Bwana.org » Utility

Official Google Buzz Buttons Available

Bwana — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:49:07 +0000

It’s no secret that I’m on Google Buzz more than any other social network lately. So I was happy to see the announcement by Google:

We’ve seen lots of people using Google Buzz to share interesting links from around the web. To do so, you had to copy and paste the link from one browser window to another — there weren’t buttons that made it easy to post to Google Buzz without leaving the site you’re on. Savvy sites like Mashable and TechCrunch quickly got creative and implemented their own Buzz buttons, using Google Reader as the backend. But not every site owner should have to hack together their own version of these buttons (and not everyone who uses Buzz also uses Reader), so this morning we’re making copy-and-paste Buzz buttons available for anyone to use.

I’m updating my sites now to include this button and if you are a user of Google Buzz, I encourage you to share my posts to Buzz.

Get your Google Buzz buttons here.

How To Install Windows 7 Beta From A USB Drive To An HP Mini 1000 [Without Vista]

Bwana — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:38:14 +0000

HP Mini 1000. Check. Windows 7 Beta ISO. Check. 4 GB USB thumb drive. Check. HP Mini 1000. Check. Google. Check. Windows Vista. Uhhh… no.

That was my issue. There are a lot of great tutorials on how to create a bootable USB drive from the Windows 7 Beta ISO which Microsoft recently released. This is primarily a good solution for those of us with netbooks without CD drives. Unfortunately, a majority of these tutorials utilize a program called “diskpart”, which is a command line utility for managing partitions and disks. Coming from a UNIX background, I figured it would be easy to accomplish, but I found out the hard way, that the “diskpart” that comes shipped with Windows XP is not able to perform the necessary tasks. Namely, you won’t be able to see the USB drives in the list of drives, and you can’t set the USB drive to be active. I’ve got a lot more long winded blah blah for you, but I’ll get right to the point. Here’s how you do it if you’re stuck with Windows XP like I am. These instructions are were conducted on and are for an HP Mini 1000, I cannot guarantee this will work everywhere else (but I don’t see why it shouldn’t):

Ensure you have a USB Drive with more than 3GB capacity
Download and Install Daemon Tools Lite (or your favorite Virtual CD emulator)
Download the Windows 7 Beta ISO
Download and Install the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool
Download and Extract MBRWizard
Insert the USB Drive
Launch the HP USB Storage Format Tool. Select your USB drive for device. Select NTFS for File system. Check Quick Format. Click Start to format the USB drive.
Mount the Windows 7 Beta ISO with Daemon Tools (make note of drive letter it assigns)
Set the USB drive to be the active partition with MBRWizard: Open a command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd) and navigate to the directory where you extracted MBRWizard. Execute the following command: mbrwiz /list.
You should see your USB Drive in the list. Make note of the disk numbers next to the drives. In the following example, the HP Mini hard drive is drive #0 and the USB Drive is drive #1.
Execute the following command to set the USB drive to active: mbrwiz /disk=1 /active=1 In my example, the /disk=1 corresponds on the drive number of the USB drive. Make sure yours matches. Answer “Y” to the confirmation
Execute another list to ensure the active status has been updated. The USB Drive is now ready to be set to be bootable.
In the same command prompt, execute the following command to set the USB drive to be bootable: e:\boot\bootsect /nt60 D: (E: is the drive letter of the Windows 7 Beta ISO and D: is the drive letter of your USB drive)
Copy the contents of the Windows 7 Beta to your USB Drive
Everything should be ready. Reboot your HP Mini 1000, and on the boot screen hit F9. Select your USB drive from the dropdown list.

If it doesn’t boot, check the following:

The USB Drive is formatted properly.
The USB Drive has all the contents of the Windows 7 Beta ISO (including hidden files)
The USB Drive partition is set to “active” (mbrwiz /list)

Like I said earlier, it’s a much easier process if you already have Windows Vista, but I found there were a few kinks with Windows XP. I’m sure someone out there has found an easier process than this one, so by all means, share with the rest of the class in the comments. The fruits of ye olde labour:

FFHolic Provides The Best Of FriendFeed

Bwana — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:16:07 +0000

The popular online discussion/aggregation service FriendFeed has a great deal of fans who swear by the service. Most of these fans have found the secret sauce in the sea of updates, duplicates, and as some would say, “noise”. This is great and everything, but it’s not an easy process to learn how to utilize the tools FriendFeed provides to see the things you want. I’ve posted a couple of articles on how to best filter the massive fire hose of information, but it’s definitely not for everyone. What about those who just want to peruse FriendFeed to see what the most popular entries are? FriendFeed added a feature a few months ago which shows the “best of” FriendFeed by day, week and month. This is great if you want to be limited to your social circle, but what about the rest of FriendFeed?

This is where a great service called FFHolic comes in and saves the day. FFHolic groks all of FriendFeed and displays the most popular stories grouped in many ways. FFHolic shows you:

Most discussed entries
Most liked entries
Most commented entries
Most popular users and rooms
Most active users and rooms

These are just some of the ones to start with. You can also show some of these entries by type such as videos, photos, and music. It doesn’t stop there. FFHolic provides a rich set of tools to get the best from FriendFeed. There’s the FFHolic toolbar which puts all of the site right in your Firefox browser:

FFHolic also provides widgets to embed on your own website. These widgets give you the option of showing your “best of” information or all of FriendFeed.

Finally, FFHolic has RSS feeds for all of its data so you can subscribe to your favorite criteria. If you use tools like Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes, iGoogle, or My Yahoo, then this may be a good option for you.

For new users of FriendFeed, FFHolic provides a fantastic springboard to see the best that FriendFeed has to offer. It encourages those who are squeamish about filtering the massive amount of information FriendFeed provides, to continue to use FriendFeed to fit their needs. If you’re on FriendFeed and enjoy FFHolic, join the FFHolic FriendFeed room to discuss it and provide feedback.

See you on FriendFeed.

After 4 Months, Has Twitter Improved?

Bwana — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:56:55 +0000

It’s still not common knowledge among my online friends that I left Twitter on June 06, 2008. It’s been about 4 months since I did, and it seems like a lot has changed. Twitter is receiving praise for their improved “uptime” over the past months. Some have gone on record to state this could be the end of the “fail whale”. I have a problem with this conclusion. When a service is not working, it’s not up.

Period.

Twitter has had issues with their XMPP Instant Messaging (IM) feature and their Track feature. I went on record to state that these features were my primary way to use Twitter. Guess what? Twitter IM and Track are still not working, and it seems like nobody cares. These were two features which made Twitter great in my mind. People seem content with “hacks” such as Summize search (now acquired and called Twitter search) and Twitterspy, which relies on the former. This is not track. This is a hack. I’m not knocking the authors of Twitterspy because I think it’s a great way to get around the lack of track on Twitter. It’s still a hack though.

Know what’s even worse? Twitter is not even acknowledging the return of IM or Track in their latest status blog entries. The last mention of the IM feature was July 7th, 2008, and the last mention of Track was June 13th, 2008:

Track: this service is disabled and will remain offline until it can be reworked

I hope I’m missing something obvious, but I don’t think I am. People like Steve Gillmor believe IM/Track conflicts with the business goals of Twitter and he believes this is why it’s possibly gone forever.

I don’t know the details behind this, but at this point, I don’t care. Either remove the services from your offering or acknowledge your service is not up until IM and Track are working.

When Twitter brings these services back, then I can acknowledge such statements “99.3% uptime”. Until then, I get a bad taste in my mouth when a company says their service is “up” and several features are disabled. Disagree with me? Well, ask Twitter who did they negotiate their Service Level Agreement (SLA) with? How can you boast about uptime with no SLA?

On the flip side, I’m glad to see Twitter getting mainstream coverage, like with CNN. I’m just saddened I can’t use it for anything other than a spamming platform, which I refuse to do. So after 4 months, has Twitter improved? No. Why? Because it’s still down.

FriendFeed Enhances Podcasting Interactivity With Audio Sharing

Bwana — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:14:39 +0000

As a podcaster, I’m always looking for ways to enhance the experience for my listeners. The community not only wants to consume the content I produce, but many feel the need to contribute their thoughts and feedback. With the evolution of FriendFeed as the one stop shop for discussion surrounding the social web, it only makes sense to try to utilize it for podcasting. With the addition of FriendFeed rooms, we were given a mechanism to capture feedback surrounding our shows, giving us a convenient and powerful way to create a usable forum.

Now, things have gotten better.

FriendFeed has launched audio sharing. What is audio sharing? As with Pownce, you can share an audio file on FriendFeed, and the file is playable right on FriendFeed’s website using a flash embed. What’s also very nice, is that this feature honors RSS enclosures. So, if you are feeding your podcast RSS feed to FriendFeed, your podcasts are automatically playable right within FriendFeed! Combine this with rooms, and you instantly have an interactive forum with multimedia capabilities. Starting today, I’m going to use my Bwana.org Radio FriendFeed room as my official forum for the podcast.

The next step is video. FriendFeed, are you listening?

Intense Debate Is the Easy Choice

Bwana — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:24:40 +0000

A while ago, I wrote about my difficult decision between choosing from the commenting systems, Disqus and Intense Debate. Much has changed since that post, including Disqus’s support of video comments and now, Intense Debate’s support of FriendFeed. At this moment, the only benefit I see of using Disqus over Intense Debate is its support of video comments. This makes the decision a lot easier for me. Now that Intense Debate supports FriendFeed, it becomes a no-brainer:

The ability to import and export existing comments with ease propels Intense Debate as the clear winner.

Both Disqus and Intense Debate now support FriendFeed, both have great moderation options, both have a decent reputation system. The huge difference here is that my existing data is safe AND my future data is easily accessible. I realize Disqus has data portability options available, but Intense Debate’s are much simpler in my mind. I also realize, with Disqus, you can keep your existing comments on your blog and only use Disqus for new posts. (Intense Debate has the same option) While this workaround may be sufficient for some, I’m not a big fan of keeping two separate commenting systems on the same blog. Intense Debate’s solution is more elegant, seamless, and easier for the user to use and maintain.

I commend the folks over at Intense Debate and FriendFeed for making this happen, and I’m glad I was patient with Intense Debate. I’m quite confident I’ve made the right choice. Take a look at the Intense Debate comments on FriendFeed.

Plurk: What’s the Big Deal?

Bwana — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:50:58 +0000

When a new Twitter clone emerges in an already crowded space, it is easy to denounce it as just another wanna-be and classify it as a failure. No one knew Twitter would take the internet by storm, competitors such as Jaiku and Pownce are still thriving today, but they are nowhere near the size Twitter is.

Enter Plurk. Plurk? Are you kidding me? What kind of a name is Plurk?

Noun. plurk (plüer-kh) – A really snazzy site that allows you to showcase the events that make up your life in deliciously digestible chunks. Low in fat, 5 calories per serving, yet chock full of goodness.

Verb. plurk (plüer-kh) – To chronicle the events of your always on, action-packed, storybook, semi-charmed kinda life.

Well, that clears things up.

Anyway, Plurk is a relatively new service which emulates Twitter’s notion of short status updates. Plurk is centered around the notion of “Karma”, which is a point-reward system for participating in discussions and using the service. The interface on the web site mimics a river of moving information. The bottom axis is the time of day and the updates travel along it. There is emphasis on specific verbs such as “is, thinks, shares”. At first glance, it’s a horrible representation of status updates. Twitter has taught us that updates in 140 characters or less should always be displayed in a vertical, tabular format. Just look at all the bashing going on at Twitter, it’s not easy to read coming from that world. Plurk aims to thrash this mindset and present the data in a new fashion. A daunting task, indeed.

Let’s talk about more of the features:

Jabber/IM functionality – The IM bot, plurkbuddy, allows you to send and receive messages from your friend list. You can reply to certain threads by using the @ notation. Each message is preceeded by a number, and to reply to that message, use @[number] [reply message]

Mobile support – On your mobile device, navigate to http://www.plurk.com/m to see a much more traditional interface to Plurk. Here you can do the basic functions of plurk such as sending and receiving messages; however, you are limited to one page of messages

Friend import – Plurk has several mechanism for finding and inviting your friends. You can import via email address books (Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Live, MSN), via IM (MSN/Live, AIM, Yahoo), and via email invitations. There are basic hooks into Facebook as well.

Friend grouping – Plurk employs a basic friend organization feature, called “cliques” where you can send messages to groups of friends you specify. It’s not like FriendFeed groups as it is a personal means of organization.

In-line conversations – Plurk’s unique time line includes a nifty AJAX interface which allows you to easily post replies to “Plurks”. If you leave these miniature windows open, the conversation updates in (semi)real-time, giving it a very instant messaging type feel.

In-line video/image support - Much like Pownce, Plurk supports embedding Youtube videos and flickr images simply by linking to them in the update.

I’ve provided a video walkthrough of some of Plurk’s features including the mobile interface:

I’ve used Plurk for almost a week (karma 38.07 at the time of this post), and I’ve found some of it’s initial shortcomings are not as huge as some make it out to be. Some obvious areas of improvement include:

API – Plurk definitely needs an API to succeed. According their developers, it is on the list of things to do right after they deal with scaling (maybe they’re learning from Twitter?)

Revamp of interface/optional views – While the timeline view is innovative, it’s not for everyone. I think giving users a choice of using this interface and a traditional one will win over the hearts and minds of those on the fence.

Extend mobile capabilities - ~~The mobile interface is almost perfect, except it lacks history/archiving and filtering. The API may solve some of these shortcomings, but the mobile site as it stands is limited.~~ UPDATE: The mobile site now has archiving

SMS support – This is a must have. A blog post on the Plurk blog hints that this may be on the horizon as it states “Carrier coming“. We need SMS.

So what’s the big deal with Plurk?

I believe Plurk is a strong candidate as a Twitter replacement for many people. Hear me out. Plurk encourages use of its system with Karma. The more Karma you accumulate, the more features you obtain. (currently only emoticons and profile features, but this can easily be extended). In an age where kids buy crappy Xbox 360 games simply to increase their gamerscore and unlock achievements, this is a huge advantage. Sure, it’s not for everyone, but there are a lot of potential users who would be addicted to Plurk not for the utility, but for the fun. I mean, who doesn’t like statistics? Think about why Jaiku and Pownce are lacking users. (Most) People stopped using them because everyone was on Twitter. There was little reason to go back if your friends were on Twitter. Plurk gives the user an incentive to return and to keep Plurking. That’s powerful.

I know there are many early adopters who believe Karma is stupid and don’t understand the appeal, but how many of those same brilliant minds could grasp the appeal of Twitter during it’s inception? Not many.

I can safely say that Plurk has grown on me. While I don’t see it as an immediate Twitter killer at the moment, I do see a great deal of momentum forming with Twitter’s issues. A wise man said: “The longer Twitter has issues and prohibits the user from using it, the more likely the user is going to forget why they fell in love with it in the first place“. The clock is definitely ticking. Twitter’s uptime has become the exception and not the norm. I do understand that the website is generally up, but for many, Twitter’s advantage to other services come from IM/Jabber and tracking capabilities, which are currently down. The API is also in a crippled state.

If you find Plurk interesting, come on by and sign up. Using this link will increase my karma (lol), and also automatically add me to your friends list. (Hey, at least I’m honest ) Once you get started, here are some resources that may interest you:

The unofficial Plurk FAQ

Plurk Karma trends

Plurktionary

Short summary: There’s much more to Plurk that meets the eye.

Why I Like Intense Debate

Bwana — Wed, 07 May 2008 05:08:26 +0000

Intense Debate aims to improve comments on your blog. I’ll make this short and sweet:

It imports all my old WordPress comments
It allows me to easily export my comments from Intense Debate if I choose to move my data
And this:

Nuff said.

I’m going to try it out for a week or so and see how it goes. I’ll miss Seesmic comments but I haven’t received a video comment in a while so I doubt it will affect anything.

Google Reader Shared Notes Feature

Bwana — Tue, 06 May 2008 04:32:44 +0000

Today, Google announced a cool new feature to Google Reader: The ability to share an item with a note. I could see this being useful for me and my podcast as Google Reader shared items is my primary source for collecting links to podcast about. Now I can do this outside of Google Reader by using the bookmarklet and also append a note about the story to use during podcasting. I didn’t want to use Google Shared Items for this as I do a lot of my link gathering through Google Reader, but occasionally, I’l stumble across something in Twitter or FriendFeed that I want to discuss. This note feature will work perfectly with that.

Now there are some who believe this feature is lacking, and while I agree, I think it’s outside the scope of the its intent. It sounds as if people want this to be FriendFeed and it’s not.

At any rate, I’ll definitely get some use out of it, especially given the amount of time I use Google Reader. Now all we need is the ability to do this from the iPhone and my workflow will be much smoother

Update: FriendFeed now imports Google Reader Shared Item Notes. Scary fast.

My Twitter-Fu is Better Than Yours

Bwana — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:49:32 +0000

Twitter has become part of my daily routine here at bwana.world, and I’ve found that while there are many interesting people on it, I don’t want to know everything about them. There are plenty of people who love to use Twitter to follow everyone that follows them. While I understand some of their reasoning, I don’t agree with taking in all that personal data from others as it is my belief that it can affect you. As with most technologies I use on the web, there must be some sort of filter or sanity. It’s true with FriendFeed, and it’s true with Twitter.

I want to share with you my technique for using Twitter. I don’t expect everyone who reads this to agree with it, but I do hope you find some bit of knowledge you didn’t already know. The technique I use is simple: Separate personal twitter from the overall noise. In order to do this, I use two programs: twhirl and Adium. One is an Adobe Air client, the other is a Google talk interface to Twitter.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

With twhirl, I send tweets and reply to conversations. With it’s all-in-one timeline, I can easily see who is talking to me and respond quickly. I also have all the features of twhirl at my disposal for searching, dealing with links, posting pictures and more.

With Adium, I use Twitters “track” feature to track certain keywords. This technique allows me to filter the massive amounts of data twitter has to offer, for keywords I am interested in. This may vary from day to day, but it easily changeable within Adium.

This video demonstrates and explains more:

So why use two programs instead of one? It’s easy. I’d rather use twhirl’s interface for creating and responding, but Adium barely gets touched. I only touch Adium when I click on a link or I add/remove a tracking term. It’s not as bad as it seems, but the reward is great. I get to sift through a LOT of noise, and have plenty of meaningful discussions, find new links, find new people, and do it all with a pleasant interface and a global filter. That’s it in a nutshell.

So what do you think? How do you use Twitter? Please leave a text or video comment as I’m open to new ideas.

In Search Of A Video Micro-blogging Solution

Bwana — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:46:14 +0000

As we become spread out on the internet, we find that we have less time to concentrate on one thought. Over the years, we’ve created a new disease that I call IIADD which stands for I.nternet I.nduced A.ttention D.eficit D.isorder. I have it and if you’re reading this, you probably have it to. We can’t focus on one blog post, one web page, one application at a time. We tend to jump around from post to post, thought to thought, application to application, forever trying to satisfy our lust for more knowledge.

As a result, we’ve taken internet publishing to the “micro” level. We publish snippets of audio, text, and images on what we dub “micro-blogs”. This gives us an excuse to cherish and nurture our IIADD. “Hey, I just read this great post on TechCrunch… Ooo look, this Flickr image of a bird chasing its tail!… I need to record a podcast…Maybe I’ll eat spaghetti tonight…Ooo food network has a great recipe…Wow FriendFeed is weird, I need to get used to it…. I like turtles“. You know I what I mean.

Micro-blogging is the new black on the internets.

Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web.
-Wikipedia

Although that’s a fairly accurate definition, Wikipedia failed to mention one medium: Video. As our dump trucks fill up with more and more information, we are able to push video media fairly easily these days. Youtube, Viddler, and Seesmic (and others not mentioned) allow us to record a video directly from our web browser. The only requirement is a webcam or camera connected to one’s computer.

I’ve decided to embrace video micro-blogging here on Bwana.org. Why? Believe it or not, I once vowed never to do online video, which is why I jokingly made my Bwana.TV motto, “..And you said it couldn’t be done”. Now I have a partnered Youtube channel and have produced hundreds of videos that are well received by the informationsphere. I also do live video streaming via Ustream.TV and stream my audio podcast production daily for the world to enjoy. I’ve decided to do this because video is where it’s at. Also, I’ve decided to go in this direction because my IIADD said so.

On Bwana.org’s main page, you’ll find a video on the top right. This idea was influenced by both Chris Pirillo, and the guys behind theleetgeeks.com (wirelesspacket, bluefox, 4four1ones). Chris embeds his live video stream on every page of his blog, chris.pirillo.com. As a result, his audience grows by leaps and bounds daily. I played with this idea many times, but never streamed consistently enough to make my show grow the same. The site, theleetgeeks.com, has a wonderful layout which I believe was led by a great web developer, bluefox. They have embedded a small video micro-entry on the top right of their page. After I saw that, I was influenced and began to think:

How can I do that on Bwana.org effectively?

My first thought was Seesmic. Seesmic’s sole purpose is video micro-blogging. It is there for you to record short snippets of video, Twitter style. There is one problem. Seesmic is in “beta”, more like “alpha” if you ask me. I do not agree with the interface and it still has work to be done. I’m not trying to knock Seesmic, it’s just I recognize it for what it is: A work in progress. With their acquisition of Twhirl already making waves on the almighty tubes, Seesmic has a bright future. I’ll be watching them closely. [Update: Seesmic was going through a hardware migration today which explained some of my issues. In that light, they still aren't ready for prime time, but I want to use them]

My next thought was Viddler. Viddler has proved to be a very reliable and flexible platform for publishing video. Their use of inline video commenting is nothing short of ground breaking. I uploaded a test video there today and gave it a shot. While it worked for the most part, I would have preferred a much more elegant solution for my WordPress blog. Namely, I want a simple tag to put in my template which shows a static video, or the latest video in a RSS feed (namely a feed based on a particular tag). This solution has potential, but some kinks need to be worked out to fit my workflow.

Finally, I moved to Flickr Video. Flickr does Video? Yeah. First, the limitations: 150MB file size and 90 seconds of video. My test video (after encoding/compression through VisualHub) came to 4.4MB and 32 seconds. Ok, that shouldn’t be a problem. The next task was ease of integration. The situation was almost identical to Viddler’s. I’d have to manually copy and paste (or later script) the embed code into an include file on my server to show the latest/desired video. Flickr video seems perfect for video micro-blogging as it forces you to condense your material like Twitter (140 characters or less). This solution is what I’m currently testing, but I’m not sure it’s my final one.

So what say you? What is the best video micro-blogging solution for you? I’m definitely open to new suggestions.

FriendFeed Replaces Google Reader? Maybe

Bwana — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:34:11 +0000

Google Reader is green with envy.

Well, at least in my house it is. Why? I’ve been using FriendFeed as my primary source of news and information for the past two weeks. Google Reader used to dominate my information consumption until I found FriendFeed. I would scour my list of RSS feeds and “share” the ones that I found to be interesting. Periodically, I would also “star” a story in Google Reader to come back and read later.

I’ve since adapted to FriendFeed and have been using the data filtering combined with “likes” and comments. Since I have an RSS feed for my “likes”, I still can share with friends the interesting stories I find, but now I can also include from many different types of sources and not just blogs. I can share a funny Tweet I saw on Twitter, I can share a hilarious Flickr photo, I can share a great comment I saw from Disqus, and also share Google reader shared items from others! This is all done while maintaining a conversation within FriendFeed.

Now with all this, I did have a void. None of the people I follow on FriendFeed are avid gamers (if they are, they don’t share much information about it) so I needs my gaming news. To fill this void, I simply added “Imaginary friends” to FriendFeed for some of my favorite gaming websites. This video shows the process:

Now that this is done, I can now see my favorite gaming news alongside the thousands of great links that comes across various social networks including Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, del.icio.us, Google Reader shared items, etc. Now that FriendFeed has released an API for the world to use, I don’t know if my return to Google Reader will be anytime soon, if at all.

We shall see.