Receive an IM When an RSS Feed is Updated

From Lifehacker:

"Web service IM Feeds notifies you via instant messenger if an RSS feeds has updated—like a package tracking feed, a special friend's blog, or news site you're tracking closely."

[via]

ScribeFire Lets You Blog Like a Mutha!

In my recent article on DashBlog (another blogging add-on for Firefox), I asked you readers out there what software you used for publishing. Faithful reader Liz responded "I use scribefire and LOVE it!!" With a response like that, I had to check the thing out! So what is ScribeFire? Here's the description, straight from the horses puhtoot:

"ScribeFire is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser that integrates with your browser to let you easily post to your blog: you can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog."

The thing that really caught my attention was its support for uploading images. As I mentioned earlier, I hate hotlinking. What I would really like to see in a blogging tool is the ability to drag-and-drop and image from a page and (instead of the tool hotlinking the image) have it upload the image to your server and link to it from there. Although ScribeFire doesn't do this, it does allow you to select an image from your PC which it uploads to your server via FTP and links to the image via the HTTP URL. This in itself saves me a heckuvalotta time - and enabling this feature took me less than a minute to set up.

All in all, I'd say ScribeFire is a keeper. Coupled with FireShot (enuff w/ naming every Firefox plugin "FireSomething", already!) for the occasional screen shot, my blogging life (and life-blogging) is now much easier. Thanks Liz!

ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging

Google Docs to Add PDF Storage

It looks like Google Docs - the web-based sharing-centric Office replacement from Google and the most sharing-centric document format around are finally going to marriage... Or at least hold hands.

We learned of this from an early announcement from the Google Operating System blog, from which we gather that Google is in the midst of implementing this new feature. You can now upload PDFs, but when you click them, you get a "Sorry, the page (or document) you have requested does not exist." error. I guess for now it's still only something to look forward to.

Zup, Yo?

For being such a social person, I'm not much of one for these social networks (like Facebooks, MySpace, etc.) Perhaps I'm getting old. But this "Zup" thing seemed too useful to not mention - that is, useful for you myorkutbookspacers out there, not so much for my disconnected ass.

Basically, it's a widget that you can use to contact people cross-network. So, if your home-boy is on Facebook and your sugar-momma is on MySpace (which makes you either 12 or a pedophile) but you like using Orkut, you can contact both them from Orkut... I think. I really don't know since I don't use any of these services (a fact I pride myself in, if you couldn't tell.) Could any of you myorkutbookspacers out there try this thing out and comment as to your findings?

Zup - Why can't we all just get along? via

P.S: I'm really trying to coin this myorkutbookspacers expression. USE IT! NOW!

Daily Link Roundup of Radiation Detectors, Solar NES, and a Big Digg Fix

As a new feature of the Daily Link Roundup, we're going to start highlighting the best and most important articles of the day in bold. That way, if you only have a second or two to check today's links you'll know where to start!

Nanotubes Help Advance Brain Tumor Research The "Work From Home" Generation Cell Phone Sensors Detect Radiation To Thwart Nuclear Terrorism Last.fm Offers Limited Full-Track Streaming and Moves Towards Subscriptions - The key word here being limited. Solar Powered NES and Gameboy Emulator: Everything Included Sega Dream DX Is Just Like A Real Dog, Only Not Really Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Officially Unveiled - The first commercial passenger spaceship. Lindo Works Like A Desk Attached To Your Hips Digg Changes Algorithm: No More Group Voting Up Stories - Hopefully it actually works this time. Is Comcast really blocking P2P? EFF + SF Weekly conclude: yeah. - My conclusion: duh. Get SMS Alerts for Your Favorite RSS Feeds with Pingie Playyoo: YouTube For Mobile Games Goes Beta Wall Cleats - Another Tool For The War On Cables BedJump.com - Hotel Bed Jumping - Not exactly tech, but neat pics of people jumping on hotel beds. Laser-cut book is a scale model of artist's house Find Popular Google Reader Shared Items with ReadBurner Use Apropos to Learn New Terminal Commands

Tech History Made on January 15, 2001

For 7 years now we have enjoyed or hated the existence of Wikipedia. The site developed by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales is essentially an encyclopedia written by everyone. If you see something amiss you can edit the posting yourself. Unfortunately, this does not always ensure accurate data, as personal opinion often creeps into posts. I'll admit that we use Wikipedia (or it's bitch cousin Answers.com) to research most of our posts here but double check the facts when available. We are sure many a grad student has been befuddled by the F they received for fully relying on this service. All in all it is a great way to find the answers to our day-to-day questions we would like to ask, but were always too afraid would make us look dumb or uncool. Examples include "What the hell is a Scener?" or, "Who is John McCarthy and why does everyone keep referring to him as The Colonel?" This and making "wiki" a household term makes Wikipedia's birth an all-important piece of tech history.

Top 5 Articles of 2007

2007 has been a great year for the Grinn Blog. We've had some great feedback from all of you, and launched two new series articles, This Weekends Tech Deals, and Historic Tech from Today. But the articles that keep you guys coming back are exactly the ones we wanted this blog to be all about: The articles that help you be more productive with your tech, and keep the tech from keeping you down! With that I bring you a review of the top 5 most popular articles of 2005:

1. Incorporate Google Calendar Into Outlook
Published way back in April of 2006, this still remains our most popular article. It is a detailed how-to for syncing your Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook using a program called Remote Calendars.

2. Add to Google Calendar by Talking Into Your Cell
You guys sure like your Google Calendars. This article introduces our Jott2GCal application that allows you to add (and now retrieve) Google Calendar events using the popular Jott service. Since then Jott has released their own Google Calendar implementation, but you guys seem to like ours, so we'll keep developing it!

3. Your Connection to the Server Has Been Lost
We had a problem and had a heck of a time finding the solution. So, when we did resolve the issue, we posted about it to share that solution with you. This article serves to correct the infamous "Your connection to the server has been lost" issue with Battlefield 2142, and apparently it serves it's purpose well because it claims the #3 spot on our list.

4. How to Fix the Azureus Disk Read Error
Yet another case of us sharing in an issue. We found a compatibility issue between the popular P2P application Azureus and Google Desktop. Here, we tell you the simple measures you can take to resolve this issue.







5. 10 REALLY Weird Instructables
If you have yet to visit "The world's biggest show-and-tell", instructables.com, you should start with our list of the wierdest. Does anyone else find a list making the list of our 5 most popular articles a little ironic?

XML Goes Binary with EXI

A new standard from the W3C promises to allow web servers to talk to each other super-fast.

When it comes to bandwidth usage, binary beats text any day. The same is true when it comes to CPU processing of data. That's why programs are compiled and why most databases don't simply store data in giant text files. So, it doesn't make much sense for XML, a metalanguage who's primary purpose is the interchange of data on the Web, to take the form of plain text.

To address this issue the W3C has recently been developing a standard called EXI (Efficient XML Interchange) that represents XML data in a binary form. This should mark a significant improvement over both data compression and commercial XML hardware-accelerators available on the market today. "It is unlike data compression, which has overhead associated with it", explained John Schneider, co-editor of the EXI working draft, "There are people out there that are buying XML accelerators and hardware to speed up XML processing... but it doesn't do anything for bandwidth."

Representing XML as binary will help solve both issues because it will not only be the most minimal possible size representation of the XML (which is good for bandwidth), but the data can be stored and processed directly in its EXI form. So not only will you not have the added overhead associated with data compressors, but processing will actually be significantly faster in this new binary form than in it's plain-text XML representation. According to Schneider, "on average, 12 to 14 times faster than processing normal XML." The way I see it, even if EXI in the real world doesn't even come close to their estimates, it'll still be hella-fast.

The best part about this whole thing is that, chances are, us programmers won't have to do a thing to take advantage of EXI. John says it will be embedded at the lowest level of the XML stack, in the parser or serializer, so your Web server will do all the work for you.

Read: W3C
Read: XML Developer

Dissecting Drop.io

A new file sharing web app has recently been released called drop.io and it is very cool to say the least. The concept is as simple as the page's design: Upload any file(s) you want and it will give you a URL to a page listing the files you upload. The attention to detail in their app's design doesn't miss a beat. I'll run you through the process, pointing out the intricate details you may might have missed.

Adding Files
When you visit http://drop.io you're presented with a page containing an Add Files button. When you click the button you're presented with the file selection dialog familiar to you from when you've clicked the "Browse..." button on other pages. But this dialog is different. You can select multiple files at once. This is done with some Flex trickery, the likes of which I had never seen before.

Once you've selected your files and close the dialog, the progress bar updates to show how much of your 100mb limit has been used. The text below the progress bar tells you how much data is waiting to be uploaded. Another neat trick. You can upload any type of file. Drop.io will generate previews for pictures, mp3s, PDFs and most types of video.

Droptions (Cute, huh? Came up with that all by myself.)
You specify a name for your drop. This name is used for the URL you can use to access your drop in the future. A random, default URL is generated for you but you can give it something a little friendlier. If you specify a password for your drop, anyone visiting your drop's URL will have to enter that password to access the site.

Next, you specify when you want your drop to expire. Your drop expiration can be anywhere from one day to an entire year. When your drop expires, all your files will be removed from the drop.io server. Although you might think, "I might as well set this to a year just in case", setting an earlier expiration date increases the security of your information by limiting the amount of time someone has to compromise it. If you near that expiration date and you're still not done with your drop, you can always "renew" the drop before it expires.

You next specify what access "others" have. Essentially, these are the permissions given to anyone who accesses your drop via its URL. This is a much more powerful feature than it may initially appear.

Allowing others to "View Only" is useful for one-way sharing - such as uploading a file or files you commonly email to clients as an attachment, or sharing a collection of full-sized images from the last expo you visited with your blog viewers.

Allowing others to only "View & Add Notes" is useful for one-way sharing with feedback - such as sharing the photos from your kid's last birthday and allowing your family members to comment on them, or sending mock-ups to a group of clients for review and discussion.

Allowing others to "View, Add Notes & Files" is useful for collaboration - such as working on a project with people in different geographical locations, or collecting photos this holiday from all your family members.

You then hit the "Drop it." button and your files are uploaded. As each file uploads, the progress bar shows how far along that upload is.

Admin Password
Once your files are uploaded you're redirected to your drop's URL. You're given the option of specifying an Admin password. If you specify one, you (or anyone else who has it) can use it to gain full write permissions to the drop. Also, you need to specify an admin password if you want to be able to add time to the expiration later on. But, you can always add an Admin password later on, as we'll see further down this article.

One of the most innovative features of drop.io is that through all of this, you never give your email address and you never have to set up an account on their service. This is a paradigm shift from other apps: taking authentication and putting it directly into the hands of the user. You determine whom you wish to give the address to, thus deciding who has access to your drop.

Your Drop's Page
Your drop has 3 different views: Chronological, Media and Interactive. Chronological View breaks down your dropped items according to when they occurred, grouping newer items by day and older items by week, month or year. Media View (the default) groups your items by type: Notes, Links, Pictures, Videos, Audio, Documents, and Other.

Interactive View is sort of like filmstrip view in Windows Explorer. To the right you have thumbnails of all your various media, with the larger "preview" view of the selected item opening in the middle of your screen. By default all previewable items are displayed, sorted Newest First but you can change what types of items are displayed and in what order using the drop-downs above the thumbnails.

Admin Options
Clicking the black Admin link to the left (assuming you have admin privileges) brings you to the Admin page. The initial view displays the current settings and statistics for your drop. From the menu at the left you can do several things:

• Destroy Drop: If you wish to permanently delete your drop before the expiration date.
• Change Drop Address: Move your drop to a different address.
• Change User Password: If you've set a user password, you can change it or remove it here. If you haven't set one, you can add one here. Changing the user password could also allow you to block everyone out if your drop fell into the wrong hands.
  
• Change Admin Password: It's never too late to add
  
• Change Drop Expiration: Add time to your drop before it expires.
• Other Users Can Add: Specify the permissions for those who visit your drop but don't have Admin privileges.
• Other Users Can Delete Media: Here's something we haven't seen before. You can allow other users to delete files from your drop using this option.
• First Page Displayed: Media View is the default view when you first visit your drop. This lets you change it to Chronological View or Interactive View.
• Upgrade Drop to Premium: Drop.io's business model is to keep these Basic accounts (limited to 100mb drops) free. Once they get out of Alpha (or perhaps Beta) release, they'll make their money by selling Premium accounts with upped upload limitations.

Emailing Your Drop
The name you gave your drop isn't only used for its web address. Your drop also has an email address which adds a whole 'nother level of interoperability to your drop. Your drop's email address is dropname@drop.io (where dropname is the name you gave your drop.) If you email your drop without an attachment, the text of the email will be added as a note on your drop. If your email contains one or more attachments, those attachments will be uploaded to your drop. What can be added to your drop is dependent upon what permissions you've selected for Others to have. It doesn't care if you have Admin privileges when you email it because it doesn't know your email address from Adam's.



This drop.io thing, in my opinion, does its job in the best possible way. The next step is to open it up a little to allow people to develop their own applications that utilize it. Email support is a great big step in that direction. With it you can already do things like send text messages and pics to your drop from your cellphone. And all an application really needs to do is be able to email to add something to your drop. So, drop.io folks - When's the API come out that lets us interface with our drop to read info from it?
 
 
 
 
 

Web 3.0: Twining It All Together

Since the coining of the phrase "Web 2.0" people have been talking about Web 3.0 will be. Some (including myself) say a big part of this is the Mobile Web, accessed from anywhere with a plethora of devices instead of just on your personal computer. Others see it as primarily focused on tying all the different parts of the web together into one big happy... Thing. But everyone agrees it will involve, at least in part, the arrival of the Semantic Web.

From the start the Internet has been geared towards readability by humans. Although search engines like Google may appear to have a grasp on what information is out there, computers have little or no real understanding of the meaning of the data we put into them. So, as the Web grows it becomes increasingly more difficult for our computer friends to sift through the sea of online data to find the information we really desire.

That's where the Semantic Web comes into play. According to the American Heritage Dictionaries, semantic means "Of or relating to meaning, especially meaning in language." The goal behind the Semantic Web is to give computers an understanding of what the internet's immense amounts of information actually means. This means cataloging that data with tags that computers can grasp.

To semantically categorize the entire Web would be next to impossible, partially because the Web grows at such a phenomenal rate. That brings us to Twine. It is making an attempt at being the first "mainstream semantic web application." It aims to index your entire digital life: emails, bookmarks, documents, RSS feeds, contacts, photos, videos, product info, data records, etc. into something meaningful not only to you, but to the Twine engine itself. You will then be able to search that data - And not just your data but the data of all your friends that use Twine. When you search it will tell you not only what it found but who it belongs to, organizing your results by how close that person is to you. There will be plenty of browser plugins, widgets and programming APIs to help you add to and take data out of Twine.

Unfortunately, although Twine has been officially announced, it isn't yet available for public use. You can however sign up on their website to be beta tester once beta testing goes public.

Read: Twine.com, Tech Crunch, sramana mitra, App Scout

Add to Google Calendar by Talking Into Your Cell

Version 1.2

We recently developed a new web application that allows you to call a number from your cellphone, say something like "Have insurance meeting with Bobby tomorrow at 3pm" and have a new event for exactly that added to your Google Calendar. You can also call that number and say "Get events from 9/21/2007 through 9/25/2007" and it will email you (and text message you if you want) with a list of those events. We do this with (lost of) help from another neat little app we mentioned a while back known as Jott.

As we mentioned before, "Simply put, [Jott] allows you to send a short email to anyone in your Jott contacts. Not using a computer, not via BlackBerry, and not exactly by text messaging through your cellphone. The thing that makes Jott unique is that it allows you to simply speak what you want emailed." Jott recently released a new feature called Jott Links that allows you to Jott directly to popular web applications such as Blogger and Twitter. This is all fine and dandy, but the really great thing is that Jott Links has an API! That means we can now develop applications that use Jott without any nasty hacks.

So, we wrote a small application that allows you to work with your Google Calendar using Jott. You do this by either saying something like, "Go to the bar on Friday at 10pm" to add an event or by saying something like, "Get events from monday to wednesday".

How to Set It Up


Let's get started.

1. Edit: Due to recent changes in Google's authentication you should first log in using this link on Google's site to avoid "Captcha" errors.
   
2. Get a Jott account (if you don't already have one.)
3. Log into your account and click on the Jott Links tab, or click here.
4. In the "My Links" panel to the right, click on the icon at the bottom that reads, "Developers - Got a custom link to add? Add it here"
5. Fill in the information on this page as follows:
   Link Name: Google Calendar
   Setup Url: http://www.grinn.net/jott2gcal
   Link Url: http://www.grinn.net/jott2gcal/convert.aspx
6. If you want, check "Send SMS Response"
7. Check "I have read and agree to the Terms of Service" (oh... and read them.)
8. Click Add. This will take you to a screen prompting you for your Google Calendar Login information. This is normally your GMail account and password.
9. Type your login information into the form. Don't worry, we won't give out your information and it's all encrypted and stuff before being saved on our servers.
   
10. Click Save.
11. Read the little blurb and click the Click Here to Continue link.
12. Continue reading below for how to use it.
    

How to Use It
To use the service, all you do is call the Jott number on your phone (1-866-JOTT-123). When the lady says "Who do you wanna Jott?" say "Google Calendar" (or whatever you set the Link Name as in Step 4). She'll confirm what you said. When you hear the beep, you simply say whatever you want added as an event or what date(s) you want to know the events for. I'll explain the syntax for you.

Originally we were going to use the same syntax as Google Calendar's QuickText feature for adding events, mainly because that would be a lot easier than writing our own translator. But, although the QuickText feature is rather "typed English" friendly, it wasn't what was best for "spoken English". So, we wrote our own translator with its own custom syntax:

To add an event:
calendar name calendar, event title on date at time for length

To get a list of events:
get (events for) date (to/through) date calendar name calendar


Examples for adding events:

• "Work calendar, Insurance adjustment meeting on Monday at 10pm for 1 hour and 30 minutes."
• "Walk the dog for 45 minutes at 5:30 pm on Tuesday."
• "TV calendar, watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force at 10pm on Saturday."
• "Pick up the car on Friday at 7am."

Examples for getting a list of events:

• "Get events for Monday."
• "Get events for Tomorrow through Thursday."
• "Get events for 4/10/2007 through 4/28/2007."
  

That's all you really need to know to get started using Jott to Google Calendar. But if you're curious or get stuck, keep reading for additional details on how it works.

Rules for Adding Events:

• Everything is optional. You can specify every part such as "Work calendar, Insurance adjustment meeting on Monday at 10pm for 1 hour and 30 minutes" or give just the title such as "Fix the car". Saying just the title will add the event as an all day event for today.
• When giving time, speak in hours and minutes. So you could say "Walk the dog for 45 minutes at 5:30 pm on Tuesday" or "TV calendar, watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force at 10pm on Saturday for 4 hours and 30 minutes".
• You can't give a length without a time. This is only logical. You can't say you want something to be an hour long if we don't know when it starts.
• There are a few shortcuts.
  
• You can use "today", "tomorrow", or "yesterday" instead of "on (date)". So you could say "Pick up the car tomorrow at 7am".
  
• You can use weekday names instead of specific dates (which the app actually prefers) such as "Pick up the car on Friday at 7am". It will schedule your event for the next date that weekday comes around.
  
• You can say "one and a half hours" instead of "one hour and 30 minutes". You can also say "half an hour" or "an hour and 30 minutes" or "an hour and a half" or any such combination.
• (Almost) everything can be in any order. With the exception of optionally specifying which calendar to add the event to, you can put the separate "parts" of the Jott in any order you like. For example, you could say "Personal calendar, Go to Michelle's party on Wednesday at 10pm for 3 hours". You could also can say "Personal calendar, on Wednesday go to Michelle's party at 10pm for 3 hours" or "Personal calendar, for 3 hours on Wednesday at 10pm go to Michelle's party" or give the items in any other order.

Rules for Getting Events:

• Say "get". If your message starts out with the words "get" it will be assumed that you wish to retrieve your list of events. If you want add an event where the title begins with "get", just specify the calendar as well. For example, "TV calendar, get ready for some football on Monday" will add an event, while "get events for Monday" will return next Monday's events.
  
• Say one or two dates. If you just give one date like, "Get tomorrow" or "get April 28, 2008" you will be messaged with all the events for that one day. If you say two dates you will be messaged with all the events from the first date through the last date (inclusively) like, "Get events for April 3rd, 2008 through April 10th, 2008".
• Optionally, say a calendar. If you want to get events on any calendar other than your default (the first calendar you created) all you have to say is "calendar name calendar" at the end. For example, if you have a calendar called Personal that you wanted to get today and tomorrow's events for, you would say "Get events for today and tomorrow, Personal calendar".
• Anything else is ignored. Anything other than "get", the date(s), and the calendar is ignored. This allows you to phrase your request just about any way you want. You could say "Get all events from today until December 25th, 2007, Work calendar" or simply "Get today December 25th, 2007, Work calendar" - it doesn't matter. The only exception is that it is assumed that anything between the last date and the word "calendar" will be the name of your calendar.
  

Detailed Explanation


calendar name
Jott to Google Calendar knows all of the calendars you subscribe to. You can add to or list events from any of your calendars by saying "[calendar name] calendar". When adding events, if you don't have access to add events to the specified calendar or if you don't specify a calendar it will add the event to your default calendar (the first calendar you added to Google Calendar). You can list events from any of your subscribed calendars. If the calendar you specify isn't found or you don't specify a calendar, the events from your default calendar will be messaged to you.

Examples:
Work calendar, Purchase new widgets for office floor on Thurday.
Get events for 10/5/2007 through 10/10/2007, Work calendar.

event title
Your event title is what will appear as the text for that event. It can contain any text, including reserved words (such as on, at, or for). For the most part you don't have to worry about this mixing up Jott to Google Calendar. It'll know what you mean.

date
When adding an event, the date portion is what day you want the event to occur on. When retrieving a list of events, you'll specify either a single date that you wish to list the events for, or two dates if you want to retrieve a list of events spanning multiple days. There's several ways you can specify the date:

By saying the weekday: "Wednesday", "Friday", etc. This will indicate events for the following Wednesday or Friday, respectively.
By saying any of the supported shortcuts: You can use "today", "tomorrow", or "yesterday" instead of "on (date)". So you could say "Pick up the car tomorrow at 7am" or "Buy groceries on your way home from work today at 6:30pm" or "Get events for today and tomorrow".
By saying the date itself: "four twenty-eight, 2008" or "April 28th, 2008" will work for representing 4/28/2008.

Currently, multi-day or repeating events are not supported for adding events.

time
You can give the time in any standard numeration such as "10:30 am" or "4:45 pm". If you don't specify AM or PM Jott to Google Calendar will try and guess what you meant. For example, if you say, "Pick nose today at 3" it will assume you mean 3pm. However, it's assumptions may not be correct (maybe you want to pick your nose at 3am) so it's still suggested to specify AM or PM in your times. Military time has limited support.

Example: Pick up breakfast tomorrow at five-thirty am

length
The length specifies how long your event should last. It can be specified in just about any reasonable way imaginable. The best way is to give it in hours and minutes such as "
2 hours, 30 minutes", "2 hours", or "45 minutes". You can also say stuff like "one and a half hours", "half an hour", "an hour and 30 minutes" or "an hour and a half". You can't say "for all day". Instead just say "all day" like "Spend time with Aunt Anna-Carolyn on Wednesday all day".

Example: Personal calendar, sell soul on eBay on Thursday at 6pm for 45 minutes.

Thanks for checking this thing out. It's a work in progress but hopefully it will help make your life easier. Please feel free to leave us a comment if you have any suggestions or to let us know how it works for you!


Updates

• 10/08/07:
• Upgraded the Google Calendar API to the new version (1.1).
• Updated error reporting on the configuration page to be more friendly and more easily noticed.
  
• BUG FIX: People were experiencing an issue when using Jott to Google Calendar in a different timezone than where our server resides (EST.) Google Calendar would add your event when it would occur in EST instead of when you said. For example, if you were in CST and you added an event to your calendar using Jott2GCal for 12pm, it would instead add that event onto your calendar at 11am. There actually wasn't even a way (that I know of) to correct this issue before the new Google Calendar API came out a few days ago, and the way we fixed it is a bit of a hack, but should work for now until Google comes out with something to specifically address this issue.
• BUG FIX: If you had never used Google Calendar, an error would occur when attempting to set up your account with Jott to Google Calendar. Now a more friendly message with instructions is displayed.
• 10/06/07:
• You no longer have to say AM or PM for your times, but it's still suggested. If you don't specify AM or PM Jott to Google Calendar will try and guess what you meant. For example, if you say, "Pick nose today at 3" it will assume you mean 3pm. However, it's assumptions may not be correct (maybe you want to pick your nose at 3am) so it's still suggested to specify AM or PM in your times.
• BUG FIX: I don't know why anyone was doing this, but an error was thrown if someone tried to access convert.aspx using a Jott Link that wasn't registered with our site. Now it just tells them they need to register first.
• BUG FIX: From the start we've experienced the occasional connectivity issue with Google's servers. When this happens, Jott2GCal will retry a number of times before giving up. It seems we still sometimes don't retry enough, so we increased the number of times it retries and increased the amount of time it waits between retries.
  
• 09/26/07:
  
  • Updated the Jott to Google Calendar translation algorithm so your items (for the most part) no longer have to be in a specific order. You still need to say your calendar name at the beginning of the Jott, but you can say the rest of the message in any order you please. For example, you previously would have to say "Personal calendar, Go to Michelle's party on Wednesday at 10pm for 3 hours". Now, if you like, you can say "Personal calendar, on Wednesday go to Michelle's party at 10pm for 3 hours" or "Personal calendar, for 3 hours on Wednesday at 10pm go to Michelle's party" or give the items in any other order. This greatly simplifies the syntax of the thing and makes it more natural to use.
    
  • Optimized the response messages when adding a new entry for SMS. Now when you add an entry it just says "Jott Added to Google Calendar: [Your Jott]".
    
  • If an error occurs when we think you are attempting to "get" your messages, it will now try and add a new event using your text instead of just returning an error.
    
  • FIX: Sometimes when you say "O'Clock" as in 10:00, Jott spells out "O'Clock". We now expect this and handle it appropriately.
    
• 09/21/07:
  
  • Added "get" functionality. Now not only can you add to your Google Calendar, you can retrieve a list of events by saying things like "Get events on next monday", "Get events from 9/21/2007 through 10/31/2007", "Get events for tomorrow" or simply "Get wednesday through friday". A list of events will be sent to your email and cellphone via SMS (if selected when configuring your Jott Link.)
    
  • Enhanced error reporting. Now all errors will be handled and when an error occurs, our development team will be immediately notified.
    
  
  

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Easily Post Images Without Hotlinking

If you've ever posted an image from someone else's site into a forum, or message board or on MySpace, you (should) know that you're not supposed to link directly to that image. This is known as hotlinking or leaching, and is considered a no-no since it uses the bandwidth of the source's website every time that image is displayed.

Normally you would have to download the image to your computer, upload it to a hosting company (such as ImageShack, or a $99/year Image Hosting plan with us), then link to the file you uploaded -- A rather lengthy process for a silly little post. Well, now the folks over at ImgRed.com have simplified the process for us posters. All you have to do is prefix the full URL to the original image with http://www.imgred.com/. For example, http://www.imgred.com/http://www.grinn.net/images/jesus.jpg instead of only http://www.grinn.net/images/jesus.jpg. Thank you, ImgRed, for being so awesome.

Oh, and if you want the source code for ImgRed, you can find it here. ;)

Read: lifehacker

Jott

If you know me then you know that I have a terrible memory. No, I don't mean the one that's left me fearing clowns. I mean that I have a hard time remembering things. This is the biggest reason that I obsess over keeping organized, and love finding new ways to remind myself of that thing I undoubtedly forgot.

Recently I was introduced to a neat little toy called jott. Simply put, it allows you to send a short email to anyone in your jott contacts. Not using a computer, not via BlackBerry, and not exactly by text messaging through your cellphone. The thing that makes jott unique is that it allows you to simply speak what you want emailed.

To use it (once you've signed up for an account), you simply call the toll-free number jott provides, say the name of the contact you wish to email, then say what you want the email message to be. Jott then transcribes what you said, and emails that person with the text you spoke. Pretty neat, huh?

So now you're thinking, "How does that help you remember things?" Well, 90% of the time that I use jott, I don't "jott" other people. I jott myself a memo! Since I always have my cellphone on me, I can send myself a quick reminder from anywhere. I jott myself in the car, I jott myself during lunch, I even jotted myself while waiting for my Emissions Inspection. I ended up sending myself 5 jotts the very first day that I signed up for the service. That's 5 things that I got done that I probably would have otherwise forgotten!

It sure is nice to see technology being implemented in a way that makes our lives simpler.

Read: jott.

Web 2.0 for the Rest of Us

If you're reading this blog entry you probably don't know what Web 2.0 means. Perhaps you've never even heard of it. Well, I stumbled across an interesting article by a gentleman by the name of Paul Hernacki the other day that does a pretty good job of explaining why you should care. I think he doesn't give SaaS the credit it deserves (perhaps only because his firm isn't yet able to produce "fully matured" SaaS apps), but the article should give you a good idea of what Web 2.0 can do for Your Business 2.0.

Read: TechLINKS.

Internet Bubbles

It seems people once again are catching the internet technology bug. Good news for us, but is the internet "Boom 2.0" going to Bust 2.0? We started this company at the tail end of the big internet bust because we saw a need for an effective use of technology. While all the broke investors hung their heads low with their companies that provided little more than glitter, we delivered solutions. The bust didn't scare us then and the inevitable chatter over there being a second bust after this new boom is no different.

New Google Maps

Ok, so it's not a *huge* change from the previous version, but it seems Google Maps got a facelift, today. I haven't seen hardly any press on this as of yet. Below are some other changes I've noticed. Some of these may be simply things I didn't notice until now:

1. The pretty new "tabs" under the search bar for Search the map, Find businesses, and Get directions.
2. More useful instructions when finding places, such as "by the Perimeter Mall" in the first result of this search.
3. You can now use the mouse wheel and buttons, as reported in this digg article.

If there's other things I've missed, please comment and let us know!