How to change the new Twitter heart to whatever emoji you want.

Written by

twitter-poop-emoji

It seems like everyone hates the new Twitter heart, so here’s how to use any emoji you want.

  1. First install the Stylish extension for Chrome or Firefox
  2. Go to the Emojipedia and the find the emoji of your choice, for example, the ‘pile-of-poo’ (💩), and highlight the emoji like text and copy it (CMD+C or CTRL+C or Edit > Copy if you’re a total luddite)
  3. Then go to twitter.com and click the Stylish icon in the top right. It looks like this: stylish-logo and select “write style for twitter.com”
  4. Once there, type this in to the editor: 
    .HeartAnimationContainer {
visibility: hidden;
overflow: visible;
}
.HeartAnimationContainer:after {
content: "💩";
visibility: visible;
display: block;
position: absolute;
}

    except use whatever emoji you want.

  5. Ta-dah… that heart be damned…

As always, keep it one-hunnit.

100

All tweets taken from my Twitter list “Only tweets funny stuff” which I maintain and love and adore. You should check it out.

(h/t @avestal)

 

Vs. – The 2 letter secret to quick & effective product comparison using Google.

Written by

When researching products and services, especially in areas outside your expertise, it can be tough just discovering what your choices are. You can use the power of Google’s search term suggestion to quickly generate a list of competitors products using just two lil’ letters — vs.

Example: I’m using Zapier for a Twitter experiment. It’s a great tool, and well worth checking out if you need to connect web services, but it’s a bit on the pricey side. Here’s the quickest way to find a list of competitors and comparable products…

zapier

Huzzah! What you see is a list that is generated based on the search terms of everyone before you trying to research the same thing, except you get a head start. You just went from a list of 0 to Zapier’s 4 closest competitors: IFTTT, Cloudwork, itduzzit, and onesaas. Pretty solid start for ~2 seconds of typing.

Continue reading…

How to fix the Power Button in OS X Mavericks

Written by

Mac OS X Mavericks Power Button Dialog

With the release of Apple’s 10.9 Mavericks, they ‘updated’ the power button functionality across all their PCs such that any time you tap the power button on the upper right of the keyboard, the computer instantly, with out any warning whatsoever, goes to sleep. This is extra annoying since the key is 5mm from the backspace button, which is among the most used keys on the board (at least for me). I feel like this is absolutely change for change sake from Apple. I can’t see the benefit of this. Why would I want my computer to insta-sleep at the push of a button with no warning?

Anyways, here’s how to fix it. Someone much smarter than I basically reverse engineered the buttons operation AND created a fix. It took me a couple tries to get it working, so here’s a simple guide in layman’s terms.

Step 1: Download this – power_fixer (compiled)

Step 2: Open Terminal.app

Step 3: Navigate to the directory where you downloaded the power_fixer file. (Chances are it’s in ‘~/Downloads’, so type ‘cd ~/Downloads’

Step 3.5: If you type ‘ls -a | grep power_fixer’ you should see the file listed. Now you know you’re in the correct directory.

Step 4: Type ‘sudo ./power_fixer’ to run the program. Enter your password if/when prompted. It should be the one you use to log in to your mac. You should see output like:

power_fixer v0.1, by binchewer
------------------------------


Found loginwindow with PID 82


loginwindow base_address is 0x0000000106d46000


loginwindow text section found at offset 0x4e10, 387004 bytes


Found potential timer setup at 0000000106d9308f


Found new timer value at 0000000106d9b5ca: 0.000153


Writing value 00008533 to address 106d93093.




All done.


 


I’m not sure what the output looks like when it doesn’t work, but that’s what you should see.


Step 5: Press your power button. You should see the dialog pop up where you can sleep, restart, etc.


And finally, it ‘just works’…


Also, the source code

			

		
		

	
	
	

		

			
How to make “Giorgio by Moroder” from Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories instantly better.

			
Written by 
		

		

			
Giogio-by-Morodor-improvement


I think that “Giogio by Moroder (featuring  Giorgio Moroder)” is maybe the best song on the album. Great beat and great tempo, but the long-winded spoken word intro really should have been a separate track.


This is a pretty handy feature in iTunes. I wish there was a split-track function, like how they have the “merge tracks”.


This also works great for those early-90’s rap tracks with the 3 minute outros that are just the mic stumbling through the chorus..


Amazon link if you wanna buy it.

			

		
		

	
	
	

		

			
Never forget a password again. A simple way to recall secure, unique passwords without remembering.

			
Written by 
		

		

			
hackers


 


Here’s a tip for coming up with determinable, secure*, and unique passwords for any website without wasting any really brainpower. I’ve been using this method for years and it allows to be able to recall hundreds of unique passwords without writing down a single one.


Step 1: Pick a base ‘word’.


This can been anything. A random string of characters or an actual word. Have it be at least 5 letters long. I like something seemingly random at a glance, but will make sense to you. I’ll choose ‘eyewtkas’ which looks like gibberish, but some clever folks might recognize that as the abbreviation for the classic Glassjaw album “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Silence“.


Example password root: eyewtkas


Step 2: Make sure there’s a number in there.


I’ll replace the ‘t’ with a ‘2’ since in full name of the album, the ‘t’ stands for ‘to’ anyways.


Example password so far: eyew2kas


Step 3: Capitalize at least one letter.


Depending on what you picked as your password root, one of the letters might be more obvious to capitalize than others. I’ll just capitalize the first letter. If there’s a proper noun in your string of letters, then that makes a great one to capitalize since it makes a bit of sense.


Example password so far: Eyew2kas


Step 4: Add some ‘seed’ data to your password.


Here’s where you really improve the overall security of your passwords by creating them according to a simple rule that allows them to be unique, but but determinable. This means you can figure it out rather than remember it or write it down.


Don’t use the subdomain if there is one. Only cherry pick a piece of the root domain name.


Example: Let’s say you were creating an account for Amazon.com. Pick 2-4 letters of the ROOT url and append them to your password. Front or back, it doesn’t matter. I’ll go with the appending the 2nd through 4th letters to my root password.


Example password so far: Eyew2kasmaz (for amazon.com, aws.amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, etc), Eyew2kasetf (for netflix.com)


Step 5: Add a non-alphanumeric character for good measure


The more sense it makes to you, the easier time you’ll have remembering it. I’ll just through a ?-mark at the end.


Final Password: Eyew2kasmaz?


And there you have it. A password you don’t need to ‘remember’ because you and only you can figure it out without writing it down.


One possible gotcha:


What if the password is for something that doesn’t have a domain name?


 This is actually doesn’t come up all that often. If it’s for an account on a machine owned by a company, then use that company’s root domain name as the source for your seed letters.


* Not like secure secure, but better than ‘god’ or ‘changeme’ or somesuch nonsense.

			

		
		

	
	
	

		

			
How to stick to your calendar

			
Written by 
		

		

			
Calendar_0


I tend to suck at things like “knowing where I’m supposed to be at a given time on a given day” and “making plans” because I never know wtf my schedule looks like. It turns of my philosophy of “just tell me the day before, i’ll be there” is really annoying to friends and family.


I’ve always wanted to have a calendar that has all of my appointments and events listed neatly, in organized lil’ categories that related to different parts of my life. I’ve never been able to stick to it. Every so often I’d get motivated, blow an afternoon trying to synch all my Google accounts and their calendars together and I’d finally get is just so. Here we go Day 1, first day of the rest of my life, blah blah blah…


And a week later it’s been 4 days since I put a single event in there, I’m just as confused as I was before. I have verified that personally, this system just does not work for me. I decided to experiment and analyze. What was the reason I didn’t stick to adding things to my calendar? I tried having my VA do it for me, but the time difference didn’t make that too effective. I tried having NO calendar. Just literally I wouldn’t plan anything…until I had to plan something. forgot about it, and then looked like an ass. I think I found a solution though:


Actively do NOT remember your obligations.


That’s it. I waste zero mental capital on remembering when I have places to be. You can only hold so much in your head at once. Don’t waste that space and effort something so easy to write down and refer to later. It forces me to look in my calendar. I’m helpless without it now. When’s my next phone call? ::shrug:: it’s on my calendar, which thanks to a widget on the home screen of my Galaxy S3, it pretty much always within arms reach.


But wait…


Here’s the part where people say “that’s great, but what about when you can’t access your calendar?” to which I reply, “I dunno..hasn’t happened yet. It’s a possibility sure, but the thing that makes me not have access to the calendar is probably going to be a big enough thing that I don’t really care about what was on it in the first place.” E.g. Asteroid destroys earth, I’m stuck in the sahara desert, etc.


Additionally, this is just an experiment that is still in progress. Everything is going well SO FAR. It might totally cost me in the future, but then I’ll at least get a good blog post out of it.


If you think this is brilliant or that I am an idiot, let me know.

			

		

		 
cheers,
 
		 						 	
					

		

	
	
	

		

			
Dynamic Sitemaps on Heroku with Rails 3

			
Written by 
		

		

			
I needed to add a sitemap for a project that was hosted on Heroku, which I was hoping to be as simple as gem install [some sitemap gem] as it seems to be with 90% of rails development. Such is not the case, however.


Difficulty? Heroku doesn’t let you write to their filesystem, outside of the /tmp directory. Also, I haven’t looked into running background processes (like cron) on Heroku, but that seemed to be a whole thing so I figured there had to be a dynamic way to do this. There’s gem for creating a sitemap (sitemap_generator by kjvarga), but you need to save the file on S3 and this is for a client that doesn’t have an S3 account already and I figured that seemed a bit excessive for what is basically one text file sitting in a root folder.


Here’s my solution. It’s mostly based on this typo-riffic Dynamic50 article and a routing tip from Bill Rowell. It ‘just works’ and updates dynamically on Heroku and is totally hands off unless you change your site structure. Also for those of you using Google Webmaster Tools, this will put the sitemap.xml file in the default location.


First, add this to your routes.rb file:


resources :sitemaps, :only => :show
match "/sitemap.xml", :controller => "sitemaps", :action => "show", :format => :xml


Then create a sitemaps_controller.rb file and use this (change accordingly):


 
class SitemapsController < ApplicationController
  respond_to :xml
  caches_page :show

  def show
    @protocols = Protocol.where(:is_approved => true)
    @other_routes = ["/","/about"]
    respond_to do |format|
     format.xml
    end
  end
end


And then create views/sitemaps/show.xml.builder and add:


base_url = "http://#{request.host_with_port}"
xml.instruct! :xml, :version=>'1.0'
xml.tag! 'urlset', 'xmlns' => 'http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9' do
  @other_routes.each do |other|
    xml.url {
      xml.loc("http://example.com#{other}")
      xml.changefreq("daily")
    }
  end
  @protocols.each do |p|
    xml.url {
      xml.loc("http://example.com/protocols/#{p.id.to_s}")
      xml.changefreq("daily")
    }
  end
end


You’ll want to edit this to match any changes you made to the controller file.


And that’s it. Thanks to those mentioned above.


If you have any tips or if I did something stupid, please let me know. Thanks!

			

		

		 
cheers,
 
		 						 	
					

		

	
	
	

		

			
17 Dimes, 21 Nickels, and No Decisions

			
Written by 
		

		

			
 I think there’s only a limited number of decisions that any human can make in a given day before nature takes over, your brain drops in to survival mode and priorities, goals, dreams, and all that other important stuff goes out the window. Are you more likely to cheat on your diet in the morning during breakfast or later in the afternoon? I’m my experience, it’s always harder to ‘do the right thing’ as the day goes on. And let’s be honest, most of your bad decisions take place after 10pm.


I love variety. I can’t tell you the last time I bought ice cream and only got one flavor. That’s the best part of ice cream, you can mix and match and it’s just solid enough so you can get each individual flavor on it’s own, but mushy enough that you can mix them together if you want as well. Coffee not so much. If you want variety, you just need to get a different flavor every time. Well, I can admit it…I’m obsessed with P.S. Gourmet. It’s a local coffee shop that just makes great flavored coffee and they have a lot flavors. It’s a pleasant 5 minute walk from my home and a great form of procrastination when there’s a particular task I’m keen to avoid. I go every day. I used to spend almost 5 minutes each day in there, staring at the big chalkboard, thinking about what flavor to get. There’s so many, and almost all of them go from ‘very good’ to ‘really freaking good’. I realized it was a hassle. I noticed that I was getting ‘what flavor?’ anxiety before I even got to the building. “What should I get?” “Did I already get that flavor before?” “What if after spending all this time and effort the flavor isn’t very good? Then it’s a waste.” Not efficient and worse, not effective.


And then I realized it was all for nought. It doesn’t matter. One day, I decided to just try them all. I walked in to the store, looked up at the menu, and ordered the first thing listed. I was not going to waste any mental capital on what was ultimately a pointless decision. Then the next day, I would get the second flavor, so forth and so on until I’ve tried them all. No decision. No thought. Same result. Now my coffee break is truly a break. I spend no mental capital. It’s just a nice break from work. And I think I can actually feel the difference. There are not many parts of my day that are completely anxiety free, but this is one. Except for one small problem…


I’m broke. This whole thing about Passive Automated Renewable Diversified Income… Yeah, I haven’t figured that out yet. My empire is still in its younger and more vulnerable years. So how can I justify spending $2.75 every day on coffee when I have a coffee maker (and coffee grounds for that matter) readily available in my apartment. Well, I remembered that I have a change bowl that was basically over-flowing with non-quarter change. I figured I could solve two problems in one, so I pulled out 17 dimes and 21 nickels… $2.75 for those disinclined to basic arithmetic. It’s the exact cost for a coffee and it’s money that was just sitting there anyway. Every day, I count out the dimes and nickels. Slowly, carefully, and actually somewhat cathartically. I put the dimes in one pocket, the nickels in the other, and then grab handful of change for a tip (you can’t just give a coffee girl 38 coins and not tip her because that’s lame) and walk down to the end of the block to get my coffee.


So now everyday I get a relaxing stroll through my neighborhood, a break from the computer, and a really great iced coffee at practically no cost to me, mental or monetary. Classic win/win.


What’s my point? I guess it’s that every decision you make has a value, and thus a cost. So don’t waste them on the trivia.


Oh, and Cadbury Crunch is the best.

			

		
		

	
	
	

		

			
Jing is freaking awesome.

			
Written by 
		

		

			


Jing is like Dropbox or water in so far as once you have used it and become accustomed to having it in your life, the thought of NOT having it seems tragic and painful.


It’s tool that allows you capture screenshots (with markup) or full video, in any size and then instantly and effortlessly share it with whomever. It’s so simple and obvious once you use it.


I made a screen capture, rather ironically, with QuickTime showing how I use it.


Outsourcing is a huge part of my dream for Passive Automated Renewable Diversified Income and this is my number 1 tool for communicating with my employees. They use it on their end as well to communicate with me.


Yes, it’s like camtasia, except it’s way simpler and free.


Also, I’m not getting paid to write this in any way (unfortunately). This is just some awesome tool I found and I’m trying to spread the word. I tend to complain a lot about crappy things, and this is a way to balance the universe again.


What tools do you use that you couldn’t live with out, yet no one else seems to know about? Let me know in the comments.

			

		
		

	
	
	

		

			
Adventures in gaining new Twitter followers, pt. 1 – The New User

			
Written by 
		

		

			


One of the things necessary to establish passive income is to have an audience of some kind. I created a few new Twitter accounts along with this website. One to use for realsies (@glwngrctngls), and a couple for testing some theories. Here’s some tricks I learned from playing around with my test accounts…


1. Find and follow NEW Twitterers – Use Tweetdeck and create a search for “my first tweet” with quotes. It’s a bunch of people that just signed on to Twitter and are desperate for someone to acknowledge them. Just the act of following shows up as a huge blip on the radar screen of someone with only 2 followers.


Here are some Tweetdeck search columns I am using:


    

  • “my first tweet”
    • 

  • “welcome to twitter” (follow the person @’d in the message)
    • 

  • #newbie
    • 



I just monitor the colums and follow the people as they popop. Most have <5 followers and many have none at all. I imagine being someone’s first follower has some measurable benefit, especiall when combined with…


2. Reach out to new Twitter users after following them – A great thing about Tweetdeck, other than the constant crashing and memory wastage </sarcasm>, is that it updates live and very quickly. Reaching to people right as they are tweeting means you are much more likely to gain their attention. Just monitoring those columns and responding to several folks tweets yielded some great results. I wasn’t keeping track as much as I should, but I’d say more than 80% of the new users that I reached out to with a personal message followed me back. I was basically adding followers as fast as I could tweet at them.


This makes total sense. Taking a page from UX design, putting yourself in the role of the user, they are confused and a bit overwhelmed. If you reach out them right at that early stage, you’re likely gaining a follower for life. My target audience for this blog is very much regular folks, usually with regular jobs, so reaching out to these types of users brings me really relevant and engaged followers. Remember way back when you read EVERY tweet of EVERY follower? That’s every single one of these folks right now.  So for the new-to-twitter crowd reading this article, go find some more of your kind and get together.


oh, and if you liked this article or this site, feel free to follow @glwngrctngls on Twitter


—


Sketchy Bonus: Be a hot girl (or at least have your profile picture be one) – Surprisingly enough, the internet is filled with dudes that would really love some attention from a hot girl. Shocker. Anyways, the results were great: I followed 100 people who came up for the search “radiohead” with an old picture of me as the profile pic. After 24 hours, out of those 100 follows I received 13 follow backs with out any communication from me. Then I changed my profile to this image:


 


Source: GIS for ‘girlfriend’


and tried the experiment again. Wouldn’t you know it, I got 36 follow backs from 100 follows. That’s 36% for you math whizzes out there.  The thing is, that’s not me and my Twitter account is going to act as an extension of actual me, so this whole technique is invalid. And it’s kiiiinda creepy. Thus, I’m done with this experiment. Moving on…


stay tuned for pt. 2.