Obvious Ideas

Posted via email from Arik’s posterous

Just read on TheNextWeb that Facebook is about to allow users to switch from profile urls like http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1234567890 to http://www.facebook.com/username. Awesome, right? They will open up the registration on Saturday, June 13. On the registration page there’s currently nothing, but a countdown until registration is open.

If you have a common name and you’re afraid that your username will be taken (like I do), you probably want some alert before the countdown reaches 0. Well, that’s exactly why I created the @fbname Twitter bot.

Just follow @fbname and it will DM you 1 hour before the registration of vanity urls is actually available on Facebook.

Enjoy
Arik

The Mr. Tweet people announced their new API to the public and I’ve just published on GitHub my PHP Wrapper for the Mr. Tweet API.

PHP Wrapper for Mr.Tweet’s V1 API
API Doc: http://api.mrtweet.com/v1/docs

It uses libcurl and requires PHP 5 >= 5.2.0 for json_decode.
Of course, you can rewrite to use other json decode funtions (or SimpleXMLElement for the XML response) and something
different than libcurl.

While it very straightforward, see MrTweetApiTest.php for example of usage.

Used originally for Topify (http://topify.com/).

Their API is in alpha right now, so you need to request an API key by emailing api@mrtweet.com.

Would love to hear comments and to see people forking it!

Arik

Posted via email from Arik’s posterous

bit.ly is the url shortner we all been waiting for since the creation of tinyurl. It’s simply awesome.

Posted via email from Arik’s posterous

I really like the built in screen capture ability of OS/X. I specially like the ability to easily take a screen capture of only part of the screen by using Cmd+Shift+4. What I didn’t like was the fact that it created a hell of a clutter on my desktop with all that screenshots.

Cluttered Desktop

For long time I’ve been just manually moving the screenshots to different folders / deleting them. But today I decided that enough is enough and looked for a solution. And of course a simple solution exists. To save you the reading here’s a summary of what you need to do:
1. Open the Terminal.
2. Create a new folder for the screenshots by using mkdir, i.e.

mkdir /Users/Arik/Desktop/Screenshots

3. Run the following command:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location [the-folder-you-created-in-step-2]

That’s it. Almost. Now you need to logout and login again in order for the changes to take effect. Instead you can use the following command (from Terminal):

killall -HUP SystemUIServer

Now you really done.

Hope it helps.
Arik

Lior Levin asked me today if it’s possible to create a Firefox extension, that will block Facebook part of the time. As a result, I created a Firefox extension (a compiled Greasemonkey) that blocks Facebook for 45 minutes each hour (form :16 to :59), i.e. blocking Facebook for 75% of your time.

This is a very rough alpha version. It will work, but it has a lot more to do with.

Will be glad to hear if you’re using it, and what you think of it.

Download extension | Download Greasemonkey Userscript

Arik

For a long time I knew I needed business cards, but because I’m mostly a free lancer I didn’t knew what to put on them (besides my contact details of course).  Recently I’ve stumbled upon Moo.com, who are nice people who like to print cool stuff. One of their services is the Minicards - 100 mini business cards with your contact details on one side and images from your Flickr gallery on the other side.

For me it’s perfect – instead of just having a dull busienss card with just my details on it, I can share my photo gallery with the people I contact.

And now, after a week of waiting, they’re here -

BTW, I’ve got a discount card for future orders of Minicards – if anyone of you interested, just drop me a line : arik at arikfr dot com.

Arik

For around a year this blog was practically dead, and I mostly maintained my Hebrew blog. Now I’ve decided to revive this blog and to change it’s focus. Instead of focusing on obvious ideas for new startups, software and mashups; this blog will now focus more on software development.

Hope you will enjoy the new blog.

Arik