The Hobbit Chrome Experiment

Write-up on The Verge and on BGR

BlackBerry has just announced that its hugely popular BBM messaging service is going multi-platform: it will be released for Android and iOS as a free app this summer.

This is great news for messaging. I was an avid BBM user before the iPhone and Android and BBM was the best thing on the device. BBM was reliable and secure. No cross platform has stolen the market yet either.

I've used WhatsApp (love it), iMessages, Viber, Kik, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Line, and Voxer over the past couple of years. They are each good in one way or another – except that everyone isn't on them. Maybe BBM will be the "one messenger to rule them all".

Personally, I think SMS has been shown to be overpriced and unreliable and I refuse to pay for it. I really want everyone to use a messaging service that is secure and uses data.

Not everyone agrees with me though.

You are greeted with a large drag and drop file window. Drag your image file there.

Use the Red minus sine to highlight over the areas you want to go away. The preview window will show you what to expect. Just like in MS PowerPoint, use the Green Plus sign to tell ClippingMagic which parts you want to keep. Keep using the minus and plus until the preview is what you are expecting.

I chose a simple image with a fairly consistent blue background to try this on.

Pretty handy tool to keep around IMHO.

Here is a before and after comparison.

Before Background Removal

After

I heard about Draft on the Systematic podcast this week.

Draft is an online text editor with built-in version control. Cool! Draft allows you to collaborate in a nice way that is different than simply "tracking changes". I never liked emailing word docs around anyways.

Draft lets you open your documents from Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Docs too.

Drafts is able to publish work to a few places including twitter (tested here) and hopefully WordPress (if you are reading this).

Try it out.

https://draftin.com/

Tippy is for Calculating Tips

Launch tippy on your mobile browser.

Enter the amount of the bill and use the slider (or enter in the field) the percent tip that you would like to give. Tippy defaults to 20% which is customary for restaurants where I live. If the service is great, slide up (to the right), poor service, slide down (to the left).

Then you Tip Big!

Tippy will round your bill up to the nearest dollar. I find it convenient when paying in cash. That’s the top number.

If you are splitting the bill you can use the slider to select the number of people and the total per person will appear below.

Now go and give good tips!

This fixes the caps-lock issue on Mac. Read the release notes.

Update: I’ve been using 1.4.12 on two mac’s at home and it has been very, very smooth.

I can be a fan of technology when it’s still too early to tell whether something will be around or not. Bit Torrent Sync hits the high points for file sharing that I have been trying to solve for the last ten years.

Problem Solved

With Bit Torrent Sync I don’t rely on a third party (a la dropbox or google drive) to be available in order to upload/download my content. Huge files can sync between my devices on my local network. My local network is faster than my internet connection by a lot.

Private – Send files directly

There is no account needed. You don’t login to the bittorrent service. They don’t know who you are. There is only a cryptographically secure key called a secret.

By sharing a secret I can send you that huge video project or audio session directly. The BTsync client takes care of NAT traversal and the peer-to-peer connections. Whenever our machines are on the data will sync. This works across groups as well.

No one other than you and whomever has the shared secret key can have knowledge of the files transferred. The data is encrypted in transit and never sits on a third party server. Spider Oak encrypts data very well but still stores your “blob” of data.

Secure – Full control of shared secret

I can share a secret key with you (read/write privileges), a read-only secret, or a limited-time use secret key. I can revoke the key by generating a new key or remove the shared folder entirely at any time. The data is unaffected by these changes. I never have to move files into a central folder to manage sharing.

Fast

BT Sync has several methods of finding the peered machines. It can take a few minutes to get started but then data just flies. I was able to sync a 3GB folder in just a few minutes over my local LAN. Syncing through corporate firewalls is a slower process – but it is working.

Simple

Well, it’s a little bit geeky (IMHO) to get the entire concept. That’s true for Google Drive, Dropbox, SpiderOak, etc. Bit Torrent Sync is controlled by YOU. There is an agent that runs and gives you status information. You can shut it down anytime. Pause syncing anytime. Remove folder shares anytime.

BTSync works on your platform too – Mac, Windows, Linux.

Free

You were probably ready to sign up via my affiliate link by now right? There is none. No data limits. No transfer limits or storage limits. No account.

Just go to the getting started page and download the client. We can exchange keys over IM, Skype, postal mail, etc.

Isn’t the web neat?

(You can even update posts!)

Guitarism is a cute little finger chord strumming app that has audio bus support. So I pumped Guitarism through Jamup and then recorded it with Garageband.

I was able to turn jamup off and on while playing Guitarism. To change patches though I would have had to switch apps.

Next test will involve the BT105 pedal with jamup running in the background…

Then I asked him to play it again in the studio.

This is so cool …

blink(1) is the world’s best indicator light, designed in the spirit of our favorite old school Unix tools: simple, flexible, and robust.

via thingm.com