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Showing posts from July, 2013

I'm blogging only on Google+ in August

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I'm reading Google+ tonight, and one of my favorite tech bloggers, Mike Elgan, is encouraging bloggers to blog exclusively on Google+ for the month of August. And I figure, why not? So, during August, you can find my blogs only on my Google+ profile.  Feel free to comment on them there, share them, etc. Or ignore them, like you do here. It's OK. I won't be hurt. Who knows? If it works out well, I may retire Blogger and continue blogging only on Google+. Or, Google could just merge the two and give Google+ some RSS feed capability and more ability to share automatically to Facebook and Twitter and such....

A post in which I embed a tweet announcing embedded Facebook posts

Social media cross promotion at its finest! Except maybe if I'd taken an Instagram video of me making this post in which I embed a tweet... Today, we are beginning to roll out Embedded Posts. https://t.co/dM2LuZCw0k — Facebook (@facebook) July 31, 2013

Ranting: Google Chrome's Notification Center a big fat failure

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Anyone who has followed me on Twitter of late has seen me melt down a few times over Google Chrome's new "notification center" , which is supposed to bring rich text notifications to your desktop via the Chrome browser. It's a great idea. At least, it would be if it worked. Or, at least, worked for me. Because it doesn't work for me. At all. I've set all the Chrome://flags properly. I've reinstalled the browser. I've deleted and reinstalled the browser. I'm currently on a version 29 beta version, thinking that might work. Nothing. I get no notifications. OK, that's not entirely true. Once - ONCE! - I managed to somehow get Gmail to give me a popup notification that new mail had arrived. But to do that, I had to have Gmail's desktop notification enabled (an entirely separate procedure than the supposedly built-in rich-text notifications) and leave Gmail open in my browser. But regular notifications from the new notification center? They

The Great Vegas Getaway

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I didn't blog this trip because we were having too much fun and I didn't make the time in the evenings but I did do a video of it. Pictures to come as well when we get home in a couple of days.

IFTTT mobile app opens up new world of automation on your phone

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The folks at If This Then That ( IFTTT ) have released an iOS app that can put some serious automation power behind routine tasks on your iPhone. The concept behind If This Then That is pretty simple, and IFTTT has now made it even more simple with essentially push-button operations: An action triggers another action, all on its own. For instance, one of the "recipes" (as they're known) that I've set up is to automatically upload any photo on my iPhone camera roll that gets put into the "Flickr" album to, naturally, Flickr. This was one I found on the IFTTT website and I activated it using my own Flickr account info. Painless. It was basically something I was doing on my own manually every couple of days, but now it's all automated to work in the background. All I have to do is move the new photos into the Flickr album in my camera roll and IFTTT does the rest. Another one that I created myself takes pictures uploaded to Instagram and tweet

Instagram now lets you embed pictures & video on your website

Kudos to them for this. The embed code is next to the photo on their desktop interface. One more reason why Instagram is better than Vine.

Day trip to Jasper National Park

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Jasper National Park , a set on Flickr. It's kinda ridiculous that, despite the fact we live 4 hours from Jasper, we haven't been there in 10 years. But thanks to some visiting friends from Manitoba, we had a good excuse to head to the mountains for the day. Much fun was had by all, capped off by taking the tram up Whistler Mountain, and then three of the five of us making the 1,000 metre hike from the trap to the top of the mountain.