BigWideLogic is the personal home page of me, John Biggs. I’m a writer and entrepreneur. I’ve written for TechCrunch, Gizmodo, and the New York Times. I’ve also written multiple books.
Need content? Check out my editorial business, Typewriter.plus.
You can email me at john@biggs.cc or ping me @johnbiggs on Threads.
Картини
I was using DoubleCommand to swap my Command and Option keys on my Logitech K800 Windows keyboard and discovered that the app didn’t record my preferences anymore. Thats when I also discovered that OS X Lion supports key swapping right in the Keyboard preferences pane.
Head over to system preferences, select Keyboard, click Modifier Keys and there you go. Just swap Command and Option. Save it and it will remain forever thus.
I’m sure someone will bump into this at some point so just FYI if you get a little Flash window in Chrome on OS X asking if you’d like to change storage settings, etc, and can’t click it, you need to actually head over here and here to manually manage your storage settings. It’s completely dopey, I know.
I’ve been using HipChat for a while and one thing we were missing was an RSS injector so we can see what our competition is up to. I built this little script to grab RSS feeds and inject new posts into a room. You have to edit setup.php with your HipChat Auth Token, room name, and name of the robot you want have visit your room. Then run the PHP code via cron. Presumably you could recreate this to run on a more command-line friendly language, but whatevs.
Good luck and have fun.
Good news, everybody! My head, scanned at Makerbot Industries by artist Jon Monaghan with a high-resolution laser scanner, is now a Thing, available for everyone to own, covet, and place into terrible places.
That’s right: I’m now 3D-printable.
Continue reading
I’ll be writing a bit more for Gadgetwise, mostly about travel tech but also about bags, apps, and gear related to road warriorship. Requests? Recommendations? Drop me a note.
Wow. That was fast. Looks like we’re expecting a July release on this puppy. It’s available for pre-order here, so please give us a little bit of muscle and help us move this thing!
I wrote a book in 2004 about hackers, spammers, and other nerds and I thought I’d like to share it with the world. It’s currently available on Amazon and B&N and is $9.99 for the print edition and an inexplicable $9.49 in the Kindle edition. It is apparently not available for the Nook.
The book is 7 years old and is nearly out of print. It is about spammers, hackers, and viruses and I wrote it for a general audience like my dad who may or may not be all that technically savvy. It’s not a How-To as much as an exploration of the personalities in hacking.
According to Bookscan I sold 0 copies in the past few months and rather than allow it to molder, I’ve decided to give it away, with some caveats.
MANDATORY STEP: Let me know you downloaded it. Email me at john @ bigwidelogic.com or tweet me at @johnbiggs
OPTIONAL STEPS:
1. Read it. It was pretty good, I was just starting out as a writer, and I thought some of it was fun/funny.
2. Buy it if you liked it. Or at least buy a copy for someone who you think will like it. Heck, even buy a paper copy. You can also buy my current book, Blogger’s Boot Camp.
3. Pass it around and tell others about it.
You guys are smart enough to know that nothing is free. It took me a two years to write this and it took Apress many resources to publish it. Now, however, it’s run its natural life and I’d like to perform this experiment to see how many copies will circulate in order to assess the feasibility of releasing books like this in the future. The publishing industry is changing before our very eyes and I’m worried many of us will be left behind if we don’t change with it.
Anyways, enjoy. Let me know if you want more formats.
My friends, I am the GADGET DAD!
Charlie White and I are putting the final touches on a book about blogging for Focal Press. Why? Because we’re bloggers, that’s why. Watch this space.
I’ve been doing some searches for OS X tracking apps in case of theft and I came up with the most popular, an app called Adeona. Sadly, it’s been down since 2009 and the status hasn’t changed so I’m using the Prey Project, which seems far superior. The app runs every 20 minutes and keeps an eye on everything including your webcam, running programs, and nearby hotspots. Once it’s set as missing, it shuts the laptop down and starts reporting its location. Very cool stuff.
