Category Archives: Tech

Passive aggressive Twitter lists (this means you @eddie_grundy)

Here’s the latest in passive aggression after naming your Wifi router to send a message to your neighbours: putting people on a Twitter list that asks for refollows:

pa-tweets

I think I ended up on this list after tweeting about Brian Aldridge.

I’m still not going to follow Eddie. He might try and sell me some dodgy cider or garden paving.

PS my wifi router has my URL in it – the theory being if anyone geographically near me wants to find out how to contact me, they can use my website to find details. Half of me wonders if that might actually be a bad idea, but I can’t quite pin down why?

A rather lovely thing happened to Mike on Twitter

My once-met net friend Mike who used to blog at Troubled Diva, now uses his blog as a repository for his successful but (to me) incomprehensible music writing for the Nottingham Evening Post Entertainment Guide.

Last week, I mentioned on Twitter that Giles Coren, star of the Supersizers, looked hot in his 80s gear. Deliberately a little ambiguous, but of course I meant that he looked attractive.

Mike agreed on Twitter, conceding that his “Guilty crush” might move on from Alistair Campbell to Giles Coren.

A few hours later, Mike got an unexpected personal response from @CampbellClaret:

@miketd why move on, say I?

Awww!

It’s a lovely graceful reaction to news of a covert crush that might fox a lesser man: although Alistair Campbell is definitely a sex god to a number of Labour women I know, I wonder how many gay men he counts among his followers?

It clearly shows that Alistair Campbell is carefully searching on instances of his own name showing up across the twitterverse – a latterday equivalent of grepping the newsfeed for your own name. I’m divided on whether that is a vain or sensible thing to do for someone in the public eye.

And it’s an object lesson in how a very simple gesture – five words! – can completely make someone’s day. A bit of a lovebomb from time to time can do great things to your reputation.

Writing more

One of the places the wedding news arrived at was UMRA, the Archers newsgroup, via an old friend who gave a link to tweets.

In the way that discussion does on UMRA, conversation digressed and included remarks to the effect that this place is less readable now it is cluttered up with tweets.

That’s an entirely true criticism and one I have heard before. The long pages of bulletted tweets, often only half of a conversation it is nearly impossible to follow, do change the nature of this place. And including them here is a short cut, because I don’t find time often enough to write more substantive posts.

And even when I do write more stuff here, I often get halfway through and think, “This would make more sense / reach a wider audience on LDV” so pack up tools here and post the piece over at LibDemVoice.org.

If you are bothered by the tweets, I’ve made two new links available over on the side bar – a link to the site without the tweet posts, and a link to the feed for the site without tweets. You’re more than welcome to use those if you like, and I shan’t be the least offended!

These are possible thanks to the magic of wordpress. The tweet category on this site is cat 19, so adding &cat=-19 into an url suppresses posts in that category. The url does however get a little bit lost if you keep pressing “older posts” and gets completely broken by page 3,

The magic of wordpress is also helping to bring more content to these pages. I’ve also installed a WordPress plugin called FeedWordPress which will automatically copy across the posts I write for LDV onto these pages. This may be a little weird. The posts will be in a category called “First appeared on LDV” and you won’t be able to comment on them. There should always be a link back to the main website, so do comment over there. Some of the posts may make little sense here – not least the Weekly Catchup… But we’ll see how it goes and make changes if necessary.

Solar Panel performance 08

I nearly forgot to report back with the first full year’s worth of performance from the array of solar evacuated tubes on the roof that feed our hotwater system.

Fortunately the basic datalogger I have access to still gives the basic ’08 readout, and it tells me the system ran for approx 1100 hours during the year and generated a staggering 3498 kWh.

Annual solar output

Nottingham Energy Partnership’s comparison cost table suggests that might have cost me around £100-£150 if I’d had to pay for it in gas.

Although I didn’t watch the system too carefully throughout the year, I don’t think there was a single day on which all our hot water came from the sun.

It was an unusual year with a pretty lousy summer and the highest energy costs for gas and electricity we’ve ever seen, so there’s maybe chance for a better financial return in future. But at this rate, my payback period is 28-42 years.

It’s still one of the better gadgets I own, and second in cost only to my car. I like the readout that always tells me exactly how hot my hot water is – I know that for a good long hot shower I need the tank to be over 60deg, and I can check before going in if necessary.

Other posts about my solar panel:

Talking of Twitter

A meme has been doing the rounds amongst seasoned twitterers to find who you followed first. If you hop along to this helpful website it will tell you.

It told me that the first person I followed was Alan Fleming, who now seems to twitter once a day, like clockwork, and seldom blog. You can read my first post about Twitter here – and Alan’s here.

As you’ll see from my post, it was a toss-up between Alan and Troubled Diva about who it was who really first got me into Twitter.

It’s rather flattering, but since the meme came along, at least three people have disclosed that they followed me first, so I got them hooked. (@willhowells, @jonxyz and @rfenwick)

But perhaps the tallest claim I can make in relation to Twitter is that I got the Lib Dems tweeting. You can see from my first blog post on the subject that I thought politics was ripe for the twittering. I suggested it in a forum to the Innovations Dept, who were at first hostile, and then later took to it like ducks to crepuscular water. That led quickly to Lynne Featherstone MP taking up the twitter baton and it spread through the party and then through UK politics more generally.

Of course, had I not come along, the Lib Dems and politics more generally would have caught on to twitter without me just fine.  I’m sure Innovations had been thinking about twitter before I made my suggestion.  And the US presidential election was a massive time for twittering to catch on in US politics – @barackobama, @hilaryclinton and @fakesarahpalin all made their marks.

Why Twitter?

Stephen Chapman asked in a comment earlier:

As you are obviously an educated guy – can you explain Twitter to me. I just dont get it!

I have no interest in knowing what my friends are doing all day (I have seen such entries as “having a coffee”, “having another coffee”, “the sandwich lady is near to my desk” etc).

And I doubt anyone wants to read about my whole day!

What am I missing!???

http://thestateofthenationuk.blogspot.com/

I don’t get what there is to get. Some other people ask “why read/write blogs?” – it’s more or less the same, but on a slightly different scale, and plenty of people don’t understand that either.

If you are reading twitters of people who are dull enough to narrate the boring minutiae of their lives, then you are reading the wrong people, as there are many more fascinating twitterers out there. In the very same way there are people who write interesting blogs and there are people who don’t, and each has their opinion about who is worth reading and who isn’t.

I was first interested in Twitter because I think it might be a useful way for elected politicians to communicate with constituents – and indeed, a number of MPs and councillors now do just that.

However, although I am a councillor who twitters, I don’t do it as a campaigning way of communicating with residents. In the same way, this is a personal blog about a person who happens to be a councillor, rather than a councillor blog. Not everyone gets that either.

Since starting to use it, it’s increased in size and the number of people who use it. It’s now a useful resource that a number of my friends are using. I can get occasional updates from people I care about the other side of the planet and I’m following enough witty people to find interesting things to read every time I log on.

The most important thing about Twitter is the way it plays well with hundreds of other web services in ways that develop on a daily basis. So Twitter can update my Facebook status, and my blog can archive them. Postcrossing can update Twitter when I send a card (jury’s still out on the benefits of that, to be honest). And there are new and interesting ways of slicing twitter feeds every day, so I think it’s safe to say that Twitter will continue to be interesting in the new year.

I entirely understand that not everyone gets it, so, thanks to the magic of WordPress, if you want to read this blog without reading the Tweets, you can do that using this link (which is also available as a feed).

World of Goo

World of Goo is just amazing! Friends were playing it on t’Wii the other day whilst the rest of us were playing boardgames (struggling with the complexity of Power Grid, winning it large in Diamant, not quite getting around to Pit, Perudo featured also too as well) and all I noticed about World of Goo then was its name.

Then I started to see the name elsewhere, so downloaded it on the Wii to see what the fuss is about.

It’s amazing. It reminds me very slightly of Lemmings – the idea is to solve puzzles using simple rules to get balls into a pipe. That sounds dull, but it really isn’t. It’s amazing. There are lots of different types of goo balls, which sing, cheer, make funny noises. They float, stretch, stick, fix, pop and more.

And now when I close my eyes I can see gently oscillating agglomerations of balls wafting gently before my eyelids.

It’s not just a Wii game, it’s on PC and Mac too, and you can either buy it on a disc in a shop, or pay and download it from their website.

The really great thing is there is a huge demo – the entire first quarter – available for free. I imagine this is because it’s difficult to explain just how brilliant a game is – once you’ve played the first levels, you’re sure to want to fork out 1500 Wii points or $19.99 for the full game. Download it! DOWNLOAD IT NOW!

The gameplay is unique, the design is superb, the music is actually… moving and stirring. I can’t praise this game enough!

Aha – suppress a category in feed

For a while I’ve been importing blog posts into Facebook automatically. I’ve also been importing Tweets automatically into Facebook updating my status.

This has meant, since I started automatically making blog posts of tweets, that I have been importing tweets into Facebook twice – as they go in statuses, and again every morning as an imported note.

I have now learned how to suppress an entire category from appearing in a feed.

So, if you would like to subscribe to my blog without receiving the daily Twitter post, use this address:

http://www.alexfoster.me.uk/feed?cat=-19

Whereas if all the tweeting doesn’t bother you, use this:

http://www.alexfoster.me.uk/feed

Next to learn… how to use Feedburner to combine my postings here with my postings on Lib Dem Voice (

http://www.libdemvoice.org/author/niles/feed

) into one handy feed to present to Facebook…

Thanks to Perishable Press for the skillz.

Your top Twitter words

Remember this post?  In it, I suggested people using twitter and wordpress and a plugin that copies your tweets to a blog also try using KB Linker to turn key words and phrases into hotlinks automatically.

If you’re wondering what words you use a lot, there’s a helpful thingie at www.tweetstats.com that tells you about word frequency.  You can find a handy tag cloud it worked out for me – the larger the word, the more frequently I said it.

My top Twitter words are, it seems, “time, day, wondering, getting, watching.”  Not sure what that says about me.  But it also gives plenty of other frequently used words I could turn into links.  @jamesgraham, @willhowells and @miketd  could all be linked to their respective blogs, for example. I say “Nottingham” quite a lot and I could choose to link that to any number of things: the Council, the local Lib Dems, the open.guide…

ONe more Twitter thing – I have occasionally thought that it would be useful to schedule a tweet for the future rather than send it now.  For example, if two amusing things strike me at once, it would be a waste to send them both together.  So it would be handy to schedule the second one for, say, an hour from now, when I will be busy and have forgotten.  This is now possible using a service at Twuffer.com  (Twuffer is apparently twitter + buffer — maybe twitter + chrontab didn’t look so good)

As a trial, I’ve scheduled a series of tweets about what I will be cooking tomorrow for the good people of Nottingham Lib Dems who are turning up at my house to stuff envelopes. EDIT:  Twuffer FAIL – it posted the whole series of messages hours early for no apparent reason 😦

Right. It’s gone 5am. They will be here shortly.  I ought to at least attempt a little more sleep before then.

One true way to bundle headphones

This cool vid on Gizmodo (hmm… two links in two days to Gizmodo, will have to keep this under review) shows how to bundle iPod earbud headphones.

iPods, as you will probably know, have revolutionised many of those dull dull jobs you have to do as a Lib Dem – many of them leaflet related. I now have a small metal  box full of BBC podcasts to take around with me when I’m letterboxing and the time just flies past.

I’ve also been using them whilst printing leaflets recently – works fine whilst printing, but you have to couple ear buds with ear defenders in order to be able to hear anything over a noisy clacking folding machine.

And it’s using the ear defenders that is the only way I have ever managed to make the bud-style headphones actually stick in my ear for more than a few minutes. I don’t know if I have anatomically wrong ears or something, but for me, earbuds just fall out after a few minutes.  I have to use sports (oh, the irony!) headphones that loop around my ear or the sort on springs that go around your neck – but those are uncomfortable for anything longer than a single edition of the News Quiz.

And while we’re at it, here’s a quick plea for the Beeb:  more comedy podcasts please!