Why Post From a Blackberry?

Dave Winer has recently switched to a Blackberry and is (re-)discovering what it means to read news and post to your blog from a mobile device. As they say, “What’s old is new again!”. I’m glad to see some renewed attention in this area; there is still a lot of room for improvement and innovation here. Dave hits a few good points, in response to the hypothetical question of posting from a Blackberry: I’ve seen a few blog posts asking why would you want to post from a Blackberry? After all, you could carry a laptop with you, and of…

Continue Reading →

Microsoft Excel Web Queries (Screencast)

Today I took some free time and created another screencast, this time covering a really cool feature of Microsoft Excel: Web Queries. Web queries let you import data directly from a web site. This is a great tool for importing table-based data for your own analysis or sorting. In the example recorded today, I use Excel to fetch the

Continue Reading →

Getting a Job in Silicon Valley

Guy Kawasaki has a great piece today titled Everything You Wanted to Know About Getting a Job in Silicon Valley But Didn’t Know Who to Ask: Many people ask me for advice about getting a job in Silicon Valley, so here’s the inside scoop. Not everyone will agree with this advice, and some will outright deny what I’m saying, but if you use these tips you will stand head and shoulders above most candidates. I won’t reiterate the whole list here, but this is definitely worth reading. He starts the list with a great tip: “Love what the company does”.…

Continue Reading →

TypePad Mobile Launched

About 5 months after acquiring SplashBlog, TypePad today announced the release of TypePad Mobile: Today we’re excited to announce the release of TypePad Mobile, a free application for your Palm, Windows Mobile or Symbian Series 60 smartphone that lets you post photos and entries to your TypePad blogs and photo albums with just a few clicks. I expect the new software will work very well. SplashData has a history of writing solid Palm OS applications and with this software being integrated directly into TypePad, should provide a smooth interaction for the user. I don’t have a TypePad account, so can’t…

Continue Reading →

Going Adobe-Free for PDFs

After dealing with slow startup times and constant update nags with Adobe Acrobat, I’ve decided to take the plunge and go “Adobe-free” for my PDF support. Instead, I’m now running: Foxit Reader is a free, lightweight PDF reader; I’ve just started using it and it seems to work just fine; it’s been able to read and properly render all the PDFs I’ve thrown at it so far CutePDF Writer is a PDF printer, allowing you to create PDFs from any Windows application; I’ve used this for a few years now and it’s rock solid Notice I didn’t say “Adobe-free”…I am…

Continue Reading →