Almost five years ago, I decided it was time to create myself a place to vent my thoughts. I installed WordPress on my home server and started writing; “Michel’s Exhaust” was born. Quickly after that I registered my own domain “micheljansen.org” and moved my site off-campus. I still used a vanilla WordPress install, with a free theme called Rin. It was clean, it was beautiful, but eventually everything gets old. It was time for something new.
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Augmented Reality against Aggression
Augmented Reality is a term these days most often associated with people running around perceiving the world through the screens of their mobile phones. That’s not the case in this Dutch campaign against aggression towards public workers though.
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Twente Milieu Afval-iCalender
Forgot to put out the trash again? Twente Milieu collects recycled paper, plastic and biomass once a month, which often leaves the less organised among us with heaps of stuff piling up. To scratch my own itch, I’ve made a simple afval iCalender webapp that scrapes the website of Twente Milieu and turns it into an iCalendar feed to subscribe your iCal, Google Calendar and mobile phones to.
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Making your Mac wake up quietly
If you’re like me, you’re always sweating when you take your MacBook from your bag during a lecture and open it up: “Did I mute the sound before I put it to sleep?”. I’m not really good at predicting when I’ll be using my Mac again, so I tend to forget.
However, the world doesn’t stop when you put your Mac to sleep. With each minute that passes, the probability of new email having arrived or iCal events being due increases. These things all have their own notifications and those more often than not involve sound. Nice when you’re not paying attention; not so nice when you don’t want everyone else’s attention pointed towards you after your MacBook loudly announces to everyone that the class you’re in was due five minutes ago.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could be sure that your Mac always awakes quietly? It’s actually not that hard to do ‘unix style’. All you need is a tool called SleepWatcher, written by Bernhard Baehr and one line of script.
Shh! under the covers.. (cc) warmsunnydays
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Meer over Backchannel etiquette
Een tijdje geleden schreef ik een post naar aanleiding van onvriendelijke tweets op het Mobile Monday backchannel. Vandaag las ik ineen blog post van Danah Boyd dat dit nog altijd een actuele kwestie is. De post van Danah is extra interessant, omdat ze schrijft vanuit haar eigen pijnlijke ervaring als spreker op de Web2.0 Expo, die nog maar eens onderstreept dat er behoefte is aan meer fatsoen onder het Twitterend publiek van conferenties en presentaties.
Danah Boyd at Web2.0 Expo
Safari’s ridiculously easy bookmark shortcuts
I’ve always been an avid user of delicious for my bookmarks. I love the way I can just type away on tags, without having to worry about cataloguing my bookmarks in hierarchical folders. Moreover, my bookmarks are stored online, so as long as there are no Ma.gnolia-like debacles, I can access them from wherever I want. This alone makes me prefer Delicious over any browser’s built-in solution.
Adding the bookmarks, however, has always been somewhat of a hassle. Delicious offers bookmarklets, small snippets of JavaScript you save as bookmark to access them, which when added to the bookmarks bar of your browser, act like “buttons” you can press to bookmark the current page. However, I always hated having to pick up my mouse to click on the bookmarklet, so I ended up trying all kinds of Delicious applications for my Mac, such as DeliciousSafari and Pukka. Some of these apps are pretty expensive for just adding bookmarks, but what’s worse is they tend to be stuffed with unnecessary features to justify the price. All I really wanted was a keyboard shortcut to bookmark a page to delicious. As it turns out, Safari can already do that just fine on its own.
Anything you put in the bookmarks bar, you can access with cmd + the place of the bookmark in the bar (from the left). This means ⌘1 opens the first bookmark, ⌘2 the second and so on. Combine this with bookmarklets and you have keyboard shortcuts for things like adding a delicious bookmark without any third party apps. As you can see, I also use this for other services that provide bookmarklets, such as Evernote.
Redmine Refresh Repository API Plugin
For a project I’m running Redmine, an open source project management webapp, with nice Subversion integration as one of its prime features. It’s a really cool app, which does a good job of showing project activity. Unfortunately it suffers from the minor annoyance that it does not automatically refresh commits when something changes on the repository end. You have to do that manually, or you don’t see the commits. As a heavy user of the Activity feed, I felt this should be fixed.
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Sesamstraat terug naar half zeven!
Wie is er niet mee opgegroeid: Sesamstraat. Vele uren van mijn kinderjaartjes heb ik doorgebracht met de avonturen van Tommie, Ieniemienie, Pino en de rest. Sinds een tijdje is dit iconische kinderprogramma echter verschoven naar een vroeger tijdsblok, ten faveure van het actualiteitenprogramma “Dichtbij Nederland”.
Vandaag schoof Sesamstraat’s Aart Staartjes, beter bekend als “Meneer Aart”, aan bij De Wereld Draait Door om hier aandacht voor te vragen en ik geef hem gelijk: Sesamstraat hoort op een tijdstip thuis waar het kinderen bereikt. Ik ben er groot op geworden, dat gun ik toekomstige generaties ook.
Deel je die mening? Vul dan snel de petitie in op
www.sesamstraatnaarhalfzeven.nl
MoMo Backchannel etiquette
Afgelopen maandag was ik bij Mobile Monday #10. Zoals ook de vorige keren was er naast het scherm met de slides van de spreker ook een tweede scherm met daarop een live stream van alle tweets met de hashtag #momo. Niet alles op dat scherm kan even goed het daglicht verdragen, en dat is meer mensen opgevallen. Niek ten Hoopen wijdde er een blog post aan.
Backchannel in actie bij MoMo. Foto door Thomas van Ardenne
Hij haalt vooral het geval aan van de presentatie van de NS, waarbij de conservatieve houding van de NS niet bepaald in de smaak viel bij het publiek in de zaal. Een reactie op Niek zijn blog groeide uit tot deze post.
Het is een interessante discussie. Er kwamen veel oprecht goede, interessante en doordachte berichten langs op het scherm, maar ik moet bekennen dat ik ook soms een gevoel van plaatsvervangende schaamte kreeg bij dingen die op het backchannel verschenen.
Ik denk dat er grofweg twee motivaties kunnen zijn voor mensen om te reageren op een backchannel: het graag je fifteen seconds of fame willen halen op het grote scherm, of uiting geven aan vragen of gedachten die de presentatie bij je oproept.
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The Resurrection of Polaroid
A while back, I was at a farewell party to wish Marjanne the best of luck on her travels ahead. Being the last time she would see her friends for a while, this party would be something to remember. For this, she received the ideal gift: an old fashioned Polaroid camera.
In the age of digital photography, we can do just about anything with pictures. We can take them, instantly view the result, modify it and even print them instantly. Still, there is something incredibly charming about collectively gathering around a tiny piece of paper that just came out of a huge camera, slowly watching it develop and scribbling a line or two in the white space below.