Daily Show Full Episodes

Finally, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart publishes the full episodes (not just snippets) on the web.
This is most important for Europeans without satellite or cable TV... finally.

Thanks.
A bold move for traditional media, I thought.

Geek And Poke: The iPhone Generation

thanks to Geek And Poke: The iPhone Generation: "The iPhone Generation"

Thunderbird compose HTML vs plain-text

I just noticed that there is a short-cut to kinda toggle between HTML and plain-text in Thunderbird when composing a message.

You just have to hold the shift-key when you "launch" the compose/editor window, and it will use the opposite mode of your profile.

So, when you have HTML on per default, and want to compose a new mail in plain-text you just hold the shift-key while you hit the "Create a new message" button.
Or when you hit Reply, ...

Nice.

Does not work inside the composer window though.
Since I have not found a toggle button (extension) for it so far, and always going through Options->Format->Plain Text Only is a bit cumbersome, I'll write one ...

Someday. But for the time being, the shift-key helps.

Dopplr's obsession with planes

Dopplr - the great and cool travel social network - has an obsession with traveling by plane, that I cannot share.

Since they started recording the means of transportation for a trip (by car, by train, by plane, ... on foot) to calculate your carbon footprint, the default setting is "by plane" no matter what the trip.

Even for a trip that is only 200km... or less.

I checked if I could overwrite this in my traveler profile, but I cannot (or at least I did not find the setting for it)

When you tweet or email a trip, dopplr does not even parse a string like "by car" - which would be easy to parse, given the clear and narrow dictionary "by plan", "by train", "by car", "by bus", ..., "on foot". One could really look for those strings literally.

Some Flickr Observations

Just some random thoughts and observations around flickr.

• I don't get explore – or the interestingness.
  I do have (or did have) a couple of my pictures in explore in the past, but – quite frankly – I only see the explore-worthiness of 2 of the 5 - guess which.
  
  
  I don't really want to understand the algorithm, really, I just don't get it. That's all.


• Why for example are my 2 personal favorites (of my own pictures) not in explore ?
  
  
  That's what I really don't understand.
  


• Why did flickr change their start page?
  I now cannot distinguish that easily between activities on my pictures (comments, favs) from activities by me on other pictures. That used to be separate, and I quite liked it.
  
  
• News drive(s) flickr views... [2]
  I do have a couple of pictures of my next door (or rather vis-a-vis) building, the "Stadt des Kindes" (read: City of/for children) - an abandoned former children's home and/or orphanage in Vienna. Used to be quite progressive 30 years ago - both, from a pedagogical and architectural point of view. Now the building is about do be demolished and the demonstrations against that of course made it into the local news... All of a sudden the stats on my Stadt-des-Kindes picture went significantly up, which google-image search being the #1 referrer[1].
  Strange ... but feels good.

So, thanks for listening.
Good night.

[1] I know that the HTTP header is called "referer", but don't blame me, if the standards guys don't know proper English.
[2] Does not really rhyme well, but what the heck.

New flickr home page

Flickr has upgraded (or is just about to upgrade) their homepage with more dynamic and community oriented features. More details here on the flickr blog