To make the glowing red eye, I punched a small hole in the pumpkin, taped an LED to a battery, and pushed the LED from the center of the pumpkin through the small hole. I thought about doing an actual red laser, but 1) I don’t want to blind any kids walking by my pumpkin, and 2) laser beams aren’t visible unless there’s fog or smoke or something for the beam to hit.

To make the side “gun” sections of the pumpkin, I had a small dowel rod lying around, so I just cut two small stakes from the dowel rod and jammed them into the pumpkin sides. It’s a bit rickety, but it works. For the video, I played some turret sound effects and moved my red laser over the pumpkin as if another turret was locking onto it.

I didn’t want to take long to carve my pumpkin. I finished it in maybe an hour, but check out this really elaborate pumpkin that someone else did. And it turns out that they work at Google too!

I like how my pumpkin came out overall:

Happy Halloween, and I hope you’re getting creative with your pumpkin carving!

First, install exiftool using this command:

sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl

Then, go into the directory with the JPEG files. If you want to remove metadata from every file in the directory, use

exiftool -all= *.jpg

The exiftool will make copies, so if you had a file called image.jpg, when you’re done you’ll have image.jpg with all the metadata stripped plus a file called image.jpg_original which will still have the metadata.

Here’s another way to come up with startup ideas: walk around your house or apartment, and look for “hot spots.” A hotspot can be an area of high information density, clutter, stress, disorganization, or any place that has a suboptimal solution. Then think about a web or cloud solution to that hot spot. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

Music CDs -> iTunes, Amazon MP3 store, doubleTwist, MP3tunes, etc.
Bookshelf -> Amazon, Kindle, iBooks
Stereo system -> Sonos, Squeezebox, Rhapsody, Pandora, last.fm, Spotify, Grooveshark, MOG, Rdio, etc.
External hard drives -> Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Pogoplug

Okay, those all seem simple or obvious, right? Let’s go a little deeper. What would you do with this pile of business cards?

Pile of business cards -> CloudContacts

Here are a few more that come to mind:
Bank statements -> Mint
Photo Albums -> ScanCafe
Bathroom scale -> Withings
Pedometer -> Fitbit
Phone -> Google Voice, Twilio, Ribbit, Rebtel
Camera -> EyeFi
Stack of video games -> Steam, OnLive
DVD player -> Roku, Netflix Instant movies
Treadmill or Elliptical machine -> Nike+ shoe sensor, LoseIt! iPhone app, CardioTrainer app for Android, Fitbit
Pen -> Livescribe

All of these take a hotspot in your home and inject a cloud or web element to make life easier, more efficient or better. So what happens when you look at a pile of manuals, or receipts? Your alarm clock? Those “Learning Japanese” CDs? A stack of take-out menus? A stack of cookbooks? A hard drive full of MP3s that are disorganized? A hard drive that doesn’t have a back-up copy? An out-of-date programming book? A box full of videotapes? All those back issues of magazines? A blank wall, with no posters or other decoration? Stuff in your garage that you’ve been meaning to sell or give away? Your wallet?

Ideas are sitting all around where you live. If you have a small snag, irritation, or hotspot in your life, probably a lot of other people do too. You can make it easier to organize something (can you convert something physical to digital and store it in the cloud?). You can sell niche versions of a product (e.g. Threadless for T-shirts), you can let people make something that they couldn’t make before (CafePress for T-shirts, LuLu for books), you can pool people with similar interests (a blog like Craftzine, or a forum for book lovers or body builders), you can review products in a particular space, you can teach someone to do something. You can become a well-known expert in something and then sell your time or expertise as a consultant. You can make a free version of something useful or fun, then sell more features or consult on more involved cases. You can do meta versions of lots of these, e.g. Etsy is a marketplace for people who like to buy and sell custom crafted objects.

I’ll stop with a story. I have a friend at Google who is really good at noticing things that annoy him. While walking from his car to his desk in the morning, he can easily find six things that irritate him because they should be improved. I’m not recommending that you make yourself more irritable, but I am saying that if you notice all the times you run across something that can be improved, those are opportunities. And I think one of the easy methods of spotting start-up ideas is looking around where you live and how you spend your time. Find the hotspots in your own life and you might identify some great products or services to build.

Any suggestions? It’s on a machine where I don’t have root access.

Update: Problem solved, but in an annoying way. The files were created by a PHP script, so I wrote a new PHP script to remove the files in question. It looked something like

<?php
unlink(“./advanced-cache.php”);
unlink(“./wp-cache-config.php”);
unlink(“./cache/meta/wp-cache-33c58158f712bca22c3414a8df924c46.meta”);
unlink(“./cache/meta/wp-cache-8f9198130973778a72a378ce93042c4b.meta”);
…
unlink(“./cache/meta/wp-cache-a9e95ca4074fc06d9672d81133751b8e.meta”);
rmdir(“./cache/meta”);
?>

This forum thread from 2001 describes the idea (thanks to Mark and the people that commented).

In case you’re wondering, pair Networks’ FreeBSD systems really don’t work well with the WordPress “WP Cache” or “WP Super Cache” plug-ins, because both plugins make files owned by the “nobody” user which appear to be impossible to delete from the SSH command-line.

1. Don’t make hard promises about the future. One of the beauties of web-based software and services is you get to decide when to push out changes. Don’t give up that freedom by promising a feature to the outside world by a certain deadline. Maybe later you’ll decide that a different feature is a bigger win. Or you may want to hold off for a week to polish down the last rough edges on a product.
2. Don’t trash talk a competitor. Your product should be strong enough that you don’t have to diss a competing company. Back in 2002, an article in the Boston Herald showed up about another search engine. The article claimed that “The entire XXXXXXXXX Catalog is updated every 9 to 11 days.” I knew for a fact that wasn’t true and at first I wanted to rip that claim to shreds like a bulldog. But (with the advice of some wiser Googlers), I decided to take the high road instead of picking a fight. In fact, claims like that motivated Google to be fresher and faster. Now I believe Google has the freshest index of any of the major web search engines.

   Sometimes other companies will throw dirt in your direction. In that case, the challenge is to correct any misperceptions without picking a fight. But first ask yourself: do you really need to respond at all? If not, then maybe it’s better not to get pulled into an argument where everyone involved loses a little credibility. So far I’ve written 10-15 draft posts (and who knows how many I’ve written in my head) where I was snarky about another search engine, and then not published the post. Each time when I look back after a few months, I’m glad that I didn’t post.

3. Don’t post when you’re angry. This is probably the most important tip. If you have to write something, go ahead, but don’t press publish until you’ve slept on the situation or had a chance to calm down completely.

I’ve broken each of these rules, and regretted it almost every time. What tips would you suggest when blogging about your company?

<a href=”http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/” target=”_blank”>Matt Cutts</a>

Go on, try it on this link: Matt Cutts

If you wanted to create a bookmarklet to open a new window or tab, you’d do it like this:

javascript:(function(){ window.open(‘http://www.cnn.com/’); })();

so the actual bookmarklet link that would appear in your HTML as

<a href=”javascript:(function(){ window.open(‘http://www.cnn.com/’); })();”>CNN</a>

and if you want to play with it, here’s the trivial CNN example bookmarklet. On Firefox, you can drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar. On Internet Explorer, you can right-click and select “Add to Favorites…”.

The reason I mention this is that bit.ly is a url shortening service that I like, and they have a bookmarklet, but it replaces the page that you’re shortening. Their bookmarklet looks like this:

javascript:location.href=’http://bit.ly/?url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)

So suppose you find a new page that you want to twitter about or shorten the url for some reason. You want a bookmarklet that opens the bit.ly url in a new window or tab instead of replacing the current page. Combining the two bookmarkets, you’d get

javascript:(function(){ window.open(‘http://bit.ly/?url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)); })();

and here is a bookmarklet for bit.ly that opens your bit.ly url in a new window or tab. You can just drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks folder.

That’s enough to get you started with bookmarklets, but you can find more info about bookmarklets by searching or by looking at example bookmarklets around the web. For example, industrial-strength bookmarklets often load JavaScript dynamically from a webserver. That way if you want to upgrade or improve the functionality of the bookmarklet, you can change the code on the webserver instead of asking every user to update their bookmark. On the other end of the spectrum, some quick-and-dirty bookmarklets don’t even bother escaping the url.

I want to open a new tab, not a new window!

Some webmasters want to choose between a link opening a new tab vs. a new window. I believe that you don’t get that choice — it’s up to the user and their web browser. For example, in Firefox a user can select their desired behavior under Tools → Options → Tabs → “New pages should be opened in:” and choose “a new tab”. Or to tweak the setting directly, the user can type “about:config” into the location bar/address bar and then modify the “browser.link.open_newwindow” option to be one of the following values:

1 = open new windows in the existing window
2 = open new windows in a new window
3 = open new windows in a new tab (this is the default in Firefox 2 and Firefox 3)

See this about:config page for more info.

Likewise in Internet Explorer, the user can go into Tools → Internet Options → “Settings” button in the Tabs section and then under “When a pop-up is encountered:” choose “Always open pop-ups in a new tab”.

Buck up, fellow iPhone hacker. I’ll tell you how to upgrade from your hacked Apple phone and keep all the settings you love from your original iPhone. The good news is that it’s not hard and there’s a set of five steps that will combine the comfort of your old settings with the joy of the new 3G iPhone. I’ll lead you through the steps.

1. Upgrade iTunes and sync your old hacked iPhone

Upgrade to iTunes 7.7 (or whatever the latest version is). Plug your hacked iPhone into your computer and make sure that you sync. When you sync, a backup of your iPhone’s settings data is stored in iTunes. Recharge the power in your old hacked iPhone and turn it off. If you want to be ultra-safe, see my post about how to backup iPhone data.

2. Buy an iPhone 3G

This step is time-consuming, but not hard. Apple has a page for its stores and after 9 p.m. you can check the Apple iPhone availability to find a store that has the new iPhone 3G. Hint: if there are multiple stores in your area, call each to see which has the shortest wait. When you buy the iPhone 3G, you don’t need to mention to the salespeople that your previous phone was hacked. Just buy the iPhone 3G and let them activate the phone in the store.

3. Restore the backup of your hacked iPhone to your iPhone 3G

(If you decide to “start fresh” with your new iPhone 3G and don’t want to restore contacts, bookmarks, music, etc. from your old phone, skip this step.)

Resist the temptation to start immediately customizing your iPhone 3G. You’re just going to override any changes when you restore your old iPhone’s settings anyway. In particular, make sure you keep the passlock (where you have to type a PIN to unlock your iPhone) off for the time being. Go home and plug your new iPhone 3G into the same computer with iTunes 7.7 where you did a sync on your old iPhone. iTunes will ask if you want to register your iPhone. I registered my iPhone, but I don’t think it was necessary — looking back, I think iTunes asked me to register to get permission to send me email offers. Next, iTunes will ask if you want to try 60 days free of MobileMe. I didn’t want that, so I declined. Only after those two offers did iTunes ask if I wanted to set up the new iPhone 3G as a new phone or restore from a backup. The choice looks like:

Choose to restore from a backup and the last sync of your old hacked iPhone should be offered as a choice. Let iTunes restore the backup data and settings from your hacked iPhone to your new iPhone 3G. Once it’s done, pretty much everything should be like it was on your hacked iPhone. The iPhone 2.0 firmware adds some new options, so make sure you explore the settings menu and set any new options the way that you want. Also, if your iPhone is configured to fetch email, your email passwords on the new iPhone 3G will be empty. You will need to re-enter your email passwords.

Finally, if you want to use the Apple App Store, you may need to add a credit card or authorize your computer to purchase things, even if you only want to download free applications. I have a personal policy not to put my data where I can’t get it back out, so I tend to buy MP3s instead of buying music with proprietary Digital Rights Management (DRM) from the Apple Store. As a result, my computer had never been authorized to buy things from the Apple Store. To authorize your computer, in the iTunes program click Store->Authorize Computer… and enter your Apple ID. Once your computer is authorized, you might need to click Store->Check for Purchases… if you tried to download an application from the App Store before your computer was authorized.

4. Upgrade your old iPhone to firmware version 2.0

The iPhone running software version 2.0 has been hacked, so there’s no need to keep running old firmware on your old hacked iPhone. Plug your old hacked iPhone into the computer running iTunes 7.7 and make sure that iTunes is running. Under the “Devices” entry on the left hand side of iTunes, when you click on the iPhone device, you should see a screen with a “Check for Update” button. Click that button. I was running firmware version 1.1.1 and at first it offered me firmware version 1.1.4. So I exited iTunes, restarted iTunes, and clicked “Check for Update” again. Then it offered me firmware version 2.0. Click to install firmware version 2.0 on the old hacked iPhone.

5. Erase the settings and data on your old iPhone

One nice thing about the iPhone’s firmware version 2.0 is that it adds a “secure wipe” that attempts to erase all data completely from your iPhone. That means you can sell the old iPhone or give it to a friend without worrying about all those crazy pictures you took, the 1-900 numbers in your contacts, the SMS messages that reveal things you want to keep private, etc. Here’s how to erase everything on your old iPhone. Eject the phone in iTunes, disconnect the phone from the computer, then press Settings, then General, then Reset, then Erase All Content and Settings, then Erase iPhone. You may have to confirm a couple times that yes, you really want to wipe your iPhone. The process takes about an hour, so I connected my iPhone to a cable that was plugged into a power outlet to ensure that the iPhone wouldn’t run out of power in the middle of wiping it.

When the iPhone is finished erasing itself, it’s suitable for giving to a family member or selling on eBay or whatever.

Reducing Junk Mail

There are several services that will help you reduce your junk mail:

- GreenDimes offers a free basic service, but I decided to do their $20 one-time fee because it offered a few extra things I wanted. GreenDimes walks you through some easy steps that will reduce unsolicited mail, and also lets you decline catalogs. Each time you receive an unwanted catalog, you go to GreenDimes and type the name of the catalog in. GreenDimes takes care of removing you from that catalog’s mailing list. I’ve been quite happy with this service, especially since it’s a one-time fee.

- ProQuo is a free junk-mail reduction service. In the future, they intend to make money when consumers opt-in to request offers; ProQuo will make money from those advertisers. I tried this service today. It lets you stop many services with just a couple mouse clicks per service, but for about 50% of the marketers (maybe 10-15 of them) you have to print and send a letter or leave to an external website to complete a form. It’s still better than nothing though, because even if you’re lazy you can opt out of a lot of junk mail with just your mouse for free. Overall, the service is free, easy, and helps you opt out of a wide variety of lists.

- Catalog Choice is a site solely for opting out of catalogs. It doesn’t tackle things like credit card offers, PennySaver, or list brokers, but the site is clean with a really nice user interface. One of the founders, Daniel Katz, has been interviewed by Bill Moyers, so I trust that they’re a legit organization, even though their WHOIS information is private and there’s very little information about the group on their site. It sounds like three different environmental groups formed Catalog Choice as a non-profit. One piece of advice for Catalog Choice: please give a little more information about yourselves (e.g. history, founders, press) so that people can easily see that you’re legitimate.

- 41pounds.org charges $41 for five years of service. The name comes from the fact that they claim to block 41 pounds of junk mail per year for you. I haven’t tried this service.

Contacting services directly

- You can visit the webpage of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) to opt-out online so that you don’t receive mail from companies that use DMA lists. The pretty url http://www.dmaconsumers.org/cgi/offmailinglist takes you to the url https://www.dmachoice.org/MPS/proto1.php where you want to select option #3 (“Remove your name from DMA Member Prospect Lists”). You will have to provide a valid credit card number, but your credit card will not be charged.

- You can opt out of ADVO online.

Other options

- While you’re at it, why not place yourself on the “Do not call” list at www.donotcall.gov to prevent most telemarketers from calling you? All you need to give is your phone number and an email address, and you will be permanently opted out. Read more about the do-not-call list if you’re interested.

All these actions won’t eliminate junk mail completely, but it will prevent a lot of the junk from showing up in your mailbox. These aren’t affiliate links, just stuff that I think people will find handy. Good luck!

Credit check options

- If you haven’t checked your credit in the last year, visit the official site that lets you get a free credit report from each of the three major credit bureaus. The site is annualcreditreport.com and you’ll have to be on the lookout for upsells like “Find out your credit score for $5.95″ or “Sign up for a credit monitoring service.” But this option is a safe and free way to get access to your credit report from Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax.

- Suppose you don’t want credit card companies sending you offers by snail mail. After all, a thief could steal the offer from your mailbox and use it to open a credit card in your name. Again, there’s a free, official service from the three major credit bureaus to stop getting “free credit cards” offer by postal mail. The site is www.optoutprescreen.com. You can opt-out online for five years, or print out and mail a piece of paper to do a permanent opt-out.

- If you had any type of open credit account between 1987 and May 28, 2008 (which is probably most adults in the United States), you can receive nine months of free credit monitoring. TransUnion, one of the big three credit unions, is settling a class action lawsuit and provides this monitoring for free if you sign up before September 24, 2008. The official site is www.listclassaction.com and you can choose from several options. I chose the nine month credit monitoring service.

If you think you might have been a victim of identity theft or are at higher risk for identity theft (e.g. someone stole a laptop that might have had personal information on it), you have a couple options. A fraud alert requests that before a new lender opens up an account, they take extra steps to verify your identity like calling you on the phone. It should be free if you call the credit bureaus, but it only lasts for 90 days, so you would need to renew the fraud alert every three months.

Meanwhile, a credit freeze is just what it sounds like. It freezes your credit record completely, so that identity thieves should not be able to open new credit accounts in your name. A credit freeze costs $10 per credit bureau each time you want to freeze or un-freeze your credit record.

I used the first three websites earlier to get my free credit report, opt out of getting more credit card offers, and sign up to for a credit monitoring service. Again, all of these are free or official sites; I don’t get any money for recommending them.

Other options

If you’re feeling ambitious, you can also get a public records report on yourself to see what turns up. I believe you can get this report free once a year as well from ChoicePoint. You can get more information here but I believe the short answer is that you need to print, fill out, and mail this one-page form (PDF link). You need to include a photocopy of your driver’s license or other ID and a copy of a utility/phone/credit card bill — see the instructions for the form (PDF link) for more info.

Do you know of other ways to protect yourself from identity theft or otherwise monitor your credit record or score?

Step 1: Install and configure podracer

I used these commands:
sudo apt-get install podracer
mkdir ~/.podracer
vim ~/.podracer/subscriptions
and add the url of a podcast, e.g. http://feeds.webmasterradio.fm/tdsc for The Daily SearchCast.

cp /etc/podracer.conf ~/.podracer/podracer.conf
Edit ~/.podracer/podracer.conf so that you can pick the download directory you want. I changed
#poddir=$HOME/podcasts/$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
to
poddir=$HOME/rawpodcasts
because I want all my podcasts in one directory where I can do a batch process over them afterwards. Go ahead and run “mkdir ~/rawpodcasts” to create the directory that podcasts will be stored in.

sudo vim /usr/bin/podracer
(it’s okay, Podracer is a shell script). Find the line that says
m3u=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)-podcasts.m3u
and comment it out so that podracer won’t automatically create an .m3u playlist as it downloads podcasts.

Run podracer in “catchup” mode to avoid downloading all the old podcasts from your subscriptions with “podracer -c”. podracer will create a file ~/.podracer/podcast.log to keep a record of all the podcasts that have been downloaded (the “-c” catchup mode creates this text file without actually downloading the MP3s). If you want to re-download a file (e.g. while you’re testing your configuration), you can edit the file ~/.podracer/podcast.log and just delete the line for any MP3 you want to re-download.

Step 2: Install and configure mp3splt (optional)

At a terminal window, type “sudo apt-get install mp3splt”. In Step 1, we configured Podracer to download podcasts as MP3s into a “rawpodcasts” directory. In this step, we’re going to take those long MP3s and split them into individual segments into a new “finishedpodcasts” directory. Make the “finishedpodcasts” directory with the command “mkdir ~/finishedpodcasts”.

Make a file /home/username/download-mp3s-and-process.sh that looks like this.

#!/bin/bash

# Run podracer to download any new podcasts
/usr/bin/podracer

# Now split the podcasts into segments
for i in /home/username/rawpodcasts/*.mp3
do
nicename=`basename $i .mp3`
# Send both stderr and stdout to /dev/null so that this is a quiet cron job
mp3splt -eqd /home/username/finishedpodcasts -o $nicename-@n $i &> /dev/null
done

This script will run podracer to download any new podcasts. Then we list all the MP3 files in the rawpodcasts directory and run mp3splt on each podcast. If you had a file test.mp3, you would be running the command

“mp3splt -eqd /home/matt/finishedpodcasts -o test-@n test.mp3 &> /dev/null”

for example. What do the options to mp3splt mean?

-e means “split on sync errors.” If someone created an mp3 by concatenating multiple mp3s (e.g. with a program such as mp3wrap), that could cause sync errors. mp3splt looks at those sync errors to split the concatenated mp3 back into multiple mp3 files.

-q stands for “quiet.” Don’t ask user to respond to any questions. Normally “-e” says something like

Mp3Splt 2.1 (2004/Sep/28) by Matteo Trotta
THIS SOFTWARE COMES WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY! USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!
MPEG 1 Layer 3 – 44100 Hz – Joint Stereo – 256 Kb/s – Total time: 35m.04s
Processing file to detect possible split points, please wait…
Total tracks found: 6
Is this a reasonable number of tracks for this file? (y/n)

Quiet mode suppresses this interactive question on the last two lines above.

-d is the directory to place the split mp3s.

-o lets you specific an output file. “@n” stands for the track number after splitting. So if test.mp3 were made out of two mp3 files, the output of the command above would be two files (in the finishedpodcasts directory) named test.mp3-001.mp3 and test.mp3-002.mp3 . It doesn’t hurt to run mp3splt on existing mp3s because it will just overwrite any old files that had been created.

Step 3: Periodically download and process podcasts

To download podcast files periodically and process them, make a crontab entry for podracer or your script. This will make the cron daemon run your script every few hours to download new mp3s.

I typed “crontab -e” and made the file look like this:

# At 3:03 am, 8:03 am, 10:03 am, 12:03 pm, and 4:03 pm, run this script
3 3,8,10,12,16 * * * /home/username/download-mp3s-and-process.sh

Whenever you’re ready to put the podcasts on some type of media (SD Card, iPod, iPhone, whatever), just copy over anything from the finishedpodcasts directory (if you used mp3splt in step 2) or the rawpodcasts directory if you skipped step 2. Then delete anything left over in either directory.