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I’ve been through two since. The old beige model and the newer black model with the trim. Recently it died. The little plastic foot on the bottom right broke off making it wobble like things that wobble do.

Sadly Dell changed the design of the newer Quietkey keyboards and removed much of the trim, something that appalls me. I needed a quick replacement so against all my better judgement I ran down to BigBoxShop(tm). I really need to get an Amazon Prime account already!

Like any happy hacker my keyboard is my weapon and it must be perfect. I tried out a bunch in the store. It used to be a little easier to find an ok keyboard but the latest trend seems to be towards laptop style keys or some nasty squishy-key hybrid.

Finally I settled on the Saitek Eclipse II. My only experience with the brand has been with my flight sticks (I’m a FSX dork) and I’ve been quite happy with those. It illuminates the keys in 3 color choices –something I feel is a little gimicky– but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t using the feature. There is something nice about a subtle red (not blue, that hurts my eyes) glow eminating from below your fingertips while building a LAMP server for your latest brain child.

My only complaint so far is that it doesn’t remember my color choice upon reboot. Yes, my keyboard needs a firmware update. It keeps resetting back to blue when Windows boots.

So anyway thats whats new in my world. A half page post about a glowing red keyboard I paid MSRP for. w00t.

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Whats up with the black sheep on the top right?

Anyway you can get your very own at http://apps.facebook.com/friendwheel/

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TubeMogul is to video sharing sites as Ping.fm is to social networks. It’s a producers dream come true. With it I can upload a single video and have it redistribute to 17 of the top video sharing sites.

Living in a house with 3 other geeks and a meger 2 Mbps upstream cable Internet connection this has the potential to stave off those “who’s using up all the bandwidth” fights.

That alone is worth its weight in megabytes but it actually gets better. The tracking and reporting features are some of the best I’ve seen in a video site. No longer do I have to login to a dozen sites and manually input numbers in a custom excel sheet to get a clue how my videos are doing.

At a glance I can see how all my videos are doing across the video sharing sites or check out individual video stats. TubeMogul reports show yesterday vs. today’s views and the percentage gain or loss. You can drill down and get really specific about videos, sites, and date ranges.

The flash-based charts are a nice touch too. The stats can be exported to a spreadsheet or embedded on a web page. Below I’m displaying my YouTube stats over the last 45 days.

Over the last three days Shannon has been uploading individually sliced segments from our back catalog to TubeMogul supported sites and as you can see it’s been pretty successful already. I hope the campaign can draw more viewers into the show with these short form snippets.

Anyway it seems that TubeMogul is

comprehensive enough for a major television network and easy enough for a casual vlogger to use.

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Twitter seems to be more convenient for me, especially with all of the third party apps for it like TwitterBerry. What I’d like to do is continue using twitter as I do and also have some of my tweets rebroadcast to my other social networks using ping.fm. I don’t want to rebroadcast my @replies since those aren’t generally about what I’m doing.

I figured this would be a great project for Yahoo Pipes. I was able to quickly make a pipe that pulls in the RSS feed from my twitter account and clean it up. The first Regex operator removed the “hak5darren: ” prefix from the messages. I know it’s not elegent but it works.

A neat feature of ping.fm that isn’t very publicized is that it ignores anything following and including four consecutive dashes. Using the Regex operator I was able to append “—-end” to the tweets in the feed. This will come into play a little later.

Lastly in the Yahoo Pipe I set a filter operator to block any items that begin with @. This removes @replies which would be out of context on other social networks. Finally the pipe is output to an RSS feed called tweet redirect.

Running the pipe I’m quite happy with the project so far but I still need a way to get the newly cleaned up tweets out of RSS and into emails destin to my secret ping.fm address. Yahoo has an alert service which will send new items in the feed via email but the messages are in HTML and not easy to work with.

After looking around for a simple RSS to Email service I came across RSSFWD.com which does exactly as the domain implies. You give the site a feed and an email address and you’ll get the option of doing HTML or plain text emails, immediate deliveries or daily/weekly digests.

This is where it gets a little sticky. RSSFWD doesn’t require you to sign up for an account to use the service but when you setup a RSS to Email forward it sends a subscribe email with a unique link that must be clicked to activate the forwarding service. Obviously I can’t have it email directly to ping.fm else I’ll miss the unique url and be unable to activate the service.

At this point in my retweeting adventure I was getting pretty tired and as a duct-tape fix decided to use Gmail to forward the forwarded RSS feeds. I signed up for the RSS forwarding service to my Gmail account, received the activation email and clicked the confirmation link, and setup a filter to forwarded any new messages from RSSFWD.com to Ping.fm.

In theory all of this works. And after my initial tests I can say it does exactly as you would expect. Yahoo Pipes grabs my tweets and cleans ‘em up. RSSFWD pulls in the cleaned up feed and spits it out to Gmail. Gmail gets the emails and ships ‘em off to Ping.fm. And Ping.fm sends my tweets off to Facebook, Myspace, Pownce, and Plurk. But alas I am not in social networking status updating heaven.

Yahoo Pipes and RSSFWD are SLOW!

Still, not bad for an hour of hackery in the middle of the night, right? At least now I’ve got the proof of concept down and can start looking at ways to do this properly.

At the moment I’m thinking of using PHP, which has built in RSS, Regex, and Mail functions to process the tweets and ship ‘em off directly to Ping.fm. With a cron job running the script every N minutes I think it might be a viable solution.

The only problem is my PHP-fu isn’t quite what it used to be. I’ll keep my blog updated as I progress on this project. I’d love to hear what the code monkeys out there think.

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