Facebook has become ubiquitous as an applications platform in the last few months, but it is also becoming notorious for causing friends to spam friends.

Most applications in Facebook now offer users an incentive to get users to invite their friends to use the application. That is all fine and good if your friends might want the application (and you’re not sending them multiple invites to the same application), but most people aren’t interested and you could wind up scaring away or pissing off your friends by spamming them with too many invites. No one wants that.

Luckily, I have found a simple solution that allows you to get your incentive (that money I talked about in the title, added abilities, higher levels…) without spamming your friends.

Just follow these three easy steps:

1. Drag the bookmarklet on this page to your bookmarks or bookmark toolbar.
2. Go to your favorite Facebook application’s invite page.
3. Click the boorkmarklet that you added in step one and enter the number of invites you want the application to believe you’re sending.

That is it! You should have more money, points, and/or abilities without sending any real invites! Your friends will thank you for it.

If you are interested in more on the subject, check out this recent post on TechCrunch that details what Facebook is trying to do to help remedy the spamming issue.

THUMB DOWN STUMBLE CARDS!

If you’ve reached this page from StumbleUpon, then there is a good chance you’ve recently encountered a Stumble Card, or two, or twenty. You’re probably reading this and wishing they would go away already, but for those not familiar, they look like this:

They’re nothing but an image… and ADS! There is nothing really redeeming about them and they’re just a cheap way of hocking AdWords to you, so please, thumb down Stumble Cards when you find them.

Last night I decided I would like to create some how-to videos; it would be a great way to present some of the processes I was documenting at work and could motivate me to release more information on here. I needed software for that though. I had seen various flash-based how-to videos before and seen reference to some of the software that was used. I knew which presentation features I would like to have and wanted something that was at least freeware and preferably open-source.

The features I was most interested in:

• Small file sizes
• High image quality
• Ability to export to Flash/SWF
• Visualization of hotkeys / mouse clicks (little pop-ups that say “Shift+W”, for example)
• Pop-over frames and notes (like comic dialog balloons or sticky notes)
• Keyboard visualization (a little on-screen keyoboard so users can visualize keys to enter)
• Ability to draw on the recording or insert shapes

I wasn’t sure what the type of software to search for would be, so I tried some google terms like video presentation software and tutorial video software that came up with results for Camtasia Studio and Adobe Captivate, which are apparently the leading commercial products. Small problem: Camtasia is about $300 and Captivate is about $600. So I started searching for free alternatives (a great way to find alternatives to commercial software is just to enter the product name followed by alternative(s) in google). This led me to the open source CamStudio software, but it lacked features and polish I was looking for. It does seem to be the favorite software of the crowd-sourced computing tutorial site ShowMeDo if you’re interested in examples of it in action. I had to keep searching, I knew I had seen better software before.

I turned to Wikipedia with my new list of software names and terms to search for and came up with a new term: Screencasting. Bingo, that’s the software category I was looking for. From there I was greeted with the motherload of relevant software. It was even in everyone’s favorite form too! I present the (drumroll please) … categorized list!

I plan to follow up this post with some software tests and reviews, but I will add my impressions of the software that stood out to me.

• UVScreenCamera’s features stood out and were what I was looking for, but it was miscategorized as freeware. I haven’t yet tested the software to see what kind of restrictions the download has, but a license is $50. I also prefer something open source.
• Jing appears to be a project released by TechSmith (the authors of Camtasia, interestingly) in the form of a stripped down Camtasia client and an easy screencast hosting service. Currently it is free, but it seems that it may not be for long. This looks really polished and seems like a great way to do fast and simple one-off demos.

It looks like CamStudio is the only viable open source option for Windows and it is again under active development, so I will investigate it further. Please let me know in the comments if you know of any other screencasting options.

I realize this is a very basic issue, but when searching online I found a dearth of information regarding reading a text file line by line using a shell script. So below I have included the basic code you need.

#!/bin/bash
#skeleton code for reading a file line by line

#fill variable “thefile” with the name and path of the file you want to read line by line
thefile=/home/var/nameoffileyouwanttoprocess

# the loop below pipes the output of the file into a variable ($line) line by line
cat $thefile | while read line
do
echo $line #placeholder command to make sure everything is groovy
done

Hopefully this helps some people!