My Photos On the Web

I've always put my photography up on the Web under the Creative Commons licensing that allows others to use and distribute them as long as they give credit and allow others to do the same (the CC-By-SA license). Over time, I've seen my pictures used for more and more things that I'd never have dreamed. One church has used a panorama of mine for their banner and I've seen my images used for several news articles, such as the story of tequila being used to make diamonds.

For those who might want to use some of my images in the future, the best place to look is on my Picasa folders. One of these, Misc Photos, contains what I consider to be some of my best general work, though I have other sections for nature photography; specific events like the Tall Ships and Fireworks; and so on. You need only credit me and provide some way for people to find the original in order to use these images.

Droid Replaces My iPhone

Friday, I went out and got a Droid to replace my iPhone (which I've handed down to someone else). My first impression is that its very nice, but for every iPhone annoyance that the Droid fixes, there's a new one to replace it.

Here are a few:

• Keyboard is far too prone to multiple keypress
• Camera is slow, and prone to blurry images
• The iPhone had a sleep function (timed shutoff) that Droid lacks
• Music management is horrible
  
• Apple's smart playlists are clearly a killer feature
• Recovery from a dropped wifi connection is not as graceful
• No popup SMS/messaging notifications (brief scroll on top bar instead)
• Google Voice / built-in messaging can be confusing (which one am I selecting?)
  

On the other hand, it has:

• An open app store
• Free turn-by-turn navigation with a fairly cheap car-mount
• A keyboard at all (narrowly a win over none... narrowly)
• Great email/SMS integration if you use gmail and Google Voice
• Search by voice for nearly everything
• "Back" button works across apps

Some things that I think would improve the experience:

• Add a countdown timer that kills the browser and music player when it goes off
• Make the music player automatically create playlists from directories on the SD
• Add smart playlists (see my other post)
  
• Build in some software guards against multiple keypress
• Improve guessing with respect to poking at links on the Web browser (I often get the wrong link)

Overall, it's a great phone, but in some respects, it leaves me longing for my iPhone. I'm sure that over time it will become my favorite phone, but it's not a clear iPhone killer.

How To Use Smart Playlists In iTunes

Do you have an iPhone and many more Gigabytes of music you love than you can fit on it? Do you get frustrated over having to choose what to put on the phone? Here's a way to never compromise your collection while still carrying around only a trivial number of tunes:

• Create a playlist for a kind of music you want to listen to. You can use one of the built-in smart playlists like "Highest Rated" or build your own (for example, I have a "Quiet" playlist of songs I like to go to sleep to)
• Now create a new smart playlist and give it the rule: "Playlist", "is", and the playlist from above.
• Select the checkbox next to "Limit to" enter "50" or "100" for the count and for "selected by" use "Least recently played".
• Now when syncing your phone, go to the "Music" tab under the iPhone's entry in iTunes. Select the option to only place selected playlists on the phone, and select your new smart playlist.

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Blackra1n, Cydia and SBSettings

I've just re-jailbroken my iPhone (mostly to fix a problem introduced by upgrading to 3.1 without first uninstalling the jailbreak - never do that), and I ran into an SBSettings problem. It installs fine, but once it's done installing, it doesn't do anything. I swipe across the top of the screen and nothing happens.

If you just used blackra1n to jailbreak, and SBSettings won't work for you, here's what you do (props to this forum for the fix):

• Re-install Cydia from the blackra1n interface
• Re-install dpkg (this may show up as "Debian Package Manager" or similar) from Cydia
• Re-install SBSettings from Cydia
• Re-boot the phone

This worked for me, and got my SBSettings install working flawlessly.

Wikipedia Needs More Trivia

The "... in popular culture" sections and articles on Wikipedia used to be called "Trivia," but were so overwhelmingly lists of pop-culture references that the convention was altered. These days there are articles like Zombies in popular culture which typically start off well, but quickly descend into cobbled-together lists of movies, books, comics and video games that may or may not relate to, or represent the state of the genre being discussed. At one time, I worked on the  Lovecraftian horror article, and while I tried to make it an article about the genre and its evolution over time, it was continuously inundated by well-meaning editors who would add lists of genre works to the article.

To combat this, Wikipedia really should embrace both styles, and integrate them more deeply. I'd love to see the template mechanism enhanced so that trivia could be encapsulated as template-like objects. (more...)

Repost/Update: Jekyll Review

Jekyll is a BBC drama series about a modern day Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The story opens in the middle, as the protagonist, Dr. Jackman is dealing with his uncontrollable transformations. There's nothing in this series that knowing the original story can spoil for you. You meet Mr. Hyde in the very first episode. You are told about the original story very early on. Before we get to the spoilers, I want to recommend that you consider buying or renting the series. What follows will certainly ruin a few surprises.

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

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Dollhouse and Stargate: Universe Have Best Episodes of Season

This week's SG:U and Dollhouse were easily the best episodes of the current season so far. Dollhouse is in its second season, while Stargate is just starting off, but they've both had weak seasons so far. In the case of Dollhouse, they have had to cut back their budget due to ratings last season, and have some ground to cover from a DVD-only episode. Stargate just seems to have come out of the gate at a trot, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's part of their LOST-like model, but in my opinion, it was a mistake that's hopefully behind. (more...)