Tonight we went for dinner at Montana’s,  a restaurant we go to regularly.  One we think of as Nut free,  except for the Ice Cream.  But now we find ourselves questioning that.  See when we got home Violet had to large welts on her legs.  Now they could have come from the shopping cart at either Costco or Sobeys. Of course during dinner she was acting a little uncomfortable in her chair, so much so we thought she might have a full diaper but changing that didn’t seem to help. So we’re left wondering what caused the welts and how to protect out little cupcake in the future. The minimum I think is that we’re going to have to start cleaning off any chairs or carts, probably with something stronger than our diaper wipes…

After the Deadline is an open source server software that provides spelling, style, and grammar checking. The service is free for personal use, and commercial users can run their own server. It has an open API so Plug-ins can be developed to integrate its functionality into almost any application. Right now I’m running both the Firefox Extension and the WordPress Plugin.  It’s moved me out of Microsoft’s Live Writer for writing my posts because I want to use it to check my writing. I’m thinking that it might be an interesting exercise to try to write an After the Deadline plug-in for Live Writer, though after using the built-in editor in WordPress for the last few weeks, I’m wondering if it’s worth it. Perhaps I should move to the web for my writing.

What makes this different from most spell checkers is that it’s very context aware and so it can spot the wrong use of words like ‘meat’ and ‘meet’ or ‘know’ and ‘no’. This is one of my biggest issues when writing, I spell the word right, it’s just the wrong word. Another great feature is that when it shows you your errors it has an option to see an explanation. For example this last sentence I had a hidden Verb, I had know idea what that was but a quick check of the explanation and now I do:

Though as with all automated checkers it’s not right 100% of the time, I’ve found it right most of the time. Add to that the ability to prompt you when you are submitting a form without running a check, makes it a great tool if you do any writing online.

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• After the Deadline Brings Better Grammar and Spellchecking to Firefox, and It’s Awesome [Downloads] (lifehacker.com)
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Tonight my readers will get an extra post, I think. I’m sitting here at my computer working on my Project 365 Post and got distracted by the blogging service posterous. Its a simple blog engine that allows you to post from email. I signed up for an account when I first learned of the service. Wanting to get address mrj.posterous.com. I used it a few times but it never stuck. When I started my blog Geek With Kids I registered the domain geekwithkids.posterous.com as well, but until today I’ve never posted to it. There are two reasons I don’t think I’ve ever used this service. The fist is I like my posts being on my blog. Why should I have half a dozen different blogs spattered around the net? Second I usually don’t like posting my first draft of my entries, and a first draft is all I ever get on my phone’s keyboard.

So you are wondering what brings me to posterous today then, well it’s the ability to have it automatically repost you posts. So I send my entry to posterous and it then sends it to what ever other services I want. This seemed intriguing to me so I wanted to see how it worked. I thought about doing just a basic Test post. In-fact I had written it before thinking why not turn it into a review.

Posterous has the most basic sign up of any site I’ve ever used, you just email it. Send an email to post@posterous.com it sets up an address based on your email account and away you go. From then on you can post to that blog from that email address. You can use it without anymore setup. Of course if you want a different address or to add some advanced features then you need to Set a password using the link in the return email they send you. In less than 5 minutes anyone can have a blog that they can update from anywhere with just email.

Now the advanced feature I’m writing about to-day is the Autopost. The ability to take you posterous post and send them to other service. There are a bunch of supported services. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr are just a few. I’ve configured my account for just twitter and my blog to see what it will do. So now here is where my post will get a little strange. I’m going to post this review and then either edit the result or post a follow-up, after seeing posterous’s autopost functionality works. So stay tuned.

Posted via web from Geek With Kids

Setup is simple, after creating your account you are given a list of service they support. You select the service you want to back up, enter your credentials and away it goes. Where ever possible it uses Oath to authenticate so that you don’t have to trust backupify with your password. Though there are some services that don’t support this.  Once the service is registered it will backup, usually in the next 24 hours.

They haven’t announced costs yet, but they are committed to a Freemium model. There will a free account with limited storage and a Premium account with more features and storage that you pay for. What the exact differences will be they haven’t announced. What they have announced is that if you sign up before January 31 2010 you will get unlimited storage. This wont be true for the free accounts if you sign up after January 31.

For me it’s the unlimited storage that is most attractive, since I’m using it to backup our family flickr account. It’s nice to get 2 backups for t It’s nice to know that all the photos on my flickr are on a second server in the cloud. I’m also using it for my blog, facebook, Gmail, Google Docs and more.

The data is stored in XML and they have a simple Archive interface for retrieving the data. They are working on automated restores for the different services. Though for some services like Twitter there wouldn’t really be a way to restore your past tweet since the twitter API doesn’t support dated tweets. They are as well as zip based downloads.

My only complaints with the service aren’t really complaints. I wish they supported more sites. IMAP based email backup would be nice, plus the ability to set the backup schedule independently for each service.  I’m currently set for daily backups which is great for most sites but for my blog it’s increased my traffic by a few hundred meg a day. That shouldn’t be a problem for my hosting account now, but it might be as my blog grows. So it would be nice if I could limit that to once a week while keeping all my other services as daily.

I would recommend that all my readers who are using any cloud base services to sign up before the end of the month.

I started using picnik with flickr, it’s a convenient was to touch up your pictures, be it a quick resize,  crop or  rotate. From there I started using the Auto-fix and Red-Eye removal. Its quick and easy to use. It has a Standard Free Version and a Premium Paid version. The free version is very powerful and probably enough for most users.  Its the clever why that they integrate the premium features with the interface that entices you to upgrade.  For use it was the Halloween themed effects that moved use from to the Premium users.

Of course once we started using the premium version it became clear that it was worth the $25 (usd) it costs a year.  Some of my favourite features are:

• Clone:  Which lets you copy another part of your picture. Great for removing a stray object from your picture.
• Premium Fonts: The amount of fonts they give you access to is astounding.
• Open your photos from wherever they are: You can pull your photos from almost any web site.
• Save to…: You can save your pictures to your computer or to other sites like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and more.
• Collage: the preset Collage templates allows you to make great collages with just a couple clicks of the mouse

Overall it’s one of the best image editing applications I’ve used online or off. If you use any online photo sharing services you should take a look at Picnik for your editing needs. I would go as to say even if you don’t share your photos online it might be worth a look.

I try to keep Jacob away from commercial, it’s bad enough that most shows are nothing more then glorified commercials, I don’t need to add to that with commercial television or excess commercials on the web. So though treehouse might be on the TV it wont be on the web again anytime soon. Though I think I’m going to have to find some more sites that Jacob and I could go to for our computer time.

At the time I thought wow, I’m only less then 100 days from being on twitter for 1000 days, that’d make a good blog post. I wonder if I could find my very first post. A quick google search later and I found www.shotbeak.com/oldtweets/index.php and with I found my first ever tweet sent 1000 days ago was:

Thinking about going to sleep… Wondering if this thing’s on!!!

Not a very inspirational first tweet. It didn’t get much better from there:

When you first start Pivot after it’s finished being installed you see a Styled web browser. The page that loads is the Pivot Collection Gallery, with around 24 samples. These use Microsoft Partner data to demonstrate the power of Pivot.  Some of the sample collections they have are Sports Illustrated Covers, Wikipedia, MLB Athletes, MLB Teams,  World Leaders and more.

At first glance it looks very cool, but while I was going through the samples and I was looking at the NHL Teams and the standings for the teams are from months ago. Which means that the sample was put together with the stats of that day, but in this day of the Real Time Web it hurts the impact of the demo. It makes me question how hard is it to have Dynamic collections that keep up today. Now I understand that this is a beta and only sample collections, but I guess I just hoped for more.

As I began exploring Pivot and writing this post it became clear that its strength will be how easy it is to great and update collections. If collections are static things, they are great for Historical data, but going forward we expect up-to-date information. I’m also not sure how you choose what you see when you look at the different Items in your collection. Overall though I’m excited to see how Pivot grows with more users and more collections.

I was  debating holding off my first post until I had had a chance to look how you create collections, but decided that’s what followups are for. Also I have an invitation code I can share with readers if they are interested. Just post a comment requesting one and I’ll get back to you with it.

Ping.FM

www.ping.fm/

From day one PingFM has had a very simple web interface, with your Social networks on the left and a big box with for typing your updates on the right. Below the update box where the services and tools available from ping.fm. This section has expanded considerably since I started using the service.

The web interface is nice, but my primary way of interacting with Ping.FM has always been through E-mail and IM. When I’m out and about and I want to post an update I usually send a quick email to my ping.fm address and out it goes, if it contains a picture that’s added either embedded in the post, on services that support it, or as a link for people to follow. All media you post is linked to your account and placed in a My Media section so that you can go back and check them out. This is a very nice feature.

Another feature I’ve come to appreciate is that url shortening service with stats. When you post a URL with Ping.FM is shortens and in your recent posts list you have access to the stats for each links. Of course the recent posts is limited to your last 25 posts and the links can be listed for the last 30, though if you save the link to the stats page you can still see the stats.

Of course there is the added factor that I’ve written a Ping.FM Desktop client. I’ll be posting a link to install it and a full write-up about it once the Application key is approved for users other then my own.

Hellotxt

hellotxt.com

I’m not sure if it’s the colour scheme or just that I found it cluttered, I never took to the web interface for hellotxt. This really shouldn’t have been a barrier of use as I have never really posted to any of these services from the web interface. Though hellotxts interface does have one compelling reason to use it, it includes a Recent Friend Activity. So that you can see what the people you are following are posting without having to go to each social network individually.

On interesting thing I noticed while preparing this post is that there is a new interface in the works. It seems like a nice upgrade to the interface, much cleaner. Its an interface I could see using.

There is support for including Pictures, Video, music and even user suggested funny quotes right from the new web interface. Another big feature is the ability to schedule your posts. So that you can get it all ready and then have it go out when you aren’t in front of your computer. This is a feature I wish was available in Ping.FM.

Conclusion

Both services support over 45 different sites, though I think hellotxt has more overall, but that really doesn’t matter. They could do 100 sites if they aren’t the sites you are using then the service is useless. Of course for me both these services cover my social networks, so how do I choose. I was hoping that writing this would give me a clear winner, it hasn’t. All it has done is made me think that I really need to give hellotxt another chance, Perhaps even write a desktop application for posting to it. After all I’m always trying to think of something to write.

Ninite

www.ninite.com

Its all about being simple, the website lets you choose applications by categories. Each category has between 3 and 9 applications to choose from. When you are done your section you download a single executable. You run it and it installs all the selected applications. There are a limited number of apps but they have all but one of the applications I included in my Apps for a new system post back in may. The only one missing is a commercial application so that isn’t bad.

The installs themselves seem to be done in sequential order and seem pretty fast. There also seems to be plans for a business orientated version with additional features and of course a fee. It will be interesting to see what the looks like.

Allmyapps

www.allmyapps.com

Is a much more ambitious concept, instead of being just a way to build a custom installer for your favourite programs. Its a site for managing and installing applications. It consists of the website for selecting the application and a desktop client that does the actual install. You can install all the applications in your List in one go, it also provides allows you to do one click installs for all the applications in its repository. Which seems to contain a lot of programs, including games.

Another added benefit is support for multiple operating system.  The site also supports Ubuntu Linux, and though I don’t have a computer running Linux to test it on, there seems to be more Linux applications then windows.  If face as I looked over the blog and other parts of the site, it would seem that Windows isn’t there primary focus, which could explain why some of the Windows applications I installed weren’t up today. There also seems to have support for commercial applications in the interface, though everything I looked at for windows was free.

Conclusion

Both of these sites make setting up a new computer easier, Lets look at each and what I liked and didn’t like. I want to touch on one of the biggest strengths and weaknesses of these tools. They are both wrappers for installers. For both you choose the applications you want download the wrapper and execute it. It then goes online to get each program you selected and installs them using default selections. These is great in theory but in practice it can fall short. First off if the repository used by the application is out of date you don’t get the newest versions. Second the thought of adding another few hundred meg to my post install downloads seems like it could be excessive if you are setting up more then one computer. These could be solved if there was a cache that could be used instead of always pulling from the Internet.

In the end I’m impressed with both these Sites and will be watching them in the future to see what surprises they have in store for us.