Geekistry: It's all geek to us

It's all geek to us

Fighting the urge to retweet

Michael Gaines | Feb, 12, 2010 | 0 comments

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Twitter and social media in general, is that I don’t always believe everything I read until it’s verified by people I trust. This rang true on Jan. 13, 2010 when tweets started coming into my feed about how there was a bomb scare at Grand Central in NYC. The tweets were fast and furious, and many of them were retweets to spread the news even further. I’ll say right up front that there was a suspicious package reported at 1:36 pm, the 4, 5, and 6 trains were diverted, and police were called in to evacuate. By 2:11, everything went back to normal.

Managing your Twitter connections

Michael Gaines | Feb, 12, 2010 | 0 comments

Recently, Twitter started to allow third party sites to access your Twitter account by using OAuth. This is a much safer way to grant access to these sites without having to type in your username and password in plain text like they used to. However, once these connections are made, how do you manage them?

Unfortunate evils: captchas

Michael Gaines | Feb, 12, 2010 | 2 comments

A few weeks ago, I started getting spam attacks on my forums. At first it was just a few here and there, and then they gradually became worse. Not only were the frequency of them going up, but the posts themselves were getting more revolting. I appointed people that I trusted in different parts of the world to monitor the forum and administer the spam, but it got so bad that they couldn’t keep up.

Television, time zones, and Twitter

Michael Gaines | Feb, 3, 2010 | 0 comments

If there’s one major sticking point of social networks, it’s spoiling your favorite TV show or movie because people in one time zone feel they have to blurt out what happened as soon as it happens, as if they’re sitting in a virtual living room with all their friends talking about it with them. “DID YOU SEE THAT?” Uh, no.

Handling your inbox with Gmail labels

Michael Gaines | Jan, 25, 2010 | 0 comments

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a cluttered inbox. I try to keep my mail organized in such a way where I know exactly where to find something when I need it. In the case of my POP accounts, I have Entourage sort all my incoming mail into folders based on account first, and then a subfolder. If you use Gmail, you’ll find that it doesn’t use folders, but labels. While the lack of folders may push people away from even trying to organize their Gmail inbox, I found that even though I was against using it, once you understand how it works, it’s really not that bad.