TechLifeWeb

Sites that I found interesting for April 9th 2009 through April 15th 2009:

• Evernote + Twitter = Instant Memories – Now you can send your tweets directly into Evernote.
• MoWeS Portable – CH Software – MoWeS stands for the three letter abbreviation Modular Webserver System and makes it possible, to run a webserver based on Apache, MySQL and PHP from an USB Stick or any other writable media (harddrive, flash cards etc.) without installation under Windows (98 to Vista).
• 10 Recent Scientifically Solved Mysteries – Epidaurus Theater Acoustics, Crystal Skulls, New England’s Dark Day, Face on Mars, The Barreleye Fish, Solving Checkers, The Unknown Titanic Child, Ancient Tablet Deciphered, Sharks Virgin Birth, Flight of the Bumblebee

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 November 15th 2008 through November 17th 2008:

• USB 3.0 to Deliver a Tenfold Speed Increase – Tighten your seat belts. Data transfer is going into overdrive as the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus, better known as USB, prepares to make a tenfold jump in speed.
• Windows 7’s new “play all” decoders, encoders and transcoding capabilities – If you have had any theories Microsoft was conspiring with the media conglomerates to protect their interests and not the user’s, throw them in the bin, pour jet fuel and remotely detonate them since Microsoft can’t be any bolder than building in DivX and Xvid native support in Windows 7
• Survival Tips for Those Laid Off or About to Be –

Sites that I found interesting for September 5th 2008

• Play With Spider – Flash 3D – An experimental project to make a realistic and natural spider in Flash, combining math and graphics.
• Stormpulse / Hurricane tracking, mapping – Pretty cool site for tracking hurricanes and tropical storms
• USB drive letter manager – USBDLM – USBDLM is a Windows service that gives control over Window's drive letter assignment for USB drives. Running as service makes it independent of the logged on user's privileges, so there is no need to give the users the privilege to change drive letters.