Introduction to the 12 Days of Twitter
Day 1: The Secret Code: What are all those initials and symbols?
Day 2: Use TweetDeck to Manage Conversations
Day 3: Share Your Funny Anecdotes While They’re Still Funny
Day 4: Follow Responsibly
Day 5: 3 Newbie Mistakes Made by New Tweeters
Day 6: Use Twitter Search to Connect and Find
Day 7: Twitter Mobile
Day 8: Five Awesome Things You Can Do with Twitter
Day 9: Mix It Up!
Day 10: If You’re Not a TweetDeck, You Might Be a Seesmic
Day 11: Twitter for Prizes and Profit
Day 12: Schedule Tweets in Advance

Follow Cali Lewis on Twitter

I submitted an application to The Best Job in the World a couple weeks ago. People kept telling me I should, and at the last minute, I decided to give it a go. Tourism Queensland is doing a marketing contest to get someone to blog and create videos from The Great Barrier Reef for six months.

1) I was interested in the competition
2) I love shooting Geek Brief in front of nature
3) Geek Brief friends in Australia keep asking for a meetup, and if I win, I wouldn’t have to pay for a plane ticket! ;)

Out of 35,000+ applications, I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of 50 shortlist applicants! Here’s the deal:

Starting today (March 2nd) I need your help to vote for me in the competition. In about a month, they will narrow down the applicants to 11 people, who will then go out to Australia for interviewing. If I have the highest number of votes on the website, I’m guaranteed to be in the 11 Final Candidates.

If you’re reading this, chances are you know about my dream for The Big Trip. The economy said no to that for now, but I’m hoping I can have one over-the-top adventure before I have a child. Like I said on the entry video, I already feel like I have the best job in the world, thanks to Mevio. I would LOVE to do GeekBrief.TV in a beautiful, natural environment for 6 months and share the whole experience with a couple hundred thousand friends! I just want to say thanks to all of you who vote, and thanks times 30 to everyone who votes every day for the next month!

And I left approximately 30 minutes later with a replacement phone.

Because of my job, I put a lot of strain on the devices I use. I push them to their limits, so my local Apple Store Genius Bar knows me well! I probably take advantage of my Apple Care more than you might, but it’s that one time that something doesn’t work and it’s easy to solve that makes it worth it. If you buy the first production model of any device (think iPhone and iPods), you’re at a higher risk of having something go wrong.

Keep in mind your devices come with a limited warranty for a year (and 90 days of phone support), so you don’t have to make the decision when you buy the device.

Text Alerts

Web-Alerts.com works in the US and Canada. Type in the website address, then your phone number where you want SMS messages sent. The service is free, and you can unsubscribe any time. Of course, standard text message rate apply from your carrier.

Pingie.com gives you the option of creating SMS alerts immediately just using your phone number or you can create an account with your email address to help you manage your subscriptions. The service is free, and you can unsubscribe any time. Of course, standard text message rate apply from your carrier.

Email Alerts

If you don’t have an unlimited SMS plan, you might prefer to get your updates via email, and for this you can use FeedMyInbox.com. Simple and easy – enter your email address and the desired website and you’ll get email updates every 24 hours if the publisher has posted something new. There doesn’t appear to be an option to get each update individually, though. They’re all grouped in one email.

How do you put a Mac in flight mode?

There are two simple steps to making sure your Mac is in “Flight Mode” when flying on a plane. In your menu bar at the top of your screen, you should see two icons. The first is Bluetooth. The second is Airport (where you see your wireless connection).

Click on each icon and “Turn Off”. When you land, you can turn them back on. If you’re in a pinch and need to preserve battery, in the air or on the ground, turning these two things off will help you extend your battery life.

*Note: If you don’t see these icons in the top menubar, go to System Preferences. Choose “Bluetooth”. Make sure the box is checked beside “Show Bluetooth status in the menubar”.

To make sure Airport is showing in your menubar, go to System Preferences. Choose Network. Choose “Airport” in the left-hand menu, then check the box that says “Show Airport status in menu bar”.

@iphreak on Twitter asked “Have you written anything in Dear Cali about how Ustream works? I wanted to set up a streaming like you did recently.”

I’ll walk you through my Ustream setup, but first let’s look at the basics. Ustream is a live streaming service. Anyone with a webcam can sign up for a free account and “broadcast” live. You might want to do this to let your family share in how big your son is getting, or you might want to produce the best show on the planet and share it with the world. The possibilities are unlimited.

Once you sign up, connect your camera. You can use a webcam, or a camcorder that connects via Firewire or USB. Not all camcorders will function as a webcam, so you might need to do some testing on yours. Next, click on the orange “Broadcast Now” button. This will open a popout window.

Choose your camera from “Video Source”, then choose your audio from “Audio Source”. Click “Start Broadcast”, and you’re now live! You can “Start Recording” if you want to save the recording on the Ustream site.

So, that’s Ustream at its basic functionality. You can use apps like CamTwist to add visual effects. For Cali Live, our weekly live streaming show, we use Vidblaster Pro, and three cameras. Vidblaster allows you to do live camera switching, lower thirds and add in video and audio. It’s Windows only for now, so we use it on Vista.

A couple tips Once you go live, make sure you have the chatroom open so you can talk with your viewers. If you know ahead of time when you’re going to be live, you can schedule shows. That way, people know ahead of time to stop by!

Neal, my husband and co-producer for GeekBrief.TV, has been asking me to show him how I use gmail filters to keep my inbox organized. I figured, if he doesn’t know how to do it, he’s probably not alone.

1) At the top of your gmail page, click on Settings.
2) Choose Filters.
3) Click on “Create a new filter”. Filter by email address, subject or phrase. If you don’t want to read email from bacon haters, for example, you send email that says, “I hate bacon” straight to the trash!
4) Click “Next” and choose your settings. I have most of my filters set up to “Skip the inbox” and “Apply the label”.
5) Choose “Create Filter”

I love Gmail filters because they allow me to answer my email in an organized fashion, rather than letting everything get piled up in the Inbox.

I submitted my podcast to iTunes, but haven’t gotten confirmation back. Is there another way people can get it in iTunes?

Any show, audio or video, with an RSS feed can be manually added to iTunes. When I record a Dear Cali Show, I release them in the GeekBrief.TV feed, but I also post them on this site, so if you wanted to, you could use this method to subscribe only to the Dear Cali feed, which of course, would make me sad. ;-)

1) If the site publishes their RSS feed, copy the link and move on to Step 2. If the site doesn’t publish their RSS feed on the site, you can usually guess it if they’re using a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress or Blogger.

For WordPress sites, just add a “/feed” (www.dearcali.com/feed). For Blogger sites, it’ll either look like this: http://pixeloo.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default or like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BloggerBuster

2) Once you have the feed copied, open iTunes. Click on the “Advanced” menu, then choose “Subscribe to Podcast…”

3) You’ll get a blank box. Paste the RSS feed in the box, then click on “OK”.

Let it download the first show, and enjoy!

Can you help. We are using PodShow (MEVIO) to host our churches podcasts. We need to delete a podcast, can you help? How do you do this?

You can delete an episode of a show by following these directions:

1) The quickest way to delete an individual episode of your show is to go to your show’s profile (geekbrief.mevio.com). Make sure you’re logged in first!

2) Click on “Previous Episodes”. You’ll get a list of all the episodes in that feed.

You can delete an entire show on the MEVIO Network by following these directions:

1) Click on “Master Control”. This is where you manage all your shows’ content.

2) Click on the appropriate show in the “My Shows” section.

3) Choose “Show Info”, then “Delete Show”.

4) You’ll get a warning message asking if you’re absolutely sure you want to delete this show. Choose “I’m sure”, and your show will be no more!

I love showing my family recent photos using the slideshow feature in iPhoto. I like that it plays music along with the music, but I’m getting really sick of that same music over and over and over. Can I make it play music from my own collection?

Changing the slideshow music is super simple. In iPhoto, click on a Slideshow so it’s highlighted. In the bottom right corner, you see four buttons. Click on the black arrow.

These are your Slideshow Settings. Choose the “Music” tab, browse to the music you want to play during your slideshow, click “Save Settings”, and you’re ready to add mood to your photos.

On a side note, you can also turn off music entirely using these directions. Just uncheck the box marked “Play music during slideshow”.