Dave Bradford

Twitter Profile Bookmarklet for Tweetbot

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Every so often I follow a link from a website for a twitter profile and have to copy the username into Tweetbot manually to then follow the user. I’m never logged onto the Twitter mobile site via my phone.

So I created a bookmarklet to take the Twitter profile URL from their mobile site and format using the Tweetbot x-callback-url scheme for opening directly into a users profile. You have to be on the users profile page via the mobile twitter site (eg. https://mobile.twitter.com/username).

javascript:var%url=document.URL;var%tweetbotProfile=url.replace("https://mobile.twitter.com/","tweetbot:///user_profile/");window.location=tweetbotProfile;

I’ve posted a gist to GitHub, it breaks down each line of JavaScript and explains how to adapt this to work for Twitterific for iPhone.

If you find this useful or can make this bookmarklet more efficient, feel free to contact me.

I’m going to try and adapt this in the future to check for non mobile addresses, so I can use this on my iPad as well.

UPDATE: Sunday 11th May 2014

I received some great feedback on this bookmarklet. It turns out that Tweetbot doesn’t care if the full URL exists in the string which is passed via x-callback-url, very handy to know. Therefore this bookmarklet can be cut down considerably, a new script is listed below.

Instead it just opens the x-callback-url in Tweetbot for the user profile parameter and adds whatever the previous URL from the address bar.

javascript:window.location='tweetbot:///user_profile'+location.pathname

Thanks to lepht on GitHub for discovering this and commenting on the original gist.

Moving to Digital Ocean

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Two months ago I moved this website over to the fine folks at Digital Ocean, who offer SSD based VPS servers.

I get the freedom to configure everything myself and experiment with configurations that aren’t supported with shared hosting. I came over from Linode another VPS provider who are brilliant, I wanted to test to see how easy it was moving everything over and see what Digital Ocean had to offer.

Basic Server Setup

Feross Aboukhadijeh helped me with most of the details with his guide How To Set Up Your Linode For Maximum Awesomeness. It’s focuses mainly toward setting up a Linode but you could apply most of the tweaks and setup to Ubuntu Server LTS 12.04.

I took a tip from my pal Danny and created a shell script with most of my install automated. In the future I’d like to look into Puppet as they seem to be the way to go for this kind of stuff.

Website Deployment

Sometime ago I moved this site over to Jekyll, a static-site generator that compiles your site from plain text files. It powers GitHub pages and I could host this site there for free however I have some Jekyll plugins that GitHub do not support.

I keep the source files on my machine and when I need to make changes or update I simple compile the site and sync the changes to my server using Capistrano, which allows you to create workflows for remote multi-server automation.

Although this isn’t necessary for a single server having a workflow to compile and publish changes to a remote location works wonderfully. I simply create the directories on my server, point my Capistrano workflow at the new destination and publish!

Digital Ocean have a great guide on setting this up.

Finally

Finally I updated my DNS records to point to the new server and waited. This has been the most painless server migration I’ve completed.

I put this down to Jekyll and way I can easily re-deploy my site to a new server without extensive configuration.

Digital Ocean offers a great service, overall I am pretty impressed with their performance. If your interested in trying them out, please consider using my referral link.

What is The Right Tool?

Thu, 15 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Has anyone ever looked down on you because you don’t have the right tools for the job?

First lets look at what the right tools mean, if your a photographer and you don’t have a DSLR does that mean your not serious about your work? Of course not, with smart phones getting better and better there has been a boom of people taking fantastic photos on their smart phones and Instagram has build a community of people doing great things without ‘professional’ camera equipment. #NoFilter was a series by The Daily interviewing some Instagram’s biggest stars. They all use smartphones to capture their best shots.

When I started designing websites, I used to design all my web images in Pixelmator, a great image editing application for the mac. When I speak to other people who design websites or do any kind of design work they say “Oh, you shouldn’t you be using photoshop?”. Who says you should be using photoshop?

I’ve just started working freelance designing for the web. When starting out, can I justify the creative suite price tag? Pixelmator is £20 (at the time of writing this post) on the Mac App Store. If you take a look at some of the work people have produced using Pixelmator you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Of course this only works if your work is contained to just you, if you work as part of a team you may need to sent files and projects inside and out in which case you might have to invest. It all depends on your workflow and your customers requirements, but for most projects the tool doesn’t matter.

The point I’m trying to make is just because a tool is ‘industry standard’ doesn’t mean you have to bowl down and learn it. You use the tools which work for you. These are just tools, the principles will stay with you. If you know how something should look or work will Photoshop really help you achieve this?

If your just starting out do you need a new MacBook Pro or can you stay on your old PC for a little bit longer while your getting established.

The tools don’t define you, you use the tool to create your idea. You see a fantastic shot and you grab your phone camera because it’s quick and you get the shot fast because the moment might pass by.

Your passion should be your work not your equipment.

Learning to Start

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The biggest and most valuable piece of advice I’ve received in the last year is just to start.

Whatever you want to do, it won’t start itself and it won’t come to you. Just start! A friend asked me the other day about programming and languages to use. I replied by suggesting to just put your ideas together, start small and keep revising, build a prototype.

You can’t learn to ride a bike without jumping on and starting to peddle? You build with practice.

Now let’s apply this to coding. Part of the learning processing is creating mistakes, fixing them and learning not to make them again. It’s important to learn and starting in the most important step.

Ruby on Rails is a fantastic language, it took me well over 2 years to start coding. I cut the cord and remove access to all the tutorials I had. I went off on my own and created something I wanted to make, you learn things and with a bit of research online.

So at lunch, tonight, the weekend whenever I get spare time, I’m starting!

Moving Away From Wordpress

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Since as long as I have been on the internet I’ve been playing around with Wordpress, they have two versions a completely hosted version and an open source version which can be installed on a web server, PHP and a database of sorts.

This is great and the whole project has a lot of experience and advanced support, but I wondered what alternatives people were using for blogging. I only do the odd post here and there, maybe my setup was a little overkill. A lower maintenance blog generator and described as blogging for hackers called Jekyll written in ruby and the backbone for github pages.

A few migration scripts and some reading of their documentation and I had my Wordpress setup converted into static files and published as a Jekyll site.

The idea is you create a simple layout and include your posts as text files in a directory, which the scripts build a website from, you can put your posts into either markdown or html format and just run Jekyll to recompile the site when your ready to publish.

The benefits of having all your site in static files is mainly speed, without php and database calls it doesn’t matter as big your site gets.

I’ve been building a tutorial for beginners to get straight in and create their first Jekyll powered site. But for now I recommend visiting the github page and read some of the documentation.

Living Without My Computer

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Picture this two weeks ago, it’s a cold Saturday morning. I get home after spending the night around my girlfriends, power up my MacBook Pro, went downstairs to make a cup of tea and noticed the screen was completely black? After a bit of troubleshooting it wasn’t just the screen, it seems to have completely failed posting at all I mean it turns on but other than that there is no chime no nothing! Wow this hit me pretty hard I mean my main machine was busted just shy of 4 years old.

It’s been a good few weeks now without my laptop - it’s tough. I don’t think I fully appreciated how much time I invested in my notebook however the way I’d adapted my setup over the last year or so has made this a lot easier to deal with.

Below is a breakdown of how I’ve managed this:

Files and Documents

Ok let’s start at the beginning for general files and documents I use a variety of different tools, firstly part of my backup process included daily time machine backups and fortnightly hard drive clones of my main boot drive. All of this seems pointless after I realised I live out of my Dropbox folder, everything thats not music or photos. Other documents can be found in my Evernote or google docs which all work from any web browser.

Music

Music is my life, about a year and a half ago I decided to move to Spotify. A very smart move in hindsight, I still have 80GB of music which I continue to backup, however not easily accessing it made me realise I never use it. Everything I listen to was in Spotify, combined with last.fm which I’ve had since I started my iTunes collection I’ve scrobbeled & loved everything I consider important, which helps me to remember which albums and songs I truly love. All my Spotify playlists are synced and a simple login to another machine brings it all back. I simply cannot recommend Spotify enough.

Photos

I have complete copies of my photo library on hard drive clones and time machine backups, however like the music this isn’t an issue. Although I won’t be organising photos until I get a new computer (I’m well into iPhoto), all my photos sync up to my Flickr account. All my events are sets inside of collections ready for review, simple editing if needed and all online taking up no physical storage of my own. I use an eye-fi sd card to copy all my photos up to Flickr and set them to private, I then make set the best ones to public, this way I have a backup copy of everything.

Code / Design Work

When I purchased my linode vps server a few years ago I went from keeping all my code locally to moving it all to the server and editing via SFTP over an SSH tunnel, I setup port forwarding for an internal only test web virual server and I can fire up a test web service just about anywhere I can run putty or command line ssh. I run nightly backups of all this data, the database files / web services and config via a script I wrote a few years ago these all get copied up to my dropbox for archiving.

Takeaway

One quick thing to point out I only use a free Dropbox account, however I have made a lot of referrals and got my account up to 4GB.

I plan to ether get a new notebook soon or get mine repaired. Either way I wanted to show how easy it is to survive this using web services while some of mine are special use cases it’s important to realise the importance of cloud services and utilise them to our advantage.

I cannot wait to get the notebook thing resolved, all of this has also been made easy also with the use of my iPhone, however I doubt I could use it full time for this length of typing!

Mac OSX Lion Using More Disk Space Than Normal?

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Since I upgraded my MacBook to Lion (Apple's new version of OSX) I've noticed a few days ago I've been loosing hard drive space quite rapidly? After searching around the Apple community forums I noticed a few articles which pointed toward Time Machine backups, turns out Lion will backup using the local disk if it cannot find it's dedicated drive, a little bit of a pain. Since I'm a laptop user I find myself away from my external drives a fair bit.

There is a command you can use in the terminal to stop this from happening:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

This will completely stop Time Machine from using your local disk and return your drive usage back to normal. Running this command gave me 2GB of space back after a restart. It looks like this only happens on Apple portable computers.

Music Previewing Service

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I've recently been trying to do something with music previews, displaying a page with a list of songs and include short music previews for each song.

After some research on Google I didn't find any services which provide anything like what I wanted. Amazon provide a music widget thing which let's you build a little bit of java script that follows a playlist but not really what I had in mind.

I was surprised that this would be so difficult to find, in my head I imagined being able to provide something like the 30 second previews Apple give you on their iTunes Store. Amazon provides similar previews which is purely a MP3 file however I don't think it's an easy thing to go in a pull out without a bit of hacking away.

Maybe the key here is not waste time building service which provides music previews but instead build a service which offers music previews!

Am I missing something here?

UPDATE:

Turns out I completely missed Apple and their iTunes Search API, this will return JSON formatted results and allows you to use it for pictures, video/music previews and whole lot more, their documentation is pretty good very easy to understand and implement.

For example - search iTunes store of all content by "The XX" would be:

http://itunes.apple.com/search?term=the+xx

You may then use extra terms in the url to specific media type, limit etc.

10 Days In A Carry-On

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Jesus.. look at that title for a post! "10 days in a carry-on" sounds like I had to endure 10 days in someone's hand luggage if that where the case then it would explain the lack of posts. 10 days in a carry on is a New York Times article I really wanted to share.

It tells the story of Heather Poole, a flight attendant and how she manages to live out of her carry-on luggage for 10 days at a time! Every time I go on holiday I do try to take less and less, try to make it to the end of the gallery it's amazing how she manages to get all that stuff with a few simple techniques.

10 Days In A Carry-On

Saving Money When Surrounded With Great Technology

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This morning I spent a little bit of time playing with my boss’s new iPad, a wonderful device. After looking at some photos and browsing a few websites I found myself finding ways to fit this device into my life. No doubt if I owned an iPad I would have place for it, however I don’t have the kind of money lying around where I could just purchase it without any finance implications.

We live in a great age of technology, with so many great devices. I’ve always tried saving money where I can and apply the same logic to every purchase I make. Following these rules makes me a better saver in a world full of great technology.

The first question I ask myself is, “Can I buy this out right?”

All of my purchases, I save for and buy with cash. Saving for technology eliminates the impulse of the purchase, giving yourself time to think about whether you really need it.

Maybe it won’t take you that long to save up or maybe you have the money around to buy straight away, even so this will buy you some time to ask yourself, “Will you use this device every day?”

To make sure this is the device for you and to justify the price tag, you’ve got to say “can I live without this for a day”, you’ll know deep inside whether you can really make do.

While I really want an iPad I can certainly live without it, is there a better device on the way? Do I need a new computer before I invest in a luxury device? Will getting into debt buying this device be worth the stress? Living without a device you’ve never had isn’t necessarily a bad thing if it will give you more time to think about it.

“Will this make my life easier?” years ago when I started freelance work I was working on a 5 year old machine which was slow, underpowered and kept breaking. I knew that a new system would make working easier to help me to earn more money, so I could justify the purchase. I hate buying new technology when I already have a working solution to the problem, if you can say the same then you can probably wait.

Most of this may seem like common sense, it’s important for me to ask myself these questions. Don’t get me wrong it’s easier to be sucked into some of these things. Some of the above may not apply to you but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, the above may be a good starting point to approach technology buys.

Getting Rid Of An Old Hard Drive

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Like most geeks, my house is full of old hard drives of various capacity, storage is very cheap these days. In a world where data privacy is an ever increasing issue and money is short you might decide that one day you want to either get rid of these old drives or sell them either over the internet or to your mate who's starting a freenas project.

Whatever you decide to do, it's important to make sure this drive leaves your procession with no possible way of accessing the old data. Of course the best way is to completely destroy the drive physically, however we all know that most people aren't going to bother, if you really have to pass this drive on or sell it you should at least make sure you try out DBAN to remove any traces.

DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) it's a boot disk which will wipe most hard drives using some hardcore data wiping technology, including some American Department of Defence techniques to make sure your data is really gone. When you delete data from a hard drive in a conventional way, there are still ways of recovering this data quite easily. DBAN will pass every section of the drive multiple times to remove references to the old files, the more passes the better.

Head over to the project page http://www.dban.org/, download the boot-able CD then burn the image using your favourite image burning application and your ready to go.

DBAN provides a few different options. I'm a massive fan of DoD 5220.22-M wipe, but it will take a little while depending on the size of your drive.

Each option will give you an idea on the type of security you will get from the erase. This is a great tool for anyone concerned about data piracy, which should be everyone!

System Serial Number In Windows

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I was on the phone to tech support about a problematic server, the first question they asked me was, "Can we have the make and serial number of your product please sir?", "ermm" I replied, I guess I could have taken a look on the box for the information, however this server was 70 miles away from where I was sitting. On a Mac OSX system you can find the serial number using "About My Mac", however on a Windows System this requires a little more effort, but it is possible.

This prompted me to brush off some of my VBS scripting I'd learn at college and come up with a simple solution to this problem. The answer? A script which will pop-up your make and model number as long as you can remote to the device. I've not found a problem with this script on any Windows system yet, this script takes advantage of WMI services from the BIOS. If you want to have a play with VBS scripting I've found Microsoft MSDN a great resource, you can extend this script to display more information, if you wish.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394587(VS.85).aspx

To get the script setup and working on your machine copy and paste the code listed below into a blank text file. Save this rename to something like serverinfo.vbs, then all you will need to do is run this on the device which you need the information from, and you will will recieve a series of popups. I was using this to dump to a text file but I found the popups easier when I need this information quickly, however this script should have everything you need to get you started.

strComputer = "." Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _ & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2") Set colBIOS = objWMIService.ExecQuery _ ("Select * from Win32_BIOS") For each objBIOS in colBIOS Wscript.Echo "Got a pen ready? Make and Serial will follow." Wscript.Echo objBIOS.Manufacturer Wscript.Echo objBIOS.SerialNumber Next

Master Gmail Shortcuts Like A Pro

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I rave on about Gmail to everyone I talk too, I can't explain how much Gmail has changed my life. If your just getting started and a just a little bit geeky, then you'll want to impress your friends with super speedy like shortcut powers. It's the printable Gmail shortcuts Google forgot to make. This will have you labeling and archiving mail in record breaking times!

This has become a lovely addition office wall, although I'm waiting for a more colourful version. Maybe I'll make my own?

Printable Gmail Shortcuts

Google Custom Builds Every Server

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past couple of weeks, I've completely moved techphooey from a Server in my bedroom to a full blown dedicated server in a data centre. After finishing a lot of research I discovered something which I completed missed early last year. Google announced that their secret server sause is a custom built server infrastructure. In the days when Google was first starting out, money was short and performance was key. The idea of building your own servers saves a lot of money, racks and racks of bare bone servers are easier to manage and easier to fix. These units are so exposed it looks like something you would find in a bedroom startup, which is exactly how Google started out.

The biggest suprise for me was the way Google handles backup power. "each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers--each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts".

It's good to see such an efficient use of resources. The full article is a great read over at CNET.

Google Custom Servers

Replace Yourself with a Small Shell Script

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A very geek post to start this week.

Hilary Mason is a computer science professor, a very interesting character. At IgniteNYC she gave a 5 minute talk on replacing yourself with a small shell script to simplify your life.

She ponders the idea that boring e-mail tasks like follow ups should be automated, humans are humans, and we forget things. I love the idea that a shell script can handle all the day to day functions we find so boring. Hilary is a true geek, please be warned, but she may be the next person to make your life easier.

Hilary Mason - Replace yourself with a small shell script

Better troubleshooting for Mac OSX

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

After some issues this weekend, I've was forced to troubleshoot a Mac. However, with Apples proprietary hardware and without the POST information from a PC it can prove rather difficult.

So after a little late night Googling, this is what I found, a great little utility called AppleJack.

AppleJack is a user friendly troubleshooting assistant for Mac OS X. With AppleJack you can troubleshoot a computer even if you can't load the GUI, or don't have a startup CD handy. AppleJack runs in Single User Mode and is menu-based for ease of use.

And my does this work! After installing you can after a restart Command - S and simply type applejack when you hit the command line to reach the diagnostics menu. Just a few seconds to install is all you need and this may just save your bacon! Follow the link below for the install guide and the AppleJack project page.

AppleJack Project

Ubuntu 10.04 - What to do next..

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Someone asked me today, I've installed Ubuntu 10.04, is there anything else I need to do? I somehow manage to end up building a new Ubuntu based machine almost every week, and managed to memorise my perfect setup. This is by no means a must do, but something to think about. A few of these will help your security but others might just enhance the experience. I'm going to be coming at these at more of a desktop angle, I shall prepare an Ubuntu Server list very soon.

Enable 3D desktop effects

If your a desktop user and you have a nice graphics card this is a must. In my office we call this "jelly windows", but it's more than that. If you've got the graphics power then you'll be a fool not to turn on the advanced desktop features in the Appearance Preference.

Setup missing codecs

Ubuntu 10.04 comes bundled with a few different media players, but these aren't very good if you don't have the codecs to play those songs you purchased from Amazon on your Windows install, luckily if your using Ubuntu to look at this post right now just click here and these packages will install using APT (ubuntu's built in software manager) Simple huh?

Install Webmin

While your finding your way around Ubuntu you might fun simple utilities missing which you used everyday on other operating systems, there is a good chance these features are there. During this transion period I used Webmin, which is a web based service which lets you do pretty much anything on your new Ubuntu install remotely via a website, the main perpose of Webmin is clearly for remote admin, But if your into your Linux and you know your way around a little give this a shot, it's a simple deb install from Webmins site. Just download and double click to install the package.

UbuntuOne

I'm a massive dropbox user, and since signing up I've ditched my pendrive. As I also use a Mac I was getting messages almost monthly about signing up for the MobileMe account, but resisted because of the yearly cost. Ubuntu 10.04 has a built in option called Ubuntu Once, which once you've signed up will give you 2GB of free storage to play with. You can also tie this into your firefox bookmarks, contacts, notes, calendar items, etc, on every Ubuntu machine you own. Nice.

Visit UbuntuGuide.org

UbuntuGuide.org is an awesome guide to all things Ubuntu. Almost everything you need to trick out your new Ubuntu location is included there! Happy Ubuntu'ing!