When you receive notification of a qwitter, visit their twitter page, follow them, and then check out their most recent tweets to find one or two of interest. Tweet a reply to each. But, here’s the key, make what you say counts, say something so uniquely fascinating that the qwitter will be so intrigued that they cannot help but refollow you, then keep up the good stuff, but remember don’t lose site of your individuality in all of this.

CAVEAT: Don’t bother if they were twammers (twit spammers)

CAVEAT 2: Sharp-eyed readers like @subatomic will have spotted the inherent contradiction in the previous tips in which I suggested you unfollow qwitters and this bonus tip. Well, all I can say is, it’s a blogger’s prerogative to change his mind.

Post from: Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

But SixApart has put Pownce on death row after their takeover of this microblogging site. December 15 is execution day. If you’re already mourning its imminent demise, then you may wish to (re)read by grief counselling for bloggers post, it will help you move on.

However, if you really cannot let go of Pownce, then there is a support group. Heidi Cool alerted me to her creation over on ning. It is called Pownce Refugees, and will provide Pownce ‘fugees with a place to stay in touch and maintain links and provide support in these difficult times. It’s already all over Facebook…ironically enough.

But, the imminent death of Pownce should serve as a lesson to us all of how fragmentary and fleeting our virtual lives are. One day you are riding how microblogging, sharing pictures, sounds, music, videos, the next, shot down in flames. Darren Rowse recently raised the notion of what to do to protect yourself from the collapse of any service on which you rely.

Fundamentally, the best protection is to make real connections with the real people you meet on any social media service.

You should get into the habit of swapping emails at the earliest opportunity with those you trust, admire, or simply have fun with. Subscribe to their blogs and comment on their posts, basically interact! Then, should any of your connection points, social media sites, web 2.0 watercoolers go belly up, you’ll have that more solid connection to fall back on.

It’s possible that Heidi’s Pownce refugee camp will actually end up bigger than Pownce ever was. Who knos? Or, you could simply move on, switch to Twitter, and forget Pownce.

Post from: Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

Now, you might be thinking why should I bother, what’s in it for me? Well, that’s the big question everyone who isn’t on Twitter is asking about the microblogging site. Everyone who is already using Twitter knows exactly what’s in it for them - the chance to share their thoughts and feelings, links and insights, ask questions (get answers) and generally make new friends with a whole bunch of people you wouldn’t otherwise meet.

So, Twitter is a microblogging platform, you say? Yes, basically. It’s like Facebook updates without the fuss, MySpace without the mess, Plurk without the weird animals and silly horizontal timeline. Think of it as an extension of your blog posts and comments section and you cannot go wrong, but here are my twop twen twips for using Twitter:

1. Edit your bio to entice people to follow you and link to a twitter landing page from it.
2. Modify your Twitter background to entice people to follow you.
3. Do follow - follow people who follow you, follow people who follow the people you follow and follow the people who follow few.
4. Do autofollow - when someone follows you, follow them, but unfollow if they unfollow or if you really don’t like what they’re tweeting.
5. Be friendly - trolls and flamers have no place on Twitter, this isn’t Usenet circa 1998.
6. Thank people - for following you, for responding, for helping.
7. Don’t spam - everyone hates spam, there’s no need to sell if you’re homeward bound.
8. Do answer - someone asks a question, chip in with your two cents, but make it worth two dollars.
9. Post links - but not just for the sake of it, make sure they’re useful.
10. Retweet (RT) the links others are tweeting (include an @username so they see your RT.

Some bigger Tweeters than I have covered similar ground, but I like my short, simple list, among them Jim Donnelly, Guy Kawasaki, Darren Rowse on how to attract thousands of twitter followers quickly and twitter tips in general. Thanks also to @overthinker for highlighting her tips via twitter itself.

Post from: Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

This USB stick needs no password protection because it’s got a built in padlock. To access the contents, whether that’s your little black e-book, your diary, your bookmarks in the portableapps version of Firefox, your email or whatever, you have to physically press the number buttons on the front face - its keypad - to unlock it.

How neat is that? No more hackable or crackable passwords that could succumb to some bruteforce attack or be circumvented by a denial of service, buffer overrun or boot error. No, to open my little black brick - it’s a 4 Gb Corsair Flash Padlock USB drive, actually - you have to physically press the numbers in the right order and watch the little red LED locked padlock symbol switch to the unlocked green LED.

Now, I feel much more secure carrying my USB drive with me when I’m out and about. If I lose I know for sure that no one will be able to get in. Here are the key features of the Padlock:

• Auto-Locking – it locks itself within 15 seconds of being disconnected from your computer
• Customizable PIN – you set your own PIN (up to
• Locking and unlocking is very straightforward just press all the right buttons
• Plug and play – there is no software to install as the security is hardware based
• It works with Windows, MAC and Linux
• Smaller than a brick, but bigger than other USB thumb drives.

I’m pretty sure no one is ever going to get into my little black brick with the enormous PIN I used. But, even if they did I’ve also used TrueCrypt to encrypt the data files on there with an uberpassword of the kind generated by Steve Gibson’s password generator site, so there’s really no chance of security compromise. For this reason it’s important that you never forget your PIN or your stuffed. That said, you can register your PIN with Corsair’s registration service (which seems slightly self-defeating, to my mind. Actually, their reg page is missing and so they probably thought of that too!)

I asked Passpack’s Tara Kelly how she thought it fits into the data security arsenal:

“I see this USB Padlock as being much more useful for documents containing critical or personal data, that are too large to go into a password manager, but are best not left unprotected,” she told me. “You could even install Passpack Offline on it,” she adds, and points to the recent announcement of Passpack offline on USB. “Passpack’s database is already highly encrypted, but certainly if folks want to tote a copy around on a USB stick, the additional layer of encryption certainly doesn’t hurt,” she says.

Post from: Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

“It specifies whether individual applications can alter the type of service (TOS) bits in the header of outgoing IP packets. In general, individual applications should not be allowed to manipulate TOS bits, because this can defeat system policy mechanisms.”

It can take a value of 1 (yes/on) or 0 (no/off) and defaults to 1.

There’s more:

“Every IP datagram has an octet commonly known as the TOS byte. The first three bits specify a level of priority. The next four bits, interpreted as a number, specify a type of service. The last bit is currently unused. For more information about the TOS byte, see IETF RFC 1349: Type of Service in the Internet Protocol Suite.”

A TOS byte? Really?

The guys who created that acronym either know very well the British usage or they’re totally clueless when it comes to checking across cultures before they started hard-coding. The same can be said of the software writers who created IM Toss and Toss It!

Post from: Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

You never think it will happen to you or your family. But, it does. In fact, more than one in three of us are likely to forget a password or worse still a username before the year is out. Others will remember their password, but have forgotten which email address was associated with their account and so be left with the same sense of loss.

It can happen to emailers, bankers, tweeters, pokers, bloggers, even Orkut addicts.

When you have tried all possible combinations of your kids’ names, memorable dates, mother’s maiden names and have gone cross-eyed trying to read captchas it really is time to let go. I should know, it happened to me when I lost a beloved Gmail name early on. I registered the address, forgot to give it the love and attention it needed, and it was only when I really needed it that I realized it was gone. No amount of hacking or cracking can ever bring it back.

The same kind of grief can strike at other times in your online life too. You may be running a lively little blog, its keywords gamboling up the SERPs like a newborn lamb. Then all of a sudden that most insidious of diseases hits, toolbar dropsy. One minute your little green vital signs are emeraldine and growing, maybe you were 4, 5, even 6 long. But, the big G wields its cruel cyberscalpel and slashes you back to 2 or 3 at a stroke, you may never recover.

Worse, you may find you’ve been sandboxed or been filtered from the results altogether. It doesn’t seem to matter what color your hat - black, gray, or sky-blue pink with orange spots. The only chance of a remission is if you got a benign malware and can persuade Google that you’ve given your site virtual antibiotics and are now clean. Recovery can take weeks, even months.

Same too if you follow your feedcount, it can be slowly climbing for weeks, when one day it drops like a stone. You feel abandoned, alone, and edgy paranoia bites. What did I do? Why have they all abandoned me? Will they ever come back?

Thankfully, feedcount deficiency is a temporary but episodic illness, it comes and goes. On good days you’re high with all the ranking, but each morning as you press that refresh button your heart is pounding as the chicklet blinks off and back on. If the count is down, then so are you, if it’s up, then a short burst of euphoria hits, at least until you read the multiple injuries inflicted by qwitter, the twitter unfollow program.

But, take heart, you will get through it. We’ve all been there at some time in our lives. Whether it’s a slashed PR, that forgotten login for a cobweb site, a bipolar feedcount, or simply your best friend unfriending you on Facebook. Be strong, move on. You can always login another day.

Post from: Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

Countless stores across the States will be opening their doors very early, typically 5 am or even earlier (Is this still true in times of 24/7 shopping) to offer their so-called doorbuster deals. These kind of sales are like all that spam we get offering cheap luxury watches as far as I’m concerned, a chance to buy tat you don’t want at knockdown prices (In the UK we reserve it for Boxing Day, December 26).

Whatever, you think of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, in the post-Thanksgiving funk of turkey farts and hangovers, don’t take your eye off the security ball. It could be a great weekend for phishers of men and women, account-slicing spammers and socially engineered scammers hoping to trap the unwary e-shopper avoiding the doorbusting stores but still after a bargain.

But, if you’re on a mobile device at the mall, make sure you hide your connection behind a wifi hotspot shield and if you’re checking GMail there, at the very least, make sure you’re in little s mode.

Remember also, the old, old tradition of Cyber Monday, which dates back to…well…almost beyond living memory…well actually the 2005 holiday season when it was a phrase coined by shop.org Security experts are warning of a massive phishing trip this weekend. Others think this is nothing more than scaremongering. I say: shop safe, whether it’s scaremongering or not, just in case.

Post from: Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

Here’s what the email had to say:

“We’re contacting you to let you know that we’ll be migrating your FeedBurner account XXXX to your Google Account email XXXX@gmail.com on 12/5/2008.

Please rest assured, this change won’t disrupt your current feeds service. As part of this migration, all of your existing FeedBurner feeds will automatically redirect to Google feeds. You won’t lose any of your current subscribers in the process nor will this affect any email subscriptions.

All of your feeds will be moved to your new account and an initial batch of your most recent 30 days’ traffic stats will also be added. Your entire history, should it go beyond 30 days, will be added at a future date.”

It then goes on to say that once subsumed, absorbed, assimilated, I’ll be able to “take advantage” of AdSense for feeds product.

The important point to note is that “this migration process is required for all publishers.”

Since first posting I’ve heard via a twitter contact @AlCarlton, that the email is legitimate, his account was already transferred.

Post from: Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

Nevertheless, the website suggests that a mashup of the following might take us some of the way towards this aural panacea:

Indy Custom Radio (colloborative filter radio)
Mercora Search (MP3 search)
Music Maps (genre studies)
Music Plasma (linking musical influences)
Amazon

The site suggests then using the recommendation algorithm of Indy Custom Radio with the reach of Mercora, the others are simply used for data feeds and to refine the recommendation engine.

There is an alternative approach to such a mashup suggested by Anderson in the original post:

Allmusic.com (great info, but no streaming, downloading or radio)
MusicBrainz (wiki-style, no music listening)
Last.FM (incorporates audiscrobbler; just radio)
upto11 (no music listening)
Discogs (no music listening)

For other music recommendation services check out Pandora, MusicStrands, and LivePlasma. If any of those are not available to you in your part of the world then check out HotspotShield and AlwaysVPN both of which provide US-based IP addresses via their virtual private network systems.

It does seem that a music version of IMDb is ripe for the picking. Those posts I cited are ancient in internet terms, but I don’t think anything has really changed since they were first published. Wikipedia doesn’t fulfill the role and neither do any of the individual music info and streaming services out there. Anyone know an ambitious and rockin’ VC?

Post from: Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to notice that all their background images are tiled and really don’t show the nice image they hoped to display, at least that’s how it appear, because it is obscured by their tweets and the sidebar. Now, some people may not mind this effect. For instance, Guy Kawasaki’s twitter page looks fine, in fact the tiling enhances the effect because it makes the background seem like an infinite gallery of magazine covers. Others work even better, laikas, for instance, but the vast majority don’t work at all, to my eye.

Now, take a look at Wayne Smallman’s Twitter page, that of nowsourcing, Kim Woodbridge’s and indeed, that for sciencebase. Spot the difference between these and the others? Yes, there’s no tiling of the background image, but more to the point you can see all of the background image, as intended. And, each in our own ways we’ve branded our Twitter page in an anti-obscure way, by creating a dummy sidebar on the left of the screen, with contact info and logos.

Unfortunately, your twitter background is not clickable. So, I’ve taken the concept one stage further. I created a Twitter landing page to which I link from my Twitter page. On that landing page, I duplicate my Twitter background. However, because this is a proper web page, it’s possible to make all the buttons and links fully clickable. So each button on my background becomes an active link on the landing page connecting visitors to each of the sites and blogs in which I hope they will be interested.

I’d already scheduled this item when Darren Rowse published his tips on making your Twitter background more esthetically pleasing. Moreover, I discovered that on normal aspect monitors (as opposed to my widescreen laptop) the buttons were getting cropped, so I’ve since made my twitter left-hand “sidebar” a little narrower so that it fits neatly regardless of screen size.

To see what others have done, check out these twitter backgrounds

Post from: Sciencetext Tips and Tricks