Paul Lindner

Clarion Alley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarion_Alley_Mural_Project

#gplus

Found lots of fall colors and conquerable  #ingress  portals in Contra Costa County today.

#ingress #gplus

Yes, I too have been playing  #ingress .  It's amazing.  You must check it out.

It really feels like one of those pivotal shifts in the way we interact with our technology.  We finally see what happens when console-quality graphics, fast networks, and huge amounts of data combine.

Add to that creativity, storytelling, great gameplay and air of mystery.  This yields a highly addictive game you can spend hours and hours playing, discovering, and communicating with new people.

No invites yet, but you can request one at the site.  (Though if I do get some they're going to people who join the beleaguered  #enlightenment  in Minnesota!)

#enlightenment #ingress #gplus

Okay, it's totally non-obvious and buried in the settings...  There is some magic that detects that it's a following circle:

https://cs.corp.google.com/#google3/java/com/google/apps/tacotown/socialgraph/client/CircleNameSugge...

Originally shared by Trey Harris

This bears repeating. Privacy is important, and Google+ has great privacy controls. But you need to know how they work to use them to best advantage.

The first rule of privacy on Google+: people don't get any access to your info without you taking action. Relationships in G+ are "asymmetric", meaning you can "follow" someone ("adding to a circle", or "circling") without their having to reciprocate by circling you back. When you circle someone, the things they share you'd already be able to see anyway — because they're shared publicly or with a circle that includes you — will appear in your streams. But if you go to their profile before and after you circle them, you won't see much difference — circling someone doesn't give you access to their info.

At the same time, when you circle someone else, you are not only asking Google+ to put that person's shares into your stream, but you're also giving them access to things you share with your circles. For instance, if you edit your profile (the circle with a profile in the buttons up top of the G+ web interface), you can give people in your circles access to your email address or your phone number. Those are people you have added to your circles, not people who have circled you. (When you edit your profile, you can change the visibility of items by clicking the little icon next to each one.)

Similarly, if you enable G+ chat, when you click the triangle to the right of your name in the chat box (in the left sidebar of your G+ stream, not in Gmail) you can choose whether "Your Circles" can chat you, or a custom selection of circles. Note that those people must have also circled you and done the same; chat is obviously one case where reciprocity matters!

But if you've been paying attention, you'll notice that you circle someone for two different reasons: one, to see their shares in your stream, and two, to give them access to your info and/or chat. This makes sense most of the time; people you know are the people you want to hear from. But sometimes the two don't align, and when they don't, you need to know a couple of more advanced tricks, which I've taken screenshots of below.

First, not all circles are created equal. Some circles are ones you may use for celebrities or people you don't know but who publicly share interesting stuff. (A lot of people use the "Following" circle for that.) Maybe you want to get their stuff in your stream, but you don't want to give them any access to your info. No problem: go to https://www.google.com/settings/plus and click "Customize" under "Your circles" (first screenshot). Then make sure only the circles you want to share with have the checkbox clicked (second screenshot). Now, when you see "Your circles", you know that really means "all my circles but the ones I unchecked here", and you're safe to add whoever you want to "just follow" to those unchecked circles without giving them visibility to things you want to share in a limited fashion.

What about the reverse case? Maybe you have business associates or acquaintances who post stuff you don't care to read, but you do want them to have the "always up to date" contact information in your profile (especially useful if they have an Android phone or use Gmail!) and/or access to chat you. In that case, put such people together in a new circle (I call mine "Contacts", because that's how I think of them). Make sure the circle is checked in the "Your circles" setting we just saw. Then go to your stream and click that circle's name in the lefthand sidebar (third screenshot). Now, at the top, you'll see a slider. Drag it all the way to the left (fourth screenshot), so it says "Show nothing from this stream in my main stream" (fifth screenshot).

Now you won't see this circle's shares unless you specifically go to this stream again, but since this circle is part of "Your Circles", they'll have access to the things you want to share with them.

(One final note: when you enable chat in G+, you have your choice between allowing chat from "Your Circles" and a custom set you select. This gives you even a bit more control. Maybe you don't want to be chatted by that guy you're following with the interesting but weird political opinions, but you'd just love it if your favorite celebrity were to respond to your insightful comment with a chat. It's your choice.)

#gplus

So my Nexus4 order was backordered.  So here's the next best thing.  I was able to get the following since I've been with T-Mobile for over 10 years:

- $199 with $50 mail in rebate.

- Waived the overnight shipping fee of $24.99 (as a credit to my bill)

- You do need a data plan of >$35/month on the line and a 2 year contract extension, however the standard plan comes with 400 text messages so I was able to consolidate a text message bundle with the data bundle and end up at $0 change.

- Retain the rest of my FamilyTime,@Home service and the G1 data plan on the other line.

And it will arrive tomorrow...

#gplus

Have to love the low tech doodles that the Missouri Lounge does for their advertisements in the East Bay Express. 

Check them out at 

https://plus.google.com/115477316230066484040

West Berkeley’s longest running dive bar, keeping people hip since 1953.

Now does anyone have a nerd walks into a bar... jokes?

#gplus

This looks incredibly useful for people with MacOS and Android.  No more wasting phone and laptop batteries using wifi tethering.

#gplus

This new camera lockscreen thing might take some getting used-to...

#gplus

I guess Die Young was a bad association for your new smartphone?

I never understood why Nokia bothers putting their phones in music videos.  It all looks so staged.  That said the Ke$ha video is pretty weird.  I can understand why they wanted to remove it.

#gplus

Since you missed this before...

Originally shared by Theodore Ts'o

Phoronix, alas, has perpetrated another example of irresponsible journalism.   I won't dignify said article with a web link, since I don't want to reward them with more ad hits.  So I'll link to the original Ubuntu Launchpad report, and include the comment I just made there:

Those specific fsck corrections --- fixing the number of free blocks and the number of free inodes --- is completely normal and is purely a cosmetic issue. There is nothing to worry about here.

What is going on is that ext4 no longer updates the superblock after every block and inode allocation; that causes a wasteful write cycle to the superblock at every single journal commit, and it also is a SMP scalability bottleneck for larger servers (i.e., with 32 or 64 CPU's). To fix this, we no longer update these values in the superblock every time we allocate a block or an inode. Instead, we only update these values when we unmount the file system, mainly for cosmetic purposes so that dumpe2fs shoes the correct number of free inodes and blocks, and at mount time we calculate the total number of free blocks and inodes in the file system by summing the the free blocks/inodes statistics for each block group. So in fact, ext4 does not depend on the correctness of the values in the superblock, but it does try to update them on a clean unmount.

In e2fsprogs commit id 2788cc879bbe6, which is in e2fsprogs 1.42. 3 and newer, we changed things so that e2fsck -n would not display this as something "wrong". However, we still do show this as something that we "fix" when running e2fsck -y or -p, since in fact it is a change to the file systems. See: http://git.kernel.org/?p=fs/ext2/e2fsprogs.git;a=commit;h=2788cc879bbe667d28277e1d660b7e56514e5b30

No one else has complained or noticed up until now, because other distro's apparently are capable of doing a clean shutdown allowing the file system to be unmounted cleanly. Ubuntu, unfortunately, is incapable of reliably doing a clean shutdown even when users request it, which is why Ubuntu users are seeing this behavior much more frequently, and apparently some people have panicked as a result. Sigh....

----

I will say that it is extremely irresponsible of Phoronix to make a big deal about this this before giving anyone knowledgeable (which unfortunately  does not include any Ubuntu kernel engineers, since as far as I know they don't have any file system specialists on staff) to comment on the bug.  No one from Phoronix even bothered to contact me to tell me they were posting this story, or to ask me for a comment.  I had to find out about it when someone asked me to comment on Google+.

However, from the perspective of trying to send as many ad clicks as possible to their web site, they are doing a heckuva job....

#gplus

Here they are..

#gplus

Following along here on my evening commute...

#gplus

Another great mural in San Francisco's Mission district.

#gplus

1313 Mockingbird Lane was much better than I expected.  Worth it for the visuals alone, including the Victorian house with the Golden Gate view, the clothes and the interiors.  But that's to be expected from the creator of Pushing Daisies 

** Not for kids though -- very dark.  

#gplus

Looks like I'm not the only one to have seen a bright meteor/shooting star just now in the Oakland Hills.

There was a loud rumble afterwards too -- wonder if something hit? 

#gplus

Forget about chewing gum -- Can you walk and code at the same time?

#gplus

Anyone want a leaky washer drain pump?

I'm a bit surprised at the so-so construction of the guts of my mid-range front-loading washing machine.  The drain filter is basically a cup with holes -- which means that debris can get into the plastic pump easily.  Oh and getting to these parts requires removing 18 screws and three rubber retaining clamps which means no-one ever cleans the filter.

At least I replaced the spring-clamps with proper hose clamps on the new pump.

#gplus

A new album by Mark Mallman, very catchy.  If you don't know his work read this review:

 Frankly, Double Silhouette, his latest, is the album the Killers were trying to make with Battle Born – an epic, gorgeous pop album filled with arena-ready choruses. But he does it in a way that doesn’t make him sound pompous (sorry, Killers).

http://www.letoilemagazine.com/2012/10/02/we-will-rock-you-local-reviews-part-deux-mark-mallman-and-...

#gplus

Oakland vs Swiss style referendum posters.  Which one would you frame?

#gplus

#badjokes  from the DNA Lounge newsletter:

Skrillex walks into a bar, sits down on a stool, and falls on his ass because the base was too wobbly.

#badjokes #gplus

The unnatural offspring of the Economist and Mondo 2000?

Came across issue 1.2 of Wired recently at home.  After 19 years it shows how far we've come and yet how far we have to go.  Archived here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.02/ but you really need to hold it in your hands with the orignal inventive page layout (and all the original advertisements!) 

Topics included:

  - The Cypherpunk movement.

  - 3DO!

  - Jaron - (who coined VR)

Gadgetry?

 - Early 3D printers

 - VR glasses

 - DCC  or Minidisc?

Pull Quotes

  "The Naked Truth is that Pink makes the Macintosh and OS/2 Obsolete"

 _"Interactive TV is doomed, it's a dead end"_

 _"If Privacy is outlawed only outlaws will have Privacy"_

#gplus