Neil Turner's Blog

A long-running blog about technology and randomness

May 23, 2012
by Neil T
1 Comment

App of the Week: Melo

Last year I reviewed ScrobblePod, a scrobbling client for last.fm for Mac OS X. Development of ScrobblePod has now ceased - a minor update was released last week to fix some issues, but there will be no future updates.

Instead, the developer has released a new app called Melo, which has been built from the ground up as a new, simple last.fm client. It sits on your menu bar and has a very simple interface, showing the song playing, a ‘love’ button if you love the track, a link to your last.fm profile and an options button.

The options let you control what gets scrobbled from iTunes – i.e. you can exclude certain artists, genres or media types (audiobooks, for example, are excluded by default). And that’s really it – there’s not much to configure in the app.

The app will also detect plays from an iPod or iPhone, by monitoring changes to your ‘Recently Played’ playlist every now and again. In my experience it takes a few minutes from a sync being completed to your scrobbles showing on last.fm.

Melo doesn’t replace all of the features of ScrobblePod yet – there’s no Growl notifications, for example, so you’ll need to use another app like GrowlTunes if you want that, although hopefully a future update will allow this. It also only runs on Mac OS X Lion, and costs £2.49 on the Mac App Store. But it does look nice and works well.

May 22, 2012
by Neil T
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10,000 tweets

Robin

Last night I posted my 10,000th tweet, although as I had been anticipating it, it was an announcement rather than just something random:

I joined Twitter on the 1st of June 2007, so it’s taken me a mere 11 days shy of 5 years to tweet that much. My blog post at the time implied a little animosity – perhaps because this was yet another social network to join. I’d only joined Facebook a few months previously. And I don’t think I imagined Twitter would become as popular as it has today.

Although 10,000 tweets over 5 years implies 2,000 tweets per year, it’s probable that my tweet rate (number of tweets per day) has been much higher over the past 18 months, what with having a smartphone that can tweet at any time. Before, I’d have to use a computer or send a text message.

Whether I’ll still be using Twitter in 5 years remains to be seen, but it’s done well so far.

May 21, 2012
by Neil T
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Cache-apalooza

Old crane, new hotel

It’s been a while since I last wrote about Geocaching. Probably because I didn’t go looking for any during April. But I’ve been out a few times in May, and found a few in York, Leeds, and on the Leeds-Liverpool Canal between Shipley and Bingley. And on Saturday, whilst in Leeds, I logged my 100th find. Incidentally, the picture I used above is where I found my 99th cache.

May has, so far, been my second best month for finds. February was my best – 24 finds, of which 16 were found in one afternoon around Shipley and Saltaire. This month I’ve found 16 – 4 in York, including one just around the corner from my parents’ house which required the use of a stepladder to retrieve – 7 between Bingley and Shipley and 7 in Leeds, including the aforementioned 100th find. I also spotted another NCN Milepost – even though I’ve definitely walked past that spot twice before and apparently never noticed it. This brings me up to 12 – only 988 more to find, then…

Later this month we’re off to London, so I’ll try to bag a cache or two around there. In fact, there’s one just outside King’s Cross station.

May 19, 2012
by Neil T
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Links from Delicious for May 19, 2012

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May 16, 2012
by Neil T
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Is Flickr dying?

Danger - Contaminated Water

The internets are abuzz with an article on Gizmodo entitled How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet. It’s worth a read; as someone who has been on Flickr for 8 years now and was there before it was purchased by Yahoo, I can certainly say that it’s not the site that it used to be.

But I wouldn’t describe Flickr as ‘dead’ – at least, not yet. Metaphorically speaking it’s almost certainly on a life support machine in intensive care, but there’s a potential for it to make a recovery. For example, this week has seen the roll-out of a new layout, which shows larger sized images on big widescreen monitors, and will automatically shrink the image down to a smaller size when the window is resized. It’s features like this that, back in the middle of the last decade when Flickr was at peak popularity, that set it apart from its rivals. Continue Reading →

May 15, 2012
by Neil T
2 Comments

Listening to books

Exam time again...

Those who know me well know that I don’t ‘do’ books. I’m never find reading a book – it’s always either a magazine, or, most likely, a phone or computer screen. And I particularly don’t do fiction – what I read tends to be factual, news, or opinion pieces.

However, this does not mean that I completely ignore books. One or two books have come out recently that have intrigued me, but I don’t really have the time to read them. Thankfully, someone came up with the idea of the audiobook; you can listen to someone – usually the author – read the book to you, so you don’t have to.

This may seem lazy but there are times when having your head in a book is impractical – like walking to work, or at the gym. This is why I’m growing to like audiobooks – you can do something else whilst listening (although, in my experience at least, nothing that requires a large amount of concentration). Continue Reading →

May 12, 2012
by Neil T
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Links from Delicious for May 12, 2012

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May 10, 2012
by Neil T
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How to: Share pictures on Twitter with Flickr

If you want to send a tweet with a picture, most Twitter clients will let you use services like TwitPic or yFrog to do so, and more recently Twitter has offered its own image hosting service which is usually the default. But what about Flickr?

Alas, as far as I am aware Flickr doesn’t have an API function that allows you to post images from Twitter clients in the same way as TwitPic. At present, you have to upload the picture to Flickr as you would normally, and then share the image on Twitter; this is a little cumbersome, especially on a phone.

Thankfully, there’s a way around it, in the form of the oddly named GDZLLA. Here’s how to set up GDZLLA to allow you to tweet pictures and have them hosted on Flickr, just like you would on any other service. Continue Reading →

May 5, 2012
by Neil T
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Links from Delicious for May 5, 2012

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May 3, 2012
by Neil T
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Getting ready for Gatekeeper

Rowntrees Park

Some time later this year – possibly as early as this summer – Apple will unleash the latest version of Mac OS X: version 10.8, or Mountain Lion as it will also be known. One of the new features in Mountain Lion is Gatekeeper, which is a security feature primarily designed from preventing malware from running.

It works by checking for the presence of a digital signature on the application – in particular, one that has been signed using a Developer ID from Apple. Developers can register with Apple for $99 a year, and this allows them to both publish the apps using its Mac App Store and also release signed apps through other channels. If no signature is present, or the file has been tampered with, then the application won’t run.

There are three levels of Gatekeeper protection. The highest will only permit apps that either came with the Mac and were provided by Apple, and those acquired from the Mac App Store. The middle, and default, setting, will run those apps mentioned previously, plus any app that has been signed using a Developer ID. Finally, you can disable Gatekeeper entirely, and run any app regardless of whether it has been signed or not, which is the situation now.

This means that, with the advent of Mountain Lion, any app that hasn’t been signed or downloaded from the Mac App Store probably won’t run, unless Gatekeeper is disabled. Anyone who has a had a Mac for some time may find that they have to do this, thus making themselves more at risk at inadvertently running malware if they’re not careful. But how much of a problem will this be?

To investigate, I downloaded RB App Checker Lite (from the Mac App Store, natch) which can be used to identify those apps that have not been signed, and will therefore probably not work when Mountain Lion comes out, unless a signed update is released. I went through all 131 applications in my /Applications/ folder, made sure that they were all up-to-date using AppFresh (which, um, isn’t a signed app), and here’s what I found: Continue Reading →