Changing background image on Twitter

It seems that Twitter does not accept background images with metadata, which unfortunately, is present in all most pictures taken by today's digital cameras. Some have advocated using Photoshop to remove the metadata. Since not all of us have Photoshop, a simpler way is to use a public domain software known as jhead, which removes all metadata from your JPEG files so that they can be uploaded as a background image to Twitter.

Here's how it is done:

1. Download jhead to a folder on your PC (eg. C:\downloads).
2. Open the command window in Windows (click Start - Run, and type cmd into the box).
3. Navigate to the folder where jhead was downloaded. If it's C:\downloads, type cd\downloads & press ENTER.
4. Assuming your JPEG file is named twitterpic.jpg in C:\data, type jhead -purejpg c:\ data\twitterpic.jpg & press ENTER.
5. You should see a message as follows if it's processed successfully:

Modified: c:\data\twitterpic.jpg

Now you should be able to upload your JPEG file as a background image in Twitter.

1. Click Settings - Design - Change Background Image

2. Click Choose File to select your image file. I suggest you also select Tile Background before clicking save changes. It seems that without this option selected, the upload sometimes fail. You can always de-select Tile Background after your image has been uploaded successfully.

Thomas

Free SMS alerts for system monitoring

To send SMS alerts to myself when a system event occurs (eg. Server or website not available), I currently use the following method:

1. Event triggers an Email to Gmail
2. Gmail filters forward only qualified messages to Hotmail.
3. Hotmail sends SMS alerts to my mobile (each SMS is chargeable by Hotmail)

However, I'm not happy with this method for 2 reasons:

1. SMS chargeable by Hotmail
2. Delays in SMS up to several hours after email was received

As such, I'm now exploring another method which is free (charges from your Telco maybe applicable though) and using Twitter.

1. Email to Twittermail with @Replies in subject
2. Configure twe2.com to send SMS alert to mobile

Will see how reliable the SMS service is.