Common carp, Cyprinus carpio

Image via Wikipedia

If you signed up for a FriendFeed account, and use Twitter, but haven’t added the Twitter service, there’s just one more thing you need to do: add the Twitter service.

Why?

FriendFeed is a Twitter client, among many other things. One of key differences between it and other Twitter clients is it’s a web application that runs at scale, and so it siphons Twitter content from different, much stronger stream (technical details) than clients like TweetDeck or Tweetie. But it needn’t grab all updates, only those of users who’ve opted-in. If you signed up for FriendFeed, but haven’t add the Twitter service, your updates drift by, unnoticed by FriendFeed and its users.

How to fix it:

  1. Log into FriendFeed, then go to http://friendfeed.com/settings/services
  2. Click “Twitter” image 
  3. Type in your Twitter username, & click “Import Twitter”: 
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    (Now, if your Twitter updates really are protected, I think you’re doing it differently, not necessarily wrong, and feel free to Cancel at this point.)
  4. If you have multiple Twitter accounts, you can add some or all of them to the FriendFeed river in the same way.

That’s it, you’re done.

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Test-driving Windows 7 location features

by Wade Dorrell on May 28, 2009

Window 7’s built-in Weather gadget defaults to showing weather for “New York, NY”:

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An aside: The default of “Cupertino, CA” on Macs is a cute in-jokes for employees and fanatics, but aren’t there statistically better choices for US retail, like, say, the most populated US metro area? Windows 7 has fixed a ton of such duh-moment details. On Windows Vista, yep, it was “Redmond, WA.”

When we go to set our actual location, we see a disabled “Find location automatically” option:

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Searching for “location” in the Start Menu, we find the “Location and Other Sensors’” control panel, and find what’s wrong… captain, sensors are offline!

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So, can I install a sensor?

Yep.

Well, maybe you can. I can’t.

A Microsoft partner, JW Secure, built a software prototype location sensor using IP address to get estimated location.  But driver developers are the audience for this prototype… I’m no driver developer. I mean, I can sling an INF file, but there’d have to be an INF file provided to sling. I’d love to try this out as a consumer: if you can get LaptopLoJack working as a Windows 7 location sensor, please let me know. I got this far:

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By fall there should be retail PCs that have all sorts of sensors, from real GPS, to laptops with 3G cards that provide cell-ID based location, to software sensors like this prototype in cheaper PCs. No INF slinging required.

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