It’s now routine for police officers to ask robbery victims what information they put on Facebook and Twitter before the crime and if their online connections are true friends or potential suspects, according to [Cpl. Janis] Jean [of the Saanich Police Department, north of Victoria].

Sound familiar?

It should. Of course, earlier this year, there was all the ruckus surrounding PleaseRobMe.com.

But as Andy Baio pointed out back in February, back in 1983, the Montreal Gazette warned against outgoing answering machine messages that tell callers you’re not at home. And in 1977, another article suggested that you shouldn’t list family weddings or funerals in the newspaper, lest you tip off would-be robbers.

Works even much longer: I’ve got 3 hours 45 minutes for the continuos record (mp3, to keep recording longer for test), Phantom power ON, headphones in, backlit off. After that time battery had 3.5 Volts, which is perfect (3V minimum supposed for Li-Pol batteries), and then device switched off itself.

There’s even a decent step-by-step instruction guide here.

triple letters are the new omit the vowels

I credit HoTTT TopiXXX.

• ifmoneygrewontre.es (for showing off the things she wants to buy, but can’t/won’t/shouldn’t)
• ukulel.es (because I wanted an .es domain, too)

Aren’t we clever?

I think there are different jobs that make up a twenty-first century journalist. One is to be a highly intelligent filter of information coming in. Another is to be an expert in reputation and reliability systems so that you are able to know who a reliable source is because there are so many sources, right? Another is community manager. Managing a community of people who have knowledge and interact with you as a journalist. Knowing how to have not just several dozen sources in your little black telephone book that you use to do your beat, but thousands of sources. Tens of thousands. And how to work efficiently with large groups of people to synthesize information is important. And also important is how to take the greater knowledge we have coming from how people use the internet. Because everything people do online is recorded. How to take this information about what people are clicking, what they’re interested in, where they’re going on the web, what they’re doing now. And treating it as clues to demand. Produce into that demand, without reducing yourself to simply a ratings-driven, click-driven reflex machine.

I think the most successful journalists are going to excel at various hybrid forms of traditional reporting, editing, checking, verifying and new forms of gathering, managing, interacting with people.

(via Jenny)

A good chart can take an elusive concept and clarify it in a visually appealing manner.

It’s pretty cool. You can dynamically generate charts using URLs. Their example turns this:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World

into a pie chart:

While this _is_ pretty slick (and Google’s service generates many, many types of charts), I think this is as good a time as any to remember that pie charts are terrible. SEED magazine summarizes findings from Bill Cleveland (emphasis mine):

although we’re good at comparing linear distances along a scale — judging which of two lines is longer, a task used in bar graphs — and we’re even better at judging the position of points along a scale, pie charts don’t bring those skills to bear. They do ask us compare angles, but we tend to underestimate acute angles, overestimate obtuse angles, and take horizontally bisected angles as much larger than their vertical counterparts. The problems worsen when we’re asked to judge area and volume: Regular as clockwork, we overestimate the size of smaller objects and underestimate the size of larger ones, to a much greater degree with volume than with area.

(via Tom)

(via Jason Agnew)

I noticed something strange earlier this week. Peter’s Cajun Creole Pizza, our favourite pizza place, was dark before midnight. Then, Tina left a comment at this blog suggesting that Pete’s has been “shut down by the landlord.”

Tonight, upon closer inspection, I confirmed that Pete’s (and Peter’s Corner) are indeed closed, and there are notes on both doors from the landlord.

Not good.

Where will I get my panzerotti fix?