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.

App of the Week: Melo was originally posted on Neil Turner's Blog. Content is made available under a Creative Commons License.

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

And this is my 10,000th tweet! Only taken almost 5 years…

— Neil Turner (@nrturner) May 21, 2012

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.

10,000 tweets was originally posted on Neil Turner's Blog. Content is made available under a Creative Commons License.

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.

Cache-apalooza was originally posted on Neil Turner's Blog. Content is made available under a Creative Commons License.

Here are the articles or web sites that I’ve found this week and linked to on my Delicious Bookmarks:

• How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button | TechCrunch
  starred items / from Waxy.org Links http://www.waxy.org/links/
• 14 Photographs That Shatter Your Image of Famous People | Cracked.com
  Surprising images of famous people – often before they were famous
• Firefox’s New "Reset" Feature Troubleshoots Problems Without Losing All Your Data
  Firefox Beta has a ‘reset’ feature that sets it back to factory defaults whilst retaining your personal data
• http://gu.com/p/37jnz/tw
  Dolphin-safe tuna labels banned by WTO after their market fundamentalism trumped sanity. http://t.co/XEbnnhL1 via @doug_parr
• m.guardian.co.uk
• “@” attacks | budgie’s perch
• In Memoriam: Our Favorite Apps and Services That Have Gone Belly Up (and Their Replacements)
  Alternatives to apps and services that are dead or on the way out
• What can you pay for with 1p and 2p coins? Not an £800 tax bill … | Money | The Guardian
  Under the Coinage Act 1971, 1p and 2p coins are only legal tender for transactions under 20p
• Can London Afford the $14.5 Billion Price Tag of the Summer 2012 Olympic Games? | Culture | Vanity Fair
  Interesting Vanity fair piece about this year’s Olympics
• Windows malware: are you safer today than you were 10 years ago? | ZDNet
  A look back at 10 years of malware on Windows
• BBC News – The Cold War rival to Eurovision
  During the 1970s, there was a soviet rival to the Eurovision Song Contest, called Intervision
• The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that don’t make sense anymore – Scott Hanselman
  Why is the ‘save’ icon a floppy disk, when most PCs no longer have a disk drive? And other outdated metaphors
• http://elektronista.dk/kommentar/dresscode-blue-tie-and-male/
  http://t.co/vX8NqAGH Dell holds in-house event where moderator celebrates absence of women from IT – sounds like a huge fail
• On Diaspora’s Social Network, You Own Your Data – Businessweek
  Remember the buzz around Diaspora? It should publicly launch later this year

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Links from Delicious for May 19, 2012 was originally posted on Neil Turner's Blog. Content is made available under a Creative Commons License.

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.

Flickr was one of the first sites to make good use of AJAX, the now omnipresent technology which allows parts of pages to dynamically update without the whole page being requested again from the server, thus making for a faster experience that doesn’t affect server load. Most big sites use it now, but Flickr pioneered it.

Flickr was also one of the first social networking sites. It wasn’t just another place to dump photos, like the now defunct Fotopic – you could join groups and share pictures, comment or favourite others’ photos for example. There was a community – or rather, hundreds or even thousands of interlinked communities. This was before even MySpace had taken off, never mind Facebook.

And Flickr was one of the first places to use ‘tags’ to describe photos, giving users a free-form taxonomy rather than fixed categories. As well as describing the picture, like metadata, tags could be used to group pictures, so that, for example, pictures taken at the same event by multiple people could be grouped under one tag, like Twitter hashtags nowadays.

So what went wrong? Under Yahoo, Flickr stagnated – there were few new features, and precious little integration with other social networks. Last week, I posted about how to tweet a picture and upload it to Flickr, because Flickr’s integration with Twitter is, at present, poor. Back in 2007, when Twitter was first becoming popular, Flickr wasn’t interested, and consequently we’re now using sites like TwitPic and yFrog to host images.

And it didn’t get mobile. As the Gizmodo article points out, Flickr was late to the game with their iOS app, and it launched to very poor reviews. Even now, though I have it installed, I don’t use it very often – most of the pictures I take on my phone are uploaded to Flickr via Instagram. Early versions of the iOS app stripped out EXIF data (bizarre, because Flickr lets users view the EXIF data on photos) and often didn’t include the picture’s location despite maps being a key part of Flickr. Improvements are promised, but the app itself is currently 5 months without an update, and it doesn’t work on an iPad.

I mentioned Instagram – though you can export Instagram pictures to Flickr, it’s a form of cross-posting. I’m finding that any pictures I upload to both Instagram and Flickr get more attention – comments and favourites – on Instagram. In fact, pretty much the only person who comments or favourites my pictures on Flickr is Kevin Spencer.

If you read the comments on the Gizmodo article there are plenty of people who defend Flickr, and that’s encouraging. There aren’t many places that, for $25 per year, will host an essentially unlimited number of photos at full resolution, with licensing – and fewer still with Flickr’s community features, even if they’re not as well used as before. So no, Flickr is not dead. But it’s not well either – and it needs to make itself more relevant, and quickly.

It’s a big task but not an impossible one. Services can re-invent themselves – though I personally don’t use it, I gather that since becoming independent from eBay, StumbleUpon has seen a resurgence in users. Maybe Yahoo needs to give Flickr more resources and more autonomy to do its own thing – or let it go and flourish in independence. Either way, something has to change.

Is Flickr dying? was originally posted on Neil Turner's Blog. Content is made available under a Creative Commons License.

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).

I’m only on my second audiobook so far, which I’ve downloaded from Audible, Amazon’s audiobook store. The first was ‘How to be a Woman’ by Caitlin Moran (Amazon Link). You may wonder why a heterosexual male like me has any interest in a semi-autobiographical feminist book, but I would call myself a feminist, since anyone who believes that men and women should have the same rights and opportunities can call themselves a feminist, whether they themselves are male or female. Plus, it’s a very good read – or, listen, in my case – and may have you laughing out loud.

Having finished that, I’ve started on ‘God Collar’ by Marcus Brigestocke (Amazon Link), another lefty-liberal book, but this time on religion and atheism in particular. So far I’m only around half an hour into it, but as someone who enjoys Marcus’ stand-up routines I’ve not been disappointed.

Both books are around the same length – about 8 and a half hours – and the first took me exactly a month to listen through. Unfortunately, some days I can only fit in around 20-25 minutes of listening as I walk to and from the railway station, so it’s only when I go to the gym that I get to listen in longer stints, which hasn’t happened as often as it should lately. In fact, Saturday was the first time I’d been to the gym since, um, February. Ooops.

With this in mind, I’m on Audible’s 1 book credit per month package at the moment, whereby you pay a monthly subscription and get one free audiobook included with it. Subsequent books bought in that month cost extra, and that can be a big extra cost – although there’s a sale on, to buy ‘How to be a Woman’ at full price would set you back over £20, as opposed to £7 for the dead-tree actual book and only £3.67 to read on a Kindle. That said, the 1 credit package is £8 per month – cheaper than £20, but still quite a bit of money to pay every month. If I’m able to get through one audiobook a month, and don’t run out of things to read, then I suppose it’s worth it, but it’s not cheap. I’ll see how I go.

Playing back audiobooks from Audible can be done in a couple of ways. Support for Audible’s .aa format has been built into iTunes for a few years now and so audiobooks can be played back on almost all iPods, including those that don’t run on iOS. For those that do run on iOS, you can either use iTunes, and play the audiobooks in the Music app, or you can install the Audible app which runs on the iPhone and iPod Touch (but not the iPad as yet). The app lets you manage audiobooks on the device without having to involve iTunes, and has a few advanced features like stepping back 30 seconds if you get briefly distracted. It doesn’t, however, let you purchase more audiobooks from within the app – presumably because Amazon doesn’t want to give a 30% cut of its sales to Apple.

So, that’s me and audiobooks. If you have any suggestions for other books that I should be listening to, let me know in the comments.

Listening to books was originally posted on Neil Turner's Blog. Content is made available under a Creative Commons License.

Here are the articles or web sites that I’ve found this week and linked to on my Delicious Bookmarks:

• Safe in Its Shell | Wired Opinion | Wired.com
  Apple locks down OSX — and everyone loves it. Anil Dash explains why.
• BBC News – Carmageddon seeks Kickstarter cash comeback
  Stainless Games is aiming to raise $400,000 on Kickstarter for a sequel to Carmageddon
• Scumbag Steve’s Advice for Annoying Facebook Girl | Slacktory | This seems legit.
  Blake Boston, unwitting star of the Scumbag Steve meme, writes to AnnoyIng Facebook Girl
• Only you should 0wn your data, Part 2: Staying safe | Agile Blog
  starred items / from Agile Blog http://blog.agilebits.com

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Links from Delicious for May 12, 2012 was originally posted on Neil Turner's Blog. Content is made available under a Creative Commons License.

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.

Step 1: Link your Twitter and Flickr accounts with GDZLLA

Go to gdzl.la and click ‘Get Started’ – you’ll first be asked to grant GDZLLA read-only access to your Twitter account, and then read-write access to your Flickr account. Once done, you’ll be given the ‘API endpoint’ which you need to make a note of to paste into your Twitter apps, although for reference this will be either https://gdzl.la/go (most clients) or https://gdzl.la/go/2.json (for TweetBot or any other client which doesn’t accept the first one)

Step 2: Configure your Twitter client

The steps required to configure your Twitter client are different for each individual client; I’ve included the ones that I’m familiar with. The key requirement is that it supports custom API endpoints for image uploads – neither Tweetdeck nor the official Twitter for iPhone app support custom image upload services, for example.

2.1: Configuring TweetBot

I’m going to post about TweetBot first, mainly because it’s awesome and is the client that I use the most. From your timeline, click the Accounts button at the top left, and then choose ‘Accounts & Settings’, then ‘Settings’. Under ‘Account Settings’, choose your account, and then ‘Image Upload’. Scroll to the bottom, and click ‘Custom’, then paste in https://gdzl.la/go/2.json and click Done.

 2.2: Configuring Osfoora

I use Osfoora on my Mac (review here). Open the application menu and choose Preferences, and then Services. Next to Image Upload Service, choose Custom, and paste in the API endpoint URL as above.

Step 3: Settings

GDZLLA has a couple of settings that you can change – it defaults to GDZLLA’s own URL shorterner for your pictures but you can use Flickr’s if you’d prefer, and you can also have all of your pictures posted to a particular set on Flickr.

And that’s it – you should be able to tweet images on Flickr just like you would do on TwitPic.

How to: Share pictures on Twitter with Flickr was originally posted on Neil Turner's Blog. Content is made available under a Creative Commons License.

Here are the articles or web sites that I’ve found this week and linked to on my Delicious Bookmarks:

• BBC – Newsbeat – In pictures: Angry Birds theme park opens in Finland
  An Angry Birds theme park has opened in Finland
• No, Boris – spending more on London won’t fix the country’s economic woes | Aditya Chakrabortty | Comment is free | The Guardian
  Despite what Boris Johnson says, London already receives more taxpayer money than anywhere else in the UK
• Next Train: Circle Line
  A rather geeky article about next train indicators on London’s Circle Line, but it shows how much work needs to be done on its upgrade.
• What Your Klout Score Really Means | Epicenter | Wired.com
  Some employers are using Klout scores as selection criteria for new hires

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Links from Delicious for May 5, 2012 was originally posted on Neil Turner's Blog. Content is made available under a Creative Commons License.

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:Firstly, there were 30 apps that came with my Mac, so we can discount those as we know they will work. Next, 23 apps were from the Mac App Store – again, these will all work without problems when Mountain Lion comes along. But of the 78 remaining apps, only 5 were signed using Developer ID. Oh dear.

I should, at this stage, point out that 22 apps did have a digital signature, but these were from the developers themselves and not Apple (this is similar to how most Windows apps are digitially signed). But even then, 51 of my apps had no signature whatsoever. This is actually quite concerning because without a digital signature it would be hard to verify that these apps are in fact genuine, and have not been tampered with.

A number of these unsigned apps are in active development, and by organisations like Google (Picasa, Google Drive), Mozilla (Firefox) and Microsoft (Messenger, SkyDrive) who perhaps should know better. But many of these are old apps, where the developers have abandoned them long ago; there’s probably little chance of them being updated in time for Mountain Lion’s release.

And so, on the basis, it’s regrettable that I’ll probably have to disable Gatekeeper just to keep all of my apps running. Otherwise, 73 out of my 131 apps – more than 50% – will stop working, if nothing changes before that time.

Getting ready for Gatekeeper was originally posted on Neil Turner's Blog. Content is made available under a Creative Commons License.