Best. Mother’s Day card. EVAR. I’m guessing they were working on similes in school that day…
I just saw this amazing tool mentioned on BikeCalgary – an interactive map that lets you plot your bike commute route and then display bike-related incidents (I won’t call them accidents, because they’re not).
Turns out, my commuting route has only had 2 reported incidents in the last several years – both on a narrow stretch that causes me constant grief with drivers thinking they need to pass me even though it’s not safe to do so.
I had to fuss around with the map’s route plotting, because it doesn’t grok the pathway-road hybrid route. I don’t drive all wiggly like that, but I had to trick the map into getting the intersections I use…
Route mapping tools are available for Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax.
Update: I just realized there may be holes in the data – a friend of mine was hit while riding his bike at one of the major intersections on my route, but that doesn’t show up here. Not sure exactly where this data comes from – he was rushed to the hospital by ambulance, so there would be some record of the incident… (and his GPS tracker congratulated him on the record speed he got for his ride, as he was in the back of the ambulance…)
And, of course, these are just the reported incidents of injuries. There are several orders of magnitude more close calls that never get reported or recorded…
Update 2: Here’s a photo of that stretch of road. Doesn’t look dangerous, but it’s narrow, on a hill, with a corner at the bottom. Poor visibility, solid yellow line. Cars parked on both sides of the road. Often with big city buses coming in both directions as I come through here – they get to squeeze by. It’s a tight fit. Scary.
great video on city biking, by kona bikes (who made the bike that really got me back into biking big time )
so good. ride a bike. polar bears are epic.
When I nuked my Flickr account, I had planned on migrating some of the sets onto my own website somehow, but wasn’t sure how, and wasn’t sure it was important to hurry along. Then Jen mentioned something about missing being able to look through a couple of the old sets. Dang. OK. That was the nudge I needed.
One of the things I missed from my now-nonexistent Flickr account was the “Sets” page, with links to historical photo sets. Easy to rectify. I just exported a bunch of the more relevant/interesting/fun sets from Aperture, as static “web page” exports. I created a “gallery” folder on the server, and dumped them all in there. I could have just let directory indexing provide an ugly automatic menu of photo sets available, but that’s not good enough. So I googled together some simple PHP code that builds a visual gallery page, with links to each photo set.
The thumbnails are pulled by randomly picking an image in the “thumbnails” folder in each set. They’re different each time the gallery page loads. I also added in a link to my “ephemera” photostream. There’s no RSS, no comments, no animated-GIF-unicorn-awards. Just the photos.
I picked a photo size of 840px because it’s big enough, and is coincidentally the same as the width of my blog posts so if I want to use any of the photos, I can just use them directly without any futzing.
Time for another reclaim project update, after nuking my Flickr account. What am I running, and what is my workflow? Well, I’m running almost everything on my Hippie Hosting Co-op account, including:
- my main blog
- all media is posted there – either in a full blog post, or in the ephemeral media section
- I use a bunch of plugins, all listed on my colophon page
- links (running a self-hosted copy of Scuttle )
- rss reader ( Fever˚ )
- url shortener (Shaun Inman’s lessn, with no tracking or administration)
- feed2js, for doing fun things with rss feeds on web pages
- about mini-site. static html.
- 1998-style home page, using my instance of feed2js to tie in feeds in a handy dandy dashboard
Most of my posts are made as photos using the WordPress app on my iPhone. I have it in the main app bar, so it’s always just one click away. Photos are lately taken most often using the great 6×7 app on my phone (not owned by Facebook, not tied to any service – all it does is take a photo quickly, and save it to my camera roll where I can quickly post it using the WordPress app).
My default category for new posts is “ephemera” so I don’t have to select any categories when posting photos from my phone. I use a plugin that I wrote, which filters all “ephemera” posts from the front page and main feed so that the 4 subscribers aren’t inundated by photos. I use a second plugin that I wrote that tells the Twitter WordPress plugin to tweak the tweet announcing posts – so “ephemera” posts have “(media)” inserted in the twoot to prevent Scott from blowing a gasket at all of the tootbot noise…
Bigger “real” posts (like this one) are written using the WordPress web interface. I used to use MarsEdit, which is really great software and I love it, but WordPress’ interface has gotten good enough that I really don’t need a separate app. And, with the Markdown QuickTags plugin, it’s actually easier and faster to use the native web interface. It also handles media uploads really nicely, which is handy (and the biggest reason I used to use a separate standalone app for writing stuff – the media uploads used to be easier that way).
The only things I’m not hosting myself are my Google account (which isn’t used much, and I still use DuckDuckGo for 99% of my searching because it doesn’t feed the beast), my Facebook account (which only exists because I have family and friends that don’t exist online outside of Facebook), and Twitter (which is like ephemeral social glue).
One nice thing about running everything on my own (co-op hosted) server, is that I can back everything up at once. I can use something like rsync to suck my entire hosting account directory onto my laptop, so I’ve got a backup in case Bad Things Happen. That’s hard, or impossible, using distributed hosted services…
What have I lost by hosting it myself? Not much. Some of the community connections, perhaps, but most of that has been happening in Twitter anyway, so that’s not a big deal.
What have I gained by hosting it myself? I own it. Nobody can say “hey. we sold our company to these guys. good luck with that.” And nobody – nobody tracks what people do here. I have the static apache logs, but that is a crude and completely anonymous aggregate of activity. Nothing directly feeds Google’s (or any other company’s) machines for tracking and monitoring and monetizing (I don’t use any third-party analytics packages, so there shouldn’t be any tracking except from YouTube and Vimeo hosted videos). That’s worth doing it all myself, right there.
Worst case scenario, if Hippie Hosting Co-op’s orbiting server platform goes offline for some reason, almost everything I publish becomes temporarily unavailable. That’s not really a big risk. The world could do with a little less noise. And, eventually, my stuff would become available again and balance would be restored. Whew.
update: I thought of some other key tools that I use that I’m not hosting myself, but would love to find a way to do so:
- google docs. no way out of this one, aside from emailing documents around again. nope.
- evernote (I basically live in this, but am kind of queasy about the amount of my private/secure data that’s residing on a company’s servers somewhere)
- dropbox – I’ve played with owncloud, but it’s just not as seamless as dropbox, especially for automagically syncing across many devices
- icloud – likely no way out of this one. it’s an email account and iOS backup, but also tied to Ping, GameCenter, and other things Apple.
and other services that are hosted elsewhere but I just don’t care because they’re meaningless (but I’d consider nuking them just to throw a shoe into the machinery of ubiquitously tracking everyone):
- linkedin. really? do people actually use this?
- facebook. it’s full of people. and creepy monitoring/monetizing.
- likely a bunch of other stuff I can’t remember because they’re silly and meaningless web 2.0 noise…
My Flickr Pro account expires tomorrow. I will not be renewing it. I now host all of my photos (and other stuff) here on my blog. It’s not the cost of Flickr Pro, but rather the principle. It doesn’t make sense to me, to pay a third party to host photos that I can host myself. I’ve been a Flickr user since August 2004, but it’s time to let it go.
Once the Pro account is deactivated, Flickr only makes the last 200 photos in my photostream available. The other 8,796 items will be taken offline unless I pay to keep my Pro account active. Which I won’t be doing. I’d be more than happy to leave the photos there so people could use them, but since they’re going to be taken offline by Flickr anyway, I’ll be deleting them from the service. I’m not sure why Flickr doesn’t just leave them available, since they make money by placing ads on the pages (for non-Pro members, anyway). Whatever. I could continue to pay the $25/year to keep my photos available for use under Creative Commons, but that seems rather silly.
Thanks for the (almost) 8 years and nearly 2 million views, Flickr. It’s been fun, but it’s time for me to move on.
meanwhile, back at the ranch…
Turns out, it’s not possible to just delete nearly 9,000 photos. Looks like the account has to be deleted to do it properly. So be it…
Dave Winer linked to an interesting post by Om Malik linking to an article on burning out by Marissa Mayer. How’s that for a linktribution chain?
They are talking specifically about corporate and startup culture, but the discussion got me thinking about universities in general, and edtech specifically. What is it about edtech that feels so burnout-inducing?
The tech vision video for project glass was released today. The technology looks interesting, if a bit creepy.
But what hits me is that this isn’t about augmenting your reality. It’s about augmenting google’s documentation of everything you do, so they can mine it to sell to advertisers. The implications of a service actively monitoring and interacting and documenting and monetizing everything I do and say are just mind boggling.
And when did dorky glasses become cool again? I got teased relentlessly as a kid for wearing glasses, and now the hipsters want to swoop in and play their indie-music-ukuleles with their dorky vr goggles? I don’t think so.
Update: even better commentary via Joe Stracci, via daringfireball. Creepy stuff. But shiny, in an awkward impossible-to-implement-and-nobody-would-buy-it kind of way…
I’ve been pretty mindful about avoiding trackers on my site. I don’t use an external web analytics package (I do have the apache logs, crunched by AWStats, but nothing anywhere near the level of a Google Analytics or even WordPress Stats tracking). But, websites connect to other websites. That’s kind of their job. And other websites track stuff. So, even a website that doesn’t directly track people, by using YouTube videos and other hosted media, exposes people’s activity to those who track them.
I saw a post about Collusion – a Firefox add-on that maps links between websites, both the ones you go to directly, and the ones that send media and pull tracking info.
Here’s what about an hour’s worth of activity looks like, after letting Collusion monitor my browsing in Firefox:
The icons that are glowing are sites that I went to directly (all work-related, of course…), and the non-glowing icons are sites that either fed media to the sites I did visit, or who tracked my activity as a third party. Looking at my blog, with no third party tracking explicitly set up, there are still several sites indirectly monitoring activity of people.
That’s kind of creepy. The only way to completely avoid this is to host everything yourself, and never link to anything else. But that kind of goes against the whole purpose of this online-community-hootenanny thing…
I’ve been playing around with gephi today, to see what I could come up with to display the discussion threads from my research data. Lots of manual data entry later, and I’ve got this:
and this:
WordPress sites are shown in red, Blackboard discussion forums in blue. So far, just a pretty picture, but I’ll hopefully be able to coax out a diagram or two that shows the difference in interaction patterns between the two platforms…