When my wife and I go food shopping we always bring a list of items but we often forget a pen to check-off what was purchased. Even when we do bring a pen it is a bit awkward to write on a piece of flimsy paper without leaning against a cereal box. As a dirt simple alternative just rip your check-offs into the side of the paper to indicate what you’ve picked up and what still needs to be hunted down.

The last few weeks I’ve been thinking about how SMS could be leveraged to help our clients market their products & services. In doing so, I found American Airlines txtSAAver program and Ping Rewards. I believe that SMS coupons & specials will become ever more common over time. For the marketer these ads are low-cost and can quickly be generated to maximize sales during low points either in the day, week or month.

However, I do see potential abuse in the system which opens the door to mechanisms which would make SMS marketing less attractive, namely too many text messages and unsolicited messages which would turn customers away from the service. Despite the potential shortcomings I think SMS marketing is a channel which has been largely over-looked to date.

The other day I was searching for a used 1U server for use in our development environment. Since I no longer like eBay, my new path for locating used items is Craigslist. I found several servers in the Denver area however I was too late and the servers had already sold. That’s when I began to think I needed a tool to monitor Craigslist.

At lunch today I told the gang that I’d like us to create a simple monitoring tool which checks Craigslist every hour or so for changes under the region / topic I’m interested. The tool would send me an email once a change was posted.

Tonight, I found my tool. I guess there isn’t a need to recreate the wheel. Here’s Craigslist Watch.

One of my favorite tricks-of-the-trade is using Google to recover content which has been lost. Whether the content is deleted from a non-versioning CMS package or accidentitaly deleted in HTML, Google usually is a good way to recover content. Here’s how:

Say I just deleted the content on our Imulus Solutions page by mistake.
http://www.imulus.com/solutions

I’ll head over to Google.com and do a web search for”Imulus Solutions”

Click on the “CACHED” link and you’ll see the old content from when Google last indexed your site. Hopefully your site will have been indexed in the last 48 hours.

Copy & Paste your content and your back in business. For advanced users just “view source” copy & paste into your favorite editor and you even will have 95% of the original code back after a few minor tweaks.

Last updated: 4/26/2007

OK for the past year or so I’ve been trying to share my iTunes library from my home to my office. Using my PowerBook with OSX 10.4, iTunes 7, Rendezvous Proxy and Hamachi I was able to pull this off and I love it!

I had trouble at first getting Hamachi to install and run on my system but the rest was pretty straight forward once I had Hamachi working, hence this tutorial to help the others out there looking to do the same!

Start Downloading
Here is the list of files you will need to get this process moving along. I’m going to assume you have iTunes 7 and OSX. I’m also assuming you have 2 Macs to try this on. I’ve tried this on the PPC and the Intel system with no problems.

Hamachi
TUN/TAP
HamachiX Graphical Interface
Rendezvous Proxy

Install the Goods
I started with TUN/TAP. Download the file and unzip it. It should produce a folder called TUNTAP_TIGER. Go into the folder and install all 4 packages, at first I just tried the TUNTAP_INSTALLER.MPKG and that failed to produce the results I needed, so run all 4 installers.

Before moving on to Hamachi you will need to enable ROOT user privledges on your Mac. Go into APPLICATIONS / UTILITIES and run NETINFO MANAGER. In NETINFO MANAGER go to “Security” and then “Authenticate User”. Once Authenticated then go back to “Security” and “Enable Root User” it will prompt you to enter a secure password, once that is done move on.

Now unzip Hamachi and it will produce some obscure folder. For me it produced “hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-osx” for simplicity I renamed it “HAMACHI-FILES”, so should you for this tutorial.

Next, open up TERMINAL under APPLICATIONS / UTILITIES. If you never used terminal then don’t worry. Just enter my commands explicitly. I’m going to assume the “HAMACHI-FILES” folder is on your desktop. For this tutorial let’s pretend your name George and your computer is ADMIN-GMORRIS

When I open TERMINAL I should get

admin-gmorris: ~ george$

Now navigate up to the HAMACHI-FILES folder on your desktop. Start entering the following lines

admin-gmorris ~ george$ cd desktop/hamachi-files
admin-gmorris ~ /desktop/hamachi-files george$ sudo ./install
admin-gmorris ~ /desktop/hamachi-files george$ hamachi-init
admin-gmorris ~ /desktop/hamachi-files george$ hamachi start

Now Hamachi should start running. Most failures will happen at this point. At least for me I was hung up here with TUN/TAP issues. If Hamachi started for you, awesome keep going.

Now create your network on Hamachi. This is very similar to an networked workgroup or domain. Let’s call your network (make up your own name) georgetunes.

admin-gmorris ~ /desktop/hamachi-files george$ hamachi create georgetunes

It will then ask for a password, so give it one, and your hamachi network will be created. At this point you should run this phase of the process again on your other Mac. Once you do that then try to join the other Mac to your Hamachi network using the following commands while on the other Mac (again, assuming your name is George and your other Mac is HOME-GMORRIS). I’m also assuming that you just finished the install of Hamachi on the second Mac.

home-gmorris ~ /desktop/hamachi-files george$ hamachi login
home-gmorris ~ /desktop/hamachi-files george$ hamachi join georgetunes

It will prompt you for your password and then you should be connected. To prove the connection enter this.

home-gmorris ~ /desktop/hamachi-files george$ hamachi list

And you should see the other system in your Hamachi list.

To make this a bit easier, Install Hamachi X on both Macs. If you have already connected to your Hamachi network in Terminal then when you run Hamachi X you should see your network and which systems are online.

Share the Music Love
Open iTunes on both Macs and then share your music. Go into iTunes Preferences, then under General enter your Share Name. Once done then go to the Sharing icon and then make sure the “Look for shared libraries” is checked, also place a check in “Share my library on my local network”.

Here is where the Intel Mac and PPC Mac differed. For the Intel Mac I just needed to reboot iTunes and I could then see the shared music from my other Mac. On the PPC Mac I needed to install and run Rendezvous Proxy.

This should get you started, I’ll add and revise this as the comments come in.