While in Hong Kong, I did some sightseeing with some American friends who were part of our group. They hadn’t been in Hong Kong before and my Hong Kong born friend had introduced them to the Octopus card so everyone in our group got this prox card (by paying a deposit), which is a convenient way to pay for public transportation as well as some goods in various shops like grocery stores. (On another note, I’m still waiting for Translink to become fully available in the San Francisco Bay Area.)

One day, our American friends were checking the balance on their card by waving their card using kiosks inside the MTR metro station. The information on the screen appeared in English. I thought I remember seeing the information appear in Chinese so I waved my card and sure enough, it was in Chinese. This might be the case from asking for the card in Cantonese whereas my American friend asked for it in English; it seems that the Octopus is configured based on the language you use with the MTR employee when getting the card. What a great user friendly low-effort idea!

My friend’s parents also recently moved to a new residence and the way they access the building is with a special Octopus card that also has their photo on it. My cousin tells me that the residences providing access control via the Octopus card are managed by the MTR corporation. Brilliant idea since most people in Hong Kong ride the MTR.

I flew on Cathay Pacific with their new seats and noticed that the user interface for the entertainment screens weren’t as intuitive as I thought it would be. It took some confusion to figure out why it wasn’t behaving as expected. While the remote was docked, I expected the arrows to work as oriented; the right arrow becoming the up function, the down arrow becoming the right function. I also witnessed my mom struggling with the selection logic despite the screen displaying text in Chinese. I wondered if they did any user studies before introducing this UI.

Joining the evil forces of the RIAA and MPAA, Hasbro has sued the makers of Scrabulous convincing them to pull their app from Facebook by legal bullying. I wonder if I can get to it while in Asia. In the meantime, according to gawker.com, it seems that you can still play it at their website… not sure how long that will last before Hasbro squeezes them there, too.

They should’ve worked with the app creators to acquire it rather than punishing Scrabulous fans which include the app’s creators. The creators made Scrabble cool again influencing a comeback even for the real wooden tiled game. At work, we even brought the board with the turntable up to our staff retreat because some of us had started playing Scrabulous on Facebook.

New York Times has an article on it - Game Over: Scrabulous Shut Down on Facebook.

The other day I was asked if I had a calculator. I had trouble coming up with an answer because I usually pull up the calculator on my computer… who uses a real calculator these days for small calculations? I searched through my stuff and lo and behold, I did have a calculator from high school:

I got the TI-85 because I was impressed one day by its predecessor, the TI-82’s infrared features. My friend had turned on the TV in the classroom one day with his introducing the potential for mischief and confusing and startling the high school teacher.

I thought I was so geekalicious in whipping out this fine specimen until I popped in some batteries and nothing on the screen appeared. I thought it needed a new backup battery or it was no longer working.

Then the guy who wanted the calculator said… “Remember, when you put in new batteries, you need to turn the contrast up by pressing the 2nd button and the up arrow?” and then he showed me.

Now that was super geekalicious.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I can’t remember the last time I saw a “hacked” site, but this is quite sad that a Turkish cracker has actually taken pleasure in defacing this hotel’s site.

If you pay for AT&T / SBC / Yahoo (whatever the hell they’re calling it today) DSL Broadband, you have a free Pro subscription to Flickr (normally $24.95/yr). Among the benefits, you get unlimited storage and unlimited uploads which means you can archive your full high resolution photos (and let friends download those high resolution photos).

This doesn’t seem to be well documented, so here’s how to get in on it if you already have a Flickr account:

1. Log into your Flickr account.
2. Go to the Flickr Account Transfer page.
3. Click on “Sign in with an existing Yahoo! ID”.
4. Enter your AT&T login (email address e.g. joeschmoe@sbcglobal.net) and AT&T password under “Yahoo! ID” and “Password”.

After you’re done, you should see the following note in your Flickr home page:

If you don’t have a Flickr account yet, you can probably link up to your AT&T DSL free offer by entering your AT&T DSL account in the Yahoo! ID field during the sign-up process.

If you have already paid for a Flickr Pro account, rumor has it that the end date for your subscription should be delayed until after you no longer have AT&T DSL.

And for those of you who like the cafe environment and computing on the go, you can use Wi-Fi at no charge at places like Barnes & Noble, airports, and McDonald’s with your AT&T DSL login [map]. I’ve always wondered… who hangs out and computes at McDonald’s anyway?

Before I got the Crackberry, I did some extensive testing of smartphones particularly the iPhone and Blackberry. Unfortunately, I didn’t happen to catch that you couldn’t easily set your “From” email address header. This has become a problem because for work I send emails from various email aliases and mailing list names, not just my regular username@workdomain.com.

I searched around for alternative Blackberry IMAP email apps, but couldn’t find a good/decent one. After some experimentation, I’ve discovered a workaround with the Blackberry default email app… somewhat. Unfortunately, it requires another account that has POP or IMAP capabilities since Blackberry Internet Service actually error checks to see if you have already previously set up the email account and will actually check for valid login information (so you can’t just configure your Blackberry email and trick it with the alias or mailing list as your login):

1. Set up another email address via Blackberry Internet Service (AT&T) and set the “Reply to” to your email alias or mailing list of choice which will change the “From” field. Set “Auto BCC” as your username@workdomain.com so you receive a copy you can file in your Sent messages folder.
2. When replying to a message, use the Forward feature which will allow you to change the “Send Using” option to one of your other email accounts set up on the device; just using the Reply option will not let you change the email account.
3. Modify the Subject line and replace “Fw” with “Re” to follow email convention. (optional)

Eudora has had the Personalities feature for quite sometime, Thunderbird calls it Accounts, but Mail.app still doesn’t allow you to configure identity settings. From what I’ve heard from colleagues who have iPhones, that’s also true on the iPhone email app. The iPhone also won’t let you choose the email account for replies (though it may let you change the email account for forwards).

Now I just wish it were easier to change the settings for the second email account on the Blackberry than via the web on the device. Or Blackberry could just implement the Personality/Accounts/Identity feature which would solve the problem completely.

Two weeks ago, the RIAA sent out another batch of 407 pre-litigation letters to students of 18 universities asking them to pay at least $3,000 for illegal file sharing.

The text of the pre-litigation letters has instructions on not spoiling evidence:

Now that you are aware that a lawsuit may be filed against you, there is an obligation for you to preserve evidence that relates to the claims against you. In this case, that means, at a minimum, the entire library of recordings that you have made available for distribution as well as any recordings you have downloaded, need to be maintained as evidence. Further, you should not attempt to delete the peer-to-peer programs from your system – though you must stop them from operating. For information on how to do this, you may visit www.musicunited.org.

The problem is that you go to the musicunited.org site and have to figure out where to go for the information. I dug around until I found that the information they were probably referring to was the Take It Off link which has their own instructions on how to turn off file-sharing in KaZaA. It also has:

Go to the University of Chicago’s Network Security group’s web page to see how to disable file sharing in other programs.

Unfortunately, that link on the Music United page is dead; University of Chicago’s comprehensive listing of instructions on how to disable file-sharing has moved to another page. I found it by doing a search for “disable file-sharing” on the University of Chicago site, something the RIAA shouldn’t expect everyone to do. The RIAA also advises ISPs/Universities to refer their users to the Music United site in their DMCA Complaints about copyright infringement.

Continue reading ‘RIAA Violates Internet Standards’

With multiple websites devoted to certain topics, I was looking for something like the croissanga plug-in that would automatically link to posts from other locations in one place. Tumblr has that capability, however, doesn’t have comments nor the flexibility of a self-hosted site.

I found a great Wordpress plug-in called FeedWordPress that allows you to import other RSS feed items as posts into Wordpress. It even has the option to turn comments off so that comments can accumulate in their original location. However, I found that my theme was displaying “Comments Off” for that setting so I modified the index.php so that it would be more descriptive to visitors (43 is the category ID for my posts imported via FeedWordPress):


<?php if (!in_category('43')) {
comments_popup_link('No Comments Yet»', '1 Comment', '% Comments »');
}
else { ?>
<a target="_blank" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>#comments">Comments Located Elsewhere»
<?php } ?>


I also appended the blog title to the post titles (in feedwordpress.php):