TweetMyPC, a free utility that lets you control a Windows computer from anywhere has just been ported to Mac. The new app is called TweetMyMac and, like its elder Windows cousin, you can use TweetMyMac to send commands to your Macbook over the web from any other computer or even a mobile phone (via a text message).
The Mac-Twitter Workflow

It works like this. You install the app on your Mac and associate it with your Twitter account*. Now you can send a regular tweet with the command wrapped in (for example, shutdown or sleep). The utility running on the Mac will check for your tweets at frequent intervals and will perform the required action on the remote Mac computer as soon as it finds some command in the twitter stream.

*It is recommended that you create a separate Twitter id (with “protected” updates) for sending remote commands to your Mac.
Send Remote Commands to your Mac

Here are some useful commands that you may send to your Mac via TweetMyMac:

1. Shutdown (to shutdown your Mac immediately without saving any files) or Sleep (for putting your Mac in sleep mode).

2. iSight - This is great if you want to know what’s happening in the surroundings. Send the iSight command and the app will take a picture with the built-in iSight web camera and will upload it to Twitpic.

3. Screenshot - If you want to know what applications are open on your Mac desktop, send the “screenshot” command - the picture of your desktop will again be uploaded to twitpic.

The app is in beta (so expect some bugs) and obviously it should always be running on your Mac computer for receiving commands.

Am not too sure if that X-ray machine at the Airport security checkpoint can damage the components of a laptop but if you are curious to know how your laptop might appear to the security guy inside, here are some real pictures.

Laptop under the X-ray machine

The images was captured by Nick Veasey who uses X-Rays to capture the inner photographs of everyday objects like a city bus, an iPod, his shoes, the remote of a TV and even a full-size Boeing 777 jet.

You can downloads Nick’s collection as a PDF file or head over to Telegraph for his more recent work. Hat tip Ilya Vedrashko.

If you ever wondered how your website appears to a visitor who might be using a different screen resolution than you, check out viewlike.us.

Just key in the address of any web page and the tool will show you how that page will look like in different screen resolutions. You can test the layout using most common resolutions like 800×600, 1024×768 or even the iPhone and Wii browser.

Which screen resolution should you use?

Expert suggest that website publishers should optimize their web pages for 1024×768 resolution as it is still the most common size. You design a page keeping the lowest resolution in mind and the layout will probably look good (and readable) in all the higher resolutions.

Google Analytics data suggests that a majority of visitors coming to Digital Inspiration have a screen resolution of 1024×768 or more but around 3% use a 800×600 resolution - that means they will have to use the horizontal scroll bar to read the content even if their browser is in maximized state.

Find Keyboard Shortcuts for all your Adobe Software in one place

In Photoshop, Ctrl+C will copy that selected portion of the image to the clipboard while Ctrl+V will paste the clipboard content into your existing drawing but do you remember the shortcut key that will merge a copy of all the visible layers into the target layer? Well, that’s Control + Shift + Alt + E for PC or Command + Shift + Option + E if you use a Mac.

You can do things pretty fast in Photoshop and other Adobe applications if you know the right keyboard shortcuts but the only problem is that there are just too many key combinations to remember.

Need help remembering shortcuts?

If you are finding it very hard to memorize that large number shortcuts, here’s some help. Adobe has just released a nice AIR App that includes a searchable database of all Adobe software that are part of the Adobe Creative Suite.

Called Adobe Shortcut App, this utility lets you browse through a long list of shortcuts that may be available for the program you are using or you can find specific shortcuts by typing a few characters of the command.

There’s also an option to save shortcuts to your favorites list so if you use a command very frequently, there’s little need for you to search the corresponding shortcut key again.

The app also has links to cheat sheets for all Adobe applications that you may download to your local hard drive as PDF files for printing.

1. Copernic Desktop Search - While both Windows Desktop Search and Google Desktop Search offer some excellent PDF search capabilities, they still have one major limitation - they’ll tell you if a particular word or phrase is present is some PDF document but you won’t know where that phrase is located and how often does it occur in the document. Copernic overcomes that limitation.

Copernic can highlight all occurrences of the search term in the document (similar to cached web pages in Google search) and you can also navigate through the found document from Copernic itself without requiring an external viewer. The downside - Copernic is free for home use only so you can’t the free version for your office documents.



2. Scribd - Let me show how you can use Scribd as an online PDF organizer.

Create a free account at Scribd (if you haven’t done so already), install their desktop uploader software (available for Windows and Mac) and upload your entire PDF library online. Make sure you check the “Keep Private” option before hitting the upload button.

Once your documents are online, you can not only access them from other computers but the other big advantage is that you can search through your uploaded PDFs right from the Scribd website. Like Google Desktop, Scribd too allows full text search so you aren’t just searching titles but the actual content of your PDF documents.




3. Google Desktop - If you are looking to find that one PDF document from a pile of thousand, consider taking the help of Google Desktop Search. The software can index the full content of all PDF documents on your hard drive and can make this information searchable as in the screenshot above.

Google Desktop Search shares the same search operators as Google’s web search so use the filetype:pdf operator to limit your search to PDF documents. Google Desktop can only index unprotected PDF files and it won’t help you find scanned PDFs that require an OCR engine (more on that later).

Windows Desktop Search too can index the content of PDF files pretty much like Google Desktop but the latter offers two extra advantages - Google Desktop is available on all platforms and second, it’s possible to search PDF files stored on the home computer from your office computer (and vice-versa) using the “Search Across Computers” feature.


4. Mendeley Desktop - If you need access to your library of PDF documents on other computers, get Mendeley Desktop - it’s available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Mendeley is an awesome desktop software cum web application that not only indexes your local PDF files but can also upload them online so you have read these files anytime, anywhere. The service offers 500 MB of free online storage space and it will also synchronize tags, notes and other meta-data associated your PDF files.

You can add documents to your Mendeley library manually or there’s a watch-folder concept (like your Windows Media player) so any document added to the watch folder automatically becomes a part of the Mendeley database.

You captured a bunch of photos using the camera of your mobile phone - now how do you upload these pictures directly to Facebook without having to transfer them to a desktop computer?

There are basically three ways by which you can send photos from a mobile phone to the Facebook website - MMS, Mobile Phone Apps and Email. Let’s look at each of these options one by one.

Facebook Apps for Mobile

If you have a smartphone like the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile or Nokia (with Ovi Store), you can visit m.facebook.com using the internet browser of your mobile phone and download the Facebook application for your device. These apps will often integrate with the camera function of your phone and provide an option to directly upload pictures to Facebook right after they’ve been taken.

If there’s no official Facebook app available for your mobile platform, you may also check the mobile app at Shozu.com - Shozu is available for a large number of mobile phones and allows uploading photos/videos to Facebook in addition to most other social sites.

Facebook MMS

Now if you are not carrying a smartphone but still want to move pictures from the phone to Facebook, you can use picture messaging or MMS. Here’s how it works.

Compose a new MMS message on your mobile phone and attach the image file that you want to post to your Facebook stream with the MSS message. Send that MMS to mobile@facebook.com (email, not phone) and Facebook will send you a confirmation code (via text) to associate your mobile phone number with your Facebook profile.

The MMS option looks like a nice technique for upload photos from old phones but the problem is that it may not always work as expected and secondly, sending MMS messages per picture (depending upon your carrier plan) can sometimes turn out to be an expensive proposition.

Facebook Email

Luckily, there’s another option provided your mobile phone can send email. Go to facebook.com/mobile and note a special "upload" email address that has been assigned to you by Facebook. Any photograph (or video clip) that is sent to this address via email will instantly get posted to your Facebook page.

Much like Flickr, when you send a photo to this "unique" email address, the subject of your email message will be used as the photo caption. And these photos will get saved in the "Mobile Uploads" photo album of your Facebook account visible to all your Facebook contacts. You can consider changing the privacy settings of your "Mobile Uploads" folder to change the default viewership of photographs upload from a mobile device.

Another tip - the email address assigned by Facebook can be quite long and complex so you may want to save it to your phone address book beforehand for easy access.

Facebook + Posterous

When you send photos to Facebook via the email option, all pictures are published to the "Mobile Uploads" folder by default and unfortunately, there’s no option to change that setting. However, if you want Facebook to create separate photo albums for each of your batch uploads, you can consider using Posterous.

It works like this. First link your Facebook account with Posterous. Then go to your Posterous Autopost settings and set the minimum Facebook gallery size to either 1 or 2. Now when you send an email message to facebook@posterous.com with 2 or more photos, they will be posted to their own albums on Facebook so it becomes more easy for you to manage / sort pictures later.

Marissa Mayer has this to say on the simple yet intuitive user interface of Google (and these words apply to the iPod as well).

Google has the functionality of a really complicated Swiss Army knife, but the home page is our way of approaching it closed. It’s simple, it’s elegant, you can slip it in your pocket, but it’s got the great doodad when you need it. A lot of our competitors are like a Swiss Army knife open–and that can be intimidating and occasionally harmful.