Disqus - Latest Comments for Andy Piper

Re: Apple – Nike + iPod – Run

Andy Piper — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 02:02:30 -0000

If you have an newer iPhone or iPod Touch, it already has the Nike+ software on it (I think it's in the 3G and 3GS) - go into Settings and scroll down, you should see Nike+ listed with your other apps at the bottom and can enable it in there.

Re: How to Embed YouTube Videos Into Blog Posts

Andy Piper — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 03:59:53 -0000

Hi Erin. This won't work on Wordpress.com blogs though, only on Wordpress blogs that you have hosted yourself. On WP.com you need to use the shortcode. There's information on how to do this over in their help section.

Re: Binder Hugs!

Andy Piper — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:01:34 -0000

I should mention that people should feel free to get in touch if they want to know how I made the site, but there's an overview at http://andypiper.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/simpl... where I've described using Tumblr for a simple photo site, minus the group submissions feature.

Re: Binder Hugs!

Andy Piper — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:59:40 -0000

Way cool Erin - here's hoping that people use the Submit tab to add their own images :-) will have to mention this on our podcast next week :-)

Re: 6 Reasons Your Blog Traffic Might Be Declining

Andy Piper — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:02:39 -0000

Actually you need to click the problogger.net link underneath the image to reach the article, clicking the image just shows the image.

Re: Nokia’s N96 suckiness doesn’t end with the firmware

Andy Piper — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 12:11:02 -0000

I agree that is not at all what I came to expect as a Nokia user... although I've not actually owned one in ~3 or 4 years now. It does mirror my experiences with Blackberry though - taking the battery out, putting it back in and rebooting, just causes the Pearl to take an AGE to start and "verify security software" or whatever it's supposed to be doing. I wonder if this is a modern malaise of mobile phones - slow(ish) processors and bloated OSes (and yes I do include the iPhone in that)

BTW you have a URL dahowlett.tv at the start of the video - doesn't actually seem to work though?

Re: New tools are killing my screen real estate

Andy Piper — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 12:38:53 -0000

I'm finding Spaces invaluable. Mail on one desktop, multiple browser windows on another, RSS reader on another, iTunes... etc. Nice way of separating things. Set a hot corner for switching to the main Spaces view, drop the pointer to a corner and zoom out. Works great for me (leaving Twhirl etc. on all desktops).

I think that something like SeesmicAir is going to help me to consume that site. The base UI is terrible.

Why NetNewsWire *and* Vienna?

Re: Experimenting with Twitter

Andy Piper — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 02:47:47 -0000

Well firstly I'm not Roo :-)

To be honest, the Scoble thing yesterday almost entirely passed me by. I actually wasn't picking anyone out when I commented on the chattiness - if anything I was realising that 50% or more of my tweets yesterday were @replies.

As for the ability to actually get this level of interactivity, that's a very cool use of Twitter. It doesn't fit in to the models that people have been identifying, but one of the nice things about the simplicity of Twitter is that it suddenly turns out to lend itself to these new kinds of interaction.

Re: Bizarre blocking behaviour

Andy Piper — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 01:20:16 -0000

Thanks for the linkage, Dennis. Of course I do carry a 3G card so I'm not entirely subject to the network access whims of the organisations I engage with... but it doesn't help when I'm recommending blogs and sites to the folks I go to work with, and their own access is restricted...

Re: The road to Macdom

Andy Piper — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 04:29:40 -0000

Since we seem to have focussed in on the issue of my neighbours' PC... I didn't waste more than an hour or so trying to "clean" the machine before taking it into custody (carrying it downstairs!) and going for a reinstall. Fact is that it did still take an entire evening to reinstall; patch; apply SP2; repatch; apply IE 7, WMP 11, etc; repatch... and of course install the basics like Firefox, Flash, Java, etc. Oh, and there was indeed the effort to recover personal data onto an external drive that I could then restore it later.

Again, I'll be interested to see what happens with Leopard. I'm assuming that the upgrade will be fairly straightforward. I like the fact that OS X can easily backup an entire OS image to another device, and then I can choose what to boot from... something that I've had to use something like PartitionMagic to achieve under XP in the past.

Re: The road to Macdom

Andy Piper — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 01:52:34 -0000

I switched in February, and you're right, I wouldn't look back. The XP incident you refer to here was the result of some neighbourhood tech support where I was fixed someone else's borked machine... mind you, after that experience, I wouldn't mind if I never have to go near the XP install sequence again. I assume Leopard will be an easier proposition.

There appears to have been a wave of switching in the last 6 months or so - Luis is just one of my colleagues who has made the change.

Re: Vodafone roaming charges – ouch!

Andy Piper — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 17:05:33 -0000

Seems all of the networks are as bad as one another. Here's a cautionary tale from a T-Mobile customer.

Re: Killing ideas with scary monsters

Andy Piper — Fri, 25 May 2007 03:46:33 -0000

I read that report as I stood in the queue for security at the airport yesterday. Incidentally I haven't used WAP much, and it's a measure of how bored I was (and how long the wait was) that I bothered - and it is painful.

My thought was - well, a lot of corporates have guidelines for bloggers anyway - and hell, most of us have some common sense. Annoying non-story.

Re: Understanding Twitter

Andy Piper — Fri, 11 May 2007 09:38:04 -0000

Right, I guessed you were looking at the public timeline. 99.95% of that will be inconsequential to your interests. Go with James' suggestion. And you could always create and account and add friends just to create a feed for the individuals you are interested in... you don't have to send updates yourself... initially :-)

Re: Understanding Twitter

Andy Piper — Fri, 11 May 2007 05:51:40 -0000

What are you actually monitoring in Twitbin - the public timeline, James, or your own home page of those you've subscribed to?

Personally I've found it useful for social arrangements / location awareness, technical support, status broadcasting, micro blogging... but you are right that it can waste time in a meaningless way. I try not to follow everything and treat it very aysnchronously, only dipping in at a point in time and not responding to everything I've either seen or missed in a 24 hour period. Others are more... committed....

Re: Seeing new Vistas

Andy Piper — Wed, 09 May 2007 04:15:52 -0000

Like Al, I guess I'm unlikely to go down the BootCamp route since I'd want to remain in the one environment. The guy sat next to me is running Parallels right now and has an XP taskbar and Word Window overlaid on his OS X desktop, and that looks neat... if I could do the same with Live Writer, that would be good.

Basically Live Writer is the only thing I want on OS X at the moment - I don't particularly miss anything else from Windows, apart from some of the development tools I'd need to have access to professionally (which is largely our own problem for not producing OS X versions, and that's more than likely a volume/testing/install base issue, at a guess).

I can't put my finger on exactly what WLW gets right that ecto gets wrong. Certainly the choice of the editing modes is great; the fact that it doesn't cannibalise any HTML I enter manually; it leaves style intact; it has nice plugins... yeah, there are a bunch of things really. Would be nice to know what comes next for ecto.

Re: MOOning

Andy Piper — Fri, 04 May 2007 08:29:00 -0000

MOO are superb. As David notes, their website is famously usable, easy, and their service has been second-to-none. I'm onto my third box of Minicards and I've just got hold of some Notecards, too. Like you, I'm finding that people smile to get a MOO card as opposed to a regular business card. They really deserve all the success that they get.

Re: A Leopard with a wiki

Andy Piper — Fri, 04 May 2007 08:24:22 -0000

This is actually extremely interesting. I guess one question I still have about Apple is about their penetration in the corporate server space... but this is a very nice feature that I hadn't been aware of. I'm intrigued to know what the underlying technology is.

Of course, Leopard (client) also includes Ruby on Rails, I believe.

Re: Are you a GIT?

Andy Piper — Fri, 04 May 2007 08:15:00 -0000

Based on the Technorati tag, I'm going to assume that you blogged this with ecto and accidentally ended up with the default new tag :-)

Re: Scrotal computing

Andy Piper — Tue, 01 May 2007 17:31:09 -0000

I really wouldn't miss the OS, crashes etc. - but despite the niceness of ecto, Windows Live Writer still works better... it seems to fulfil the "ease of use" and "simple to get started" promise of the Mac more than the Mac apps do, in fact :-(

Re: IBM impresses with no Blue Suit

Andy Piper — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 01:18:18 -0000

James was right, you do blog (and evidently also answer calls) at obscene hours of the morning / night ;-)

Great to meet you in person, and thanks for the invitation. I'm sure we'll do it again.

(incidentally it's Richard Brown, Gendal is his middle name, thus the blog title)

Re: London soiree: James and I

Andy Piper — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 10:19:18 -0000

Unlikely to make 5pm, but might make it somewhere between 5.30 and 6. Will let you know.

Re: Being a laggard

Andy Piper — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 05:01:18 -0000

Hi Dennis, thanks for your interest in my post!

I'm impressed that anyone is running Windows 3.1 now - don't think it will get very far on the Internet, but you're right: if it does what is needed, then why not?

What's wrong with IM or Skype or a real meeting? Absolutely nothing.

I found the interesting part of the Twitter thing in Stephen O'Grady's original post, where he refers to James Governor's concept of Declarative Living. The other very interesting post that ties into this is one I found via Ted Demopoulos yesterday, Seth Godin on Web 4.

Twitter strikes me as a little too much, but perhaps only because I've not got that far yet.

Re: Selling Music Directly To The Fans, But At What Price?

Andy Piper — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 18:56:49 -0000

I paid about twice that - £5. It's still a cheap price for the UK... my justification being essentially the same as yours, and since I wasn't getting particularly high bitrate MP3s with no album art or embedded lyrics of anything (and I can download good DRM-free albums with artwork etc. from CDBaby for around the same price, or less).

It's an interesting experiment. On last week's Dogear Nation podcast they mentioned this thing called TuneCore which might be an attractive option for independents who want to release music... no idea what it is like though.

Re: Album: Fantasies

Andy Piper — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:16:43 -0000

One of my friends who moved to Canada recently mentioned these guys and I picked up their album last week - I'm enjoying it too! Couldn't find it on eMusic in the UK though :-(

Re: Twitter limiting followers to 2000 (Scripting News)

Andy Piper — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 04:55:15 -0000

Well it's variable anyway - Scoble is on 21,000. The number is crazy anyway.

Re: Beware of Dixons Tax Free shopping - Digging in a Habari sandpit

Andy Piper — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 18:25:57 -0000

Did you ever get a response to the email? I'm intrigued. The answer is to carry an internet-capable phone or other device and compare the prices on the spot. I don't have one, so I always have to remember to look prices up on the net when I get home...

Re: detailed analysis of referer logs - Digging in a Habari sandpit

Andy Piper — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 18:34:22 -0000

An analysis of search terms is already pretty fun. What about the more obscure ones?

I'm subscribing as of now...

Re: I am a Virgin (again) - Digging in a Habari sandpit

Andy Piper — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 06:03:41 -0000

Maybe it is just me, but "Watch it, surf it, talk it, walk it." sounds remarkably like the current Sky advertising for their TV, phone and broadband services.

Re: UK broadsheets narrow view of syndication - Digging in a Habari sandpit

Andy Piper — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 05:21:54 -0000

It's worse than just the names of the Times feeds being questionable. I find that the content is mixed up, too. For instance, i frequently see political or sports-related stories in the Entertainment feed. They responded to my feedback to say that they are addressing the problems "as a matter of urgency", but I don't see any evidence of that.

Nice round-up.

Re: Nofollow Killed Google Social Graph API 3 Years Ago

Andy Piper — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:59:07 -0000

I actually find that sticking my Technorati profile in there makes a complete mess of the results for how my sites are connected, since I write for some group blogs so I end up seeing data for other people who share those blogs. It actually works OK for my own connectedness - in fact, as you say, it is quite effective based off of the Technorati profile, but that's likely because I have things like Twitter in there as well. So I guess the net is that it's an interesting experiment, but not very useful. I also can't easily instrument links as being "me" on WP.com, unless I go and hack at my pages I suppose. Oh well.

Re: Nofollow Killed Google Social Graph API 3 Years Ago

Andy Piper — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:59:07 -0000

Re: Web 2.0 Expo Berlin: Better Social Media Plumbing

Andy Piper — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 04:36:42 -0000

Nice photos, Adam, and a good write-up.

As I commented over on the Crowdvine page for the session:

"One question I'm now pondering is that as the web evolves towards flow, and the apps go in the same direction - is there a danger of a gap forming between people's ability to deal with flowing information (continuous partial attention etc) and be productive, and the tools and web of flow itself?"

Oh, there I go fragmenting the comments and stuff :-)

Re: #TweetupLondon

Andy Piper — Mon, 18 May 2009 06:40:12 -0000

Any idea what happened to all the pictures taken? I've seen some from Jason but haven't tracked down the others yet.

Re: Touch-to-focus on the iPhone 3GS

Andy Piper — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:36:02 -0000

Agreed. It's very nice. I wonder how long before DSLRs sprout liveview touchscreens with a similar capability...

Re: Bluenity: It Only Gets Better

Andy Piper — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:04:45 -0000

Wow... total FAIL huh!

Re: British Computer Society struggles to use computers

Andy Piper — Tue, 13 May 2008 04:35:27 -0000

LOL - scary....

Re: 8 Facts About Me Meme - Jason Cartwright

Andy Piper — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:01:26 -0000

Wow. I only just caught this... evidently I missed the tagging when I saw the original post, and the link only just showed up in my blog dashboard.

Um... I kinda dislike memes too. I might have a think about this one, but I'm kind of guessing that I'm not even going to be able scrape up 8 facts, let alone 8 people to tag.

Kind of amused that I'm the opposite on flying / travelling - absolutely fine once I'm up there but I tend to dislike the process of getting through the airport and hotels and all that stuff associated with travelling.

Re: Blogging Tweets

Andy Piper — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 04:40:36 -0000

Hi Whitney, Heidi recommended your blog to me as I was following the IA Summit remotely.

There's a Wordpress plugin called Twitter Tools which will automatically publish your tweets as blog posts but it will only do a daily digest, I think... not exactly what you wanted here, on a per-session basis.

Re: Why I Don’t Have an iPhone (but might someday)

Andy Piper — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:33:16 -0000

Well this is an interesting analysis. I recently had a BlackBerry Pearl foisted on me, and I can say that I'm unimpressed - I think my speed of typing was faster on a traditional phone SMS text keyboard with predictive text. It's worse than that as the applications generally have appalling ease of use, too. From the little I've played with iPhones, I'd say their apps win out on ease-of-use, but I'm not sure about the keyboard... I think I'd actually agree with your view that sensory feedback is going to be missing.

Interesting that the BlackBerry Thunder is all touchscreen. I wonder whether they are following the iPhone styling crowd just because they "have to".

Re: TweetDeck stream of consciousness

Andy Piper — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 03:54:51 -0000

I have to say I completely agree. To me, Twitter is a stream to dip in and out of and I don't want it taking over my desktop. Some great analysis here Whitney.

Re: New job jitters

Andy Piper — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 09:02:07 -0000

How interesting! Congratulations, and good luck.

Re: Dopplr: More Fuzziness Wanted

Andy Piper — Wed, 02 May 2007 18:47:37 -0000

I agree that Dopplr's simplicity is a strength at the moment. I was actually also reading your post about Twitter usage (with a list of implied improvements they could make), and wondered whether all the features you could add to a service like this are going to improve it or not.

What's missing? Hmm. They already state / imply that they will add some contact management features, and I think that will help. I also mentioned to mattb that integration with e.g. Upcoming makes a lot of sense... if that can happen without Yahoo! acquiring the hell out of them :-)

Basically I'm relatively satisfied. I've taken to adding a note to any invites I send that the person I've invited needs to add me in order for me to see their trips - it's a little counter-intuitive coming from other social networks, but a good way of managing access.

Re: Dopplr: More Fuzziness Wanted

Andy Piper — Thu, 03 May 2007 13:51:26 -0000

Geoff: enjoy the invite ;-)
So Luis IM'd me to ask for an invite on behalf of Euan Semple which was destined for Geoff. There's social networking for you!

Re: Video: BBC Interview (Teenagers, Facebook)

Andy Piper — Mon, 21 May 2007 11:10:07 -0000

I tuned in via the website (having seen your tweets) and thought you handled the questions very well - the whole thing about the overblown victimisation was bound to provoke a challenge from the interviewer and you gave a good answer.

Looking forward to watching your presentation tips later, can't really watch the video right now - but the audio episode 5 of FLS was good, caught that at the weekend. Keep it up! :-)

Re: Flickr: Open Up Tagging Your Photos to the Community, Please

Andy Piper — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 05:31:17 -0000

I'm having exactly the same issue with photos taken at HackDay and last week's Flickr party in London - so this is definitely worth doing. Thanks for the tutorial, Steph :-)

Re: Twitter Stops Sending SMS in Europe

Andy Piper — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 08:19:10 -0000

Well, I can see that Twitter must have been completely bleeding cash as usage mounted. One option is that they could introduce a fee-based service, of course. I'm not hugely upset by the loss of this service... although I used it initially, lately I've relied on DMs coming through email (which I accept are not going to be always accessible from the phone), and use a combination of Hahlo and Twinkle on the iPhone for posting or reviewing messages. But then, I made the choice of the iPhone explicitly knowing that it would enable me to be online in this manner, with an all-I-can-eat data subscription... and again I realise that isn't the case across Europe.

I'm not sure this is enough to make me switch to another service, as the majority of my network is still on Twitter. It will be interesting to see what happens though, as you and a number of my other contacts are commenting that this is a major issue. Presumably other services that might offer SMS updates will also ultimately have to suck up this cost, or start charging us for it.

Re: Giving Windows Live Writer a spin

Andy Piper — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 03:04:14 -0000

Hi Torley! Yeah, I like Windows Live Writer too. You should take a look at some of the plugins (sites here and here). There's one that allows you to browse Flickr and insert an image from there. There's another one that handles acronyms, and many more.

Re: Google Chrome Comes to Mac and Linux. Sort of.

Andy Piper — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:40:52 -0000

I have installed it on Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my Acer Aspire One, largely for the experience to see how it would perform versus Firefox. It definitely works, and is pretty snappy, but the huge missing chunks of function at the moment are a bit of a roadblock!

Re: ShowYourself Updated to v1.1 [updated]

Andy Piper — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 11:43:06 -0000

Looks really nice.

I already use onXiam for storing my identities, though. Also I can't embed this in WP.com... :-(

Still, a neat solution.

Re: Web 2.0- Was It Ever Alive?

Andy Piper — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 07:14:38 -0000

I've never been to a Web 2.0 Expo before, and I have to say that I've been to a few talks here this week and listened to the starts, and thought "hmm, why are we going over this old ground?" - but there are a few perspectives to remember. Firstly, as Tim suggests, some (many) enterprises are coming to this for the first time. Secondly, I'm *in* this space so I've been following it all. Finally, I think there *are* interesting new directions being mentioned this week, even if some of it appears to be "boilerplate / context / what is Web 2.0" stuff - it has been useful.

Re: Google announces more sleepless nights ahead for MSFT product managers

Andy Piper — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 06:17:56 -0000

I wrote a mini-review of Google Spreadsheets this morning.

Re: Wordpress.com getting new features

Andy Piper — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 02:38:24 -0000

I made a similar observation about the new features helping to build community around WordPress.com - and through the responses to the post, I discovered that the excellent coComment allows you to track comments from around the blogosphere, not just WordPress.com.

Re: RSS shows its age in real-time web (SUP and XMPP to the rescue?)

Andy Piper — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:06:12 -0000

As a follow-up to the last comment, you could also check out IBM's messaging solutions - WebSphere MQ, MQTT, MQLLM etc. which all do pub/sub messaging.

Re: Best Firefox extensions - my selection (update)

Andy Piper — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 16:51:16 -0000

Is SwitchProxy FF 2.0 compatible yet?

Re: Facebook’s Rights Grab – I’m Out

Andy Piper — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 04:06:59 -0000

I avoid posting photos there for sure... although my Flickr photos get fed to my Facebook profile through an app and so do my blog posts. I've always assumed that this only applies to content posted directly to FB rather than stuff aggregated through applications. Either way, it's a deeply objectionable policy and I've been pointing it out to people for ages.

Re: Facebook’s Rights Grab – I’m Out

Andy Piper — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:56:25 -0000

I believe that the whole point of the user agreement is that YOU agree that they CAN do exactly that i.e. use your pictures of your kids. It may well be damaging to their reputation, but by agreeing to the ToS you are agreeing that they can do that.

Re: Day 6 – Like attracts like & Get rid of dead weight

Andy Piper — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 06:05:55 -0000

Sean, what's the value in following you? it seems to me that the only thing you're giving to the community here is this "experiment" - I'll also be interested to see when and whether you hit the following limits on Twitter.