Tweetdeck is my Twitter client of choice. I was interested to read this article about using it as a light RSS reader and set about making it a reality.

First, I used Google Reader as my base. I already had a lot of feeds in there, I like it’s ability to manage things and I know it’s pretty reliable. I created a new folder “All Feeds” and moved all of my feeds in to this folder. Then, in Settings > Folders and Tags, I set the Sharing value of this Folder to “Public”. It then gave me a link to my Public page for this folder, which I visited and clicked on the feed icon that appeared in Firefox’s address bar.

I then grabbed this Feed URL, which is in ATOM format. I’ll need it in a minute.

I went to Twitter and signed up as a new user. Remembering these details, I headed over to Twitterfeed and signed in using my Google credentials as an OpenID, then created a new Twitterfeed. For the RSS feed URL I used ATOM feed from Google Reader, put in my new twitter account details and activated the feed, setting it to check every 30 minutes and publish up to 5 items.

Next, it’s back to Twitter and I sign in as my own Twitter user. I find the Twitter profile of the account I just created and I follow it.

Finally, I open Tweetdeck and choose “Group” (in v0.20b, it’s the third icon from the left at the top, with two little faceless people on it), then called the Group “RSS Feeds” and added the newly created account to the group.

That’s where I stopped and it’s doing the job for me. You could go further and make the new account’s entries Protected, so that only you can view the output of your feed in Twitter - though remember to follow yourself with the new account or it won’t work!

Also, you could easily have multiple groups and have separate Twitterfeeds for each one, with identifying prefixes, all filtered in to the same twitter account. Experiment, have fun - share your improvements in the comments!

If you work in an office in the western world, chances are you’ve encountered a Flavia drinks machine. If you have one in your place of work, I have something for you. It’s the perfect recipe for a cappuccino from said machine, as I discovered through experimentation this past week.

First, get your cup and put the contents of a packet of sugar in the bottom. Put the cup in the machine and insert the Foamy Topping packet. Once it completes, pour a second packet of sugar in to your cup and then insert the Espresso Roast packet in to the machine. Finally, add a third and final packet of sugar, stir well and enjoy.

You’re welcome.

Apple software update popped up on my Macbook running OS X Leopard yesterday and prompted me to install the 10.5.5 update. I did so and after restart found that there were black boxes showing around various icons and the shortcut to Macintosh HD on my desktop.

This bothered me somewhat so I googled around to see what the problem might be and came across a post on Red Sweater Blog about a similar problem:

So … if you googled your way here after installing 10.4.8, and want to lose the damn rectangle. Let me review:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Go to Universal Access pane.
3. Switch to the “Seeing” tab.
4. Click the “Options” button for the Zoom section.
5. Turn off the “Show preview rectangle” checkbox.

So I checked these preferences on my machine but found the “Show preview rectangle” checkbox was already turned off. Further searching on the topic found no other help so as a last resort, I tried enabling Zoom, turning the checkbox on, then closing System Preferences. Then, I followed the instructions from the Red Sweater Blog again to turn it off and hey presto - no more black boxes.

Thought I’d share in case anyone else is perplexed with the same issue.

I recently got a Three Skypephone and found that it could be paired to your PC and used as a modem. The software provided was Windows-only, so I set about looking for a way to connect my Ubuntu laptop as this is what I’ll be using any time I’m away from home.

The closest match I found was this tutorial at davesource, but it didn’t work right off the bat for me. All it took, however, was a few restarts to get bluetooth playing nicely - then I disabled my existing network connections:


sudo ifconfig eth0 down
sudo ifconfig lo down


Then edited the gprs-connect-chat script from davesource’s tutorial so that line 47:


OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet2.voicestream.com","",0,0' \


looks like:


OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","three.co.uk","",0,0' \


I then followed the connection routine detailed in the davesource tutorial and after a short while I was up and running - fired up Firefox and was able to connect straight away.

Speed was pretty good, the service I selected with my plan was “Broadband Lite” and it isn’t an overstatement, you get pretty decent performance. This was with my 3G signal indicator at 3 out of 4 bars.

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Hi there!

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Chris pointed me towards an interesting set of tips for making your start-up a success. I like it when posters have a sense of humour:

So even though he’s French, his advice, when given, is worth listening to.