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.

When we moved to Sowerby Bridge almost 18 months ago (no, I can’t believe it has been that long either), one thing I moved away from was an easily accessible cinema. In Bradford, I was well catered for – the Cineworld multiplex by the Interchange shows all of the new releases, plus there’s the National Media Museum showing IMAX films as well as regular films in its Pictureville and Cubby Broccoli cinemas.

But Sowerby Bridge doesn’t have a cinema of its own; nor does neighbouring Halifax, although this will change this summer when a Vue multiplex opens opposite the bus station. The nearest big cinemas are back in Bradford, or the Odeon in Huddersfield, although its out of town location makes it awkward to get to without a car.

As the crow flies, the Rex Cinema in Elland is closest, although getting there by bus means changing at Halifax which is a bit of a pain (Elland’s railway station closed in 1962, and though there’s talk of building a new one, no plans have come to fruition). It’s a small, independent cinema which shows films every evening, but these aren’t usually the latest and tend not to be the big blockbusters. Same for the Hebden Bridge Picture house, further up the valley, which I wrote about in January.

But it wasn’t always like this. Sowerby Bridge, like many towns in days gone by, did have its own cinema. In fact, it had two – both on Wharf Street, the main road through the town.

The Roxy Bingo Hall – Wharf Street  © Copyright Betty Longbottom and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

The first was the Electric Cinema. The building dates from 1915, although the exact date that it opened seems to be disputed by various web sites and may have been as late as 1917. It later became the Roxy Cinema, and was operated by Gaumont Cinemas until 1951, with an impressive capacity of over 800. It closed in 1962, where upon the building lay dormant until 1972, when it became a bingo hall. Sometime around 2009, the owners converted it into a bistro and late opening venue, which is how it survives today. [Credit: Malcolm Bull's Calderdale Companion [1] [2], Bingo VG]

Former Essoldo Cinema, Wharf Street, Sowerby Bridge  © Copyright Humphrey Bolton and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.The other cinema, which was literally around 200 metres further down the high street was the Regent Cinema, opened in 1939. It became the Essoldo Cinema ten years later in 1949, before closing in 1967, again to become a bingo hall. More recently the bingo hall shut and the building was converted into shops, and now houses a charity pound shop and a newsagent. [Credit: Malcolm Bull: [1] [2]]

Although it’s good that both buildings survive and are in use (something that sadly can’t be said for Bradford’s 1930s former Odeon cinema), it’s a shame that the town hasn’t managed to retain a cinema despite having two at one point. Still, it will be nice for Halifax to have a cinema again, even though it will be a big multiplex run by a national firm, rather than the small, independent community cinemas in Elland and Hebden Bridge.

Cinemas and Sowerby Bridge was originally posted on Neil Turner's Blog. Content is made available under a Creative Commons License.

There’s a blog post over at Wired called What Your Klout Score Really Means. It’s well worth a read, and gives an insight into how companies have increasingly been using Klout to target special offers at influential people. A resort in Las Vegas upgraded guests’ rooms if they had a high Klout score. A graphic designer with a score of 74 gained a free Windows Phone and an invite to a VH1 award show.

There’s even a cited example of a marketing company, which, whilst interviewing for a vice president post, asked the candidate what his Klout score was; he didn’t know, and the interview was cut short when the interviewee was shown his score – a low 34 out of a possible 100.

My score is lower than that. So low, that it doesn’t exist. Back in November, I opted-out of Klout. I became very unnerved about all the data I was volunteering to it, and the information about my Facebook friends that I was giving it access to – even those with private profiles. It also wasn’t terribly accurate, as it thought I was influential about Spongebob Squarepants and Baghdad – two subjects that I con honestly say I know very little about. I’ve never even watched an episode of Spongebob.

So the revelation that at least one company is using Klout as a metric to judge potential hires by is worrying. Not at least from the point of view of people like me who would be at a disadvantage, but also that some companies are happy to trust a third party and its mystical closed algorithm that isn’t open for public scrutiny. Of course, Klout is a business that wants to make money – being transparent about how to get a perfect Klout score would result in widespread abuse thus making it completely meaningless.But even without widespread gaming of the system, do Klout scores actually mean anything? The Wired article notes that the only person to have a perfect 100 score is Justin Bieber – presumably by virtue of the huge number of followers he has on Twitter who are happy to retweet his tweets. Even the US president, Barack Obama, can only manage 91, although that’s still a high score. And while gaming of the system isn’t widespread, it’s still possible to get high scores by cheating a bit – @Betelgeuse_3 has a score of 53 by virtue of having over 4500 followers, but also because it’s a bot that tweets ‘IT’S SHOWTIME!’ at anyone who types ‘beetlejuice’ three times in the same tweet. That’s more than the official Twitter account for the TV series Red Dwarf which only has a score of 49 despite having over 12,000 followers, and, you know, being the official Twitter account for the TV series Red Dwarf. Which would you say was more influential? And would you base a major business decision on a third party service that thinks that a Twitter bot is more influential than a world-renowned cult TV show?

Of course, would you really want to work for a company that hired people solely because Klout tells them that they’re important? Maintaining a high Klout score essentially requires you to tweet a lot – participating in lots of conversations with other Twitter users in particular – and have lots of followers. I wouldn’t want to feel like I had to keep tweeting drivel and constantly try to get more people to read it just so that some faceless company can grade me. I’d probably lose more followers that way.

I’ll leave the final word to Tom Scott (whom I actually met in person recently, he’s awesome) and his site Klouchebag.

Over and Klout was originally posted on Neil Turner's Blog. Content is made available under a Creative Commons License.

Earlier this month I posted about my attempts at boosting traffic to this blog using various technical interventions, and so far, when combined with a couple of popular posts (my guide to improving iPhone battery life and cloud storage service comparisons in particular) have seen traffic go up around 20% on average.

A big change was a new caching plugin. As I previously mentioned I used to use WP Quick Cache, which is a good, basic plugin that doesn’t need much configuration, but I’ve had better results with W3 Total Cache. It takes more work to get running optimally though.

If you have shell access to your server, you can combine W3 Total Cache with APC – the Accelerated PHP Cache – to further boost performance. Getting these to work together has not just boosted the performance of the front-facing site, but also the WordPress CMS dashboard as well, so it’s well worth looking into.

Firstly, you will need to install APC, as it’s not usually installed along with PHP. Log into your server using SSH to get a shell prompt, and type in pecl install apc – you may need to do ‘sudo’ if you’re not root. This will install the APC package from pecl.

Next, you need to install W3 Total Cache. It’s not the easiest plugin to install as you’ll need to make a couple of folders writeable and then modify your .htaccess file to enable it, but the instructions are quite clear.

You’ll now need to configure W3 Total Cache to use APC. I’ve taken hints from this guide by Chris Gilligan, and whilst it’s worth ready all of his blog posts on the subject, we’ll skip to the section where he tells you which modules to enable and which ones to use APC on. APC is just one of a number of ways that you can cache data, and it’s not always appropriate. For the Page Cache, don’t use APC – use the Enhanced Disk cache if possible, and similarly don’t use APC for the Minify Cache – in my own testing, enabling APC for Minify completely broke it.

Where you do want to enable APC is for the Object Cache and Database Cache. These are all on the General Settings page – make sure each of the modules are enabled and then save your settings. If you’ve previously used W3 Total Cache with different settings, you should also clear all of the caches after this.

If your experience was like mine, this should result in a shot in the arm for your site’s performance.

How to: Boost WordPress performance with W3 Total Cache and APC was originally posted on Neil Turner's Blog. Content is made available under a Creative Commons License.

Although I’ve made a few edits to my SkyDrive vs Dropbox vs Google Drive blog post from last week, I haven’t gone into much detail about some of the more technical aspects of the services. Dropbox, being the more mature of the three, has some clever tricks up its sleeves which Google Drive doesn’t have, and SkyDrive also appears to lack too.

LAN sync

LAN sync is a DropBox feature that will share files between computers on the same network. If you have Dropbox open and signed in to the same account on two computers on the same network, and save a file into your Dropbox folder on one computer, then as well as uploading that file to Dropbox’s servers, that computer will also send the file to your other computer over the network. This is much quicker than the other computer waiting for the file to be uploaded to Dropbox’s servers to download it again, and saves on your bandwidth. Google Drive doesn’t have LAN sync, and I don’t think SkyDrive does either.

Sadly, LAN sync only works between desktop computers; if you save a file on your iPhone, it won’t appear on your desktop until your desktop has downloaded it from Dropbox’s servers, even if you have Wifi enabled on your iPhone.

Delta syncing

If you edit a file that’s already in your Dropbox, Dropbox will detect which bits of the files have changed, and then only upload those changes. Google Drive isn’t quite so intelligent and will just upload the whole file again. So if you have a 750 MB high definition video in your Dropbox, and change some of the metadata in the file’s header, Dropbox may only need to upload a few kilobytes (and other computers on your Dropbox account will only need to download those few kilobytes too). Google Drive will instead upload the whole 750 MB file again. Coupled with the lack of LAN sync, as mentioned above, that’s a lot of bandwidth being used unnecessarily.

Duplicate file detection

If you put two identical copies of a file in your Dropbox folder, Dropbox will detect that they’re the same and just upload one copy, but make sure that both copies are on its servers (note that both copies will count towards your total storage space). Google Drive will still upload both files regardless of the fact that they contain the exact same data.

Resurrecting deleted files

Dropbox keeps a file history going back 30 days, meaning you can recover deleted files and also revert to older versions of existing files. Google Drive doesn’t appear to let you revert file versions but deleted items go in a trash folder. But Dropbox is also clever about deleted files. Say you have a file in your Dropbox folder, which you then drag to the Recycle Bin; Dropbox will delete the file, but let you recover it on the web if you wish; but also, if you undelete that file on your desktop and put it back into your Dropbox, Dropbox will detect that the file was already on its servers and just make the file live again – it won’t need to upload it again.

Memory efficient desktop client

I ran all three clients at the same time and compared their performance using Mac OS X’s Activity Monitor. SkyDrive is arguably the clear winner here – although it uses a little more CPU than Dropbox, its memory usage is tiny, and it’s the only one of the three to take advantage of OS X’s code operations for 64-bit applications. Google Drive is a hog by comparison, using almost 3 times more memory than SkyDrive and much more CPU – and this is whilst idle, i.e. not syncing files. Furthermore, this is despite not having the advanced features that Dropbox has.

Obviously Google Drive is new and it’s likely that future releases will reach closer feature parity with Dropbox, but right now, Dropbox is technically superior than Google Drive, thus working faster and saving your bandwidth. I haven’t looked into SkyDrive as much as I possibly should have and will revisit this post when I have more information.

Much of the information for this article is sourced from this post on Dropbox’s foums.

The technical superiority of Dropbox 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:

• Supercalicontentious – Ideas – The Boston Globe
  The story of ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ and its legal history
• "The hidden side of your soul": How the FBI uses the Web as a child porn honeypot
  How the FBI uses online honeypots to trap paedophiles
• What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for? – Super User
  If you want to feel old, here’s a question from someone who doesn’t know what the A: and B: drives in Windows were for
• 10 Outdated Gadgets You Can Still Buy Today
  10 outdated gadgets that are still available to purchase new
• BBC News – Charges after penguin ‘prank’ at Australian theme park
  Imagine waking up after a particularly rough night out with a penguin in your hotel room
• iBorg: I have become them | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog
  Going back to a regular book after using an e-book reader
• What I learned the day I, like Noel Edmonds, met a ‘troll’ face to face | Joanna Geary | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
  ‘What I learned when I met a troll face to face’
• From New Coke to Consignia: brands consigned to the dustbin of history | Business | The Observer
  Brands consigned to history, like Consignia
• Drew Curtis: How I beat a patent troll | Video on TED.com
  Fark’s Drew Curtis on how to beat a patent troll

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Links from Delicious for April 28, 2012 was originally posted on Neil Turner's Blog. Content is made available under a Creative Commons License.