Google-powered, reader-antagonistic, content-obscuring survey-ads: W-T-F?
I’ve seen something like this a few times on a dictionary website, where the text on the page has been replaced by gray boxes. There’s nothing more aggravating than looking up a word only to find the definition permanently obscured unless I interact with an ad. Merriam AND Webster must be rolling in their graves.
So you can only imagine my disappointment to find the bottom third of a local news article (that I had recently linked to) obscured in a similar manner. But what surprised me the most was to learn it was powered by Google! Really Google? Really!?
Here’s a screenshot of the survey in situ:
Hotel Wifi JavaScript Injection
So I’m checking my blog on the hotel wifi, like ya do, and I notice something a little off with the style. There’s a dark colored bar at the top of the page that shouldn’t be there. That’s funny. Maybe a recent Firefox update changed how they treat CSS?
Screenshot of Justinsomnia with weird bar circled in red
I probably wouldn’t have thought much of it, except my blog had recently been hacked (someone had gained elevated access to my web hosting account and prepended every single PHP file with a base64 encoded rootkit), so I immediately decided to view the source. Sure enough I saw some unfamiliar CSS and JavaScript that had been injected after the <head> tag (reformatted here for readability):
Emending an esoteric Exif error
From November 2006 until June 2007 (coinciding with my use of Ubuntu’s Edgy Eft v6.10), there was a bug in the old photo importer (or in Gimp, I’m not sure which) that failed to set the Exif orientation tag to 1 (aka top-left) after rotating a photo. This was solved in the following release of Ubuntu, though the fix was somewhat incomplete—as I wrote about in How to fix Eye of Gnome’s photo orientation in Ubuntu Feisty.
What this means is that the vertical photos I edited in Gimp during that time had an Exif orientation tag indicating that the top-left of the image was something other than the top-left as it appeared when I hit save. The funny thing is that Firefox (to this day) completely ignores this orientation tag. So I had no idea there was a bug lurking in the Exif metadata of the photos on my blog.
The first time I discovered the problem came much later, on an iPhone no less. See, Safari does pay attention to the Exif orientation tag (or at least it did—I was unable to reproduce the problem on Stephanie’s iPhone 4), so when it sees a photo that says it needs to be rotated, it rotates it. Which meant Safari was rotating my already rotated photos, rendering those vertical shots from 2006–2007 horizontally in the affected blog posts. I have to say, I’m surprised no one ever brought this to my attention.
iPhone demonstrating my erroneous Exif orientation tag (here’s how it should look: I think this is an Indian Warrior)
I’m famous! (on a virtual supermarket website in Chile)
Back in July, Andy Baio posted a link about these virtual South Korean grocery stores where people can shop by scanning QR Codes next to photos of the items (while waiting for the subway).
Tesco’s virtual grocery store in South Korea
Well, apparently they’re also making a splash in Chile. I just hope they stock up on lots of tasty Justinsomnia!
Screenshot of Jumbo Mobile in Chile showing off my QR Code
How to set up a local copy of your WordPress blog
Why might you want to do this?
- To access your posts while you’re away from the internet (long flights, container ships, developing countries, etc.)
- To compose posts with WordPress’ native editing and preview tools, rather than client blogging apps
- To speed up the process of editing posts, because the internet where you are is very slow or very costly
- Or perhaps some combination of the above…
This is how I managed to keep my blog up to date while I was “on the road” over the last year, even when I didn’t have access to the internet. As long as I had power (which was not always a given), I was able to compose drafts (usually in a text editor), edit photos (in GIMP), and then layout/revise posts (in my local copy of WordPress). When I was ready to publish, and had access to the internet, it was a trivial process of uploading the photos (via SSH), copy-and-pasting the text over, and pressing “Publish”.
In fact I found it so much faster to compose and revise posts locally, that I’ve continued to use this set up even after returning to fast internet connections. Think about how many times you’ve hit that “Save Draft” button and waited for WordPress to “return” so you could reload the post preview tab—and you probably understand what I mean.
The steps I describe are based on my past experience of setting up a local web development environment on my laptop. Of course I ran into a few gotchas along the way, so I documented the process here for future reference. I don’t necessarily recommend this approach for everyone, but I figured it might offer some interesting insight into how I do things.
Holy QR cupcakes, Batman!
If you happened to catch the recent Duncan Hines “Bake On” commercial, you may have registered a subliminal cupcake crop circle that momentarily materialized before disappearing beneath a giant flying brownie. I’m not making this stuff up. The first time I saw it, my brain didn’t even realize that it had seen a QR Code until after the next commercial started—and by then I had no recollection of what that crazy kaleidoscopic, cupcake-tastic commercial was even advertising. Here are some screenshots from the trippy 30 second spot:
At first glance, it seemed utterly pointless—flashing a QR Code so fast no one even knows that they’ve seen, let alone has the time to pull out their smartphones. I imagined people on the edge of their couches with iPhones primed, eagerly anticipating that split second when the commercial inevitably airs again. Visions of Orphan Annie’s Secret Society decoder pin danced in my head.
And then I remembered all those DVRs out there. Now assuming folks are not already skipping the commercials, this is actually a pretty neat strategy to get people to stop and take note of an ad, albeit one with a pretty high technical barrier to entry.
So where does the QR Code go? Well, that depends. It encodes the URL http://dhbakeon.com/qr/code/1, which, if you scan (or click) using a desktop web browser, will redirect you to Duncan Hines’ Facebook page. But if you scan with your iPhone (a more likely scenario), you’ll get a little web-based mobile site with recipes and coupons, including some features that are “locked”, requiring you to “Scan more [cupcake?] QR codes” (leaving no brownie unturned, I’d imagine).
Boing Boing’s tribute to Steve Jobs
Screenshot of Boing Boing’s touching tribute to Steve Jobs
Update: also see xkcd’s Eternal Flame
A QR Code for my wunderkammer
This time not mine, but I bought one partly to make sure!
Royal Dutch Mint 2011 Commemorative Fiver (obverse)
The photo above shows a commemorative, silver-plated 5€ coin issued by the Royal Dutch Mint in honor of their 100th anniversary. As a concession to modern technology, the reverse features a QR Code that encodes a URL—apparently the first of its kind. This is a bold move, as coins presumably last longer than URLs (not to mention QR Codes!), a reality that doesn’t seem to faze the designer, Juan José Sánchez Castaño:
Some people are worried about the fact that QR Codes will disappear in the future, or the coin will not be connected or linked any more to this webpage. [The] internet can also change or disappear in [a] few decades, and so [can] the coins, who knows? The Roman Empire disappeared centuries ago, but nowadays we still enjoy their coins and we know their meaning. As Marshall McLuhan said: “the medium is the message”. The QR Code is the message. The representation of the time we are living is the message, no matter what is encoded on it. The QR Code is a part of the design, part of the message and a beautiful way to close the circle of the one hundred years.
