Feast your ears on THAT Spin Doctors mix!

If you’re just joining the rest of us on the internet, there’s something you should know.  There are several websites that allow you to use your physical location in the world (typically via the GPS in your mobile phone) to virtually “check in” to venues like restaurants, sporting events, and movie theaters.

Checking your location into these websites – namely Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places – can unlock perks like free food at restaurants, help you find new and interesting places to visit, and lets you tell your friends where you are (well, it lets everybody know where you are in most cases).

With any new technology, there’s an acclimation period where society figures out exactly what to do with the new concept.  This is known as cultural lag, and yes, it can affect things as simple as social networks.  In this article, I’m going to cover how you can effectively use these social networks without driving everybody crazy on the internet.

How to Not Suck at Location-based Social Networks

Before I start, understand this: I’m not trying to be hypocritical.  I use these services too, and like everybody else, I’m learning how to keep them useful without being obnoxious.  Most of these tips will apply to Foursquare, but I’m sure you will find a way to apply it to your social network of choice.

1.  Turn off automatic notifications to your linked social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

One of the basic features in location-based social networks is the ability to connect your other social network accounts to notify your friends of your actions.  When you check into your favorite restaurant, you can notify sites like Twitter and Facebook  – but that doesn’t mean you should do it every time you go somewhere.  Instead, turn off automatic notifications (this can be done in Foursquare’s settings online, and usually in the mobile app as well).

Disabling automatic notifications lets you pick and choose which venues to publish to your friends, and maybe you won’t need to alert everybody you just got a car wash.

Turning off automatic notifications lets you pick and choose which venues to publish.

It’s tempting to check into every location you visit when you’re traveling or out on the town, and it’s perfectly fine to do so.  When I’m taking a road trip, I really enjoy checking into new locations (especially when other people have added tips – these are great when trying out new restaurants), but I only publish a small fraction of the venues I visit.

Besides, do you really want your Facebook profile to be a graveyard of old location check-ins?

Don't worry, your teachers probably won't notice that August 23rd was a Monday.

If you’re truly set on publishing all of your updates to your connected social networks, that’s alright.  It’ll just give me a reason to write another article about filtering the noise from your social network feeds.

2.  Add a personal message to the default check-in notification message.

You know what’s just as important as your location check-ins?  Context. Sure, it’s interesting if you check into a restaurant on the top of the mountain or at an exotic location, but adding a personal message actually tells us something about what you’re doing and makes that notification completely justified.  Foursquare gives you the option to add a personal message when checking in, so do that instead of posting the default “I’m at ________”.

If you consistently post bland, impersonal check-ins, people will start overlooking your messages at a subconscious level – just one of the amazing perks of being human.  Entertain your followers, it’s usually why they followed you in the first place!

Tweets like this really put the FU in FUN.

3.  Mind the network.

This will sound completely crazy to somebody who hasn’t been using sites like Facebook and Twitter (or both together, more importantly) – but social networks have etiquette.  On Twitter, updates are fast-and-furious and your annoying posts can easily get lost in a busy timeline.  Sites like Facebook, however, are more personal and updates tend to linger much longer (especially with Facebook’s News Feed that doesn’t display content chronologically).

Facebook prioritizes content that appears in your News Feed by your personal contact with other people, so if you’re posting a lot of junk, you’ll only be hammering your friends’ News Feeds with it.

4.  Don’t be the mayor of your own house/apartment/castle.

Actually – go ahead and be the mayor of your own place.  It’ll be that much easier for somebody to come over and convert your place into a two-way petting zoo.

5.  Don’t check into places you’re obligated to be multiple times a day. (Work, School, Jail, etc.)

I won’t go as far as to say you absolutely shouldn’t check into places you’re required to be, like work or school, but if you are going to do it – don’t do it every time you walk into a new building or come back from a break.  Having a feed full of check-ins at Work, Work, Home, Work, Home, Chuck E. Cheese, Work, and Home won’t look cool, and your co-workers will just end up stealing your fancy red stapler anyway.

6.  Use real, publicly accessible locations.

Sure, it’s hilarious being the mayor of your neighbor’s bathtub, but it defeats the arguable usefulness of these social networks.  Venues you add to social networks like Foursquare should be publicly accessible, and nobody likes the guy that creates a separate venue for his row at the Celine Dion concert.

"It's cool, dude, he'll totally think this is HILARIOUS."

7. (Bonus) Adding new venues correctly is a responsibility.

Luckily for us, children are no longer taught irony in their curriculum.

If you have the privilege of adding a new venue, please take the time to do it correctly.  This means adding its proper name (tip: search Google), the type of venue, and a somewhat-accurate address.  If you don’t know the address and your GPS isn’t accurate, the street name is still helpful.

And if you’re standing in front of a giant, blinking billboard with the venue’s name on it, at least take the time to spell it right.

Conclusion

It’s hard to say which way location-based social networks are going to go, but we might as well try to minimize their annoying tendencies in the meantime.  Now that Facebook has launched Facebook Places, we could see this trend becoming explosively mainstream – or disappear like so many other internet fads.  I like sites like Foursquare, both to discover new places and to interact with my friends, but there’s a fine line between celebrating a service and becoming totally ridiculous.

Oh, and there are always those pesky security concerns…

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My favorite way to use Aero Snap is with the keyboard – simply press the Windows Key + the left or right arrow on your keyboard and the current application will snap to the side of your screen.

Check out the video below to see how it works:

When I use earlier versions of Windows like Windows XP and Vista, I often find myself missing this feature.  But good news: it can easily be added with AeroSnap BETA.

AeroSnap BETA

AeroSnap BETA is a free download for Windows XP and Vista, and instantly gives you the same Aero Snap functionality seen in Windows 7.  After downloading and installing AeroSnap BETA, a small icon will be present in your system tray.  Right clicking this icon gives you more options.

In the General tab, you can set AeroSnap BETA to start with your system so snapping is always available.  You can also enable hotkeys, which is the best way to use Aero Snap in my opinion.  Pressing WIN + Left Arrow and WIN + Right Arrow will shift the current window to different sections of the screen, going from Right Snapped to Center to Left Snapped.

In the Snapping tab, you can adjust the different types of window snapping and also the width of the regions that the snap is sensitive to.

Adding Aero Snap to your older version of Windows is a great way to add some new functionality to your aging system without buying an entirely new operating system.

Enjoy this tip?  Make sure to check out our other articles about Windows!

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As a relief to me, Gmail released an “Undo Send” feature quite awhile ago that gives you a small window of opportunity to un-send an email if you notice something wrong with it.  This feature is available in Gmail Labs, which you can access by clicking the small green beaker in the top right corner of Gmail.

You can then locate the “Undo Send” feature, click Enable, and scroll to the bottom of the page to click Save Changes.

Undo Send… Improved!

When Undo Send was first released, you had about 5-10 seconds to click the Undo button before the message was sent.  Now the good folks at Gmail have given us much more time (up to 30 seconds), and the ability to choose how much time we would like to have available.

After activating Undo Send in Gmail Labs, head over to the General tab of your Gmail Settings page.  Scroll down to the “Undo Send” options, where you can now use the dropdown menu to select the amount of time you would like to be able to un-send an email.

In my opinion, the more time, the better!

The next time you realize you just sent a steamy letter to your grandmother instead of your girlfriend, you can rest easy knowing that the email can be un-sent.

If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out the rest of our great articles about Gmail.

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I swear, the rain and traffic simultaneously cleared up just when I was going to take this picture.

As I write this article, rain falls from the sky, the earth rotates around the sun, and I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a Jeep making its way out of city traffic.  Using my Android phone and the free-with-limitations EasyTether application, I can browse the internet on my netbook anywhere that I have a data connection with my phone.

Sure, Android 2.2 has built-in tethering, but you’ll often have to pay your carrier for this service and some phones simply will never support it.  If you’re like me and are using a phone that still hasn’t received the newest Android update, EasyTether is a great way to give yourself internet access on the go.

The “lite” version of EasyTether is completely free but only allows you to access non-https (secured) websites, so if you’re looking to do this on the cheap you won’t be visiting your secure webmail or doing any online banking (probably for the best, anyway).  If you need to do some more serious usage, you can pay a fairly reasonable $9.99 to unlock full functionality.

Using EasyTether

EasyTether can be found in the Android Market by searching for its name.  Install and open the app to get started.

Step 1) After opening the EasyTether app, select your computer’s operating system.

Step 2) You will then be prompted to download the client application that must be installed on your computer.  Since you most likely don’t have internet access on your computer at this point, you can download the client through your phone, mount your phone as a USB drive on your computer, then run the installer.

If you do have internet access on your computer, you can visit this site to install the client software.

Step 3) Install the desktop software and accept the default settings.  You may receive some driver security warnings during installation, which you need to accept.  Make sure to run EasyTether on your computer after installation.

Step 4) After you’ve installed the desktop client, head back to your phone and check the box that says you’ve installed the desktop software.  With your phone connected to your computer with a USB cable, you can now right click the EasyTether icon in your computer’s system tray and select Connect via Android.

That’s it!  You can now use your phone’s data connection on your computer.  Please note that all of your carrier’s data usage policies still apply, so make sure to figure out what those are before sharing the connection.  Also note that even if your carrier offers “Unlimited” data use, there is probably a limit of about 2GB – exceeding this will give you some huge fees.

If you enjoyed this article, check out our ever-growing list of articles about Android.

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One problem with large photo collections is that it can become extremely difficult to find pictures of specific people.  If I wanted to dig up a picture of one of my college buddies, I’d have to spend quite a bit of time skimming through photos, hoping the correct one pops up.  But with Picasa, you can use the fantastic Face Detection feature to tag your friends.

Face Detection works similar to Facebook’s photo tagging feature, except Picasa will automatically show you a list of unnamed faces for you to tag.  Once you’ve given them a name, you can easily find that person again in the future.

Picasa will automatically scan your photo library for your friends’ faces.  To start tagging pictures, click the Unnamed entry under the People section (this will say Scanning if it’s still identifying faces).

The Unnamed People album will contain a huge list of faces.  If you know the person, simply type their name into the Add a name box and press enter.  You will then be able to create a contact for that person (which can be reused whenever tagging photos).  If you don’t know the person, simply click the X to ignore them.

After you’ve tagged a few pictures, Picasa will begin suggesting photo tags for you.  Look for the orange question mark (?) next to a person’s name, then you can click the green checkbox if the tag is correct or the red X if it is incorrect.  I must have an easily-guessable face, because Picasa guessed me correctly in every picture.

The more photos you tag, the better Picasa gets at guessing faces.

After your pictures are tagged, you can use the buttons under the tagged person’s name to create slideshows and movies from their pictures.  The recently-released Picasa 3.8 includes a new feature called “Face Movies” which makes a slideshow that revolves around a single person’s face.  If you’re making a video for a wedding or birthday, this would be a killer feature to utilize.

Now if only there was only a way to integrate tagged photos in Picasa with people on Facebook!  Picasa is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux.  [Download Picasa]

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Have an app you’d like to recommend to us?  Post in the comments at the end of this article, send us an email, or hit either of us on Twitter!

Evan’s Pick – Rainy Days

I check the weather on my phone a lot, and the ability to pull up weather radar at my fingertips saved me and my friends from getting destroyed by a thunderstorm on the lake this summer.  There are a lot of solid weather apps in the Android Market, but if you just want to check out weather radar, Rainy Days is the app for you.

Rainy Days is a very simple application.  Just open it up, press Settings, and select My Location to display the current radar in your area (you might need to enable additional location services in Android – I found that it wanted to use network location instead of GPS).  Standard touchscreen controls work just the same in Rainy Days: pinching and double tapping zooms, and you can drag across the map to move.  The slider bar at the bottom controls the opacity of the radar, which is useful if you want to see specific locations under a storm.

Rainy Days cycles between the last hour of radar footage, which can be paused by touching the screen.  You can control animation speed, automatic location use, and graphical options in the application’s settings.  Rainy Days supports the United States, Western Europe, Spain, and Scandinavia.

Search for Rainy Days in the Android Market or scan the barcode below to download!

Kevin’s Pick – Extended Controls

Android already has a pretty nice built in power control widget that allows you to enable and disable things like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS. Having one touch access to those parts of your system is incredibly convenient, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to control even more aspects of your phone? Thankfully, there is a widget on the Market that fills that exact role.

Extended Controls will set you back 0.79€ (about $1.20 as of this writing), but the convenience it offers is well worth the small cost. After installation, long press on an open spot of your homescreen and go to the Widgets menu. In here you’ll find various sizes of the Extended Controls widget, ranging from 1×1 to 1×4. After selecting the size, you’re taken to the setup menu. From here you can adjust the look of the widget (I prefer the defaults, but to each his own) as well as manage the various controls of the widget.

In addition to the five options found on the built in power control widget, Extended Controls gives you access to 20 extra settings. With a single touch you can now toggle options like USB tethering, autorotate, the lock pattern, and 4G.  If you have rooted your phone, you can set a button to reboot your phone, either normally or into the bootloader or recovery mode.

As you add controls, a preview of what the widget will look like can be seen at the top of the screen. Once you’re satisfied, click Apply to add the widget to your homescreen.

If you’d like to see what Extended Controls has to offer, scan the QR Code below to be taken directly to its Market page.

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3. Android App Roundup! SDMove and Google Places

Taskbar Shuffle is a tiny application that quietly sits in your system tray.  After installation, you can move any item in your taskbar to a different location by clicking it and dragging it to a new location. 

You can even rearrange items in your system tray by dragging and dropping them.

On top of adding useful functionality to your system, Taskbar Shuffle allows you to customize application grouping in the taskbar (useful for when you have multiple instances of the same application open).   This program also adds the option to close applications in the taskbar by middle-clicking them, which is the same way your browser handles closing tabs.

Taskbar Shuffle is a free download for all versions of Windows (except Windows 7) and is available for both 32 and 64-bit.

[Download Taskbar Shuffle]

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To use the Fluxtimator, select the meteor shower you would like to observe (tonight’s being “#7 Perseids”), select your location, and then select your viewing conditions.  Specifying your viewing conditions will help fine tune the ideal time to view the event.

Once you’ve entered the information, you’ll see a chart displaying the optimal times to view the shower.  In my part of the world, best viewing conditions for the Perseids will occur between 1am and 5am on August 13th.

The Fluxtimator takes into account moonlight (which is supposed to be minimal this year, providing a better view of the shower), but you should stay away from city lights and street lamps for the best possible view.

The Perseids should be visible around the Cassiopeia constellation, and you can check out Sky and Telescope’s great illustration of where to look.  Android users can use the free app Google Sky Map to easily locate the correct area to watch.

Happy stargazing!

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We welcome all suggestions for future App Roundups – you can post them below in the comments section, send us an e-mail, or let Evan or me know via Twitter.

Kevin’s Pick: SDMove

One of the most welcome additions in Android 2.2, especially for those of us running phones with a pathetically small amount of internal memory, is the ability to offload applications to the SD Card. This still requires the developer to flip a switch to allow the move, and while some developers were a bit slow to adopt the feature, more and more are starting to realize that this is something people might want to use.

How do you go about moving your hundreds of applications to external storage? By default, the only way is to go through the applications list, click on each individual application, and click the ‘Move to SD Card’ button if it’s not grayed out. Thankfully, one guy noticed this limitation and created a simple, amazingly effective application.

SDMove presents you with a list of all the applications you have installed, color coded based on each application’s SD Card status. Green apps are currently located on external storage, yellow apps aren’t on the SD card but can be moved there, and red apps aren’t allowed to be moved either because the developer has specifically flagged it as unmovable or hasn’t bothered to set a flag at all. There are a few other colors as well, and a full legend can be found in the ‘About’ section of the menu.

It doesn’t pack much flash, but SDMove does what it advertises and can save you a lot of time and frustration. Best of all, it’s completely free (if you don’t mind looking at the usual ads)! If you recently updated to Froyo and want to see what apps you can move, or if you’ve already moved some apps and want to see how much more space you can save, scan the QR code below to be taken directly to SDMove’s Market page.

Evan’s Pick: Google Places (part of the new Google Maps)

This app is an easy recommendation because most of you should have it installed already (as long as you’ve updated to the newest version of the Google Maps app).  If you haven’t updated your Google Maps yet, open the Android Market, press the Settings button, select Downloads, and install it.

If you’ve ever used services like Yelp, Google Places is a direct competitor.  Google has eagerly jumped aboard the location-based service bandwagon, and Places gives you a simple way to quickly find restaurants, bars, hotels, gas stations, and entertainment.

When you open Places, it will automatically grab your GPS location (if you have it enabled), so picking any category or performing a search will show you a list of relevant locations sorted by distance.  A small compass will even show you the direction of the potential destination.  If you don’t see the category you’re looking for, simply perform a search or use the “+ Add” button to create your own category.

Selecting a location will give you details, including reviews, available cuisine, and features like “Quiet atmosphere” or “Wi-fi Hotspot”.  You can click the buttons on the listings page to show it in Google Maps, navigate to the location, or call the business’ number.

I used Google Places this weekend to find a great new sandwich shop for lunch that was only a few miles from me but I didn’t know it existed.  If you do any traveling, I’m sure it will be even more useful.  Google Places is included with Google Maps, and can be found in your Apps drawer.

Related posts:

1. Android App Roundup! Touiteur (Twitter) and ROM Manager (for rooted phones)
2. Android App Roundup: SystemPanel (Task Manager/System Monitor) and Ringdroid (Ringtone Creator)
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If you’re using Firefox, there is a very simple way to prevent websites from resizing your browser window without disabling JavaScript altogether.  Sure, disabling JavaScript is the kill-all solution (and would be more secure for your browser), but there are way too many legitimate uses for JavaScript for me to suggest doing that.

Disabling JavaScript’s Ability to Resize Your Browser Window in Firefox

Note: In this guide, I’ll be using Firefox version 3.6.8.  Details in this procedure may vary according to your version.

Step 1: In Firefox, click Tools then select Options.

Step 2: Click the Content tab, then click the Advanced… button to the right of Enable JavaScript.

Step 3: Uncheck the box that says “Move or resize existing windows“.

That’s it!  Those pesky websites won’t be able to resize your browser window anymore.  Make sure to check out the rest of our articles about Firefox!

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