The blog of Abraham Williams

I am looking for a hosted web application to use as a mind dump for ideas. I've tried a number of Google tools that almost work but each one misses a feature or two. Google Search was not much help either. Required features: Title field Freeform tags Per item comments Per item private vs public toggle Share by email for private items File attachements Domain alias Search Hide/view by tag Like to have features: Description field Implemented toggle Social media share buttons Random metadata attachments such as links, ratings Specific metadata attachments such as Flickr, YouTube, Google Maps, Tweets. Maybe with http://www.oembed.com/ Do you know of such a tool? Please please please let me know.

Having my MacBook Pro slowly grinding to a halt sucks. What sucks even more is having it happen every 6 months. So this past weekend I took the opportunity to wipe and start afresh the cyclical tradition of computer power users. The install itself was far from smooth due to a number of unfortunate issues but that is a store for another time. Now that I have an untarnished Snow Leopard install I must sully it with my carefully tagged list of must haves. Most are developer and social media oriented and the list may seem few but not listed are the plethora of web based services I employ. Quality applications they are all though. Interested to see other epically OSX applications I inquired on Twitter. what are your must have OSX applications? 1:12 PM Jun 20th via web Abraham Williams abraham I've got some hardcore OSX users so the answers are useful and diverse. You can see the full list below and reply with your own must have OSX applications. What are your must have OSX ...

The @Twitter Annotations Hackfest happened this weekend at the Twitter office. I missed it being in Seattle but awesomely Twitter streamed it all on @JustinTV. Below are the highlights of the introduction and final demos. You know. So you don't have to watch all 24+ hours of recorded video . Introduction to Annotations by @noradio Watch live video from abrahamwilliams on Justin.tv Hackfest demos Watch live video from abrahamwilliams on Justin.tv You can find a list of demoed apps on the hackfest wiki .

I decided to test the speed of my new Google I/O HTC Evo 4G 's hotspot. It is running Sprint's new  4G service  which has pretty good reception from my apartment. As you can see the download speed drop significantly after the first test but after that stayed pretty consistently around 1 Mb/s. Apparently 4G is supposed to average between 3-6 Mb/s but I have yet to see it. I actually wrote this blog post and uploaded this images while still using the hotspot. :) I even watched a full episode of Eureka from Hulu  without a stutter or buffering. And on 480p no less! Echofon, Gmail, Google Reader, and Dropbox were all running the entire time. I'm not yet ready to hang up my wired connection. But wireless is getting pretty awesome.

Draft! Not yet implemented. Please leave comments with your feedback. Historically my responses to inquiries has ebbed and flowed. Sometimes my inbox would pileup for a month before many people would get responses. This manifesto is my contract to the world to improve my communication response time. Before contacting me I suggest you read this manifesto and a couple of essays about email. Here is my commitment to response time going forward: Short form: - @Twitter*, SMS, @GitHub, IM, etc. - Response within 24 hours. - Must be less then 250 characters. - Preferred method of contact. Long form: - Email, @Facebook, snail mail etc. - Response within 48 hours. - Generally longer then 250 characters. - Keep it short and to the point. Voice: - Phone calls, voicemail, @skype voice, etc - Callback within 24 hours. - You must leave a voicemail. - I don't like phones so you should consider the above options first. What if I miss my deadline? If it is impo...

I decided to give @publitweet's new list widget beta a try on my @google list .

@Twitter recently had an interesting bug dealing with their mobile commands . Tweeting "accept abraham" would result in me following the tweeter. Awesomely though the bug was not limited to just me, any screen_name would work. Shortly after the bug widely known Twitter disabled viewing of relationships leaving everybody following zero people for a couple of hours. Twitter has since locked down the command and appears to be cleaning up the resulting mess. Follow bug discovered, remedied. Read our status blog for details. http://bit.ly/dhQ3fF less than a minute ago via web Twitter twitter @TwitterAPI was following me for a little while.

@StarCraft 2 beta keys are hard to come by but I managed to snag one from an unlikely source: @Twitter. I happened to do a search for #sc2 and found a key a few hours old. Of course the key didn't work but I repeated my search the next day and snagged a working key from a status that was just a few minutes old. #sc2 JZNHJT-WWBT-DKDY64-6BBD-7E4VRJ less than a minute ago via web Alf Jonsson _Unstable Or you can just drop $20 on @Ebay.

Update: Yahoo! Pipes has been inconsistent pulling in new items so you should check out these awesome feeds instead. I set up a Yahoo! Pipe that filters any stories with fewer then 10 votes from the Hacker News  RSS feed. I love HN content but I don't have time to read everything. The HN web interface is often slow and checking the homepage frequently shows me top stories over and over again. So I fixed it myself. :) You can see an example of the feed below or subscribe yourself.