bradgrier.com

Category: How to

  • Getting Twitter Spam? Here’s how I deal with it

    This is the second part of a post series I star­ted a few days ago, deal­ing with Twit­ter spam. How to avoid becom­ing a Twit­ter spam­mer [part one] How to deal with Twit­ter spam [this article] What got me think­ing about it was the recent spate of incom­ing DM tweets from trus­ted people I fol­low. I received…

  • Want to get more ReTweets (RT)?

    I just had a quick con­ver­sa­tion with a friend about ReTweets. Not enough for a full blog post, but an idea I did­n’t want to not write about. The concept is to leave enough room so that any­one who wants to retweet you does­n’t have to work to do it. Here’s a simple for­mula I use: 140 -…

  • How to avoid becoming a Twitter spammer, the easy way

    Over the last few weeks I’ve been receiv­ing spam on Twit­ter from trus­ted people I follow. It’s not that they’ve all been over­come by the need to mon­et­ize their Twit­ter accounts (there, I said mon­et­ize in a blog post, I’m doomed), rather, they’ve fallen vic­tim to diabol­ic­ally-craf­ted account phish­ing schemes and their Twit­ter accounts are…

  • How to make your WordPress blog mobile friendly

    Earli­er this week WordPress.com (the free blog host­ing site) announced that they’re includ­ing two new mobile friendly tem­plates in their offer­ing. This is abso­lutely awe­some. I say this from the per­spect­ive of a iPod Touch own­er who often surfs blogs on the device. The more mobile friendly web­sites get, the more people will be able…

  • Essential things to do before upgrading to Windows 7

    Win­dows 7 is on its way so I thought I’d doc­u­ment some steps to take to pre­pare for a Win­dows 7 upgrade. Depend­ing on the state of your cur­rent com­puter and the ver­sion of Win­dows you’re cur­rently run­ning, your Win­dows 7 upgrade could con­sist of: in-place upgrade over top of your exist­ing OS (Only sup­por­ted for…

  • How to make a Polaroid from any digital image

    Even though Polar­oid instant cam­era and film packs are no longer being made by the Polar­oid Cor­por­a­tion, you can get that same look on your digit­al pho­tos with Rollip.com. Once upon a time you had to manu­ally cre­ate these things in Adobe Pho­toshop or GIMP. Not any more. Basic­ally, Rol­lip takes your image and does some…

  • The top three URL shorteners for ReTweets

    If you use Twit­ter at all you know that tweets really are the essence of tight-writ­ing, since you’ve only got 140 char­ac­ters to work with. If you’re plan­ning to include a link to oth­er web con­tent or leave space so that oth­ers can retweet your tweet, your char­ac­ter count drops further. Sav­in’ the tweet, one…

  • How to use a webcam as a home security camera

    Over the years as I’ve acquired vari­ous bits of hard­ware, I’ve some­how ended up with a few ‘extra’ web­cams. Not really want­ing them to lan­guish in my parts bin, I figured I’d take a stab at set­ting them up as home secur­ity cam­er­as. And, I wanted to check out what my dogs were up to…

  • Lucky with sunsets lately

    Over the past few days I’ve been test­ing out a cool device, the Eye-Fi SD card. It’s a cam­er­a’s memory card that uses Wi-Fi to upload pho­tos to your net­work, or a web­site. I’ll have a full in-depth review in a bit, but for now, just know that it’s a neat device 😉 UPDATE: Sep.15.09 —…

  • How to automatically post your Facebook status to Twitter

    Well it looks like Face­book and Twit­ter are now play­ing nice. If you’re logged into Face­book, this page will walk you through the pro­cess of hook­ing things up so that your Face­book updates will go out to your Twit­ter feed. Select what you want, and pro­tect the rest. I’m going to leave this post as…

  • Installing Eeebuntu on my eeePC

    You may remem­ber this post where I waxed poet­ic on the some­what-easy install­a­tion of Easy Peasy Ubuntu on my eeePC 8G (it’s a 701). Well, believe it or not, I’ve nuked Easy Peasy and am now run­ning Eee­buntu…and the install was even easier! What got it all star­ted was this post about the ‘base edi­tion’…

  • A simple and easy way to back up your Google Docs

    If you do a lot of your work on vari­ous com­puters in dif­fer­ent loc­a­tions (as I do), con­veni­ently access­ing your doc­u­ments is important. Though I carry a 2GB USB drive every­where, I actu­ally find it easi­er to use Google Docs and store my work ‘in the Cloud’, so to speak. But, that amorph­ous blob of com­put­ing-stor­age…