Bug-Man’s Blog

It appears there is no law governing the use of direct SMS marketing here in the UK, only “regulations.” Well, regulations be damned. Both Lindsay and I received direct marketing messages today from a company called “Utext”. I have never heard of this company and so they should not be texting me.

Regulations are usually very limited in their effectiveness, as they do not break the law and the enforcers of regulations do not have as much power.

Here in the UK you are entitled to opt-out of all unsolicited marketing calls to your mobile phone by putting yourself on the Telephone Preference Service but as far as I know, this only covers calls.

When it comes to text messages, the email below outlines the regulations and it specifically states that a prior relationship must already exist between the business and the recipient. Considering Lindsay and I received our SPAM SMS’s within mere minutes of one another, it is clear the company was using a bulk SMS delivery service to SPAM their unwanted services.

The UK newspapers have recently been discussing a controversial company by the name of 118 800 who claim that you can gain access to their directory of mobile telephone numbers for any purpose and that you can use this service to obtain the name and number of any mobile user for only £1. Apparently all of this information has been obtained from marketing lists and the like. Yes, I have so much trust for these companies and their use of my personal information. Sarcasm mode off.

So with regard to my dealings with Utext, I have sent this email along and I will see whether or not they are willing to respond. I don’t hold out much hope but sometimes companies like this are just unaware that they are doing the wrong thing. (Did I say Sarcasm mode off?) I did not know my rights until I researched this this evening, and I think it pays to make the effort to badger these companies directly who use these kinds of methods, whether they are in the right or the wrong, so that people like them know that people like us won’t stand for it. It’s also a massive time-waster for them having to deal with the likes of us, and as I see it, they’ve already wasted my time enough today so it’s comeuppance!

(Here’s a trick for the willing: Next time a company you don’t like sends you advertising material in the post with a reply-paid envelope, fill it up with junk mail, seal it, and post it back. They have to pay for the postage on the reply and waste their own time and effort processing it. It seems only fair — an eye for an eye.)

My email follows:


To: help@utext.tv
Subject: Unsolicited Commercial SMS
Date: Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:20:31 +0100

Hello

Today I received a marketing SMS from your company from the number 85066 advertising a product called Utext to my number, (removed).

This method of marketing is in breach of the UK Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications(1), which is effective October 2003. The directive states that such SMS advertising (covered under the title of "electronic mail"(2)) should not be sent to any consumer unless the following three conditions are met (from the consumer's viewpoint):

- The marketer has obtained your contact details via a sale or sale negotiation.
- The text messages concern similar products or services offered by the business.
- You were allowed an opportunity to refuse the SMS marketing when your contact details were obtained and, if you didn't refuse, then you were offered an easy way to opt out in any future communication.

As I do not know your company and have never dealt with you before to my knowledge, could you please explain how each of these three criteria above apply to me and my number and assure me that you are operating within the rules.

I await your reply,

Adam Smith

(1) The Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications can be found here: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2003/20032426.htm

(2) SMS is covered under the guise of e-mail as electronic mail (see: http://www.the-dma.org/international/articles/UKElectronicprivacyreg.PDF page 2).


Sorry non-geek readers, but I am compelled to write a geeky post. Now that the weather has improved I shall be out and hopefully post a bit more about my days!

I use Safari 4.0 Beta on my Mac, and I’ve been using three useful JavaScript Bookmarks (though one more than the others.) So in order of preference, here are three interesting bookmarks that you should consider adding to your own Bookmarks toolbar. They’re similar in effect to GreaseMonkey scripts but suit me better because they apply to any page and can be clicked on at your preference.

1. Readability

Readability is a script that transforms a cluttered web page into something actually readable. You’ll know what I’m talking about when you visit a news service that has a thousand ads, side bars, menus and all sorts of other links cluttering your screen, when all you really want to read is the main content. Just like the old Internet!

In steps Readability. In one magic click of a button (or menu-item, depending on your way of looking at it) your page is transformed; the clutter is gone and all that remains is the main article you wanted to read in the first place. If you want to go back to the original page, just click reload.

Readability is customisable so the pages you choose can be output to a few different styles of your preference.

Here’s a before-and-after shot as one example of an article I clicked on today:

And after:

The transformation is very cool! You can go to the Readability website here, and there are links and instructions on how to add it to your browser.

2. Google Translate on-the-fly

Here’s all it is:

javascript:void(location.href='http://translate.google.com/translate?u='+location.href)

and this script will pipe your page through Google Translate as quick as that!

Bookmark it here. You probably won’t use it too often unless you visit any foreign websites, but on the occasions that you do you’ll be glad you’ve got your quick and easy link! Do you need some news in French?

3. Subscribe…

A little superfluous considering most modern browsers auto-detect RSS, but it can’t hurt, but this little script finds any RSS Feed within a page and takes you to it in Google Reader. Unless you’re using a third party RSS utility like Reader Notifier (also quite useful) then this will be of some use.

Here’s the code:

javascript:var%20b=document.body;
var%20GR________bookmarklet_domain='http://www.google.com';if(b&&!document.xmlVersion){void(z=document.createElement('script'));
void(z.src='http://www.google.com/reader/ui/subscribe-bookmarklet.js');
void(b.appendChild(z));
}else{location='http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/'+encodeURIComponent(location.href)}

And a bookmarkable link.

I hope you enjoyed this little venture and I hope you can take away at least something useful! If you have any other ideas or suggestions feel free to comment and tell everyone. If I’ve helped anyone by posting this information then please comment and let me know!

And finally… go and check out Cool Iris. Yes, it does seem to be “professional software” but for the moment it’s apparently free. I usually don’t bend for these sorts of plugin things but I tried this one and it really is quite good. It’s a full-screen interactive media plugin for your browser and is extremely useful for Google Images, Flickr, sometimes Facebook and probably several other media sites. It’s pretty snazzy. Check the website out and you’ll see what I mean.

Before I start, “STEVE JOBS JUST DIED” was the first message posted to the hijacked macrumorslive.com feed, and while it was funny for a few minutes, I soon got very annoyed at the sheer idiocy of the hijackers. This particular feed is, usually, the best one to follow, so it was a shame that it quickly became worthless.

The surprises from Apple this year were not that exciting. New iWork stuff including iwork.com for online office work, which seems to be a big thing lately. Apple, Microsoft and Google are all doing it. It may be interesting to see what comes of that but Apple’s online services have been of very little interest to me so far, considering how little Mobile Me does for me at the moment.

iLife ‘09 — about the only useful part of this package is iPhoto, if you even use it. The main problem with iLife is that you need to buy it as a whole package, even if you don’t want iMovie, iWeb and GarageBand. And I don’t. I’ve used iMovie before, for a while, but that was in my YouTube hey day.

Until recently I have been keeping my photos in a directory structure on my computer (backed up of course) and not used any particular software to manage it. Even more recently I was toying with Aperture. Now the Keynote came out with all of these cool-sounding features in iPhoto that I WANT!

A library that allows you to organise by event/place, facial recognition that will find faces and let you tag who they are, then intelligently guess who it thinks faces belong to in your other photos. But not only that, there is Flickr and Facebook integration which means that if anyone tags anyone else in your photo, that tag is instantly downloaded and merged into your library. I’ve often found having your own private meta-data that isn’t compatible with other systems most annoying!

I’m quite interested in this facial recognition stuff, and I really want to see what it’s all about.

Geotagging - again, totally cool and being used more and more. I’m eager to play with iPhoto ‘09. Sadly, Apple does not offer a trial version if iLife, so I’ll be waiting to play with it by some other means, and hopefully these features make it to Aperture quickly!

On other notes, the MacBook Pro 17″ with the new unibody is not much of a surprise, not not of great interest to me because I don’t use the 17″. No news on iPhone, and some stuff about iTunes store, which I don’t use very much for music at the moment. At least there’s a general price reduction on music and it’s now DRM free. Yay!

So Apple won’t be at the next one, so what does that mean for next year?

What is Twitter?

A Micro-Blogging platform that lets you post messages of up to 140 characters in length. You follow people and people follow you. It has been very high profile, is used by a large number of news and tech-news sources. It has an abundance of clients for OS/X, Windows, Linux, iPhone and probably other phone platforms as well. It has an extremely large userbase and is, as far as I know, the first one on the scene.

What is Identi.ca?

Identi.ca is a similar service based on http://laconi.ca/, an open source “equivalent”. It has a smaller userbase and lesser third party applications but way more potential for growth and expansion because it’s open source.

So what’s the difference?

Twitter has been on the scene for a long time now and users are still being drawn to it based on the hype and discussion going around on the Internet. But people aren’t talking about this cool new thing called “micro-blogging”; they’re talking about Twitter, the current king of micro-blogging.

Twitter has a well established, well known presence on the web now, and is commonly discussed. It’s also becoming somewhat of a household name which is the best way to market yourself. Consider other biggies like “Coke” which can also refer to any other cola beverage. Well OK, so Twitter’s not as big as Coke, but you get the drift.

These micro-blogging services allow you to tap into their network and control them or display them from external sources, including Facebook, blogs, RSS feeds, Instant Messenger hook-ups, your iPhone or BlackBerry. I can sign up for an account with Identi.ca that is able to push updates to Twitter so that if I update on identi.ca, my twitter followers don’t miss a trick. They instantly see the update because my identi.ca account has a one-way link from identi.ca to twitter. But what about the other way? I can’t. Twitter doesn’t work like that and they choose not to. It’s fundamentally flawed because I can’t tie it in reverse. I can’t go to Twitter and update and expect my Identi.ca followers to see my update. If Identi.ca implemented something like this they would need to poll the RSS feed from each twitter account constantly just to receive new updates. A nightmare. Also, my friend might have an account called purpleman on twitter and one called terrytips on identi.ca. When I reply to him on identi.ca I am saying “@terrytips ” which also appears on twitter, but doesn’t readdress that to purpleman.

So Twitter have decided to close their doors opening only a few cracks. Nobody can see their platform code and nobody can peer into their data store, which is the opposite of ideas like identi.ca. Is it always the case that an idea will appear on the scene, become “uber-popular” but far too late for any other, better, or more open similar ideas to surface?

If you consider that in Australia, the UK or the USA our supermarkets are very much driven by these giant corporations who dominate over all of the little guys. The big ones made it, they are household names and are ubiquitous throughout society. Nobody has heard of the small guys other than the “locals”. The small ones might be better with their friendlier staff, local knowledge, family values, but ultimately the big guys will win in terms of traffic because that is where everyone is. What’s the point of a social networking site if none, or only a handful of your friends are on it? None. If they’re all elsewhere you might as well be there too. Just as it is when you go out with your friends who mostly decide to go to a pub you don’t like, but majority rules, you don’t want to go elsewhere without your friends, so you suck it up and go to that venue instead. Majority rules here!

MSN, Facebook, Twitter, Internet Explorer, Windows, Microsoft Office, The QWERTY keyboard! And they’re just some geeky ones.

Jabber (an alternative to instant messaging and the technology that drives Google’s GTalk) did the right thing — it built a network standard that was completely open source, allowed an API to other Instant Messenger networks, allowed you to run a complete Jabber server on your own computer, set up an account on it with your own email address and you’d be able to add contacts from any other Jabber server that exists out there in the world. My traffic goes out of my own server and directly to my other contact’s. It doesn’t rely on third parties. It’s that flexible. With Jabber you can do super-cool things, for instance, at your workplace you can run a server internally for internal communication between staff. You can have your server plug into your LDAP tree. You can create a contact like “Alert” who is really a bunch of scripts on a back-end receiving updates from your alerting system. Server breaks and not only are oncall notified but so are all of your tech staff because they receive an instant message.

With MSN messenger you’re stuck with a proprietary and closed protocol, no plugins to other networks and if the central servers go down you’re out of luck. Add to that your messages and conversations are transmitted around the world to those central servers and who knows what happens to them in transit or when they get there. Did you know that the only reason there are alternative messenger clients for MSN is because the protocol was originally reverse engineered? When they change the standard, it still needs to be reverse engineered. Madness? Maybe — but do you have an MSN account? I would guess that the answer is yes and this is because the rest of the world uses it.

Oh with Jabber I could easily set up a Jabber server, my own Jabber account and install an MSN transport — a plugin that was written with code that reverse engineered the MSN Network protocol — I’d be able to use a client of my choosing and it would all appear rather seamless, but it’s just not happening around the world. We should be in a position where these networks (Twitter, MSN and the like!) are all configured in such a way to allow openness and intermessaging. I should be able to have an identi.ca account and subscribe to someone’s Twitter feed or their uber-micro-blog feed and it should all just work. PEOPLE want this, but BUSINESS doesn’t. Will the world ever catch up?

A few links for you:

Twitter: www.twitter.com
Identi.ca: identi.ca
Jabber: www.jabber.org

(Look at that, I even put Twitter first without even thinking.)

I trialed MobileMe when it came out and I didn’t find it useful. When the trial subscription was coming to a close I made sure that I jumped on to the Me.com website and cancelled the trial. “Your credit card will not be charged” says the website. Adam leaves happy.

Lo and behold I check my bank account details and I’ve been charged £59! I checked it out and sure enough, it’s a charge for “17 Nov APPLE COMPUTER INTL INTERNET GBR 59.00″.

I was able to log in to the service with my old details however, I had thought that it was cancelled, so shouldn’t my account and password no longer work anyway?

I checked on the Mobile Me help website and you are able to cancel your membership with a full refund within 45 days, so I logged in, went to account details and cancelled my subscription. Their website did say my credit card would be refunded. Unfortunately they don’t give you an opportunity to explain in words why you have cancelled your membership and I am still going to write to them to find out how this happened, as I am unimpressed!

I sent the following to Apple:

Hi Apple,

I recently cancelled my trial subscription of Mobile Me as I found the service was not really what I was looking for. My username is (was) . I cancelled the subscription on November 10th, many days before the trial ended. Your website confirmed that my account was cancelled and that my credit card would not be charged.

I was surprised to find that on the 15th of November, my credit card was charged £59 by Apple. I have lodged a cancellation request through the Mobile Me interface and it indicated that my card will be refunded. I have a couple of questions I would like answered:

#1 - If my account was previously cancelled, how was it that my username and password and account were all still active when I logged in today? Why has it not been deleted?

#2 - How is it possible that my card could be charged even though the account was previously cancelled? Once it is cancelled surely there are steps in place to ensure payments don’t still go ahead. Can you please confirm that I will be refunded?

Sadly I have lost a little faith in Apple after my experience today.

I’ll wait and see how it goes!

I effing hate it!!! I just spent an hour painstakingly organising and describing my Berlin photos (finally…) for upload, hit the Upload button and it cleared its screen and instead, decided not to upload anything.

IT MAKES ME SO MAD!!

Now I have to start again, because it doesn’t save sets.

OH I F’ING HATE THIS PROGRAM. But what alternative for Mac *IS* there?

GAHHHH!!!!!!

Web browsing is something most web users do very, very often. The Internet is an immense tool full of all sorts of data, instantly available at your fingertips. I frequently use websites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Google, Discogs and more, all to quickly search for images, videos and information. It’s slow and cumbersome to have to load up each of these websites in order to just perform a search, so the best way to improve your overall web experience is to treat your web browser more like a search tool.

Firefox and Opera both have a built-in feature in which you can use keyword shortcuts to quickly search specific websites for information. When I was working for an ISP in Australia I found this extremely useful, not only just for searching for information on the web, but also for quickly searching for things on our Intranet and various in-house troubleshooting tools. In a moment’s notice I could have whatever information I needed up on screen without having to navigate to the Intranet, click on the tool, enter the information, submit and wait for the results. With one keyword I could have instant access to the results.

Consider a tool as powerful as Wikipedia, where you can search for just about anything or anyone and be presented with (mostly!) accurate information about that item. If you wanted to look up steganography for instance, most web users would do something like:

1. Click on the Wikipedia Bookmark
2. Wait for it to load
3. Use mouse to navigate to the Search box
4. Enter the word ’steganography’ into the search box
5. Click search or hit enter

Consider that with steps 1-4, you don’t really want to visit the Wikipedia front page; you only want to use its search features but in order to use them you had to visit the Wikipedia page first. It’s cumbersome, slow and annoying!

Imagine if you could access those websites with the following sequence instead:

1. Hit -L (to get to the location bar)
2. Type ‘wp steganography’
3. Hit enter.

You avoid having to go through the website’s front door and can go in straight to the results you want. It saves you so much time and you can use it on any website with a search box. You also don’t have to use any mouse clicks!

In order to take advantage of this on Safari, you need a plugin called Keywurl. It’s a bit irritating to install but once it’s done it will work like a charm.

To install and set up, do the following:

A: Download and install Keywurl

1. Download Keywurl
2. Open up the contents of the DMG file in Finder
3. Double-click the SIMBL package and follow the instructions to install

B: Create the Plugins Directory manually

4. Load up a new Finder window (press -n)
5. Navigate to: HOME/Library/Application Support
6. Create a new directory called ‘SIMBL‘ and navigate into it
7. Create a new directory (beneath SIMBL) called Plugins

C: Copy the Keywurl Plugin

8. Go to your Finder window containing the Keywurl files
9. Go into either the Leopard or Tiger directory, depending on which release of OS X you’re running.
10. Drag the Keywurl.bundle file into the SIMBL/Plugins directory you just created
11. Restart Safari and launch it

If you check your Safari preferences, Keywurl should now be installed!

Keywurl comes with a set of default keyword searches which you can add/modify/delete at your leisure. Try one out. Go to a Safari window’s location bar and type ‘imdb Jumper’ and it should take you to the IMDB.com results page for the search ‘Jumper’. It will work with multiple words of course, such as ‘imdb The Brady Bunch’.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

It’s pretty easy. If you do a Google search, you might notice that your URL will always look something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Safari&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

The part after q= is the interesting bit, because that’s what we’ve searched for. If you look at almost any other search results you will see something similar. All you need to do is create a new Keyword URL in the Keywurl preferences, give it a shortcut name, put in the URL just like the one above and then replace the keyword “Safari” with “@@@” which is what tells the script where to put the search string. In keywurl your Google search URL would look like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=@@@&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

You add these searches into Keywurl in Safari’s preferences, and the searches are stored in a file called Home/Library/Application Support/Keywurl/Keywords.plist so be sure to back that up.

Personally, I have shortened keywords and have added some more of my own. Here’s a list of the ones I use:


amazon http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index%3Dblended%26field-keywords%3D@@@
asx http://finance.google.com/finance?q=ASX:@@@
do http://www.discogs.com/search?type=all&q=@@@
ebay http://search.ebay.co.uk/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=@@@
ep http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aepguides.com%20@@@&btnG=Google+Search&btnI=745
flickr http://flickr.com/photos/tags/@@@
gg http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=@@@
ggi http://images.google.com/images?q=@@@
imdb http://imdb.com/find?s=all&q=@@@
map http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=@@@
mini http://www.mininova.org/search/?search=@@@
news http://news.google.co.uk/news?hl=en&ned=&q=@@@
thesaurus http://thesaurus.reference.com/search?q=@@@
tla http://www.thefreedictionary.com/_/search.aspx?tab=32&charset=iso-8859-1&SearchBy=0&Word=@@@&TFDBy=0
wp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=@@@&go=Go
yt http://youtube.com/results?search_query=@@@


You can download my file and copy it if you wish.

To add one, just search for something on a website and copy the URL to the clipboard. Go into Keywurl and click the + button, type the keyword, press tab, and paste the URL. Replace the keyword you searched for with ‘@@@’. Make sure that if you’ve searched for something with two words, it will get replaced with ‘coca+cola’ or ‘coca%20cola’. You will need to replace that entire string with ‘@@@’.

GOTCHA’S

Watch out for some clever sites like Wikipedia which will always take you to the results page if there is only one hit. Search for something like ‘Japan’ in Wikipedia and you’ll be taken straight to the page on Japan. To find the URL, the trick is to search for something that it most likely won’t match and it will send you to a results page. Here you can grab that special URL. An example on Wikipedia is searching for something like ‘gadeo‘ which is a word I made up and so no page should exist.

TRICKS

Some sites don’t have their own search engines, so consider using Google to search them instead. For epguides.com for instance, go to Google and search for “site:epguides.com Frasier”. The URL you get is:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Aepguides.com+Frasier&btnG=Search&meta=

The magic for turning that into an “I’m Feeling Lucky” search is to add ‘&btnI=745′ to the end of the query, turning it into:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Aepguides.com+Frasier&btnG=Search&meta=&btnI=745

Have fun! Please remember to post your comments below about your experience with Keywurl, as well as any useful website you’ve made search shortcuts for!

Justin has been having some difficulties with the iScrobbler client that lets you scrobble your tracks to Last.fm. If you don’t know what Last.fm is, it is a website that trends your music listening over time, and lets you link to your friends as well as strangers who have similar tastes in music to you. Of the things I don’t use it for, you can play music through the website as well as create radio stations, post blogs etc. But one of the best things about it is that it knows about all of the artists that nobody’s ever heard of — the ones I listen to! The entire database is community driven/build which is what makes it so great.

Just for good measure, here’s my feed:

The normal Last.fm client is a rather bloated piece of crapware so it’s no surprise that people don’t want to use it. I have used it for quite some time because I found that previous versions of iScrobbler failed miserably and crashed a lot. Annoyingly when you search for iScrobbler in Google, one of the top hits is an out-dated version on Sourceforge, which is probably why I have had so much trouble previously. That version hasn’t been updated since 2002. All hail the new version!

I have read on the Internet that iPod submissions don’t seem to work very well because once you scrobble data to Last.fm and then try and scrobble data from a time earlier than your last scrobble, it will fail on those submissions (Say you listen on your laptop, go for a walk, come back, listen more, then sync your iPod — those iPod tracks won’t scrobble!) The client uses the Recently Played playlist to work out what it needs to scrobble. I’m going to run some tests and see how the new iScrobbler client behaves with the iPod. Now that I actually have an iPod, scrobbling my history from it is rather important to me.

Test #1 - Installation!

Initial tests for iScrobbler 2.0 are good; it installs and runs without crashing. It’s more advanced than any previous version I have used, which is a good sign. It detected my previous bloated Last.fm client which I have disabled. It has an option for iPod sync which I have selected.

Test #2 - Scrobbling

As I write this I am waiting for one track to scrobble that I have listened to in full…. and it has scrobbled successfully, proving that full communication back to the Last.fm server is working properly. This is good news.

Test #3 - Listening on my iPod

I played four tracks on my iPod. When I plugged it in to sync, iScrobbler paused track submission on the client (nothing was playing anyway) and successfully scrobbled the tracks I played.

Test #4 - Listening on my iPod and iTunes mish-mashed, then performing an iPod Sync

Alright! I’ve plugged my iPod back in and I’m listening to music again. A couple of tracks on the iPod, a couple of tracks on iTunes, then back to the iPod, then one more on iTunes for good measure. It will be interesting to see how the client handles this mish-mash of history, considering the tunes I play from within iTunes will scrobble automatically.

Theoretically the tunes on the iPod will be cast down as un-scrobbable because they pre-date the latest submission. If it fails here, it’s painful, because it will mean making sure you plug in your iPod EVERY SINGLE TIME you finish with it. Damn, if only it my iPod had wireless.

I got a bit confused during my track playing and lost track of what was doing, and I think I went:

ipod
ipod
itunes
ipod
itunes

So for good measure I added in another few tracks:

itunes
ipod
ipod
itunes

There! That should be plenty to play with. I’ve kept the track titles properly recorded in a text file this time so I can be sure of my results when I compare it to the Last.fm website.

And the results?

“No Matching Tracks”. This is the message you get if there are no tracks to scrobble. So yes, quite simply this means you can’t scrobble your “historical” data and you MUST sync your iPod before using iTunes (with iScrobbler enabled anyway) otherwise you WILL NOT be able to Scrobble your iPod’s history. This isn’t a fault of the client as far as I can tell, rather, it’s a fault of the submissions system being unable to receive out of sequence scrobbles.

The application is awesome and I will continue to use it. I will just have to remember to sync my iPod more regularly!!

Well as you’d expect, less than 24 hours into the MacBook Air being released to the masses, Gizmodo has taken it apart for all to see. What else would a bunch of geeks do?

The least they could have done was destroyed it! Here are a couple of pics:

It’s also been reported that over the remote disk, you can’t play DVD media, burn a CD or listen to music.

I’ve wanted some good integration between my Flickr Photo Feed and Google Earth for some time now but what’s out there isn’t that awesome. I’ll discuss a few things –

# Flickr

Flick’r own KML (Google Earth) feed is good however, restricted to the last 20 photos or so, which is really awful. This means that anyone browsing your photos in Google Earth will only see a handful.

# Metal Toad Media

These guys provide a fantastic feed which I use all the time! Check it out. Once installed it will scan Flickr for the nearest 200 photos (sorted by most interesting) and insert little pins on the map. You can then click the pins and view the picture. This is awesome, as it means you can visit anywhere on the planet and as well as looking at the aerial view you can see all the photos people have taken of that area, too! Because it sorts by most interesting first, the further you zoom in on any one space the more you see. Every time you move around the map it updates the feed and within a few seconds Flickr photos begin appearing. It’s great! I recommend it.

http://kmlphotos.metaltoad.com/

What would be great is a version of the above that works on a single user’s feed (or group/tag/search) only!

# Trippermap

These guys have a couple of great tools. The Trippermap Geotagger (free) will let you Geotag Flickr photos using Google Earth instead of the clunky horrible Yahoo map. Basically, when enabled, you line up the crosshair with the coordinates you want to mark a photo or photos, click the link in the bubble and it will take you to the trippermap.com page where you can update any photo. Because it uses the Flickr API there’s no need to sign up to their services or anything like that! This is the tool I use to tag my photos. I need to get myself a better GPS system

Their website offers you the ability to create your own Flash Google Map with your own photos all over it however, if you want the ability to create a Google Earth KML you need to subscribe to their Premium service (for $10). No thanks. Not for a simple KML feed!

# loc.alize.us

http://loc.alize.us/ is a website that provides a fairly flexible Google Map & Flickr Mash-Up, and it’s pretty good, too. Here’s a small version which shows the map with only my photos:

Apparently this small version only shows the last 99 photos but there’s a full-sized version which is much easier to use and shows more photos.

These guys also offer a service that will let you Geotag a Flickr photo however, you need to go to Flickr first, click the photo, click a Bookmark and then find your location in the small Flash Google Maps window. It’s all a bit slow.

# Yahoo! Pipe by steeev

steeev has created a Yahoo Pipe which will create a KML of your last 500 geotagged images. All you need to do is put in your Flickr username (as NSID) and it will output a KML of your photos which you can use with Google Earth! The only problem is, of course, that it outputs a KML file that has a static list of all of your pictures, so if you install it permanently, it’s no good for new content.

You can copy the link that outputs the KML and visit it over and over again, eg. here is the link to my photo feed. Click on that any time and it should bring up a KML of the latest photos in my feed. I guess that’s one cheater’s way of doing it but the draw-back is you have to click on the link from a web browser every time.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has found any better tools!