sxa's Technical Musings

I often tweet during live Formula 1 motor racing. Usually before each race starts I put up a disclaimer like this to warn followers I might fill up their timeline with F1 information. In order to try and reduce the impact of that for non-F1 fans, I've created a second twitter account, @F1sp . This account is NOT going to be used to post tweets (which stops me needing from switch between accounts), but rather to hide F1 tweets from people who aren't interested. How will this work? Well all of my F1 tweets will be prefixed with @F1sp. That means that unless you follow @F1sp as well as my @sxa555 account, you won't see them, because twitter will automatically hide them from your timeline. Bear in mind that if you follow me via a list for my F1 tweets, you'll need to add the @F1sp account to that list as well. I don't expect to post much in the F1sp account, it's purely there do give me the ability to 'hide' F1 tweets from those who are not interested. ...

[Short link if you need it: http://goo.gl/v6AkX ] This seemed like a good time to post this draft I've had given that Facebook is in the process of announcing some new privacy changes including tagging approvals and the ability to reset visibility of a post after you've posted it (instead of having to withdraw and repost as at present) and they are, of course another step in the right direction. There is a lot of information on the net from people who say that facebook isn't that great at privacy, and giving you control over your own data. And, well they're often right as I've said before . However there are a few things that I've heard people say that Facebook should provide, but they actually already do (and could do before Google+ before anyone starts). Here's a list, and how to access them (at the time of posting - they may move it of course - the last one's moved since I posted this!): Have your stream set to view just people in a list ...

[Short link if you need it: http://goo.gl/2sKkp or retweet me ] So where do I start with this one? You all know the story that broke on July 5th 2011 about News International's UK tabloid newspaper the News Of The World (Henceforth NoTW) having "hacked" the phone of the missing Milly Dowler in 2002. Now I won't condone interfering with a police investigation and I agree that a subcontractor of the paper deleting voicemails was seriously out of line and that those individuals responsible need to be brought to account for it. But the reaction to it worried me and I believe the majority of the public got it wrong. I seemed to be one of the only people who wasn't supporting a boycott. But why? (Note,. other than in the references section, most links are to twitter posts I made at the time - this isn't just a perspective with the benefit of hindsight) For one thing, since I haven't heard otherwise, I can only assume that the 'voicemail hacking' was don...

Shortened link to this page if you need it - http://goo.gl/xqWUZ or on twitter feel free to retweet me instead . (This article split into two sections - one an overview and comparison with alternatives, second a bulletted list of observations/things to be aware of about how it works) feel free to skip to below the line if you don't want all the waffle!) I've been playing around with Google+ for a few days now, and so far I like it. They've got everything just about right, and unlike Diaspora they've got the project live in a reasonable state, although currently still limited access while they iron out the bugs (contrary to other people I think that's a good thing, and that inviting 'the masses' at the moment would be bad if they come to it believing it's a production ready facebook competitor at a time when things might not work - I think Diaspora's probably suffered a bit from that) The 'hangouts' are cool and allow multiple person videoco...

I've blogged on some of facebook's stupid changes before and there have been plenty of concerns over some of the things that they've done over time regarding privacy options. In truth most of them are reasonably valid concerns but let's be honest, they are a business and the way they are going is understandable regardless of whether or not you agree with it because they have a huge captive audience. However some of the things that they do is just purely nonsensical from the perspective of actually enabling users to put the restrictions they want in place. Despite them making strides forward with the settings, they still have glaring holes. This article will show you some of the things the just don't seem to have got right: Control of posting from external apps If you give an external app access to post to your wall, then it's impossible to set the visibility of that app's posts to anything other than your default visibility. If you use an app t...

Shortened link to this page if you need it - http://goo.gl/o2xXf or on twitter feel free to retweet me instead I've had several mini-rants on this topic before and it was one of the points in my "Antisocial Networking" blog post (also linked from my twitter bio) but I feel that the number of problems associated with protected twitter accounts deserve their own blog entry. So here's a list of scenarios/issues with protected twitter accounts and are all the reasons why I hate protected accounts, and generally don't follow any more of them: On the plus side I won't be able to see any negative replies from people who tries to disagree with me and send a tweet @sxa555 from a protected account ;-) (As an primer, ignoring the protected account issues here is a quick guide to @reples and DMs in general if you're not too familiar with it already) You can't find posts from protected accounts during a search . One of the great things about twitter is...

Shortened link to this page if you need it - http://goo.gl/5qFCj I posted an article a while back about how useless the general public are at reporting news. Twitter is often hailed as a way of the public spreading news, but the problem is that you have no idea where rumours started. Journalists (well, some of them - and you can probably figure out which ones have integrity) at least have a vague idea about how to source information reliably. It's their job to do so. And most members of the public suck at it. For this reason, we need journalists to do their job. Background info Right, superinjunctions. A standard injunction prevents the media releasing details of something. A superinjunction prevents them from even mentioning that they can't talk about it. There are two problems with this: Firstly it is country specific. We are in a globally connected world. If you gag the UK media from talking about something that doesn't prevent someone outside the UK from publishing it,...