In the spirit of the holiday tomorrow here in the United States, here are two links thanks to the wonderful and useful blog, Lifehacker regarding the 4th of July. One has a slew of beautiful wallpaper images capturing fireworks displays. The other link gives you tips on how to capture some of your own images suitable for desktop wallpaper:

Celebrate the Fourth of July with a New Desktop Wallpaper
Take Better Photos: Fourth of July Edition

The article linked below is actually titled, “How Bandwidth Caps Hurt Your Mac & What Apple Can Do About It,” but I don’t see how this isn’t as much of a threat to any computer user, regardless of computer brand or operating system. Bandwidth caps, especially really really low caps that some of these Internet Service Providers are forcing and enforcing (3GB/month?!?!? I’ve got thumb drives that filling them up would hit that cap!)

I am not in that industry whatsover, so I don’t know what real costs are involved in delivering bandwidth to the end user once the network is up and running, but from the outside, it really seems to be price gouging and cable companies protecting their own content, rather than trying to recoup costs of maintenance and delivery of bandwidth to users. In this day and age of 720p and 1080p streaming, video podcasts, high resolution photo sharing, video conferencing, VOIP and hundreds of other applications and data streams, such low (or really any) caps on your broadband connections seem ludicrous and bordering on price gouging.

I do understand the author saying Apple should be at the forefront of battling these caps, but in no way, shape or form, think cause you’re on a Dell, that this isn’t just as much of an issue.

How Bandwidth Caps Hurt Your Mac & What Apple Can Do About It

Here’s a little roundup for making the most out of Twitter. I’m proud to say, I’m already using several of these tools — three to be exact. Two of these tools, I’ve been using for quite awhile. TwitterFeed (now sporting a new design it seems) is especially great. I use Twitterfeed in conjunction with ping.fm to automatically send out new articles of this blog, along with our baby blog and the GPS data from all my bike rides over at Keefer Madness, Little Baby K to not only Twitter, but also Facebook and various other social networking sites all in one swoop. (via their RSS Feeds).

So yeah, those two tools the article below references are very familiar territory to me. After reading the article, I did also sign up with Futuretweets.com as well. With the blogs both being on the Word Press platform, I can already schedule content to post at a given time via those two blogs, but if I want to just schedule a Tweet of some sort that site should come in handy!

I also tried out Twinfluence.com as well. No surprise, I’m not very high on the rankings in the Twitterverse, but still some interesting data. It’s nice to see my “Social Capital” is ranked as very high.

Regardless, check out the article and links in it to help maximize your Twitter account’s usefulness in self (and professional possibly) promotion.

5 Free Twitter Tools For Smarter Tweeting

With the release of Firefox 3.5 imminent, good ol’ Lifehacker made up a couple collections of the best extensions for Firefox. A lot of those in their lists, I’m already utilizing (like Tab Mix Plus, Firebug and Better Gmail), but there are a few new gems on their lists worth trying out:

Lifehacker’s Firefox Add-On Packs

So like my friend, John I too tried the upgrade to 2.8 and had an incomplete/successful install of WordPress 2.8 today. I should have learned from his hardship with the new version.

All day today, I was unable to get into the admin tool, and all of the plugins sat disabled, giving me a glimpse of how important those plugins are for rounding out the display of the site, but more importantly, filtering out all the comment spam.

Anyway, for about 12 hours today, this site was limping along, but it’s now back to full strength, with its plugins all working fine with 2.8. It took my web host intervening to get me back up and running. He found a solution on a forum, overwriting some files with new versions for 2.8. Anyway, upgrade is working fine.. now.

Add a little SEO and simultaneously add an easy to remember URL to your Facebook account starting Saturday:

Starting On Saturday You Can Get A Username On Facebook

Perfect for all of you that have a computer (Mac or PC) hooked up to your TV. I would love to have an old Mac Mini for just this purpose. Now the next request will be higher quality (HD) content to show on those big television sets.

Hulu Desktop Lets You Rot Your Brain From The Comfort Of Your Couch

Twitter and cycling, two things I spend a fair amount of time on. It seems Lance Armstrong, while not doing a whole lot on the bike in the Giro d’Italia (though he’s still working and staying within the peloton just fine), is making a stir off the bike. First, he was blamed for the rider protest of the Stage 9, where they were complaining of unsafe conditions, that ended up neutralizing that stage. Now, the press is upset that he’s been circumventing the media and tweeting away updates, rather than interviewing the media. Why can’t he do both? I think it’s asinine to bite the hand that feeds you, especially when part of Armstrong’s comeback is about raising awareness. While Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds, traditional media should still be used to its fullest potential to reach the broadest audiences, IMHO.

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