Once upon a time, I was in a rock and roll band called The Canaries. This past week, Tristan found a copy of our first and last recording at the Value Village near Queen and Logan. I’m not quite sure how this correlates to fame and fortune.
I’m a sucker for nostalgia, as evidenced by GRTTWaK. So, you can image my delight when Jenna sent me a link to a series of photographs by Irina Werning called BACK TO THE FUTURE:
I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it’s imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today… A few months ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future.
Amazing.
My CBC tech column this week is about new research from the French National Institute of Computer Science that looks at how using the same public usernames across multiple websites could lead to unwanted online profiling. The point of the research was to demonstrate that username profiling techniques are possible.
Well, now they’re out in the wild, on a large scale. Just this morning, Google announced some changes to its Social Search features, including username-linking:
if our algorithms find a public account that might be yours (for example, because the usernames are the same), we may invite you to connect your accounts right on the search results page and in your Google Account settings.
Google’s offering is optional, but it’s not hard to see how this technique could be used to link your online profiles without your consent. As I said in the column, “bad news for ‘EngelbertHumperdinck1936,’ but good news for anyone named John Smith.”
The Compass (“The Newspaper of Trinity and Conception Bays”) has a lovely feature article on my pal Tristan Homer called An animated Homer:
In his time with 9 Story Entertainment, Homer has been able to work on several popular shows, including Max and Ruby and Wibbly Pig. The latter was nominated for a Gemini Award in 2010, representing a career highlight for Homer, who was a line producer on the show.
“It didn’t win, but the Polkaroo (from the long-running kids series Polka Dot Door) was at the awards ceremony, and that was pretty fun,” he says.
Agreed. Decent consolation prize.
One more reason not to talk to strangers, at least on Facebook. They’re launching a new feature called social authentication, and if your friends list is full of people you don’t actually know, you could be locked out of your account:
Instead of showing you a traditional captcha on Facebook, one of the ways we may help verify your identity is through social authentication. We will show you a few pictures of your friends and ask you to name the person in those photos. Hackers halfway across the world might know your password, but they don’t know who your friends are.
The problem with this, of course, is that if you may not know who your friends are, either. +1 for my new favourite Gmail filter.
I grew up in Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fielding questions like: “Why Lower Sackville? Is there an Upper Sackville?”
Of course, there are no fewer than three Sackvilles in Nova Scotia: Lower, Middle, and Upper.
Residents in the Lower Sackville area of Halifax Regional Municipality have been receiving notices from city hall asking them for feedback on a proposed district name change. According to veteran councillor Bob Harvey, the renaming process is part of a municipal program that has been going on for seven years in various areas.
“It is mainly driven by public safety issues related to 911 emergency response,” Harvey, who represents Lower Sackville, said in a recent email interview.
“We need clear community boundaries understood and proper civic addresses.”
He said “one option was to have (the) name of Sackville for the entire community” of Lower, Middle and Upper Sackville. But the councillor said “it doesn’t seem that popular, particularly in Middle and Upper Sackville.”
Four years ago, as a New Year’s resolution, I decided to host “an evening of drinks, laughs, and adults reading funny, sad, and/or embarrassing things they wrote as children.” That evening turned into a series called Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids.
And in about one month’s time, we’ll gather for the tenth installment, GRTTWaK10.
If you’re in Toronto, I hope you can make it.
If, like me, you’ve been driven to the brink of insanity by janky text formatting during a copy/paste manouver, you’ll appreciate PureText. It’s a tiny little Windows app that I’ve been using for the past few weeks on my CBC PC. Copy anything to your Windows clipboard, and PureText will strip all formatting:
This includes the font face, font style (bold, italics, etc.), font color, paragraph styles (left/right/center aligned), margins, character spacing, bullets, subscript, superscript, tables, charts, pictures, embedded objects, etc. However, it does not modify the actual text.
Just the text, ma’am. I love it.
(via onethingwell)
As is my custom on this day, I’d like to wish you all a Merry Christmas by re-posting the 2005 holiday classic Jim Dupree: Christmas Enthusiast:
“There’s skin cells in my egg nog!”
“You got tricked! We bathed in it! We bathed in the egg nog!”
Hard to believe it’s been five years since Tristan and I made this. Standard definition 4×3 was all the rage back then.
A week after launching, then pulling its Latitude client from the app store, Google has officially released an iOS mobile location tracking/sharing app. Personally, I’m quite excited about this.
Previously, I’d been using a clunky combination of a friendless Foursquare account + Mayor Maker as a “tell my wife where I am” system.