CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-21 14:19:16 (3 comments, 11 reshares, 22 +1s)

#linux #opensource #geek #funny  

2013-05-21 14:26:31 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Somehow mistyped my new work password twice on my work Mac when changing it yesterday, locking myself out when I came in this morning. Thankfully on a Mac (in the absence of disk encryption), all you need to do is reboot in single-user mode, start up the directory service and change the password for the user.

2013-05-20 21:48:54 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

I like AppEngine, but it way too difficult to write multi-module applications with this framework due to the brain-dead manner that the jars are laid out, and how the Eclipse plugin works.

Trying to get a non-web project that references AppEngine included in your AppEngine project causes all sorts of grief. Yeeesh.

2013-05-20 13:04:30 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

This is what happens when you use the courts for revenge instead of rehabilitation: the government gets revenge on those it considers problematic.

Note that this guy wasn't exactly a prime example of an upstanding citizen, but there is no way he deserves this treatment.

2013-05-20 00:18:24 (4 comments, 6 reshares, 8 +1s)

Batten down the gadgets.

2013-05-19 22:30:44 (30 comments, 5 reshares, 17 +1s)

I just found out the hard way that GTalk on Android has been silently replaced by Hangouts and the do-no-evil geniuses have removed everything dealing with XMPP from it ... everything

The "hard way" is from the fact that I did not get a server alert on my phone because Hangouts no longer supports outside messages from XMPP sources (also known as Federation.)

This has me all worked up in a lot of ways:

Personally - a lot of my friends are XMPP users so now I no longer have a single client for my messaging needs and this means that GTalk will not be my primary tool, heck I may not load it at all now.

Professionally - I'm a member of the XMPP Software Foundation and we have been very proud about XMPP being the core of a lot of commercial communication products (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Cisco and many others) and even tho each... more »

2013-05-19 17:13:14 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 15 +1s)

After spending a few days with two-column Google+ via zoom in and "Read More" auto-expanded, I have to say that this really is what Google+ should be. Please, Google: make the font bigger (Roboto is OK, just needs to be larger), get rid of the super-skinny cards let us read long walls of text.

2013-05-19 16:52:33 (3 comments, 3 reshares, 14 +1s)

Just in case you have any residual love left for Microsoft's abomination, Clippy.

2013-05-19 04:11:59 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 9 +1s)

First world problem: DVR is more than 70% full.

2013-05-19 03:29:43 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 9 +1s)

TIL: the Inspector Gadget theme was based on In the Hall of the Mountain King.

2013-05-19 03:17:39 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 15 +1s)

Ah, reddit...

2013-05-19 03:08:25 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

So what happened to online presence notifications in the Google Talk hangouts app?

2013-05-18 22:14:39 (17 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Today's project: get this bad boy working.

2013-05-18 20:20:19 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 18 +1s)

I deleted the Facebook application from my phone a few months back. I have yet to miss it, although I occasionally use a desktop browser to check it and post to some pages, but I am really close to be able to ditch it entirely, likely putting me on a number of global watch lists.

2013-05-18 16:31:56 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

I look forward to Telsa's low-end entry into the market, but I'm glad to see the Nissan Leaf getting rave reviews as well.

2013-05-18 16:29:42 (3 comments, 3 reshares, 7 +1s)

+Ray Cromwell's comments on Microsoft's lowbrow anti-Google campaign are worth a read. This is why long-form text is important on Google+.

2013-05-18 04:29:00 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

Martin Emms is a researcher into new payment formats at Newcastle University's Centre for Cybercrime and Computer Security. He also found his contactless card was debited when he placed it a few centimetres to the side of the reader from inside his wallet when he intended to pay with a normal debit card: "If you're placing your card to the side of the reader your intention isn't to pay. The terminal is working within the specification of Near Field Communication but not within the intent."

2013-05-18 04:15:30 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 6 +1s)

"If they’re correct, the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time that make the four-dimensional spacetime we live in today isn’t how it’s always been — the Universe may have existed in a lower dimensional state in the past."

2013-05-18 04:12:35 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

Amusing and poignant Taiwanese CGI news rendition of Toronto's mayor's, Rob Ford's, alleged crack problem.

"If his smoking, drinking, fighting, bad driving, and colourful racial comments didn't bother Toronto voters, crack smoking probably won't either."

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

2013-05-17 17:40:01 (9 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

So I've managed to fix a few of the annoyances with the new Google+ notification popup's margins, double-scrollbars and scroll-event-eating, but I'd like to recruit a few people to test it out before I foist it on the 40k unsuspecting existing users of +Replies and More.

Any victims volunteers interested? You'll have to understand how to install an extension manually via drag-and-drop on the extensions page.

2013-05-17 15:18:47 (8 comments, 1 reshares, 11 +1s)

Big surprise- fluoride out, cavities in.

“Now we’re seeing again the horror stories in a younger population of children since they’ve taken the fluoride out,” Smith said, citing higher levels of decay in young children and even babies as young as 11 months."

2013-05-16 23:18:17 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 27 +1s)

Stolen from +David Blunt.

Totally worthy.

2013-05-16 23:00:54 (8 comments, 1 reshares, 15 +1s)

OK, I've updated +Replies and More to v1.62 with a new feature to expand comments as well. Note that I've taken a different approach with this - I'm leaving "Read More" when the comment section of a post is unexpanded, but showing all comments for a post will auto-expand all comments under that post.

+Lauren Weinstein +Sai +Andreas Schou 

2013-05-16 17:43:30 (8 comments, 7 reshares, 16 +1s)

Alright. I think that I love the new Google+ design, but I had to tweak three things:

1) +Replies and More auto-expanding posts
2) Zooming in until I get two columns worth
3) Overriding the Roboto body font with "arial"

With these three changes, it looks pretty good to me. I think I'm going to add a font override to +Replies and More that lets me automatically fix this. I'm not sure how to force two columns, though.

I'm also now enjoying the long-form posts that people have been writing.

2013-05-16 16:40:58 (22 comments, 32 reshares, 16 +1s)

Inspired by +Lauren Weinstein and +Sai's posts on Google+'s poor handling of long text posts, I've updated +Replies and More to auto-expand text posts. 

This will automatically click the "Read More" link, and hide the "Show Less" link. Since +Replies and More is opinionated software, I've turned this on by default.

2013-05-16 15:59:01 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 19 +1s)

I'm trying to be open-minded about the new re-design, but the double-scrollbars in the notification menu are driving me absolutely nuts.

2013-05-16 15:40:33 (1 comments, 4 reshares, 4 +1s)

Big surprise: governments start using porn filters to block other sites they don't approve of.

2013-05-16 05:06:36 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Our wonderfully corrupt government is basically self-destructing right now. If only they could do it before the next election.

2013-05-16 04:28:48 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 15 +1s)

Someone sent this to me... #perfect  

2013-05-16 02:11:48 (9 comments, 4 reshares, 16 +1s)

"I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there."

"You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes."

2013-05-16 01:03:01 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 9 +1s)

So AutoAwesome is pretty cool, but I wouldn't mind ManualAwesome.

2013-05-15 22:03:36 (11 comments, 0 reshares, 16 +1s)

Blah blah blah iOS blah blah Apple blah Google blah blah blah auto-hashtagging test blah blah blah Android blah Pizza explosion blah blah cats.

2013-05-15 21:58:42 (12 comments, 3 reshares, 23 +1s)

If someone wants to test this, I'm available to receive money. Minimum $50.

2013-05-15 21:02:15 (13 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Something is seriously messed up with the new responsive layout. If you resize the browser horizontally, the sizes shift all over the place - sometimes two columns, sometimes three.

2013-05-15 18:35:16 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 10 +1s)

OK Google, post my thoughts on the new Google Maps.

2013-05-15 17:58:00 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

Google smile enhancement: uses the children's brain implant to control facial expressions.

2013-05-15 17:50:05 (9 comments, 1 reshares, 14 +1s)

Google has apparently just put all photographers out of business. Robot aesthetics FTW. 

2013-05-15 16:50:01 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

So far, Google I/O 2013 keynote seems to be mainly about getting you to buy more media.

2013-05-15 16:46:27 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 14 +1s)

G+ What's Hot Serves Based On Gender

I heard a rumour this morning that if your profile is set to male, you'll get different What's Hot (Explore) content than if you're set to female.

So I opened a tab with my profile which was set to female, and from that opened a fresh tab with WH.  Then I immediately changed my profile to male and opened another WH tab to compare as closely in time as possible the difference.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

When I'm a girl, I get piles of those graphical platitudes I hate.  I have understood all along why +EcoSnark gets those more than my real profile, because she shares them to her NerdSmacked community to make fun of them (see https://plus.google.com/communities/117382348426379346016 ).  I don't plus them or share them, but they're always there.  I loathe them and it's why I have had theslide... more »

2013-05-14 20:15:37 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

A look at why JavaScript is a pretty good candidate for a universal web VM.

2013-05-14 03:52:42 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Looking forward to the next general election now. This is a good trend.

2013-05-14 01:15:54 (8 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Ooh. OSX works well on ESXi.

2013-05-13 22:49:42 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Google+ just crashed. But now I'm curious - what's a skyjam?

2013-05-13 21:46:13 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

I'll go on record as saying that requiring Java web developers to populate WEB-INF/lib with everything at development time is a stupid idea.

2013-05-13 04:28:03 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

As a gamer I enjoy watching TASes, or Tool-Assisted Superplays, in which players use emulators, slowdown, save states, and frame advance to play games beyond the limit of human abilities.  Usually these are attempts to complete a game as fast as possible (which is why some people know "TAS" as "Tool-Assisted Speedrun").  However, it's also possible to do a TAS that's just silly.

In the video below, the author abuses the SNES "Family Feud" answer recognition algorithm to input completely garbage answers and win big.

2013-05-13 03:39:16 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 5 +1s)

"Although past studies confirmed this germ was linked with both of these catastrophes, much controversy existed as to whether it also caused the Justinianic Plague of the sixth to eighth centuries. This pandemic, named after the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, killed more than 100 million people. Some historians have suggested it contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire."

2013-05-12 22:27:18 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 8 +1s)

Looks like the myth that H264 is "more efficient" than WebM might be busted. I'd like to see this test on a more mainstream device with definite onboard H264 acceleration, like the Galaxy Nexus. I'm not sure if this N90 tablet had that.

2013-05-12 16:59:32 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh

WTF Canada

2013-05-12 03:54:36 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

Greatest song ever.

2013-05-12 03:35:53 (4 comments, 2 reshares, 8 +1s)

Human-powered pile-driver. That is all.