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Showing posts from June, 2011

How to Automate Your Ego Searches for Ninja-Like Online Awareness

Matthew Rogers — There's no shame in admitting that you occasionally Google yourself; it's worth keeping an eye on what the internet has to say about you. But if you're manually searching your name on Google, revisiting blog posts you've commented on to see if anyone's replied to what you've said, and searching for (non-@)mentions of your company on Twitter, you're wasting a lot of time. Instead of sitting in front of your computer for an hour a day just to satisfy social curiosity, you can automate the process—and turn your ego search into an ego watch , instead. Here's how. Earlier this week, we talked about performing an "ego search" to see what people are saying about you online. Even though it's the best way to find very specific mentions on any given day, it does take up a lot of time. That's why we want to automate the process, so we can have our cake and eat it, too. The easiest way to set up an automated ego search is to tur...

How to Hide Secret Messages and Codes in Audio Files

To encode, you're going to need Coagula (Windows-only), and to decode you'll need Sonic Visualizer (Windows/Mac OS X/Linux). You can watch the video above for a visual walkthrough, but here are the steps you need to follow: Create an image you want to encode. White text on a black background works well, and it helps to have a small image without too much empty space. Save it out as a JPEG or BMP. Open the image in Coagula and click the setting for "Render Image as Audio Without Blue/Noise." Be sure to choose this option as the other rendering option will not work. When you're done a new audio file entitled "Coagula.wav" will be in the same folder as the Coagula application. You can either go grab that file or you can save it out to a location of your choice by choosing "Save Audio File" as from the file menu. That's it. Message encoded! To decode the message, open it in Sonic Visu...