fnt (fascinating new thing)

Courtesy of Dan, I now have an Atom feed!

[Thu Aug 28 01:15:21 2008] p

Facesuck
UPDATE: Glady correctly pointed out that if all you're really interested in is Status updates, then you can just Save Page in the browser (after clicking "See Older Notes" to make sure you have everything), and voila, snapshot of what you've been doing. Still, XML export would be nice.

So I've finally figured out what irks me about Facebook. Goofy "pokes" and "virtual gifts" aside, it really is a compelling place for you to get in touch and keep up with with old friends.

I think part of my initial gripe with it was the insane popularity (and admittedly very slick usability) of their Photos app. Super simple but fast UI, very specific and useful implementation of tags (instead of the "note graffiti/overload" you sometimes see on Flickr), nice integration into the News Feed, and cool uploading from mobile devices (yay, a Palm app!)

BUT.

What happens if and when Facebook goes out of business, gets acquired and shutdown, or horribly hacked?

Where are your photos then? Surely you have them backed up somewhere else. On your hard drive? What if that crashes?

Ok ok, so maybe you only post some of your photos to Facebook and the originals are safely stashed on multiple RAID 5+1 arrays distributed around the country. Fine.

Here's the important bit (finally, Darryl):

Glady mentioned the other day that what she really loves about Facebook is that it's become a journal of what she's been doing. Status updates, mobile photos, communications with long-lost and closely-held friends. "It's like blogging, but so much easier."

Yes. True. But then it strikes me. The Movable Type install that I set up for her years ago is on a server that I pay to have backed up nightly. The data will be there, presumably for as long as we keep paying our bills. Like photos that I host on Phanfare or SmugMug, there are backups and redundancy, and more important, there is a way to get them back out.

So I've gone and buried the lede: Facebook doesn't allow export, and this is why it sucks, especially when so many people are investing so much time and effort into using it as not only a transient communications medium, but also as a record of their communication.

Sure, Scoble got bounced because he was scraping his contacts. And yes, it would be swell if you could get those out. But whatever -- my network isn't extensive or vital enough to me that I care about losing contact with these folks. But I do care that Glady thinks of the stuff she posts on Facebook as "her journal", when in fact, when Facebook goes bye-bye, so does her journal.

Suck.

So if somebody knows of a way to export the contents your own wall (I'm not trying to write an e-mail address harvester) using the API and I'm just a dope for not being able to find it with 5 minutes of Googling, please let me know

It'll save me the trouble of hacking together something awful.

[Tue Aug 26 13:00:27 2008] p

Dont' Buy It!
So it turns out the site is over 4 years old, but Noah discovered it today, and it is awesome, like if AdBusters magazine did a website for kids:

http://pbskids.org/dontbuyit/

(The fake banner ads are awesome.)

[Mon Aug 25 00:45:22 2008] p

The Waifs w/ Krystle Warren
2008.08.23 - The Great American Music Hall

Thanks to Rosalie at KFOG for the tickets, Tim with the Waifs for giving the ok to shoot the photos, Kenny and Mary from GAMH for their hospitality, and Pete at the front of the stage for letting us stand in front of him!

[Tue Aug 12 21:35:07 2008] p

Heh.

[Wed Jul 30 03:48:02 2008] p

Outside Lame Festival
Please ignore the previous update. Your children are not welcome at San Francisco's Outside Lands festival:

Date: 7/29/2008 3:51 PM
From: Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival <info@sfoutsidelands.com>

As a general rule, attendees are not allowed to enter the festival gates more then once each day (i.e. re-entry is not allowed). However, if you absolutely must leave the festival and need to return the same day, BEFORE YOU EXIT the festival grounds, you must speak with a Supervisor at the main entrance/exit at Speedway Meadows so that an authorized pass can be issued to you to allow you to leave the festival grounds and return that same day. Remember you will not be allowed to return to the festival grounds if you leave the site without getting an authorized pass BEFORE you exit.

As for strollers, they are allowed into the festival, although we do not recommend or encourage people to bring kids to the festival, due to the festival environment.

Meh.

[Sun Jun 29 03:30:44 2008] p

Photo Hostage Sites
So Phanfare recently announced that they are offering importing from Kodak Gallery (Ofoto), Picasa Web Albums, Shutterfly, and Snapfish. Unfortunately the "catch" is that for Kodak, Shutterfly and Snapfish they can only import the low-resolution (500-600 pixel wide) versions of the photos. Only good enough for screen viewing *not* printing.

Now I don't fault Phanfare for this (although it's a tad misleading), because those three services don't offer any API for accessing full-sized images. In fact, they don't offer an API for downloading the web-sized images. What Phanfare is probably doing is logging in as you and "scraping" those web-sized images off of the webpages. (It's as if you went to your Shutterfly gallery yourself and did a right-click/Save for every image.)

And to tell you the truth, I don't really fault Kodak, Shutterfly or Snapfish, as it's not in their best interest to let you download your full-sized images from their sites. They want to sell you stuff. It's what they're good at. I've ordered cute mini-photo books from Snapfish that turned out great. We recently did our son's "memory book" for pre-school at Shutterfly and it looks beautiful.

The point is, these companies, along with nearly every other company offering "free photo albums" are not really Photo Hosting Sites. They're Photo Hostage Sites. Or more diplomatically Photo Product Sites. (Like I said, I love their products -- they do great prints too, but Costco is almost always cheaper and faster since you can pick up at the warehouse. However I never hesitate to take advantage of the "free prints" offers that these services regularly offer. And the prints almost always come out great.)

Anyways I should probably add this to my Honking Big Photo Sharing Sites Comparison spreadsheet, but here's a quick run-down of how much it would cost you to get your photos back from some of these Photo Hostage Sites:

Service Product Pricing

Shutterfly Archive DVD 1-100=$7.99; 101-500=$11.99; 501-1000=$15.99; Each additional 1,000 pictures, now only $3.99

Snapfish High Resolution Photos (For Download) 1=$0.25; 2-50=$0.05 ea; Limit 50 photos per download

Snapfish Custom Photo CD 1-50=$9.49; $10 per 150 additional photos

Kodak Gallery (formerly Ofoto) Gallery Archive CD 1-50=$9.95; 51-100=$14.95; 101-250=$19.95; 251-500=$29.95; 501-1000=$39.95; Each additional 100=$14.95

Interestingly, I found that Kodak now offers a service called Gallery Premier that for $24.99 offers unlimited full-resolution photo downloads, and an "insurance policy" of a $500 credit for any photos destroyed in a natural disaster, human error or hard drive crash or theft. (So if you made prints or a book out of photos hosted at Kodak, you could get those reprinted out of the $500. And if your hard drive was stolen or crashed, you could use that credit to get archive CDs.)

But other than upgrading to Premier, there doesn't seem to be a way to download your images from Kodak. Shutterfly doesn't appear to offer any downloading option at all.

Now to be fair, SmugMug will also sell you DVDs or CDs of all your photos. And it ain't that cheap: CDs are $11.99 for the first 650MB, + $10.50 for each additional 650MB. DVDs are $22.00 for the first 1GB, plus $3.50 for each additional 1GB.

But the difference is SmugMug lets you download every single original photo you've ever uploaded. For "free" (well, it's part of your annual fees.) There's even 3rd-party bulk downloaders to make this easier. Phanfare doesn't even offer a DVD or CD service. But they do make it easy to download of images with a link to a zip file for every album (if you decide to enable it).

[Thu Jun 26 05:13:42 2008] p

Mail Hacks
I've always hated how Evite forces you to clickthrough to their website just to get the basic location and date of the invitation. I mean, it essentially turns the e-mail into worthless piece of spam.

So, I finally did something about it. evite.pl is a Perl script that parses an Evite message, goes to the website for you, scrapes the important details (Location, Date, Other Info), and then inserts it into the message and re-mails it to you. A Procmail rule "catches" incoming Evites and pipes them through the script.

Similarly, YouTube does the same annoying thing with comments on any of your YouTube videos. In fact, this is extra annoying because when you go to look at a comment it increments your Views by 1. Must be great for their advertisers. What a bunch of jerks. So my ytcom.pl script still adds one to the Views, but at least I don't have to look at any ads just to see what comment somebody has left for me.

Here's the Procmail rules that I use to trigger these scripts. Proceed at your own risk, as parsing mail for URLs and scraping HTML is a tricky business. You might want to change the :0: to :0c: so you have a copy of the originals until you're confident that things are working.

[Sun Jun 1 16:50:26 2008] p

Time Lapse Photography on the Cheap

Ingredients

Canon S3 with CHDK Firmware Add-On lets you run the Ultra Intervalometer script that can shoot as often as 1 frame per second until you run out of space.
ImageMagick's mogrify -resize 20% *.JPG resizes all the images.
MPlayer's mencoder "mf://*.JPG" -mf fps=10 -o multi.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vbitrate=800 converts the images into a movie.

[Sat May 10 12:11:09 2008] p
Hey, whaddya know -- these instructions on installing Movable Type on Pair.com are still kind of relevant. (Of course you could pay $2.95/mo to have them do it for you, but that's like... $36/yr!)

[Sat Mar 29 13:15:32 2008] p

A Tale of Two Sisters (Resorts)

"Families who drive a hybrid vehicle to Sierra Resort will be able to park in Preferred Parking for free!" (This offer is valid every day of this season. Preferred Parking is normally $15.)

"Guests driving hybrids get to park in preferred parking for FREE on Earth Day at Northstar Resort." (This offer is for one day, April 20. Preferred parking is normally $20 midweek, $30 weekends/holidays.)

*[It's a Semisonic song, ya know? It's not like my life is fascinating. i just had to put something up there.]
>:P
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Yeah, sorry, this is it. i know, i know, all that hype for this?
Well, i still have the geek page, but i won't be updating it. Sorry.
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Oh yeah, your feedback, as always, is welcome.