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Facebook has finally added the support for HTTPS protocol on their social networking site. HTTPS and SSL work together to encrypt the communication between the sever and the client. Most importantly the session cookie is encrypted which means session hijackers can no longer easily take over you session. Also the recently popular Firefox plugin Firesheep won't be able to hijack your session either.
Facebook has had the ability to run the HTTPS protocol for a while now, but you needed something to keep you on it. You could force the conenction but a link back to Facebook would land you on the regular site again. The new HTTPS setting will be rolling out over the next couple weeks. It will be available in the Account Setting under Account Security.
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Beer has got to be one of the oldest beverages known to man. Civilizations have been making it for centuries and I happen to love it. I wouldn't have thought that someone could completely rethink the way we pour our beer but it seems someone has. The current tap systems pours beer from the top down to the bottom of the glass. This has to be done slowly or the beer will foam up too much releasing too much CO2 making for a flat beer. This has been eliminated by the Bottom Up system that pours the beer from the bottom allowing you to pour beer much more quickly.
The Bottoms Up uses a special glass that has a hole in the bottom which is sealed after pouring by a little disc which is magnetic called "The MAG." The best part about the little MAG plug is that it can be branded for advertising. So the major improvement of this system is the reduction of waisted beer and the speed of the pour. The distributor has a video on their website where they pour 55 beers in one minute!
They are of course selling these things to commercial bars and stadiums, but they are also making a consumer version! I think my Kegerator could use a Bottom Up system what do you think? There are only a couple things I don't like about this system. First off you have to drink your beer out of those plastic cups which is never my first choice. Second if you put your beer down on something or you accidentally grabbed the bottom of the cup you could punch the plug out spilling your beer everywhere. My last concern is the cost of the cups and plugs. You have to purchase their special cups which is how they get you I imagine but I can image they are not that cheap to produce since they have a magnet in each of them. Other than those concerns I think it's brilliant. I have no idea what one of these things cost, but perhaps I'll contact them and ask but it can't be cheap. Check out the Bottoms up in action!
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Google Voice is great and has some great features, but before today they only allowed you to get a new Google Voice phone number and forward it to your current cell and home phones. Well Google has just announced that they are going to offer the ability to port your current number over to Google Voice.
What does this mean? Well Porting your number is kind of like changing cell phone carriers. It will basically cancel your current service plan with your provider and given the phone number to Google. Since Google isn't cell phone carrier you still need service. So you then get a new service plan with a new number. You then forward Google Voice to the new number.
Confused? Yeah it's a bit confusing. Think of it like this. You have a phone number that everyone has and you want to keep that number. By porting your number you are basically replacing your old Google Voice number with the number from your cell carrier, the one everyone has. By doing this you have to get a new number and plan to make it happen. You then place it as your new forwarding phone number. Still confused? Maybe a Google video will help.
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Do you use a specific system preference all the time and keep having to open system preferences and navigate to it and wish there was a fast way. Well there is. You can create an alies or shortcut ,is it's known in the Windows world, to your often used system preferences.
All you have to do is navigate from your computer's root directory System>>Library>>PreferencePlanes. Then all you have to do is hold down Command+Option while dragging your desired preference plane icon. You can then place this alies anywhere giving you the ability launch specific preference planes without having to open the main system preferences menu.
Confused? See Lifehackers video on how to do this.
Another quick tip concerning system preferences is after you have opened system preferences once you can right click the icon on the dock and be presented with the contextual menu that now has a shortcut to all the options in system preferences. I discovered this a while ago and comes in handy now and again.
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Two Weeks ago I wrote about Skifta, a handy little Android app that could stream your home media right to your phone. I said then that I wasn't aware of an iOS equal and even though AudioGalaxy only does music, unlike Skifta, it does music really well.
AudioGalaxy is a free iPhone app that has a desktop helper that goes along with it. After creating an account and installing the helper application it will then begin to index all your music. You can then launch the iOS app and browse all your music by Artist, Albums, Genres, and Playlist all of which are taken from your iTunes library. The AudioGalaxy app also works on a playlist queue type model allowing you to add songs to your song queue as well as artists and whole albums. You can of course review your list of queued songs, edit, and even save it as a new Playlist if you would like.
AudioGalaxy also has a web app as well so if you're on a friends computer or your own you can access all your music right there All you have to do is login to their website and start adding songs to your music queue. It couldn't get much simpler so give AudioGalaxy a try.
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When you put videos on the web for people to see what format do you put them in? You have tons of options and depending on what browser or device the user is using determines what format they need in order to view it. Everyone including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Flash are trying to push their video formats on the world. Google has already said they are going to stop supporting H.264 in Chrome sometime in the future, which is currently around 90% of internet videos. So how do you make sure the users can watch your videos no mater what they have installed and no matter what browser or device they are using? Vid.ly, a brilliant little URL shortener that does all the work for you.
Vid.ly works by allowing you to upload your video to their servers. They then encode the video into several formats. After they finish encoding the video they present you with a short url that can be tweeted and sent directly to mobile phones, an embed code for websites, and a direct link to the FLV for Flash players. When someone tries to play your video vid.ly will automatically detect their device and browser and deliver the appropriate video.
This take all the guess work out of the equation for you and your viewers can enjoy video delivered in a format they can view. This is really the best of both worlds and perhaps the future of internet video unless everyone can agree on a video standard which is unlikely.
TechCrunch has an interview with the co-founder, which has some interesting conversation on the current internet video situation and they have a Beta Code
TCRUNCH2011 if you want to try vid.ly.
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One thing I don't like about iCal is every time you add an event it's like filling a form. You have to fill out the event title, location, and time and it seems like work to me so I end up adding less stuff to my calendar because I don't want to mess with it. Quickcal lets you add events to iCal in plain english letting you type out an event like you would describe it to someone and it creates the event for you. The default shortcut to activate the Quickcal menu is Command + Shift + C but can be changed if you would like.
Quickcal was already a dashboard widget but not everyone likes them and I happen to be one of them. This is why the developer of the widget has released this menu bar version for the dashboard haters like me.
Quickcal has a couple tricks up it's sleeve other than just event creation. You can also create a tasks by typing something like "todo – get stuff done" or "pay taxes before 4/15." You can also switch calendars by simply starting to typing the name of the calendar and Quickcal will pull it right up, letting you add an event to that calendar. Quickcal also adds alarms for all events as well as one based on how far out the event is. So by default all events will alert you 5 minutes before the event happens, events a week away will remind you a day before, and events a month away will remind you a week ahead of time. Makes you realize how weird the default alert setting in iCal are because Quickcal's setup makes a lot more sense.
Quickcal is a free download so go and check it out.