You’ll find that the makemetheking.com service is faster and more reliable than ever! Please let me know if you have any problems, and thanks to everyone for their recent support, and the donation or two. The donations actually made this switch possible, I was considering shutting down the project all together due to lack of funds.

Thanks again and enjoy!

If you’ve used and enjoyed the service, you might consider donating… it helps me keep the service up and running. Of course, no obligation necessary.

What you should have clicked:

How to avoid shame in the future:

Enter www.reasonstohate.com. A horrific domain name, purchased for a different purpose many moons ago but never put into production. I’ve recently converted it to a hotspot for Facebook public data. I apologize for the poor domain name. I don’t like it. I don’t think it represents me well.. but it’s available and dangit, I don’t want to register yet another domain.

It’s amazing what people will put in a Status Update. People are funny, sad, depressing, open and in many cases, just plain weird. Using Reasons To hate.com is an amazing view into the mind of the average, public Facebook user, the kind of language they use, and the kinds of things they say. Quite honestly it’s been a really eye opening experience into the minds of the average Joe that exists outside of my own little circle.

Reasons To Hate.com uses the Facebook Public API (graph.facebook.com) and jQuery to search public Facebook Status updates and display them for you. Facebook updates are displayed live, in real-time! I’ve picked out some of my favorite gems (that lead to the most interesting comments) as well as left you a search box, so you can search for a phrase yourself.

Profile names and pictures will click through to real Facebook photos.

What’s the goal?

1. Raise awareness regarding the dangers of Facebook, and public online identities

2. Entertain myself and others

How does it work?

Facebook makes public information available via it’s API. I use jQuery and JSONP to make AJAX requests on your behalf to get the latest data on whatever search term you’re looking for. There is no back-end code. Your query doesn’t go through me, and I don’t give you any data.. it’s all done through Facebook through the miracle of Javascript. When a custom search (using the search box) is submitted, I log the query in a flat file (and only the query. No time stamps, no IPs) so I can look for ‘popular’ searches later on.

What about Privacy?

I’m not exposing anything that isn’t already public, searchable, and index elsewhere… I just put a different User interface on it and made it a little more search-friendly for the previously stated purposes.

And while many (most?) people know about basic Google operators like + and -, there’s a whole list of operators to refine your Google searches.

These are what I believe to be the most useful and relevant Google operators. While not all-inclusive, there’s virtually nothing in the Google machine that isn’t within your immediate reach with these operators.

Sure, many of these attributes are available under Googles “Advanced search” menu item… but who uses that thing? Keep in mind that many, if not most of these Google operators work in other Google searches, such as Google Image search. Also remember that most of these operators can be combined with each-other for some serious precision.

What’s your favorite Google trick?

I wanted to start sending e-mail using a Godaddy SMTP account, via Gmail to get rid of that annoying “On behalf of” tag line that was giving away my super-secret gmail account name (or something like that).

I went into GoDaddy and created a brand new SMTP mail account, then went to Gmail and tried to add it as a valid SMTP account to send from. I kept getting messages like:

Your other email provider is responding too slowly. Please try again later, or contact the administrator of your other domain for further information

I was using smtpout.secureserver.net like GoDaddy told me to, but it turns out, it was a GoDaddy configuration issue. To resolve this, log into GoDaddy’s creepy web interface then:

• Click on the Settings tab
  • Click on Display Settings menu item
• Click on the Other tab
• Check the Use Full-Time SSL Mode checkbox
• Click the OK button

When configuring the account in Gmail, make sure to check “Always use a secure connection (SSL) when sending mail” and use Port 465.

I actually found most of this information by putting together a bunch of forum posts, but it was misplaced enough I thought consolidating it into one “typical GoDaddy…” post would be appropriate.

I put together a simple ASP form that can be installed on any IIS installation that is running indexing service, in order to test querying the catalog. It doesn’t have all the features of the previous “Query the Catalog” page, but it should be sufficient to know whether indexing service is returning results at all.

Simply toss the file into an IIS directory and hit it with your browser.

Download: Indexing-Service-test-page.zip

This software is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I’ve recently added HTML5 Support to the site. Now, virtually every modern device should be able to listen to Voicemail audio! iPhones and iPads are supported via HTML5 directives, while older or less awesome browers (IE?) use a Flash plugin. If all else fails… I just provide a download link.

HTML5 is the latest version of the Hypertext markup language approved by the W3C. HTML5 audio players allow for embedded audio played directly from the browser, without any 3rd party support such as Adobe Flash or Real Media.

Try it out and let me know how the HTML5 support works!

HelloLinko.com

edit 2 minutes later:

Let’s face it… we should be embracing anything that allows us to take a few steps away from Flash, which for years has had a creepy strangle on web-embedded multimedia.

HelloLinko.com lets any Google Voice user to share their favorite Google Voice transcriptions (errors, typos, weird sentences and all!) with all of the internet. The best part about it? You can share a Google Voice transcription directly from Google Voice! You can choose to share an audio copy of your Voicemail, or just the transcript.
What’s more, Fans of HelloLinko can call and record their own Voicemails for HelloLinko… or even send a text message.

I even remove phone numbers from transcripts before being posting but beware that if you choose to include an audio copy of your voicemail, personal information can’t be removed.

This project is still in beta, but I invite any of my blog readers to try it out and pass it on to their friends!

But like many things in life, the time has come to bite the bullet. I’ll simply have to set aside my insecurities and concerns and join the rest of the world.

Follow me on twitter using @imasuper. You can also find me on Facebook here!

See you on the intricacies of Web 2.0.

The Story

I was recently given a broken first generation iPhone. The headset assembly had a torn ribbon cable that made the phone unusable. Attached to this ribbon cable was the vibrator, headset jack, volume and mute controls, and the power button.

I shopped around online for apple part # 821-0449-A. Unfortunately, it is a pretty rare item that looks like it’s only sold from a few mom and pop operations. No large retailers like Amazon or NewEgg carried the assembly that I needed. Since it was a first generation iPhone, it made it even harder. The few places I did find it varied in price and reputation… anywhere from 7$ all the way to 49.95$.

After looking around, I finally decided I would try to order the part from FlexQueen.com since it was only $8.50. However, I was skeptical about this online store as it had absolutely 0 reviews online. I decided to call the phone number on the website. If they answered and didn’t sound too suspicious, I’d run it through my Credit Card and Paypal… figured I couldn’t lose.

I called FlexQueen and they answered after a few rings. No phone system, just a good old fashioned phone. I spoke with a gentleman who confirmed they stocked the Headphone assembly I needed.

I Placed my order online at 8:27 AM… received an e-mail shipping confirmation at 1:58 PM. My order arrived exactly two days later via USPS. It was well packaged, and exactly as ordered. What actually did surprise me is that the item was OEM. I’m not sure where FlexQueen got an OEM Apple part, but I’m not complaining.

I had to borrow a screwdriver set from a neighbor because the Philips screws that are in the iPhone are incredibly small. I mean… small. You have no idea how small.

After some ridiculous finagling we were able to get the assembly in, except for the power button which had been ripped to shreds by the previous owner. I was totally bummed because I wasn’t going to be able to finalize my reassembly until I could purchase a new power button. However, I did cheat and powered the unit on using the compression switch on the headset assembly without putting the phone back together and sure enough… Power! That means I repaired an iPhone by hand. Oh, the pride.

Naturally I went right back to FlexQueen’s website to order a replacement part. To my heart’s delight, they had a the power button at a fairly reasonable price. (It was $3.50 for a button smaller than a dime.. but still, a hard to come by button..) Unfortunately, shipping on this button was a whopping $7.50!

After some thought, I called FlexQueen and explained my situation. Octavio immediately offered to send me my new part for regular price plus a nominal shipping fee. The additional shipping charge was essentially cost + a few pennies just because rounding and adding wasn’t worth the time.

I ordered my button from Octavio at 2:00 PM Friday and the button was in my mailbox Monday morning in a hand addressed envelope. I think Octavio was unable to fulfill the order using the normal ordering system, so he took it upon himself to complete my order by hand!

Needless to say, I was incredibly impressed with FlexQueen’s fulfillment of my order.

Why did I write this review?

But one question remains… Why did I bother to write such an indepth and stellar review of an online company that is smaller than this blog (Seriously… my blog has a higher Google Page Rank than FlexQueen)?

The answer is simple. Inside of my first order was 4 things:

• My ordered headset assembly
• Packing material
• A receipt
• A hand-signed note note

This note was a hand-signed plea from what I can only assume was a proprietor of FlexQueen.com. It read in part:

We sincerely hope you are fully satisified with your purchase and if so please give us a good review. Good reviews are the only way we can compete with Asian distributors that have overhead costs that are so much lower than ours.

So there you have it. FlexQueen gave me a great price on hard to find cell phone parts, shipped it very quickly, and went the extra mile by giving me a reasonable price on additional products I needed that were associated with my original order. In addition to that, they recognized their ‘small-time’ circumstances and sought out positive feedback.

I don’t need cell phone replacement parts very often. In fact, this is only the second time I can think of… but I can guarantee that if and when the occasion arises, I will order from FlexQueen again.

To Octavio and my new friends on FlexQueen/OCESA Manufacturing: I hope this positive review is an adequate ‘Thank You’ for your honest and prompt service.