single location that people can subscribe to).
While performing my investigations I signed up for nearly every single available service, until I lost track of what I was feeding [...]

A week ago I installed Jiglu (automatic website tagging) and wrote about it.
It has been fantastic to see how thorough can a free auto-tagging plugin prove to be, and I am definitely interested in the functionality that highlights words on a page and overlays upon request a list of other instances of those words throughout [...]

I am not a designer, never been and never will be. Working on the web, however, I have often indulged in the pleasure of pushing pixels around a page.
However, with time the pleasure has turned into frustration, and the real satisfaction is now mainly derived from playing around with data to make it do what [...]

Yahoo! has announced that it will support OpenID. What can this bring to the average web user?
In terms that I hope are not oversimplified, OpenID lets you log on several websites with one single set of details. You do not spread out that single set of details to all the websites (that would defy the [...]

I use Outlook extensively, and not only for sending and receiving messages. It is a repository for all commitments, reminders and notes. Surprisingly enough, I never bothered to look into shortcuts, until the other day, when I accidentally hit three random keys together and a 'Move Item to' window popped up.
A quick search returned this [...]

I've been playing around for a bit with Jiglu tonight.
Jiglu's tagline is 'Tags that think', and that's exactly what it does: it automatically tags your content and displays tags as cross-referenced links.
All you have to do is register your URL, install some code (I used a ready-made WordPress plugin, but there are versions for Blogger, [...]

Hello dear technically-inclined reader, I wonder if you could help.
I have been using email as my main means of capturing and storing information. Started with Outlook, switched to Gmail for a while (loved the tags and no-directory structure) but then went back to Outlook when I got an HTC Tytn II that syncs with [...]

A few months ago I read a very intriguing article on typography and vertical alignment (Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid). I am not a designer and I have always found very hard to understand why certain elements and composition are pleasing, and other are not. The article in question explains that [...]

WordPress is great. However, upgrading to the latest version can be a bit of a struggle. There are quite a few thinks to keep track of (especially if you are a heavy customiser) and do in the right sequence.
If you have more than one installation, you can spend the best part of an evening doing [...]

I am a perfecly happy Google Reader user and have very little to say about it that is negative. Feeds are my main source of information and I have tried many readers (Kinja, Netvibes, Attensa, Bloglines) before settling on Google's product.
For a brief period, I used the 'share' feature in Google Reader with some items [...]

I spent most of yesterday trying to figure out why I could not access WordPress from my mobile any longer. Well, it's the holidays and I can waste a day like that if I want to.
It turned out that Mobile Admin (the plugin that streamlines the WordPress admin interface for easy access from smartphones and [...]

From Doris Lessing's Nobel prize acceptance speech:
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, [...]

You might be aware of Beacon, Facebook's new advertising platform that allows Facebook's partners to place a cookie on your machine when you shop with them, and next time you log on to Facebook you are notified that the retailer is sending a story to your profile that says 'X bought (played, watched, etc.) Y [...]

When I heard Barclays was releasing a three-in-one Credit, Oyster (London transport) and OneTouch (cashless purchases under ten pounds by waving the card on a reader) OnePulse Barclaycard, I was the first in line to get it.
The accompanying leaflet showed the logos of some of the retailers that will be accepting OneTouch payments soon: Books [...]

This time I was looking for a tutorial to find out how to allow in-cell editing in Outlook.
So I found out that the seventh most popular search starting with "how to" is about the lyrics to "How to Save a Life", and number nine is "how to save a life" which I guess is more [...]

I've had Yahoo! Mail account for as long as I can remember, and I've always been very happy with it.
I've also had a Gmail account since the time they were still only in invitation-only beta. I forward all my other mail to it so it acts as a searchable permanent reference. I also set [...]

A post from Overyourhead into my Google Reader, about delays in a Spanish airport, with the word 'delay' in Spanish.
And, right below it, that day's Spanish 'word of the day', which was… 'Delay'.
Either a very odd coincidence, or Google is getting more and more powerful these days.

At some point this afternoon, searching for 'ditsy' on Answers.com made Google return Jessica Simpson merchandise as sponsored links.
It does not any more now, but I took a screenshot to prove it. Click on 'all sizes' for the original version where you can read all the text.

For the lucky ones among you who are unaware [...]

Five Reasons Why Web 2.0 People Need to Shut The F**k Up about the Mobile Web,
in reply to
Five Reasons Why The Mobile Web Sucks.
I totally agree with the content (but perhaps not the tone) of the top article. I consume cartloads of mobile content every day (on T-Mobile "unlimited - as long as you do [...]

Two days into my holiday my mobile phone reset itself and was wiped out.
I back up all my contacts daily with my desktop and online once a month, so information was not lost and easily retrievable away from home.
However, my notes on how much I had spent so far, on what, and how to split [...]

This graph shows all the music I have listened to in the past six months in a pretty visualisation.
Click on the picture to view it at Flickr, then click on 'All Sizes' and select the original picture for maximum detail.
From lastgraph via plasticbag.

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