Book reviews for May 2013
(Related: Mission:Explore Food - Crowd Fund It!; Kindle: Figure out sorting!; ZoneInfo Update (tzdata for .NET))
(You might also like: Fermi Suicide; Unidentified Butterfly; Corona Heights)
(Related: Mission:Explore Food - Crowd Fund It!; Kindle: Figure out sorting!; ZoneInfo Update (tzdata for .NET))
(You might also like: Fermi Suicide; Unidentified Butterfly; Corona Heights)
(Related: Mission:Explore Food - Crowd Fund It!; Kindle: Figure out sorting!; ZoneInfo Update (tzdata for .NET))
(You might also like: Pulling the plug on Facebook and Twitter, Tweet Archive; New Normal; Google Spreadsheets API and Column Names)
My new debate site, Like Debate, is finally up and running and I'm losing the first debate badly. I need your help: The Oxford comma is an acceptable form of punctuation. Actually vote your conscience. I don't care if I win this one, but give it a spin and let me know if it works for you.
If you have a better argument for or against that wretched comma have at it.
(Related: Scott Adams; Fixing the Washington Post Democratic Candidates Quiz; Thinking about the UK referendum on AV)
(You might also like: Catfood: Klout and Follower; Recent Wildlife; Coronavirus Hikes: May 2020)
There are things I still sort of like about Skype. I use it a lot for video calls (although for work and muti-party video it's pretty much all about Google Hangouts these days). I have a Philips phone that integrates with Skype for international calls (they seem to have discontinued it, and while the calls are cheap the UI is baroque). But the IM is horrible. It can't remember which messages you've seen between devices and so you're constantly trying to figure out what you have and haven't read.
And the IM on the desktop is nothing compared to the horror of the Skype Android app. This slowly spins up and by the time it's loaded previous messages your battery is dead.
Imo.im made Skype IM tolerable on Android and possible on a Chromebook. In the last week it seems that Skype has kneecapped them and blocked their servers from signing in. I'm limping by with IM+ Pro at the moment, but it's slow and buggy and frustrating.
I sympathize with Imo.im. I've been stiffed by Skype before as an officially sanctioned partner so it's no shock that they'd take out this kind of tool.
It would be nice if they could fix mobile and web access to the network first though.
(Related: Skype for Android 4 - Better but Useless; Android 11 Gripes; Staying Chrome?)
(You might also like: Time Zone Time Lapse; Crab at Fort Funston; Bernal from Davidson)
(Related: Humpback Whale at Fort Funston; Dolphins at Fort Funston; Gray Whales at Waddell Beach)
(You might also like: I didn't think I'd ever fall for fake news on Facebook; Bay Model Tide 360 Timelapse; Blogger Classic Templates Bugs and XHTML)
2013-06-16 Update: There is now a patch for the issue discussed below.
I just upgraded to BlogEngine.net 2.8 as it contains a fix for broken links from Facebook. There were a couple of hitches that I'll share in case they help anyone else.
I messed up the first upgrade attempt because the updater utility updates the source folder (containing the newly downloaded 2.8 code) instead of the destination folder (containing the current version of your blog). This is a little odd and the result is I uploaded an unchanged instance and then embarrassingly complained the the Facebook bug hadn't been fixed. It had, just not in the folder I was expecting. I probably didn't pay enough attention to the instruction video.
Having got that out of the way I discovered that new posts were appearing with a bad link (to /.aspx instead of /blog-title.aspx). I rarely post using the editor as I have a home-grown post by email service running. After a bit of digging it turns out that prior to 2.8 you could leave the slug empty when creating a post but now this results in the bad link. Luckily there isn't much effort require to fix this, you just need to set the slug before saving the new post:
In the middle of playing with this my live site died and started returning a 500 error. No amount of uploading the working local copy would fix this. Happily Server Intellect have outstanding support and restored a working backup for me in the middle of the night. Thanks chaps!
(Related: Upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.5; Tedious Feed Update; Capture DropCam (Nest Cam) frames to Google Drive)
(You might also like: Four Parties; Pinnacles National Park; Oakland Hills)
Not to pick on British Airways but yes, that screenshot is real. It's a marketing email opt out that has not only been pre-populated in favor of spam but has then also been disabled.
(Related: Email marketing - don't shoot yourself in the foot; Stamp out B2B spam with an evil calendar; Fight Facebook with Email)
(You might also like: Use WPF Dispatcher to invoke event handler only when needed; Geotagging posts in BlogEngine.NET; Wall of Skulls)
4/5
A brilliant and detailed transposition of 9/11 in America to 11/9 in Arabia. I thought it was going to be a one trick pony but Mirage also delivers a solid thriller.
(Related: The Harvard Business Review Fallacy; I didn't think I'd ever fall for fake news on Facebook; Scott Adams)
(You might also like: Baby Yellow Spiders; If you can’t see my mirrors, I can’t see you; Bishops)
(Related: GGB; Playmobil; Clouds Over The Farallones)
(You might also like: But does it get you in the HOV lane?; Catfood Earth; Google Trends for 'impeach supreme court justice' This Week)
Photo of the moment a sealion dives into the bay at Fisherman's Wharf.
(Related: Bay Snaps; Pier 14; City by the Bay)
(You might also like: Round Top loop at Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve; San Francisco 2014 Ballot Measures; Farallon Islands)
Export Google Fit Daily Steps, Weight and Distance to a Google Sheet
Accessing Printer Press ESC to cancel
Sending email via GMail in C#/.NET using SmtpClient
Enable GZIP compression for Amazon S3 hosted website in CloudFront
Is it safe to open securedoc.html (Cisco Registered Envelope)?
Monitor page index status with Google Sheets, Apps Script and the Google Search Console API
Automate Google PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals Logging with Apps Script
Google Trends for 'impeach supreme court justice' This Week
Stamp out B2B spam with an evil calendar
Outlook/Office iCal feed 400 bad request error with C# WebClient