Author Archive
Scuba diving in Tenggol
I must remember never to dive with a newbie and non-photographer group ever again. This is the second time I’ve made that mistake. They tend to go to very safe and shallow areas and move far too fast for patient photography.
So I didn’t get much photography done. Especially since the first day was overcast and I don’t have strobes. I also didn’t get to return to the part of the Sri Nakhoda wall that has all the nudibranches.
The visibility on the third day was very good and the first wreck in Tenggol bay was the clearest I’d ever seen it. Here was the giant moray hidden inside.
How to box-in a speeding driver
Once in a while, every driver will have the experience of having an aggressively-speeding driver tailing him or coming up too fast from the rear.
Two of the more common ways of dealing with such a driver is either to give way or to make a hard brake. The first is passive and doesn’t do any good. The second is inappropriate and downright dangerous.
Here is how I deal with speeding drivers: I execute a two-lane block to box them in. It’s a safer alternative and it gives me a warm feeling inside.
(The scenario I am about describe assumes that both you and the speeding driver are in the fast lane.)
- With the speeding driver tailing you, increase your speed until you approach another vehicle that’s ahead in the same lane. The speeding driver will continue to tail you, thinking that he is pushing you faster.
- Signal to move into the slower lane, if the slower lane is clear, then move in. The speeding driver will then speed up a bit to take your place, tailing the other vehicle in the fast lane.
- Increase your speed a bit as soon as you are in the slower lane. You will now be blocking both the vehicles in the fast lane from moving into your lane. The speeding driver is now effectively boxed in.
- Revel in delight at his pain. Every moment that you box him in will be agony to him. But do not make eye-contact with the speeding driver, not even in the side-view mirror. Or else he may figure out that it was all part of a plan.
At this point, one of three scenarios may play out.
- The vehicle that’s ahead of the speeding driver in the fast lane will speed up and pull into the slower lane to let the speeding driver pass.
- If you are on a highway that has three or more lanes, the speeding driver may execute an over-take from the slowest lane.
- If an approaching vehicle looms ahead of you in the slower lane, try to speed up and over-take both vehicles in the fast lane. Then continue to put some distance between you and the speeding driver. By the time the speeding driver has come up to your rear again, you will be in the correct position to execute another box-in. Repeat from Step 1 until you’re satisfied.
How to hide your Facebook friends list and status updates from everyone
Every day, the Facebook Help Center gets asked questions about hiding the friends list and status updates. But they nearly always go unanswered. So I’m providing the solution I use.
The trick is to operate a white list, not a black list.
- Create a new “Friend List”. A “Friend List” is what Facebook calls a sub-grouping of friends. Click on the Make A New List button in the Friends section. Let’s name the new list “Blocked”.
- Add all your friends to the new “Friend List”. Although there isn’t a “Select All” option to select all your friends at one go, Facebook makes creating a “Friend List” quite easy. Even if you have a few hundred, it takes only a few minutes to add all your friends by clicking on each picture. No need to type their names.
- Add the “Friend List” to Limited Profile. Go to Profile Privacy, scroll down to the Friends section, click on the Edit Custom Settings link. Type “Blocked” in the text box underneath Limited Profile. Then click “Okay” and “Save Changes”.
- Repeat Step 3 to hide your status updates. Under the Status Updates section of Profile Privacy.
The Caveat. This isn’t a perfect solution because Facebook isn’t designed to operate white lists. For instance, when you add new friends, they’ll be able to see your entire friends list and status updates until you manually add them to “Blocked”. So they may realise that you are hiding stuff.
But in most cases, it works. So give it a try.
TV commercial blog
My experiment with locating TV commercials around the internet to create blog content is working out surprisingly well. At first I thought I’d be posting a few a week. But it looks like there are so many good TVCs around the web that I can promise to post three new ones every week day. And I’ve been running it for over two months already. Of course it’s only my opinion of what is a good commercial. Feel free to submit your own, I’d love to find out more about what’s out there.
Wifi phones
This news about Philly’s metropolitan wifi LAN (MOWLAN) experiment isn’t new news. They’ve been talking about it for years. I came across the story a few years ago when I was researching a new idea that has yet come into fruition.
My idea was to eradicate cellphone networks and replace cellphones with wifi phones. Phones that work using VOIP.
I was inspired by the development of MOWLANS in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where there is currently the world’s largest MOWLAN. Wifi phones would allow calls to other wifi phones to become absolutely free and calls to land-line phones or cellphones anywhere in the world to be cut as much as 50%. Wifi phones use practically the same technology to communicate by voice as you do using Skype.
Wifi phones aren’t new. Currently, they work exclusively with hotspots like the ones at Starbucks or the ones being established by more and more offices. There are two things holding back the development of wifi phones.
First, there is the lack of network coverage. But with the creation of MOWLANS, this is becoming a moot point. Already, MOWLANS have been established in small towns in the US where cabling is harder to setup and maintain than an internet connection via satellite.
Second (and this was the problem with the establishment of wifi phones in Malayia), the cellphone companies are too powerful. They blocked any talk of wifi phones and the spread of MOWLANS using threats of legal action.
So far, the Philly story hasn’t spoken a single word about wifi phones. But I’m pretty sure that VOIP companies like Vonage are already on the ball.
Iamspeechless.com
You know what would be a really cool name for a blog about comment spam? Yup, Iamspeechless.com (or the other four-word variation Thismakesmespeechless.com). I get dozens of these comment spams a week with just those three words and a bunch of irrelevant links.
Akismet.com
I’m really happy that Ozh recommended Akismet.com to me. It’s a comment spam catcher for Wordpress. For the past couple months I’ve been getting more and more comment spam every day — the kind that looks like it was sent by a real person and doesn’t use any of the comment blacklisted words.
Akismet caught 26 for me in the last 24 hours. Zero false positives. If you aren’t using Akismet yet, all you need to do is sign up to Wordpress.com.
Theme feedback
If you tried the Problogger Clean theme for Wordpress and you had problems with it, please do leave us a comment.
We have had some comments by email about problems with IE. But we’ve had inconsistencies with replicating the problem. The comments have revolved around the sidebar being misplaced in the single post pages.
If you have had this problem, please let us know the browser and platform you are using. A screenshot would be most helpful. Thanks!
Immedi.at offers IM alerts for new RSS content
I thought this was pretty cool. But I was expecting Microsoft to be the first to introduce this feature. Immedi.at gives you a bookmarklet which you click on when the website you want has a auto-discoverable RSS feed (or click on the bookmarklet when you are on the actual feed url). But I find it inconvenient that Immedi.at doesn’t save my IM settings so I have to re-enter them every time I want to bookmark a new feed for IM alerts.
immedi.at helps you to keep track of online information as it changes. It sends you an instant message whenever any RSS or Atom feed you want to monitor changes. immedi.at works with all major IM carriers including MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, and AIM/ICQ.
Problogger Clean Theme for Wordpress
This theme is based on my own blog design. But in many ways, this theme release is better (and with neater mark-up too). It has been tested on Firefox, Safari and Windows IE. Seven things are significant and quite unique about it.
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Monetised
This is one of the first Wordpress themes that comes with Adsense blocks built in. The adsense blocks have been tested to have optimised positions and optimised colours.
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Featurised
Unlike other themes which come sans-features, this one has built-in features using a single functions file that comes with the theme folder. So it does not rely on any plugins.
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Corporatised
It is a bit of a serious theme with a very corporate colour scheme, not usually the kind preferred by personal bloggers.
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Search engine optimised
Heavy interlinking for search bots to easily find pages. And page titles are automatically customised to the post titles.
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Promotion optimised
There are a few features that allow you to promote yourself and allow visitors to the site to share it with others if they find it interesting.
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Stickitised
Ok, that’s not a real word, but it simply means particular attention was paid to the internal navigation. Links to other posts are placed prominently and throughout all the blog pages to invite visitors to click on them.
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Prioritised
The positions of the sections, colours and font sizes have been prioritised to the immediate communication needs of the first time visitor. The theme is space sensitive and is thus very content focused, keeping much of the important details at the top or near the top of the fold.
And those are also the reasons why the theme is called Problogger Clean. If you choose to use this theme, please do email me or leave a comment about it on the support forum. We’d really like to see how you use it so that we can get more ideas on improving themes.
Proceed to download Problogger Clean or view the documentation.
Openomy launches
I just received an email telling me that Openomy.com has launched. Openonomy gives its users the ability to store files of up to 1 gig total on its servers. (There’s no copyright policy on the site that I found so I assume it can be used to store all kinds of video and audio files.) You can add tags to them to describe each file.
But Openonomy isn’t just a file system with tags. If it was, it would just serve as your own private online file catalog. Openonomy also allows its Ruby-savvy users to write applications to manipulate and present the tag data from your file system as well as the file systems of other users. It’s kind of like Ning.com in that sense, but only with the ability to manipulate file tag data.
New Wordpress theme coming
Watch this space. On Wednesday, Ozh and I are releasing a new Wordpress theme. But this one is made for bloggers who are interested in having a monetised blog — the theme has Adsense ad positions and colours built into it (I think it’s a historical first, but I could be wrong). It also has numerous functions built into it too. It comes out on Wednesday.
Free Christmas present delivery
Research shows that most online retailers are expected to offer free delivery this Christmas. So if your online shop isn’t giving free deliver, try shopping elsewhere.
A survey by Shop.org and BizRate Research suggests 79% of online retailers will offer free shipping with conditions such as a minimum order.
Google user research by industry
In order to help advertisers make up their mind about using Adwords to promote their products, Google has provided some very useful consumer data for the usage of search engines according to industry. I was particularly interested in the search engine usage for travellers because I have a mate who is setting up a travel portal and I’ve been advising her to use Google Adwords to get to the top SERP.
PhpBMS - Invoice, scheduling software
This week, I’m testing out the new PhpBMS software. It’s an online system into which you enter all kinds of client details, including meeting schedules, deadlines and invoicing. It’s not bad for something which you want to use for viewing important client details at a glance. And it uses AJAX too.
http://kreotek.com/products/phpbms/
New blog: adblog.wordpress.com
Back in 1998, there was a very popular website called Adcritic.com that tapped into the idea that people actually like seeing TV commercials. They showcased new commercials, mostly from the US. The site became so popular that when it closed down, it became the poster child for Popularity Meltdown. Bandwidth costs money and video takes up a lot of bandwidth. Adcritic later rose again, but in a paid subscription model and never regained its earlier popularity.
The next generation of video content sites like iFilm.com learned from the Adcritic case and created partnerships with bandwidth providers. But video content sites became anathema to venture capitalists. Until this year.
With the increasing popularity of high quality digital video recorders and the rise of the mobile phone video recorders, video blogging started becoming the in-thing. The year of the video bloggers began in 2004 (or arguably somewhat earlier) as people began making their own video content and posting them on their blogs. Then sites like Youtube.com and Video.google.com burst onto the scene earlier this year and things never looked better for video blogging.
Now that I’m in the advertising industry, I wanted to re-look into TV commercial blogs. There were none. Advertising blogs up till now focused on posters and press ads and photos of ambient media — cheap low-bandwidth-sucking images. One of the issues was that there was no reliable video hosting that was cheap enough for the lone enthusiast to afford. But with user-submission sites like Youtube and Google Video, fans of TV commercials now have free and reliable hosting resources to make highlight their favourite commercials.
So I made adblog.wordpress.com, a brand new TV commercial blog. It showcases the commercials that I like, culled from sites like thespecspot.com, viralx.com and adforum.com. The videos are hosted on these sites and I blog links to them. Or else, if I find the video on other sites, I upload them to Youtube. (Nice thing about Youtube and Google Video is that they generate thumbnails of the video from screenshots.)
There is so much TV commercial content floating all over the internet right now that I can post about four commercials a day and still have left over content for the following day. I hope you enjoy the commercials as much as I enjoy blogging about them.