Photo caption — “Make: Canon Model: Canon EOS-1D Mark III Date/Time: 2009:11:30 10:57:33 Source: Herald Sun”

Source: Herald Sun

Facebook has new simplified privacy options.

Including one for About Me, which it claims “refers to the About Me description in your profile”.

“About Me”? I don’t remember that.

So I went looking in my profile. It was nowhere to be found. I thought maybe somewhere on the Info tab. Nup, couldn’t see it.

Eventually with some clues from someone on Twitter pointing me to it, I discovered it’s invisible unless you’ve set it to say something. Very helpful.

So to find it, it’s under: Profile / Info tab / Personal Information, then if you can’t see About Me, click the Edit button for Personal Information. Only then will it appear.

And just to confuse things, the “Write something about yourself” box underneath your photo in your Profile is different.

So here’s the thing. The other day I was looking at Facebook, at the Wall of a friend of mine, Jason.

And for a few minutes there, Facebook decided I was logged-on as Jason.

Except I wasn’t. I didn’t have any permissions to look at his private stuff, nor change things, but every time I clicked on the Profile button it showed me his Wall, not mine.

When I clicked Home, it thought I was me again. Clicking back to Profile, Jason again. I just couldn’t get to my own Profile.

In the bottom-right it said I had a bunch of notifications. But it wouldn’t let me see them; they must have been his.

Then I clicked logoff, and became me again.

I had a look at a couple of other friends’ Walls, it didn’t do it. But back on Jason’s, it got stuck again. I let him know, of course.

Makes me glad it didn’t just assume I was him and let me do and see anything he could. All I ever saw (apart from the number of notifications he had) was stuff I could see anyway as his friend.

All very odd.

If you’ve ever wondered how election results make their way from the ballot boxes onto the screen on the ABC, Antony Green’s written a fascinating post about how it how it all works, and how the technology involved has changed over the years from paper slips to XML feeds.

BBC: Classic video game Elite turns 25

Elite co-developer David Braben takes the BBC’s Daniel Emery on a flight in the BBC Micro computer game.

The space fantasy involved trading in slaves, narcotics and minerals as you flew around a fictional universe.

Pirate and police ships threatened to disrupt your journey or kill you.

I never got to the rank of Elite, but I did make it to Deadly.

• Docking in Elite

Turns out I don’t need an XBox to play the new(ish) Pac-Man Championship Edition; it’s also available on mobiles.

I’ve had a go of it… great graphics, and the gameplay is a really clever twist on olde Pacman. Very cool. Though oddly the sound doesn’t seem to work…

The problem is the controls. You can either use the phone’s numeric keypad (2/4/6/8 for up/left/right/down… pretty logical)… or the directional buttons. But on my Nokia N95 phone, it’s hard to find the right numerics to direct Pacman, and if you use the directional buttons you’re at constant risk of pressing one of the surrounding buttons, some of which will unceremoniously throw you out of the game.

I expect I’ll get used to it.

After some problems in the last week or two tracking stats (often they’d show zero hits), URL shortening service tr.im shut down suddenly this morning around 8am AEST, citing lack of investment:

tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.
Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.
However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.
Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.
We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.
No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.
There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner.
There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.
We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.

Personally I liked tr.im, but with its demise the quest for the ultimate URL-shortening service continues. Search Engine Land has a good list from April.

I’ve signed-up for bit.ly, and it looks okay, though already I can see one annoyance: it tracks everything by US time, with no apparent options to change that.

And I guess I’ve got about 4 months to manually go through the best of my Tweets and save the expanded tr.im URLs — something I started doing last week to prevent any future problems with stuff I’d written being lost.

Interestingly at least one of my older URLs from tinyurl.com (which has a very good record, having been around for 7 years) looks to have been corrupted: http://tinyurl.com/34sov somehow points to http://51744jqgt36.jqgt36/JQGT36 instead of http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/10/so-you-think-yo.html Odd.

Another example: http://tinyurl.com/263hx would have linked to some media article I think; now it goes to a Polish photo web site.

Update Tuesday: More interesting reading on tr.im

• tr.im RIP — official post from the company, Nambu
• Was denial-of-service attack the final straw for tr.im? — Sophos’ Graham Cluley’s blog

Update Wednesday: tr.im is back… for now.

Want to appear in adverts to your friends on Facebook?

I don’t. I don’t see why an advertiser should be able to imply that I use or recommend their product. And I had been wondering why people I know started showing up in ads like this:

Note that all three suggested dates are wrong. Pretty stupid.

Anyway, you can stop your profile image appearing in adverts by going to this Facebook settings page.

Or if that doesn’t work, go to Settings / Privacy / News feed and wall / Facebook Ads. Nicely obscure, isn’t it.

(via Rae… who also pointed me over to this article about recent changes by Facebook in this area.)

In Australia the 7 Network’s Austext teletext service is to shut down at the end of September, with only Supertext subtitles/Closed captioning continuing to be transmitted. (I wonder if they’ll move them from the current page 801 to the default 100, to make them easier to use?)

Over in the UK, ITV’s Teletext service is to shut down in January 2010.

The BBC’s Ceefax will last until analogue TV is switched off in 2012.

Hardly surprising really. I’m sure demand for text-based news and other information has plummetted since the widespread adoption of the Web. In fact I’m surprised teletext has lasted this long — I struggle to think of anybody I know who uses it.

I’ve been trying out Oolite, the open-source Elite clone.

It’s got its niggles, but it’s a very good copy of the BBC Micro original — I took a look at that again to compare. I’ve found myself wanting the original keyboard controls, and may go ahead and reconfigure it to match.

While playing around with the BBC version (actually the slightly-enhanced Master version) I refreshed my memory of how to dock without using a docking computer. I was a bit rusty, but managed to do it without too much trouble. (Well, okay, it was actually my second attempt — BeebEm includes an option to record output to an AVI.)

As I’ve mentioned in passing before, I hate relative time on updates.

Twitter is the obvious one here. “About 8 hours ago”. “About 9 hours ago.” WTF use is that? Why not just tell me the time it happened, so I don’t have to mentally work it out?

It’s particularly useless if I want to compare the time of that Tweet to something outside Twitter.

Likewise the ABC Online News “4 hours 37 minutes ago” … jeez, just give me the publish time.

It’s doubly-annoying when presented on web pages, which may or may not get read immediately, and sometimes sit there for a while without being refreshed or updated. I come back half-an-hour later… “About 3 minutes ago”… oh really? When was that? 3 minutes before I last refreshed the page? Again, useless information.

The annoying thing is some programmer has actually jumped through hoops to display the time like this.

PLEASE, just give me the option of showing the ACTUAL time, not the relative time.

Now, does anybody know of a good Windows Twitter client that will show me actual times?

(OK, some people on Twitter reckoned Tweetdeck is one to try.)

I wanted an instant music collection at work, without installing iTunes or anything else, and without individually ripping the CDs. Fortunately all my CDs had been ripped to MP3 on my iPod, so I just took it into work and plugged it in.

Of course you don’t want to use iTunes, as that will mess it up completely, but as long as you can browse around the iPod’s files (eg you’ve switched-on Enable Disk Use), look into the \iPod_Control\Music directory (it’s hidden, so switch Explorer to view hidden files) and you’ll see iTunes has helpfully given random meaningless names to the MP3 files, such as F00\AJUR.mp3

No matter. Copy them to the new PC, and then drag them to Windows Media Player’s media library. It looks at the MP3 tags, which do match the actual artists and track names, and displays those in its library.

Done.

I knew there was a reason I encoded all my songs as MP3 instead of AAC. While there are hacks to get WMP to play AACs, officially it can’t — making it awkward to do on a corporate PC. I figured when I ripped them that MP3s are more widely supported, and perhaps more futureproof.

Saw a guy on the train with an old-style portable CD player. ‘Cos, you know, digital music from real CDs have a warmth that MP3/AAC on iPods just can’t match…