Playing with Sharp Objects.

How To Play Foursquare

shokk — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:54:32 +0000

It came to me today that since I’m usually at the top of my Foursquare friends list, that I may know how to do Foursquare right. while my high score of 395 may not be super impressive, I’m consistently in that neighborhood with just under 3000 checkins as of today.

The biggest secret is to just checkin everywhere that can be a proper noun in which your feet stop for longer than a minute. There are apps that will remind you when you’re sitting still for too long, and will alert you. From looking at 4squareand7yearsago.com, I can see that I was not doing this a year ago. I’d checkin only at interesting places, and not everything in my path. In other words, I did not take mayorship into account, and thats where some of the biggest points are.

The way I play the Location Game is simple. I have a routine for going to work that involves traveling by train. I go from home (checkin), to the station (checkin), to the parking garage (checkin), to the platform (checkin), to the specific train I’m riding (checkin), to the platform I arrive at (checkin), to the station I arrive at (checkin), and to the office building (checkin). In the evening, i do it all over again. If I happen to go to another office building, there’s another few checkins. If I have to catch a connecting train, there’s a few more.

Lately I average about 20 checkins per day, which adds up to a lot per year. Why so many? Well, at any one point, I may have to wait at one of those spots, and well… that’s where I am at that moment. Most of these places are places that I hold a mayorship at, so they add up to big points. If you’re hitting a location consistently, you get extra points for being a frequent flier for that week, and for continuous weeks, and for returning after a lengthy absence. Weekly ritual locations such as gas stations are also good for mayorships, since everyone else there is only coming once a week or so. And we know you’ll out-checkin them, right?!

Weekends can break a streak since most of us don’t have to go to work those days, but it presents new opportunities for checkin points and mayorships. In fact, stopping at a new place every day will break the monotony of your routine, get you points for your first time there, and could lead to a new non-Foursquare IRL enjoyment.

After a while of checking in to so many places every day, checkin fatigue sets in. There are a number of apps that will do automatic checkins for you, but reliability is a key factor. Most of these apps, even in the foreground, will forget to remind you, will lose your position, and will simply see you as being in the wrong place. Reliable GPS and wifi service in buildings is key, but will not improve until location tracking is taken more seriously. Those can only be seen as helpers, but serious players will want to make sure every checkin counts.

Another reason for checkins is unlocking daily deals. A lot of places participate in loyalty programs and there are plenty of sales with BOGO and percentage off and bonus items that can be taken advantage of. These places pay money to be in those programs and you are helping Foursquare by showing that these programs work, and you are helping the vendor by giving them a return on their investment. Plus it helps you save money.

The number of people playing Foursquare is pretty low, and even lower for Facebook, Gowalla, Google Places, and Twitter. This means opportunities for mayorships are always available. An app like Mayorama can be very helpful in showing which places are ripe for the picking. Use a site like One More Checkin to see where your next badge opportunities lie.

Checking in to places with no signal can be trouble, since you have no 3G/4G or wifi to take advantage of. In some cases the available wifi must be subscribed to, such as with XFinity, so you have no options for checkin unless you already use those services. These are lost opportunities for vendors to capture loyalty.

Lastly, checkins can be informative and educational. There are a lot of sites that will watch your Foursquare status and tell you about bus and train schedules, nearby friends, historical facts and more. Connecting your Foursquare account to these services can make you a winner IRL.

MonkeyChow updated

shokk — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 02:14:44 +0000

Thanks to MonkeyChow fan Ila Murugu, I have rescued the tarball versions of MonkeyChow that supported multiuser access, and updated the git repo to that code so that it’s never lost again.

To grab it, run the following…
git clone git@github.com:shokk/MonkeyChow.git

or visit https://github.com/shokk/MonkeyChow

Boxcar notifications for Vuze on Linux

shokk — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 03:53:18 +0000

If you’ve ever used Vuze on a Mac, you’ve been spoiled by the Growl integration.
Using it on something like Linux, however, and you don’t get those same nice notifications.
I’ve been experimenting with Boxcar for a while now because of its notification capability to iPhones.
I’ve also been Vuze on CentOS 5.6 and there is a real lack of notifications with the built-in app.
Vuze’s azexec “Command Runner” plugin gives you the flexibility of calling whatever commmand you want when a download has completed.
I’ve used the following script to push notifications from Vuze directly to my iPhone through Boxcar.
Marrying these two technologies together would make things a bit easier. Here’s how…

First, sign up for boxcar at http://www.boxcar.io to get a username and password to use below.
Next, save this script somewhere on your system. I’m using /usr/local/bin in this example.
Be sure to change the username and password to what you registerd with in the above step.

#!/bin/sh HOSTNAME=`hostname` APP=$1 shift NOTICE=$* USER="" PASS="" KEY="" SECRET="" /usr/bin/curl -d "notification[from_screen_name]=$HOSTNAME" -d "notification[message]=$APP Downloaded: $NOTICE" --user "$USER:$PASS" https://boxcar.io/notifications

Get the contents of the azexec plugin installed into the ~/.azureus/azexec directory.
Scan for new plugins.
Load the azexec plugin
In the plugin, I set the command to
/usr/local/bin/boxcar.sh vuze "%N"
save it all and start downloading!

If you’re particularly brave, get a custom provider account, fill in the KEY and SECRET fields according to your accoung, and add this to the shell script anywhere between the curl command and the URL

-d "secret=$SECRET"

and change the URL to


https://boxcar.io/devices/providers/$KEY/notifications/broadcast

which will let you set your own icons and sounds for the notifications.

Note that this setup uses curl, which can be downloaded and installed for Windows, and can be modified to use as a .bat file.

Checkin to Everything

shokk — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 20:00:16 +0000

The idea behind social networking is to let your friends know what you’re doing in a way that spurs a conversation. Foursquare covers the “where”, but there aren’t a lot of apps that cover the rest of the things we do, the who, what and why. For everything else that Foursquare cannot check you in for, there is GetGlue. It integrates with the same social nets, but let’s people know exactly what you are doing when you’re at a location. Whether you’re listening to music, or watching a movie, a show, a game, or even a conversation, GetGlue has you covered. They have a huge database of albums, movies, tv shows, video games, sports teams and topics. And while you’re at it, you might as well check in to Foursquare with it!

Location Location Location

shokk — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 23:25:52 +0000

I’ve previously written about the location game here http://shokk.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/the-location-game/
I’m an avid, some would say frustratingly fanatic, user of Foursquare. In my constant search for convergence in hardware and software, I switched to using an app called Footfeed that checked me into Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Facebook Places, and Google Places. The problem is that not all the location services had the same database, so I would end up having to create the venue on at least one service. Adding a new venue for most services involved switching from Footfeed to Gowalla (for example), making the location in the Gowalla app, switching back to Footfeed, waiting for the new venue to appear in the Gowalla list after a few refreshes, then checking in. All because some of these sites had closed APIs. Put that together with some services being down at one point or another, and you have a process that’s too tedious to keep up with. I found that what I was really interested in was points from Foursquare and it’s badges. Autocheckin apps like MayorMaker only supported Foursquare. Plus Foursquare’s app has gotten much faster. So I switched back to just using Foursquare in the interest of simplicity, speed, and stability. I feel that autocheckin is something that will eventually be built into Foursquare, but for now this is one of my top favorite apps. They recently added push notifications and the new Lists feature to the app, so it’s very full featured.

The Daily Paper is Delivered with Instapaper

shokk — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:55:52 +0000

Bookmarking systems have been around for years. Yahoo bookmarks, Google Bookmarks, del.icio.us and more along side the bookmarks scattered across various browsers and smartdevices you’ve used over the years. Rather than tying the bookmarks to a webmail provider or a specific computer or device, keeping them in a central spot that can be accessed from anywhere is the best idea. Instapaper collects your web sites for later reading through bookmarklets. A standalone app on iPhone, and integration with many web browsing apps makes this a must. I even use a service like ifttt to move stuff from twitter favorites and google reader starred items into Instapaper, my single place to look for reading articles of interest on my commute.

You Get the Message with Facebook Messenger

shokk — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 22:50:24 +0000

Once upon a time we all used services like AIM and ICQ. OK, maybe just really older people like me. I’ve chatted on stuff like Trillian, Meebo, and Adium to aggregate my IM chat sessions from Yahoo, AOL, Google, ICQ, Hotmail, etc. More and more, everyone I knew shifted to either SMS or Facebook. Very recently I had been using AIM to combine my AOL, Facebook and Google identifies into one client. But I noticed that the majority of my contacts were on Facebook and Yahoo. The majority of the time, no one I knew was on AOL or Google. Yahoo has produced so much spam that I’ve been avoiding it altogether, and the people on Yahoo are usually on Facebook, too. So, when Facebook released their Messenger chat client, I jumped on that. In 10 years we’ll probably be chatting on some other way.

Simply put, when Facebook transformed their chat system into a message system, complete with email, they created another inbox. This inbox was worth replacing all my other chat inboxes since there’s a social network tied behind it. This was something AOL and Yahoo just couldn’t figure out.

Keeping Up with Reeder

shokk — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:40:22 +0000

Another app that integrates nicely with a number of social tools is the Reeder RSS app. I’ve been reading RSS feeds as my main source of information for quite a few years, even going as far as writing my own multiuser web based RSS reader. Being able to push stories that interest me to various social networks or save them to Instapaper for later viewing is important to me. News tends to come up in the feeds a day or two before friends post it on Facebook or mainstream outlets. RSS, while a forgotten side of the web for the most part, is a vital protocol on the back end for transferring information by subscription. I like to keep direct contact with my feeds, much the same way I used to be glued to NNTP in the 90s. Reeder helps me keep up with everything from my geeky tech interests to work topics to jokes. Reeder connects you to Google Reader to maintain your subscriptions and synchronizes your read articles with what you see in the web interface, so you don’t reread twice. Also, Instapaper.

Give a Tweet with TweetDeck

shokk — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 22:30:19 +0000

I pretty much live on TweetDeck these days, interacting with a combined Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare stream. I can’t wait for them to add G+ and Instagram. The added integration with Instapaper makes this a winner. TweetDeck takes care of all my main social networking services. If anything can combine social sites into one tool in a better way, I’d like to see it. Now that Twitter has bought them, my concern with this app is that Twitter will shutter it in favor of their own client or lose the multi network functionality, making it just another Twitter client. They’ve already gotten rid of deck.ly support in the latest TweetDeck update instead of adding it to the rest of their clients, so things are already looking down.

My main love for this app is that should it crash or close unexpectedly, your place is saved when you reenter the app. It doesn’t skip tweets if you haven’t looked at your stream in a while, so I can keep up with the people I follow. The customizability of being able to define your own columns is also a plus. The amber highlight at the top of a column lets you know there’s an update in that stream. My biggest complaint is that while looking at a long column of tweets, accidentally hitting the status bar at the top will make you lose your place. Next, after missing about four days of tweets, the app gets very crashy. I look forward to minor tweaks like forwarding links to Instapaper without leaving the app, inline pictures, and push notifications.

My iPhone Apps 2011

shokk — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:25:28 +0000

iOS 4 allowed us to have so many more apps on our phones, many of which now run at the same time. As of this moment, I currently have 205 loaded. This year in going over my list, I realized there was too many apps for one article. Some of them are duplicate services – Facely and Facebook, for example. In those cases, the original app was missing a function that an alternate app provided, with the alternate app being less than optimal for general use. At best there are 30 that I use all the time. My criteria for using a new app: does it do something new, does it aggregate multiple services into one so I can have less apps yet use more, does it do something better than another app, does it connect to most of my social nets. Every once in a while I go on a binge or purge of apps on my iPhone. Over the next few days, I’ll show you what seems to always stay around my home screen, and why.

You’ll notice there really aren’t any apps for video or video games. It’s not something I have time for and it’s not what I have the iPhone for. Coming from a heavy XBox gamer, thats a big change. There are a lot of peripheral apps like Phone, Safari, Mail, Messages, Calendar, App Store, Maps, Camera that can’t help but be used. Even these apps are begging for enhancements and consolidation, and I am always looking for something better than the original apps.

I’m a person who hates having more than 3 pages of apps, so I make heavy use of folders. Also note that I’m one of those people who bought this expensive phone but is adverse to paying even $0.99 for an improved calendar. There are some nice gems in here you may not have seen yet. I hope there articles help. See you in a few!