Feed aggregator

There are websites that will try to determine your virtual popularity based solely on the number of followers you have. Most Valuable Follower (MVF) is a website that allows users to find out who that follower is.

The website uses a simple technique to do this, which is to check the number of followers you have and then show you the one with the most followers.

Using the website is pretty simple. Just visit MVF, and let the website access your Twitter account. The website will then process your Twitter followers, scan them and then display the most popular follower and how many followers they have.

The website can also show you the top five followers if you tweet the top one on Twitter.

Features

• Simple and easy to use.
• Find the most popular Twitter follower following you.
• Makes it easier for you to keep in touch with the valuable followers as any RT by them would lead to an increase in Twitter followers.

Check out MVF @ http://mvfapp.com  (via Mashable)

Last week, I made my attempt at welcoming newbies to the wonderful world of Internet Relay Chats. This week, we’re going to step things up to the next level for those of you who have decided that HydraIRC belongs in your taskbar. If you’re anything like me, you feel it’s necessary to be in 50 different channels at once (even though you know you’ll never be able to keep up with all of that).

It’s time for you to learn how to save yourself a lot of time at every startup and automate the process of joining your favorite IRC servers and channels. This is, by the way, another reason why HydraIRC is the superior client to those of you who are new to the chat universe. Creating “scripts” is incredibly simple and intuitive.

Let’s start off by going into the Options menu and clicking Prefs…. A window of preferences should then pop up for you.

On the left, click Scripts. At this point, you should see a single option of “SomeNetwork_OnLoggedIn“.

In my screenshot, you’ll see many more because I’ve set up autojoins on several servers. Nonetheless, this is an example script profile that HydraIRC has created for you. Using it alone, some users can gauge how to set up their scripts. You can learn a little more about command/script profiles on the official website, but let me do some basic explaining.

HydraIRC has three built-in profile name suffixes that trigger the program to automatically execute a script. These three are as follows:

• OnStartUp, which will execute the script immediately when the application is launched.
• OnLoggedIn, which will execute the script when you have joined a particular server.
• OnJoin, which will execute the script when you join a particular channel.

By creating profiles with the names “OnStartUp”, “{SERVER}_OnLoggedIn”, or “~{SERVER}_{CHANNEL}_OnJoin”, you are authorizing HydraIRC to automatically execute the scripts during those conditions. If we wanted a script to automatically execute when we join the EFNet server, we’d name the profile “EFNet_OnLoggedIn“. If we wanted to execute the script only when we join the #chat channel on EFNet, we’d name it “~EFNet_#chat_OnJoin“.

Let’s go over an example. We’ll use GameSurge, as we did in my first post. By default, it is included with HydraIRC. On the server list, it is given the exact name “GameSurge” (which will need to be exact, case sensitive, in the profile name).

On Gamesurge, we’d like to automatically join #sourcemod, #gamesurge, and #linux when we connect. So we’ve done the hard part. Now here’s our script, “GameSurge_OnLoggedIn”:

/quietjoin sourcemode,gamesurge,linux

It’s very simple. The “/quietjoin” command is ideal when you’re joining multiple channels at once as it softens each join. Afterwards, the channel names (pound signs are not required) delimited by commas.

Now what if you want to automatically join GameSurge every time you launch HydraIRC? That’s simple also. Your script profile would be “OnStartUp”:

/server irc.gamesurge.net

That’s it. At this point, when you start HydraIRC you’d now automatically connect to the GameSurge server and automatically join those three channels. Do you want to connect to multiple servers on startup? Just add a new line with the following (with FreeNode in this example):

/newserver irc.freenode.net

Every power IRC uses user scripts. Automation is one of my favorite things in the world, and you’ll find that automating certain parts of your chatting experience will allow you to do what you came to do – enjoy it. If I’ve still been unable to convince you that HydraIRC is the way to go, check out a few interesting scripts for mIRC.

Holler at me in the comments if you’re having trouble or want to share any more useful scripts for the IRC platform.

One of the most widely used cloud-based storage services on the Internet, Dropbox, is offering users the opportunity to add up to 5GB of free storage space by simply uploading photos and videos to their storage account during a beta testing period of a Dropbox experimental build.

Dropbox is testing a new feature that allows users to automatically upload photos and videos from their USB-connected camera, camera phone, or SD card reader.

In order to use the service and receive additional free space, you will need to download a beta version of Dropbox and install it on your Mac or PC. (It might be wise to back up your current Dropbox data before downloading and installing the beta version.)

This experimental build of Dropbox works with Windows, Mac OS 10.5 and above and Linux. Link to this forum page for the latest listings and upgrades.

After the beta version is installed, you simply connect say your camera, phone, or SD card to your computer, and Dropbox will automatically detect images and ask if you want them imported to a Camera Uploads folder automatically installed in your Dropbox account.

 

Dropbox clarified that “you can’t get up to 5 GB of free space with this feature, if you count the initial 500 MB space for the first photo import.” Because Dropbox is testing the importing process, you most likely cannot receive space increase unless you use the importer popup window.

Dropbox encourages users to keep plugging in their cameras so they can “snipe all the common bugs during the beta testing.

If you want to create a prefect stylesheet (CSS) based on your HTML markup, then check out Bear CSS.

BearCSS is a handy tool for web designers, who want to create stylesheets using your markup. All you have to do is write your HTML, upload it and Bear CSS will automatically generate a CSS template based on HTML elements you used.

To use the service, just click on the “Upload HTML” button and choose the HTML file from which you want the markups taken from – the website will automatically check the HTML elements and draw up a CSS template file from the HTML one.

Once done, you can download the CSS file to your local computer and use it in whatever way you want.

Features

• Simple and easy to use.
• Effective way to draw up CSS template stylesheet without errors.
• Saves time as CSS template file is chalked up using your own made HTML file.
• Similar sites: Csspivot, CSS3-Generator, Typeset Style Generator, CSSPrefixer, CSS Warp, TextSnip and Codepad.

Check out BearCSS @ www.bearcss.com

Google+ may not have taken over Facebook but with around 100 million users, it is one of the most widely used online social networks. PlusDemographics is a web service that lets you make some sense of these almost 100 million users by giving you global demographics. This demographic report is free and covers areas like relationship status, gender, age, employer, occupation, school alumni, top state, region and city and even what users are interested in.

You can see a nice breakdown of each demographic as a small list as well as a pie chart. The best part is, you can drill down to any country and see the Google+ demographics specifically for that country. For a small fee, you can also unlock demographics for your Google+ network and the people in it.

Features:

• See global demographics for all Google+ users.
• See reports at global or country level.
• See reports for your Google+ network for a small fee.

Visit PlusDemographics @ http://www.plusdemographics.com [Via ReadWriteWeb]

Last week we were interested in your tweeting habits, and asked you how often you share on Twitter. We wanted to get an idea of how frequently people tweet, and found out the surprising fact that more than %40 of you don’t tweet at all.

Out of the 145 readers who voted, 19% don’t even have a Twitter account, 23% have an account but never tweet, 23% tweet 1-5 times per week, 19% tweet 1-5 times per day, 7% tweet 6-10 times per day, 5.5% tweet 11-20 times per day, and 3.5% tweet more than 2- times daily.

Full results and this week’s poll after the jump.

While not a whole lot of readers voted, it was still surprising to find out that so many of you are not big on tweeting, with a staggering 65% who tweet 5 times a week or less. In a world so consumed by Twitter and hashtags, it’s interesting to see such results.

This week’s poll question is: What Do You Think Of Windows 8′s Metro UI?

Microsoft Metro UI is not entirely new, with early glimpses of dating back to earlier versions of Windows Media Center and Zune, but with Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8, Microsoft made sure we all heard of and knew what Metro UI is. Metro is a design language which is based on certain principles such as specific fonts, use of tiles and text for navigation, and more, and by utilizing in in Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to go in a completely different direction. This UI has gotten mixed reviews (although more good than bad), with some people thinking it’s the best thing since Windows added a Start button, and others hating the thought of having that as their main operating system. Where do you stand?

What is it about Metro UI that you like or don’t like? Do you think it’s good on some products but not on others? If so, which? We’re waiting for your comments.

Security is a feature usually built in each software. However, users often have to give up software that is pretty useful otherwise but don’t provide adequate security and privacy features. OTRProxy solves this problem by letting you make your IM tool secure. Once installed and configured, all your messages communicated through your IM client pass through the OTRProxy where they are encrypted and authenticated.

It works on Windows and OSX and supports SOCKS5, HTTPS and HTTP proxies. You do have to manually add a proxy to each IM client and if your IM client is already using a proxy or behind a firewall then OTRProxy won’t work. Users are authenticated by generating private keys but if you ever lose them, none of your previous conversations would be compromised. OTR also has plugins created specifically for clients including Pidgin and Miranda.

Features:

• Encryptes conversations made through any IM client.
• Ensures authenticity through private keys.
• Works on Windows and OS X.
• Similar tools: CryptoCat,OneTimeSecret, Encipher.It, File-Encryptor and Encodor.
• Also read related article: Five Online Encryption Tools to Protect Your Privacy.

Download from @ www.cypherpunks.ca/otr

Amazon wants to sell you stuff. If there is something you are willing to spend money on, Amazon will find a way to take your money and deliver said item to you. Now, they are moving into the lucrative world of sports memorabilia. They are starting off this new Sports Collectible Store with more than two million unique items ranging from relatively cheap collectible cards to high-priced autographed items.

For now, this new store is only available in the United States. They have items from many of the major sports organizations like the NHL, NFL, MLB, NBA and International Federation of Association Football (IFAF). For any fan of the major sports organizations, you will be able to find something that tickles your fancy on this new Amazon service.

Everything purchased on the collectible store comes with Amazon’s AtoZ guarantee, so you will always receive the same level of customer satisfaction you expect when purchasing an item from Amazon.

In addition to searching for an item in the store, you can also browse based on the sport, year, type, team and price. This allows you to find what you are looking for, even if you don’t know exactly what that is.

Source: The Next Web

Sound Sunday is a weekly feature promoting free album downloads. Every edition invites you to explore various genres and artists from around the world. With this edition let me take you on a journey of ambient and electronic soundscapes that are out of this world.

Please share your thoughts and post your feedback in the comments. Album submissions, suggestions, and genre requests via email [tina at makeuseof dot com] are most welcome!

Genre: ambient, electronic, soundscapes, trip hop

Olive Caves – EP (2012) by Arundel

From their Facebook page: “Arundel is the name encompassing many of the musical creations of Brisbane (Australia) resident Lucas Arundell. He plays the role of songwriter, composer, arranger and producer, creating a broad range of songs, grooves, soundscapes, remixes and instrumental pieces.”
Arundel is supported by the independent record label Paper Street Records. You can view the video for the title track A Deep Freeze here.

Olive Caves is a name your price download from Bandcamp. Donations to support the artist and his team are most appreciated.

Genre: alternative, indie, dreampop, lo-fi, rock

Little Bits EP by Magic City

Magic City is a lo-fi indie band from Chicago, Illinois. Their record label writes about the album: “Magic City is this kind of band as their music is a dreamy commentary about life, love, and the human condition. Releasing their E.P. Little Bits back in November, Magic City launched itself onto the Chicago music scene as butterflies dreaming of being people. This is not to say that their music is petty in any way as their E.P. is fantastic. The thing about Little Bits is that its sound and lyrics are draped in an ephemeral curtain of dreamscapes and distortions.
But behind these dreamscapes and distortions Lauren Whitacre meows about how hard it is sometimes to be a person. Her vocals are in a similar way to PJ Harvey’s but her lyrical messages are far more draped in blue than Harvey’s could ever be.”

Little Bits EP is a name your price download from Bandcamp.

Genre: progressive, rock, ambient, psychadelic rock, art rock

The Traveler by Spiral

From the album page: “This is part 2 of a planned trilogy of records telling the story of Rip and his daughter Anomoly. To listen to part 1 “The Capital in Ruins” please follow this link: thespiral.bandcamp.com/album/the-capital-in-ruins And look forward to part 3, which is in the works.”
Spiral was previously featured on Sound Sunday with their albums Citizen, The Capital in Ruins, Machine, and Your Kindness Let a Monster In.

The Traveler is a name your price download from Bandcamp.

Genre: indie, pop, chillwave, dreamgaze, dreampop

Mria by Galway

Galway are four young guys from Moscow, Russia. Mria contains some re-recordings of earlier material, embedded in a selection of new songs, which they recorded over the past couple of months. It is an album of indie pop melodies muffled in atmospheric sounds. Catchy guitar solos and energizing drums occasionally break through the soundscape, such as in my favorite song of the album Each Of Us Loves Space Tears.

Mria is a name your price download from Bandcamp.

Genre: alternative, progressive, ambient, experimental, dreampop, rock

Glass Kites by Glass Kites

From their Facebook page: “Wowing audiences with emotive progressions, hypnotic grooves, lush walls of sound, joyful lyricism, and unique progressive composition Glass Kites caters to the music fan yearning to be impacted and enveloped.”
The record was recorded at Vancouver’s Warehouse Studio.

The selftitled album Glass Kites is a name your price download from Bandcamp.

Genre: alternative, electronic, experimental, progressive, psychedelic

Botany EP by Something Fiction

From their Last.fm page: “Something Fiction is an experimental music project formed by vocalist/instrumentalist/producer Matt Humble, guitarist Raul Rodriguez, and percussionist Nick Greder of San Antonio, Texas. The music combines electronic synth sounds with ethnic and acoustic instruments supported by a vibrato driven vocal performance.”

Botany is a free download from Bandcamp.

Genre: ambient, electronic, chillout, chillwave, dreampop

Resonance by mindthings

Mindthings is the music project of Clément Peres, an event producer, illustrator, and music composer from Bordeaux, France. Resonance is his sixth album.

Resonance is a name your price download from Bandcamp.

Genre: indie, ambient, electronic, dreampop, hip hop

Comfort by Giraffage

From Giraffage’s Last.fm page: “Giraffage is the creation of 21-year old multi-instrumentalist/producer Charlie Yin of San Francisco, California. The general sound of Giraffage is described as a weaver of refreshingly crisp electro dream pop tunes that thread their way through loose-knit grooves and tightly-toothed rhythms. Gaining inspiration from things as diverse as dreams or the weather, Giraffage evokes a woozy yet familiar mood that is sure to stimulate your eardrums and leave you feeling a sense of nostalgia and melancholy.”

Comfort is a name your price download from Bandcamp.

Genre: ambient, electronic, downtempo

The Golden Age Of Space Travel by Kleptonaut

From the album page: “All music is built on the shoulders of the road traveled by giants and gnats. This music sometimes follows that road and tries to get some speed, and when it’s lucky, and you happen to be on board, it just might lift off and surprise you.
These 10 tracks were all made in the last year. Moogfest 2010 was a major recent inspiration. Michelle is a perpetual inspiration. This album was mostly for her as she has been my main audience of 1.
The album is free for the taking to any ears willing to lend themselves.
Any single person paying for the album, before or after downloading it, will encourage me greatly to make more music.”

The Golden Age Of Space Travel is a name your price download from Bandcamp.

Genre: electronic, remix, symphony

Symphony of Science Bundle v1.3 by Symphony of Science

From the project’s homepage: “The Symphony of Science is a musical project of John D Boswell, designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form. The project owes its existence in large measure to the classic PBS Series Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steve Soter, as well as all the other featured figures and visuals. Continuation of the videos relies on generous support from fans and followers.”

Symphony of Science Bundle v1?.?3 is a name your price download from Bandcamp.

New to Sound Sunday? Past editions of Sound Sunday are available here.

Feel free to get in touch with me [tina at makeuseof dot com] to share free material, suggestions, and feedback or simply add your comments below.

Security is a big deal today. It seems like everyday when you turn on the news, you hear about a team of hackers breaking into some system, or someone’s identity getting stolen. It’s scary, but one thing you can do to help protect yourself is use strong passwords. The stronger your password is, the harder it will be for hackers to compromise your system, and the safer your private information will be.

Passwordgenerator.net makes it very easy to generate passwords that no one could crack. You can choose some basic features of the password. You can decide whether it has symbols, lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers and similar characters.

In addition to providing the password, they also give you a phonetic way of remembering the password. They give you a bunch of common words that start with each letter of the password. Obviously, having a secure password does no good if you can’t remember it.

They also give some handy tips on how to avoid having your password stolen.

Features:

• Easily generate highly secure passwords.
• Choose if you want symbols, lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers and similar characters in the password.
• Phonetic device to help remember new password.
• Tips on how to protect your account from hackers.
• Similar tools: PassCreator, Wolfram Password Generator Reference App, Password Generator, NakedPassword, Passplex, MashedLife, Easy Password Generator, PassPub and Password Chart.
• Also read related articles:How To Create A Good Password That You Will Not Forget
  5 Free Password Generators For Nearly Unhackable Passwords

Find Passwordgenerator.net @ www.passwordsgenerator.net

Microsoft SkyDrive has been around for a while, but was recently given a fairly significant update. We took some time to talk to Microsoft about the new features and play with it all, so here’s a breakdown of what you can expect.

You’ll need a Windows Live account to start making full use of SkyDrive. For those too lazy to read – there’s 25gb of storage, web-based versions of popular Office apps; collaborative editing that doesn’t require everyone to login; and an iPhone app you should probably avoid for now.

In SkyDrive, you now have access to cut-down versions of popular Office apps, to both create and edit documents without the need for a full offline Office suite (though you can at any point open your SkyDrive files in regular Office apps, then seamlessly save back again). Personally, I’m not a fan of Google Docs, so if your documents are predominantly MS formats and you’d like to move into the cloud without the hassle of importing and exporting etc, this is a great solution – and free.

The web-based versions work across OS, taking advantages of new HTML5 standards rather than Silverlight, so that’s something to keep in mind if someone mails a Word document to your shiny iMac when you don’t have Office for Mac.

You’ll be pleased to know that the cloud versions of Office now support collaborative editing, or at least a hybrid form of it. First up – this feature isn’t as advanced as say Google Docs, where you can see collaborators typing in real time and changes are done at a character level. Instead, SkyDrive takes the approach of locking certain parts of the document – a paragraph will be marked as being edited for instance. Once changes are available to view, you need to manually click the update changes button.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a huge step forward in a world where Office documents are still the norm in many companies – and changes at the paragraph level are more than sufficient for most of us. It’s a shame it doesn’t work asynchronously though as manually refreshing things is quite tedious.

Along with collaborative editing comes an easy way to share your files and folders. Three levels of links are available – public, can edit, and view only. You can either share this straight out to your Facebook and Linked In status, or get a regular URL to share in Twitter etc.

One really cool feature is that you don’t need a Windows Live account to edit the documents if someone sends you a link, so it’s a fantastic tool get anyone’s input without complicated sign ups. Compare to Google Docs which requires all collborators to have a Google Account in order to sign in and edit documents, which can be a real hassle with less tech-savvy users.

On the downside, the share links are ridiculously lengthy. I can’t help thinking that some kind of automated link shortening service would have been really easy to add. As it is, a simple view-only link to a photo comes out like this:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=86d16a5e767798c4&resid=86D16A5E767798C4!107&parid=86D16A5E767798C4!102&authkey=!AArcUia4KgCYgbI

Even if you don’t need collaborative features, SkyDrive’s free 25gb is a generous cloud storage locker. It doesn’t sync with your files, so you can offload files totally to the cloud if you want, or just use it for backup. The interface is very Explorer-like so Windows users will feel right at home, but it also works just fine on a Mac. We had a few issues during testing with Chrome though, so stick to Firefox or Safari (or Explorer if you insist).

Unlike Apple’s iCloud service, Microsoft has made a big effort to make the SkyDrive available on other devices. Unfortunately, the SkyDrive app for iPhone is decidedly under-developed – the user interface is confusing at best; files must be uploaded one by one as there’s no mass-upload feature; a manual refresh is often needed to keep it in sync with the web-based version; and worst of all – if you take a photo directly within the app, and it fails to upload (as it often did in my testing), the photo is lost forever – it doesn’t get saved to your Camera Roll as you would expect. I’m afraid I really can’t recommend the iPhone side of SkyDrive until a good update is released. If you must, take the photos with the Camera app first, then do the Choose Existing dialog to upload it.

If you have ventured to try the app out, and can’t for the life of you figure out how to delete a photo from the SkyDrive iPhone app – you need to click the “share” button in the top right and change the thumbnail view to a “Details view“, then you can swipe left to right to reveal Delete on the item.

Though I didn’t get a chance to play with SkyDrive integration on Windows Phone 7, I think it’s safe to assume it’s a more fulfilling experience than the iPhone app; and I think we can also say that SkyDrive is likely to be strongly integrated into the upcoming Windows 8.

SkyDrive is obviously Microsoft’s answer to iCloud and Google Docs, and while iCloud is still the stronger platform in my opinion, it’s limited to Apple devices. SkyDrive is cross-platform for the most part, and has made a valiant attempt to integrate with iPhones too – hopefully an update will tackle the problems I’ve outlined.

For Windows users and Windows Phone 7 owners – SkyDrive is a clear winner. Even if you’re not a big fan of Microsoft stuff, you can’t argue with 25gb free space. Collaborative editing that doesn’t require the user to login to anything is unique to SkyDrive and could be a great feature for many if you’re sharing with less technically capable users or large numbers who you can’t guarantee have Live / Google accounts.

Have you had a chance to play with the new SkyDrive yet? What do you think? How do you compare it to Google Docs, or iCloud?