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Showing posts from January, 2015

Kitchen creations

Spotify gets annoying

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I was listening to the Christian worship group Hillsong on Spotify the other day when the service suddenly played me a Katy Perry song. And then another top 40 pop song. And then I finally got back to Hillsong. Weird, I thought. Normally, Spotify intersperses songs into its shuffle playlist (for freeloaders like me) with songs that are at least related - by the same artist, or in the same genre. So what I want to listen to gets interrupted but at least by something that isn't a jarring departure from what I chose. I accepted it as the price to pay for not paying the price for Spotify's premium service. On my drive home from work Friday afternoon I'm listening to the new Steve Taylor album Goliath. I get through 2 songs and then MILEY CYRUS plays. OH COME ON NOW! Then another Steve Taylor song and suddenly: Coldplay. So I switched to my Music app and started listening to other things. Of course, I could pay the $10 a month to get the full service and skip Spotify i

Blogging platform showdown: Google+ versus Blogger

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As I am wont to do from time to time (gee, that sounds familiar), I've switched up my blogging routine with a focus more on this blog on Blogger than my Google+ site. As you'll see from the embedded Google+ post below, that's a change up from my routine last August. But the fact that I can embed that post here is one of the reasons why I've gone back to Blogger over Google+ - it's way more flexible. I can embed tweets, Instagram or Flickr photos, public Facebook posts, hyperlink to my heart's content, upload my own photos, videos, use Twitter cards, draft and save posts, schedule posts, etc. Did I mention embedding tweets? I love embedding tweets. Retweet if you think trolling for retweets is a silly idea! — Mike Jenkinson (@MikeJenkinson) January 8, 2015 Noted tech blogger  +Mike Elgan  was the person essentially responsible for me using Google+ as a blogging tool, and it is a good, straight forward service: text and a photo (or photos) or a YouTube

Sorry, Canada, no Twitter analytics for you

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At least, not yet. With no real fanfare before Christmas, Twitter let it be known that they now provide built-in analytics in their iOS app that lets you track just how unpopular ... er, how great your tweets really are. Yeah, that's the ticket! The analytics first popped up for me when I was on vacation in Maui a couple of weeks ago, back when they were supposedly in the slow roll-out period. I thought I got lucky and it hit my account early. When I came back to Canada, the analytics disappeared, and then briefly reappeared for me one day. Then they disappeared again. I posted about it on Twitter and got this response: @MikeJenkinson Twitter has scaled back the analytics to a U.S. only rollout, So VPN maybe using a U.S. IP? http://t.co/ogGJetLmA0 — Ross Hammond (@RossGraphitas) January 6, 2015 And this was confirmed by a Twitter engineer: @LawLeague yes we had some issues with global rollout. U.S. Only now, global very soon! Hang tight! — Ian Chan (@chanian) Ja

We saw whales in Hawaii ... and you won't believe what happened next!

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Now that we're back from the Winnipeg portion of our Christmas vacation, I have time to post some stuff from the Hawaii portion of our Christmas vacation. And use a totally Facebook inspired click-bait headline to bring you here. Here's a video of our zipline trip that Google+ made with their Auto Awesome feature. Basically, I uploaded all my pictures and videos, and ROBOTS did this. And this is our vacation wrap-up video, full of whales, and food and more whales, and ziplines. For those who just want whales, here's raw video of the "competition pod" that we saw while whale watching. It was an amazing experience.