Macgasm

Twitter has this nice feature, a way to mark certain tweets as favourites, but besides being an easy way to tell yourself that this tweet was really funny, it can be used in many helpful ways.

If you’re like me, you tend to use the feature to also bookmark tweets with interesting tips or links in them. In my case, those links contain content that doesn’t belong in Instapaper, because the content is not text-based or something that I don’t just want to “read later”.

Unfortunately, the way favourites currently work makes it easy to forget the things you have starred, because there is no good way to remind yourself of them (1).

There is a nice solution, though:

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of your own favourites, having it show up in a RSS reader of your choice, enabling you to treat your Twitter favorites as something of a to-do-list. The only thing you have to do is add this feed URL to said RSS reader, adding your own Twitter username instead of the placeholder:

http://twitter.com/favorites/~username.rss

Note: that there’s no u in favorites. Adding a u breaks this whole tip.

If you don’t use a dedicated RSS application, or simply don’t want these things to show up in your favorite reader (mine is Reeder, by the way), you have a great number of alternatives.

To name only a few:

• Every major browser (Safari, Chrome, Firefox) has a way to handle and subscribe to RSS feeds inside the app. The feed will show up as a bookmark with badge number, indicating how many unread items there are.
• The Mail application built into OS X can fetch RSS feeds, making them show up similar to notes or tasks in the app (2).
• Thunderbird and Outlook offer ways of subscribing to RSS feeds, too.

Another thing I want to mention is something the service Pinboard offers: Tweet archiving. If you don’t trust Twitter to save all of your tweets forever (3), Pinboard will archive them for you. The reason I’m mentioning this is because it will also save tweets you starred, giving you easy access to a list of all the things you found worthwhile in your Twitter stream.

Do you have other tips on how to make Twitter favourites more useful? Share them with us in the comments.

Have you ever saved a link on the iPhone or iPad, only to find that opening it in Safari on your Mac gave you the mobile version of the site you intended to visit?

Well, now there’s a nifty little extension to solve this problem. It’s called ‘Demobilizer’ and is made by Mike Piontek, the man behind the brilliant Delivery Status Dashboard widget and the matching iOS application.

He describes the extension like this:

If you run into this problem from time to time, the extension is worth checking out. Get it on junecloud.com

Do you ever wish there was a way to turn that old computer sitting in your closet into a Time Machine-enabled backup hub for your Macs? Fret no more. Using Debian 6.0 and Netatalk, you can now create your own Time Capsule for a fraction of the cost, should you have a spare machine kicking around. This may seem a little “UnApple”, but I thought it was interesting enough to pass on to you guys.

I stumbled across a tutorial by Mike Palmer that walks you through the steps of creating your own Time Capsule:

If you’re the Do-It-Yourself type, and you like to tinker with your hardware, give the tutorial a shot. It’s pretty straight forward. I think I’m going to do it with that old Mac mini I have kicking around in my closet.

Have you ever accidentally closed a tab in Safari and cursed yourself, wondering how to get back to the content that you closed?

Until recently, I figured that I would have to either re-search for the article using a search engine, or even worse, dig through my history to find the recently opened website. It turns out, however, that Apple has your back. Did you know that you can tap and hold the new tab icon (looks like a plus symbol) in Safari on the iPad and a list of recently closed tabs will appear?

Now all you have to do is tap the listing you want, and the tab will re-appear in your browser, just like it did before you let your sausage fingers accidentally close the tab.

If you’re anything like I am, you probably find yourself using Mail.app as a bit of a ToDo list. Anything that kicks around in my inbox and that’s not deleted immediately usually means that there’s an actionable item I need to carry out within the email. Problem is that sometimes if I let it slip too long then I forget to address the email in its entirety. Instead, it just sits at the bottom of my inbox waiting for me to miraculously get to it at some point. That point never really comes for a lot of the emails. I’ve stumbled on a nice little tip today that’s going to help me get to the bottom of the problem, and I thought I would pass it along.

Did you know that you can drag and drop an email from your Mail.app directly into iCal? By dropping the email into iCal, you’re able to schedule in time to complete the task like you would any other event. The extra-cool thing about doing this is that iCal will create a link to the email in question so that you can reference the original email when the time comes to do something about your it.

This isn’t going to solve all of your email problems, but it will help you focus in on completing some tasks for the more important emails you get on a daily basis.

Have any other awesome tips? Tip us tips@macgasm.net

Apple devices “just work” right out of the box. Every step of the first experience with an Apple computer is designed to teach you how to use it. The iPhone, a candidate for Most Useful Device Ever Invented, only comes pre-loaded with a few applications, but those few are enough to do the trick.

But the best part about the iPhone is that it’s extensible. The Springboard interface and the App Store software business are a perfect match. They’ve made apps more popular than songs in iTunes. Think of that!

The most physical computer ever

iOS imposes the right kinds of constraints. It’s a grid of icons, and we tap, hold and drag them. They’re almost like real objects. By seamlessly linking the software to our fingers, and by traveling with us in our pockets, the iPhone is the most physical computer ever. It’s more like a real, human tool than any computer before it. And thanks to the App Store, it can be endlessly customized to fit our needs.

But we aren’t used to thinking about computers that way. If we forget that the iPhone is a physical tool, it can end up a mess. Too many apps and not enough thought can turn its helpful constraints into a handicap. Does that sound familiar to you?

I’ve spent way too much time solving this problem. Fortunately, now I waste almost no time on my phone, because it’s configured perfectly. Whenever I spring for a new app or need to make an adjustment, the change is minimal, and it follows a plan. Here are the three steps I use to tune my iPhone:

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Have you ever wanted to get your hands on a dock one moment, only to realize there’s not one in sight? Turns out Make Magazine had your back, back in 2009.

Today, after spending a few moment looking for awesome iPhone docks for my office, Google revealed some pretty pricey options. With a baby on the way, those Benjamins can easily go to better things. So, I searched for an origami iPhone dock. Paper is plentiful, and cheap. It turns out that it can also be an iPhone dock.

All you have to do is print out the template on some card stock, or if you’re craftily inclined, free hand it. Voilà, a cheap iPhone dock at your disposal. It looks like the PDF was free back in 2009, but today they sell it to you for $5.00. While the price isn’t ideal, it’s still cheaper than the $30-90 options available on the market today.

Via: Make Magazine

Syncing your photos to iCloud is pretty awesome.Having your screenshots go with them to that magical cloud is not. We talked a little bit about the iOS 5.1 beta 2 release yesterday, and how it brings the ability to manage your Photo Stream; however, who knows when Apple will release the update to the public. If you run a jailbroken phone you can stop your iPhone from sending screenshots to the cloud automatically with Screenshot Dam.

The application, available in Cydia, automatically recognizes what photos are screenshots and which photos were snapped by you and then segregates them before iCloud gets a hold of them and puts them in your Photo Stream.

Sure, not too many people out there take a lot of screenshots, but if you’re like us and run an Apple blog, taking screenshots happens on a daily basis. Having those photos in your Photo Stream is a pretty big bummer.

Hat tip to Addictive Tips for the find.