Products I Can't Live Without - 2009

Inspired by this post from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, I thought it would be interesting to make my own annual list of products and services that I can't live without. Here we go for 2009 (in the order that they came to mind):

Gmail, Google Calendar, Remember The Milk, iPhone, F-Spot, Quicken, Google Reader, Facebook, Google Sites, Flickr, iTunes, Twitter, Jungle Disk, Dropbox, Delicious

Gmail
I use this every minute every day for both personal and work email (my company uses Google Apps for email and calendar). I just love the user interface and ease of accessing it on the web and the iPhone. Beats the hell out of Outlook for work email.

Google Calendar
Again, this is how I keep track of temporal events in my life both at home and at work. I love that I can get text messages with alerts for calendar events.

Remember The Milk
Ever since reading David Allan's Getting Things Done, I was in search of a tool to put his ideas to work. About a year ago, I settled with Remember The Milk (RTM) and have used it ever since for task management. The user interface is outstanding and I can access it from the web and iPhone. Perhaps the best feature is that it integrates perfectly with Gmail as a "Gadget".

iPhone
I don't identify with being an Apple person, but I couldn't resist the lure of the iPhone. It really adds a lot of value to my life as I can manage email, read blogs, listen to Podcasts, use Google Maps, locate GeoCaches, and even SSH to a server at work. Oh, and visual voice mail rocks!

F-Spot
This GNOME desktop application is what I use to manage photos. It stores photo metadata in a SQLite database which I can easily access if I ever want to export the data somewhere else. It also makes it easy to upload photos to Flickr.

Quicken
I have been using Quicken for years to manage my personal finances. I upgrade it to the latest version every even year, so right now I have Quicken 2008. Honestly, I would love to stop using Quicken and switch to a web-based solution, but I can't find one that is fully-featured enough for me. I just have to have the ability to create arbitrary asset accounts for my wallet (cash), reimbursements, etc. Most web-based services don't offer this yet. I've got my eye on Mint which, I have a feeling, will get good enough for me to make the switch one day.

Google Reader
I read a lot of blogs. I couldn't possibly keep up if I didn't use a blog reader. In late 2008, I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader because the user interface for Google Reader just kept getting better and eventually it won me over. A big part of this was the excellent user interface of Google Reader on the iPhone.

Facebook
This barely made it to my list. Maybe I could live without it, but I do find myself checking it almost daily because so many of my friends use it and somehow it makes me feel like I'm in touch with all of them without ever really talking to them :). Also, Facebook is the platform I used to develop and launch my book sharing application We Read which continues to grow slowly, but steadily each day and recently passed 1000 users.

Google Sites
This past year I finally committed to using a wiki for my family. I have been using wikis for years for work and open source software projects, and always thought it would be useful for keeping track of personal things like lists of gifts to get people, account information for utilities, financial services, and contractors, etc, etc. I tried setting up and hosting wikis like XWiki and Confluence, but ultimately went with the free, online Google Sites which was formerly JotSpot.

Flickr
I purchased the Pro Account and now use Flickr for all my online photo sharing needs. The pro account allows me to upload an unlimited amount of photos for about $25/year. My family depends on this to see the many photos I take of my son as he grows up.

iTunes
I hate the fact that iTunes doesn't run on Linux machines, but I can't resist it because it is really the only good option for managing music and videos on an iPod. I use it daily to load up my iPhone with podcasts.

Twitter
I use Twitter a lot. I blame Twitter for killing my urge to blog. It is just so much easier to share things 140 characters at a time. I have Twitter linked with Facebook so that each Tweet I send out ends up updating my Facebook status.

Jungle Disk
This might be one of the most important services I use. It keeps my music, videos, photos, and other important files backed up on Amazon's S3 network. At only $.15/GB, it ends up being pretty cheap to store a lot of data. This way, if my house ever burns down or someone steals my computers, or I experience a hard disk failure, I will always be able to restore my precious data.

Dropbox
I have started storing all files that I access often in a special directory on each computer (home, work, laptop, etc) called the Dropbox. Each directory gets automatically synchronized so I have easy, local, access to the files I need wherever I am. It also makes it extremely easy to share files with other people that use Dropbox.

Delicious
I store all my bookmarks in Delicious and take advantage of its Firefox plugin to easily tag sites and recall sites I've already tagged. I don't do a lot with the social features of Delicious like bookmark sharing, though. Maybe it's just because I don't know which of my friends use Delicious too.

Well, there you have it! I can't wait to see how this list compares to the one I'll make in January 2010.

My Twitter Account Has Disappeared!

I was about to Twitter just now and for some reason Twitter wouldn't let me login. I tried visiting my Twitter feed page at http://twitter.com/kweiner and Twitter responded with the message "That page doesn't exist!". Figuring that Twitter was just down, I tried a friend's page, and that page loaded just fine. In the "Following" section of my friend's page, I noticed that my picture was missing! Next I tried to reset my password, and when I entered my email address, Twitter responded with "Oh, snap! We couldn't find you!".

What is going on? Is my Twitter account really gone and my data lost forever? I know they have had problems scaling recently, but losing someone's account is way worse than having a temporary outage. I submitted a support ticket and also posted a message to Get Satisfaction. Let's see what happens... If this doesn't get resolved, I am just going to give up on Twitter which will probably make my wife happy.

Getting Twitter4R to Work on Ubuntu 7.10

Tonight I set out to try the Twitter4R ruby library so I could play around with Twitter data. I am not a ruby expert by any means, but I thought it would be easy to setup. Unfortunately, I ran into a number of problems:

I first tried to upgrade my ruby gems installation to 1.1.0. I downloaded and unpacked rubygems-1.1.0 and ran 'ruby setup.rb'. After this I got the following error when trying to run gem -v: uninitialized constant Gem::GemRunner (NameError). I googled this and ended up on this blog post which solved my problem. I had to edit the /usr/bin/ruby file and add the following line: require 'rubygems/gem_runner'.

With gem working, I installed Twitter4R: sudo gem install twitter4r. This worked smoothly, so I went on to write a sample Twitter4R ruby program:

require('rubygems')
gem('twitter4r', '0.3.0')
require('twitter')

Twitter::Client.configure do |conf|
conf.source = 'kweiner'
end

client = Twitter::Client.new(:login => 'kweiner', :password => 'mypass')
timeline = client.timeline_for(:me)
puts timeline


Running this gave me the error No Such File to Load: net/https. Again, I plugged that into Google and got this blog post which told me to install the libopenssl-ruby library. I did this easily with sudo apt-get install libopensll-ruby.

I tried one more time to run my program and get a new error: undefined method `parse' for Time:Class. Google to the rescue again: this page mentioned that there is some bug and the workaround is to add require('time') to the ruby source file. I did this, and, voila!, my program printed the latest tweets from my timeline.

Twitter Is Killing My Blogging

I started twittering about 3 weeks ago just to see what all the hype was about. I have known about Twitter for over a year, but before now, I just didn't get what the appeal would be. I thought: Do I really want to tell the world what I'm doing every minute of the day?

In these last 3 weeks, I have twittered 72 updates, or "tweets" as they're also known. It turns out I am finding it fun and fulfilling to use Twitter and to follow a few friends and co-workers that are doing the same. It satisfies the urge I have to let people know about things I am doing or find interesting. Since each update is limited to just 140 characters, I don't have to spend much time writing as much as I normally do in a blog post. The amount of blog entries I've written has dwindled to just 2 or 3 in the last 3 weeks.

If you want to follow me on Twitter, you can find me at http://twitter.com/kweiner

You might also like to check out the many websites that do interesting things with Twitter data. This blog covers them all: http://www.twitterholics.com/

If you still don't get Twitter, check out this video from Common Craft: http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter