"For fucks sake, people" - Cameron

“You people just cannot be trusted” – Cameron

UK Prime Minister David Cameron called an emergency press conference at 8am this morning, to announce that the usual 1st April tradition of April Fools’ Day would be cancelled this year for the general public’s safety, in light of the recent petrol panic-buying trauma.

“It is with great sadness that I have had to take this decision, and I must emphasise that I have not taken it lightly, ” began the PM, in a sombre tone “but you guys… I just… I don’t even know any more. I really don’t. You’ve let me down big time with this panic-buying shit, guys”.

“I’ve been left with no choice but to cancel April Fools’ Day” he continued. “After what you’ve shown me over the last few days, I cannot take the risks of you buying into any of the big scams, jokes or tricks traditionally associated with 1st April. You’re too much of a liability, all of you”.

Cameron paused for a moment, appearing visibly distraught, before ending “For fucks sake, people”.

" :-/ " - Clegg

Implementing The Ban

Deputy PM Nick Clegg followed on from Cameron to announce further details of the implementation of the ban. “I too am sorely disappointed with the intellect of the British public displayed over the last few days, ” he began “and fully supported the PM in making this decision.”

“Anyone found to be attempting to trick or scam either large groups of people, or individuals, will be sentenced automatically to one day in jail for every person they attempted to fool. Yes, we’re suspending habeas corpus for this. That’s how pissed off we are”.

He added “If you think anyone has attempted to trick or fool you in any way, do not hesitate in contacting your local police station. We need to stop this thing before it gets out of hand”.

Clegg too then left the conference. Some in attendance claim to have seen a tear in his eye, but this can not be confirmed at this time.

This morning I discovered, whilst laying in bed listening to Rob Da Bank on Radio1, a term for a genre of music which has probably been around for ages (especially given that it seems to encapsulate Burial in some way): future garage.

It’s like, garage, man, but it’s in the future! Or, the present, as the future’s now called.

Anyway

Some sounds, and then some links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a73UdTDTunk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orf9sQcn5m4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4plUKqJnuA

Reddit has a future garage area and soundcloud has an ace group too.

Seems Facebook have removed (or, given the distributed nature of their codebase, are in the process of removing) the “sk=top” kludge that powered my old script.

So, if that’s stopped working for you, here’s the replacement method.

It’s been replaced with a new command, so here’s a new script to default the logo and home icon to use this, so you don’t have to click the “sort by” thing and change it each time you visit. “Top Stories” (now termed “highlighted stories it seems) aren’t removed any more, but they’re at least placed chronologically by using this, which is good enough.

Using It’s Pretty Simple, Still

1. Install the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox by clicking that link, if you haven’t already got it
2. Restart Firefox
3. Or, remove the old script from Greasemonkey (from Firefox’s “Add-ons” management area there’s a thing called “Userscripts” where you can do this)
4. Click this link to load my new script into Greasemonkey
5. Go and load Facebook, note annoying “highlighted stories” at the top
6. Click the Facebook logo at the top left and note how the stupid “highlighted stories” might still be there, but at least they’re sorted properly now, by post time
7. Add this to your bookmarks, now it’s sorted properly, which’ll help smooth things out too, and save some extra clicks (assuming you launch sites from your bookmarks, herp derp)

And That’s That

Should work this way for quite some time, I’d expect.

Yesterday, several zombies arose in Brighton and done a walk all the way from somewhere to somewhere else. According to an official count from the main organiser there were around 4,000 of the blighters! 3,500 started out, with around another 500 latecomers (well, they are zombies after all) joining in as they went, and I done a photo of quite a few of them.

Most Of Them Had Red On Them

Click any one of the 15 photos below to go to the full version on Flickr. There’s 178 photos in total in my Flickr gallery. Sounds like a lot, but most of them aren’t rubbish, so it’s worth a look. You can click this to start at the first one, and just keep clicking “next” at the top, or you could click this for a thumbnail view of the lot. Aren’t I good to you, eh?

A: When You Give A Shit About Sharpness

I’d heard from people before that lenses were not always sharpest at their widest aperture settings, but never really sat down and checked it out. Reading an “e-book” about street photography just now and seeing the topic brought up again however, made me decide to check it out.

Well Gee That Sounds Exciting

Shut up!

Sorry. You Were Saying?

My 50mm f/1.8 prime seemed a perfect candidate to experiment with, so I stuck my Xbox360 pad in my light tent, both my 100W bulbs on it, and snapped four shots from my tripod, at f/1.8, f/2.8, f/4 and just for the shit of it f/8. At f/8 it was down to 1/40 shutter timing, even under dual 100W brightness, so it’s unlikely that’d ever get used, but I wanted a reasonably high end point.

Yawn

Well it turns out that, yes, the thing is rather pants when at its widest. See here, a nice four way 50% crop of the thing I was focussed on (the text of the “space” bar, set manually, at 10x zoom on the LCD, to make sure it was proper tight) essentially SOOC:

That’s Pretty Shit At f/1.8 Then

Yes, yes it is. I was quite surprised by exactly how shit it was. I think the shitness is exaggerated by the extreme bright light, mind, which is why it’s never been so clear before, but it’s always looked mildly pants when wide open, and I’ve always shot with it wide open because I bought it thinking it was an f/1.8. Now I know better, I’ll stick to f/2.8, or maybe even f/4, or above. Husss.

Oh and here’s the full shot of the pad at f/4 because why not.

Script Updated! Now At v1.1, See Bottom Of Post For Details, But If It’s Your First Time Here, Keep Reading…

Thanks to my mate Rob Warwood, who gave me the idea of trying this, and thanks to my splendid coding skills, if you’re using Firefox (which, y’know, you kinda should be) you can return Facebook to its old, simple, sensible, newest-first method of sorting its news feed with this simple thing what I done wrote just now.

It works by changing the link on Facebook’s logo at the top left to point to a special URL which forces the time-based listing.

It’s Pretty Simple

1. Install the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox by clicking that link*
2. Restart Firefox
3. Click this link to load my script into Greasemonkey
4. Go and load Facebook, and note the presence of annoying Top Stories
5. Click the Facebook logo at the top left and note how the stupid Top Stories aren’t there, and your news feed is all lovely and newest-first again

You’re Welcome

Problems? Not working? Leave me a comment.

But please, do ensure you follow the above. My script only changes the link on the logo, so you still need to click that, but it’s better than nothing, and clicking the logo was my default method of refreshing the page already so it seemed an obvious mechanism to attach to.

*What’s This “Greasemonkey” Thing? Sounds A Bit Lewd…

Sadly it’s not even mildly lewd. It’s an add-on for Firefox which allows simple scripts to run which can modify the behaviour of webpages, inside the browser. You need to be a coder to create these scripts, but it’s much less effort than writing a full blown add-on, so it makes things a lot simpler.

You could create scripts to replace any images on a page, or filter out swear words, or strip out great swathes of page content (it would be easy to create one to hide Facebook’s Ticker, for example), or change a link or two. It’s pretty fly (but not lewd ._.)!

4/10/2011 – Update Ahoy: v1.0

There’s an updated script now, which also turns the “Home” link at the top right into a special newest-first link too. To upgrade your script, simply click the link from Step 3 above, install the new script, and refresh your Facebook page.

5/10/2011 – Version Update: v1.1

Now works properly with SSL on, or with SSL off! Automatically detects and changes the URL appropriately. As before, just click the link in Step 3 to reload the script.

The Clue’s In The Question

Decided today that my trusty grey-and-orange blog-face needed a bit of a makeover, found this rather lovely minimal theme, and after a touch of tweaking, I’m quite liking it. Everything’s nice and clear and tidy (except for that opening sentence, but ho hum).

Internet Exploder has other ideas, of course!

Unlike all the other browsers listed up there, it’s decided that complying with internet standards is too much like giving a crap, and isn’t rendering the lovely text shadows on my title and headers, which, really, makes a world of difference to how tidy it looks. Stupid blasted Internet Exploder.

Or, maybe you won’t notice, as I’ve just spent over an hour making it work in IE

Over an hour. To recreate an effect every other browser out there, including the one on my phone, can do inherently.

This is the problem with Internet Exploder. We Firefoxians and so on who despise it so, do not do so to be trendy, or alternative, or underground, or anti-establishment, but because it’s a horrendous piece of shit which forces you to spend hours making stuff look the same as it does in every other browser straight out of the box.

The cost, in time spent doing crap like this, to the web development industry, is enormous.

And even then, it’s kludgey, and slow.

I’m so enraged by this, I’ve made an image to express my feelings, using a popular meme from Internets Land.

I’ve been “reliably” informed by a buddy of mine that there is an actual process to get things a little more back to normal on ye olde Facebook News Feed. I’m in the process of trying it, so can’t verify, but thought I’d post it up anyway, because of stuff.

1. Go to Account Settings, then Notifications, and turn off the thing at the top right. Quite why this helps I don’t know, but never mind.
2. Go through your news feed and click the little blue triangle at the top left of anything marked as a “Top Story”, to de-set it as a “Top Story”, so you end up with no “Top Stories” at all.

And that’s it. Allegedly that means you’re only left with “Recent” stuff, but we’ll see about that, won’t we?

Won’t we, Facebook?

Little cats: more cute than little chats

You see, I have just arrived home to discover the latest changes to what you think I want to see in my news feed, Facebook. As is probably implied by the fact I’ve written a blog post entitled as this is, I’m not exactly enamoured with the changes.

The core problem is basically this:

Your algorithms do not know me as well as I do, Facebook

You seem to think your algorithms can deduce what news items will be of interest to me based on two factors; what news items are of interest to other friends of mine, and which people I manually tell you I want to see more from. Possibly which people I interact with on there too, with IM sessions and such.

And that’s just a wee bit short-sighted, Facebook

1. There’s certain people who don’t post much of anything. Will I even still see their stuff, or must I now manually go and tell you I want to?
2. I have 257 friends, apparently. Their interests and what matters to them isn’t necessarily what matters to me. There’s no way to say that everything that’s popular with them, collectively, is something I care about.
3. A fair whack of these 257 people may post stuff that most of the time I’m not fussed about; not being insulting here, I’m sure a lot of my own e/n bullshit whistles by most peoples’ eyes too. Every once in a while there’ll be some gem that does pique my interest, so to see these now, must I indicate that every friend I have is someone I want “top stories” to appear from?
4. I’ve had one-off interactions with many people on assorted topics, and with this “wisdom of crowds” approach there’s no way of knowing if such obscure one-offs would happen now, because who’s to say some obscure post of mine/theirs will make the respective “top stories”?
5. Besides, semantic understanding and classification of text is nowhere near the stage where you can reliably determine what a given news item is about, and whether I’m interested in that.

Basically, it’s just dumb, Facebook

I’m a nerd. I’m a massive nerd. I’m maybe the biggest nerd I know (depending on a few factors, but even adding this parenthesised bit strengthens my case OH GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE-).

Even I, with my love of organising shit and making things “clever” and “integrated” know that stuff like this just does not work as intended. It’s flippin’ annoying.

Give me control over what I see, Facebook

Or I may just have a cry, Facebook

;_;

Does short-sighted even need a hyphen?

OR – A Mildly Clever Little Bit Of Marketing

Let’s say you’re an Android app developer, you’ve written a few little things, and you want to get some traffic to them. How would you go about it?

Well, if your name’s Chris Economou you do it by creating an app with an interesting name, leave no details of what it does on its description and hope the intrigue hits home, carrying the thing on virally.

You give the thing a link to your other apps, so it serves as an advert for them, but you don’t let that detract from its main purpose. So… what is its main purpose?

Well, that would be telling. You’ll have to install it yourself, and see if it lives up to its name.

protip: it does.

Still, it’s a novel way of trying to gain attention, and I like it, which is why I’m posting this, and why you’re reading it. It’s a funny old internet!