eugene gordin

Two seemingly unrelated things, unless you’re still getting your photos developed at your friendly local photo place. Well, for the purposes of this post, they are simply two very helpful but unrelated tips. Here goes:

Split Bills Simpler

Have you ever gone on a trip with a group of friends, and painstakingly collected all of your receipts only to find out that now you have to fire up Excel and figure out who owes what to whom? I have. In fact, if you count our house bills, I have to go through this very process pretty regularly.

Luckily there’s a fantastic little tool out there called Short Reckonings which takes all of the work out of it. All you have to do is open the Short Reckonings page, name your expense sheet, enter the involved people’s names, and then enter the expenses one by one and the people among whom you’d like to split that expense. That’s it.

Short Reckonings does the rest for you, figuring out how much each person owes, and the most efficient way for each person to pay (so that a minimum of checks are written). It generates a report for you, optimizes for printing, let’s you have non-even splits (weights), and even allows you to export your data to Excel format. You don’t even need to sign up for an account. It saves your expenses and gives you a convenient URL to save or hand out to the participants (check out my Bonnaroo expenses, for example).

It’s a great little tool and the developer, Mikaël Gravé, is extremely helpful and always looking for suggestions and bug reports. There are alternatives to Short Reckonings but none are nearly as well done or as simple. So next time you gotta split up a whole lot of expenses, be sure and try out Short Reckonings.

Easily Download Picasa WebAlbums on a Mac

Have you ever received a notification from a friend that he or she has place new photos of your most recent trip on their Picasa Web Albums. If you’re on a mac, you know that its nearly impossible to easily download all of those photos all at once. In fact, the only way I knew how to do this was to run Picasa in Windows through Parallels (which allows you to simply click Download to Picasa and drag the photos back to my Mac that way, ugh).

Luckily, today I found a simpler way thanks to a thread over at Apple’s Discussion Forums. As long as you have iPhoto ’08, you can simply do the following:

1. Copy the URL of the RSS feed from the PicasaWeb album (it’s at the bottom right hand corner of the thumbnail view)
2. In iPhoto go to: File –> Subscribe to Photo Feed and paste the URL you just copied.

That’s it. I didn’t even need to number those steps. Iphoto will automatically download the photos to your Mac. Brilliant!

I’ve been meaning to post these little Apple dictionary tips and tricks for a while now, but now finally have the time to do it. They come from a few TUAW and Lifehacker posts that I found particularly helpful. Dictionary.app is a built-in dictionary, thesaurus, and wikipedia (in Leopard) application that provides spellcheck and grammar throughout OSX.

Therefore, In most OSX applications, you can highlight a word, right (or two-finger-, ctrl-) click and go to “Look up in Dictionary.” This is very useful when you’re tired of deciphering enigmatic diction.

But, there’s a better way to get to the dictionary. In any native Cocoa application (most OSX apps), just highlight a word and then press CMD+CRTL+D. A little dialogue box opens up with the definition, synonyms, etc. Very cool.

The final little dictionary trick has little to do with the dictionary itself as much as it does with looking up words. If you come across a word (or phrase) in a document, pdf, or anything else that you’d like to Google, simply highlight the word and drag it to the Safari icon in the dock. Safari will the immediately open a new tab with a google search for whatever word or words you dragged.

Simple and effective. Enjoy.

Just a quick post today about something I’ve been patiently waiting to be released: Silverflow Interface for Quicksilver.

I’ve written about Quicksilver before, and now that its open-source I still highly recommend it. However, for those looking for a little more dazzle for their Quicksilver interface can download Silverflow, a coverflow-type interface.

Julius Eckert has more than a handful of very good looking QS interfaces, but Silverflow is now in open beta and I recommend those that don’t mind little beta bugs to try it out. Its a beautiful thing.

[Quick note: to install Silverflow, simply double click on the .tgz file that you get from Julius' site, and then double click on the Silverflow.qsplugin that gets extracted. Then, fire up Quicksilver and press cmd+(comma) to see the Quicksilver preferences. In the Preferences section, click on Appearance in the column on the left, and then under Command Interface select Silverflow. All done!]

Last Monday, I received a phone call from Microsoft’s Mac division, asking if I would like to help them improve Microsoft Office for Mac. My first instinct was to ask them how they’d found me. As it turned out, Microsoft and their henchmen keep their ears to the proverbial (online) street, and had recently encountered my website and found it filled with the sort of feedback and recommendations that they thought would serve their purpose. Since this isn’t exactly a tip or trick, click the link below to read about my visit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Luckily, someone over at LifeHacker and DownloadSquad must have been thinking on the same wavelength, because they both posted the next day about Awesome Highlighter. Awesome Highlighter allows you to highlight as many passages as you want on any webpage, and then send the link to someone else, preserving your highlights. It even creates a short URL for your link, making it easier to share with people. This is great little tool and I highly recommend it. If you don’t believe me, take a look at an example. Enjoy!

PS For those looking for a bit more features, such as adding comments and the like, check out Jump Knowledge, which is also a great tool but a little more complicated.

Just a quick tip for those of you who are Safari users (all you Mac users should be using Safari anyway). Personally, I was always really annoyed that Safari didn’t open links in a new tab, always opting to open them in a new window.

As a result, I found myself using programs like Saft and SafariStand, purely to get my links to open in new tabs instead of new windows. Luckily, thanks to a post on TUAW today, this problem is no more. Even those of you who are Terminal-shy can definitely do this. I promise it won’t hurt (and is well worth it!). Just keep in mind that you need the newest version of Safari (3.1), which you can get via Software Update.

All you have to do is open up Terminal, and paste the following command into it, and press return.

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true


That’s it. From now on, your links will open in new tabs, instead of new windows. To undo this preference, just copy the same command above into terminal, changing the true to false. Enjoy.

Update #1: I found some more really interesting Safari tips via Digg. Be sure and check those out too!

Update #2: In keeping up with my apparent theme of cool Safari tricks, Jon Hicks of Hicks Design pointed out a cool new trick in the leopard version of SafariStand. Its called History Flow. Just as the name implies, it allows you to go through your browsing history with a coverflow-type interface. Very cool for those instances that you remember what a webpage looked like, but not what it was called. Click on the image to the left for a screen shot.

Simply put, I was disappointed. After just over two weeks with the Time Capsule, I found myself stopping my Time Machine backups manually, constantly fixing little problems here and there, and being just plainly frustrated. Let me explain why.

1. Configuration is Complicated: the first backup must be done over wired ethernet, but if you don’t use the Time Capsule as your main wireless router, you need to reconfigure it at least twice, involving Time Capsule restarts each time you make the slightest configuration change. Sure, once its finally set up, the Time Machine just works in the background, but this only brings me to my next complaint.
2. Speed is Terrible: even after the initial backup is done, the incremental (and hourly) backups take entirely too long, often staying in the “Preparing to backup” stage for hours at a time, regardless of backup size. Sure, it doesn’t matter how long it takes because its in the background, but that little clock icon spins infinitely, and the backup results in errors a quarter of the time.
3. Other Connections Suffer: Trying to browse the internet while one of the Time Capsule backups is working is almost impossible. Since there’s no way to throttle or prioritize the Time Capsule traffic, my internet connection would go out almost regularly during a backup session (which happened every hour). And I wasn’t the only one feeling the hit – those on my network had problems connecting too. This is entirely unacceptable.
4. Server Grade Hard Drive My Foot: It turns out the much touted “Server Grade” hard drive inside the Time Capsule is about as server grade as I am. Not the biggest deal, but why advertise it as such?
5. SuperDuper Doesn’t Work: This has less to do with the Time Capsule (or Superduper) than it does with the way OSX is built. Basically, you can’t create a bootable copy of your hard drive with SuperDuper and Time Capsule because OSX cannot set the permissions correctly on shared network drives. There are workarounds, but nothing that will allow you to create an instantly bootable copy.

After two weeks of dropped connections, errors, constantly spinning icons, and unbootable backups, I’m finished. Indeed, I loved not having to connect my external hard drives and printer to my computer each time I needed them, but daily usability shouldn’t suffer in the mean time.

I want to be sure and note that just as I’ve said before, any backup solution is infinitely better than no backup solution. In fact, if you plan to use Time Capsule as your main router, and only backup, then I recommend it. In that sense, Time Capsule is a great idea. However, Apple’s unbelievable ability to take great ideas and turn them into great products simply failed with the Time Capsule. Most of the problems it has can (and most likely will) be fixed in the future, but in the mean time, I’d rather not deal with them myself.

One of my favorite applications for Safari is Inquisitor. It was this program, along with SafariBlock, that made my transition to Safari from Firefox easiest.

Those of you who have used Firefox will recognize the idea behind Inquisitor. And those that have used Apple’s built in Spotlight will immediately recognize Inquisitor. In fact, Inquisitor’s tagline is: Spotlight for the web.

That’s useful and great, but what I love about Inquisitor is that it extends Safari’s search capability by letting you search not only Google (which is standard in Safari), but pretty much any site that has search capability. Let me show you what I mean. Let’s say I wanted to search for Time Capsule (because I’m getting mine today).

With Safari by itself, I would type it into the search box and press return for my results. But with Inquisitor, not only does it autocomplete as I type, it also begins to list search results automatically for me. And if that wasn’t enough, it lets me search Google, Wikipedia, Google Blog Search, and anything else that I have it set to search – just with the click of a button!

This is a great little feature and I use it all the time. And adding a new place to search couldn’t be easier:

• Go into Safari’s preferences, and click on Inquisitor
• Check the “Display Additional Search Engines” box and click “Edit Sites”
• In the window that opens, either choose from on of the many sites built in, or choose “New custom search shortcut” from the little + arrow in the bottom left corner.
• If you’re adding a custom one, all you have to do is replace the query with %@.

I have listed some examples below from the ones I use:

• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%@
• Hype Machine: http://hypem.com/search/%@/1/
• Gmail: http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/%@
• Last.fm: http://www.last.fm/music/?q=%@
• Google Blog Search: http://google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=%@

Right now I find myself aboard Flight 763 to Las Vegas, and the only word I can muster at this point (other than those that I’m typing, of course) is: amazing. The cabin of the plane looks like nothing short of a classy nightclub, backlit with blacklights and soothing lavender neon. The divider between first class and coach isn’t a trendy curtain that the flight attendants censoriously shut, but a transparent purple plexiglass enclosure that seems to just be some sort of soon-to-be fishtank they’d fill if only the FAA would let them bring liquids onboard.

• The ability to instant message not only seat to seat, but also in chat rooms, either with the entire flight, a select group of passengers, or specific to a TV channel (in split window with the channel itself). Unreal. So cool.
• The ability to make playlists from the offered music catalog – wow. I guess it helps when you own your own large record company.
• Electrical outlets at every seat: simple, necessary, well done.
• The food is ordered from the Eat menu on your screen – choose from drinks, snacks, or entire meals, all with one swipe of your credit card along the top of the screen. The flight attendant comes right over and serves you your order.

I found it especially interesting that the options for email checking, shopping, reading (of news), and instant messaging were all already built into the system, just waiting to be enabled (although it was quite sad to see those options, but to not be able to use them). How I long for the days of in-cabin wireless internet. The future of air travel is a bright one.

What can I really say except that the entire flight was, well, an experience. That, and I paid full price for my ticket: a whopping $44.

For those that don’t know, Airtunes is a feature of the current Airport Express, which allows you to broadcast your music from iTunes to any speakers hooked up to the Airport Express. In my house, for example, we have our Airport Express in the living room, which means that at any point, I can tell iTunes to play music not through the speakers in my computer, but to the speakers in the living room (which are hooked up to the Airport Express). Airtunes lets me do that, and its quite an amazing little feature.

The one downside of Airtunes (other than the occasional skip), is that you can only transfer audio from iTunes wirelessly, and any other programs get ignored. Well, luckily, the fine folks at

Rogue Amoeba offer a very good tool called Airfoil, which allows you to broadcast all of your audio, iTunes and any other program, to your Airport Express (and now Apple TV!) – see the screen shot below!

• control the volume on the target stereo hooked up through airtunes (not possible with iTunes on its own)
• output to multiple speakers throughout the house (iTunes has this ability too but Airfoil extends it to all applications)
• play video and have synced audio using Airfoil’s Video Player
• turn any computer into a speaker (basically you can play your music through any computer in the house, very cool)
• use it on Mac OR Windows!

The one downside that I see to the beauty that is this app is that its not free, but $25 (there is a demo version on their site that you can try, fully featured). Still, for all of the added features that this application provides, its still quite worth money. If you have an Airport Express or Apple TV and aren’t using Airtunes, I highly suggest you check it out. But once you do, be sure and pick up Airfoil.