Twitter is never having to say TL;DR
Category: Tech
Manic Monday
First, some linkblogging…
- The Spam Primer has been “completely revamped.”
- Mars Express Orbiter catches video of moons Phobos and Deimos.
And then the “fun” started.
- Me: I’m going to focus on project X today!
Computer needed for project X: I’m going to lock up today!
Me: Argh! - Someone thought it would be a good idea to cover “Wonderful Christmastime?” 😯 (For the record: Shazam says it was Hilary Duff.)
- OK, after 3½ hours stuck at 74%, I think I can assume chkdsk is stalled. *grumble*
- Ate some blackberries I’d forgotten about from a week ago. Good news: I only threw out 1! Bad news: I should’ve thrown out 2. Blech!
- Chkdsk round 3 is at 55% on Stage 5 of 5. Going to call it a night & hope my PC runs tomorrow. (According to Facebook, this posted at 5:55pm!)
Computer update: Disk check finished overnight, seems OK. Ran a backup just in case, but got some work done on that project!
First Look Through Google Goggles
I tried out Google’s new Goggles app. Basically it lets you use the camera on an Android phone to do an image-based search. The examples include landmarks, book covers, artwork, logos, contact info, and places.
So I played with it for a bit at home tonight. It’s good at picking out book covers and logos, if you’ve got good lighting and a clear image. 50-50 at landmarks, at least when taking pictures of my monitor. In a couple of cases, it actually picked out the exact photo as a match. It’s not so good at objects, even obvious ones like a Coke can. I’ll have to try it out in the real world next.
Cylon Spammers
I’m seeing a lot of word salad spam comments this weekend. It’s entertaining to read them in the vocal style of a Cylon hybrid.
Wednesday Bits and Bytes
I’m trying to remember when the BOFH attitude prevalent on antispam mailing lists didn’t bother me. It’s weird how suddenly reporting spam turns into a bad thing because someone (else) might make money with that knowledge.
Best Way to Label Dead Links
I use the Broken Link Checker plugin on this blog and on Speed Force to find broken or moved links. In addition to helping you manage them in the admin interface, it can also assign formatting (as a CSS class) to mark them in your posts.
Cool! Readers can see that the link is broken before clicking on it!
But what’s the best way to label the links?
The plugin uses strike-through by default. You are marking something that’s gone, but strike-through usually means the text is being crossed out. That’s fine for a link in a list, but something like “Catering was provided by MyNiftyFoodCo” implies that the name of the company is wrong, not that the website is gone.
Just making something italic or changing the color doesn’t work either, because it’s arbitrary. Nothing about an italic link (which could be a title), or a random other color, suggests that something might be missing.
What I’ve come up with is to reduce the contrast on broken links. It combines two familiar schemes:
- High contrast for new links and low contrast for visited links.
- “Graying out” inactive items in software.
So here, I’ve got bright blue for new links, darker blue for visited links, and broken links as black (well, very dark gray), the same color as surrounding text. I’m keeping the underline in place so there’s still some indication that it’s a link, but it’s not as strong as the label for one that’s still functional.
It’s still not ideal, since color is the only difference, but it should cause less confusion than the strike-through.
Netbook, Laptop or Smartphone?
I briefly considered doing a fresh install on the old PowerBook to see if it could be used as a second laptop, instead of just wiping it to recycle, but quickly remembered that the reason we replaced it was a hardware problem.
Still, it would be nice to have two portable computers for when we travel. I have a horrible tendency to hog the laptop when we get back to the hotel.
The thing is, we don’t need a second laptop for normal use. So getting another MacBook, or even a full-size Windows laptop, is overkill. Would a netbook do the trick? What do I use a computer for when traveling?
- Reading/writing email.
- Managing & uploading photos.
- Blogging & managing blog comments.
- Twitter (and more recently Facebook).
- Web access.
Yeah, I could easily get by on a netbook, freeing up the MacBook for Katie to use.
But do I even need the netbook?
Almost everything on that list is something I can do with my Android phone, assuming WiFi or a decent 3G signal. Not as quickly, perhaps. I type a lot more slowly on the G1 than a full-sized keyboard, and even at 3G speeds web browsing can be slow, especially on sites that don’t optimize for mobile use. And websites that require Flash still won’t work.
The real deal-breaker is (still) photo management. I can upload photos I’ve taken with the phone, but only one at a time — and I can’t transfer photos from the regular camera. The small screen size also makes it harder to look through a set of several similar photos and pick out the best one.
So I could manage with just my phone if I had:
- A way to transfer photos from my camera to my phone. (The hard part. Android issue 738 is an enhancement request to be able to connect USB devices. It’s not clear whether the G1 hardware supports USB On-The-Go or not, but the drivers and Android OS don’t — at least not yet.)
- An app to mass-upload photos to Flickr. (They exist, I just need to research and try a few out.)
I guess for now the best way to handle it is for me to just upload photos on the laptop, without taking the time to label them, then hand it over and move to the smartphone. Though if the network connection is particularly slow, like it was at Comic-Con International this year, that would still be problematic.
Of course, we don’t have any travel plans at the moment until next spring. Who knows? By then a netbook (or a newer phone) may be more practical.