It’s been a while… My last post was a long time ago. I my defense, I’ve been working on a project, and that took up a lot of time. Now that that’s done, I may just post to my blog every now and then…

Let’s start with something simple… Cats and laptops. Here are a few pictures of my cat that I’ve taken over the last few months.

The last picture is the prelude to the next picture – a while after I took the previous picture I needed my laptop again. Here is what I found on the screen:

What happens when you hang a photo upside down? Does it still work? Does it still look good? Does it turn into something different? Find out for yourself at the “Upside Down” show at the Rochester High Falls Art Gallery. One of the current shows has all frames mounted upside down.

The free public reception for the shows is on Sunday, December 6th from 3 to 6pm.

The exhibits continue through January 8th, 2009.

For more information, download the official PDF flyer.

So, you’ve read my previous post and were bummed that the outlined procedure only worked for a Mac? I have good news for you. Here is an Adobe AIR application that can import your TweetDeck Groups into Twitter as lists:

TwitterListImporter.air [Update: See the note at the end of this post]

Download the application and install it. Because you already have TweetDeck (why else would you run this app‽‽‽) it’s not necessary to install the AIR runtime system. Once you start the application, you need to provide the path to the TweetDeck database file. The application will open the directory where you can then manually select the correct directory. In the directory that’s shown, locate a directory that starts with “TweetDeckFast” followed by a string of letters and numbers. Make sure you pick the directory, on the Mac there is also a plist file with the same name in that directory.

Once you’ve double-clicked on that directory, you will see a directory called “Local Store”, in which you will find the actual database file. It will start with “td_”, will contain your Twitter username and will end with “.db”. Select that file.

After specifying your Twitter username and password, just click on the “Convert” button and watch the show. After the application is done, you should have new Twitter lists with the members of your TweetDeck groups.

If you want to make any groups private, you need to do that on the Twitter web site.

Update – Note: When you download the file to a Windows system, the file may be named TwitterListImporter.zip instead of TwitterListImporter.air. Just rename the file. Windows is changing the extension – as far as I know, for no good reason.

Getting your Groups out of TweetDeck… Again!

If you are a regular on Twitter, you’ve probably heard about the new feature that is currently getting rolled out to more and more users: Lists. On the surface, they look pretty much like the TweetDeck groups, but once you start digging a bit deeper, there are a number of things that you can do with lists that are not possible with groups.

Even though the TweetDeck folks have indicated that lists will be added to TweetDeck soon, I did not want to wait, to get my TweetDeck groups into Twitter lists.

I’ve written a number of posts before that explained how to extract group information from TweetDeck and other Twitter applications, we can use these techniques to extract the group members and use the Twitter API to create new list and fill these lists with users.

This time, I will do this using the Mac version of TweetDeck – mainly because every Mac comes with all the parts that are necessary to accomplish this task (Perl, sqlite3), but also because I needed it for the Mac, and just did not have time to look at a Windows based solution yet.

Getting Our Hands Dirty

Download this Perl script, copy it to your Mac and rename it to TD2TL.pl:

• TD2TL

Then edit the file and provide your Twitter username and password – potentially you also need to modify the path to the TweetDeck database file. I’ve only tried this on a few TweetDeck installations, and it seems to work, but if things go wrong, find that file and modify that path as well.

The next step is easy: Just run the program from the command line by either making it executable, or by calling Perl with the program file on the command line:

chmod 755 ./TD2TL.pl
./TD2TL.pl

perl ./TD2TL.pl

While the script is running, it will report what it’s doing (e.g. creating a list, or adding users to a list). Once it’s done, you will have these groups available as Twitter lists – without the hassle to go through all your 1000 followed Tweeters and manually assign them to lists.

[ Due to a huge amount of comment spam, comments on this post are now disabled ]

Converting PDF documents to PowerPoint presentations is probably not something you need every day. I think I needed it once when the original PowerPoint file of a presentation I needed to give was no longer available, but the PDF file created from that presentation was. I did not have access to AnyBizSoft PDF to PowerPoint Converter back then, so a lot of copy&pasting took place.

Today you can download a free version of that software from GiveAwayOfTheDay.com. I’ve played around with the application a little, and it really does what it promises: PDF elements get converted to editable PowerPoint page elements.

Here is a list of the key features of AnyBizSoft PDF to PowerPoint Converter:

1. Convert PDF files to PPT presentations quickly and accurately
2. Retain all the layouts, images, and hyperlinks in the output documents
3. Produce an editable and dynamic PPT presentation with a few clicks
4. Convert up to 200 PDF files at the same time
5. Support Office 2010 and Windows 7

I cannot vouch for the last two list items, but I know that it worked for up to seven files, and that all the other claims are true. If you think you’ll ever need to convert a PDF file to PowerPoint, give AnyBizSoft PDF Converter a try – and if you do it (download and activate) today from GiveAwayOfTheDay.com it will not even cost you a dime.

Amazon.com sent me an email yesterday, informing me that Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is available for pre-order. Because I have more than one Mac, I’m of course interested in the family pack for up to five computers. When I visited the page on Amazon, I was surprised to see what customers bought after visiting that page:

That looks very suspicious… My first thought was that Microsoft might be behind that, doing some “optimization” behind Amazon’s back. Just to be sure that it was not just a fluke, I visited the site again today, and the numbers are still the same.

Now that the Small show is over, it’s time for a new exhibit at the High Falls Gallery: The Abstraction show is about to open.

Join the artists for the opening this Sunday, 07/26/2009 from 3 to 6pm.

Here is a link to the flyer in PDF format: ag abs109 invite 1up.pdf

I know, it’s a few days too late… Last Saturday was the 2nd Annual Worldwide Photowalk.

(Thanks to Michele for taking this picture).

I led the walk in Rochester, NY, and the fruits of our 3 hours of walking around downtown Rochester can be seen here:

All Flickr images tagged with WorldwidePhotoWalkRochesterNY2009

The Flickr group for participants of the Rochester walk.

As far as I know, everybody had fun – at least until the rain started. It was not too bad: It rained for a about 10 minutes, but we lost a few people during and after that little break.
Let’s do this again next year.

If you haven’t been to the High Falls Gallery to see the Small Show, there is still a chance: It is open until July 11th.

The next time you are in or around downtown Rochester you may want to consider stopping by to look at a few pictures. The art work is small (hence the name), so it should not take too long 🙂

The next show – titled “Abstract” – will open on July 26th and is running through September 11th. I submitted three of my images, so I’ll be at the opening. Do you want to join me?

Update:

Please visit the same post on my business site. The comments are closed here, so if you want to comment, you have to head over to http://khkonsulting.com/2009/06/adobe-reader-enable-rights/

Have you ever tried to fill a PDF form in Adobe Reader and to then save that filed document to your hard disk? Did it work? Chances are that it did not.

Have you ever thought about why the Adobe Reader is called “Reader”? The answer is pretty obvious, it’s because it is only reading and displaying (and printing) PDF files – that is, it is not writing them. That also includes that it will not save a modified document. You would need the “Adobe Writer” – or “Adobe Acrobat” as it is called for that.

But regardless of the name, we can “trick” the Reader into writing a filled form to the disk. OK, it’s not really a trick, Adobe did implement this feature, so it’s official, and we are not hacking or cracking anything.

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