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San Francisco. Programmer. Just another vanity site.

“Organic” isn’t enough

Posted in Environment

Wasteful tag

Without getting into the vagaries and lack of legal definition of the word, I just want to point out that I just cooked up some delicious broccoli and got frustrated: wrapped around the stalks was this tag:

It’s a yellow elastic band with a card attached. At least the card is recyclable. I doubt the elastic is.

So, between the plastic bag used to put the broccoli in at the grocery store and the elastic tag used to hold the stalks together, that’s quite a bit to send to the landfill for a little bit of broccoli.

This kind of thing makes me shake my head and sigh. Is organic now just another buzzword?

“They were restless and enthusiastic”

Posted in Thoughts

They were restless and enthusiastic. Sometimes they blithely disrgarded cautionary lessons of experience and history.

Daniel Charles, “Lords of the Harvest”, a book on the genesis of genetically engineered foods

Is Twisten.fm dishonest? [updated: not anymore]

Posted in Music, Tech

Twisten.fm is a hot new app in the online music mash-up world that’s been getting a lot of blog love in the past week. From their website:

“Twisten.fm crawls Twitter for tweets about music. Then you listen to them.”

The Twisten.fm homepage is a view similar to a Twitter stream - chronologically sorted tweets - except on Twisten.fm, all the tweets are about music and all the tweets contain a link to Grooveshark that allow you to listen to the song the tweet is about. Twisten.fm was created by employees (and I assume other resources) at Grooveshark.

Here’s the catch, though. It appears as if Twisten.fm doesn’t actually crawl for tweets about music. It only catches tweets that link to online music services - including their own site and Grooveshark’s site, but includes other sites like imeem, Last.fm and Blip.fm.

And then there’s the dishonest part: when displaying the tweet on their page, if the link isn’t to Grooveshark or Twisten.fm, they replace the original link with one to Grooveshark. This modification isn’t noted and they don’t provide a link back to the original tweet, so unless you do some investigating, you would never know that all those people that show up in the stream on the Twisten.fm homepage aren’t in fact tweeting about Twisten.fm or Grooveshark.

What they’re doing is wrong because they’re taking content created by someone else, altering it, and then presenting it as if it were the original. If I linked to a song on Last.fm, I probably want to link to Last.fm for a reason. And I definitely don’t want anyone putting words in my mouth, which is effectively what Twisten.fm is doing.

I think that Twisten.fm is a neat idea, but they need to fix this ASAP. There are a few ways to make this right, but the best way is preserve the original tweet when displaying it, link to the original on Twitter, and provide the Grooveshark link as separate from the original tweet.

This would in no way diminish the value of their service — they would still be aggregating the same music related tweets and driving traffic to Grooveshark while at the same time ensuring they remain good Internet citizens.

Update! Twisten.fm has updated their site! They now provide a link to the original tweet, and the link is in the form of the icon of the service that the original tweet linked to! Go check it out. Great job, twisten !

How to Stop RedPlum Coupon Mailings

Posted in Environment

Stop RedPlum Coupons

Do you get those annoying RedPlum junk mail coupons that you never use?  Do you wish you could save some trees?

Well, you are in luck. Stopping RedPlum coupon mailings is as simple as pressing the giant button above, visiting their parent company’s site and filling out the form.

I received one additional mailing after submitting my cancellation request, but they stopped coming! Much respect for RedPlum and their parent company for making the opt-out process so easy. If only they could switch to an opt-in model…

New site is up

Posted in meta

The old johnmarkengle.com used Drupal and a theme by the humble author.  Unfortunately, Drupal doesn’t cut it as a blogging engine, and your humble author is not a web designer.  Needless to say, things around here stagnated.

But no longer! The site has been redone in Wordpress, an impressive blogging engine with an eye towards design and ease-of-use, and a theme designed by a third party.

With the sites snazzy new engine and duds, the idea is to be able to post when inpiration strikes, and strike often it will.  Let the fun begin!