December 22, 2008 - Reading time: 2 minutes

Lately I’ve been working on consolidating all my Contacts into Gmail. During this process I ran into this maddening error message:

Oops. An unknown error occurred while importing your contacts.

Grrr! It’s enough to make a pacifist like myself want to pummel baby penguins! Just kidding, PETA.

All I want to do is import a CSV full of contact information, and that error message drove me crazy until I figured out a workaround. Here are two possible ways that I’ve found to work around this problem: Read more

December 20, 2008 - Reading time: 12 minutes

One of the things I think of every single working day is how great a platform OS X is for software development. Now, take that with a grain of salt… I do development in a LAMP dev shop running Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP, but we’re running some enormous sites (LowFares.com, IdentityTheft.com, and Low.com). All of those technologies are open-source, and (in my opinion) very well suited for serious commercial sites. Java is fine if you need to send a man to the moon, but it you just need to say “Hello World!”, you still might be dealing with a rocket launch… Read more

December 19, 2008 - Reading time: 3 minutes

If you had any thoughts of entertaining productivity this weekend, kick them to the curb with these two amazingly addictive, flash-based Tower Defense games.

Bloons Tower Defense 3

You’re a monkey. No, wait, you just control a bunch of monkeys. No, wait, you control a bunch of monkeys, cannons, spike shooters, frost towers, and an assortment of other wacky tools in a desperate attempt to pop balloons (or bloons). Lots of them. MILLIONS of them. Read more

December 18, 2008 - Reading time: 8 minutes

Podcasting is the practice of distributing media files online for subscribers to view. Since it is Internet-based, it is similar to simply posting on a website. Many podcasts are distributed as episodic content – such as weekly radio or television shows.

This brief tutorial is focused toward people who have never created an audio podcast before. I put it together for an electronic music class that I teach, and thought it could be of use here on TipsFor.us.

Required Tools

Software

• Digital Audio Workstation Software

If you’re only recording speech with little or no music, you likely won’t need software like this. Something like Audacity will suffice. For more complicated editing and mixing, you’re going to need digital audio workstation (DAW) software. Read more

December 17, 2008 - Reading time: 9 minutes

Update: There’s now a third, very simple method available – who.hasfiles.com – see more info.

Google Blogger is a great and easy way to create your own blog, but one nagging problem is the limitations on uploads. Sure you can upload images and video, but not other common file types such as MP3, DOC, ZIP, and PDF.

There are a number of ways around this limitation. I’m going to show you two of them today.

I had three requirements in mind when finding a solution:

1. None of the methods should cost a single penny!
2. The method should allow for direct linking to files, not going through a middle-man.
3. The process should be as simple as possible. Read more

December 16, 2008 - Reading time: 2 minutes

I think I finally found a good solution to my dilemma. The best part is, it’s open source and available for windows, linux, and mac.

Songbird - DEAD, unfortunately

I had tried it in its early beta, and decided to try it again. It can easily do everything iTunes does (except for all the stuff you don’t want iTunes to do). Any feature it’s missing is typically available as a plugin. It has some flaws, but they are already set for later releases (such as CD burning, but heck why not just use infra recorder for everything). Just take a look at the features and “coming soon” section of the page. Read more