A quick post for @colmsmyth about what you can see when someone blocks you

For the last 11 months I've kept a search open for people talking about the block on Twitter and if they say anything indicating that someone you've blocked can't see your tweets then I generally tweet back and point out, politely, that this isn't quite the case. I'm sure I am the most annoying person in the world (and occasionally people tell me to thrrppp, but mostly it's indifference and sometimes people are pleased to know about it and make their accounts private if they've been experiencing abuse from someone monitoring their tweets) but it bothers me a lot that Twitter's clarity on what happens when you block someone is so... turbid.

What you can or can't see when someone blocks you depends a great deal on what platform or software you're using. It seems that Twitter for Android behaves differently from Twitter for iPhone, and on Echofon for iPhone not only can you see all their tweets but you can see their profile too (but not on Twitter for iPhone). On desktop Twitter (Mac, Firefox) you can't see their profile page but you can see all their tweets by searching for their username (their hashtagged tweets would also show up if you happened to be looking at the hashtag search results).

Colm Smyth has also found a trick using an IFTTT (IF This Then That) script that sends all tweets from a blocked account to you. I was intrigued to discover that he doesn't see all tweets when searching their username though.

So we tried it out and he's blocked me for half an hour while I take some screenshots, so that I can show him what I see when I look at his profile and search for his tweets, while blocked. First I logged out and refreshed the page.

Here's me logged out...

Here's me logged in again and unable to see his profile when I go to his page...

Here's me searching for his tweets. I've typed from:colmsmyth into the search bar. If I type just colmsmyth then I see only my tweets until I click the 'Live' link. The 'Top' link is shown first by default, underlined in blue in the picture below, just above the avatar in the first of his tweets I can see. I'd just see more tweets (and in their correct order) by clicking the Live option.

It is quite possible that his system shows something else entirely. Twitter has given users inconsistent and incomplete information about how the block works.

As far as I can tell, from Twitter's point of view when you block someone you no longer have to see their tweets (they cannot contact you through that account). Given there are so many ways / workarounds for the blockee to see your tweets I have to assume that preventing that from happening was never really a 'thing'. Of course you can always log out of your account and view any public account. You might think 'everyone knows that' but I can assure you, from 11 months of chatting to strangers about it, that it's not actually obvious or intuitive to everyone until they considered it or had it pointed out to them. Of course once they realise, it's perfectly obvious.

Many people form their mental model of the way Twitter's block works from the system that they use to implement a block or experience a block (and this is perfectly reasonable). It is not obvious that the way a block works on 'your Twitter' does not transfer to 'other people's Twitter' though, where blocks may be much leakier on different apps.

I've no objection to the block being leaky (there is actually no technological solution to this given that Twitter is public by default and there is no need to log in to view content), just the fact that Twitter implies that it isn't. It is.

How to take screenshots

A version of this was originally posted another post about capturing tweets.

How to take screenshots
On desktop computers people may want to INCLUDE the URL in the address bar but NOT INCLUDE their bookmarks. If so they can usually use the VIEW option in their browser to temporarily hide their bookmarks toolbar (and any other toolbars) to neaten the captured image. They can also resize the entire window and use the Ctrl+- (the Ctrl or Command* key plus the hyphen key) to reduce the size of the text on the screen. Ctrl++ (Ctrl / Command and the + key) to embiggen it again :)

*Command = for Mac keyboards

To take a screenshot on a Windows desktop PC or laptop
• Look for 'Print Screen' on the keyboard which is likely to be spelled Prt Scr.
• Press it to take a picture of the entire screen or press the Alt key first and then Prt Scr to take a snapshot of just the active window.
• This silently copies an image of the screen, or part of it, to the clipboard (it doesn't send it to the printer).

If you open Paint (free with Windows) or Word you can paste it in (keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+V). In Paint you can edit the image.

To take a screenshot on a Mac laptop
Note that 'Command' = the ⌘ key
Command+Shift+3     Capture the entire screen to a file
Command+Shift+Control+3     Capture the screen to the Clipboard
Command+Shift+4     Capture a selection to a file
Command+Shift+Control+4     Capture a selection to the Clipboard       
Source: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1343

You can use the Preview tool (free with Macs) to do some basic editing of the image.

To take a screenshot on an iPhone
Press the on/off button (at the top right) and the 'home screen' button at the bottom. This will copy whatever's on your screen to your camera roll which you can then email to yourself (private) or upload to image sharing services (public).

To take a screenshot on an Android phone (v4.0 and above)
Press and hold the power and 'volume down' buttons simultaneously - h/t @ErisianLib
More at http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/google-android/3446798/how-take-screenshot-on-android-phones-tablets/

To take a screenshot on a Samsung S3 Mini
Press and hold the 'home' and 'on/off' (power) button simultaneously - thanks to @Jackpot73 for the info. 

To take a screenshot on a Windows 8.1 phone
Press 'power button' and 'volume increase/up' at the same time - info from @Flatsquid, thank you

To take a screenshot on a Sony phone
It's power and volume down simultaneously, according to @clangyandjammy - thanks

Annoyance with printing stuff from a website - any ideas?

Printing from websites has always been a miserable experience. I usually do quite a lot of pre-emptive tinkering on the print preview page before I press 'send'.

I've noticed that quite often the preview version bears little relation to the on-screen view. I presume this is due to the use of style sheets (CSS). These are part of the underlying code (as is html and things like that) which determines what the page will look like on the screen.

I don't want to print the underlying code, but the final page. Unfortunately what I get is the underlying code.

To see what I mean compare the Print Preview option for your own Gmail inbox (looks the same) and your Twitter feed (looks hideous).

When faced with this sort of thing the quickest solution, for me, has been to forego any efforts to print it as real text and just take screencaptures, knit those together in Paint, paste into Word document and print. This works well but is fiddly and I've shown quite a few people how to do it as they'd not found a solution either.

Surely EVERYONE has this problem. How do you get round it and is there a better way?

There are some customisable options in the Print Preview options menu (Windows 7) but none make the page look as pretty as it might.

(And no, copying and pasting the text doesn't entirely solve the problem - it solves a different problem in that I can format the text any way I like, but it doesn't let the web page look like the web page).

iPhone screenshot or taking a 'photo' of your iPhone screen

I discovered how to do this quite by accident, after playing with all the five buttons on my iPhone and trying them in different permutations.

How to take a screenshot with your iPhone
Press the 'sleep' button and the 'home' button simultaneously (see first photo below) - the screen will 'blink' as if taking a photo (if you have the ringer button set to on it will make a camera sound).

The photo is now in your Camera roll.

See demo photos (second and third photos) at the end of this post.

Why would you want to do this?
I use this A LOT when I'm going to be travelling somewhere and can't guarantee I'll have a good wifi or 3G signal, and I might need to have a local map with me. So I check the map via my home wifi and screenshot it for use later. Clearly I also use this function for demonstration purposes too ;)

Further info
The relevant buttons are marked on this photo which I pinched from Wikimedia then tweaked.


Photo credit: Flickr user lecates (http://www.flickr.com/photos/lecates/354510858/), taken from Wikimedia (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apple-iPhone-001.jpg).

Examples
Screenshot of iPhone map showing London Zoo


Close up - keeping this sort of thing in my Camera Roll means I'm less likely to get lost even if there's no signal.

Sharing websites pictorially - how can I do this?

In Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari I can click on a button that will show me a grid view of the tabs I currently have open or my recently visited (favourite) websites, as below.

Microsoft Internet Explorer tabs (full size below)


Apple Safari recently visited / favourites (full size below)


I would like to be able to create a series of these pages, with different content, that can be shared with others.

For example

• recommended diabetes sites for healthcare professionals (which would include Diabetes UK's professional pages and NHS Evidence - diabetes among others)
• my favourite skeptical / science blogs
• useful library resources

Incidentally, if I wanted to share my Safari favourites, or the IE tabs I had open is there an URL I could uncover that would let me do so? If not, that's the sort of thing I'm after...

I've previously had a play on Pageflakes believing that this service would let me do that but I didn't find it straightforward. It's certainly true that you don't have to restrict yourself to their presets and can put in pages of your choosing, however they all seem to be RSS newsfeeds - for updating purposes. I don't want this, I just want the homepages.

There is useful diabetes info here, but it's very text based, and it's just updates http://www.pageflakes.com/bell.library/21584955/

I'm a big fan of the 'corporate ID' of a page - its logo, and the way it's set out and this is usually what cues me in to knowing that I'm on the right page! It's easy to see from the pictures above what pages are open when I took the screenshot.

My ideal system would let me input a number of links and it would automatically grab the homepage (the ones above are personalised to me cos I'm logged in) and produce a new page for me with miniature windows for each link already embedded. Something similar is krunchd.com which lets you input a series of links and it will give you a single link in return.

Visiting your new krunchd link will open a page containing a drop down menu with all your pages in and you can move through them, and each new page is presented within a frame. Example: http://krunchd.com/FindReviewers (viewed over 670 times... ).

Is this something I could do on Google Wave if I had any clue how to create something on Wave, and also had access to it? Or does anyone know of something else that would work - I don't think Netvibes does this either.

Microsoft Internet Explorer tabs


Apple Safari recently visited / favourites