ReactionDynamics

Jan 5

A long exposure experiment with nothing but my mouse and computer lights

Jan 4

Not quite sure how to read this, something to do with the buoyancy of those globes fluctuating with temperature.

Jan 3

A quick shot of my new runners

Jan 2

I've decided to take a photo of something around my neck of the woods every single day for a year. By doing this I hope to learn a bit more about digital photography, and scene composition. The idea was inspired by the awesome John Worthington. My Camera is a hopelessly dated Kodak DX7590 5.0MP, but this should get an upgrade sometime this year.

My social media experience has been (is being) formed by interaction on several popular social networks. It changes daily, but there's a few things I've noticed that one should probably avoid doing. Of course, I don't wish to sound preachy, so take this with a pinch of salt. Social Media is what you make of it, after all. 1. Don't Use Your Service as a Megaphone Only This is a big one for me. The first word in Social Media is social, meaning creating and maintaining relationships and discussion around various content, users, friends, etc. If you don't reciprocate, how can you expect to keep those relationships, or stimulate discussion? Unless you're strictly breaking news, megaphoning will distance you from the people who actually like you. 2. Don't Lie With today's internet, people can access information about you with suprising ease, therefore it can sometimes be trivial to fact check people against their claims. Especially if you're looking for work, don't ever lie online, it may cost you that cushy new job. 3. Don't Be Intolerant People from all walks of life frequent social media networks. If you harbor any hateful or resentful feelings against people of any race, religion (or lack thereof) or sexual persuasion, it's best to leave it at home. There's nothing wrong with polite debate, but outright slander is an easy way to ensure your message is ignored, and your audience is thoroughly reduced. 4. Don't Spam Your Feeds Some companies and marketing individuals often request that you add them to your feed, appearing like they wish to be genuine contacts, then proceed to fill your feed with ad after ad. Others simply tweet link after link to their blog posts or content without break. In the case of Twitter at least, it's extremely hard as a follower to hide this activity without blocking. Spamming will almost always lead to a blocking / un-following and a bad reputation. 5. Don't Leave Your Profile/Bio Empty Believe it or not, people do wish to know a bit about you, and even visit your site. Make sure you fill in your profiles and bios with clear, concise information about who you are and what you do. If job-seeking, ensure you add a bit about your skills.

The Humble Morning Coffee

Earlier tonight I have been examining my food intakes in my current diet, and trying to figure out why for the last 12 months I haven't been able to make a significant dent in the 8-10kg of midriff fat I have remaining. At the end of it, something interesting emerged from crunching the approximate caloric numbers and may serve to explain the discrepancy - coffee. The coffee machine I use in work actually outputs two serves per (massive) cup, at around 500ml. With the milk we use, standard milk, not full cream, it's around 200 calories per shot which means per cup is around 400 calories simply in milk calories. If I have 2-3 of these cups every day, I've added around 2-3 standard meals to my diet simply by drinking these, or 800-1200 calories. With other foods consumed throughout the day, 3 days out of 7, I consume a bit more than I am burning. It means I'm not losing, I'm very slowly gaining. I guess the lesson is, if you're trying to lose weight, the cardinal rule is to output more than you consume and create a nutritional track record. Hence, if you do let yourself go, without realizing, the maths can show you the holes.

A brand new dedicated (non-official) Friendfeed podcast has begun, hosted by Friendfeed users John Worthington, Mark Wilson and Josh Haley. FFundercats promises to bring the best of the madcap chaos that is the Mona-era Friendfeed, and they've just completed their first 'cast. Check it out over at FFundercats: A FriendFeedic Convergence Of FFunderous Proportions

Friendfeed has just released a new feature called "Real-Time", a feature that enables you to browse your subscriptions posts live as they happen. This can be done either in the main window as standard, or by popping up a second 'mini-window', leaving you free to browse Friendfeed as you would normally. The benefits of the new feature are exciting. If so inclined, you can "real-time" any list or room you're in, instantly giving it a kind of chat functionality within that container (though replies to comments are not yet threaded in real-time mode), so rooms are now multimedia chat rooms. Unlike a chat room however, each item doesn't just consist of text, but items such as video, pictures, links and feeds. Additionally, communication happens instantly, but is also pushed to the top of the regular FriendFeed page making updates accessible to all "static" users, not just the "Real-Time" users. It's even possible to see the real time updates of a particular user and their friends! There are a few problems with this basic version of the new feature. Firstly is the classic problem of networks like Friendfeed, which is having many subscriptions. Although this can be managed in many ways on Friendfeed, with "Real-Time" it becomes worse if you've neglected lists and leave all your subscribers inside the "home feed", you will get rapidly flooded with updates. I wasn't actually able to like or comment on many updates because they scrolled by too fast, pushed ever downward by the flood. Lists do help with this problem, but also are a detriment if you don't want to isolate subscribers into secondary or tertiary lists. Secondly, there's no way to drill down or filter comments from standard posts, so updates are just a deluge of mixed content. This makes it difficult to follow the thread of conversation and comment on comments themselves, leading to confusion. Several features I'd like to see added to the Real-Time standard/mini-window:

• Keyword filtering, e.g show only updates containing the word 'lego' and so on
• Service filtering, eg. show me only Twitter updates, Last.fm updates
• Stickies, eg. dock a thread of interest to the top of the window, so it's not just pushed down as new updates occur, and also show a count of comments/likes as they occur on that stickied thread
• Threaded comments, allowing me to reply to a commenter directly.
• Noise control, say, show me only a certain amount of live updates per given time. Let me control this with a slider, AKA Socialmedian style.

All in all, it's a great new feature. I can forsee Friendfeed rooms for TV shows, debates, and events finding this feature particularly useful. Give it a whirl over here.

As I reach my 25th year of life, certain things have become apparent to me. I wouldn't call them truths, but lessons learned. I've learned that things take time. Gaining skills takes time, earning things takes time. Even learning about yourself is something done over a great deal of time. Sure, you can say, 'Ahh, but Mo, this is self-evident', but I disagree. I have been brought up in the now classic, money-centric, Western culture. An instant-gratification society, where everything is expected to happen 'now', as we want it; where battles to earn love, character and material objects are removed in the name of convenience, and hence are diminished in value. However, life has not been so rigid, the natural world doesn't support it. I used to think in straight lines, from A to B, courtesy of my upbringing. But like driving a car, the path is never from one goal to another is littered with detours, hazards, traffic. Leap-frogging these challenges, these personal battles, enforces a detrimental frame of mind - I'd call it 'unwarranted expectation'. When my innate expectations weren't met, I'd be depressed, confused, rejected and angry. Time after time, this led to missed opportunities, bad moods and even self loathing, but looking back I've learned my lesson. Dropping ridiculous expectations, learning the value of earning and enjoying the journey is far more fulfilling.

Sweetcron, an open source lifestreaming blog software package developed by Yong Fook, has been released.

Sweetcron is a simple package you can use to aggregate your socical networking and blog services together, such as Twitter and Plurk. Prominent features include a neat default theme, a basic blog function, easily customized php/css themes, tagging, and a simple to use administration interface.

Sweetcron is simple enough to leave alone. It will happily aggregate your feeds together in a neat visual fashion and is tidy enough to be used as a simple blog.

View my 30 minutes of Sweetcron customization here at RD Download Sweetcron (Currently version 1.02 beta) Installation instructions Further Support