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Randy Cassingham of This Is True has been driving a weekly Twitter event he calls Pet Peeve Wednesday, with the hashtag #PPW*. Some items I’ve posted about things that Just Bug Me(tm). I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that they fall into two categories, tech and language.

Tech Annoyances

  • Mobile websites that change the URL so you can’t reshare the page on Twitter without sending desktop users to the mobile site. Or worse: the ones that redirect you from a full article to the front of their mobile site, so you have to hunt around for the article that someone was trying to share with you.
  • New password forms should always spell out the password policy before the user tries to pick something it doesn’t like.
  • If you have to cite a bogus law to claim that your email is not spam (or worse, that recipients can’t callit spam), it’s spam.

Language Annoyances

  • “Weary” means you’re tired of something, not concerned about it. You’re thinking of “wary” or maybe “leery.”
  • If you’re going to reference “Wherefore art thou Romeo?”, remember: she’s asking why, not where. (Think of it this way: The answer to “wherefore?” is “therefore,” and you know what “therefore” means.) It’s a lead-in to the “What’s in a name?” speech.
  • What do people think an “intensive purpose” is, anyway? The real phrase, “for all intents and purposes,” at least makes sense.
  • The word is “foolproof,” as in even a fool can’t mess it up, not “full proof.” (As opposed to what, half-proof?)

*There’s a hashtag collision with both “Pet Peeve Wednesday” and “Prove People Wrong” using the same tag.

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I had no luck viewing the Transit of Venus. I didn’t have time to find and meet up with any sort of viewing party that might have a telescope or other equipment, and I’m kicking myself for not having tracked down a set of eclipse glasses of my own, so I was left with a handheld pinhole “camera” made out of a cardboard gum package. The clearest image I could get with that was about 1/4″, too small to see the tiny speck moving across the sun. (Though I could see the cloud bank the sun was setting into about the point that I gave up and went inside.)

Oh, well. I can’t be too upset, since I got to see a great solar eclipse two weeks ago. And there are plenty of places to watch online and find pictures.


Photo from Astronomy Picture of the Day.

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I swear this sounds like the setup for the kind of 50s B sci-fi movie that would have found a home on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Or possibly a SyFy Original Movie.

Of course, in the real world, the tuna are less likely to grow wings and fly around the beach, killing surfers and bikini-clad sunbathers before they make their way inland, knocking down the Hollywood sign on their way to the intense battle with the US Army in and around Downtown Los Angeles.

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I had several plans for viewing today’s solar eclipse, depending on the weather. As the hour approached and clouds loomed in the west, I decided that my best bet would be to get above the cloud cover, and drove up into the hills to Del Cerro Park at the top of the Palos Verdes peninsula.

I’m glad I did, because a lot of other people had the same idea.

Individuals, couples, families, groups of friends, groups from schools — and everyone had a different way to see the eclipse: pinhole cameras, binoculars projecting on cardboard, welding helmets, “eclipse glasses” and more. There were also people who were just out for a day at the park, and wanted to know what was going on.

If J had been a few years older it would have been a family event for us too, but at a year and a half, I don’t think I would have been able to explain anything beyond “don’t look at the sun.” A partial eclipse is easy to miss if you’re not paying attention.

I’d cobbled together a pinhole camera the day before from two Amazon boxes, a sheet of paper, a sheet of aluminum foil, and lots and lots of packing tape. I actually started with just one box and I decided the image wasn’t big enough, so I grafted on a second. Even then it was only about 3/8″ across, but when testing it I could see the edges of clouds drifting across the sun, so I figured it would work. It did. Continue reading →

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I have cobbled together a pinhole camera out of two Amazon.com boxes (one at first, but the image was too small), a piece of paper, a piece of foil, and a lot of packing tape. The test run looks good: The image isn’t that big, maybe 3/8 of an inch, but I was able to see the shapes of clouds as they drifted in front of the disc, so it should be sharp enough to show the eclipse.

Since I was building it around the same time of day that the eclipse will be happening, now I know what the sightlines are going to be like. I’ll definitely have to go somewhere less obstructed, probably somewhere higher in case the clouds roll in tomorrow. Update: I did.

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The classic link-sharing site Delicious is still around, trying to find a niche in the new social media world. One of the things they’ve recently done is set up a way to import all links you post on Twitter. It does a historical import when you link the account, and then pulls in new tweets going forward.

It’s a cool idea, depending on how you use the sites, and they’ve made it just flexible enough that anyone who might want to do this in the first place will find a way to match their use case.

In my case, I mainly used Delicious as an additional bookmark store that I could access across browsers and accounts, though for the most part that’s been replaced by Xmarks. I haven’t used it as much for deliberate sharing, though I’ve posted the occasional link in the hopes that someone might notice it.

Anyway, I linked it up with my personal Twitter account, left the site for a few hours, then came back to see just how far back it had imported. It went back about 3 years, pulling in over 1,000 links that I’d posted to Twitter.

The Good:

  • It merges duplicates.
  • Links are backdated to the day you posted the tweet.
  • All imported links are tagged with “from twitter” (you can change this), making it easy to filter.
  • Hashtags are imported as tags.
  • The text of your tweet becomes the comment.
  • It extracts titles and thumbnail images from the links.
  • It can follow some redirectors, including Twitter’s own t.co.

The Bad:

  • It doesn’t follow all redirectors. There are an awful lot of bit.ly and is.gd links in there.
  • That also means that if I tweeted the same link twice using different link shorteners, it doesn’t resolve the duplicates.
  • A lot of those links were only of short term interest.
  • Three years is plenty of time for a redirector (or, of course, a target link) to shut down. Fortunately, it looks like I didn’t use tr.im much.
  • My blog automatically tweets links to new posts, which means every post I’ve made in the last three years is in there – the earliest with an is.gd or tinyurl link, the later ones with bit.ly. I don’t need those in my own bookmarks (with a few exceptions), and as far as sharing goes, it makes me feel spammy to plug three years’ worth of backlist at once.
  • Searching for links gives you less-functional results than simply looking at your list or filtering by tag. Not all details appear on the results page, bulk actions aren’t available, and you can’t always delete a link if you edit it from search results. This meant I couldn’t, for instance, search for “New post” or “K-Squared Ramblings,” skim the titles and bulk-delete the bookmarks to my own content.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been taking a few minutes here and there to go through what started as 60 pages’ worth of imported links, delete the ones I don’t want to keep and fix up the ones I do. It started out faster than my last Twitter-related cleanup project, but that’s because there were a lot of auto-posted links I could just delete without taking the time to evaluate or label them. It’s already slowing down.

I could just leave all the clutter there, but part of the point is for this to be my bookmarks-away-from-home, and it’s easier to find stuff without the extra junk.

On the plus side, between this and the broken link cleanup, I’m getting to see a bunch of old posts and photos I’d forgotten about. That’s been an interesting process.

It’s also convinced me that linkblogging round-ups really don’t belong on this blog. I still do them on Speed Force, but that’s in part because Speed Force has readers who don’t follow the social networks. (OK, let’s be honest: because Speed Force has readers.) Here, where it’s just a personal site, I’m better off sticking with the best medium for each post. That means Twitter, Facebook and Google+ for short posts (barring a few categories that I’ve got history here, like license plate spotting), the blog for longer posts, and social networks for link sharing.