monkey!

September 21, 2008

Blog to watch: Kitchener - Waterloo Conscience + Veg Van!

Great blog discovery today that is just starting off but looks good for us Kitchener Waterloo folks who just love all that alternative energy goodness.

Kitchener - Waterloo Conscience is the name, and it’s devoted to following a green life style and “conscience”, specifically focusing on the K-W Region. His latest take, on the new Bay in Conestoga Mall is a great look at what they have done to really promote the green attitude. I didn’t even know there was also some solar panels!

While browsing through this blog, I discovered this man, Ian, is also the driver of the Veg Van! Doesn’t get much better then a creepy looking blue box van that’s running on grease. It’s definitely an interesting look into something totally different.

I also don’t plug my good friend Corey enough, who recently redesigned his blog and is focusing on some interesting writing lately. I recommend you check it out, he will be posting a neat short story this Monday.

September 16, 2008

Switching from iTunes to the new Songbird

Over the past few months I’ve slowly gotten more and more annoyed by iTunes. The interface is so slow it makes me want to buy a Mac and all the latest iTunes updates have been met with some mixed responses.

Enter Songbird. Songbird is an open source music player that is labeled the Firefox for music players. Why? Because It’s doing a good job of giving me what I want and oh it has those precious addons we Firefox users love so much.

Songbird makes me feel quite at home because it looks like iTunes, almost. It has the same structure and nearly the same style making the switch pretty easy on the UI-centered part of my brain.

Out of the box, it invites you to try out some of the features like its built-in concert finder which is simply powered by Songkick (Unfortunately, not available in Canada!) as well as Last.fm support, which as an avid user I am a huge fan of. You can extend the power of Songbird quite easily with addons like mashTape which not only function great, but are super easy to install!

The real reason I decided to try it out was beause iTunes was slow slow slow. Songbird is actually pretty fast. Importing my entire library of 5,000+ songs took only about 5 minutes and moving around in the player itself is pretty quick. No random lag and weird UI glitches like iTunes for Windows. Oh, did I mention Songbird is available for Windows, Mac, AND Linux? Hell yeah, you guys rock.

Of course, Songbird is still in development and not even in 1.0 status yet. Adding Podcasts (Subscriptions) was a bit wonky and I’m still having some trouble with a few that I want to subscribe to and video isn’t quite there yet. These guys are working hard however to get new updates out make a name for themselves in the music player community. You can follow them on Twitter to get a bit more insight into their day-to-day workings

Overall, I am so far very happy with Songbird. It does what I need it to do with minimal hassle and the importing of my iTunes library made it quick and easy to switch. Once a few more bugs are squashed and a few features are tightened up it should be one hell of a killer music player.

P.S - Songkick, please get some Canadian support for your listings!

September 12, 2008

Saving Money Tip: Showering yourself with money

I’ve found one of the most effective ways to save money, especially as a younger guy who is constantly buying things, going out for dinners, and not worrying about pinching pennies is to have multiple sources of savings.

This plays on the same idea that having multiple sources of income, even if those extra sources are little in comparison to your main source, it still adds up.

For example, for my short-term (non retirement) savings, I save money in three ways:

1. Using automatic deposits into a high interest savings account like my ING Account. Every week, ING takes out a set amount of dollars from my chequing into my savings. This is most people’s first step to savings and it works great, because you end up budgeting around the weekly deposits.
2. Saving your change adds up too. With my girlfriend, we fill up a huge pickle jar with change. Once every 4-5 months it gets full. Our last take out, we cleared well over $200 on change we would have never thought of using.
3. Don’t just save your change, save your dollars and bills. A woman from Boston saved $12,000 just by collecting her $5 dollar bills. I’ve begun to start doing this slowly and it’s a nice companion to saving change.

September 8, 2008

Dropbox makes online backup and sync almost too easy

Online backup, sync and sharing has been all the rage for ages and for awhile now a very quiet startup named Dropbox has been working on making it very simple, useful and sexy.

Dropbox is pretty straight forward. You install an app on your pc and a certain root folder is designated as your dropbox! Whatever you place in this folder, or in subfolders you create, it is automatically uploaded to your dropbox. Additionally, using the web UI you can upload files that will end up being synced to your pc. Lovely.

So why do I like Dropbox?

• It’s simple. Even the most novice of the novice could get this. It functions like a regular folder on your computer, but just has some nice magic working behind it. The web interface is also very clean and simple to use (Although currently being in beta, it still has a bit to go)
• Multiple computers can hook up to a single account. This is very useful, as I can now sync certain media files between my work and home PC. I could do this already yes, but the point is dropbox takes away a ton of hassle and just makes it seamless.
• Great integration between the web and pc client. The activity stream is almost instant, and file upload notifications are very fast. It’s a small thing, but it feels good to see a web interface that relies on an outside source working so nicely.
• 2GB of free storage for all users. If you read their blog, you’ll realize this will last even when they are launched. They will of course, introduce payment plans for more space and premium features once they are closer to launch (See their blog for some details.)

Obligatory file uploaded using Dropbox.

To sum it all up, Dropbox has been around for awhile and they’ve been polishing up their product and it’s almost to the point where it’s ready for the primetime. I’ve been using it for a few days and am enjoying how easy it is.

Dropbox, as far as i know will be launching this week at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Fransisco.

September 6, 2008

Quick Tip: Firefox Favourites Icon Bar

This is a simple trick that gives you way more bookmark real estate. As you already know, Firefox has a bookmarks bar right above the tabs in which you can throw stuff you commonly visit onto.

A neat way to get more out of it is when you add a link to your favourite site, right click and select the Properties of the bookmark and simply wipe out the “Name” field. This will leave you with just an icon on your toolbar.

Most sites have a favourite icon, and it has served me well for the past several months so if you’re aching for some more bookmark space, try this!

(P.S: If you can guess what all those sites are in my list, minus the one empty page you are a true internet hero)

August 26, 2008

Finding the best deals in your area with Yahoo Pipes

Today while twittering away spaetzel showed off a very cool Yahoo Pipe of his. This pipe basically took all the deals from the Kitchener / Waterloo region and created one big listing out of it. Via the power of RSS feeds, it automatically updates and does all the work for you.

So what is Yahoo Pipes? In about one sentence: It’s a way to combine a variety of data from the web into one seamless stream of useful information, tailored to your needs.

Enough chit chat - Let’s begin. Point your browser to http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

Get into your Yahoo! account and hit “Create a Pipe”. In this simple Example we are going to take data from Kijiji, Craigslist, add some filters based on our needs, and then add it to our RSS Reader.

So you’re now in a big window, telling you to “drag modules here” Scary! I know. Not a problem. Let’s start by going to the left and clicking on and dragging the “Fetch Feed” module over to the center panel. It’ll take a second to create, but now you should have your first Yahoo Pipes module up!

Now, we need this to do something. Let’s head on over to Kijiji, pick your city and then select a category. We could get very broad, but there’s no point just yet. I’ve selected the video games category. Once on that page, you should see the ever-familiar Orange RSS Feed icon in your browser (For Firefox, it’s on the top right). Click it, and you should get the address for the RSS Feed of the video games section. It looks something like this for me:

http://kitchener.kijiji.ca/f-SearchAdRss?CatId=141

Take that address, go back to your Yahoo Pipe and put it into the URL Field on the module you placed. You should notice the icon change to the Kijiji icon.

Now let’s make it work for us! Click on the small circle connector near the bottom of the module you placed. You should see it stretch out. Bring the connector to the connecting piece on the module labeled “Output”. Now if you look at the bottom, in the Debugger panel you should see a bunch of text. Basically, that is a very simplied version of our output. In mine, I see a bunch of entries for PS3, Xbox, etc. You may see something different, depending on what you added as your category.

Ok, this is nice and all, but we could use some more!

Go back and add another “Fetch Feed” module. Head on over to Craigslist this time and repeat the process we just did, respectively on your newly placed module. Now, we’ve run into one small snag. We can’t link two modules to the Output. Output only has one connector. What do we do? We add a Union. On your left menu, you should see a category titled “Operators”. Open that up and drag a Union module onto your screen. You should now see the Union module has 5 connectors on top with one on the bottom. If you have more then 5 feeds being fetched, you’ll just have to add more unions, it’s that simple!

You should now notice your Output has a lot more variety and quantity of items being returned.

Finally, let’s add one more step. Let’s add some filters so we only get what we want. For this example, let’s say I am highly interested in everything that is PS3. In your left menu, head over to Operators and select and drag the Filter module onto your panel. Adjust your modules so your Union leads to the Filter, and the Filter now leads to the Output.

In a filter, you have two options. Block and Permit. I’ll use Permit for this example. Now, as I said I am interested in all things PS3 so I’m going to add a few keywords.

ps3, playstation

In the first field, you can select what field of data you want to match. In our basic case, it’s going to be item.title. Essentially I am looking for any items that contain the words ps3 and playstation. Very simple.

Now, I can move forward and add some more filters like xbox, or ninja’s or whatever else I want. I can also create a second filter module and set it to “Block” incase I do not ever want to see things containing nintendo or werewolves. (To be honest I am a big fan of both) In the end, your Pipe should look something like this:

Once this is complete, you can Save the Pipe and add it to your favourite RSS Reader, or simply bookmark the Pipe page if you are not a fan of rss readers.

Of course, as I said you can do all sorts of crazy and cool things to extend on this simple setup but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Try adding all the feeds you know, some filters, and play around with all the operators. You’ll be surprised just how complex you can get with something that looks like so much fun!

You can find some great video tutorials and examples on the Yahoo Pipes web page.

August 19, 2008

How hackers mess up your blog without you knowing it

Earlier today I was updating one of my older blogs to a new version of Wordpress. With the update, came a small change in my blogs template. As I opened up the template editor I noticed something strange

Literally thousands upon thousands of links to various spam-related subjects.

But how come I didn’t see them when I visited my blog?! Very simple actually. A lot of spammers now inject all these hidden links, but they only show up, and literally cover your page when you are visting your blog from a search engine, or another specified referer. A direct non-referal visit to your blog yields no links and your page looks perfectly normal.

This happened simply because my Wordpress install was very old, which was prone to exploits. Yes, despite the awesome and easy update process of a Wordpress blog I got lazy on that one

Really the best solution to this is to just keep up to date on your Wordpress installations and periodically check your source. It’s as simple as Viewing Source and you will quickly notice any strange quirks.

August 16, 2008

Great Cheat Sheets for Programming, Design, and more