Disable notifications at the level of a tweet - suggested Twitter improvement

by @JoBrodie, brodiesnotes.blogspot.com

Yesterday I had a handful of notifications from slightly iffy accounts that had been favouriting tweets of mine, or tweets I was mentioned in, but with all of these tweets being from several years ago.

The tweets were reasonably popular being retweeted or responded to a few times when they were originally sent. As far as I can tell the purpose of favouriting these tweets now is to get people to notice the account doing the favouriting, a sort of "hey I'm here". Some people will follow / interact, others will ignore or not even notice (I report as spam* and block).

Sometimes one tweet will receive a spate of new favourites. To stop the notifications tab from recording this (not talking about email or web notifications as I got rid of those on day one) the options currently available are to block each account that favourites a tweet, activate the option to show only notifications / mentions from people you follow, or delete the tweet (if it's one of yours).

A suggestion
Allow users to choose to stop receiving notifications about activity on any tweet that they previously sent or were mentioned in (at the level of the tweet, not user). This will not stop replies to the tweet of course (but my experience has been that these bots never reply, they only favourite previously popular tweets).

A separate suggestion (not related to spam bots) for users with tens of thousands of followers
Instead of sending a notification each time someone interacts with a tweet instead do it in batches of 10, 50, 100 etc. That way people still get the information but aren't swamped with constant updates. I'm not affected by this as I don't have tens of thousands of followers, I just get the spam bot interaction instead, but the reason I killed off Google+ was because I couldn't work out how to switch off notifications. It also seemed like nothing much had happened to warrant being notified most of the time so it was the final straw for me ;)

*annoyingly Twitter's phrasing says 'they are posting spam'. In fact they're often not posting anything they're just engaging in spam-like behaviour to get someone's attention.

Today's brilliant or crap idea - random monthly magazine subscriptions

I had an idea and need to put it somewhere, in the hope that someone more enterprising than me makes it happen or tells me that it already exists. Or, as my dad suggested, doesn't do it at all.

You can be in a wine club type of thing and each month (or quarter or however these things work) they send you a different wine. I don't think they just send you the same type of wine but a more recent version of it.

With monthly subscriptions to magazines mean you get the next issue of the same magazine.

How about a magazine subscription that lets you try out different magazines. You could say you're interested in science or history and the publisher could send you a different magazine each month. Or, for the more adventurous magazine subscriber (!) you could opt for potluck.


I suggested this to my dad and he pointed out that it's a fairly crap idea because it costs more to post the magazines than it does to print them but even so how would anyone know how many extra to print. My reply that there would probably be magazines left over didn't impress either - then you'd be sending out old magazines. Ah well. I'm sure someone could do something sensible with it...

I wish PDFs had a 'make single column' button...

Edit: 19 July 2021 - solved

Use MS Word to open the PDF, then select all the text and choose Layout > Columns > Single column. Hurrah.

----------------

 

...to save scrolling down one side of the page, scrolling up again and then scrolling back down the other side. Sometimes I do copy and paste the text into something else and sort that out myself but maybe Adobe could put this in one of their many, many, many updates.

Edit 14 March 2014 - potentially solved! If you have Adobe Reader X (which apparently I do, as it sort of worked) open your two column PDF, press Ctrl+4 [not the numeric keypad 4 but the one below the $ symbol] and wait patiently while the file is shoogled into a single column format. Amazing! 

The downside is that success is very dependent on the quality of the formatting of the PDF - and since most PDFs are presumably not intended to be read in this way results might be a bit hit and miss. The example PDF below renders like this, ie a bit Latin withallthewordshavingnospaces between them. I can read it OK but goodness knows why anyone ever wants to have double columns in a PDF in the first place.

 


Original post

Here's what I have (click to enlarge)...

...here's what I want

I made this myself in Paint on my PC but I can't keep doing that ;)

The paper shown is Blandford, A., Cauchi, A., Curzon, P., Eslambolchilar, P., Furniss, D., Gimblett, A., Huang, H., Lee, P., Li, Y., Masci, P., Oladimeji, P., Rajkomar, A., Rukšėnas, R., & Thimbleby, H. (2011). Comparing actual practice and user manuals: A case study based on programmable infusion pumps. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems for Medicine and Health Care (EICS4Med), 59–64.

On Flickr I'd like to be able to select 'show this photo' v 'keep in reserve'

I've lots of holiday photos from my trip to Orkney that I'm uploading Flickr. Some are passable, plenty are probably just for completists only ;) I tend to take an 'upload them all and sort them out later approach', especially when on sporadic wifi (the iPhone Flickr app is *really* good at uploading stuff I've noticed).

Some of the ones that are neither good nor bad are perhaps still of some interest if they're of some obscure bit of technology (I've taken a lot from the Orkney Wireless Museum for example), or provide some detail missing in one of the others - but I'd like to 'hide' them from the main 'set' or mosaic of pictures while still making them available.

So I don't want to make them private, or delete them - I want them there, but available to anyone that wants to see them.

I'd like to be able to pick out eight of the best and say 'show these 8, but don't "promote" these 14'. Whoever might like to look at my photos might see the selected 8 and be more than satisfied with those but anyone who's thinking about going to the museum or interested in grainy shots of old tech might like to see more.

There are many options available at every conceivable level of granularity (ie you can do something to one photo, to a group of photos [set] or a [collection] of sets) ... except, as far as I can see, this one.

Basically I want to fling all my photos into the vat and pick out a few to pin to the wall above it leaving others to rummage in the vat if they want. Is that possible?

Using IRC (internet relay chat) at conferences, to save hashtagged tweets

About 15 years ago I was a fairly regular user of IRC, at a sort of 'advanced amateur' level on one of the several #London channels; I forget which network though. I really enjoyed it, learned quite a lot about computery stuff and enjoyed the company (both on- and offline) of the chums I met there. I don't remember suddenly stopping using it, but as soon as I got going on Twitter I was reminded of it, and of the similarities.

The main difference though is in effort in getting started - Twitter is exceptionally easy to sign up to and get going, the work comes in connecting with people. With IRC you need to download a client, set it up and join a channel. There are a few commands you need to use as well - it's not difficult but requires a smidge more effort and is a shade geekier than Twitter. I've just used freenode for the first time - it wasn't in the list of available networks so I had to work out how to add it myself, again not difficult but a slight barrier to wider use.

I know that people use IRC as a backchannel at conferences, as well as Twitter, I just don't know if people have been IRCing at any of the conferences I've been to. I'd peg the Science Online ones in London as being likely candidates, but certainly on a much smaller scale if so. Possibly there are certain types of conferences, events or sessions that use IRC - not that surprisingly the #sciencehackday event is using it. The people who whizz high altitude balloons upwards also discuss matters geeky on their freenode channel. Possibly IRC is destined to stay outside the mainstream, unless there are lots of web-based IRC clients I don't know about (familiar only with Pirch and mIRC).

When I entered the #sciencehackday channel I noticed that a bot (robot) was sending anything from Twitter containing the hashtag #scihack to the channel. I thought that was rather clever and wondered if it was something that could be used to save hashtagged tweets from a conference - a topic I've blogged on before:
Following conference hashtag tweets in real time and saving them for later
and TweetNotes - tool for archiving hashtagged tweets at events and conferences etc

I also wondered if it is as straightforward as setting up 'What The Hashtag' (wthashtag) or TwapperKeeper to record a series of tweets. Apparently setting up an IRC bot probably requires a bit of programming knowledge and I may be some time, trying to understand the suggested instructions here http://github.com/tommorris/twittertoirc

To me IRC as a backchannel is analogous to using FriendFeed - with FF it is possible to set up a room in which the search results for a hashtagged tweetstream are posted in real time and which people who are already signed up to FriendFeed can read and comment on, as well as adding their own comments (these aren't pinged back to Twitter).

In that sense IRC and FriendFeed are almost identical but the big difference is that FriendFeed seems to strip out author details meaning that you've no idea who's posted a tweet if it's come via the Twitter RSS. IRC certainly wins here, although the interface isn't quite as pretty.

I see someone else has had similarish thoughts to me:
Wanted: an IRC bot to gateway to a twitter backchannel - http://ideas.4brad.com/wanted-irc-bot-gateway-twitter-backchannel

Google groups and file sharing for skeptics?

I was wondering if there exists a Google group for UK skeptics? If not might there be any mileage in setting one up? Not for the chatter, which already takes place in a number of online venues but for the useful facility of being able to upload files (PDFs of useful papers perhaps) for storage / sharing among the group members.

There might be a copyright issue of course, in terms of storing other people's articles - but I could always write to authors and ask if they're happy for their material to be used and stored for this purpose.

In the next week or two I'll be collating a bunch of papers from the British Library (which will be bought for my own personal use so I expect I can't share them without falling foul). I'll be sending these to Trading Standards (TS) / Advertsing Standards Authority (ASA) regarding a local shop which is making some ridiculous claims in a leaflet (ASA) and on its website (TS). Having spoken to someone who worked in the shop it's clear that they consider that "people keep coming back / feel better" equals good evidence.

Anyway, if I were to get a bit more organised and email authors for permission for their copies to be stored in a small skeptic repository via Google groups... does that seem sensible?