If there was ever a product needing a manual, frankly it’s Google Plus. It remains a rather obtuse beast — at least to my way of seeing things. Google Plus: The Missing Manual attempts to remedy this by providing a comprehensive review of all the possible interactions you’d have with the web service from a user perspective. So, do I feel like I know the service any better after reading the book. No, not really, unfortunately maybe it’s just the case that G+ doesn’t work the way I do. The book makes a valiant effort, but I have a sense that I personally would be better served by a pure cookbook approach. Read the rest of this entry »
strikingly random thoughts and 'maximum data existentialisation'
Archives for category: Blogging
Head First by Jeff Siarto is one of a superb series of Head First books that adopt a visual approach to teaching. This particular volume is very well done and offers a deeply basic introduction to setting cup, configuring and managing a WordPress blog. It takes a new user through the basics and then provides a hands-on practical experience with all the appropriate skills to meet basic to intermediate user demands. It is well written and comprehensively delivered and if you are either a visual learner or a person who does not want to sit down with a stock manual than this is the approach for you. Read the rest of this entry »
The subtitle ‘Bringing Location to Web Applications’ is particularly apt to this thorough and useful volume. In HTML5 Geolocation Anthony Holdener takes a programmatic approach through full cycle, exploring the nature of location, the technicalities of goelocation and definition of the JS W3C Geolocation API. It goes beyond this mere definition of accessing the API to exploring the ways in which this information can then be utilised using a variety of the Mapping and geolocation API’s available as webservices and ways in which the data produced can be shared using existing standards.
Gamestorming by Gray, Brown and Macanufo has the slugline ‘A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers and Changemakers’ and it lives up to its rather lofty ambitions by providing solid and systemised routines that can be implemented to create an environment for innovation. The book provides a recipe-like guide to a wide (100 or so) variety of exercises and scripts for groups of individuals to employ to open up the flood gates for the free flow of ideas, breaking through impasses and generally making great things happen.
Am participating in the Day of Digital Humanities organised by Peter Organisciak, Geoffrey Rockwell, and Stan Rueker. Check it out.
I made a few quick references to the mode by which I transfer my long and lat data to Google Earth for route display. I was asked whether I was capturing altitude information along with 2D position and the answer to this is yes. In fact, there are a variety of interesting ways of visualising this data. Although Google Earth does allow for some manipulation of this, I recently started using GPS Visualizer to play with this dimension. If you point it at your data file it can provide you with some interesting perspectives on your trips.
The weekend jaunt down country looks like this:
A second cool way of showing this same altitude mapping is to simply colour code the 2D route for altitude. This map was also generated at GPS Visualizer using the same dataset:
We all know I love my gadgets. As I blogged earlier in the week one of the first things I picked up on 
arrival was a new disposable cell phone. I chose a little Sony Ericsson 530i from <a href=“http://three.ie” target=_blank”>3.ie because it allowed unlimited Skype usage. I have been blown away by how well the Skype functionlity is implemented on this phone and the mobile itself has demonstrated a few other neat features. My original plan was to get the cheapest thing I could for the interim and purely utilitarian considerations. Then come July 11th ponder the 3G iPhone. However, I have to admit that I am rather pleasantly surprised by the little 530i. Its a solid little phone and pure candy bar form factor. I am glad to be back to candybars and from experience will not use a slider or a flip in the future. I put a crystal case on the 530i to protect the screen (experience with my last SE).
The camera on the 530i is a common 2Mb. I love having a camera with me at all times and the resulting photos are quite fine. Being able to bluetooth these back and forth with my MacBook Pro is brilliantly convenient. And then I noticed that the photo menu offered an option to Blog This…
When I pressed the blog this button it was clearly linked to blogger and I figured (intriguing) I’ll attach this to my existing blogger account at some point and try this. As it turns out its much easier than this and I am very impressed.
To blog one’s life on a Sony Ericsson 530i with 3, you snap a pic, choose blog this and leave the rest to the phone. 3.ie creates a brand new blog on blogger for you, uploads the picture and then emails to your phone a special token. The phone is now linked to this blog. You claim your token via a browser and are then given the option of personalising the blog that was autocreated or simply linking the incomming posts to an existing blog. I happened to have an old one sitting around (NapoleonicTourist…unused since 2006). I pointed to this one and lo and behold there was the pic (not too exciting as I grabbed an image of the wood floor in the apartment). However, this is a very slick and smooth process. It would be very cool if I could send it to my own wp blog, but haven’t figured this one out yet…maybe. But as it stands…very cool and I am going to play with this, see what happens and make 3.ie a little richer for every post ;-)
As I read through my RSS feeds in Google Reader today, 
I was once again struck by the increasing number of familiar headlines. By this I don’t mean similar themes continue to be explored (although true — Hilary is clearly a bad, bad, bad woman and John McCain throws kittens into wells), but rather that I had already read the articles that were popping as new posts. My immediate thought was that Reader wasn’t catching my ‘mark as read’ flags, or that I had inadvertently created duplicate feeds. Alas, neither the case. These are the same posts…simply with different authorship claimed. Note that I am not even getting into the automated blog post piracy that is designed only to attract search engine attention.
When you try to stay on top of all your news feeds with a reader and attempt to strategically manage the multitude of feeds, the collapsing of feeds into headlines makes this phenomenon rather obvious. As I considered this, I realized that there is a certain tiering in the bloggosphere. Digg, Redit and other aggregators are at the lowest level and explicitly point to other’s posts. At the ‘highest’ level you have blogs that create absolutely original, thoughtful and unique posts. Between these there are all manners of variants. Review sites are somewhere in this milieu and they account for a substantial amount of this overlap. Some new gadget is released and the sites all tend to either hear about it or get their hands on it around the same time. Yet, it is interesting to note (when you have far too many RSS feeds coming in) post gravity and proliferation.
Susan Nance, professor of US history at the University of Guelph, presented a fascinating paper
“A Star is Born to Buck: On the Development of Rodeo Bulls in the 1990s” at the Rural History Roundtable today. Although Nance’s past work has touched on topics such as tourism under the Ottoman Empire and religious parades in interwar Chicago, her more recent work has focussed on accounting for the absence of animal’s stories in historical scholarship. The subject of her talk today is a transnational study of rodeo’s and performance with an emphasis on the contribution of the animal — most specifically ‘Bodacious’, the ‘World’s Most Dangerous Bull.