Deploy websites for free with dropbox and bitly in 30 seconds or less

Making your website available to the world:
1. Open your dropbox folder
2. Open the directory named "public"
3. Copy the site to that directory (html, images, js, css etc)
4. Right click on your main html (probably index.html)
5. Select copy public link

Making it easy to share with a customized tiny url:
1. Go to bit.ly
2. Paste the website link
3. Alter the name to something more meaningful

Done.

Writing LaTeX in Sublime

LaTeX is a language for writing and designing documents. It's kind of a CSS language for academic papers. If some of you ever need to write an academic paper (or submit a very elegant homework) , Sublime would be a great choice for a LaTeX editor. For compiling LaTeX documents in Sublime, adding syntax highlighting and other great features you'll need the LaTexTools plugin. Below is a short tutorial on how to compile your first LaTeX using Sublime:

1. Download Sublime Text Editor and Sublime package Control by copy- paste the content in this page to Sublime console by pressing on "ctrl  + "~"  or view > control panel
2. In Sublime press "Ctrl + Shift + P"  and write down install package > Latex tools OR download the plugin manually from https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools
3. Download sumatraPDF , this is a free PDF viewer that will be used for viewing your PDF output and get inverse search.
4. Download MIKTeX - this is the library that actually compile your LaTeX document
5. Assuming that you know how to write LaTeX, whenever you want to compile your latex project just press Ctrl + B (Or Tools > Build). If you get any warning message for missing libraries - just click accept and it will download the libraries for you.

If Pocket then Mailbox

Mailbox is a really cool iPhone app for managing your inbox. Why is it important? As Chris Dixon once tweeted:

"Your email inbox is a to-do list created by other people." - [someone]  (via) 

I find it convenient to manage both my "to read" list and my inbox in the same place. A great Mailbox feature is moving emails to a "to read" list. However, since most of my read it later stuff are in Pocket , this feature appears to be somewhat useless for me.

Here IFTTT come to the rescue. IFTTT (if this then that) is a site that lets you connect different apps or web services so they can sync automatically with each other (MAGIC!!). Since Mailbox integration is not supported yet in IFTTT, my recipe for the integration was just sending myself an email each time that I "pocket" a new page, then I manually move it to my "to read" list using Mailbox app (a simple slide left gesture).

Managing multiple Google accounts in Chrome

Ever had the need of managing multiple google accounts on the same computer? It's not fun. Do you have a 'private gmail' and 'work gmail' and you're tired of switching accounts all the time? share the computer with your family? if you search in google how to manage multiple account, google will suggest you some very inconvenient methods to do it that doesn't work well on SSO (single sign on) sites and require from you to select manually which account to use in every usage.

The best solution that I found so far is probably the simplest one, just install another chrome version that doesn't collide with your regular chrome. So go a head and download Chrome Canary at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/chromesxs/ . This is a beta version of chrome, but still it works great (maybe even better?). 

BONUS: you'll get a shiny gold chrome icon!

Getting Started with Scala + Processing

Scala is awesome. Processing is awesome library for digital design and for creating visualizations. After some researches, I feel that using Scala + Processing + IntelliJ is the best combination for writing rapid high performance visualization hacks. Here is an example that I like for a nice swarm simulation that was done using processing (from http://muehlseife.blogspot.com/search/label/swarm)

Since every swarm simulation needs to start for somewhere, here is a quick start tutorial for getting started with scala, processing and IntelliJ:

1. Download and install IntelliJ Community Edition (free)
2. Launch IntelliJ and install Scala plugin from edit -> settings -> plugins -> browse repositories -> Search for scala
3. Download scala (zip archive) and extract it (C:\scala-2.9.2 would be great!)
4. Create a new project in IntelliJ and add Scala as a Facet, insert "C:\scala-2.9.2" in the scala distribution input.
5. Right click on src > new scala object "HelloWorld". Copy-paste the hello world example from scala official site and run your first scala application.
6. (Bonus1) Enable scala syntax highlighting (click on the yellow square on bottom-right), I don't know why but it's still not enabled by default.
7. (Bonus2) - to make scala compilation super fast you can go to Project Structure > Facets > Scala and choose "Use project FSC" (Fast scala compiler)
8. Download processing from http://processing.org/download/  and extract it (C:\processing-1.5.1 would be great!)
9. In intelliJ go to project structure > Libraries > click on the "+" and add C:\processing-1.5.1\lib
10. Finally, here is a simple template to run scala + processing
11. (Bonus 3) Full screen is supported by adding "--present" as argument: PApplet.main(Array[String]("--present","ScalaProcessingExample"))

I recommend...

• A Tool - Workflowy is awesome online single page notebook that assists me in organizing stuff. At a first glance, it looks like a simple doc file, but that's also it's power. It's so generic that you can use it for whatever you like - organizing ideas, memos, todo lists, bookmarks and more. It also has great keyboard shortcuts support. It's a great complement to the well known Trello app.
• A Lecture - The next chapter in Human Computation by Luis von Ahn is a truly inspiring 17m talk that will open your brain on how 500 million human can corporate and build something together.
• A Book / app - The perfect bait is a small motivational book (also available as audio book in iTunes) that was written by Bobby Chiu, one of my favorite artists (see portfolio). Whether you are a software engineer or an illustrator, if you have big dreams (and you should have), this book is highly recommended.
• A Post - What Makes a Good Engineering Culture? by Edmond Lau (Quora Engineer). Every bullet is totally true, no matter how small / large the company is.
• A Short Technical Preview Trailer - Siggraph 2012 is largest Computer Graphics conference in the world. If you want to see a very short preview of the most amazing CG researches, this short 3m preview video is a must.