iFixit.org

iFixit.org — The People Who Are Fixing the World — is a new project by the talented and helpful team at iFixit.com, the ‘free repair manual you can edit.’ I have used iFixit to get detailed instructions on upgrading our Macs and it’s been a really useful resource. You can find repair guides for all kinds of things—including game consoles, automobiles, cameras, household items and more. They have a free repair manual app for iPhone and iPad so you can download guides right from your mobile device.

On ifixit.org, we’ll be writing about the problems caused by our throwaway culture. [...] We’re going to profile repair gurus and share why people fix things.

They are also working on a documentary: Fixers, a film about repair. I’m looking forward to this.

Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts Online

For the science geeks among us: Isaac Newton’s papers have been digitized and posted at the Cambridge University Digital Library. Below is a shot of one of Newton’s pages from Trinity College in 1661. Published to the world for free. This is one of the things I love about the Internet.

Search Results vs Answers

Sometimes we do a web search because we want a bunch of results to look through, and this usually works pretty well. But sometimes we just want the answer to a question: we know there is exactly one correct answer to the question, and we just want that—not a bunch of useless “hits” and ads (aka sponsored links) cluttering up the page.

When the iPhone 4S went on sale recently, Steve Wozniak—co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs—was at one of the Palo Alto Apple stores waiting in line, and was interviewed about several things, including the Siri intelligent assistant software on the new iPhone. He made a really interesting comment about the current state of web search: he said that what we often need is not search technology but answer technology.

Rick Webb posted a typical example of search results for “gold price” on Google and also on Wolfram|Alpha (WA). The Google results are familiar—and not entirely useless—but the WA result is an answer (assuming that the search term means ‘what is the price of gold?’). The technology at the heart of Siri uses the WA services, among others, to find and deliver very specific responses to user input. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but it is pretty amazing considering how relatively immature the field is right now. This is clearly the future of web search, especially on mobile devices.

Wolfram|Alpha is a “computational knowledge engine” that can provide an amazing breadth of data, sometimes cross-referencing several databases and calculating complex results on the fly. If you haven’t yet checked it out, start with the tour and see  for yourself what this technology can do. Also, see the examples page to get an idea of the range of subjects where you can put WA to work for you. It’s free.

Asana project management and collaboration

I discovered Asana today, a free web-based project management and collaboration tool that looks really good. I haven’t worked much with it yet but I did create an account and set up a sample project, and at first glance it seems like a versatile tool for managing tasks and teams. You can create multiple project workspaces, assign team members, track activities across tasks, set projects to private if you don’t want something shared out, and much more.

There are other collaboration products out there that I haven’t paid much attention to, but there were favorable comments about Asana on the Hacker News forum so it might be worth a look if you have a need for something like this.

There’s an overview video on the front page and you can get more details on the Asana product page or their company blog.

Dropbox API for mobile & web apps

Today Dropbox announced an API for mobile and web apps.

From a security standpoint this sounds great:

You’ll never have to enter your Dropbox account info into a third-party app on version 1. Instead, you’ll approve access using the official Dropbox app on mobile or via the web at dropbox.com.

And this.

Version 1 adds support for apps that can only read or write to a single folder in your Dropbox.

Authentication is not sent to third party apps, and you can selectively limit access to a single folder which prevents exposing all of your Dropbox data. Hellofax is one example of this kind of integration—they offer the option of receiving faxes as PDFs that can be routed to a Dropbox folder.

More detailed info for developers at dropbox.com/developers.

Free Final Cut Pro X Tutorials

This is really cool. Israel Hyman (Izzy Video) has posted some Final Cut X Pro tutorials on his site. Below is a list of the various training videos he has created and provided free of charge. You can also download his entire FCPX course, including practice files, for only $37. What a great service by Izzy. I’ve only looked at a couple of these videos so far, but they provide a huge timesaving over reading the manual and figuring it out on your own.

I learned Final Cut Express a couple of years ago using Izzy’s tutorials, and he’s an outstanding trainer. A lot of work went into creating these and I don’t know anyone else who would do all this and give it away. If you want to learn about digital video, pay attention to Izzy Video.

1. Getting Started
2. Overview of the Interface
3. Keywords and Ratings
4. Different Kinds of Edits
5. Overwrite Editing
6. Using Markers
7. Clip Appearance
8. Tools
9. The Precision Editor
10. Transitions
11. Transition Details
12. Titles
13. Transforming
14. Built-In Video Effects
15. Clip Effects
16. Generators
17. Compound Clips
18. Storylines
19. Auditions
20. Retiming Clips for slow motion and fast motion
21. Clip analysis for stabilization and color balance
22. Color Correction, Video Scopes, Color Boards, and Color Match
23. Importing from a Video Camera
24. Sharing and exporting your video project
25. Managing Your Media and Projects
26. Conclusion

Posted: August 10th, 2011
Filed under: Free (or low-cost), Software, Tips, Video | No Comments »

Lion DiskMaker

Since OS X 10.7 Lion is delivered exclusively via download from the Mac App Store—no boxed disk or installation media of any kind is being sold—Guillaume Gest has created the free Lion DiskMaker Applescript application to provide a way to create an installation DVD or USB stick (USB should run faster than a disk). This would be useful if you ever need to reinstall Lion without having to download it again, or if you want a quick and easy way to install it on your other Macs.

Gest’s web site claims that a 4 GB USB stick will handle it, or a single-layer writable 4.7 GB DVD.

via MacTrast

Google+ growth

The chart below shows impressive growth numbers for Google+ — although I don’t know what it really means at this point, if anything. Could be a lot of people are just looking for an alternative to Facebook, but 10 million is a pretty big user base in just a couple of weeks time.

I joined G+ this week and have been poking around a little, mostly out of curiosity to see what they’ve built and how the technology works. I never used Facebook and I don’t know if G+ will be any different, but they are doing some interesting things there with the ‘Circles’ model of security and permissions. You can see the Circles concept demonstrated in a YouTube video here.

Watching the developments with Facebook and Google+ I wonder if a single platform needs to “win” this game or if several different ones will find their own audience and grow independently of one another—if so, what if some of your friends or family are on one network but not the other? Maybe some form of integration among the networks will evolve. I don’t imagine the principal players will want to go along with that but it might be an opportunity for a third party middleware service to do something.

Chart came from this Betabeat article.

Google+

Google’s ‘social’ platform/Facebook competitor: plus.google.com

Pronounced Google Plus but not to be confused I suppose with their +1 button recommendations system they recently introduced.

Google has a detailed blog post describing the service. Interactive (Flash) Tour of Google+ is here.

Make your own link shortener

With the popularity of Twitter and the need to keep ‘tweets’ within the 140-character limit, someone came up with the clever idea of a link-shortening service. The idea is that sometimes you want to include a link in your tweet, but some URLs are really long, like the following link to a Wikipedia article which has 67 characters in the URL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening#Registering_a_short_URL

If you wanted to include this URL in your tweet it would take up almost half of the available characters, so you might have to shrink your message to accommodate the link. Link shortening services like bit.ly and goo.gl and others provide you with a unique short URL that will redirect to the longer one, so you drop the short link into your tweet—or in your email or web page: you can use them anywhere you would use a link—and when someone clicks the short link it directs them to the longer URL. This leaves more room in your tweet for your message, and minimizes the number of characters used for links.

For example, I shortened the Wikipedia article URL above using my own shortening service I set up yesterday, which uses only 17 characters: http://stacy.cc/4

I used a free PHP script-based tool called YOURLS (Your Own URL Shortener) found at yourls.org. You can register a short domain name of your own, install and configure the YOURLS software on the domain, and you’re up and running with your own service. Domain registrations are pretty cheap as well, so this is a very low-cost solution if you need it. I registered the stacy.cc domain through my hosting provider, Dreamhost, for $25. I had the whole thing up and running in less than two hours.

Why create your own rather than use one of the freely-available services already out there? The best reason I can think of is control. If you use someone else’s service to handle link redirecting for you, then you run the risk of losing this function if the service shuts down, and your shortened URLs will no longer work. For most people I don’t think it’s a big deal if they’re just using it for Twitter, but if you like the idea of running and controlling your own service, and you’d like to use a custom/branded domain for your redirects, setting up a service like this is a quick and inexpensive option.