Matthew Lang

Firefox now lets you block annoying website notification pop-ups

I’ve been using Firefox a lot recently and it’s definitely getting better. I just wish it had sharper icons in the toolbar like Safari has.

My personal defcon status has been lowered from “bloody miserable” to “almost bearable” as this cold lessens it’s grip. 🤧

The great thing about RSS readers is the speed at which I can catch up. Even after a couple of days of not checking them, I can still blitz through over 200 unread items in a few minutes. I never seem to be able to catch up on Twitter.

Following a raft of measures to cool off the property market, sales have plunged, down 35% overall in Feb 2017 relative to Feb 2016; prices are down an average of CAD110,000, and listings are up (which will drive the prices down further).

— Toronto’s real estate market is imploding via Boing Boing

Imploding might be a strong word in this case as it’s only based on one month’s sales, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the start of a decline in house prices in Toronto and the surrounding areas.

With my in-laws in Ontario and annual trips out there with the family, we’ve see vast amounts of land swallowed up by builders over the last two decades. The rate of building and development has been staggering.

In the last ten years though house prices have sky rocketed.

My wife and I have toyed with emigrating to Canada in the past few years. The always increasing house prices mean that we would have to look at smaller properties near Toronto or larger properties away from Toronto for the move to be worth it.

With a dip in house prices though, maybe a move is still possible?

📚 Got my copy of Michael Wade’s Random Thoughts. Great to have all these in one place.

Did I just write a reply in the style of old Donald himself?

📚 Almost halfway through King of Thorns by Mark Lawrence before I decided to give up on it. First book I’ve given up on this year.

What do you think Apple will call its over-ear headphones?

I’m going with HeadPods on this one.

Lacking direction?

Reset your personal compass with NB.

Do you want want blank spaces on your iPhone home screen? Here’s how

All things good for the mind, body and soul.

Nothing better than getting back to normal. Roads are drivable and schools are back open.

One thing I’ve been doing over the last couple of years is switching colours on my blogs and social media profiles according to the seasons.

Technically it’s spring in the UK although with the weather it certainly doesn’t look like it. Never mind, I’m still switching to green to mark the start of spring.

Street Fighter’s Chun Li is 50.

Wow.

Now I feel old.

Nicholas Bate offers up some nudges to get you writing.

BBC Studios is adapting Terry Pratchett’s iconic Discworld books for a six-part TV series

I enjoyed the adaptations that were on Sky a few years ago. I’m looking forward to seeing what the BBC do with Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books.

I’ve been moving over some lists and accounts over to Feedbin. The significant advantage of this is that I don’t need to open Twitter and scroll through my timeline.

It’s the same way in all social media platforms. You’re trying to find that point in the timeline where you left off previously, and you can’t determine what you have already seen. Throw in the different ways in which posts are promoted or injected in your timeline, and it makes for a very confusing experience.

Yesterday I opened up Feedbin at the end of the day and noticed that one of the lists that I have on Twitter had over 50 unread posts on it. Unusual for that particular list, but there was an event on, and so the activity was a bit higher than usual. Rather than pour through each post, I decided to flag the whole list as read.

I weighed up that the amount of posts that were unread wasn’t worth my time to scroll through, even on Feedbin. So I just marked them as all as read.

Seeing the number of unread posts in Feedbin allows me to quickly decided if a list, tag or feed is worth reading. If it’s too high, I can just mark everything as read.

The number of unread items on Feedbin is a small thing, but it’s a great indicator of what I’ve missed. I wish more services and social media platforms would use signs like this rather than trying to sort out your unread items for you magically.

Did a stupid thing today and deleted a checklist from Trello that I was using. As far as I am aware, there’s no way of undeleting it and also no backup of the Trello board to speak of.

Perhaps it’s not only the source code that’s a valuable asset of a project. The supporting project management material that drives the development should be at least backed up or even under version control as well.

I’m wondering if this is something that might interest the users of Micro.blog.

I want to ask a question to Micro.blog users, but I don’t want the question to appear on my blog. Much like my replies don’t appear on my hosted blog, I would like to ask a question to the community and for everyone to see it on their timeline. Just not on my blog.

I know there are Slack groups for this type of thing, but perhaps Micro.blog is just as great a place for this type of thing.

Does that make sense?

Twitter finally gives us an official way to bookmark tweets

I can’t see me using this at all. I use Pinboard for bookmarking and I’m rarely using any of the Twitter clients these days.

Overwatch’s newest hero is an armor-clad engineer named Brigitte.

Overwatch can do no wrong in my eyes. Easy to start playing, easy to level up and immensely fun. Makes me wonder if Blizzard would have done a better job at Star Wars Battlefront II than EA and Dice did.

🎵Got the Master and Commander soundtrack playing while I catch up on some Rails work for a client tonight.

Brilliant and better note-taking at meetings courtesy of Nicholas Bate.

Another day of snow in Paisley.

My wife is thinking of setting up a Facebook account so that she can book in for a fitness class she likes and keep up to date with the kid’s school information.

Crazy, right?

Yes, Facebook will be the single way that my wife will be able to register for the fitness class in the future and yes Facebook is the only channel that the school regularly updates despite having a website and two native apps.

Frustrating? Definitely.

There’s a section of people that still see Facebook as the “default service of the Internet”. Facebook is probably easy to set up but other than that the only perceived benefit it has for these organisations is the numbers. They think most people are on Facebook, so they use Facebook.

Facebook is a crux technology and not a good one at that. The Internet has many tools for organisations to communicate and engage with audiences. So, why do so many organisations turn to Facebook?

I don’t know the exact reason why. It could be that organisations find it easy to use and they think that everyone else is using it. It’s true that most people are using Facebook, but it’s not everyone that’s using it.

It’s not Facebook that’s the problem, it’s the view that Facebook is the only way of communicating with audiences. 

How do you change that when the majority of people see Facebook as the only way of using the Internet?