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Nick Cotter  //  Wired, tired, and tedious to know.

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May 5 / 1:56am

Facebook Disconnections

I've just been checking out Facebook Connections, as per a helpful EFF article. I thought I'd try removing the suggested pages. Here's what happens if you do:


Note, I didn't touch any of these settings here - I simply removed the suggested Pages (which were all incomprehensible autogenerated gibberish anyway - the reason I wanted to remove them in fact). But doing that removes things like my "Work and education".

Facebook sucks.
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Filed under  //  facebook   fail   privacy  

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Apr 7 / 2:55am

nothing is simple

Just spent an hour or two, spread about a couple of days admittedly, trying to get twitter to update my facebook status.

I used to the the Twitter app. This was working fine until a few days ago at least, when I realised that none of my tweets were showing up. I tried removing and re-adding it, but now it tells me that my twitter credentials are invalid...

So, let's try another app, this time Tweetpo.st. This appeared to work briefly, only it posted statuses to my wall, not my status. Couldn't figure out why at the time.

So I tried again, with Selective Twitter. This worked - sometimes. Often the status would only appear on the wall though.

After some digging, it turns out that Facebook has issues with links in statuses. If you disable the profile link option in Selective Twitter settings, it starts posting to your status every time. Unfortunately, making the same change to Tweetpo.st didn't make it work (or they are way over capacity, either way the time between updates is tending to infinity...)

Selective Twitter is good. It has the advantage that it actually works. However, it doesn't solve my actual problem, which is that I want to update my facebook status without any special settings. One has to include a #fb hashtag to make it update facebook. This is more than simply allowing one to control one's tweet distribution, it's requiring that level of attention. I just want to tweet from one place, without any extra tags, ignoring any retweets or replies, and have it end up as a facebook status.

Finally, I did find something that worked: Smart Twitter. It does what I need. We'll have to see how long it lasts though, there's definitely a lot of instability around facebook/twitter integration at the moment. This business with links is annoying - is it some clumsy security feature?
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Filed under  //  facebook   fail   twitter  

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Feb 26 / 1:57pm

Snake Oil Supplements

A cunning interactive chart showing the worthiness, or not, of different supplements, based on the evidence so far:

snakeoil_supplements_956.png
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Filed under  //  fail   food   health   science   visualisation   vitamins   win  

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Sep 10 / 2:01am

iphone wifi woes

As if I don't have enough on my plate this week, my iPhone has lost all wifi functionality. Since I use it as a remote and an entry system for my Remember The Milk "brain", and since there's next to zero cellular coverage where I live, the usefulness of this device has plummeted to more or less zero.

It started yesterday morning, when it started dropping the connection randomly. By the end of the day, it would only occasionally find the home (Apple) network, and when it did, it would often fail with "Unable to connect".

So I applied the 3.1 update which came out yesterday, which didn't exactly claim to address the issue, but did claim:

"Better iPhone 3G Wi-Fi performance when Bluetooth is turned on".

Naturally, after the update, it doesn't detect any wifi networks. Ever.

There's a HUGE discussion on the Apple support forum about this, which suggests the following remedies (among others):

  • reset your network settings
  • reset your phone back to factory settings
  • put it in flight mode for a while
  • turn off bluetooth, then wifi, then back on again (and various permutations of this)
  • change your MAC address and restore
  • put it in the freezer for 15 minutes (!)

I've tried resets, flight mode and bluetooth shenanigans, without success. I'm hesitant to put it into the freezer, because nobody seems to be able to explain clearly how this would work, and also it may invalidate the warranty. The iRecovery tool required to change the MAC address doesn't appear to work.

So tomorrow I'm taking it into an Apple store to see what's what...

The most annoying thing about all this is a useless device. The second most annoying thing is the utter lack of response by Apple. It's like this problem doesn't exist. After all, we're just consumers.
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Filed under  //  apple   fail   iphone  

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