I promise not to cross-post every single Mix blog post, only the ones that I think you’d like. If you use Mix and want to keep up with where it’s going, you really should add the Mix blog to your feed reader if you haven’t already. Or if you’re not into RSS or don’t know… Read More
Author: Jake
a.k.a.:jkuramot
Zombies Attack Austin
With SXSW looming, Austin may need to clean up its zombie problem. I’m in a local news mood for some reason, maybe because I rewatched Anchorman last night and just ran through the video from KXAN’s coverage of a roadside sign hack from last week. Here’s the video: This made the local news here last… Read More
Reply-All RIFF’ed
When I read this one, I had to wonder if April 1 had come early. “Nielsen Deletes Reply-To-All Button” But it’s true. Nielsen’s CIO sent a memo alerting all Nielsen employees that that they “Reply to All” feature from Microsoft Outlook, their corporate email client. Oh, the irony if the memo had been an email.… Read More
Want to Help with Mobile Usability?
Continuing today’s theme, which is, at least for me, mobile apps, a team within our usability group contacted me about a survey they’re running. If you own one of those fancy-pants cellular telephones that does more than make phone calls, like an iPhone, an Android phone, or one of those BlackBerrys (or is it Berries)… Read More
Optimized for iPhone
Did you know that for quite some time now (months), this blog has been optimized for iPhone/iPod Touch and Android phone viewing? Rich installed the WPtouch plugin what seems like years ago. I know, time has lost its meaning for me. In the past, I rarely came here on my iPhone, forgetting we had this… Read More
Random Connect Observations
It’s been a slow news week. Usually, I have a few topics on deck that I can fall back on, but the well is really dry for me this week. Anyway, I’m waiting to blog about Clayton’s Oracle People iPhone app, which is ever-so close to getting approved for mass distribution. Drop a comment with… Read More
Things about Me Meme Comes to Facebook
My wife and several of my Facebook compadres have engaged in the latest version of the “things about me” meme. Only this time, it’s 25 things and 25 people. You may recall about a year ago, I started up a version of this meme, a.k.a. blog tag, with the eight things/eight people format. If you… Read More
Now We’re on FriendFeed
Disqus announced an integration with FriendFeed today. We’ve used Disqus for a while here and were early FriendFeed adopters. I like both services but have struggled to keep up with comments on FriendFeed that apply to posts made here. The FriendFeed plugin was great, but that stopped working a few months ago. So, the news… Read More
Posting to Twitter, Take 2
Last week, I started posting tweets to theappslab Twitter account. That didn’t last very long. The plugin I used stopped working shortly thereafter; initially, I thought it might be a conflict with TweetSuite, which I’ve found to be disappointing so far (and have turned off, for now anyway). But even with TweetSuite out of the… Read More
Connect’s Third Version Launches
On Friday, Rich and Anthony updated Connect to what we’re calling 3.0, or that’s what I’m calling it. The UI has changed from blue back to white, and the main navigation is now on the left, versus on the top. Maybe you recognize the UI; remember when we showed off some mockups back in August?… Read More
Welcome to White House 2.0
The shelf-life of this post is rapidly fading. I would have blogged it sooner, but Paul wanted real work out of me this week. So, hey we have a new president here in the US of A. I loathe politics. So for the most part, I’ve tried to stay clear of all that ruckus since,… Read More
Social Hacking is Primetime
No sooner had the ink dried on my post about tweeting with care, than my feeds yielded this post from TechCrunch. The short version is that a phisher hacked into some poor dude’s Facebook account, then whipped up a friend-in-need story and tried to sucker one of his friends into sending money using FB chat.… Read More
Tweet with Care
This post features 95% more obvious than your average post, and as usual, insert Twitter disclaimer here. Obvious Point 1: Twitter is growing fast. According to Mashable (data from Compete), Twitter grew 752% in 2008 in terms of daily unique visitors, rising from about 500,000 uniques in January 2008 to 4.43 million in December. And… Read More
Volunteering Geeky Skills
Yesterday was “a day on, not a day off” for many of us; then, President-elect (today, President) Obama called on Americans to serve their communities on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. A friend of mine here in Portland, Nate Angell, organized a geeky volunteer day, called Day On about a week ago. The twist, this… Read More
Posting to Twitter Now
Twitter isn’t for everyone. So, if it’s not for you, stop reading now. Recently, I created an account for this blog; if you want to follow, it’s theappslab, natch. Not sure why it took me so long to do that, but it’s there now. So, the obvious follow up question was what should we do… Read More
More Ubuntu Adventures
I’ve been following a story that came out of WKOW 27 the ABC affiliate in Madison, WI. The headline WKOW uses, “Woman blames Dell for missing online classes”, doesn’t accurately reflect the crux of the issue. Slashdot boiled it down as “Woman Claims Ubuntu Kept Her From Online Classes“, and story is called “Ubuntu Causes… Read More
Washing Machine Hack!
As mentioned recently, I love geeking out and have a list of projects I’d like to work on, given the time. In comments, Matt threw out a bunch of his own to-do projects, and professed his affinity for “mating the physical world with the interwebs”. You’ve probably heard about the plants that tweet by now.… Read More
Use SMS to Set Your TiVo with Kwiry
But I’m a bit scared to try it out just yet, since I’ve no idea how many text messages my iPhone plan has. I’ll back up; I read (and shared) this post from my pal Rick Turoczy (@turoczy if you’re into Twitter), about Kwiry, an SMS service that allows you to program your TiVo using… Read More
Add TweetSuite to Your Blog
By way of Mashable, comes a nifty Twitter+blog integration widget from Dan Zaralla for WordPress blogs, TweetSuite. You should stop reading at this point if you’re sick of hearing about Twitter. OK then. TweetSuite allows you to track tweets about your blog posts. How you ask, since most links on Twitter use a shortening service… Read More
Connect API Goodness
As you probably know already, Connect is our internal social network. It’s been around a while, and we’ll soon be launching a UI redesign, as teased late last Summer. In the 18 months since we launched Connect, we’ve accumulated quite a bit of social data about people: their profiles, avatars, work experience, personal interests, and… Read More