This guide for anyone who just “doesn’t get” Snapchat (aka non-millennials).
I’ll teach you what “the kids” are doing all day on Snapchat, and show you the best ways that you can try the app out yourself.
Stay tuned for a full guide (written, not recorded) coming soon to this blog.
I recently purchased a home server (Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 with Intel Xeon E3-1225). My goal with this purchase is to learn a little bit more about Linux, play around with Xen a bit, and eventually create a home-base for all my media and files.
I’ve been documenting every single step of the process in my personal wiki, but I want to take select pieces from that and turn them into mini tutorials. This is one of those pieces.
Linux is designed to be installed from a CD-ROM, which feels so old-school to me. I haven’t owned a CD or DVD player or burner in years — none of my laptops have them, I have no gaming systems, and I stream all my media to an Amazon Fire TV running Kodi. So installing Linux from a CD just felt wrong.
I chose to work with Debian, specifically because that’s one of the Linux flavors we use at work. I downloaded the ISO (or CD image file) from the official website, “burned” it onto a USB stick, and installed.
However, when I tried to use the apt-get command to install some software, specifically lvm2, I got this error:
Media change: please insert the disc labeled 'Debian GNU/Linux 8.2.0 _Jessie_ - Official i386 CD Binary-1 20150906-10:02' in the drive '/media/cdrom/' and press enter
Even though I installed Debian from a USB stick, it was still looking for a CD in the CD drive. I needed some way to tell the system to look somewhere else. Continue reading
I still have the chat logs from my endless hours spent on AOL Instant Messenger back in high school (2000 – 2004). I rediscovered them recently and spent about ten minutes reading before I couldn’t go on any further. Every other word made me cringe.
There’s a very specific reason why I was cringing: I remembered exactly what I was thinking as I had those conversations, but that is not at all how it came across as I looked back at things. I thought I was properly communicating my thoughts, but everything was actually coming out all wrong. I wasn’t being witty, I was just being a jerk.
I’ve become slightly better with words since then (I hope!) but there’s only so far that text chats can get you. When you’re trying to explain something to someone, there are times when words aren’t enough. You need to show them.
But when you’re not sitting right next to that person, showing can be difficult. There are a few different ways to solve this problem. Chris Ducker, of Virtual Freedom, crafted what he calls the VA Training Trifecta, in which an entrepreneur can either text, audio, video, or some combination therein to communicate tasks with virtual staff.
But there’s another powerful tool that I use nearly everyday to quickly show people exactly what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about GIFs.
A GIF is the perfect communication tool for describing small bits of dynamic information, like how a button animation should work or the way something is working on your computer. You can guarantee that whoever you’re talking to can see exactly what you’re seeing, and it’s much easier to show rather than trying to describe the problem with words or going through the hassle of creating a huge screencast.
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a GIF is worth over 9,000!
I’ve perfected a system that lets me make GIFs on my Mac in about 30 seconds. I’m going to show you exactly how I do it. Continue reading