let us give you our bit.ly api key

The major twitter clients do a great job, but I don't think any of them allow for a bit.ly/j.mp api key that would allow you to keep track of the links you have shared.

Ideas I have for little hacks

potential little projects to add bits of functionality here and there

-Delicious archival for ReaditLater (from within app, list, etc)

-Something that automagically grabs and saves all the links sent to me via SMS message inbox. Same could be applied with filtering to emails, RSS, etc. I like the idea of automatic link fetching for communications apps

-Mapping/accessing javascript browser bookmarklets via context/right-click menus (so you could easily highlight text and trigger action) 

-a browser extension that counts characters with space (instead of words)

I've searched and can't find hacks that do any of the above. They're just little hang-nail things, but it would be fun to try to solve them. If I had some time, I'd be trying to do it instead of writing about it. ;-p

escalating privilege, Vertically

I jailbroke my iPhone yesterday. I used blackra1n and have installed both the Cydia and the Rock APT installers. I've got mine turbocharged now (even got a bittorrent client & webserver running on it!)

It's really quite amazing how much it opens the phone up. It was a nice product before, but this makes it no different than running a beautiful, robust little multi-touch UNIX computer in the palm of your hand.

I don't know why I was so previously opposed to jailbreaking and was so embarrassingly far off. This device is head and shoulders above anything out there. (All Android devices included in that not-so-humble assessment) Unlocking the file system on the phone & providing a means to install 3rd party software on it outside of the AppStore (which is all that jailbreaking really is) is a no brainer and totally enhances the experience of owning this device.

Looking back, looking forward

If you're a friend or reader of this blog, you know it's something I've never been consistent with.

From this point forward, I'm going to try to keep my posts more informal and observational, but much more frequent. I intend for this to be a personal record of thoughts, ideas, and findings about tech products & services, and any other interesting stuff that I may find.

For a time, I hoped to make a 'serious' technology blog out of this domain, regurgitating news releases and other 'analysis' from the blogesphere. I can't guarantee I won't occasionally fall into that claptrap now and again (it's the nature of tech blogs, I think), but going forward, the best way I can be serious about any effort is to simply be genuine.

(whether or not that's always interesting is another story...but I believe there's better odds going this way)

So anyway, that's my apology post, dated 12/25/2009.

My resolution for 2010 is to capture more stuff here, with more frequency as well as face-lift in terms of design and more.

Thanks for reading and following me!

Merry Christmas.
Chris Duffy aka Spinchange