Back in August 2019 I wrote a blog post about how to use Chrome or Firefox extensions to use the “old” Twitter web interface instead of the new Twitter interface.
So you don’t like the new Twitter?
Well you can revert back to the old one in a couple of ways.
If you are running Chrome or Firefox then there is an extension you can install which forces your browser to use the old Twitter interface.
Alas, as of the 1st June, changes at Twitter has meant these extensions no longer work and you are now forced to use the new Twitter! When you attempt to use them you get this error message.
I am now looking for a Twitter client for my Mac which looks like the old Twitter…
So you want to use your iPad a whiteboard in a Teams meeting? Well this is one way in which you can do this easily. You will need an iPad (obviously), a whiteboard or drawing app and it helps to have another device (main computer) to interact with the meeting as well as using the iPad to draw from.
This post came about after seeing this tweet on the Twitter from Charles Knight.
Is there an easy way to use an ipad as a whiteboard in say teams? Because it would be handy to have a separate device like that…
It got me thinking about whether this was possible, but also how you would do it. So I quickly tried it out and it worked fine. I did tweet a response, but have now written it up as a blog post so others can refer to it (and I can remind myself how to do it as well).
Though you can screenshare direct from the iPad, once you are screen sharing on the iPad, you can’t see the chat or other members on the Teams call.
One solution is to join the meeting from both your main computer and your iPad at the same time.
As well as screen sharing you can also share other content or video from your iPad as well.
So on the main computer start or join a Teams meeting.
A couple of days ago, the IFTTT recipe I used to post native Instagram photos to Twitter stopped working. I used IFTTT as the sharing function on Instagram to Twitter only posted the link, whereas with IFTTT the process posted the full image.
However in the last few days, it has stopped working, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. I checked my IFTTT applet process and saw this.
I recall getting an e-mail from IFTTT, which now I can’t find, but I didn’t think applied to the applet I was using. Well it still may not apply, but I did the following and this appears to have fixed the problem.
What I did was re-authorise IFTTT to access my Instagram account.
Go to this page (ensure you are logged into IFTTT).
I recently changed hosting for my WordPress blogs. My main reasons for changing were, my host was unable to update the version of PHP which would result in being unable to update to the most recent version of WordPress. They did offer me a new hosting contract, but I would then have to migrate my blogs across, so I decided that if I needed to do that I might as well review new hosts. I had had reliability issues with my existing host. I was also concerned about upgrading to SSL (https). Both Chrome and Safari were marking non-https sites as “non-secure”.
It’s not as though I was doing e-commerce on my blogs, but it looked like Google would drop non-https sites down in their search results. I also thought the “non-secure” identification might worry people.
There were a few challenges, mainly as I took the opportunity to move a couple of my blogs to a domain of their own. I say opportunity I wasn’t sure I could recreate the same setup with the new host that I had with the old one.
Alas, as of the 1st June, changes at Twitter has meant these extensions no longer work and you are now forced to use the new Twitter! Links have been removed to the extensions.
So you don’t like the new Twitter?
Well you can revert back to the old one in a couple of ways.
If you are running Chrome or Firefox then there is an extension you can install which forces your browser to use the old Twitter interface.
GoodTwitter for Chrome
GoodTwitter for Firefox
Install the extensions and your browser forces Twitter to use the old interface!
There is another way without installing an extension which is as follows.
Click More
Click Settings and Privacy
Click About Twitter
Click Directory
Click Home (sometimes you click Notifications first)
You should then have old Twitter back.
So there is a lack of persistence, but there is also a quicker method is to use the URL
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.
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).
Want to see what your Twitter timeline would've looked like 10 years ago today, if you followed all the same people you do now? https://t.co/41a6iQcYhc
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.
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
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.
Back in the early noughties I remember attending edtech conferences and the wifi failing to cope with the number of delegates. That wasn’t surprising, they were often using a single wireless access point and when sixty plus edtech delegates hit the event with their laptops and PDAs it wasn’t much of a surprise to find the lone access point failing to deliver any wifi.
Even today I have been to events where the wifi struggles as delegates with their laptops, iPads, smartphones connect to the wifi. It is partly about the number of devices, it is also about how they are using the connection, refreshing twitter, uploading photographs, streaming video like Periscope. I also think that some people may take advantage of the fast connection (sometimes inadvertently) to download updates, podcasts and video.
At the recent UCISA Spotlight on the Digital Capabilities event in Birmingham, the conference centre wifi, which in theory could cope with 250 wireless clients, failed to deliver a stable consistent wifi connection. I found that if my laptop was connected to the wifi, it not only took time to get a connection, but every so often the connection would drop. I would say that when I had a connection it was fast and consistent. I felt lucky that I could still tweet and upload photographs using my phone on my Three 4G connection. I was getting over 60Mb/s on that connection in the main auditorium. I was quite pleased that the seats in the auditorium had tables and power sockets.
The thing is, a conference with delegates from the edtech world are probably going to melt the wifi as most conference centres don’t plan their capacity on the extremes. For most events it probably works just fine. Personally since those early days I have come less and less to rely on the conference wifi, using a 3G dongle, 3G tethering, a 4G WiFI Hotspot to my current 4G tethering. This means that not only do I not worry so much about melting wifi, but it frees up the bandwidth for somebody else, and I think I might a pretty heavy user of bandwidth!
