I navigated over to DropBox’s snazzy iPhone optimized interface and attempted to download the PDF file. I clicked it. Downloading…
Bork, Unsupported file type!
"Cannot download. The content being downloaded is not supported on the phone."

What? I knew that PDFs can’t be read on the Android unless you send it to your Gmail address and use “Preview;” however, WHY can I not just download it, attach it to an email, and send it? Is the Android G1 supposed to just a nerd phone with no business use at all?

By tinkering a bit more, you can eventually download PDF’s, but you need to have an application like “JetCet PDF” which “registers” and thus “supports” the file type. On the subject of JetCet PDF, the application is in extreme alpha. The application either crashes on me when I attempt to open a PDF or it opens it with garbage as most of the English text.

I later found out that Gmail on the Android will only allow you to attach and send pictures. Again, what? I guess you could use a file manager app to change the extension of a filename from Agenda.pdf to Agenda.pdf.jpg, send it, and make sure the recipient knows to change the file extension or risk viewing gobbledygook.

Google, I want to be able to download any file I want and attach any file I want!

Conclusion: I temporarily changed my DropBox password so that the president could download the Agenda and print it off.

Text messaging saves unneeded overhead from short conversations like “Where are you?” or “Are you coming tonight”? A couple of days ago I almost sent out an embarrassing text message with my Nokia 6103. I wanted to ask someone if they “Could bring the plates,” but instead almost sent “Could you bring the slaves?”T9 predictive text was on and
apparently Nokia thinks that we would still use the word slave more
often than plate. Really, who uses the word slave unless you are a tech
junky talking about hard drives or one of two love birds.

Using Twitter, a micro-blogging tool, I sometimes forget to
label an update as a “direct message” by prefixing the message with the
letter “d” followed by the destination’s username. One time I publically broadcast my mileage, fill up info, and the price of gas to Twitter when I meant to privately send it to
the nifty gas mileage tracker “@mymilemarker” @ mymilemarker.com. I
realized this a couple minutes later when I noticed that I did not receive a
SMS with my average miles per gallon report. “Oh man… now everyone
knows the mileage on my car.” Thank goodness it wasn’t anything that
private like direct messaging a friend my phone number or my address or
some juicy tidbit about work (like the SSH password).

When Twitter had an IM bot with Google Chat in Gmail, some people,
cough… Repository, would accidentally post messages to their
twitter account thinking that they were actually talking to Bill Bob.

Check out some confessions on Twitter.

Have you ever made an SMS blooper or Twitter blooper? Let’s here it.

Here are some of my favorites:

AmandaGravel: Twitterblooper I tweeted my mobile number to about 1,000 people, and said “Call me right now!” because I thought I was just texting a friend

————-

I blooper occasionally, even as resent as this morning. Searching for a
drive to tonight’s ultimate frisbee match, I sent this message to
several teammates before realizing the unfortunate typo: “I need a life.”

While I eventually found the lift I needed, I also found a day’s worth of heckling and sarcastic sympathy.

-Rob Maguire

You can follow me on Twitter @kalebdf.

Inspired by this Mashable’s story.

AutoHotkey (AHK) is a simple, open-source automation tool for Windows users. Ever needed to automate a backup that doesn’t have a built in scheduler and only supports visual actions, remap keys and buttons on a keyboard or mouse, a text expander (btw => "by the way"), or put together simple key combination shortcuts? AHK can help you accomplish all of those tasks.

AutoHotkey scripts are extremely easy to understand and master. There are several simple tutorials for AHK including some on one of my favorite sites, Lifehacker. If you run into any problems, AutoHotkey has wonderful functionality documentation on their website and in their “in-program” help library.

An example of a simple script that I use to remap the Capslock key to be the CTRL+S (save) combination is:

Capslock::^s
+Capslock::Capslock

The key combination SHIFT+Capslock actually toggles the real Capslock function. Yes, I am weird, but this really helps my pinky+index finger combo. Want to pull up the Windows Calculator quickly? Add this to your AHK script:

#c::Run %A_WinDir%\system32\calc.exe

This will launch the Calculator with the combination WINKEY+c . In shortcut terms, ^ is CTRL, + is SHIFT, ! is ALT, and # is WINKEY. AHK has variables such as %A_WinDir% allowing the same script to be compatible on multiple computers.

An awesome feature of AHK is that you can install AHK on one computer, create a script, convert it into its own executable program, and place it on a flash drive that can be used anywhere.

BUT Kaleb, I don’t like touching code? No problem! AHK has a helpful
"Key/Mouse-stroke recorder" that is included with the installation
called, "AutoScriptWriter (recorder)."

I have many more script tidbits and helpful hints on automation coming. Download AutoHotkey today! Try it out. Tell me what you think? What automation software do you use?

Check out these sites for more quality info about AHK:

• AutoHotkey Tutorial (Official Wiki)
• Turn any action into a keyboard shortcut
• Texter - Advanced text expander
• ClickWhen - Automated "click" scheduler
• NoThickManuals

Thanks Kent; I have been delaying this post for a while.

The issue has been resolved and Scroggles! is back in all its glory to its blog reading / commenting / posting state.

Become more productive by freeing yourself of the start menu or having to navigate to your Desktop to bring up your favorite programs. Launchy is an open source keystroke launcher for Windows which allows you to execute any program, Internet shortcut, music file, document, and anything.

To start Launchy, hit the customizable hotkey ALT+SPACE to begin. Simply start typing what you want to "Launch" and Launchy will search through the items it has indexed. Don’t remember exactly the name of what you are looking for? Launchy will suggest items for you. Hit ENTER once you have found what you want. If you "Launch" certain items more than others, Launchy will weight them differently so the next time those items will be suggested first.

The customization options for Launchy are endless. Click the cog-options-wheel (or Rt-Click > Options) to access the Options window. Launchy will automatically index your Firefox and IE bookmarks and your "Start Menu" shortcuts. In the Catalog tab, you can add your "My Documents" folder and instruct it to only index your .doc, .xls, and .pdf files. Changing the Launchy hotkey, the skin, the opacity is just as easy.

Try out the plugin "Weby" by bringing up Launchy and typing:

google TAB Scroggles!

This will search Google for "Scroggles!". By pressing TAB after the item Launchy will let you pass in a search parameter. Check out the plugin "Weby" for more shortcuts (Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon…). Additionally, Launchy can be used to pass in a command "parameter" to the Command Prompt or instruct Putty (a SSH client) to connect to a particular server.

It is similar to Windows Vista’s new Start Menu live search feature, but is way more powerful.

Quicksilver for Mac OSX is the inspiration behind this software. Gnome-Do is an awesome launcher for Linux.

Have you had a go at Launchy, Quicksilver, or Gnome-Do? Tell us about it.

Today, I happened upon an Obama video on YouTube of him defending several comments that he had made about small town people being bitter and hanging on to things like religion, gun laws, and no same-sex marriages. I was just about to close the tab when I noticed that on the right side of the YouTube page under the comments there was a Google Checkout Contribute box. Nifty, convenient, and helpful, but do the other Presidential Candidates have it on their videos?

Both Clinton and McCain do not have the Google Contribute box with their videos. For example, an official McCain video here & an official Clinton video here are missing this box possibly separating their respective campaigns from extra funding.

Do Clinton and McCain (of course they have other people who are in charge) know about this wonderful little Google Contribute box?
Both Clinton and Obama and some of the other Republican candidates seem to know how to integrate themselves into the online community. Obama’s website & Clinton’s website are centrally focused around a red, white, and blue America theme and seem much more inviting, lively, and interactive than McCain’s website with ARMY black, silver, gold theme. Also both Obama and Clinton have listings on their front page with links to all the "social communities" that they are "involved" in, Flickr photos, Twitter, Facebook… McCain is lacking any prominent display of social connection with the younger generation on his website. I wouldn’t mind "following" McCain on Twitter. This is why I doubted McCain would have the Contribution box; however, I was surprised to see Clinton’s video page devoid of such a key fundraising tool.

Does YouTube have some sort of affinity toward Obama?
I don’t know and doubt they do. I do however know that all three candidates have visited the GooglePlex within the past 2 years for some event or speech. YouTube had the "debates" this year and they still have an entire page devoted to U.S. Presidential politics, http://www.youtube.com/youchoose.

I just know that we should all be readying ourselves for Election Day. Have you registered to vote? You should!

A nifty aside; when you search for "register to vote" in Google both the California and Texas voter registration show up within the first 5 results. Oh yeah, Texas rules!

Gmail Custom Time allows users to send emails with a custom time (Now, 1 hour ago, 6 hours ago, Other…). User feedback has shown uses like claiming "first-come, first-serve" tickets after they were already "temporarily" awarded. Custom Time’s slogan is "Be on time, Every time*". "Every time*" means ten because Google’s researches have concluded that…"Allowing each person more than ten pre-dated emails per year would cause people to lose faith in the accuracy of time…" Custom time would rule, but I would have a hard time deciding if it is really worth it to use one of my ten. Although, I could just create another Gmail account!!! Simply hilarious. I know I will be using Scroggles! own Custom Time on this post.

Google also has proposed to work with Virgin Group in a joint venture called Virgil. "Virgle’s goal is simple: the establishment of a permanent human settlement on Mars." We were called to spread out to the ends of the Earth and world and we have done so. But the Earth has some problems and we need a "Plan B." Additionally, the entire planet and colonization will be Open Source.
This IS a hoax, right… Check out what else Google has to say at their dedicated Virgil site, here & the Official Google Blog here.

Australia’s gDay allows for people to search for web-pages 24-hours before they were created.

Last year, Google introduced Gmail Paper, allowing users to print out their emails for a free paper archive shipped to their doorstep, and Google TiSP, a Toilet Internet Service Provider using existing house/building plumbing to connect computers to the Internet.

What has Google done in the past? Hit the link, Google’s Past April Fools Hoaxes.

Google really is quite creative. I look forward to these every year, since I first started drinking Google Gulp.
Enjoy & Happy April Fools Day!
[images from Google]

The other day I was asked to write out the basic algorithm for reversing a string. I could do it in whatever language I wanted; I chose PHP. I knew that in Ruby you can just do strvar.reverse, but I didn’t quite remember if PHP had a simple single function to accomplish this. It does, but there are many different combinations too.

PHP has a built in function to reverse strings. It is strrev($string). A common use is:

//PHP Manual: string strrev ( string $string )
$str = "judicious";
echo strrev($str); // suoiciduj

//.0000159740447998 sec. - First Run -> 1.6E-5
//.0000150203704834 sec. - Second Run

So simple, yet I didn’t remember that because I never use it. However, I think it was better at the time for me to show that I could come up with an algorithm to yield the above result. I have just completed running "time trial" tests on about 5 different ways of reversing a string. I ran each algorithm in its own page and timed them using the microtime(true) function which was used to return microsecond calculations. I wanted to see which was the best way without knowing about strrev().

The substr() reverse algorithm:

//Vars
$str = "judicious";
$output = "";

$startTime = microtime(true);
for($i=(strlen($str)-1);$i>=0;$i–)
$output .= substr($str, $i, 1);
$ttlTime = microtime(true) - $startTime;
echo "String: $str<br/>";
echo "Completed in [$ttlTime sec.]<br/>";
echo "Result: $output";

//.0000751018524170 sec. - First Run -> 7.5E-5
//.0000472068786621 sec. - Second Run

This was the algorithm that I answered the question with. I decided to use substr() to cut the $str variable down to the 1 single last character in $i th position starting at the end and working backwards. I thought it was good, but check it in comparison with strrev().

The exact character reverse algorithm:

for($i=(strlen($str)-1);$i>=0;$i–)
$output .= $str{$i};

//.0000689029693604 sec. - First Run -> 6.9E-5
//.0000450611114502 sec. - Second Run

I am convinced that some version of this algorithm runs in the back of strrev(). When running right after strrev() in the same script it goes much faster. Calling each individual character in string $str by using the curly brackets.

The str_split() one liner reverse algorithm:

$output = implode(array_reverse(str_split($str,1)));

//.0000629425048828 sec. - First Run -> 6.3E-5
//.0000419616699219 sec. - Second Run

I had a similar algorithm using a for loop again, but this runs way lighter. I like the readability of this algorithm too. First it splits the string into an array of pieces 1 in length. Next it reverses the array and then implodes the array back into a string.

Let’s review the time score card!

This goes to show you that there are many ways of doing the same thing and sometimes people have already done them. PHP has many awesome built-in functions that I wish languages like C++ without having to import some library. Check out the PHP Manual online. I visit it often when I am developing.

UPDATE: Interestingly as I was making my calcuations I noticed that when I used a custom function that exploded microtime() (I guess before PHP5 with the "true" param) it added about 1.1E-4 seconds onto the execution timer. Therefore, use microtime(true) if you have PHP5.

Have you ever desired to visit a site or search a site without typing in the entire web address or visiting the site first? Bookmarks in Firefox can be assigned simple keywords to make browsing and searching quicker. The feature of Bookmark Keywords has been available for a while now, but many people have not taken advantage of it. All you need is the free Internet browser Firefox!

To get started simply create a new bookmark in Firefox (Rt-Click your Bookmark toolbar or "Bookmarks" menu > "Bookmark this Page"). The "New Bookmark" window should pop-up. Let’s say you love this post so much that you want to go to it alot. Type favpost in the "Keyword" field and hit "Ok." Now open up a new tab (CTRL+T) and type favpost in the "Address Bar" (where you normal type in the website address). Woah, it went to this post! That is because Firefox created a shortcut keyword for the term favpost. Now think of the possibilities. New York Times Homepage => nyt, Flickr => f, and Scroggles! => s!.

Well as if that wasn’t enough, you can actually add a dynamic parameter into the bookmark keyword. For example, I use the Google I’m Feeling Lucky feature alot which goes to the first/top result for any search on Google. If I want to go to a high-ranked "PHP Tutorial" site, I would type gg PHP Tutorial into the address bar. I setup a bookmark with the keyword gg. The URL/Location is set to: http://google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky
The %s in the Location address is term that Firefox replaces without whatever follows the keyword & space, [gg ], in my example PHP Tutorial. Again the possibilities are endless. Need to look at a specific tag sorted by most interesting in Flickr? You could use: flint => http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/%s/interesting/.

Here is a list of bookmark shortcuts that I enjoy using:

• Google Search: g => http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
• Google Map Search: gmap => http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=%s
• Yahoo! Search: y => http://search.yahoo.com/search?&p=%s
• Wikipedia Search: wp => http://en.wikipedia.org/?search=%s
• Definr: def => http://definr.com/%s
• Lifehacker: lh => http://www.lifehacker.com
• Gmail: mail => https://mail.google.com
• Weather Search: we => http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=%s
• PHP: php => http://www.php.net/%s
• TinyURL creator: tiny => http://tinyurl.com/create.php?url=%s

Which ones do you use? Any cool quick shortcuts like the tiny url creator with tiny? Post in the comments.

If you sync your bookmarks across computers with the free Foxmarks extension for Firefox, you can access your custom shortcuts everywhere!

UPDATE: I forgot to write that CTRL+L (in Firefox) will put the cursor into the Address Bar for easy typing. CTRL+K will move the cursor to the search box.

Convert, rename, resize, adjust contrast, and much more with many photos all at once with FastStone’s Photo Resizer. Occupying only ~1Mb of disk space this tool is perfect for your computer or to carry around on a flash drive. Did I mention it is free!? I use it to convert, lighten, rotate, and resize photos when I need to send people notes that I have "photo-scanned."

FSResizer allows the user to convert any image into a JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, or JP2 file. Simply specify what you want to do and what the output format should be and where it should go and hit Start. It processes the images quickly and accurately.

The "Advanced Options" menu provides a list of options to add to the process and includes a preview window of the picture when trying to adjust the contrast or brightness.

Of course, if you are professional photographer you probably have Photoshop or CS3 or equivalent that might do this for you. However, FSResizer’s quick and easy to use interface makes this a tool for all.

Need to resize those giant pictures that you have so that they can send in email? Resize them, adjust the quality if necessary, and hit Start to produce small email-able files that still look decent.

Check out FSResizer and put it on your flash drive for those quick converting needs. FastStone offers many other awesome products.