February 2009
25 posts
Quite Useful Weekly Roundup
This week we featured two detailed articles on social networking: Twitter for Your Boss and Grow Your Social Network. Both these articles complement each other and discuss social networking in a professional context.
We also published two reviews: Spotify and Codebase. Ric’s article on Spotify includes tips on use, so it’s worth reading if you’re already using it.
Hack Your...
Spotify: Free Music at Your Fingertips
This article is by Quite Useful contributor Ric Roberts.
The Swedish company Spotify provides a service which offers a new way to access virtually any track you can think of, for free, on demand… and legally! They recently started their public beta in the UK. For me, it’s almost impossible to describe just how amazing this service really is. As a true music lover, I honestly...
Grow Your Social Network
Yesterday we published Twitter for Your Boss. I thought I’d follow it up with more specific tools and techniques for growing your social network. All the advice you’ll find herein is 100% whitehat/ethical.
If you’re using Twitter professionally and personally, check out our post on Taming Multiple Twitter Accounts.
Identify Potentials
Who would you like to network with? In a...
Twitter for Your Boss
If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to feature on Twitter, then this article is for you. It’s designed to help you sell your boss on Twitter, and also offers ideas on how to gain followers ethically in a professional context.
The Basics: Why Twitter?
Twitter runs on everything: not just on the web but mobile phones through apps and SMS, smartphones like iPhone and Blackberry. ...
Review: Codebase
Codebase, made by British company aTech Media, is a source code management web app. It uses git, and provides ticketing, milestones, time tracking and full web-based repository management. They’re also working to support deployments, which will streamline the workload for a lot of web developers.
If you use GitHub you’ll already have a lot of the skills you need to use Codebase. ...
Hack Your Tumblr Blog
Tumblr provides easy to use and free hosted blogging, but it doesn’t support plugins. WordPress gained popularity because of the plugin support: there’s plugins to do just about everything, so it would be great to see plugins in Tumblr.
However, Tumblr allows full control over templates. This means you can extend just about everything with JavaScript and CSS.
The Basics
Visit the...
Quite Useful Weekly Roundup
Welcome to the Quite Useful weekly roundup! We launched our new design this week, so if you’re reading this on the feeds stop by and check it out.
This week Quite Useful featured articles on game console media centre tips (PS3, Wii), Facebook chat for your desktop, Firefox bookmark and password syncing.
And here are the choice cuts from our tweets.
Social
StreetWire shows info for your...
Firefox Sync Part 2: Passwords
This article continues on from yesterday’s post about syncing Firefox bookmarks. Passwords are a slightly different matter: naturally there aren’t any social services like Delicious, and you might not want to sync to a third-party service.
Foxmarks
Foxmarks includes a feature called “secure password sync”. This encrypts passwords with a pin that you define. The data is...
Firefox Sync Part 1: Bookmarks
Time was Google ran a service called Google Browser Sync. It synchronised each of your Firefox installations, which was great for people who wanted to sync login details and bookmarks between home and work. Google’s stopped running the service now, but there are alternative ways to clone the core functionality.
In these articles we’re going to look at syncing bookmarks and user...
Facebook Chat on Your Desktop
Facebook chat works well enough on the web site, but it has one major drawback: you keep missing messages because you’re reading a site in another tab. By the time you notice you’ve got a message your friend has quit!
Fortunately there’s a few ways of using Facebook chat on your desktop. This is much more convenient, although it is a good way of totally killing your...
Wii Media Centre Tips
This article is a follow up to yesterday’s article entitled PS3 Media Centre Tips.
The main way people view content on their Wii is through the Wii’s Internet Channel. This is powered by Opera, and costs 500 points from the Wii Shopping Channel.
Getting Favourites onto Wii
Opera’s favourites work well on Wii, but typing can be annoying. It now supports USB keyboards, so...
PS3 Media Centre Tips
The PS3 sits amongst all my media devices like Mr T, pitying the other fools with their poor format support and lack of blu-ray or HD. In Playstation 3 Media Centre by Jon Hicks he discusses using a PS3 as his main media centre. I’ve been using my PS3 this way for a while, and I’ve got a few tips to share so you can get the most out of your PS3. It’s great for watching video...
Quite Useful Weekly Roundup
Welcome to the Quite Useful weekly roundup! Remember there’s a few ways to get Quite Useful content:
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Quite Useful Backup Series
Never lose any data again by backing up just about all your data with our 5-part series on backups:
Social Network Backups
Online Backups (and how to backup with Automator)
Time...
Videogame System Backups
This article is part 5 of a series of Quite Useful articles on backups.
If you’ve ever spent more than a few hours getting into a game, the last thing you want is to lose your save data. I recently sank over 20 hours into GTA4 so I really don’t want to lose all the things I’ve unlocked! This article is about backing up your save data for videogames.
Wii
Wii saves are stored...
iPhone Backups
This article is part 4 of a series of Quite Useful articles on backups.
I’m an iPhone developer, and I enjoy working with the platform. My first iPhone, however, was faulty: it would occasionally lock up and wouldn’t reboot for hours. Fortunately Apple gave me a replacement with no hassles, but during this time I was highly concerned about data loss.
There were times when I could...
Time Machine Tips
This article is part 3 of a series of Quite Useful articles on backups.
If you haven’t tried out Apple’s Time Machine yet it’s worth checking out. USB drives are now so cheap it makes for an affordable and largely hassle-free backup solution. I’ve used it since Leopard came out and haven’t had any major problems.
Networked Backups
If you’ve got...
Online Backups (and how to backup with Automator)
This article is part 2 of a series of Quite Useful articles on backups.
It’s always good to have an off-site backup. Online storage and broadband are getting cheaper and faster all the time, and the services are also getting easier to use. I’ve reviewed my favourite online storage services here, and how to use Automator in Mac OS to schedule remote backups.
Online Storage Solutions
...
Social Network Backups
This article is part 1 of a series of Quite Useful articles on backups.
I saw Blaine Cook and Joe Stump give a talk at The Future of Web Apps last year, in which Joe said “… and lo and behold you guys like to make a lot of crap!” It’s true, we do like to make crap. The problem for us comes when we want to save that crap or back it up.
Most social networks have APIs,...
Review: MoloPix
MoloPix is an iPhone app that tiles multiple photos into one image. It’s similar to QuadCamera but with different tiling options and an integrated website. The site automatically displays the location the photo was taken, and hiding the location is possible. It also includes commenting and rating, so it’s easy to find pictures people think are cool and discuss them. Setting up an...
Quite Useful Weekly Roundup
Here are a few gems from our Twitter and blog posts this week:
Social
SocialWhois is a tool that allows you to look up a username on FriendFeed or Twitter and view their profile. You can also search for people based on an interest (they call this tags). Pipl is a similar service in that it hits profiles on sites like Flickr, but it also scans documents, photos and blog posts.
A related tool is...
Turn Your Netbook into a Gaming Powerhouse
This is a Quite Useful guide to netbook gaming. Something for the weekend!
If you’ve recently bought a netbook, you probably bought it for work. I see people in cafes with their email client open or a word processor, but never Mario jumping around.
The first thing to realise is netbooks are powerful enough to emulate most of the 8bit and 16bit consoles. The second is your favourite old...
Tame Multiple Twitter Accounts
Many Twitter clients don’t support multiple accounts. One of the ways I keep in touch with customers is through Twitter, so immediately I use two Twitter accounts regularly. You might be in a similar position.
I quickly realised how awkward it is to manage multiple accounts: I’d forget to check one and subsequently get a backlog of @replies. Getting an email for direct messages...
Ric's Ruby on Rails NetBeans Tips
This article is about programming, and is written by Ric Roberts of Swirrl.
I’ve been using NetBeans for rails development for ages, originally inspired by this blog post: NetBeans THE best ruby on rails IDE. Netbeans is now on version 6.5, and there is a ruby-specific build available for rails developers.
Interface Tweaks
I’m quite a visually motivated person and I need to feel...
URL Shortener Roundup
If you’ve used Twitter you’ve no doubt noticed long links get automatically shortened using TinyURL. Not only does it crop up there though, I’ve noticed New Scientist (and other magazines) have been using it across their entire publication. That’s pretty cool, but what if TinyURL goes down? Also where’s the innovation if just one service rules the roost?
So while...
Quite Useful Code Blogging Tips
I do a lot of technical blogging, and this involves writing code in my posts. It’s a real hassle too. I forget to escape it, then it comes out all wrong. Recently I discovered some nifty ways to easily post and share code. Some even use JavaScript (see the Gist example below) so you don’t even need to install anything.
Embed code samples with Gist
Gist on Github allows you to embed code...