scrambledmindsMixed up thoughts on the web world, photography and life.

I use a lot of the google tools like gmail, google calendar, google analytics etc etc. When I started using Google Gears so that you could use these web tools offline it started creating shortcuts on my mac that could be put straight into the applications folder and used to start them like normal local applications, including putting them in the dock for easy access. I did a bit of digging around and created similar shortcuts for other services as well and thought it might be useful for other people. I’ve included:

• Google Mail – email, the greatest time waster of the 21st century.
• Google Calendar – track where you’re supposed to be right now.
• Google Docs – online document storage, creation and collaboration.
• Google Reader – read news (rss) feeds to your hearts content.
• Google Analytics – get stats about your website.
• Google Webmaster Tools – understand how google is interacting with your website.
• Google Adsense – place adverts on your website and get paid by google.
• Google Adwords – advertise with google.
• Remember the Milk – a great web based todo list manager.

These currently load safari as the browser. You can download the files here.

Technical bit – not an expert, just enough knowledge to cause havoc

To modify the shortcut, just right click or click while holding the control button on the keyboard and select “Show Package Contents”. You need to change the name in the Info.plist file, change the url in the launch.sh file and change the icon file. You can then make any shortcut you want. You’ll need to do this if you use Google Apps for Your Domain.

I assume you can also change the browser in launch.sh by changing the line ‘/Applications/Safari.app’ to ‘/Applications/Firefox.app’ or any browser of your choice that you have installed. I don’t know if you can just set it to start in the default browser. Does anyone know?

If you want to change the icon, you can replace the icons.icns file. BTW, if you want a tool to create the required icon file in a snap, check out img2icns.

It’s about time. We’re finally going to get a National Broadband Network (NBN). The Rudd government has “bitten the bullet” after making promises of delivering the NBN through the last election.

It’s been fraught with controversy however with Telstra, Australia’s ex nationalised telecommunications company until the last few years has had a stranglehold on the market, being excluded from the bidding due to a non-compliant bid. Good riddance I said. Telstra has been “servicing” the Australian public for many years. Yeah right. In a recent statement by the Telstra chairman (Donald McGauchie) he said that Telstra was “committed to ensuring the best interests of our shareholders, employees and customers,…”

And that’s the whole problem with Telstra really, they’ve been focused on shareholders (mentioned first) to the detriment of the customers (mentioned last – read Australian public). You would think that if you’re serving your customers well then you’re inherently going to benefit shareholders. I suppose the commercial versus public responsibility equation doesn’t always add up. It definitely doesn’t in Australia where we have one of the lowest population densities in the world. It’s expensive to provide service to those people that are not in the metropolitan areas.

Anyway, this wasn’t supposed to be a Telstra or a public vs. private rant. I for one (actually one of quite a few in Australia) am excited at the opportunities increasing Australia’s digital capabilities will bring. I do agree with the Australian Computer Society (ACS) though – the pipes are not enough! We need initiatives to build the value services that can use that bandwidth.

It will also be very interesting to see what comes of the pricing for using the network in the future. There’s already reports that it may be as high as $100/month which is way too high. My view is that it’s too early to tell.

Having grown up in a remote area, I’ve seen the limited investment that commercial organisations will make. There must be a reason for paying taxes though, so I think everyone should have the opportunity to have access to what is really becoming another utility for every household.

I’m a little divided as to who should own the NBN in the long term though. Public Private Partnerships don’t have the best track record in Australia. I think that a National Broadband Network is Infrastructure and should remain in public hands due to the commercial sacrifices that will ultimately be made. On the other hand, the government is not in the business of running telecommunications companies. I guess I’ll just reserve judgement and get on the bandwagon when something goes wrong.

Anyway, check out the official announcement on the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Ecomony here. This is momentous! I hope they follow through…

Have you ever sent an email and immediately wished you could undo it? I just saw this article on the Google Gmail Blog that lets you enable a feature that gives you a few seconds to recover from the unfortunate send-finger-twitch with an undo link.

Anyway, if you’re a gmail user, you should be able to enable it by turning on Undo Send in Gmail labs under settings. Nice one!

WordPress is an amazing tool. It’s probably one of the easiest tools to use when if you want to “blog” or record your thoughts for the anonymous audience that is the web. This simplicity also means that there are certain things that have been left out, however the smart folks over there at Automattic made sure that WordPress can be extended by the community through themes and plugins. Today I wanted to give you the essential WordPress plugins that I’ve found to be the best at covering the most important holes. I’ve recently been getting into blogging a lot more and have found an interest in Internet Marketing so I’ve got a list that I’m now installing on every blog. Sorry for another essential WordPress plugins list but, to be honest, the other lists I’ve found haven’t really suited my needs (I really wanted to write crap here but I showed some restraint) or they were very out of date (as I’m sure this post will be in 6 months time). So here we go:

• Make your blog search engine friendly (Search Engine Optimised – SEO) – All in One SEO – donate if you like it.
• Make sure you back up! – WordPress Database Backup – Note that this will only back up what’s in your database, which is just about everything. It will not back up your files or anything else in the wp-content folder where WordPress is installed as far as I’m aware. I’ve also recently found another plugin (WordPress Online Automated Backup) that backs up to an online service in an automated fashion. I’m not sure if this backs up your whole blog either though but it’s much easier in concept as you don’t need to do anything after it’s configured.
• Check your stats – Google Analytics for WordPress – I’ve recently been learning of the wonders of Google Analytics and the power within. This tool is great for understanding who is visiting and doing what on your site. Massive!
• Update google when you post – Google XML Sitemaps – This gets the updated information to your greatest friend (and potentially all powerful overseer), Google so that your info is always up to date in search engine land.
• Let people share your content – AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget – This will add the little button at the end of the post that allows someone to post this link to digg, delicious, facebook etc. Social bookmarking is the term I believe. I love it when all I have to do is install a plugin. I hate coding. It’s a shame that I know the word coding and what it means.

I’ve included the relevant links to each of the plugin locations but I’d strongly recommend you use the new search and installation feature from within WordPress as this makes installation so much easier. These are installed over the default WordPress plugins which I think are also essential. Happy plugin fun!

*** Update 13 April 2009 ***
I’ve found another essential plugins for wordpress:

• Give people access to your RSS feed… and measure it! Feedburner Feedsmith. This lets you redirect the default feed address of your wordpress blog (http://www.myexampleblog.com/feed to your feedburner location by default so everyone gets the feed from the same place. You get to measure all the goings on with Feedburner this way

Jody sent me a link on youtube for this video. It’s an old promotional video from British Telecom talking about video phones. I’m particularly fond of the capturing the image on the screen using the photo reactive plate. I’m not sure when it’s from but it’s cutting edge stuff!

If any of you have a Mighty Mouse with your Mac then you’ve probably run into a problem of the same ilk as Blackberry users with a scroll ball / track ball. They work good… until they don’t. It’s frustrating when those little balls of joy don’t work. Without one that’s working there’s all sorts of ailments and profanity that may result. Anyway, I’ve tried cleaning both. One without success but a lot of fiddling, fear of losing crucial pieces, and disgust at the nondescribable stuff thatcomes from inside the track ball mechanism (Blackberry). The other with success out of pure luck (the Mighty Mouse).

Given you can’t easily disassemble the Mighty Mouse, I had originally tried the apple-endorsed approach to cleaning the track ball, and a number of variations located with my friend Google, will little success. Don’t ask me why, but I decided to run track ball of the Mighty Mouse “vigorously” upsidedown on a piece of A4 paper on a flat surface. What can I say. This worked a treat and released all sorts of stuff from around the track ball. I can now multi-direction scroll to my heart’s content. No more one direction but not the other!

I don’t know if the same thing will work with the Blackberry as the one I fixed was for a friend. Maybe one of you can try it?

So everything is supposed ot be easy with a Mac. Everything is supposed to just “work”. Well it’s not always that case. If you’ve ever tried to synchronise your contacts with your phone on a Mac, you’ve probably run into the fact that it aint always easy. My phone broke recently (it didn’t just “work” either), so when I got a loaner until the new one arrived, I needed to get my contacts onto it. I was loaned a Nokia 6120 Classic. This solved my syncing problems.

word.

I wish I wasn’t so crap at CSS so I could spiffy up scrambledminds. I wish I wasn’t so lazy as to not learn.

So WordPress 2.5 has been released. It seems pretty slick and the new management interface is much nicer and more functional before. Check out the details here.

I’ve also managed to start putting my photos over on Flickr. It’s all going well and I’m getting them on scrambledminds.com by using the Slickr Gallery and Shutter Reloaded (a Lightbox variant) plugins. Quite a few people think that Slickr/lightbox is slow but I think it’s worth it for single or small sets of photos. For larger sets I just hard link to the slideshow url on Flickr.

So, apart from the odd post, you can see it’s been pretty quiet on scrambledminds for some time. Boringly so. Thanks to those that think that even when there are posts that it isn’t boring as batshit (Julie). So it’s time to get my act into gear and get some more gear up here. And I will, when I’m finished revamping the site. This involves me learning how to make it look snazzy so it may take some time!