Viewing posts in the category of Technology

iStat Menus and iStat Pro

October 17, 2009 | Productivity | Technology

islayer

Two great apps that I’ve found recently are iSlayer’s iStat programs.

These little apps are basically a window into your Mac’s inner workings.

The iStat Pro is a dashboard widget that displays all sorts of good information about how your Mac is running.  Anything from RAM usage, to Drive stats, to temperature of components, to fan speed are all at your disposal.  The units are dragable to any most any order you’d like.  Also the skin has a few different colors so you can change to taste.

istat4

The iStat Menus contain the exact same information but in your OS X menubar.  The advantage over iStat Pro is the always available visual readouts.  (Yes, that one click to open the dashboard makes a difference!)  You can customize the individual icons to contain more or less visual info and you can (by the order in which you activate them) dictate their position in the menubar.  Also, the colors can be tweaked.

istat2They work well together too.  I use the menus for “critical” – or at least what I call critical – info.  RAM, drives, network usage, and CPU usage are all just a glance away.  I can then open up the widget for other info – like temps, fan speed, uptime, and power stats – that I don’t need in front of me.

In any case, these apps are small and fairly light, and can help troubleshoot if you need some quick info.  (Example: Why is my fan always running!  Oh!  It’s some malfunctioning program!  I’ll fix that!)  Hopefully, you can find good uses for these two programs!

Do you have any apps to recommend?

Twitter Groups in Tweetie (or Anywhere)

August 17, 2009 | Productivity | Technology

tweetiegroup1

For those of you trying to create groups in Twitter on the Tweetie Mac app, I found a solution.

It’s almost a little too simple, and isn’t the cleanest thing around, but it gets the job done.

So the solution?  Use the search.  Here’s how. [Continue reading...]

Open or Closed, Part II: License and Free(dom)

July 10, 2009 | Art | Technology

sourcecode

I found another portion of the open or closed question.  What about open and closed software licenses?

Here’s a quick rundown of the license categories (check here for more details):

  1. GNU GPL type licenses.  Very open.
  2. Liberal Licenses (i.e. Creative Commons type, Mozilla Public License). Mostly open.
  3. Closed source (i.e. proprietary license).  Closed.

The more open your license, the more innovation you generally have.  WordPress is licensed as GPL.  Anyone can see and edit the WordPress code, and thus, a very diverse, dynamic, and versatile platform has emerged.

The problem with the GPL type licenses, that I see, is the return.  I can’t really reap the rewards for my work when anyone else can make a tweak and give it away.  Also, if you were to combine a GPL licensed work and any non-GPL work, according to the license you’d need to release the whole larger work as GPL.  Effectively, you’d have to release your closed source code to abide by the license.  It doesn’t sound very “free” to me.

The liberal licenses form the middle, allowing open source innovations but with the option to combine works or the option to redistribute with different licenses.  They tend to play nice with GPL (as in the work can be licensed under GPL without breaking the other license), and might allow greater return.

In recent times, closed source hasn’t had the best run.  Just take a look at the state of the music business to see what happens when you overuse the “closed” idea.  But yet, closed source still generates the revenue.

I’m not an expert with these licenses, nor am I a lawyer.  But this I do know: forcing people to use a particular license is not freedom.  That part of the GPL rubs me the wrong way.  I do understand the desire to not be ripped off, as in the case of a closed source project essentially stealing open source code.  That isn’t right either.

So, where do you stand?  I don’t know at the moment for myself.  As a content creator, I want return on my investment (or at least control of it).  As a content user, I want to be able to use and improve what is there.  Is there an answer?  Let me know what you think.

[ Image by acme ]

Is Twitter the New RSS?

July 8, 2009 | Technology

twitter_logo

I have been thinking about this lately. Is Twitter replacing RSS? I mean, I seem to find my articles via Twitter, not my Google Reader.

Ok, here’s my line of thinking.  Twitter is the real-time communication tool of the moment.  The idea of RSS is that you don’t have to run to each site every 20 minutes to see if there’s something new.  Well, Twitter and FriendFeed and the rest all make that insanely easy.  You follow your favorite news sources, magazines, and blogs, and their new articles get sent to you in real time.

But there’s one problem.  If you follow more than 75 people on Twitter, then you don’t get every tweet you follow.  If you follow over 500, you pretty much only get like 5 minutes of history.  So what happens when you’re at work and you can’t check Twitter?  Well, you miss that great post.

Ok, so Twitter won’t be replacing RSS feeds and Google Reader quite yet.  But it could happen.

Do you find yourself neglecting GooReader for Twitter?  Do you think Twitter can replace feeds?

Notice for WordPress Theme and Plugin Developers

July 4, 2009 | Technology

themespluginsdbJust wanted to pass some info along to all of you budding theme developers.  Your themes need to be licensed under GPL.

Well, okay, part of them.  According to this article from WordPress the php and html in your themes are GPL because WordPress itself is under the GPL.  However, the css files and any images in your theme do not technically need to be licensed under the GPL.  Talk about a monkey wrench!

What that means is technically you could pull off a case where you can hold all the rights to your css and image files to control the php and html.  Now, I’m not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination (and the only area I know something about is music copyright law), but that seems to be really tricky.

As an aside, this is really only a problem for premium themes and plugins.  Because the php and html are derivative works of WordPress, you must follow the GPL.  That does not mean that you cannot charge for your time, effort, and distribution of the themes or plugins.  But you have to allow for the provisions of the GPL; namely, your code must be available, and anyone else can modify and/or distribute the code without permission.

Ah, the new world of copyright and license.  For me, I’ve spent a good amount of time coding, tweaking, and testing my WordPress Creations.  And while I do agree that open is better, I would like the option to get something back for my effort.

Do you all have any thoughts?  Any arguments for or against?

Edit: Well, it seems the crux of the argument is what constitues a derivative work of WordPress.  This article details the problem.  Thanks to Andrei from Softblog for the link.

New WordPress Page: Got Themes?

June 28, 2009 | Blog News | Technology

WordPress Page ScreenshotLately, I’ve been coding some WordPress themes and code.  So, I thought I’d showcase my efforts here on my site.  Check out my new WordPress page to see what I’ve been up to.

There will be some items to download for your own use.  Not all of them will be free, but some will.  I’ve spent a lot of time on these, and I hope you might find them useful.  If you like what you see and want something custom done or a tweak to something up there, let me know on the page.

Anything you guys would like to see for WordPress?  I’m always looking for ideas.

Open or Closed: Experiencing (Social) Technology

June 23, 2009 | Marketing | Technology

open_closed_doorOpen.  Or Closed.

This has become a big question for web technology.  Opening up your source or API to the public can reap huge dividends.  Just look at Twitter and all the news and apps and traffic it has.  (It also has great content, but let’s have that as a given.)  Closing your source or API can have quality control benefits and keeps your tech where you want it.  Think Apple and their secrecy.  Great innovations.  Pros and cons on both sides.

For me, I’m more on the open side.  Here’s my take.

Using my Twitter example, its growth has shot up in recent months.  Personally, I think it is because of its openness.  You could use any number of apps to use Twitter.  You can control your experience.  If you like the web version, use that.  If you like an app, use that.  Switch as you feel led.

Now, I’m not sure being totally open all of the time is the way to go.  Apple obviously is doing okay, and they keep a tight lid on their advancements.  The iPhone, the iPod, iTunes, and (oh yeah) their great computers.  They do open their code up so people can create programs to use on their hardware (the App Store, Objective-C, Cocoa, etc).

So, what do you think?  Open or Closed?  Or Both?  Or some better way?

Wordpress Development Cheat Sheets

June 17, 2009 | Technology

wpcheatsheet

Found this via John Saddington today.  It’s good enough that I wanted to post this for any of my readers who design Wordpress themes.

This article contains some Wordpress cheat sheets for all of your theme development and design needs.  I’ve already downloaded most of them, and will be referencing them often.

So, click through and enjoy, and let us know if you found them useful.

Video Games Saved My Life

June 14, 2009 | Fun | Life | Technology

video_games

Going about my usual blog reading, I was reading this post (which linked to this Mashable post).  Great thoughts.  I’d like to add a few.

Video games are the movies of the next generation.  Games can suck you into their worlds so easily, it’s not even funny.  I remember playing Star Wars:Knights of the Old Republic for days and days, totally immersed in the story.  I think that game might be one of the reasons I like writing stories so much.

But as much of a bad rap as these games get, they do teach us something.  They keep our minds active (and now with the Wii, the rest of us too!), they make you solve problems, they make you work with others.  These are all very important in the working world.  Use this to your advantage.

As an aside, I know there are games out there that are over the top.  All things in moderation.

What have games taught you?

How Do You Consume Online Media?

June 10, 2009 | Marketing | Technology

gooreader

With all the means to get news, blog posts, and almost anything else on the web, which tools do you use?  How efficient are they?  Could they work better?

I was inspired by this post to think about my subscription practices, and I’ve found they could use some work.  For my RSS feeds, I use Google Reader.  I love it.  But the number of articles per day has grown beyond what I can read everyday.  What the above article suggested was to use email subscriptions for your must-read feeds.  This would act as a filter and let you spend less time checking your feed reader.  Cool.

So, my mind is taking that idea one step further.  I find that for the few sites I frequent daily, I end up just checking their actual website.  Why?  Well, I comment on the posts.  To do that, I have to be on their site.  So why go through the RSS middleman?  I did subscribe by email to these sites to see if it helped me at all.  I think it has, at least a little.

I’ve found that I will probably end up with three categories of “feeds.”

  1. A-list feeds that I just go to their site, but will also have some subscription to alert me (probably email and/or Twitter),
  2. A-list feeds that I really like, but I don’t generally comment on or frequent the site, so I’ll get an email subscription,
  3. Other feeds that I like enough to subscribe too, but that I just consume.

Of course, the feeds are always in flux.  If I really start liking a feed in the third category, I’ll jump it somewhere above.

So what’s your way?  Any cool tools you use to make it easier?

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