Webspace of Eric Brodeur

Perspectives on storytelling and digital cinema.

Category: Internet

Moving your Mac Documents folder to Dropbox

Posted Jan 01, 2010 by Eric

Apple logoUntil Dropbox provides a feature to easily redirect your local folders to the cloud-based Dropbox, you need to use symlinks or consider abandoning the default Documents folder on your Mac.

Being a purist, I wanted to keep using the entire Documents folder without symlinks for new subfolders I wished to place into Dropbox. This forum post at Apple Discussions provides a quick and easy solution.

Word of caution: if you drag the contents of a folder (such as Documents) into Dropbox and shortly thereafter change your mind (and drag it back) you may find all of those files are deleted from Dropbox and you Mac. Be sure to have an up-to-date Time Machine backup before you perform large file moves.

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Filed Under: Apple, Internet
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Block Adobe Flash and stop the spinning beach ball in Safari

Posted Dec 12, 2009 by Eric

Anti-FlashI don't know what it is with Adobe Flash on the Macintosh platform but it's a CPU hog. Safari is my main browser and any page utilizing Flash causes the spinning beach ball for a number of seconds, rendering the computer almost useless until Flash is good and ready to relinquish the CPU.

Waiting for pages to load was more than I could bear. Some searching unearthed the Click2Flash plug-in for Safari which inserts placeholders for every Flash element on a page.

No more waiting to load and if you want to use a Flash object (such as the YouTube video player) just click the word "Flash" in the placeholder to enable it.

Click2Flash has options to load a single Flash object on a webpage, all of them, or whitelist the entire site so Flash objects are always visible.

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Filed Under: Apple, Internet
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How to send Google Reader stories to Evernote’s web interface

Posted Sep 30, 2009 by Eric

Evernote logoFor the longest time I used DEVONthink for gathering project-related information into one place: Word and PDF docs, scanned images, web pages, etc. The downside to this approach is requiring your computer nearby.

This prompted me to try Evernote which has its feet on the desktop, iPhone, Blackberry, and the web. Although lacking the depth of DEVONthink, Evernote is excellent at clipping web pages, storing images and documents, and keeping everything within reach from anywhere.

If you’re using Google Reader to manage your news intake, Evernote’s web clipping just got easier when you’re away from the desktop application. Learn how to configure Reader to send entire blog posts to Evernote without browser extensions.

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Solution to DISQUS and WordPress RSS feed breakage

Posted Sep 25, 2009 by Eric

WordPress logoSome time ago I tried the DISQUS plug-in for WordPress and discovered it broke my RSS feed due to a JavaScript bug. DISQUS support didn’t have a solution at the time so I deactivated the plug-in.

A recent search unveiled a workaround by disabling the Comment Count setting in the Advanced Settings of the plug-in.

It works, although a genuine fix would be ideal. With version 3.0 on the horizon I doubt they are looking backward.

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Posterous gallery AutoPost feature stops at 60 images

Posted Sep 06, 2009 by Eric

Posterous logoWhen Posterous released the PicPosterous iPhone app I took notice of their blogging platform. Posterous is your one-stop location for status updates, blog posts, and media sharing to (almost) every social web site on the net.

I made extensive use of PicPosterous during a recent trip and used the AutoPost feature to upload photos to my Facebook account in real-time. It worked very well although I was stumped why only 60 of the 240 images were uploaded.

I asked the question and Posterous support told me they have set that limit “to prevent spamming the Facebook servers too much.” Although they may be raising this number to 100 it seems odd they are concerned about image count instead of the speed of those updates hitting the Facebook servers. It’s the latter which tends to be problematic when using API calls.

Despite this limitation Posterous is an interesting service, free, and easy to use for keeping everyone – everywhere – updated.

UPDATE: my source suggests they might remove the 60 (or 100) limit altogether if the service isn’t abused.

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