Today I came across the most exciting thing since the Internet came into my life! It is IFTTT! What is IFTTT?

It is a service that automates many of the tasks we are just too lazy to complete, or never thought we could even do! It stands for If This Then That.

Up until today I thought it was a fancy term for automator actions that many Mac users are familiar with, but was only available for computer driven tasks. Little did I know that I am late to the game, and IFTTT is now a website (ifttt.com).

This post is a perfect example of the power of IFTTT. I took this picture in Instagram. Because I added the hashtag #wp, IFTTT has recognized my automated task that I set up, and has posted a blog post to my WordPress.com blog! I’ll probably change the tag, but you get the idea!

Granted, I have come in after the fact and edited this blog post to add in my fleshed out content. But that is not the point here. If I want to take a picture in Instagram now, I have it automatically backup to Evernote and Dropbox too! And if I like it enough, I add a tag and wham, I’ve done a blog post!

The amount of ‘recipes’ available to use are mindblowing!  There are over 750 pages of actions to choose from that people have shared. You can set up your own customized IFTTT tasks, but more than likely one is already pre-saved for you to start using!

I’ve set up automated backups of all my incoming Gmail attachments(pictures, PDFs, Word Docs, etc…), to Dropbox. I’ve set up automated backups of all my blog posts from WordPress to Evernote. Well, actually I’ve played with IFTTT so much today that I think I am going to fall down on the ground laughing at how god damn cool it is!

Not only cool, but the big thing is that the site is extremely easy to use! Once you grant access to IFTTT with a couple of clicks on services like Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Evernote, Gmail, you simply follow the prompts to tell the task what you want to achieve.

Ever kicked yourself for forgetting someone’s birthday? Set up a task to email them on their birthday automatically! You’ll look like a champion! You can even set up automated phone calls in those awkward moments when you wished you could get out of that conversation with your annoying neighbour! Text yourself a quick message with a tag, and IFTTT will phone you. Same goes for setting wake up calls. Set up a time for the call to happen and it does.

I could spend hours talking about all the cool stuff I found today, but do yourself a favour and go create an account at ifttt.com and start making the internet what it was meant to be used for. To make our life easy!

Boom! Did you hear that? That is my mind blowing up from the giddiness!

Related articles

• Review of If-This-Then-That (ifttt.com) (roundpeg.biz)
• Prediction: .ifttt to be ‘the next big thing’ (bloxhammarketing.wordpress.com)
• IFTTT and Evernote (dougpete.wordpress.com)
• How to: Get started with ifttt in 5 easy steps (bloxhammarketing.wordpress.com)
• IFTTT Triggers Loyal, Nerdy Following (techcrunch.com)

Reblogged from Lindsay Glauser:

I was asked to contribute to the Love is a Four Letter Word serial that my fiancee and I were featured in a couple months ago on Vancouver Is Awesome. I had a hard time finding a couple willing to divulge their intimacies: How they met, what was the attraction and so on and who fit the criteria.  I thought and made lists of suitable couples that I knew or that we knew people in common, and I finally found the perfect couple. Tonight we met for their interview in the eclectic setting of the Prophouse …

I’m currently using Remember the Milk(still love it the mostest), but Producteev has really been hard at work refreshing their app. They’ve even made it easy to import your RTM tasks directly into your account. I’m doing that right now, and will see how the import went. If it goes well, I’ll do a small review of the new interface on the site…

For now, here is a link to the Lifehacker article which also hosts a video of the changes…

“Comprehensive to-do suite Producteev has not only updated its web app and iPhone app, its now also showing some love for Windows 7 and Android users. The cross-platform task management app works great for group or individual tasks and has a revamped interface.”

via Producteev Is Now a Universal Task Manager with New Android and Windows Apps.

I enjoyed it, and thought I would share it with you…

Image via Wikipedia

I have mentioned a few times on here that I am a Linux user. I love it! It’s the operating system by the people, for the people…lol. I have grown to love the developers and users of the open source community, and whenever I read about Microsoft or Apple doing their dirty work to make sure others don’t benefit from the Linux experience, it makes me angry.
It’s not enough that Apple and Microsoft aren’t a couple of the biggest companies in the world sitting on mountains of cash. They have to stick it to the little guy.
Now, following in the steps of Apple and their locked-down iPhones, Microsoft seems to be heading in the direction of locking down hardware that will run Windows 8.

IMO, Microsoft is pulling an even dirtier move here, in that they are forcing other hardware companies that develop computers to lock out Linux if they plan on offering Windows. At least Apple makes their own computers, tablets, and phones! Of course the hardware companies will comply as they want to sell a whole bunch of their phones/tables/PCs to compete with Apple. Why not block Linux? What is Linux to them anyway? Why would they care?

The point is that Microsoft and Apple can’t compete in a fair way. They resort to monopolist behaviour like this rather than use marketing and trying to develop a superior software product to beat the open source movement. Much like other corporate babble, they claim it is for the safety of the user. Malware, viruses, blah, blah, blah…
They piss me off!

“Microsoft has been discovered to have changed its requirements for the upcoming ARM version of Windows 8. The change essentially will prohibit ARM devices, including PCs, from running operating systems other than Windows 8 after they ship to customers.Specifically, Microsoft recently amended its requirements for ARM Windows 8 System Builders. Unlike Windows 8 for Intel-compatible x86 & x64 machines, the ARM version of Windows 8 will not be sold to the public. To purchase an ARM version of Windows 8, you will have to purchase a device with it pre-loaded similar to Windows CE devices today, such as Windows Phone. The new requirement calls for utilizing UEFI Secure Boot, a technology that forces manufacturers to instruct devices to boot code certified by the manufacturer for the device.”

via Microsoft Illegally? Demanding ARM OEMs to Block Linux on Windows 8 Hardware | PhoneNews.com.

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

Just came across this website apologizing for Stephen Harper. lol. I thought it was cute and thought I would share. And, sorry again for letting you all down…I didn’t vote for him…

“Sorry, World.We messed up.We know you look to us as one of the last great strongholds of common sense in a swirling sea of crazy on this big ol’ crazy planet of ours.Decriminalized marijuana, same-sex marriage, our peace keeping force, universal health care, education, our stance on environment, human rights, and religious freedom made us look pretty darn awesome.Now were realizing that those things that made us awesome are being taken away from us, and its not just us Canadians who are paying the price.Turns out some of us thought it would be a grand idea to put this fucking guy in charge.”

via Sorry, World. We fucked up..

Related articles

• Same-sex marriage confusion reaches beyond border (cbc.ca)
• Union busting, Stephen Harper-style (rosalita54.wordpress.com)

Cover via Amazon

I came across this article through a friend of mine on Facebook. It is a summary of some comments that were made by an Archbishop during his Christmas sermon.

For me it’s no surprise that a male dominated religion would have such a low regard for woman, and promote forcible abuse as a right from god. I think what surprises people is that they don’t see the vile beliefs still being pushed by organized religious groups. Aren’t we in the 21st Century?

From radical Islamic groups, to the Catholics, one thing is clear, men are considered superior in organized religion, and women are not considered equals.

I told a story on here a few years ago of an ex-girlfriend of mine that oddly enough invited me to her wedding. When we dated she was a vibrant, independent woman. We had differences in beliefs that could not be resolved so we decided to just remain friends. At the time I was quite happy she had found a partner that shared her beliefs.

Then, when I went to the wedding, at a very nondescript Christian Centre, I was shocked! She had to yield to her ‘man’, and her path to heaven was only guaranteed by serving her husband. WTF!

It is quite extreme to state that women that have had abortions have given up their rights to say no.

It’s such a hypocritical statement to judge a woman for making choices about her body, when religious people state all the time that only god can judge. At what point does an Archbishop think he can judge women and authorize rape and forcible abuse?

At what point do we decide comments by these religious leaders are hate speech? Why can religious leaders speak without consequence? Why can the Pope go unpunished for hiding paedophilia in the Catholic church?

It is time to stop being silent about human rights abuses and start making religious and political leader accountable for their hateful words.

Here is the article I read today. If anyone can translate the full speech and put it in comments, that would be muchly appreciated!

The Archbishop of Granada, Javier Martinez, said in his Christmas sermon that it was acceptable for women who have had an abortion to be raped. Author Manuel António Pin expresses his outrage in the daily Jornal de Notícias: “The Spanish Church won’t let anyone dissuade it from its intolerant traditions. … After [Prime Minister] Mariano Rajoy, who is close to the Church, announced his intention of ‘extirpating the putrid secular abortion law’ that was passed under Zapatero’s government I was given a copy of a Christmas sermon delivered by the Archbishop of Granada in which he says that ‘a woman who has an abortion gives a man absolute licence to abuse her body without restrictions because she has committed a sin as if she had a right to do so’. … For the Archbishop Hitler’s and Stalin’s crimes (he forgot Franco’s) were ‘less dreadful than abortion’. In such situations even a non-believer wishes there was a God to condemn these people.”

via euro|topics – Spanish bishop legitimates rape.

Related articles

• RC Bishops blames UNESCO for ‘Promoting Homosexuality’ (kiwianglo.wordpress.com)
• Archbishop Dolan Continues To Obsess Over NY’s Same-Sex Marriage (lezgetreal.com)
• Abortion Worse Than Unemployment, Homosexuality UN Conspiracy- Vatican (lezgetreal.com)

I am such a sucker for new apps like this, so I went and grabbed my iPhone and went over to the App Store. There it was, $1.99!

Many of you know that I am a diehard Remember the Milk user, and I really don’t need this app, but I went and bought it anyway…It was more like I gave my coffee money for the day to the developer. I try to support developers whenever I can, and grass-roots, open source projects deserve more support from users! So go buy more open source apps while it’s fresh on your mind…

Anyhow, Todo.txt was developed to merge the simplicity of a plain text list with the mobiliity people are looking for in today’s mobile devices. How they do it is they link to your Dropbox account. You simply create a todo.txt(obvious…) file and place it in your Dropbox account. I found that it wanted to nest the file in a folder called ‘todo’.

Here are a couple of screenshots of how it looks in iOS.

Loading Dropbox on my iPhone, here is the file inside my ‘todo’ folder already auto-updated.

You can also open it up from within Dropbox to see it as a read-only file.

The power of the iOS app is the ability to use the search function that is hidden at the top of the app. That way you can sort out your tasks based on Priority, Project, keyword, etc…

On my laptop, I can open up Terminal within Dropbox and use VI to update or add to the list. The developer does offer a shell script to sort, list, complete, and organize your ToDo list that makes using a large text file a lot easier to work with. That is as long as you remember what you are looking for! My complaint from last year…

Having played with ToDo.txt Touch for a few hours, I like it. For me though, it is unfortunately not going to develop past playing I’m afraid.

Having all my tasks in one master text file that I have to use search features to simplify seems so unproductive…Yes, it is cool to use the ‘power’ of the command line to find your tasks, but it seems much more like an exercise than an easy to scroll ToDo list.

Looking currently in my Remember the Milk account I have 130 outstanding tasks. Can you imagine what that would look like in ToDo.txt?

I’m happy to spend the $1.99 to encourage more grass roots development like this, but I’m off to my RTM account and getting back to work…

Related articles

• Todo.txt Touch Brings Its Simple, Text-Based To Dos to iOS (lifehacker.com)
• Todo.txt Touch for iOS Now Available (smarterware.org)

Image via CrunchBase

I came across a fantastic article over at readwriteweb.com about why Google+(and Facebook for that matter) is ruining the Internet as we know it. Found it on Twitter of all places…

I’m not a tech insider, and don’t pretend to know how the inter-web works. I have reactions to new services like most people and hope they improve how we all communicate and collaborate online. When Google+ first came out, I took it as a Facebook competitor that was going to be there as a social tool to share content, pictures, and updates with who you wanted. What I didn’t see coming was how it became a replacement for content.

It has turned out to be a massive disappointment! People are starting to realize that Google+ is slowly replacing the brilliant Google search function. You used to be able to say, ‘just go Google it’…Now you end up having a discussion with the person that did the Google search about why your results were different than theirs. Google is putting Google+ discussions about articles and blogs above the actual articles. They want to you to go to Google+ to read. And, they are profiling you with what they think you want to read and see.

I’m surprised that the #1 result for me isn’t boobs for every search I do!

If you’ve been on any social network, you know that the original content is bastardized into a short snippet and pales in comparison to the actual content. Do I want to spend my time reading comments and seeing who +1′d or Liked the article, or get the gist of the article by actually reading it?

The way things are going now, people are being herded to social networks to get their content. After reading the summary of the content, they make judgement or form their opinions.

Remember back in the day when people read books, newspapers, and magazines written by real authors? Nah, me either. I’m sure I lost most of you at the very beginning of the post. I’ve rambled on too much, and you probably just clicked the link at the bottom…haha. Good thing it actually goes to a well written blog post by a tech writer!

I hate Google+. Can’t stand it. It is agonizing to use. The stream is so noisy, it won’t even bother me when the inevitable Google ads arrive. Culturally, it feels like walking into a religious school. It swarms with disciples of the + waiting for the messianic downfall of the Evil Internet, so that the One True Google+ is all that’s left.But I’ve been polite. It’s my beat, so I’ve covered it fairly. When it gets a feature I love, I say so. When it does something obscenely bad, I give its creators a fair chance to respond. But it’s getting harder to grin and bear it. I’ve been a happy Google customer product for a long time, because Google tools used to enhance the Internet. But as Google ships “the Google part” of its new Google+ identity, it’s breaking the Web it once helped build. I can’t take it anymore.

via Google+ Is Going To Mess Up The Internet.