How to create a Twitter list using the command line Twitter client, t, on Windows.

Hashtags are nice, but I wanted to be able to dynamically create and delete Twitter lists as well & I found the t Ruby client which allowed me to do this. Here’s how to get it going from a blank slate.

First, install Ruby with RubyInstaller. You’ll also need the DevKit.
Install the Ruby gem with gem install t. Then, register a application with Twitter. Next, authenticate the client with t authorize, which should take you to Twitter and ask you if you want to let the app you created access your account. You might have some issues with silly stuff getting the authentication to work, like outdated keys or whatever.

Then once you get to where you can tweet from your account, you’re ready to go. Create a new list with t list create [name of list]. The neat thing about having a command line client is that all the pipes and redirects and stuff work, so you can do cat listofhandles.txt | xargs t list add [nameoflist]. I think you have to have cygwin installed for xargs and cat to work, but I guess you could just do a batch file with a loop if you didn’t care about looking cool.

How to root & install a custom ROM on the AT&T Nexus S running Android OS 2.3.4 (Windows or Ubuntu 11.04)

I grabbed one of the free Nexus S phones that Best Buy was giving away, and since for my last phone I was too far into using it before I thought about rooting, I wanted to be sure to start this one off right, so I literally rooted before I even put the sim card in. This was my first time rooting, so I still had to synthesize the method from a bunch of sources, filter out the sketchy sounding “download my super cool ROM from my .ru server and you’ll get 8 times the battery life” posts, and fill in the gaps with educated guesses. The actual process itself is really simple, looking back at it. This basic process will probably work for most Android phones if you get the right recovery image and ROM for your phone. Continue reading