We’ve gone solar.
The system covers 100% of our usage on average year-round. We’re leasing it from Sunrun, which services 10 states. It was installed by REC Solar, whom I’d highly recommend. Excited to get off the coal train.
Author: Martin Remy
iWeb to WordPress.com in 45 minutes
Apple sent out another round of emails today about iWeb and MobileMe shutting down on June 30th. That’s slightly annoying, but good for Apple to recognize that this stuff is not core for them, and for communicating well about the approaching sunset.
My sister has a site on iWeb for her portfolio of drawings. I decided to help her move it to WordPress.com. The whole thing took about 45 minutes, including downloading and then uploading images, picking a theme (Linen FTW) and adding some image galleries (which use the beautiful new carousel feature).
Here is her new site on WordPress.com, what do you think?
Tweaking the UI
Who wrote this?
… with enough money … I’ll tell you what I would do. In the first place, I would change the general appearance of the site and make seven wide columns where we now have nine narrow ones. Then I would have the font spaced more, and these two changes would give the site a much cleaner appearance. Secondly, it would be well to make the site as far as possible original, to clip only some leading sites … [we] must also increase our number of advertisements [even] if we have to lower rates to do it … images are a detail, though a very important one … images attract the eye and stimulate the imagination … all these changes [should] be made not by degrees but at once so that the improvement will be very marked and noticeable and attract universal attention and comment.
Perhaps the antiquated language at the end gave it away. This is not an email from an online publisher to her investors in 2005. I just replaced paper with site, type with font, and illustration with image in an excerpt of a letter William Randolph Hearst wrote to his father in 1885, listing changes he would make to the San Francisco Examiner if his father would just let him run that paper. Hearst did take over the paper and, after making a number of changes like these, made the Examiner the most popular paper on the west coast.
Source: The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst by Kenneth Whyte (a great read).
Bring back the Muppet Show!
Watching The Muppets with my family last weekend made me nostalgic for that Saturday afternoon ritual from my childhood, dubbed in German of course. It’s still funny:
How I fell out of love with my Nook
I’ve been an early adopter of gadgets for a long time. I remember buying a Sharp TM-20 before a trip to Europe because I thought, Won’t it be bitchin’ to get my email by just holding this gadget to a hotel phone or pay phone! That was one of the few impulse gadget buys that worked out, the TM-20 really was bitchin’.
Got Telescope? Binoculars?
Last night I noticed some bright planet-like things in the western sky, so I dragged the old Dobsonian telescope out of the basement for the first time in years. The objects turned out to be Jupiter and Venus. I’m clueless at taking photos through my telescope, but I found some examples by the talented jpstanley to give you an idea of what you can see through a normal amateur telescope:
Even a good pair of binoculars will show you Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings, and if you catch a half-moon (when the shadows are longest), it’s one of the most rewarding sites in the night sky:
The next time you see a half-moon, grab your binoculars, you’ll be amazed at the detail you can see.
More info:
Another fine feature from my fine team-mates.
Once in a while, it’s important to stop, catch your breath, and look at your accomplishments before you move on to the next thing — to put a stake in the ground that says, “I made it this far!”
Today, we’re rolling out a couple of notifications to help you celebrate your blog activity milestones. From now on, whenever you hit a milestone for how many followers your blog has (5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and beyond), you’ll get a badge:
We also created badges to celebrate when you receive lots of likes from visitors:
In addition to celebrating your achievements, we wanted to notify you when you’ve had a particularly good day for receiving likes or new followers. From now on, we’ll let you know of your best days for such activity:
Keep in mind that we’ve only started counting your best days this March.
We all blog for different…
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My favorite feature in WordPress.com stats.
If you’ve ever wondered where on Earth all the visitors to your site are coming from, this feature is for you!
Mosey on over to your My Stats tab on the WordPress.com homepage:
…and check out the brand new “Views by Country” panel.
Now, you can see at a glance exactly which countries comprise your audience:
When you click on or hover over a country name, the map zooms in so you can really get a feel for all the parts of the planet your content has reached:
The Summaries page shows you country stats for the previous week, month, quarter and all time, but keep in mind this feature is new and views by country are not available prior to March 2012:
We are tremendously excited to be working on new features like this for your WordPress.com My Stats tab. Stay tuned for the next evolution!
Apple, you’re cold and I’m leaving you
This is the story of how Apple lost the enthusiasm of one family of formerly fanatical customers.
We’ve owned nine or ten iPhones, a couple of iPads, and a long string of iMacs and Macbooks. Most of these are no longer with us, but the warm glow of that “it just works” feeling is still with us, and that’s what keeps us going back to the Apple store for more. About a month ago, Apple breathed an icy wind into our idyll. One of our iPhone 4’s was bricked by Apple’s iOS 5.0.1 update.
One minute it’s humming along in perfect working order, eagerly anticipating its new iOS version, the next minute it’s a useless brick. Doing Apple’s own iPhone update from within iTunes on a Macbook Pro had bricked the phone. It’s not jailbroken or anything weird like that, just an innocent iPhone 4. I think to myself, “no problem, I’ll take to the friendly geniuses at the local Apple store, they’ll take care of it”. I made an appointment, drove down to the store, and explained to the genius what had happened and that I’d tried the various restore methods found on Apple’s support site.
Enter the icy wind. Not being able to tell a customer from an idiot, the genius tried the same restore methods again and, surprise, they didn’t work. This is where I expected her to say “This is our fault, I don’t know how to fix it, I’ll give you a new one”. Instead, I heard “it’s a month out of warranty, we can only sell you a replacement”. Cost of said replacement: $149.
This would be an extremely generous offer if I’d caused the brickification of the phone. But since it bricked itself during the iOS update process, with help only from Apple’s own servers and software, this offer was an affront. Clearly Apple caused this issue. Asking for some explanation of why Apple wouldn’t own up to the problem, I was told that since they’d replaced so many cracked screens and things in the past for free, they were no longer doing that.
I tried to explain very patiently the difference between a problem I might have caused myself (e.g. cracked the screen) and a problem that Apple caused due to some defect or snafu in their iOS update. The latter is not my problem, it’s Apple’s problem. The fact that Apple used to give away free replacements willy-nilly to people who sat on their phones or left them out in the sun is also not my problem. It’s Apple’s problem. The Apple store employee and I went around and around for ten or fifteen minutes before I left.
That’s where things stand now, with an icy wind where there used to be a warm Apple-shaped glow. If you can’t own up to this, Apple, you’re off my list.
I’m still a fan of Apple computers, and I’ll continue to buy them, though I’ll probably wait longer between upgrades. I’m not eager to give Apple money anymore, the magic spell is lifted, their computers are simply more efficient to use than the alternatives.
In a future post, I’ll write more about how the Apple mobile device ecosystem is like being in an all-inclusive resort, whereas Android is more like a city, with traffic and noise. And choice. A resort is all about the warm glow and the “ahhh” of settling down into a beach chair with a mai-tai.
But after a while you get sick of resort food, and resort muzak, and resort transport, and resort activities, and you’re ready to go back into the world of choice. Having used an Android phone for a while, there are quite a few things to like and amazingly it just works and is more efficient and easier to use than my iPhone. If you’re getting resort ennui from your Apple devices, go out into the world and take a look around. You might be surprised.
2011 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys (and their fabulous keepers — trust me, I know them, they’re amazing) prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,600 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 27 trips to carry that many people.
Martin Remy 