Feb 14 2010
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Appropriate Badge Unlocking
Thank you to everyone who came over to celebrate my birthday last night. It was wonderful.
Feb 11 2010
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On March 5th 2008—two years ago—Fire Eagle went into public beta. Underpinning the design was this: Given the multitude of different public and private contexts in which a user can benefit from using their location, the user should have simple granular control over the disclosure of their location.
Two years. Today, Molly Wood writes about her initial experiences with the brand new Google Buzz (emphasis mine):
When you first visit the [Google Buzz] mobile app on your Android phone and attempt to post something, you’ll be asked whether you want to Share Location or Decline. The “Remember this Preference” box is prechecked too, so be sure you’re ready to have everyone know right where you are, whenever you post to Buzz.
[…]
Buzz also displays buzzes from people near your location—and identifies them, as well—by exact address. And there are no preferences in the Android app—no way, near as I can tell—to choose to broadcast only to the list of people you follow or a group you’ve established, as you can in the Web interface. So be equally prepared for everyone around you to know who you are and where you are when you post to Buzz from your phone. Yeah, no, really. I’m totally not making this up.
—Google Buzz: Privacy Nightmare by Molly Wood (CNet)
On a related note, Twitter’s geotagging feature doesn’t support disclosure granularity yet, either. If making your precise location public via each Tweet you post sounds unsettling, can can still hook up Fire Eagle to Twitter (using the old-school “Update your profile location field” method) using Eagle Tweet, and have control over the level of detail shared.
(Disclosure: I was a member of the Fire Eagle engineering team for eight months in 2008 and 2009.)
Feb 05 2010
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I ♥ the Blue Lego!
FlashCrash — Exploits a Flash bug and crashes your browser… Unless you’re running Snow Leopard and Safari (or, I guess, Chrome), in which just the plugin crashes and everything else carries on as normal.
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The Beatles Rock Band Ending Cinematic
Oh my. The Beatles Rock Band cinematics (also the intro) blow my mind.
Feb 04 2010
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PvP are running a FourSquare arc. It’s weird, because it’s not really satirical, nor even contain any actual jokes. It’s just the straight, absurd truth. Reading this as a resident of San Francisco, it’s like someone was spying on me through the window of Four Barrel.
Start at Part 1: Grinding Rep
Feb 03 2010
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Using Twitter as a Fever° Spark
I seem to reference Fever° every day at the moment (usually in the context of reading Tumblr…), but this evening I was hacking in aid of a different service; Twitter.
Fever has fabulous highlights feature called ‘Hot’, an aggregate view of articles and sites blogs you are subscribed to are linking to. The output is a ranked list of the most talked about things on the internet, sourced exclusively from people that you are already interested in. Fever goes further, allowing you to subscribe to feeds but keep them hidden as ‘Sparks’ (regular, visible feeds are ‘Kindling’.) So, whilst I don’t read high-volume feeds like Engadget or Hacker News, I do subscribe to the feeds, so that when someone links to them, or they link to an interesting article of the day, the particular post will surface.
My most valuable sources are friends and colleagues. I subscribe to my Delicious Network; everything that you bookmark contributes to my reading highlights. Forever I wanted to add Twitter to this as well, but Twitter’s RSS feed is both high volume, and doesn’t mark up its links with HTML anchors; Fever doesn’t see the links…
Today’s hack fixes that. TimelineLinks grabs posts from the Twitter API (including retweets), only returns the posts containing links. It’s rough around the edges, but it works well enough. I have it subscribed to in my Sparks. Tomorrow will be interesting, to see how it affects the highlight view.
Feb 02 2010
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Google will save Flash, a developer who uses it says
By Robert Scoble
I just recorded a 45 minute conversation on my iPhone while we sat on the desk at the Half moon Bay Ritz with Luke Kilpatrick about Flash, Silverlight, Palm Pre, and a few other topics, but mostly focusing on what will happen to Flash.
[Blue Lego Flash plug-in placeholder image]
Damn it
Heh heh heh heh.
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Song of the Day: ‘Romance is Boring’ by Los Campesinos!
Best chorus of the year so far.
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ExpanDrivel » Some Foursquare Badges I’d Like to See - The ExpanDrive Blog
You’re checking into the venue “Phone Booth in front of Whole Foods” from your cell phone?
Notable difference between these ideas and the much maligned ‘Douchebag’ badge? All of these negative traits are algorithmically determined (or based on personal information); they’re not open to trolling by other user factions.
Feb 01 2010
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Gorgeous modern world map. Screen printed.
these are things, via Notcot.
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Rich Feeds for Tumblr Blogs
If you’re reading this in the Tumblr Dashboard, there’s a good chance this is irrelevant. Bear with me, though.
I’ve written before that I use a feedreader in place of the Dashboard. Tumblr offers RSS feeds for everyone’s blog, and I subscribe to these in Fever°, but, to be blunt, the RSS output from Tumblr stinks. I assume it’s an evil incentive to use the Dashboard.
Quotes, for example, are not marked up as quotes. They just have some punctuation marks and a couple of line-breaks. Post titles are a disaster; entries that don’t have explicit titles have them generated as too-long, concatenated copies of the first paragraph immediately following; so you just read the text twice.
So, I’ve written a feed script. It’s called Tumblfeed, which sounds like tumbleweed… which I suppose is a metaphor for the semantic desolation of the Tumblr RSS feeds… or something. It was an accidental rhyme. (This is why commercial software companies have gigantic marketing departments to name their products “iPad” and “Vista” and “EeePC”.)
Tumblfeed does this:
- Given a Tumblr URL, reads the last 20 posts from the API, runs them all through Markdown and then outputs them as Atom.
- Tumblfeed will attempt to infer sensible titles from posts; taking the leading heading for the post content, for example.
- It will include an HTML5
<audio>element to play back audio that you’re self-hosting (or linking to off-Tumblr.) Tumblr-hosted audio is cockblocked, so you have to play that through the Flash player on the Tumblr page itself (the feed will include a link, though.) - Conversations are marked up with
<cite>and<q>elements. - Quotes—shockingly—are marked up with
<blockquote>. Honestly, it’s like there’s some kind of out-of-control genius at work here…
In short: Tumblfeed produces legible, properly marked-up feeds for Tumblr blogs. (There’s a bit of work still to do with video posts.)
The codebase is butchered from Tumblr2Wordpress; an export script that I forked from Hao Chen and now maintain. Open source software is awesome.
To use Tumblfeed you’ll need to host it yourself. There are two files, and it throws up a simple form to generate the new feed URL. Bookmarklets and GreaseKit scripts are planned. Feeds are supposed to be reliable, so there’s no way I can offer you my server as a stable, not-going-to-go-away service. If you want to just play with it (or take your chances), contact me and I’ll share a development URL with you.
Jan 31 2010
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This was an epiphany. I publish my work in HTML, people primarily read my work in HTML, so it makes sense to write in HTML too. Writing in one format and converting it to HTML is not worth the mental and technical overhead. HTML is not just one output format among many; it is the format of our age.
Emphasis mine.
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Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening—really listening—to what people say about your writing. This is the golden age for aspiring writers. We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and—if you can manage to get anybody’s attention—get near-instant feedback. Writers just 20 years ago would have killed for that kind of feedback loop. Killed! And you’re asking me what word processor I use? Just fucking write, then publish, then write some more.
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Selective HTML5
YouTube has shipped their new ‘HTML5 video player’ in beta. Whether it’s just that the beta is for tech geeks, and some differentiation from the Flash version is required, or there’s some greater ulterior marketing at work, the loading screen actually includes the text ‘HTML5’.
Alas, the page uses table to lay out a single row of playback controls. It’s HTML5 in video element and branding only; the spirit of using the mark-up language properly remains elusive.
Jan 30 2010
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Yes, we already had a big year planned for 2010, with several long-anticipated major product releases—but we think iPad is really important: important enough to spend some time juggling our plans to figure out how we can introduce five new iPad apps
The Omni Mouth » iPad or Bust!
Very cool in itself, but I think this is also a huge instant reward to Apple for launching the iPad with iWork. They gave over substatial presentation time to highlight the iPad’s capability for productivity and business software, that it goes beyond media and consumer applications that the iPhone is focused on. Without iWork, iPad would be a similar, consumer, media device. With iWork, it’s a computer. It was a very smart exercise in resetting expectations.
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