Reid Dossinger

I'd always liked the idea of Google's Chrome's ability to sync (and, essentially, back up) bookmarks, preferences and applications across multiple installations of Chrome...but I could never get it to work. The preferences said that everything was backed up, but man...it was so not. I thought I'd give it another try again, and this time it worked. I don't know if it was just this fix or this combined with a fix in the browser by Google, but here's what I did: Turned off sync in the Google dashboard Turned off sync on both installations of Chrome that I wanted to sync (one Mac and one Windows) On my netbook (Windows), I deleted all the bookmarks I had there and closed Chrome On my main computer (Mac), I turned sync back on and let it finish. On my netbook, I turned sync back on and let it finish. ....and that did it. About time, too.

The personal blog that I've kept since 2003 has always had a serious personality split. It took on tech posts (especially beginner how-tos) and the music I'd been listening to, both of which could find a larger audience...if it wasn't for the fact that it was jumbled up with each other AND with the personal blog type stuff that had a, uh, extremely limited audience. I would constantly want to promote the music and tech posts, but would stop short because it conflicted with wanting to keep the personal posts for just me and my friends. The easy answer, of course, was to split things off. My music blog (which I still kick myself for not starting years earlier) has been going for almost three years now and I write tech in various different places. But since I split things off, the personal part has barely been updated, and I missed it.   I considered just retiring the Wordpress site and just letting Tumblr be my dumping ground, but being a sentimental guy, I couldn't ju...

I just spent the last few days in "New" York, in my second straight year (a personal record!) at the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference, which combines the worlds of publishing and tech. I also had a couple of great meals and my first pickleback (and, unfortunately, my second), but that's another story. This year felt pretty long on theory and short on practical examples and takeaways, but much of the theory did end up being pretty inspiring. Here's a few quickshot thoughts on the conference: The future of ebooks is...totally uncertain It seemed that at least once every hour, someone pondered the future of the ebook. Yet no one really has a good answer for it. It's obvious that we're still in the early days (which I also felt last year), that standards are still being debated and grasped at, but that we're still a ways away from organized steps forward. This is my opinion, and it seemed something that no one else wanted to say, but it seems clear t...

And so begins a new feature that I call Ask A Reid, where I answer questions from people I know about the dorky-but-useful stuff on the interwebs, and put it here for other people who may want to know the question/are bored and will read anything. Question: i know you operate different Twitter accounts - are they all linked to the same email address?  can you link more than one twitter account to the same email address? Answer: Well, you can't do multiple Twitter accounts with a single email address, but there's an easy way around it: Gmail lets you filter emails just by adding a plus sign to your gmail username. So you could sign up for one Twitter account with fakeaddress@gmail.com and another with fakeaddress+twitter2@gmail.com . You can put whatever you want between the + and the @. That works well for filtering newsletters, too. But I use a different email with each account anyway. I have multiple emails and when you buy a domain, you can do absolutely anythi...