Excursions

I finally watched Justice League and I am left with a strange feeling. Sure, the movie is a drag, but it’s a lot better than recent attempts from DC. A lot less gloomy, peppered with few light moments. Never thought I would rate a DC movie same as a Marvel (latest Avenger) one.

Watching the hands-on videos of pixel Slate has been a very strange experience. Every frame suggests how laggy the ChromeOS platform is — but I have hardly seen anyone mention that. Is it not apparent while using it in actual? All impressions have been overtly positive.

I am loving this new addition to the Discover tab - now I can browse all the emojitags right here. How did I miss this update? Kudos @manton for making the m.b webapp better every day.

I don’t understand Google’s call screening feature. How does it solve the spam calls problem? Don’t I have to be equally attentive when the call arrives? I don’t think the problem is I have to receive the call, problem is I get the call in the first place.

Rather I am more distracted reading transcripts and making decisions. It looks to be targeted at the automated machine-driven calls. Human spammers/scammers will still have to be handled.

In most cases, the spam calls I get start with a person, a human, asking if it indeed is me. Then goes on to specify the call is about some information related to my account or a service I am using. And then comes the “offer for you” part. I tend to disconnect right at first step when someone wants to know if me is indeed me.

What’s to say the call screening will transcribe something like “This is xyz from abc bank and this is a service information call.”?

Anyway, no doubt Google has a great technology at its hands and the showcase via this use case sounds a lot coherent than the general duplex demo we saw during I/O. I am just perplexed how everyone seems to be already sold that this solves the problem which it isn’t even targeting.

Update: The post isn’t intended to be judgemental of the feature, rather it was, to be frank, in response to the constant perspective of “this is so useful, I need it now” from all around. But I could hardly understand why. John Gruber’s this comment finally triggered this.

man oh man, do I want that feature (Call Screening) on iOS.

Even Sarah Perez described the problem with scam calls succinctly in her opinion piece at TechCrunch.

Nearly half of all cellphone calls next year will be from scammers. And their tactics have gotten much worse in recent months.

They now often trick people by claiming to be the IRS, a bank, government representatives, and more. They pretend you’re in some sort of legal trouble. They say someone has stolen your bank card. They claim you owe taxes. Plus, they often use phone number spoofing tricks to make their calls appear local in order to get recipients to pick up.

I get it, it’s a problem. But Call Screening solves it how? I could not find the answer to that question in the whole post.

So Samsung has launched a quad camera smartphone in Galaxy A9? This madness needs to stop - these devices may be becoming smarter by day, we humans are running opposite fast on that scale. This is some crazy, mindless, shit-sticking race in play.

I have realised that I am being a lot more “social” on web these days. And I think m.b and efforts I put to enable the IndieWeb principles on my blog played a big role, to just open my mind to express more. I put down some of my thoughts.

Update: David has added a new function “to step around the issues micro.blog was having with images in Blot’s RSS feeds”. This change should allow using the Blot’s caching feature.

For all the defaults templates, David has already deployed the fix. So you should have the issue sorted without any update. If you have a custom template, to enable this change, wrap the html component around with the function absoluteURLs in your RSS file. For example, if you use html, use the below block in your description feed of your rss file (typically feed.rss).

{ {#absoluteURLs}} { { {html}}} { {/absoluteURLs}}

When you publish a micro post (one without title) on Blot which has images in it, Blot uses a CDN by default to store for these images. Though it may be helpful overall in blog performance, it causes some issues while interoperating with micro.blog. You will find that these images are not visible on its timeline.

It’s a known issue where micro.blog is unable to parse these images. To enable the images posted on Blot to appear on micro.blog timeline, make following changes with the configuration.

1. You can disable the blot cdn. This option is available on the Blot settings page under Settings > Services > Cache And Optimize Images. This makes the images be served directly under your blog’s domain. This change does not take much time to propagate, you will see the change reflect in the url for the images.
2. In addition, by default (in most themes), images may have relative urls. For example, you might just put \_images\<IMAGE_NAME> while adding the image to the post. However,these relative paths are again not parsed by micro.blog well (though most feed readers do it well). Anyway, to overcome this problem just include the complete url of the image while adding it (for example, http://<BLOGNAME>/<PATH>).

These changes should be enough to allow your images to be visible at m.b timeline.

Had a brilliant ambience at the bistro we visited today. Perfect for a chatty evening with family.

It’s been some time now that I have started again to regularly write, post my thoughts. Long and short. One of the key reason for this change in my behaviour, my returned inclination to write has been the changed follow behavior. I am reading interesting posts that make me think, that make me question my beliefs. And for each such question, I have a reaction — a post.

It is all thanks to the community at Micro.blog for convincing me that every post, irrespective of how short it is, is worth putting out there. It is a way to be social. I was doing so on other social networks like Twitter anyway - through all the likes, tweets and retweets. Why not take it to the next level and do the same on, as Brent Simmons had called it, the social network - the web?

But if you think of the years 1995-2005, you remember when the web was our social network: blogs, comments on blogs, feed readers, and services such as Flickr, Technorati, and BlogBridge to glue things together.

And so that is what I have been doing. Reading from the web, reacting on the web - my website.

IndieWeb also played a huge part in helping me to go social on web though. It allowed me to post to my site my reactions to what I was reading on web. I could easily like a post, reply to it or even repost part of it and that in itself became a new post on my site - I called them the social posts. So as long as I had the posts tagged with appropriate microformats and was able to send a webmention to a site, I was interacting on web.

I need not be part of any siloed platform, I need not shout. All that mattered was I expressed. And just with that, I have been the most social I ever was online.

Watching the #MadeByGoogle event live today would be like going to that one movie which you’ve discussed and debated and heard narration for from many folks, those you know and those you don’t. It’d be a real event if Google manages to surprise anyone. Would still watch though.