Posts tagged as "home"

Visualising Tag Clouds

If you haven't played with Wordle yet, I strongly suggest you point your browser of choice there right now and see what gorgeous visualisations of tags it comes up with. This is my delicious tag cloud ...

Playing with tag clouds: https://delicious.com/vicchi

... this is the tag cloud for this blog ...

Playing with tag clouds: /

... and this is the tag cloud for the blog I write for work.

Playing with tag clouds: https://www.ygeoblog.com/

All of which were produced using the default settings, with no tweaking, shows just how varied my personal approach to tagging is and how strongly tied to usage my tags are.

Contextual Location (and Echoecho Redux)

I recently wrote about echoecho, an SMS based location sharing service and rather dismissed it as another PlayTxt or DodgeBall, both of which are now shuttered, and argued that EchoEcho fails my Theory of Stuff.

Nick Bicanic, the CEO of Purpose Wireless, the company behind echoecho was good enough to look me up and drop me a long email commenting on my blog post and -- very politely -- pointed out that I might want to revisit my opinion of the service. An edited version of that email to me formed the basis of his latest blog post on the topic of location as a context.

Deliciousness: ringing phones, suicide linux, Flickr plugins, editing, zoomable maps and upsidedownness

Today's social bookmarking deliciousness, from down the back of the internet.

  • Got a colleague who keeps wandering away from their desk and leaving their mobile phone behind, which then keeps on ringing? Maybe they need one of these signs left on their desk. Maybe.
  • Fancy a challenge? How many times a day do you type the incorrect command at the shell? Once, twice, three times a day? More? Maybe you should give Suicide Linux a try; it helpfully turns any mistyped command into rm -rf / thus helpfully erasing your root file system. Concentrate now.
  • The WordPress Flickr Manager is a wonderful plugin which integrates your Flickr photostream into blog posts. Alas it doesn't work with WordPress 2.9. Until now.
  • Posting the same article to multiple blogs severely impacts your search engine ranking results. How did I not know this? It's stopped at least one person from using the Posterous autopost function.
  • Sometimes, just sometimes, sub-editors trim just a little bit too much from an article prior to publishing.
  • We're used to online slippy maps being able to zoom in and out; but zooming in and out of paper maps? That's something else indeed.
  • What's happens in Vegas stays in Vegas; but sometimes it stays on FourSquare as well.
  • Photo of the year so far; the Space Shuttle Endeavour, caught in silhouette from the International Space Station. That phrase alone sounds like it's been lifted wholesale from an Arthur. C. Clarke novel.
  • ˙uʍop ǝpısdn ǝdʎʇ oʇ pǝǝu noʎ 'sǝɯıʇǝɯos ʇsnɾ 'sǝɯıʇǝɯos

I Can't Get No Sleep

"And here we are, half past two in the morning. I can't get no sleep"

And here we are. Half past two in the morning. I can't get no sleep.

A slight mangling of the lyrics to the Faithless classic, Insomnia, as Maxi Jazz lamented about being wide awake at 3.30 AM whereas I am most definitely awake an hour earlier. And not for the first time either.

This is what happens when I wake up and thoughts for my next location talk starts fizzing in my mind, unbidden. Sometimes the only solution is to get up, set them down on paper and head back to bed.

"I'm wide awake in my kitchen, it's black and I'm lonely, oh, if I could only get some sleep, creaky noises make my skin creep, I need to get some sleep, I can't get no sleep ..."

A Posterous Wish List

I've been using Posterous for a while now, a quick trawl back through the archives shows the first post I wrote via the service was in August 2009, and I've been using it ever since. It's fiendishly simple and works like this :-

  • I write a blog post in my email client and send it to post@posterous.com.
  • Posterous expands any links that it can, such as links to my Flickr account, and embeds the graphic inline in the text.
  • Posterous autoposts any embedded photos to my Flickr account.
  • Posterous looks for any tags in the subject line and autoposts to my Delicous account.
  • Posterous date and timestamps the post and puts it up on my Posterous blog at https://vicchi.posterous.com/.
  • Posterous autposts the entire blog post to my main, WordPress powered, blog at /.

Through the Window Redux

The view from my window has changed a lot of recent. Through my office window there's been St. Giles and Covent Garden in the snow ...

... and Hanger One on Moffett Field, one of the world's largest free-standing structures.

Through my hotel window I've seen the Chrysler Building in New York at sunrise ...

...  and Silicon Valley on a cold, foggy and damp morning ...

But of all the view I've seen through my window, I think I prefer this one most of all, because it's home.

It's Time to Stop LAMB (Location Based SPAM) Before It Even Exists

We all suffer from SPAM, the unwanted and unsolicited commercial bulk emails that are the reason we have Junk Mail filters and folders in our email clients and servers. A quick glance at the Junk folder for my personal email account shows over 300 of these since the beginning of February alone. If you use some form of instant messenger, be it MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, AOL or any of the others on the market, you've probably come across SPIM, Instant Messaging SPAM. Then there's also mobile phone SPAM via text messages, comment SPAM, the list goes on and on.

We're poised to start seeing a new form of SPAM raise its ugly head. Let's call it LAMB for now, Location Based Advertising SPAM.

As Ed Parsons pointed out on his blog yesterday, Apple are banning location based advertising in apps. "If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store."

This is a good first step in locking down potential abuses of a technology before it has a chance to get out of control. The reason we have SPAM and all the other variants in the first place is that the underlying technologies were designed in an open manner with no control mechanisms in place to thwart unsolicited and unwanted messages and content. But we need to go further than this.

Sometimes the Hardware is Willing but the Software is Weak

I've had an HP DeskJet F-something-or-other for a couple of years now. It's a small grey thing, around the size of a shoe box that prints, scans and photocopies. At least that's what it said in the brochure and on HP's web site. It used to sit plugged into the USB port on my AirPort Express for easy wireless printing. Not that it actually printed mind you. I viewed this piece of hardware's role in life as rendering documents from one of the Macs we have in the house, in full colour or black and while, onto sheets of A4 paper.The DeskJet had other ideas.It viewed its role in life as a source of revenue for HP to get me to keep buying ever more expensive replacement inkjet refills, by the cunning ruse of reporting the cartridge was empty when it was brand new, by refusing to print colour or black and white consistently and in the end, by just refusing to print, unless it was using invisible ink that it secreted somewhere in that grey shoe box.The scanner was OK though but the photocopier functionality was somewhat hampered by the lack of being actually able to print what had just been scanned. The printer continued to not endear itself by refusing to be installed on my faithful and ageing PowerPC based iBook G4 running Leopard. Intel MacBook Pros running Leopard and Snow Leopard seemed to be fine but the iBook insisted the printer was actually another model entirely and just sulked.So based on the premise that we wanted to print far more often than we wanted to scan, the HP DeskJet F-whatever-the-model-number-is has been retired and replaced with a gleaming, black, colour laser printer from Samsung. It's a CLP-315W for those of you who like model numbers.