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Software
How to shrink your Facebook tabs iFrame when AutoGrow fails you.
When building a Facebook application tab, Facebook gives you a great function called FB.Canvas.setAutoGrow (formally FB.Canvas.setAutoResize) that allows for the Facebook iFrame to automatically figure out how tall it should be to incorporate all your content. As you switch between pages in your app, it continues to grow as needed.
The downside is that it doesn’t shrink. If your first page is 2000 pixels tall, and your second is only 800, the iFrame remains at 2000 pixels and you get a bunch of empty white space at the bottom.
This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. FB.Canvas.setAutoGrow grows. And when you grow, you don’t get smaller; ever.
Google+. The social network that wants to be cool but isn’t.
Who doesn’t love the idea of Goolge+? It’s a social network, from Google, that ties into your Google life. It’s got a pretty easy to use interface, does a great job at grouping friends, has video and audio chat built-in and can automatically upload every picture you take from your Android phone into the system. It has a lot of good things going for it; except no one really uses it.
Sadly, Google+ doesn’t fix the main problem with social networks; noise. I actually follow fewer people on Google+ than I do on Twitter or Facebook and it just seems more noisy. There are so many links, images and videos that it’s information overload.
Flashed Miui onto my Droid Incredible
I’m not a huge Android fan but I do have an Android phone that I want to love. I’m a Google fan, but the phone has not been as good as I thought it should be.
I think the real issue with Android is the fact that carriers modify it. Once Google releases an update it first has to go through HTC and then Verizon. They modify functionality, add apps you can’t remove, and cause problems.
So I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands and I flashed on a new ROM; aka installed a different version of the Android operating system.
Google Music’s uploader app finally adds playlist support.
I’ve been using Google Music for a while now, but my biggies issues is that the app uploads everything in iTunes. This means that it uploaded Christmas & children’s music whether I wanted it or not. Plus there is no way to create smart playlists so I could listen to everything but those genres.
Turns out that when I opened Google Music’s uploader system preference the other day it now appears that it supports playlists; regular not smart playlists. This should make it easier to upload only the music I want and exclude the rest.
To the CloudApp with that screenshot and return me a link.
If you’re on a Mac, Cloud is a great free app.
To use it, you just drag a document onto the application icon in the menu bar and it gets uploaded to the internet. It then copies the link to the file so you can just paste it into an email or use it wherever.
To make it even more handy, it can automatically uploads screenshots you take and return a URL to the file to your clipboard. This is very handy when I’m writing an email or a form post where I want to include a screenshot.
Why do phone carriers still charge for text messaging when there are so many free alternatives?
I’m not a big texter, but I do get a few each month from others. So I end up paying a few dollars for texts. What I don’t get is why phone carriers charge for texting when so many others give it away for free? I already pay $$ for the phone and service, why do they have to charge me on top of that?
As an alternative, my wife and I usually use Facebook Messenger. I send her pictures and texts all the time. The downside here is that you need to be friends with someone to message them.
Backblaze continues to backup my computer.
It’s been nearly three years since I signed up for Backblaze and it’s been backing up my computer ever since.
I have it set to back up once a day and it currently has backed up 112,452 files at 82,287 MB. That’s over 80 Gigs! All this for less than $5 a month.
Luckily I have never had a computer crash were I needed to get my files back. But, as my computer ages, it’s good to know that everything is safe.
Get 50GB of cloud storage free from Box.net & access your files from your desktop.
Box.net has a great promotion going on for iOS users. If you create a new account, or use an existing free account, login via the iPad or iPhone app and you’ll automatically score 50GB of space for life.
The downside with Box.net is that it doesn’t have desktop syncing like DropBox does. However, you can mount your Box.net account on your desktop and manage all your files. It’s not the speediest, but it works.
Rooting and Un-Rooting my Droid Incredible.
Rooting my Droid Incredible was one of those geeky things I really wanted to do. I didn’t have a good reason, I just thought it’d be cool. So I did it; then I tried to un-do it.
Rooting my phone was really easy thanks to the unrevoked3 recovery reflash tool. All I had to do was plug my phone into my computer, start the app and it did the rest.
Then I had the wonderful world of root….. but didn’t know what to do with it.
Lion. Why you no like my computer?
Sad Cat
It’s sad but it’s true, Lion won’t work on my iMac. It’s one of the first generation Intel iMacs and it didn’t make the cut.
Ohh well. I can still put it on my work computer so at least I’ll be able to play with it.
And I can still get backwards scrolling if I want it via Scroll Reverser.
