Quick Emoji on Desktop

! When this was first published, Facebook and other apps did not have desktop emoji support. Even now, it's a bit clunky and cramped so this post might still be helpful

I love using emojis on mobile. It's childish, but I entertain myself by posting eleven cry-laughing faces in a row; or any insane flood of emotional responses and random items. I find that it adds a bit of dimension to plain raw text without having to find the exact rage comic or photo to accompany a quick message.

Even my wife sends entire emoticon shopping lists.

On desktop, however, it's annoying to have to Google a set of icons to use for just a casual Facebook interaction. Using Chrome, I created a bookmark and made a short keyword to quickly launch a preferred page of symbols.

Link a Page to a Keyword

I've been using this set of "facebook symbols" because its layout is decent, the emoji organization is similar to my Android, and it automatically copies single selections and it can copy an entire string of emoticons. Something like Emojipedia is not as rapid-user friendly.

• Navigate to Chrome Settings (chrome://settings)
• Scroll down to the Search category and click Manage Search Engines
• Scroll to the bottom the lower box (Other search engines) 
• Type a page title in the Add a new search engine box. Something like Facebook Emojis will do
• Pick a short keyword to launch the page. For my Facebook Emojis page, I entered fbe here
• Finally, paste the URL of the page in the last textbox
• Click Done and close Chrome Settings

Now simply open a new tab (Ctrl+T) and type your keyword to launch the page.

Manage SD Card Media with an Android Tablet

I love my Nexus 7.  It's the 2012 version and when I got it for Hanukkah, I pretty much entirely stopped using my laptop.  It's a large enough screen while still being small, light, and portable. It's powerful enough to be a solid graphics post-production workstation for photos from my adventures, and it was quite a bit less expensive than similar tablets.  There are tons of really powerful (FREE) apps that can tune my pictures and really make my photos pop!

The only drawback to the Nexus is that I've had to transfer media from my old GoPro HD Hero or my point & shoot camera to an intermediate device before I can dig into editing the files on the tablet.  I'll have to:

1. Connect the camera/card to a computer
2. Transfer the files to the computer
3. Connect the tablet to the computer and transfer again, or e-mail the photos to myself

This also implies that I have both a mini-USB cable for the cameras, and a micro-USB cable for the tablet.

Solution:

1. Any USB multi-card reader: $5-10

2. Any micro-USB OTG cable ("On The Go" cable): $1-2

3. Nexus Media Importer app: $4 on Google Play

Setup:

1. Buy the card reader and the OTG cable. With shipping, it's still probably under $10.
2. Download Homesoft's Nexus Media Viewer and test out your new cable and card reader. If you can successfully view photos with this app, uninstall it and buy the Nexus Media Importer app

That's it! It's a pretty solid app.  Simple to use, simple to copy data to your tablet, and it has some pretty sweet methods to select the specific files or groups of files that you want out of a given directory.

It also works for other types of data (video, music, documents, folders, etc.)

Tech Mashup Idea: Live Street View for Google Maps

Cell phone cameras are getting much more impressive.  I just saw an 8 megapixel HD camera on an Android  phone.  Neat.  Also about time.  Android also has lots of great apps too (I really need to dig into Java programming a bit more).  After all, it's free to develop apps (eclipse.org, android.com, etc.) for it.  A friend (@alanlupsha) and I were swapping app ideas when it finally hit me: live street view feeds.

Given that phones have:

• high quality cameras to capture photos and video
• the ability to record a lat/long position, and a bearing & angle (via compass app/tilt/acceleratometers)
• the ability to send data and communicate with other devices/computers

then this app can:

• automatically geotag photos with a lat/long, direction, and angle OR
  automatically geotag frames of a video with locations along a recorded along a path (also see RoboGEO software)
• upload geotagged media to a server when you return to your home wifi connection, or any other wifi hotspot (@alanlupsha)
• server geocodes the images (with minimal effort now) and updates an internet mapping application view that can be shared individually as a single view (see Google's Street View @ the 2010 Olympic ski runs)