Archive for category Twitter
And now for something completely different
Posted by orerfireced in Articles, Google, Twitter on March 11th, 2010
Since I’ve been working on Google Reader, I’ve told a lot of my friends about how great it is. And while some of them try Reader and find it really useful, many of them aren’t interested in taking the time to get Reader set up. That’s why today, I’m happy to announce an experimental product from the Google Reader team that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone, while giving Reader users a new way to view their feeds. It’s called Google Reader Play, and it’s a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web that’s easy to use and personalized to the things you like. Best of all, there’s no set-up required: visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try.
In Google Reader Play, items are presented one at a time, and each item is big and full-screen. After you’ve read an item, just click the next arrow to move to the next one, or click any item on the filmstrip below to fast-forward. Of course, you can click the title or image of any item to go to the original version. And since so much of the good stuff online is visual, we automatically enlarge images and auto-play videos full-screen.
Reader Play adapts to your tastes — as you browse, you can let us know which stuff you enjoy by clicking the “like” button, and we’ll use that info to show you more items we think you’ll like. If you want, you can also choose categories, and we’ll personalize your stream to only show you stuff from those categories. And you don’t even need a Google account to use Reader Play. Of course, if you want to star, like, or share items, we’ll ask you to sign in to your Google account. Since Reader and Reader Play share the same infrastructure, any actions you take in one will be reflected in the other.
You might be wondering where we find all the awesome stuff in Reader Play. It uses the same technology as the Recommended Items feed in Reader to identify and aggregate the most interesting items on the web. If you sign in, Reader Play will also be personalized with items that people you’re following have shared in Google Reader, and items similar to ones you’ve previously liked, starred, or shared.
Since Reader Play is an experiment, it’s launching in Google Labs for now. To be clear, Reader Play isn’t intended to replace Google Reader: both Google Reader and Reader Play are about finding and reading interesting stuff online. In essense, Reader Play is a different view of Reader. It’s designed to be a fun and easy way to browse interesting items, while Reader is a highly customizable way to organize your feeds, keep track of what you’ve read, and much more. In Reader, you can switch to this view by clicking “View in Reader Play” from the feed settings menu.
Try Reader Play today and let us know what you think. Send us feedback in our forum or on Twitter, and check out our help article for more info.
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And now for something completely different
What’s the Easiest Way to Share Large Files and Media with Friends? [How To]
When you want to to share music, movies, photos, or other files online, you’ve got countless options. We’ve examined most, and for our money, one tool emerges on top of the heap for its ease of use, wide support, and all-around excellence.
Sharing files publicly has always been a subject of hot debate, but put aside any legal concerns for the moment and consider: What if you want to just share some home videos or music privately with a few friends rather than the internet at large? What’s the easiest way to share large files?
The Answer: Opera Unite
For this writer and tech enthusiast’s money, the easiest and best way to share large files of any kind with your friends and family is to simply install Opera Unite, walk through a couple of quick configuration screens, and then send them the URL and password to access your content from any browser.
Plenty of web sites let you send large files around, usually by uploading a file and then sending a link to the content, and BitTorrent is also great for sharing large files, but the problem with both of those is that you’re unnecessarily putting your content out there online for others, and wasting bandwidth by sending it to third parties. (You could set up private torrents, but those still require an open tracking server, which aren’t always reliable.) Opera Unite sets up a fast, direct connection to share your files, it’s extremely easy to use, and best of all, it’s free!
Update: Many commenters have pointed out that Dropbox is an excellent way to share files, and we wholeheartedly agree. However, Dropbox has a 2GB limit for free accounts, which is hardly enough space to share a collection of large files with your friends—plus, you have to wait for an upload to finish before you can share it. With Opera Unite, you can share large directories of any size instantly, for free.
Setting Up Unite is Easy
Since Unite is just a component of the Opera browser, all you have to do is download and install the latest version of Opera. Unite comes along for the ride automatically, but you’ll need to activate it by opening up the sidebar, clicking the Unite icon, and going through the wizard to set up a free Unite account (see screenshot).
Note: You don’t have to switch to the Opera browser to use Unite, so if you’re a Firefox or Chrome loyalist, you can still choose to use Opera just for your file sharing needs.
Once you’ve set it up, you can right-click on Opera Unite Home and access the Properties, or you can select the File Sharing module and click the Start button to open up a short configuration wizard to help you share your files.
The Technical Bits
Internally, Opera Unite is nothing more than a web server that runs inside of your web browser, and uses the standard HTTP protocol so your friends and family can access your shared content from any browser. Your free Unite account gives you access to Opera's dynamic DNS service, which means you can share your content with an easy-to-remember, unique URL that you can send to anybody. Unite automatically hooks into your router using uPnP to dynamically open port 8840, but it can also use a Unite proxy server when you're behind a more restrictive firewall—though it will obviously be slower.
Everything is password protected, so even if you've set up file sharing and the URL is public, it doesn't mean that people will be able to see what you are sharing—only those that you've given both the public URL and the password to can access your files. You'll probably want to change the default passwords, though.
Share Files With Your Friends
Now that you’ve set up Unite, it’s time to start sharing. Click on the Unite icon in the left-hand pane of Opera (it’s the swirly-looking one), then double-click the File Sharing module.
You'll be asked to choose the folder you wish to share. You can click the Advanced button and set up a few additional properties, but that's pretty much all you'll need to do to start sharing your files—a URL and password will be automatically generated for you so you can share those files quickly and easily.
After setting up your file share, the next time you double-click on the File Sharing module in the left-hand Opera panel you'll open up the administration page. Look over to the right-hand side, where you can see the URL and the automatically generated password. You can copy and paste those to your friends, and they'll be able to access the files immediately—but you should probably change the password to something slightly more difficult first.
Your unique Opera Unite URL will always be set to the [devicename].[username].operaunite.com address format, so you can actually have multiple devices set up on your network and easily share files with each one. If you would prefer to get a little more geeky, you can actually set up your own domain name for Opera Unite, but that’s probably overkill for just sharing some files with friends.
Accessing the Shared Content
Once you've sent somebody the URL, they'll be prompted for a password to access the shared content, at which point they can browse through all the files you've shared and download them. Since Opera Unite usually enables port-forwarding on your router automatically with uPnP, the connection is surprisingly fast if you have a decent internet connection—it's going to be slower if it has to go through the Opera proxy server.
What makes this really great for sharing with your less tech-savvy friends is that they don’t have to install any applications, or even install Opera—all of the content should work from any browser.
Taking Unite Beyond Simple File-Sharing
Since Opera Unite is nothing more than a web server, it also enables many downloadable modules to do any number of things that you could do with a full web server setup—like create your own streaming music server so you can access your content from anywhere. Just double-click on the media server module in the Unite panel, choose the location of your music folder, and then make sure to set a more difficult password. Just like that, you've enabled your entire music collection to be streamed from any browser anywhere, directly off your home PC. There's a player embedded directly in the page so you don't even need a media player installed on the other machine.
The fun doesn't stop with media serving—there are modules for a simple HTML web server, photo sharing, whiteboards, chatrooms, file sync, and more.
What about you? What’s your best method of sharing large files with your friends and family? Have you used Opera Unite? Share your thoughts in the comments.
The How-To Geek loves the simplicity of Opera Unite for sharing files. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.
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What’s the Easiest Way to Share Large Files and Media with Friends? [How To]
Most Popular How-To Features of 2009 [Best Of 2009]
Posted by vosduholov in Articles, Google, Twitter, apple on December 10th, 2009
We cover a lot of tips every day on Lifehacker, but we get our greatest pleasure from putting together in-depth, step-by-step guides. From Windows 7 to Hackintoshes and beyond, here’s a look back at our most popular how-to features of ‘09.
How to Do Everything with Windows 7
Windows 7 was a huge part of 2009, and the Lifehacker crowd was eager to try it out early on—but not necessarily ready to ditch XP or Vista outright to do so. This guide got you up and running with a Windows 7 and Vista/XP dual-boot system. Once you got it up and running, our complete guide to Windows 7 got you started with the most important parts of tackling your new operating system. We toured Windows 7’s best, most underhyped features, schooled you on its impressive list of cool new shortcuts, and detailed how to pull a little XP mode in Windows 7. It was a pretty good year for Windows users.
How to Build a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard, Start to Finish
The Apple tax is always a little higher than a lot of people are willing to pay, so this year’s guide to building a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard, start to finish, followed up by the simplified guide to install Snow Leopard on your Hackintosh PC, no hacking required made a pretty big splash.
How to Crack a Wi-Fi Network’s WEP Password
Whether you’re verifying the security of your own network or up to something a little more dubious in nature, this guide to cracking a Wi-Fi network’s WEP password with BackTrack—followed by this WEP cracking redux post that took WEP cracking out of the command line realm proved popular.
Google Wave First Look
Google Wave made a serious splash this year, and while a lot of people still aren’t sure how to best put it to use, there’s no doubt that there’s a lot of interesting technology going on there. We did our best to help you understand how you might use it yourself, starting with our Google Wave first look, moving onto a few best use cases for Wave, and rounding it out with a guide to Wave keyboard shortcuts, filters, searches, and more with our Google Wave 101 guide.
Clean Up and Revive Your Bloated, Sluggish Mac
Feel like your Mac isn’t the speedy little box it used to be? Our guide to cleaning up and reviving your bloated, sluggish Mac will get your machine back to running like a champ. (PC users, we’ve got you covered here.)
Prep Your Mac for Snow Leopard
Windows users had the Windows 7 release, Mac users had the Snow Leopard upgrade, and this guide detailed how to prep your Mac for Snow Leopard for a painless transition.
Build a Silent, Standalone XBMC Media Center On the Cheap
The future of home entertainment isn't in your cable box as you know it today—it's in powerful home theater PCs. There was a time when you'd need a big, noisy box next to your computer if you wanted to impress with your HTPC, but this guide to building a silent, standalone XBMC media center on the cheap turns an inexpensive, tiny nettop computer into a standalone XBMC set-top box.
The First-Timer’s Guide to Building a Computer from Scratch
Ever been interested in building your own PC from the bottom up but always been a little scared of rolling up your sleeves with computer hardware? Building a computer from scratch is easier than you think, and it’s also one of the most satisfying projects a tech enthusiast can tackle.
Programmer 101: Teach Yourself How to Code
Whether you just want to do some simple scripting or you want to start down the road to an entirely new skill set, our 101 guide for teaching yourself how to code is a great place to get started.
How to Fix Your Relatives’ Terrible Computer
If you didn't already fix every one of your relatives' computers over Thanksgiving, don't worry—the holidays are quickly approaching, and you know your the resident IT person for your friends and family. Our guide to fixing your relatives’ terrible computer can help.Photo by Justin Marty.
Cut the Cable For Good with Boxee and Apple TV
If our above guide to building a silent, standalone XBMC media center wasn’t quite your bag of chips, consider our step-by-step guide to cutting the cable for good with Boxee and Apple TV. You remember Boxee, right? They’re the killer media center folks who had to fight it out with Hulu all year, and they just updated with an impressive new look and feel. Photo by philcampbell.
Six Ways You Should Be Using Twitter (that Don’t Involve Breakfast)
Twitter may be taking the world by storm, but it’s often- and much-maligned by many of our readers. (47 percent of you say you’d never even use it.) Say what you will about tweeting, but if you’re not using Twitter for at least search, we think you’re missing out.
Properly Erase Your Physical Media
A whopping 40% of the used hard drives on eBay contain easily recoverable personal data. This guide details how to properly erase your physical media when you get rid of anything containing a hard drive so your personal data doesn’t end up in someone else’s hands. Photo by Robert Scoble.
The Definitive Guide to Finding Free Wi-Fi
Spend a lot of time on the road and out of the comfort of your home or office? Our definitive guide to finding free Wi-Fi can help you find some fast internet while you’re out of your home territory. Photo by °Florian.
The Beginner’s Guide to Creating Virtual Machines with VirtualBox
We play around a lot with various pieces of new software and even entire operating systems around these parts. Play it safe or just play around with our beginner’s guide to creating virtual machines with VirtualBox, a free, open-source virtualization tool.
Use Firefox to Fix the Web’s Biggest Annoyances
The web is an amazing place. It can also be an extremely annoying place. Skip the annoying flashing ads, turn off auto-playing movies and sounds, skip the auto-refreshing pages, and more with our guide to fixing the web’s biggest annoyances with Firefox.
How to Build a Web Site from Scratch with No Experience
Ever wanted to try your hand at building a web site you've been dreaming about—but have no experience with web development? We've been there (I was proud to release MixTape.me earlier this year), and this guide for building a web site from scratch with no experience will point you in the right direction.
You’re Backing Up Your Data the Wrong Way
Your data is the most important thing you've got on your computer—in fact, it's everything. If you aren't backing it up correctly, one bad move and all that information—and all those memories—goes the way of the dodo. If you're not sure if you're backing up the right way, this how-to will steer you in the right direction.
Ten Must-Have Gmail Filters Available for Download
If your inbox is overflowing and you feel like you’ve lost control, these 10 must-have Gmail filters will get you started slicing and dicing your inbox into a more manageable place.
An Exhaustive Guide to Saving Your Smartphone’s Battery
If you spend a lot of time outside your home or office, your smartphone is likely your lifeline to the rest of the world. Problem is, your pesky battery can die pretty quickly if you’re not mindful of how you’re using it. Follow our exhaustive guide to saving your smartphone’s battery and you may be able to squeeze a few more hours out of that gadget of yours. Photo by [177].
Make Free VoIP Calls from Google Voice
Soon free-calling functionality may be built into Google Voice (now that Google’s bought Gizmo5), but in the meantime, here’s how you can make free phone calls using Google Voice.
Hack Your Wii for Homebrew without Twilight Princess
If you’ve got a Wii and want to undertake a little homebrew fun, the Twilight Princess hack used to be the only way to go. Not so anymore, and our guide to hacking your Wii for homebrew without Twilight Princess walks you through how to go from zero to homebrew step by step.
Which Is Your Favorite Lifehacker How-To Feature of 2008?(polls)
Got a favorite Lifehacker guide on or off this list that we covered in ‘09? Let’s hear about it in the comments. If you’re feeling nostalgic, you can also gander back at the most popular how-to features of 2008.
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Most Popular How-To Features of 2009 [Best Of 2009]
New Twitter Homepage Goes Live With Search Front And Center
Twitter has just rolled out the new version of its homepage that new potential users and users who are not logged in will see. The design has been completely overhauled from the previous version which was fairly cluttered (see it at the bottom of the page). This new version is sleek and features trending topics by the minute, hour and day.
Most importantly, the new version features search functionality front and center. This way people who aren’t even Twitter users yet can search for things being said on the service. And results are nicely placed on the same page below the main area. Read the rest of this entry »
The Top 12 Social Media Stories This Week
Posted by assichadi in Articles, Google, Social Media, Twitter on July 27th, 2009
Social media was even busier than normal as we got new info on some of the web’s most anticipated products. The first screenshots of Firefox 3.7, the revelation that 100,000 invites for Google Wave arrive in September, and the removal of the Alice in Wonderland trailer from YouTube made headlines this week.
Social media was not without controversy this week, though. Digg was engulfed in controversy when it changed its short URL service, the DiggBar, early this week, and a contest by Electronic Arts, “Sin to Win,” resulted in a Twitter backlash. Here are this week’s top 12 social media stories: Read the rest of this entry »
Five Best Instant Messengers [Hive Five]
Instant messaging has become so ubiquitous, an entire generation of internet users is probably unaware there was ever life without it. Check out the following five most popular instant messengers to to help you communicate across networks and the world. Read the rest of this entry »
HOW TO: Translate Your Tweets
Ever wanted to Tweet in multiple languages? While you could (roughly) translate your Tweets by pasting them into Google Translate, new service Twinslator wants to make it even easier, allowing you to write a tweet, translate it into another language and (optionally) post both messages. That’s all there is to it: a simple app for one straightforward purpose. (Incidentally, the translation is powered by Google Translate.) Read the rest of this entry »
Twitter Launches a Twitter 101 Guide for Business
We know that Twitter’s rising rapidly in popularity. We also know that a huge number of Twitter users don’t stick around. So what’s a company with a user retention problem to do? Launch a guide to using its own product, of course.
Just minutes ago, Twitter released Twitter 101 for Business, a guide for getting started with using the Twitter service. It covers the basics of Twitter, how to get started, the lingo, and includes case studies. Here’s how Twitter describes its value to businesses on its new Twitter 101 website: Read the rest of this entry »
Digsby Passes 1 Million Users; 3 Million IM and Social Media Accounts
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles, Facebook, Social Media, Twitter on July 24th, 2009
The social IM client Digsby can not only connect you to your AIM and your Gtalk accounts, but log you onto Gmail, Facebook and Twitter, too. A recent release fixed its RAM-eating problem , and now it seems that all of that hard work (and RAM-fixing) is paying off.
The company announced this afternoon that it reached a major milestone: 1,000,000 users. Considering that Digsby only launched 18 months ago, that’s an average growth rate of over 50,000 users per month – not too shabby for an IM startup. Read the rest of this entry »
RIM Enables Etisalat Update Removal
“Recently an update may have been provided to you by Etisalat for your BlackBerry Handheld via a WAP push. The Etisalat update is not a RIM-authorized update and was not developed by RIM. Independent sources have concluded that the Etisalat update is not designed to improve performance of your BlackBerry Handheld, but rather to send received messages back to a central server. RIM has developed this software (“Software”) that will enable you to remove the Etisalat update.” Read the rest of this entry »