TechLifeWeb

Sites that I found interesting for March 10th 2009 through March 13th 2009:

• Footage from 2/3" 3k Scarlet with 100mm Red prime – So cool!
• Selective Twitter Status on Facebook – A simple hashtag added to your twitter status will send your status over to Facebook. Cool for sending other things over to Facebook like TwitPics and other 3rd party Twitter tools that might not have FB integration.
• 4 Annoying Twitter Myths –

One of my favorite applications for Twitter is TweetDeck. TweetDeck comes as close to my idea of the Ultimate Twitter Client as there is. It lets me set up groups and watch keywords and arrange a sort of dashboard to keep track of everything.

The main downside to this is if something goes wrong. Once you set up a group and add lots of people only to later accidentally delete it you will know what I mean. All that time down the drain. Additionally, the settings are local to your computer. If for some reason you have to do a clean reinstall of Windows or you move to another computer, all your carefully crafted settings are left.

To remedy this situation I wrote 2 Windows batch scripts. One for back up and the other to restore. They are meant to be run from a USB memory stick or other location but you can put them anywhere.

Running the backup script will create a subdirectory in the location where you run the file and copy all your TweetDeck settings there. For example, if you put the backup and restore scripts in a folder called h:\backup and your run the backup script, it will create a folder called h:\backup\tweedeckbackup and copy into it all your TweetDeck settings.

The restore script does the reverse, copying files from the special subdirectory (h:\backup\tweedeckbackup in my example above) into where you have TweetDeck installed.

The scripts are contained in this zip file. Unzip it to your USB stick or anywhere you want to put the files.

tdbackup.zip

The scripts are commented so you can see what they are doing. Open them in notepad if you want to see how they work. I have used them on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

Update to clarify restoring:

If you run the backup script from a USB memory stick and you want to move them to a fresh install, first install TweetDeck. Then run the restore script. This will put back all of your preferences including notification settings, groups, search queries, layout and colors.

UPDATE: 28JAN09 4:20PM

I just discovered the wrong versions of the files were included in the zip file. They should work but I redid them to work better with network drives and be more efficient.

UPDATE: 16MAR10 11:40PM

I discovered some settings were not being backed up. I believe these are new settings that were not present in Tweetdeck when I wrote the original script. These center around all the settings related to the different accounts you may have set up through Tweetdeck. All of these should now be preserved.

Sites that I found interesting for August 20th 2008 through August 26th 2008:

• Microsoft Photosynth creates 3D panoramas from 2D photos – Kudos to Microsoft for rolling out a tool that's likely to amuse you for hours on end: It's called Photosynth, and it's free for everyone with a Windows Live or MS Passport account.
• American Offers In-Flight Internet – American Airlines passengers will now have Wi-Fi access on some flights. The airline said Wednesday that it has finally launched its in-flight Internet access service via Wi-Fi on 15 of its 767-200 airplanes. The service, called Gogo, will be offered on nonstop flights between New York and San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, and New York and Miami. The cost is $12.95 per flight. Passengers will be able to sign up when they boot up their browsers.
• Apple hit with class-action lawsuit over iPhone 3G flakiness – A lawsuit has been filed against Apple over what the plaintiff is referring to as the "Defective iPhone 3G," which she hopes will become a class-action complaint. Alabama resident Jessica Alena Smith filed the complaint yesterday against the iPhone maker, alleging that the new iPhone's 3G performance and reliability has been subpar, despite the claims made by Apple's aggressive marketing campaign. Considering that a true fix has yet to be issued for users' 3G problems, this could just be the tip of the iPhone lawsuit iceberg.
• TweetDeck – TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.
• The 2008 Olympics Built out of Lego – Models of the Olympics in China made out of Lego! More than 300,000 Lego bricks and 4,500 Lego people were used to create the display, by the Hong Kong Lego User Group.