Bullcrap

Man, I suck at this Tumblr thing.

How to email your iPhone 3GS videos to Vimeo

While waiting for a native app to get video recorded on a 3GS posted to somewhere beside YouTube and MobileMe, this workaround will get you there:

What you need: - Vimeo account - iPhone 3GS - Patience

First, create an account on Posterous.com. Then tell it about your Vimeo account (in the autopost config settings). Now, anything you send to vimeo@posterous.com will be automatically posted to Vimeo (this cam take a few minutes, so keep your shirt on).

So, shoot a short video (there’s a size limit on emailed videos which seems to be roughly 30 seconds of video) and email it to that address. If all goes well, you’ll get an email from Vimeo that your video is posted.

Incidentally, I’ve been quite taken with Posterous lately. Very cool service and they’re adding new features at a FriendFeed-like pace.

Quick and Dirty jQuery Hack

I was tasked with updating an HTML layout so that all external links were set to target=”_blank” (which would open them in a new window instead of the current window). Reading about jQuery’s selector syntax last night was serendipitous as it led me to this little piece of awesome:

This code finds all of the ‘a’ elements (links) in a page whose href value (where the link would take you should you click on it) begins with “http://” and add target=”_blank”. Needless to say, I’m impressed.

Why I Freaking Love FriendFeed and You Will, Too

Thinking back to a little over a year ago or so - back when Twitter was having *major* stability problems and people were starting to look for alternatives. Plurk and Identica gained some traction, as did FriendFeed. But none of these other services offered the sheer volume of users that Twitter had, so people dealt with day-long outages and incessant service interruptions because, well, because that’s where there friends were.

A group of fairly vocal critics of Twitter migrated to FriendFeed anyway. This wasn’t especially hard for them, since they had thousands of followers on Twitter and several of them were seen as experts or authorities in tech circles, so many of their followers did what followers do and trekked right on over to FriendFeed. I gave this service a look but, at the time, it seemed too much of a departure from the way Twitter worked and I left my account to collect dust like so many other accounts on so many other social networking sites.

So here we are, a good while later. Twitter has gotten far more stable (and far more popular among the regular non-nerdy humans) and Robert Scoble (among many others) is still standing on the corner trying to convince his readers and follwers to come over to FriendFeed. Now, FriendFeed hasn’t been sitting idly by while all this has been happening. Truth be told, they people behind it have been pretty busy with 2 major UI overhauls, a slew of new features and pretty damn good Twitter integration. Being the chronic procrastinator that I am, I decided that it might be worth an hour to give it another look. The result? I love it.

The big mistake in all this is assuming that FriendFeed and Twitter are somehow at odds with one another, that they’re similar services competing directly for your banal sandwich updates and backchannel chatter. While there are similarities, this isn’t really the case. I’m still a heavy Twitter user, but I just use it (mostly) from the FriendFeed interface. I still get all of my @replies and all that, but FriendFeed offers so much more than that. The real magic of FriendFeed is that I’m able to interact with all of my favorite social networking sites (Twitter, Last.fm and Flickr - and Facebook to a lesser extent) from a single place. If you’re my friend on FriendFeed, then I see more than just your Twitter updates - I’ll also see your new Flickr photos, your new favorite tracks on Last.fm, your status updates on Facebook, your favorite YouTube videos, yadda yadda yadda. And I can comment on every single one of them, irrespective of “network of origin”.

So, how do I make it all work? Well, a few different tricks have gotten me most of the way there. Let me break this down like a compound for you:

Twitter

A good many of my Twitter friends are on FriendFeed. That means that their Twitter status updates show up in my feed and I can comment on them (and my comments are sent back to Twitter as @reply messages). For those that aren’t, FriendFeed has this *awesome* feature called “Imaginary Friends”. This allows me to create a fake FriendFeed user with your name, add all of your feeds to it (Twitter, YouTube, Last.fm, Flickr, etc.) and comment on them as though you actually had an account. This is where FriendFeed wins the game, if you ask me. I don’t have to pine away for my Twitter buds to chug the Kool-aid and create a FriendFeed account just so I can keep Internet-stalking them.

Twitter allows you to create RSS feeds from searches, so I just have anything containing “inkedmn” or “@inkedmn” sent into FriendFeed via that RSS feed. Easy effing peasy. The only drawback to this is that I can’t reply directly from FriendFeed to Twitter in this case, but this isn’t really a deal-breaker for me. The people I having meaningful conversations with are already Imaginary FriendFeed Friends, so I only occasionally switch to Twitter proper to send a reply - no biggie.

Other Feeds

I’ve got a ton of other content showing up in FriendFeed, all of which has the potential for discussion. This is probably the biggest reason why I’m so amp’d on this site - you never know what’s going to spawn a whole debate or start a new (admittedly “Internet”) friendship.

So, what about the actual FriendFeed site? What makes it so badass, anyway? Glad you asked.

As I’ve said, people can comment on anything that shows up in your feed. What I didn’t point out is that these comments happen in real time. No page refreshes, no interval-based polling - as soon as somebody submits a comment on a feed item, it appears below that item. This offers an *unreal* amount of potential for debate, discussion and interesting chatter with people you may not even know yet. That’s point number one.

You can also group your friends into lists. For the people who are friends but also produce a fairly high level of noise, they can be shuffled out of your main feed and read whenever you have the inclination. It’s also good for separating friends out by relationship (coworkers, for example) or whatever other whacko scheme you can devise.

Groups are crazy awesome because it’s a great way to find people on FriendFeed who like the same kind of thing you do (parenthood and various “learning FriendFeed” groups are where you’re likely to find me these days). You can also create private groups so your other friends don’t find out about that needlepoint habit you’ve developed.

The final hotness is saved searches. Several other people have put together some great ideas for how to use these, but my personal favorites are searches for posts of mine that have a comment or “like” (since I’m just starting out), popular photos and posts from the FriendFeed developers. This feature has virtually limitless potential, so have fun digging around.

So, I guess that’s my pitch. I’m really enjoying FriendFeed and I hope you’ll give it a try. And, no, I don’t work there or anything (though, that’d be fracking sweet).

Here’s me on FriendFeed if you want to look me up and say hello.

Your Questions... ANSWERED.

ronbailey - Daps or High Five?
Having no clue what either of these things are, I’m totally unqualified to formulate an intelligent response. So, Daps.

routerguy - OSX, XP, Vista, or Linux…Which one should I use, and why? (none of that virtualization or dual-boot stuff)
I’m a big Mac guy, so I’ll have to say OSX. I don’t care much for Windows and Linux requires you to spend what I consider to be a prohibitive amount of time getting things simply working the way you want. I spent a few years running Linux as my primary desktop OS at home and really enjoyed it, but OSX makes it easy to do stuff that should be easy, like printing and networking (which were non-trivial undertakings with Linux in the not too distant past)

faneffingtastic - Am I your one question? And did I just waste it on asking you that?
Yes. And yes. Sigh.

myrm - If Xzibit pimped your ride, what would you want him to put in it?
A little context: I drive a 2004 Ford Mustang, which (as you may already know) is one of the douchiest cars on the road today. I got it used for a really good price, so that’s why that’s that. As far as modifications, I’d probably have the frickin’ spoiler removed (or, as my car guy buddies call it, “lips”) and have them somehow figure a way for me to listen to audio from my iPhone while driving it. Oh, and a touch screen, in-dash Mac so I could play Scrabble at red lights.

shawnaf - What don’t you want your mom to know?
Actually (and I’m being totally straight with you here, promise), my Mom and I are super close and there isn’t a whole lot about me she doesn’t know, nor is there anything I’m intentionally keeping from her. Well, except maybe the coke thing.

Geordan - What was the turning point in your life that took you from pre-programmer job to your current position?
Well, at my last job, I started as a helpdesk guy. I knew I wanted to get into software development, but I had no formal education or experience. So, long story short, I just bugged the project manager until she’d give me little programming things to do (QA, simple applications) and I’d do them. Then they realized that I was the only one in the whole building who knew a damn thing about low-level(-ish) socket programming and, lo and behold, I got a new job in that department :)

kevinthompson - What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow.
African or European?

frageelaytwit - Your house is on fire; what’s the first thing you grab before running out the door?
Assuming my wife and kids were all at a safe distance, I’d have to say I’d grab our 3 good wedding pictures off of the wall, my wife’s photo albums, my kids blankets (which they sleep with each night and love dearly) and my external hard drive (which has a bunch of video on it which is about the only thing of which I don’t keep regular, offsite backups).

yellowsuitcase - Which tattoo is your favorite and why?
This is a tough one, actually. I think it’s a 4-way tie between the ones for my kids (one on each forearm), my wife’s name on my lower back (which she really doesn’t like me showing people) and The Jesus Prayer across the top of my chest. Here are some pictures (wife tattoo omitted because I don’t have a good picture of it):

For my daughter:

For my son:

Jesus Prayer:
  

As to why these are my favorites, I’d say the first three choices speak for themselves. With respect to the Jesus Prayer, I got that because I wanted that sentiment staring me straight in the eye as often as possible.

Thanks for the questions, friends!

This is fun - anybody else?