TechLifeWeb

LEGO was one of my favorite things growing up because you can quickly change things around if you don’t like the build.

I’ve always wanted to make a stop motion movie with LEGO. Minifigs, the scale and the snap together nature of LEGO lends itself naturally to this process.

I was recently given this kit and as it included 4 mini-figs I thought it would be fun to make a movie. While it was really fun to do it does take a ton of patience.

Enjoy.

It is no secret that I love Evernote.  I use it to keep track or and remember all kinds of things. On of my favorite things to do is come up with new ways to use it.  Having that secret email address is a wonderful thing and makes it dead simple to save off link shares from Google+. You may not  yet be using Google+ but you will be soon so here is how to get this done:

• Open Evernote and click Tools –> Account Info
• Here you will see your special evernote email address, copy it down (hint: right click on it and click copy)
• Now go to Google+ and, under ‘In your Circles’ on the right, click ‘view and edit’
• Click on the first circle on the left to create a new one
• Name your Circle Evernote or some other short name
• Click ‘Create Circle with 1 member’

Now, when ever you want to save something to Evernote you simply share it with that one Circle.  This has the side benefit of also having all these articles in your Evernote Circle on Google+ kind of like a bookmark but also letting you share them with your larger audience after you read the article and find it worth sharing.

One of my favorite things on Twitter is when people post links to sites that they have created or have some interest in. Many of these happen when you aren’t looking or go by too fast to catch. One big example, since I live on the west coast, are the east coasters scanning news when they get up and post links. Those I’d never catch because of the time difference.

So I decided to do something about it. Thanks to Twitter offering up my feed via RSS and Yahoo! offering their wonderful Pipes tool I was able to build a filter and subscribe to a feed that gives me only ‘tweets’ with links in them. If you have a Twitter account you can use it too. Go to

http://pipes.yahoo.com/techlifeweb/twitterlinkmonitor and enter your Twitter user name in the field provided then click Run Pipe.

Now, here is the tricky part, when you get your results you want to subscribe via email. Why? Because your twitter timeline goes by fast. Each time your RSS reader polls for links it only gets the most recent ones from Twitter. So if you want to monitor feeds overnight then you either have to leave your RSS reader open and actively polling over night or you can simply subscribe via email and then build a filter in your email program (if you don’t want all these things filling you inbox). Gmail’s threading pulls them all together so I haven’t yet built a filter.

Note: If you don’t have a Yahoo! account or don’t want to create one, you can grab the RSS from the link provided after you run the Pipe and then go to http://sendmerss.com/ and use their service to subscribe via email.