Google Announces Buzz

Yesterday, Google announced its now Buzz service. Essentially, this new service will allow you to include your Twitter feeds, RSS Feeds, and Chat all in your GMail Inbox. CNet reviews the concept here.

Since the tool has not been rolled out to my account yet I haven't had a chance to try it. But my first impression is this seems like a bad idea. With e-mail I try to read and process all the messages I receive. Twitter and RSS feeds are completely different. Those I browse for just the stories that interest me. Sometimes I might miss a day or two of the feed. There is simply too much information to read it all. Having this avalanche of data pile up in my inbox does not seem like an improvement to my data browsing habits. But I will reserve further judgement until I have a chance to try it out.

MacTip: Taking Screenshots with Mac OS X

Mac OS X includes a number of key combinations which allow you to take screen shots. The available options are as follows:

Key Combination	Result
Command+Shift+3	Capture entire screen and save as a file on the desktop.
Command+Control+Shift+3	Capture entire screen and copy to the clipboard.
Command+Shift+4	Capture dragged area and save as a file on the desktop.
Command+Control+Shift+4	Capture dragged area and copy to the clipboard.
Command+Shift+4 then Space bar	Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and save as a file on the desktop.
Command+Control+Shift+4 then Space bar	Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and copy to the clipboard.

With OS X Leopard, the files are saved as PNG files. With the clipboard option, you can save the image to a graphics tool, or use Preview and select File -> New Image from Clipboard.

GoogleTip: Movie Showtimes with Google

Have you ever wanted to check movie showtimes really quick? Well then, a simple Google search is all you need. If you type in the word "movies" or "showtimes" along with a zip code in  Google search box, voila! You get a list of theaters, movies and times. For example. If I want the movie times for the 80021 zip code I could type:

movies 80021
or
showtimes 80021

And you get a link at the top of your search page like this:

Once you click on the link, you get a page like this:

Quick and convenient. Enjoy.

Win7Tip: Set the Path in Windows 7

Q: How do you set the path in Windows 7?

A: From the user interface, do the following

Click Start -> Computer -> System Properties -> Advanced System Properties -> Environment Variables -> Select Path under System Variables.

The computer option can be found on the right side of the Start menu. The System Properties option is on the main menu of the Computer dialog.

It seems to work pretty much like it did in XP. It is just a little harder to find.

Custom Blogger Feeds

The bloggerdesign blog has this article on how to get custom feeds from your blogger blog. Basically, you use your labels to get topic specific feeds. The result is just the posts for that label in an atom format.

The basic format is:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/labelname

Where blogname is your blogs name on blogger. The labelname is what
appears in the URL of your blog label page.

Here are a couple example URLs from the article.

Example URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/personalization
Example Feed: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/personalization


This approach does not appear to work with FeedBurner, but I think I really only want to annoy folks with ads in my main feed anyway. :)

Site Updates

Over the weekend I made some cosmetic updates to the site. You will notice a newer "blue sky-like" header. It adds some much needed color to the site. In addition, I updated the CSS and removed the boxes from the headings for posts. Just wasn't digging the boxes any more. So you will see some lines separating the posts.

Finally, I added a "Lastest Posts" section at the top of the right column. This should allow you to scan the latest posts on the site if you stumbled upon the site with a browser. I using a built in Blogger widget for this. I would really like to have more post headers there and style each line a little bit better. So I may be rolling my own widget to do that in the future.

Update: The widget just isn't working. So you won't see in the right column until I can write my own.

MacTip: Switch Between Windows within Applications or Between Applications

Q: On my Mac, using a keyboard how do I switch between windows within an application or between applications?

A: Use Expose. By default Mac OS X assigns three function keys to assist you in managing windows.

F11 - Hide all open windows.
F10 - Show all open windows of the application with focus.
F9 - Show all the open windows of all applications currently running.

Once the function key has been pressed, you can use the arrow keys to select the window of your choice.

If you have a multi-button mouse, you can also assign mouse buttons to perform the same function as the function keys.