i’ve been following David McCandless’ rss feed on informationisbeautiful.net for some time now. he regularly has amazing visualizations about a lot of different topics that become much clearer when seen in his graphs. he was giving a talk at TED which i recommend watching. i especially like the one minute and ten seconds part at 6:20.
Category: english
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[video] Tilt Shift Miniature…
i did a little tilt shift miniature time lapse, just to see how it is done and estimate the complexity.
here it is (best seen in HD and full screen):
Time Lapse Miniature from flowolf on Vimeo. also on youtube.com
music by bob wizman – “on your 45”, licensed under cc-by-sa
the howto can be found here.
the original apple ear buds are not known for their comfort. so they are a good piece of old hardware to hack 🙂
i adapted them to have a shackle. this adds a lot of wearing pleasure and stability.
i took a wire to do the framing and some tape to fix the cable to it. then i coated the whole thing with sugru, apparently my new favorite working material.
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nook power adapter sugrufied…
- the nook power supply supports 240V
as i blogged a few days ago, i got a nook (german). as this device only sells in the US it comes with a US power supply. lucky me that the supply supports 100-240 Volts out of the box. so the hack to adapt it to european power outlets was rather simple.
- the nook power supply and the fixing part
i found myself an old device which didn’t need the jack anymore
i love firefox addons for certain quick tasks. they get things done so much faster and there are some really nice ones that i use regularly.
one of them was Exif Viewer, until it stopped working with version 3.6.* of firefox. 😐
since there was no update since July 2009 i didn’t expect a quick fix. so i did it myself.
here is what you do to make the addon work again (i already had it installed when i upgraded firefox to 3.6).
go to (the SOME_HEX_ID part is usually different for everone)
1 | ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[SOME_HEX_ID].default/extensions/exif_viewer@mozilla.doslash.org/ |
and edit the file
1 | install.rdf |
in that directory.
change:
1 2 3 4 | [...] em:minVersion="1.5" em:maxVersion="<strong>3.5.*</strong>" /> <!-- Firefox --> [...] |
to
1 2 3 4 | [...] em:minVersion="1.5" em:maxVersion="<strong>3.9.*</strong>" /> <!-- Firefox --> [...] |
or a version number that suits you. after a firefox restart the exif viewer addon should work again.
i give no guarantee this will work on any version of firefox. after all there is a reason they put a version number in there 😉
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Twitter vs. RSS…
I’m following about 50 people on twitter. some of them post regularly some of them from time to time.
what annoyed me was when people twittered automatically via some service about something they do VERY often (e.g. geocaching: “i found the cache XYZ”).
and now i did it myself 🙁
i posted automated messages on twitter. no actually in my case i let twitterfeed check for my flickr photo stream RSS feed for new images, that the service could then publish as twitter messages. although i explicitly set twitterfeed to only check for photos that had ‘tweet’ as tag to avoid spamming the daily image annoyed some.
thanks to mika for reminding me 🙂 i apologize for spamming you (my followers) with automated messages. i will try to avoid this in the future 😉
here why i think this is bogus:
- twitter is a platform where spontaneous messages, thoughts, findings, fun facts and any type of content can be published, without the overhead of formulating a big chunk of text e.g. a blog. twitter is great to publish tiny little bits of content that are greatly incoherent. people love twitter because others remind them of stuff they did not think of and pull them a little aside from the usual dirt tracks they use in their every day online life. do not post the same stuff over and over again.
- there are already platforms out there that offer a way to publish content in different ways such as video or photo sites: youtube, flickr, picasa, vimeo, etc. these platforms offer a great variety of services that users can access mostly for free. this includes distributing their content and making it accessible to others via different ways and formats: standard HTML (normal web surfing), RSS and atom feeds and maybe an API. use it!
- one should not abuse a service for something it’s not! this is definitely the case when you use twitter to divert a RSS feed as i did. let the original service serve its RSS feed. this way people have the choice to follow your contributions on another platform if they wish. post a message on twitter that you offer a RSS feed about a specific topic and people can get it from there.
to sum it up: follow my daily image here if you like. subscribe to my blog via RSS or Atom feed. i even have a youtube feed.
let me know what you think, post in the comments or send a trackback.
if you don’t know what RSS is read on on wikipedia about RSS and Atom feeds.