All posts by Ryan Cullen

Lessons from Twitter #1: Don’t use TwitPic

Twitter,

TwitPic is a sort of add-on for Twitter. You can upload an image via their website, a 3rd party twitter client from your mobile or send them an email/MMS with the picture. They then tweet on your behalf with a link to the picture.
The problem is that sometimes the picture they link to isn’t your picture. Below is an example of what happened to Philip Schofield during the Brits last month.

Schofe Schofe 19:38
http://twitpic.com/1k1ya – Nearly showtime!
Schofe Schofe 20:08
http://twitpic.com/1k2l3 – Oh my God!
Schofe Schofe 20:23
http://twitpic.com/1k2vr – Nearly took a pic of Girls Aloud! Name that TV exec?
Schofe Schofe 20:24
http://twitpic.com/1k2wj – Nearly took a pic of Girls Aloud! Name that TV exec?
Schofe Schofe 20:37
http://twitpic.com/1k36f – Coldplay!
Schofe Schofe 21:10
http://twitpic.com/1k3wr – Take That proper show biz!

As you can see unless Take That had gone abroad to do their piece, the picture wasn’t the one which Philip Schofield wanted. The give away to the picture being wrong is the grey “bars” at the bottom of the image.
From my guess it would seem that an image got stop part way through a process to resize and then attached to the wrong users tweet. You know that no one has hacked Phil’s account as the words follow from the previous messages.

So far not really a problem, Phil noticed the issue and applogised for the lack of Take That. However this wasn’t the case for BBC Tech corospendant Rory Cellan Jones.
He spent quite a large amount of time at the BBC News studios covering the YouTube / PRS story, and showing of Twitter to the journalists took some pictures.

ruskin147 ruskin147 18:18
Tellng George Alagiah about YouTube and music. http://twitpic.com/1yki0
ruskin147 ruskin147 18:38
Now BBC World with the lovely Tanya Beckett. http://twitpic.com/1yl1w
ruskin147 ruskin147 19:32
And now Joanna Gosling and Ben Brown on the News Channel. Ben has just joined Facebook. Not so keen to tweet.. http://twitpic.com/1ymo3

Now two images have been removed (from TwitPic, so the links go to an error page). The one of Tanya Beckett was quite a nice shot of her. However the picture of Joanna Gosling and Ben Brown clearly wasn’t them. Nor was it safe to view whilst at work.

Rory followed up with these tweets:
19:37 oh my god i’ve been hacked – really really sorry.
19:46 Very very shaken by that Twitpic hack. Has that happened to anyone else? The tweet was genuine – but not the picture
20:01 Not sure how keen I am ever to use Twitpic again. Is there another way to link pix?
20:51 To clarify for those who missed my Twitpic horror earlier I uploaded a pic of BBC studio – instead something very post watershed appeared
21:59 Twitpic tell me I wasn’t hacked – it was “a random bug that we are working on..”. Oh, fine! About to go live on 10 – hope no random bug

So the simple lesson is AVOID TwitPic.

Phone Mast applications

Featured, Mobiles,

When I was a councillor on Lincoln City a total of three applications for phone masts came in front of the Planning Committee.
Due to a prejudicial interest I never took part in the discussion however I was pleased to see that the councillors understood the laws around the applications. Two of the applications were accepted without much fuss.
The third was from O2 at the Birchwood shopping centre. It was a retrospective for a 13 metre poll with 3g aerials on top. They had already got consent (via appeal) for a 13 metre poll with 2g on top, but put up a 3g mast instead (only real difference was an extra 10cm in diameter of the bit at the top). It was felt by the committee that the overall shape of the structure was detrimental to the visual amenity of the area, however the planning inspectorate appeal again overturned the committee.
Continue reading Phone Mast applications →

eBay “free” listings

Other,

Good news acording to the eBay news feed:

Zero insertion fees on qualifying auction-style listings on eBay.co.uk
From 12th March 2009, there’s no insertion fee if you’re a private seller and you list your item in an eligible category in the auction-style format with a starting price of up to 99p. Don’t forget, your first picture is also free.
If your item doesn’t sell, you don’t pay a penny. All you pay for are optional listing features and upgrades

Sounds great, but lets take a closer look.

* The free listing fee is only for those with a starting price of 99p and under, any thing else still has the same listing fee.
* The final value fee has again gone up. Instead of a sliding scale starting at 8.75% it’s now 10% up to a maximum of £40.

With a bit of a back of a fag packet (excel spreadsheet) during my lunch I’ve come up with these figures.

An item selling for £1 will now have a fee of 10p instead of 19p (9p up).
£5 will have a fee of 54p instead of 50p (4p up).
£8 will have a fee of 80p, the same as before.
£10 will have a fee of £1 instead of 98p (2p down).
£20 will have a fee of £2 instead of £1.85 (15p down).
£40 will have a fee of £4 instead of £3.25 (75p down).
£100 will have a fee of £10 instead of £6.40 (£3.60 down).
£150 will have a fee of £15 instead of £9.02 (£5.98 down).
£250 will have a fee of £25 instead of £14.27 (£11.73 down).
£400 will have a fee of £40 instead of £22.15 (£17.85 down).
£750 will have a fee of £40 instead of £34.90 (£5.10 down).

Only when an item sells for more than £1090.05 will you end being better off again. On top of this, with the forcing you to offer PayPal, eBay can take a second hit at your money.

No, I don’t want to take your silly notes

Politics,

This morning reading the Beeb website I came across this:

‘Legal’ bid over Scots banknotes
An attempt is to be made at Westminster to make it legally binding for shops and businesses in England to accept Scottish banknotes.

Scottish NotesFor those who have never ventured North of the border, may be suprised to find that the Scots don’t just have their own version of our notes, but 3 different versions each issued by different banks.
The reason why shops don’t accept them is that with any currency you need to know that the note is worth the paper it is written on.
I’m pretty good at spotting a forged twenty. The feel, the watermark, the silver foil, the bit that rubs off etc. But I have no idea what a scottish twenty looks like, and the same goes for many staff in shops outside of Scotland.
Forcing shops to accept them will just result in a large number of forged notes being passed around in the smaller shops miles away from the issuing banks.

Luckly this is a Private Members Bill, so hopefully it’s not going to go far in Parliament.

When will my bin be collected?

Council, Lincoln, ,

We’ve just moved house, not far from the last one (still in Park Ward) and tomorrow would have been our bin day. However I can see no sign of any bins out on the street. Remembering that I had seen something on the council website with a list of street names and days I tried to find it.
First I came across the GIS site run jointly with the County Council. This can tell me who is my MP, MEP, County and City Councillors, where the nearest Library, Doctor or Dump Recycling Centre is. However for the day of bin collections I just get a link back to the City Council website.
Trawling through here I can see that my bins should be out by 7am, if my bins should have been collected on Christmas or Boxing Day the alternate day I should have put them out, that the weekly large black bin trial has ended, if I have a real Christmas Tree it can be collected during the next two weeks, but nowhere I can find which day my bins will be collected on.
The closest I have found is on this page which states

To find out what collection services are available for your street, please refer to the Waste Collection Calendar (NOTE: This is currently being updated and is due to be available in March 2008).

As it’s nearly March 09, I really hope that it would be up by now.
I guess I’ll have to try the old fashioned way of working out which day the bins are, talking to the neighbours.

Quiz Answers

Other

For those who took part here are the answers to the quiz:

1. Chris Hoy
2. Fern Cotton
3. John Barrowman
4. Rachel Rice
5. Lily Allen
6. Chris Martin
7. Heath Ledger
8. Barack Obama
9. Lewis Hamilton
10. Peter Kay
11. Jeremy Clarkson
12. Paul Newman
13. Heather Mills
14. Kelly Osbourne
15. Tom Chambers
16. Katie Price
17. Boris Johnston
18. Davina McCall
19. Usain Bolt
20. (Robyn) Rihanna (Fenty)
21. Carol Vorderman
22. Melissa Joan Hart
23. Russell Brand
24. Robert Peston
25. Harrison Ford
26. Guy Richie
27. George Sampson
28. Fernando Torres
29. Paris Hilton
30. David Walliams
31. Judi Dench
32. Naomi Campbell
33. Miley Cyrus
34. Andy Abraham
35. Ian Smith
36. Seth Rogen
37. Laura Robson
38. Alexandra Burke
39. Alistair Darling
40. Rebecca Adlington
41. Jamie Oliver
42. Fiona Phillips
43. Luiz Felipe Scolari
44. Joe Swash
45. Amy Winehouse
46. Peaches Geldof
47. Jason Donovan
48. Gordon Ramsay
49. John Sergeant
50. Tina Fey

Congratulations to Ross Pepper who managed to get 47/50 correct.

Ryan’s Nana Picture Quiz of 2008

Other

For many years at Christmas Mum’s side of the family would get together and in the evening we would play Nana’s Picture Quiz of the Year. It would take hours as we only had one copy of each page and it had to be shared around. By the end of the night if any of the teams had achieved 80% they did well.

This year, I’ve decided to do the quiz and have made a nice PDF version which you can either print out or just view on your PC.

There are 50 “celebrities” to be named and unless asked otherwise you are to give the full name of the main person in the picture, not their character name.

If you want to be scored, please complete your answers in an email to quiz@artesea.co.uk (please don’t leave answers in the comments!), with the picture number and the name eg
1. Michael Jackson
2. George Bush
…..
50. Wayne Rooney
Winners and all the answers will be announced after Christmas

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