I’ve had some technology challenges ever since my home PC died last year and I went 100% Mac. The changeover, and resulting delay in getting my act together on the home tech front, resulted in two important changes:

1. First, because I didn’t have access to my iTunes music library (I’ll put a separate post up on that), I stopped listening to all my marketing, tech, science, political and humor podcasts. If it wasn’t already on my iPod or listenable through Pandora, I wasn’t consuming it.
2. Second, just because my work habits were interrupted, I stopped reading my RSS feeds. All those good blog posts from friends, news sources, pundits and otherwise smart people were being ignored.

Well, now I’ve fixed both of these, and I’m back and better than ever! What got me to resume consuming RSS was a little Air app called Snackr, which syncs with your Google Reader account beautifully and scrolls all of your headlines. I keep it running on my second monitor (too distracting for my main screen), and it works like a charm! Hello again all my blog friends!

Both Google and Apple make decisions in complete vacuums, but at least Apple usually makes good decisions.

I forward and read my work mail in Gmail, and use Google Calendar (which still doesn’t recognize the concept of time zones) to manage my calendar. Now, anytime I get a calendar invitation sent to my work email that I try to accept, I’m greeted with the pleasant error message:

Google has a very helpful (can you read the sarcasm?) page that explains this. Is this a less-than-subtle nudge to force more people into Google Apps? Or just Google going off as usual and making technical decisions with no regards to actual usage or business (e.g., Wave)? Or both?

More important, is anybody aware of any workaround besides deleting all my alternate emails, creating new Google Calendar accounts for them and messing around with two different calendars?

As I mentioned on Twitter, I’m frustrated by one particular “feature” of the Mac OS X Finder copy function — when you drag a folder containing multiple subdirectories and files to another folder with similarly-named files and subdirectories, the Mac finder will blast everything in the destination folder and copy from scratch. This is not how Windows handles this process — Windows will compare files and subdirectories and perform a “merge:” It will preserve the directory and file structure of the destination folder, and only add files and folders that do not already exist.

Any Windows user who has accidentally blasted entire directory hierarchies after switching to the Mac and ignoring the warning knows this pain. Apple has no incentive to fix this, despite the cries from all corners of the Mac power user and Windows convert communities. I’m struggling with this as I try, in my limited free time, to clean up my music library (don’t get me started about iTunes).

There are a couple utilities you can download and try out, including Folder Merge 1.0.1a and Xcode’s FileMerge utility.

But it turns out that there is a relatively simple (and built-in) command line tool called ditto that performs Windows-like copy merges.It works great on it’s own — just open up the Terminal app, cd to the source directory and run the utility.

I wrote a shell script (first one I’ve written in 15 years) that lets me loop through select files/folders and “merge” them with a destination folder. The code sucks, and I don’t trust it, so I’m not going to share it here, but if you want to write your own, note that you’ll have to deal with the following:

• Save, temporarily change and revert $IFS to deal with the inevitable spaces in file/folder names
• Query or use command line arguments to specify any delimiters (do you want to copy all files or just select ones?) and the destination folder
• Use for or some other loop function to loop through the items

WARNING: BACK UP THE DESTINATION FOLDER BEFORE MESSING WITH SOMETHING LIKE THIS! I am SO not responsible for blasting away any of your files.

You’ll need to use the Terminal app and either vi or a root-enabled visual text editor to make this work.

I call the utility “dittodd” of course. Call yours whatever you want. I put the utility in /usr/bin (see my last post for hints on how to do this) so you can call it from any directory.

If you want the code, email me and I’ll share it with you. Good luck!

I’ve complained many times here (including my most recent post) about all the shortcomings of the Mac OS X Finder. But thanks to the foundation upon which the OS was written (Nextstep, a flavor of Unix), we do have access to a VERY powerful command line. But that command line won’t do some of the more important (and interesting, but also dangerous) work unless you have root access, which by default is disabled. For Unix geeks like me, it’s tempting just to try to pop open the Terminal application and “su” to root, but until you “enable” the root account by setting the password, you won’t get far. You can preface each command you want to run with “sudo” without enabling the root account, but that gets tedious after a while.

How to enable the root account in Mac OS X (post 10.5 onlyif I’m not mistaken)

1. First, if you’re going to try and be a power user, drag the Terminal app to your dock — you can find the Terminal in /Applications/Utilities
2. Make sure your logged into an account that has administrator access by going to Apple Menu -> System Preferences … -> Accounts, finding your account and making sure “Allow user to administer this computer” is checked
3. Launch the Terminal app and type sudo passwd root — you’ll have to enter your regular account password once, then the new root password twice (I keep them the same so not to confuse things)
4. Now, anytime you want root access from the command line, you can just type su, hit [Enter], enter your password and you’re good to go — don’t forget to type exit or hit [CTRL]-D to exit this shell when you’re done for your protection

Editing protected files One last tip: if you ever find yourself wanting to edit a file that only root has permissions to, you have two options:

1. Follow the instructions above, cd to the directory you want, and use vi to edit the file — but you need to know how to use the vi modal command line text editor, which ain’t an easy undertaking
2. Or, follow the instructions at this article

So I’ve just finished cleaning up how I work with all of my favorite networks. Here’s what I’m doing.

1. Hooray for HootSuite! Let’s start with my new favorite Twitter client, at least for my “day job.” HootSuite lets me manage DOZENS of accounts (still for free), includes basic workflow management (including giving team members access to accounts and the ability to assign follow-up) and has a SPECTACULAR iPhone and Droid app. I do almost all my updates from there these days. The only downsides:
   • No desktop notification. There ARE desktop apps, but the Mac one at least doesn’t support Growl notifications.
   • No new follower notification. TweetDeck had a column you could add to see all your new followers. I like that.
   • Droid app ignores all desktop reconfigurations. If you add a new service, or rearrange columns, they won’t be updated on the Droid app — you’ll have to uninstall it and reinstall it to see the changes.
2. Help from hashtags! Rather than spam Facebook and LinkedIn with all my tweets, I’m using the hashtag #fb for tweets I want Facebook to post on my wall (using the Kipdola Twitter Sync app, see below) and #li and/or #in for LinkedIn (a setting in LinkedIn preferences available once you configure your profile for Twitter).
3. Fans on Facebook! While Kipdola is monitoring my Twitter account for things to add to my profile, I’ve also set up Smart Twitter for Pages to monitor all the other Twitter accounts that I post to from HootSuite. If I post something from the “PubClubofNE” Twitter account, for instance, it will add that tweet to the “Publicity Club of New England” Facebook page as a wall post. It’s no substitute for proper monitoring and measurement, but it’s an easy way to push content out to your pages, either based on keywords or accounts. So this is how you get content into Facebook. How about how to get it out? That can be a little more challenging…
4. Feed from Facebook! While there are Facebook apps that can accomplish pushing content out from Facebook to Twitter, I haven’t been happy with any of them. So instead, I do it the old fashioned way (while it still works). First, you need to find the RSS feed for your Facebook status updates. This ain’t easy. I lifted these instructions (and edited them a bit) from a comment from yelvington on the Drupal boards:
   1. Log into Facebook.
   2. Click on the globe (Notifications) icon.
   3. Find the RSS link under “Subscribe to notifications” and copy it. THIS IS NOT THE RIGHT LINK but it contains essential information.
   4. COPY the link URL arguments — everything to the right of the “?” in the URL. This should looks something like id=563407515&viewer=563407515&key=1234aa32e7&format=rss20.
   5. Paste it after http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?
5. Fretting about Feeds! There are a few weird things with the Facebook feed, and some inherent problems with piping updates back and forth between Facebook and Twitter. Facebook prepends your first name to every status update, an anachronism left over from the days when status updates looked and acted a little differently. So if your status update says “I hate Mondays,” your status feed will actually read “Todd I hate Mondays,” which doesn’t really make sense. We need to get rid of the Todd. Next, we need to prevent annoying people with redundant messages (and avoid the possibility of infinite loop meltdowns) by making sure that we don’t repost to Twitter a tweet that originated there but that was picked up by Facebook. We’ll kill two birds with one stone by filtering our feed through Yahoo! Pipes.
   
6. Perfection of Pipes! Okay, that might be an exaggeration just to keep the alliteration going, but I’m a huge Yahoo! Pipes fan. It’s an amazingly easy way to do some pretty sophisticated feed and content manipulation. Above, you’ll see a rather simple Pipe with four steps:
   1. Grab the RSS feed (the one we caught up above).
   2. Using Regex rules, replace the occurrence of “Todd” at the beginning of each feed entry with nothing (effectively removing it)
   3. Filter out any entries that have the #fb hashtag (because we know they came from Twitter to begin with)
   4. Pipe it to the output (which is another RSS feed).
7. Trust in Twitterfeed! Once I save and run the Pipe, I can find its RSS feed and give that feed URL to Twitterfeed, which I have set up to post to Twitter on a regular basis (with “[From Facebook]” at the beginning, as is my convention).

Using these tools (especially Yahoo! Pipes), you can do quite a lot. I hope this helps you get the most out of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Let’s face it — it’s not in Delicious.com’s (and Yahoo!’s) interest to make it easy to let people default to NOT sharing their bookmarks, but I wish they made it a little easier to actually do it.

So here’s how you do it in Firefox:

1. Quit out of Firefox
2. Explore deliciousBookmarks.jar (the location of this file depends on which OS you’re running) with a proper JAR editor (NOT just a text editor) and open the file yAddBookMark.xul,
3. Search for the following code:
   
<checkbox id="cb_noShare" label="&addybookmarks.sharing.label;"

    

4. Add checked=”true” to the tag, so it looks something like this:
   
<checkbox id="cb_noShare" checked="true" label="&addybookmarks.sharing.label;"

    

5. Save the file, exit, and relaunch Firefox. Voila!

Now don’t forget to uncheck it if you DO want to make something private!

Finally gave up on Vista, but it’s not Microsoft’s fault (though I still don’t forgive them for the hideousness of Office 2007+) — turns out my HD had some subtly failing sectors that caused all the crashes. So I’ve reverted back to Windows XP running off another drive, and I’m only using the PC as backup (and occasional gaming) — I’m 100% Mac now. If only I could get TweetDeck to behave, I’ll be set!

While I was complaining on Twitter (what will I tweet about now, by the way?), I got a pitch from litl on the benefits of getting rid of the HD. Folks, appliance computing is here, and guess what? It’s not as scary a place as I thought it’d be. While I’d lament not being able to pop open a terminal window and crank away on the command line, how often do I ACTUALLY do that? The last .bat or shell script I wrote was 4 years ago.

While I don’t think I’ll embrace the litl (I do like the design though), I’m a little less scared about the cloud each day.

(I warned you about topical departures, rants and tech talk, right? Here it is again: if you just want marketing talk, go visit the Fresh Ground Blog.)

It’s simple, ladies:

1. Stability (often in the form of spouse / lover).
2. Progeny (the closest thing we have to immortality until Kurzwiel figures it out).
3. Sex (however we can get it at the frequency we desire).
4. Wealth (most of the time, this varies roughly inversely with numbers 1, 2 and 3)

The problem is the nature of the relationships between these four desires. Here’s a graph (a tribute to Indexed) that explains it better:

So the problem is, we want all four, but can’t really have all four, at least for long periods of time. I think a lot of bad behaviors can be explained by men trying to figure out the right equation to max out all four of these variables. Good luck, gentlemen!

Yesterday I wrote about my collection of favorite WordPress plugins for managing a private user community. One of the plugins I mentioned was Absolute Privacy.

I love my friends, but I wouldn’t trust most of them with a loaded weapon. Similarly, I want to give my editors the ability to approve new users in a closed WordPress forum I set up for one of our clients, but I don’t want to give editors all of the functionality that comes with the manage_options Capability.

I’m using the Absolute Privacy plugin for WordPress, which I’ve slowly been modifying myself, so it’s the one plug-in I’ve set to version 999 to ensure that it doesn’t get accidentally overridden by an overzealous admin (read: me). This means it’s also the one plugin I’ve been playing around with deeply.

By default, Absolute Privacy tests against the manage_options Capability flag to see if you should have permission to moderate new users. I don’t want to give my editors the ability to manage all WordPress options, so I did the following:

1. In Users->Roles, I added a new capability called approve_new_users, and gave Administrators and Editors the capability.
2. Then I went into the code for Absolute Privacy and found the function that creates the Moderate Users menu item. I edited two lines of code:
   • I replaced the line that tests the user’s Capability to read
     if (!current_user_can('approve_new_users'))
   • I edited the add_submenu_page call to read
     add_submenu_page('users.php', 'Moderate Users', 'Moderate Users', 'approve_new_users', basename(__FILE__), array(&$this,'moderateUsers'));

Done!