Author: jamesclay

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Is it time to go?

I think the time has come, after eleven years to leave Flickr.

Back in the middle of the 2000s we saw an explosion of social media sites, we saw the birth of YouTube in 2005, Twitter hopped onto the web in 2006. Flickr was launched as a social photography site in 2004.

I joined Flickr in April 2007, a month after I had joined the Twitter. I think the reason I joined was that many of my professional peers were either members, or were joining at the same time.

The first photograph I uploaded was of Admiralty Arch having just emerged from the Strand Tube station. The photo was taken on March 30th 2007 with a Nokia N73 mobile phone.

Admiralty Arch

I went Pro in July 2007 and have then since paid every year for the professional account. I have at the time of writing 14,280 photographs on Flickr.

I like to think that this is my top photograph, it’s of a zebra at the West Midland Safari Park.

zebra

The reality is that it’s a classroom in Gloucestershire College.

a classroom in Gloucestershire College

I use Flickr partly as a place to store photographs, but mainly to collate photographs into “albums” so I can find them easily when I need images for presentations, to share images on Flickr, or to use images on my blogs.

An example workflow, is to take a photograph of some nice food, edit and post to Instagram, then use IFTTT to upload that resulting image not just to Twitter, but also to Flickr. I can then download the image from Flickr and upload to the blog. I use to occasionally embed straight from Flickr, then that stopped working for a while, so I stopped using it.

However I think the time has come to cull my Flickr account. I don’t think it’s worth $50 per year. The value is there, but I am not sure if that value is $50. I am a little disappointed that existing Pro subscribers are not only not grandfathered in, on their old pro rate, but that they don’t even get the introductory discount of 40% that new subscribers get.

I still have a little time to reflect on this, but I think the time has come to say goodbye to Flickr.

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I’m sorry I can’t play that music….

I have been messing about with a few voice assistant hub including the Amazon Echo.

One feature of these devices is the ability to ask them to play music, either an individual track, an album, an artist, a playlist or even just a genre or decade.

If I ask Alexa to play a particular song, she delves not just into my personal music collection on the Amazon Music app but also what is available through my Prime subscription. If the song isn’t available I could either subscribe to Amazon Music streaming service, or purchase the song. The Alexa ecosystem is built around my Amazon account and the services available to me as a Prime subscriber.

What Alexa doesn’t know that I have quite a large music collection on iTunes. She can’t see it, access it or play it.

With Google Home I have connected a free Spotify account to it. This is one of the key features of these devices that you can connect services you already subscribe to, so you can control them via voice. Of course the reason I have a free Spotify account is that Google Home would much prefer I was connected to Google Music, and it certainly won’t let me connect to either my home iTunes library (where virtually all my music is) nor to Amazon Music. So when I ask Google Home to play a particular music track, she gets annoyed and says that she can’t as that is only available on Spotify Premium. Now Amazon Echo can play from Spotify, so some overlap there.

This is one of the challenges of these devices that they are quite reliant on subscriptions to other services. Apple’s HomePod only really works if you have an Apple Music subscription. You can stream Spotify to the Homepod using AirPlay, but you couldn’t use voice control to say “Hey Siri, play my favourite Spotify playlist”. That wouldn’t work.

So at the moment my main focus is on the Amazon Echo and linking it into Amazon Music through my Prime subscription.

I like the concept of voice control and for many features these devices work well, but they do tie you into their ecosystems.

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Fixing Embedding Twitter into WordPress

I have been having few issues recently embedding tweets into some WordPress posts.

In this post the tweet is seen as a text link (and not even a live link) rather than the embedded tweet itself.

embeddedtweetlinknotworking

The process is suppose to be that as you write your blog post you merely copy the link (from the date of the tweet) and paste it into your blog post

https://twitter.com/jamesclay/status/1020746984808853504

The magic then happens and when you click publish the tweet link is converted into an embedded tweet.

Now in some recent blog posts I was getting an inconsistent result with some tweet links converting into embedded tweets and others not so. In one case in one of my blog posts one of the tweets did what it was supposed to and the other one didn’t.

I know I can do a screen grab of the tweet and embed that into the blog post, but I do like how the embedded tweet was live and dynamic, you could like or reply to the tweet from the embedded tweet.

Looking around for a potential cause of the problem and hopefully a solution I found this WordPress support link from a Google search on the issue.

Embedding with a shortcode

If you want more control over the display and layout of the tweet you are embedding, you can use a special shortcode. Copy and paste one of the following shortcodes into a post, page, or text widget. Be sure to change the tweet URL or ID to the one that you want to embed.

[tweet https://twitter.com/jamesclay/status/1020746984808853504]

With the end result being an embedded tweet.

I used this process of my problematic blog posts and it fixed the issue.

Still none the wiser to the actual cause of the original problem though.

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Bristolian emoji 😘

Inspired by @natlibscot here ‘s some Brizzle (Bristolian) emoji

😘 Alright my luvver?

👥 Babber

🧠 Keener

😳 Ark at ee

😄 Gert

❤️ Gert Lush

🛍  Cribbs

👍 Innit

🏘 Sadly Broke

🌉  Brizzle

👍🚌  Cheers, drive!

💚 Mint

🥙 Jason Donervan

💙 Proper

🍏🍺 Scrumpy

🗺  Where’s it to?

❗️Mind

🍏🍺 Glider

🎢 Slider

❄️ Pitching

👀 I looks at

👋 Laters

I also posted this to the Twitter.

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Twitter, ten years, timeline and chronologically speaking

Twitter

There is a buzz on the Twitter at the moment about the “ten year timeline”

Andy Baio on Twitter provided an easy link that showed your Twitter timeline from ten years ago (if you followed the same people you do now).

Looking over the feed from that time, it’s interesting to see how different Twitter would have been for me, than it is now. Back then I followed a lot less people (and I have stopped following some I followed back then), so it’s not entirely accurate reflection of what Twitter would have been like.

However there is a lot less commercial stuff and a lot less tweeting of news and links. There are no animated GIFs and no images, and no web page previews for links, so the feed is very textual, compared to my feed today. Today’s feed on the left and the 2008 feed on the right.

Twitter, ten years, timeline and chronologically speaking

You can use this search method, even if you weren’t on Twitter ten years ago and you can of course change the date as well.

The search query is

filter:follows until:2008-05-25 -filter:replies

Twitter

What I found equally interesting, but more useful was how you can use the search function to get a strict reverse-chronological timeline with no algorithm bases tweets (or advertising). From this tweet.

By the way, if you remove the date parameter from that search and click “Latest,” you get a strict reverse-chronological timeline with no algorithm junk.

filter:follows -filter:replies

This is how I remember Twitter in the early days. So that link has been added to my favourites bar.

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Where did my hotspot allowance go?

checking my e-mail

When I got my iPhone 6S Plus in 2015, I got a new phone contract and moved providers. The SIM only contract was with Three and came with unlimited data. However this was unlimited on the phone only, there was an allowance for hotspot, which was only 4GB. This was initially problematic as at home we had a very poor ADSL connection, so I would use the hotspot quite often when I was frustrated with my poor connectivity. As a result I would need to keep an eye on my usage. Quite often I would run out. 4GB was generally fine for simple browsing or e-mail, but would quickly run out if I was streaming video.

I did think about increasing the allowance, but the packages available weren’t cheap. Today Three’s unlimited data contract has a 30GB hotspot allowance. Why don’t I upgrade? Well my contract is just £17 a month, the current unlimited data contract is now £30 a month. However since my home broadband was upgraded to fibre I’ve stopped using the hotspot feature at home, reserving it for trips and visits, again mainly for browsing and e-mail. The 4GB allowance has been fine for this kind of internet activity.

A recent trip away to Glasgow made me aware to still carefully check my usage. I was away staying at the Premier Inn which came with free wifi. According to the blurb the free version of the wifi was for browsing and e-mail and the Ultimate version of the wifi was for streaming. Testing the free wifi, I found it worked fine for streaming Netflix. So there I was watching my favourite TV shows on the iPad and though the free wifi wasn’t brilliant, it was working. As I watched the next episode I found the quality had improved, this is alright I thought. Then another episode…

Then I got a SMS from Three saying I had nearly used my hotspot allowance. I was confused, it was only five days since it had reset. Where had my allowance gone? I then noticed that my iPad wasn’t connected to the hotel wifi it was now connected to my iPhone’s hotspot.

What happened was that previously at the Airport I had connected my laptop to the hotspot, but hadn’t turned it off. My iPad was connected to the hotel wifi, however that connection must have stopped or dropped and then the iPad found and connected to the hotspot network automatically. So when the hotel wifi came back it didn’t re-connect. So the quality of the Netflix stream had improved because of the new connection… the downside was that it sucked up all of my hotspot allowance.

Will I upgrade, no, because it was an error and though it may happen again, I am quite content with a 4GB limit.

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Adding the keyboard

As I am still having major issues with my Smart Keyboard and my iPad Pro I have decided to start using an old Bluetooth keyboard with the iPad. I had to reset the keyboard and then pair it with the iPad.

bluetooth keyboard

Using it made me realise how useful a “proper” keyboard is with an iPad (or even an iPhone) when you have to type up lots of stuff. Even just entering an username and password for me is easier with a keyboard.

It also reminded me how useful Bluetooth is, though today we take it mainly for granted. I do remember how exciting and innovative Bluetooth was when I first experienced it.

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“Eat the frog…”

"Eat the frog…”

Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.

Though wrongly attributed to Mark Twain the concept of “eating the frog” to improve productivity is something that has gained traction over the years.

What it means from a productivity perspective is that if you face down and complete that “big” task that is hanging over your head then your productivity over the rest of the day will be higher.

If you don’t “eat the frog” then that task will be always there in your head, you will worry about it and this will have negative impact on your work and resulting productivity.

Often that task appears to be worse than it actually is, and that thinking about it is actually the problem. Having started to do this, I have found it just works. Not sure if my resulting productivity has increased, but the impact on wellbeing has been positive.

Though it’s every easy to say “eat the frog” I think there is more too it than just doing that task. It makes sense to reflect on your workflow and work patterns and explore why you aren’t eating the frog. What are you prioritising instead of the frog? What are you doing instead of the frog? Can you change that approach?

In my own practice, I would often start going through e-mail rather than face the frog. Once I realised that this was causing me to not to face the frog, then I sorted the e-mail issue out. Initially I did that by turning off and closing my e-mail client, this then stopped those distracting notifications. Longer term I moved to Inbox Zero.

If it was a big “frog”, then I would break it down into smaller frogs or tasks which were easier and faster to complete. That big frog now became a more manageable and easier to get done.

So now I face the frog. Do you eat the frog?

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It’s just layers and layers

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

I really enjoyed Star Wars: The Last Jedi I know it didn’t sit well with some of the Star Wars fans, but I thought it was great.

The special effects were really good and I think the use of CGI has significantly improved since the prequels. One aspect of the prequels I didn’t like was that the use of CGI allowed for the use of camera angles and zooming which wasn’t possible in the original trilogy. With the new possibilities that CGI allowed the battle sequences for me were all over the place with revolving cameras, excessive pans and zooms. Just watching some of those starship battle scenes in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith made me dizzy. Okay so just me then…

What I have enjoyed about The Last Jedi, The Force Awakens and Rogue One was how many of the special effects sequences reflected the original trilogy look and feel, especially Rogue One.

This video shows how the different layers were meshed together to show the Resistance bomber attack on the Star Destroyer at the beginning of the film.

You can also see a similar process here for the mass of First Order forces.

These videos don’t ruin the movie magic for me, more they make me appreciate the hard work and effort that creates these movies. The attention to detail and making things look just right.