Drop Entrecards Like a Drunken Monkey Part II: Bauer-Power Entrecard Toolbar for Firefox

Yesterday I told you about my script that allows you to open Entrecard pages using a Windows hot key. That is pretty cool, but there is still something a little too manual about the hot key thing. Do you feel me?

I happened upon a Firefox toolbar that was released by Entrecard themselves, the only problem? It is only available for Firefox 3.0. I don’t know about you, but I am running version 3.5.1 right now. So I took the liberty of updating their Firefox toolbar for them so you can use it in the latest release for Firefox!

Behold, The Bauer-Power Entrecard Toolbar for Firefox 3.5.1! (Actually, it works for all 3.5 versions)

(Click Here to Download)

To install, just do the following:

1. Download Bauer-PowerEC_toolbar-1.0.xpi to your desktop
2. Drag it onto a running Firefox page
3. Ignore the warning about it not being signed
4. Restart Firefox

Now you can seriously drop Entrecards like a drunken monkey with the full blessing of Entrecard!

If you like this tool bar, please pass the word. I only ask that you link back to this post :-)

Technorati Tags: entrecard,dropper,firefox,toolbar

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Drop Entrecards Like Drunken Monkey Part I

I have been using Entrecard for a while. It doesn’t provide server crashing traffic, but it does help one important aspect of marketing which is “Branding.” A lot of SEO’s and bloggers understand some aspects of marketing, but one thing I rarely see talked about is the old fashion art of branding.

Ask yourself, how many times have you seen a product in the store, but didn’t buy it because you had “never heard of it” so you took a few steps to the right and purchased the well known BRAND? You see? It really does work! The idea is to get your name and logo out in as many places as possible to create a recognition for your brand. That is where Entrecard becomes handy. You can place your logo on hundreds of blogs to get your brand out there and in the minds of those surfing the interweb.

The key to Entrecard though is to drop a lot of cards. The more cards you drop, the more credits you earn which in turn can be used to purchase ad space on other blogs. This is where the process gets tedious as a mutha! Manually clicking on Entrecard widgets gets old fast.

I have good news though! I got the idea, and the code to make an Entrecard dropper program to help you drop cards on other blog sides quicker. The idea and code came originally from Alfred over at the TechiePortal.com. Please check out his site and subscribe to his RSS feed. He has lots of great tools and resources there.

My version can be downloaded here: (Bauer-Power Entrecard Dropper)

A lot of people got banned a few months ago for making “Auto dropper” scripts and websites. This utility is NOT an auto dropper! All it does is allows you to open up Entrecard user blogs one site at a time using a hot key (Windows + Z). That’s it! Therefore it doesn’t violate Entrecard Terms of Service.

Full instructions are included in the Readme file.

What Entrecard tools do you use/know of? Do you use Entrecard? What do you think of them getting bought out? Let me know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: entrecard,dropper,script,free,fast,drop,program

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Cool Free Screenshot Program

In my profession it seems that I am always taking screenshots. Lots of my friends love Snagit. In fact, I might go as far as to say they are the industry standard in screenshot software. The only problem is that it isn’t free. If money isn’t an object, then by all means buy it. I mean, it is a great product.

If money is an object however, then step right up. There are lots of free screenshot programs out there. Most of them, however, do little more than the built in ctrl+print Screen function built into Windows. Tools like Snagit allow you to capture a Windows, a region, or the whole screen, then add shapes, arrows, text etc to the captured image.

This free program I found does that too, and is completely open source. It is called Greenshot. Here are it’s basic features from their website:

• Save a screenshot or a part of the screen to a file within a second.
• Apply text and shapes to the screenshot.
• Offers capture of window, region or full screenshot.
• Supports several image formats.

Here is a little screen shot I took real quick:

Like most screen capture programs, there are hot keys that allow you to take images of your desktop quickly. For instance, here are some hot key combinations for Greenshot:

Capture Region	Print Screen
Capture Last Region	Shift + Print Screen
Capture Window	Alt + Print Screen
Capture Full Screen	Ctrl + Print Screen

What screen capture software do you use? Is it free? If not how much is it? Post a link to your favorite in the comments.

Technorati Tags: free,alternative to,snagit,screenshot,screen,shot,capture

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Need To Move Files With The Quickness?

I ran into a little application today that I thought was interesting. Lately I have been doing a lot of file transferring, copying etc. In fact, the other day I wrote about a file copier that does bit level copying and is a Windows port of rsync called DeltaCopy.

What if you need to just do a simple one time copy though? Just copy and paste right? Sure, if you have all day. What if you need those files copied faster? Then I have the tool for you. It is called FastCopy, and like most things I write about, it is 100% free!

Here are a list of features from their website:

• FastCopy is the Fastest Copy/Delete Software on Windows.
• It supports UNICODE and over MAX_PATH(260byte) pathname files.
• It automatically selects different method according to whether Source and Destination Directories are in the same or different HDD.
• Because Reading/Writing are processed with no OS cache at all, other applications aren't easy to become heavy.
• It can bring out Reading/Writing performance that is close to device limit.
• Include/Exclude Filter (UNIX Wildcard style) can be specified.
• It runs lightly, because MFC is not used. (made by Win32 API and C Runtime only)
• You can modify this software, because all source codes have been opened to the public in the BSD license

What I like about it is the fact that you can carry it around on a USB stick (Don’t you just love portable apps?) or you can install it. It doesn’t matter!

Here is a screen shot of it. In this I am copying files from the local drive of one server to a file share on another:

Unlike regular copy and paste, you can also change the way you copy as well. Such as file sync, differential, overwrite all, etc. If you have to make regular file copies, FastSync has command line options as well for scripting goodness!

Know of any other fast file copy utilities? What software do you use to move large amounts of data around your network? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: free,fast,file,sync,copy,windows,script,fastcopy

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Fun With Software RAID on Windows Server 2008

At my company we just got a server back from the field. It happened to be our backup server for our Houston office. My project is to re-purpose it and configure it as the backup server for our colocation facility in Denver Colorado. Easy as pie right? Just slap a fresh install of Windows server 2008 on there and call it a day!

Well it turns out this particular server, which is an HP Proliant DL360 G4 only has two SATA hard drives, and the SATA controller doesn’t support hardware RAID. Damn! Who the hell ordered that? I am a big proponent of NOT sending out a production server without some sort of fault tolerance. I mean, what happens if the hard drive fails out in Denver? Now I have to attempt a remote install of Windows, and reconfigure everything from scratch. No thanks!

So what are my options here? I could order a hardware RAID controller, but that costs money, and we have no budget, or I can configure software RAID through disk management. Guess which one I did?

To create a mirror in Disk management is really easy. All you have to do is the following:

1. In Disk manager, in the lower half of the screen, click the square labeled Disk 0.
2. Right click on the square and select Convert to dynamic disk
3. After it is done converting to dynamic disk, make sure your second hard drive is unformatted, and unallocated.
4. Now right click on your system partition on Disk 0 and select Add Mirror, now select Disk 1 as the destination for the mirror.
5. Do the same thing with any other partitions you have.
6. You will now see that the mirrors are syncing.

Hurray! Now we have some fault tolerance! Sure, write operations will be a little slower, but at least your data is safe.

Now if something happens to Disk 1, not biggie, you can break the mirror, slap a new drive in, and recreate the mirror. So what happens if Disk 0 fails? Here is where the ultimate in ass pain is found for Windows software RAID. You now have to create a floppy boot disk so you can boot to your mirrored drive to break the mirror, install a new Disk 0 and recreate the mirror. Yes, I said Floppy! Don’t worry, I said WTF too!

To make your floppy, do the following. I used an external USB floppy drive for this. If your server has a built in floppy drive, well then yours is older than mine, and your in better shape.

1. Format your floppy using the quick option
2. Open a command prompt
3. Run: MKDIR A:\BOOT
4. Run: XCOPY /H c:\bootmgr A:\
5. Run: REG SAVE HKLM\BCD00000000 A:\BOOT\BCD

Now if Disk 0 fails, you can boot up with the floppy and select…

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 – Secondary Plex

…and boot up to Disk 1. Now you can break the mirror to Disk 0, replace Disk 0, and recreate the mirror. Awesome! You’re not done yet though. If you reboot, you will still need the boot disk to boot until you fix the boot sector on Disk 0. To do that you can restore the boot sector using a little utility I found called EasyBCD from Neosmart Technologies. They have a boot sector restore. Just point it to A:\boot\BCD and select restore. Bam! Done! Now all is right with the world, and your server is running again!

If any of you have successfully made a boot cd from a 2008 Boot Floppy I am all ears. So far, I have been unsuccessful in making one. I can’t believe that in this day and age we still have to use floppy disks!

Have you had to use any software RAID in your environment? What kind of tools/procedures do you use to recover from a drive failure? Let me know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: windows,server 2008,software,raid,mirror,dynamic disk,recover,how to,boot floppy,bootdisk

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Found P0rn… At Tacobell?

I had lunch with my coworker today at Tacobell, and I decided to order their “Volcano Box” for $5.99. Before I go any further, I realize this has nothing to do with geekiness, or technology, but I thought I would share it with you anyway. Also, before I proceed, you must first get your head out of the gutter and down into the sewer where mine is or else this will just not be that funny.

So anyway, I get my Volcano box, and here is what I see initially:

No big deal right? Just an ordinary box of delicious Tex-Mex ready to be devoured right? Then I look a little closer and I start to snicker a bit:

Okay, a little funny, but then mid way through eating my food I see this along the side and I completely loose it!

Seriously Tacobell? Did you have to go there? The entire meal I couldn’t help but think of this Digital Short from SNL:

Technorati Tags: tacobell,porn,dick in a box

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The Hak5 Forums Got Hacked

This morning I got a nice little email from the administrators at the Hak5 forums. I have mentioned Hak5 many times in my posts. They run a pretty cool IPTV show about technology, systems administration and network security. They also have their own forums, and that is where the attack happened. Because of the attack, their database containing user information and passwords was compromised, so they are encouraging all users to reset their passwords immediately.

Here is the email I received this morning:

On July 20th, 2009 the server hosting Hak5.org and the Hak5 forums was hacked into and defaced via an exploit on a unrelated system. During this time the forum database was accessed and as such, passwords (which are linked to your email address) used for forum accounts have been compromised. Please login to http://www.hak5.org/forums/ and change your password, more importantly if you used this password elsewhere you will need to change these passwords ASAP. We apologize for this inconvenience.

http://hak5.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=13730

If you are a Hak5 forum user, be sure to login and change your password as soon as possible. If by chance you use that username and password combination on other sites be sure to change your passwords there as well.

Technorati Tags: hak5,forum,hacked

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Free Alternative To SureSync – Meet DeltaCopy!

One of the many tools my company uses to backup file share from remote servers is a pretty awesome program called SureSync. It is pretty cool, you have a server with a number of relations, and it lets you do bit level file synchronization across the network, or in our case, across the country. If bandwidth is an issue, like it is with my company, it also allows for file compression.

If you are a Linux admin, this may sound like a familiar Open Source program called rsync right? Basically yes, except with SureSync you have to pay for the server license, as well as a license for each client you have to backup.

Well, we are currently maxed out at my company. We are backing up 21 file servers across the country with SureSync, but it so happens that I need to add a few more. The only problem? No money! That’s when awesome open source comes to play.

Our network is mostly Windows, so I needed something like rsync. How about an rsync port for Windows? I found a program called DeltaCopy that provides a Windows wrapper for the tried and true rsync program! Here is a description from their website:

In general terms, DeltaCopy is an open source, fast incremental backup program. Let's say you have to backup one file that is 500 MB every night. A normal file copy would copy the entire file even if a few bytes have changed. DeltaCopy, on the other hand, would only copy the part of file that has actually been modified. This reduces the data transfer to just a small fraction of 500 MB saving time and network bandwidth.

Here is a list of features:

• Incremental backup - Copies part of the file that is actually modified
• Task scheduler - Profiles in DeltaCopy can run based on a schedule
• Email notification - Administrators can receive email confirmation on successful as well as failed transfers
• One-click restore - Backed up files can be easily restored.
• Windows friendly environment - No need to manually modify configuration files or play around with command line options.
• File Compression – As with rsync, DeltaCopy provides an option for compressing data before sending it across the wire to conserve bandwidth

On a basic level, DeltaCopy does everything I currently use SureSync for including sending me notifications of successful jobs as well as failures.

Do you currently use a program like SureSync or DeltaCopy? I want to know what you guys use to sync files across the network? Robocopy perhaps? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: windows,port,rsync,gui,suresync,alternative,file,sync,sompression,free

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Zombie Attacks Coming Soon!!

Now I’m sure none of you have been wondering where I’ve been lately but that’s ok because you’re not going to find out anyway. But I am no longer known as MrEpicFail. Why you ask? I changed this because my new MakeMeaSammich.net isn’t just about Epic Fails anymore. So in light of that I figured it was best to change to something else even more awesome. TheEpicChocobo.

Now lets get right into this here. We all know that zombies aren’t real… Ok well most of us know zombies aren’t real and for those of you just now finding out for the first time. I truly am sorry for you having to find out this way. So now you can just place this shattered dream next to you finding out Santa isn’t real.

That doesn’t mean that they won’t be real one day. But what I find disturbing is that according to resources we has humanity have been researching how to create zombies for quite some time and only just recently like this year really started looking up how to kill these zombies!! Seriously wouldn’t you think we’d want to know how to kill something before we’d want to create it. Apparently no.

Get your info for Zombie Attacks here:

Google Chart

Zombie Attack News

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Entrecard Sells Out

I just got an email with the following notice for Entrecard users stating that they have just been purchased by Zip Runner. Here is the email:

Dear Entrecarders,

It is with great excitement that I announce Entrecard.com, Inc. has
been acquired by Los Angeles based ZipRunner Inc.

ZipRunner has the resources, vision, and dedication to Entrecard that
will allow it to grow in pursuit of the vision I laid out nearly two
years ago.

Moving forward, my relationship to Entrecard will be that of an
adviser, and I will help the good folks at ZipRunner take the whole
project to the next level. Expect a follow up communication from them very soon.

ZipRunner Inc. was chosen out of a number of potential suitors because
of the resources they can dedicate to the project, their exciting
vision for the company's future, and their understanding of social
media and the blogosphere.

I urge you all to look forward to a bigger, better Entrecard, and I
couldn't be more proud to bring it to this point before passing the
torch. I've heard first hand all the great things that are in store
for the company and it's members, and needless to say it has me quite
excited.

If you would like to keep in touch with me in the future, your can
find me at my new blog Ontrapranore.com where I look forward to
sharing my stories of entrepreneurship and starting/running internet
companies.

Whether you love or hate the decisions I've made for Entrecard in the
past, I always did the best I could to move the company forward given
the resources I had, and I always had the best interest of the members
in mind. Now, with new management and ownership stepping in, I urge
anyone who has left the service to give it another chance, and I urge
those who have been loyal members for days, weeks, months, or years to
look forward to a brighter future, a reliable and stable service, and
great new features and strategic direction.

Signing Off,
Graham Langdon
Founder of Entrecard

Ontrapranore

How do you think this will affect the Entrecard experience? Hit us up in the comments!

Technorati Tags: entrecard,sold,out,sell out,purchased,ziprunner

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Publish Videos To Multiple Video Sites At Once!

I like to make videos. You may not like to watch them too much, but still, I enjoy making them just in case you may change your mind :-P

I once saw an episode of Epic Fu on How To Make a Kick Ass Web Show, and one of their recommendations was to not upload your video to only one place, but to upload it to as many video sites as possible. That way you can maximize your exposure. The way they recommended doing that was by using the free service offered by a site called TubeMogul.

Here is a list of benefits from their website:

• Stunning Charts - Easily create charts that track videos and/or video publishers.
• Powerful Analysis Tools - Create custom groups of videos, video publishers and online video sites, and receive analytics by group.
  Universal Upload - Upload your videos to all major video sharing sites in one shot!
• Aggregated Analytics - Track online video analytics across online video sites including Google Video, MetaCafe, MySpace, AOL, Yahoo!, Revver, YouTube and more!
• Communication Tools - Effortlessly email charts to the recipients of your choosing.
• Data Export - Exports charts and other data to Excel.
• Ease of Use - Enjoy TubeMogul's intuitive user interface and easy to understand charts.

I grabbed this video from their home page. It is a video clip of Gary Vaynerchuck of Wine Library TV talking about how everyone should be using TubeMogul:

Do you know of any other sites like this that distribute your videos to multiple video sites, as well as provide you with aggregated data and analysis? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: upload,videos,multiple,sites,at one,batch upload,stats,analysis,tubemogul

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Twitter Spam in Real Life

Once again, if you didn’t catch the full Bauer-Power Episode 12 on Monday, here is another clip from it just by itself. In this clip, Sundance and I try to depict what Twitter Spam in Real Life would be like.

This one was sort of hard to shoot. We shot it on our lunch break at a nearby supermarket. We didn’t realize how noisy a supermarket was until we went there to shoot! Also I flubbed my line during the Sushi bit. We didn’t do another take because it was really noisy there, and there were lots of people hanging around staring at us (Creepy).

Anyway, here it is. Twitter Spam in Real Life!

Do you get spammed by keywords on Twitter? Do you feel like us in the video? How do you deal with it? Hit us up in the comments!

Technorati Tags: twitter,spam,real,life

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How To Setup a Joomla Website

If you guys didn’t see the full episode of Bauer-Power I posted yesterday, here is the short tutorial I made on how easy it is to setup a Joomla website in just a few minutes on 000Webhost.com.

Some things to note, the setup is very quick, but the upload of Joomla files takes FOREVER, and unzipping the Joomla files takes some time too! Other than that, a 12 year old girl could setup one of these sites!

Here is my video:

Have any of you setup Joomla? Know where to get some good templates? Know where you can get some good tutorials? Let me know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: joomla,how to,setup,install

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Bauer-Power Episode 12

The wife is out of town, so Sundance and I had the opportunity to do some filming in order to bring you this installment of our Bauer-Power videos!

In this episode I will show you how easy it is to setup a Joomla website on 000webhost.com, we take a look at what Twitter spam looks like in real life, and finally Sundance shows us his top ten Firefox plugins for web development!

We also decided to give chroma keying another try, as well as recording our voices with a USB desktop mic. We stopped doing that because it was an epic pain in Movie Maker, but is a piece of cake in Adobe Premier Elements!

Sit back, crack open a cold beer and talk some tech with us! Here is Episode 12:

As always, if you have any questions comments or concerns, hit us up in the comments!

Technorati Tags: joomla,how to,twitter,spam,firefox,plugins

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Get More Youtube Views For Free – On The Shady

I have came across tools out there that use proxy lists to artificailly boost your Youtube views. Why would you want that to happen you may ask? The idea is that the more views your video has, the more “popular” it is, and the more real people will see it, and also better Google search results come from the higher views.

Here is a quote from a non-free software company called Tube Increaser that makes a proxy based tool to beef up your views. They say:

YouTube search ranks videos according to how many views a YouTube user has. In other words – the more views you have, the more exposure you will get over the other videos that have the same keywords and content. Another important aspect of video marketing is google search. If your YouTube video views have high views, your google ranking of the specific video will increase!

By having sufficient youtube video views daily, you can now compete with big time YouTube celebrities. This is an important part of creating more exposure for yourself – being able to be seen with high views and highly ranked is one of the key components of becoming successful on YouTube!

Now I am not an expert on Youtube, but that seems like it makes sense. If you know more about Youtube rankings, let us all know if the above is true, or B.S in the comments!

Anyhoo, Tube Increaser sounds cool, but I am all about free so I decided to look for a free alternative to Tube Increaser. That is when I found ViewTubeTrain. It is completely web based, and doesn’t require proxies. It doesn’t require proxies because you are swapping views with others on the internet!

All you have to do is post the Youtube link to your video on their site, then sit back and watch other peoples videos! There is also an option called Automatic train that automatically takes you to the next video when the one you are watching is done. This is where the shadyness comes in. You can turn it on, then mute your sound and minimize your browser and just rack up the points!

I am trying it out right now on my new NinjURL.us commercial I just filmed:

Do you know of other similar Youtube boosting tools? I am interested in both paid and free ones. Post your links in the comments!

Technorati Tags: youtube,boost,views,increase,free,tube increaser,viewtube train,how to

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Got My Invite For Google Voice – PURE WIN!

A few days ago on the 7th I finally got the all coveted email invite from Google to use their Google Voice service! I signed up for it about a year ago when I first heard of it from one of my college instructors.

First off the bat, users cannot give out invitations themselves at this time. At least, I can’t find that option anywhere when I login. So please don’t ask me for an invite. If I could give them out, I would totally do it in the form of a contest!

So I logged in for the first time, and it immediately asked me to enter the area code for the number I wanted, then it asked to enter a four letter word to see if it was available. I entered 619 for San Diego, and TECH because I am into techy stuff. Bam! It gave me about eight available numbers all with the TECH extension. If you jokers want to give me a call you can now reach me at (619) 630-TECH!

Once logged in, the interface is rather familiar. It resembles Gmail in a lot of ways, which is good because it makes using it pretty intuitive. Here is a screen shot of it:

I’ve only been using it for a few days, but so far I like it a lot. Here is a list of my favorite features and why:

• Free nationwide calling – My cell phone reception at home sucks, but I am only paying for local service on my home phone. Now, with Google Voice, I can call long distance on my home phone without being charged
• Online text messaging – I can send SMS text messages from within Google voice, and it shows up on the recipients phone with my Google voice number. When they reply back it goes to my cell phone. When I reply on my cell it still keeps the Google Voice number on the recipient’s end.
• Free voice to text – When users leave a voice message, if you enable this feature, the messages automatically get transcribed to text format. Now I don’t have to call my voicemail box, I can just read it in an email. This feature still isn’t 100% yet, but it’s good enough.
• One number – Now I have one, simple to remember number that I can give out to everyone, and they can reach me no matter where I am.

Now, there are many more features, but so far the ones above are what I have used, and what I like. For a full list of features click on this link: (Google Voice Features)

Do you have a Google Voice account yet? What are your favorite features? What don’t you like about it? Let us know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: google,voice,invite,invitation

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Time for a Twitter cleanup?

I woke up this morning, and did what I usually do. I grabbed my Blackberry to check my emails and Twitter. What? You don’t do that too?

Anyway, so I am scrolling through the updates of the people I am following and it is just one spam post after another. I can’t hardly read the updates from those who I am interested in. Every friggin’ post was from a spammer!

This problem all stemmed from playing with a couple of autofollow services I tried out. I am always testing out new things, so I figured why not? The idea of the autofollow tools is that you automatically follow people based on keywords in the hopes that they will follow you back. Honestly, this doesn’t work out so good. Most of the people you end up autofollowing are themselves autofollowers, and most autofollowers are spammers.

Well, I couldn’t remember all of the services I tried out, so the only way I could think of to stop autofollowing people was to change my password on Twitter. Bam! No more autofollowing! Okay, so now I am following 750 people compared to the 450 that are following me back. Time for a little Twitter cleanup!

I found a pretty awesome tool that can help you with this. It is called Mutuality, and it lets you to do one of three cool things in bulk:

• Unfollow all who do not follow you back
• Unfollow all
• Follow all who follow you

I decided to use the first option to do some bulk cleanup. Amazingly with this tool I went from about 750 people I was following down to 165. After that, manual cleanup was easy.

Is it time for you to do a Twitter cleanup? Did you try various autofollow services? Know of other cool Twitter cleanup tools? Let us know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: twitter,cleanup,bulk,unfollow,remove

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Short URL Service… With Ninjas!

I know what you are all probably saying, “Why do we need another shorten URL service?” The answer is simple, you can never have enough! That is a fact!

Besides that, how many of them out there have Ninjas? Not too many! How can you possibly want to post a short URL on Twitter, or Facebook without the help of Ninjas? You wouldn’t!

So what am I really getting at here? I am introducing you to my personal alternative to TinyURL, and it is called NinjURL.us! Use it for all of your small URL needs! Take really long web addresses and turn them into something useful and small!

Do you want to make your own TinyURL like service? You can use the free PHP script I used. It is called Broken Script! All you need is a hosting service that supports PHP and MySQL, or build your own LAMP server.

The next time you are posting a long URL on Twitter, a forum, or something like that, why not give NinjURL.us a try?

Technorati Tags: ninjurl,ninja,tinyurl,shorten,url,service,alternative

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Bauer-Power Episode 11

I hope you all had a great Independence day weekend! You know I did! Fortunately for me, my company gave use a three day weekend, and I took full advantage of it!

On Friday the 3rd, Sundance and I got together to do Episode 11 of Bauer-Power. In this episode we discuss epic geek battles. In that segment we try to determine who would win between the following:

• The Borg vs Cybermen
• Worf vs Saren
• Anakin Skywalker vs Sylar

Who do you think would win? Let us know your picks and the reasons why in the comments!

After we discuss that, we decided to Go Office Space on an Acer! As you all know, I don’t like Acer very much. Well, we got our hands on an Acer LCD monitor and decided to beat the living hell out of it!

When we were done taking out our aggressions on the poor defenseless monitor, we decided to introduce you to my new short URL service, NinjURL.us! (More on that tomorrow!)

Without further ado, here is Episode 11 of Bauer-Power! This time filmed with my Kodak Zi6!

So what did you think? Any recommendations, suggestions, hate mail? Hit us up in the comments!

Technorati Tags: bauer-power,episode,11,geek,battles,pwnage,ninja url

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We have a winner! Enjoy your Linux Computer!

It has been a long month. I have been waiting for this very moment to let you all know who was the lucky winner of June's contest to win a free Bauer-Power Linux Computer! There was one in there that I didn't think I would be able to deliver due to some possible legal restrictions and what not, but in the end I made everything legit and I was able to see this to the end!

Okay, so who won right? Well, the winner is the very lucky...

...@barnett1949

You have until Monday at 12:00PM pacific time to DM me with your shipping address so I can get this machine out to ya!

To all of you who played, thank you very much! I really like doing these twitter contests, and I hope you do too.

Technorati Tags: contest, winner

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Free Open Source Photo Gallery

My wife is an amateur photographer. She has been aspiring to go pro, and perhaps start making a little money on the side. She frequently has people asking her to take their family photos, wedding pictures, baby pictures, school pictures etc. Most of the time, she does this as a favor to friends and family, but eventually she wants to branch out.

One of the things she said she wanted to get her foot in the door, and to provide potential clients with samples of her work was an online photo gallery. I decided i would put my skills of finding cool free software to use, and decided to look into an Open Source solution for her!

What I found was a little PHP based photo gallery that ties to a MySQL back end. What’s that smell? Smells like an Ubuntu LAMP server! Well, in my case I went with a free hosting service that I wrote about a few months ago called 000webhost. Anyhoo, that is neither here nor there.

The free gallery is called Coppermine, and setup is a snap! Just create your MySQL database, username, password etc, then upload the Coppermine files to your web server. Then you browse to your website’s URL and follow the installation wizard. It really can’t be any simpler.

I plan in the future to do a number of video segments showing users how easy it is to setup some of these free PHP sites, and I plan on using Coppermine as an example.

Here is the URL to the site I setup for my wife (http://momentsbefore.com). It is still under construction, and she hasn’t uploaded any photos yet. There is one picture, but that is only because I uploaded it to show my wife how easy it is to use.

Speaking of my wife’s photography, here are some samples of her work:

Like many other free PHP CMS/website scripts out there, there are lots of free Coppermine templates available so you can put some customizing touches on your gallery. Just do a Google search for Free Coppermine Themes.

Do any of you out there dabble in photography? Do you use Coppermine? Do you use something else? If so, post your photo gallery URL’s in the comments!

Technorati Tags: coppermine,free,php,website,photo,gallery,mysql,easy,open source

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How To Redirect To Exchange 2007 OWA in IIS 7 and Windows Server 2008

My company just setup our first Exchange 2007 cluster, and are getting ready to migrate our users over from Exchange 2003. Before we do that, we want to make sure everything is working correctly, and almost seamlessly to our users.

With that includes making the access to OWA (Outlook Web Access) in Exchange 2007 idiot proof. By default, there are two things that make idiot proofing difficult. For one, like most companies we set our OWA to require SSL. For two, the URL for OWA is https://servername/owa. No biggie right? Just tell the users to use that URL. Well, that won’t work too well for our users. We want to just tell them to go to “webmail” and have it work.

So here is what we did:

• In IIS 7, I clicked on the Default Website
• I clicked on Error Pages
• I clicked on 403, and selected Edit
• I clicked on the Respond with a 302 Redirect radio button, and inserted the URL to OWA:

• Done!

Now our users don’t have to type in HTTP or HTTPS, they can just open up a browser, type the server name/address in and automatically end up in the right place!

Has your company moved to Exchange 2007 yet? Have any problems with the migration? Did it go smoothly? How do you like Exchange 2007? Let me know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: exchange 2007,iis,owa,redirect,windows server 2008

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