omgbbq!

Google Chrome Ads give interesting insight in browser usage

Google Chrome Abri's are starting to show up here in the Netherlands lately, and in all their innocence give a great insight in what we use our browser (and the internet in general) for, especially form privacy's point of view.

Obviously a search query for strained hamstring and a session on pancakes are examples of lesser embarrassing (medical) queries we fire away during our information-cravings and probably carefully selected attractive scenario's to make sure we don't realize how easy it would be to build personal profiles based on our various bits of internet usage.

Very interesting still, to see how a story can be deducted from various internet queries and vice versa.

Snowbound

       

Dreaming of a white Christmas

Or actually, I'm not dreaming:

     

It's downright winter-wonderland here. Like walking trough the landscape of a beautiful christmas card.

My other posterous, for others' stuff

Here's on omgbbq! is where I post what I came across IRL (y'know, the "offline" world) and feel like sharing. But others do that too and I like to share that too.

Now I could just do that right here. But obviously, anybody who like's what I whip online here myself, doesn't have to like what others whippin' online and I happen to like. Still with me? :P

So, since these here fascinating Posterous thingies are free, I've opened another Posterous called Repostin' - for reposting things I liked here on Posterous or elsewhere on the web. This way, I won't bother you with it if here on this site, just in case you wouldn't like that. But if you do, feel free to subscribe to the other posterous. :)

Temperature Prediction Fail

(temperatures are in Celsius - In Fahrenheit that's 66.2º predicted and 86º real temperature)

Piece of mind on everything - and then some

There's a time and place for everything. But everything is changing. Hopefully, time and place will shift along. As for me: I'll try. New technology enables us to do more with less effort in less time. The catch is in the temptation to focus on quantity rather than quality, quick wins, or even stuff that's really unethical or illegal when you stop to think about it.

Yes, I use easy-to-maintain blogs for publishing and social media for my shorter brainfarts, but I still craft my writings. Finding the proper words, finetune the bits and pieces, think it over as a whole, until it's exactely like I ment it to.

That's how I always did it, and that's what I'll keep doing. Unpublish or republish if necessary. Why? Short version: because I think it's worth it. Long version: because I think it's worth it, and here's why.

Many things I used to publish on my personal website (in Dutch, I might add) now have a place elsewhere and in some ways what was left there seemed obsolete. I was about to pull the plug and reconsider this site as a whole, when I read an inspiring article on (among other things) 'motives to publish' from Marlin Mann: Free as in "Me".

Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups

He gave a piece of his mind as a result of what he describes as "the increasingly popular practice of re-publishing someone’s online work on another site without the attribution, formatting, and linking that many bloggers regard as standard, ethical, and fair".

His story evolves around the fact that someone re-publishing your content assumes you'll be grateful for granting you a little publicity. Wich in turn is based on yet another assumption: that traffic is what it's all about (for anyone, publishing anything). But that's not everybody's holy grail. Both that and the price ain't exactly "free" as in beer.

Quality visitors over the quantity

Now I'll admit to enjoying my fair share of attention just as much as the next guy, but it's not what drives me in the end. It's not a purpose on it's own. Melin explains a little something about what drives him to publish stuff - and I recognise a lot of what he writes there. It's not so much about attention, as it is about respect, I guess.

I'm not in it for the views or the money. I happen just to like to share some stuff with the world, like there's many of "us" out there who do. Stuff I've observed, researched or otherwise figured out and in general: felt like sharing. Because I think it's worth writing about.

As for the pageviews: I'd rather have a few visitors how actually care to take effort in reading the lengthy full piece of mind I have to offer, then a whole bunch of them who don't.

That does not limit the subjects

Does it have to? Tumblr-developer Marco wrote about how he started "feeling obligated to raise the average quality of what I post and stay within the bounds of what people expect me to write about" after gathering a crowd of readers (he refuses to, and I can't blame him for it).

And while I don't need a crowd to have issues with "raising the quality", it's quite clear how 'having a crowd' can raise all sorts of expectations towards an author (or make him/her feel that way).

The cliché answer is probably to "stay true to your goal" - but many blogs (like mine) don't have a definite purpose other than "write" (for the process and sake of it) and "share", obviously. So in the end, I guess it all comes down to being true to yourself and to what drives in the first place?

What happens to Mac Mail when you disable Spotlight?

There's many ways to turn spotlight off, dragging your Macintosh HD privacylist in the Spotlight system preferences is probably the easiest and fastest way for most of us. But the question remains: how does that affect Mac Mail or other applications that make use of spotlight indexing?

I can't judge for the latter, but for Mac Mail, I've found out experimentally: it does effect search, but it doesn't disable it as a whole. Mac Mail without spotlight is still able to search the from, to and subject fields and sort the results as usual, but the  'entire message'-option is grayed out, however

So there's your answer: yes, the most powerful of the search options in mail is gone, but your basic search is still there (and lightning fast!). A small price to pay for continues system performance.

Obviously, I'm not the only one inspired by spring

Also: thank you, spamfilter, for keeping me productive.

I ♥ spring

Walked into this beautiful color gradient earlier tonight:

I like the world so much better when everything is at its greenest.

omgbbq!

Yes, that's exactly what I thought. Therefore, I made it so: this posterous now has it's own domain, omgbbq.nl.