Like it says on the tin:

See the full gallery on Posterous

I'm taking several pictures of myself each day without any effort. It's a lazy photo diary that I don't have to devote any time to maintaining.

I recently came across a post on this subject, but the author didn't include the scripts he used in his implementation. I wrote my own. You'll need:

• OSX 10.5 or later
• nonzero familiarity with Terminal.app
• sleepwatcher, a free command-line daemon that monitors sleep, wake, and idle states

With sleepwatcher installed, it's just a matter of connecting it to a photo script. I used Automator.app to create a workflow (with camera flash or without) that launches Photo Booth.app and takes a photo.

Photo Booth works well here — more so than invisibly taking a photo in the background, perhaps — because it counts down from 3 before capturing, giving you time to pose, and because it remains open afterwards for re-takes. Photo Booth won't be much help recovering your laptop from a thief, but there is an app called iTried that purports to be more subtle.

With your Automator workflow in place, run this command in Terminal and point it at your photo workflow. I saved mine in Dropbox for easy access anywhere.

/usr/local/sbin/sleepwatcher -d -w "exec automator ~/Dropbox/Documents/TakePhoto.workflow"

This command will need to be run once every time your computer starts up. For bonus points (or a future update?) you can add a launchd script that will start it automatically on login.

Permalink

I used a free Chrome Extension, Graph Your Inbox, to plot my inbound and outbound GMail volume by month since I first joined in late 2004. As far as I can tell, this is counting conversation threads and not individual emails.

It looks like I reached peak inbound email around March '09. I attribute the decline since then to several things: aggressive email filters, increased usage of Twitter and Chatter, and an unfortunate proliferation in the number of email addresses I maintain.

Less email is good. My condolences to those of you with inboxes spiraling out of control.

Permalink

I joined Facebook in late 2004 because... well, everyone else was doing it. I was a sophomore and CMU was one of the first universities targeted in Facebook's early aggressive expansion.

For many years my daily usage was north of Facebook's sitewide average of 55 minutes per user per day. In mid-2010, I started cutting back — first by no longer reading the newsfeed, then through rampant defriending — until ultimately deactivating deleting my account in early November. I did so because:

I can't control my personal information on Facebook. Privacy controls are continuously eliminated for increasingly more profile data¹. Wide swaths of your personal information are shared anytime you use Facebook Connect with a third party. Your friends, without your knowledge or consent, can share your information should they connect with a third party. Contrast this with my own website, where I control the entire experience, and with Twitter, where there's much less personal data to reveal and the privacy controls are much simpler.

I don't trust Facebook or its CEO. Zuckerberg is on the record calling his users "dumb fucks" for entrusting their data to him. Facebook is at its core an advertising company and you, the Facebook user, are not its customer — you are its product. Your personal data will be bought and sold as Facebook pleases². Facebook is not an environment in which I feel comfortable sharing because I'm never sure who has access to my information under what circumstances, to say nothing of data retention.

Facebook's new "Places" app is a great case study. You can check yourself in anywhere, tag your friends (whether they're there or not), and see where others are checking in. But I want to use Places to meet up with people, to organize events, to see where my friends' favorite places are. It's just not very good for that. And it reeks of poor design — enough people checking in at your house will force it to be a public location, and there is no process to privatize it again. Places seems like a better deal for advertisers and retailers than it does for me or my friends. It feels scummy.

I don't find Facebook useful. Simple social planning was probably the main reason I joined Facebook in the first place, and I still find their photo and event apps to be among the best-executed parts of the site. But the Farmvilles, the quiz apps, the ads, the constant droning drudgery of someone friending someone you don't know and relationship statuses and "Buddy McZynga needs your help to complete their³ castle!" — where is the value? Worse, it's boring. And it seems to be an increasingly large part of the site experience. 

I haven't missed anything about Facebook. And I doubt any of my 560 "friends" noticed I'm gone.

¹ Facebook Privacy Policy circa December 2009: "Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings." ↩

² The EFF's timeline of quotes from Facebook's Privacy Policy as it changed over the years is well worth a look. ↩

³ Our generation's greatest tragedy unfolds before our eyes. How many of your gender-identifying friends have had their possessives rendered in your newsfeed as "their"? ↩

Permalink

Facebook announced today its new "seamless messaging" product. From the announcement:

It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. ... With new Messages, your Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into an Other folder.

This seems completely backwards to me. Some of the most important email I've ever received has been from people I've never met. Why should a random message from a high school friend -- someone with whom I interact only rarely -- have the same priority as a monthly bill that's more likely to require my immediate attention?

Facebook continues to try to force all your communication to center around interactions with other Facebook members, in this case at the expense of sensibly prioritizing your messages from people, objects, and systems that are not your Facebook friends.

Then again, as with most of Facebook's new features lately, I suspect I'm not their intended audience. I deactivated my account yesterday.

Permalink

The media loves this nonsense because it generates pageviews, so they've been reliably putting out the same crap every few months for the past three years.  

(Update: I was wrong. :)

Permalink

I wasn't an active Tumblr user, but I disliked Tumblr's frequent 404s. Worst of all was the interminable slowness. Although, as these things go, I guess I wasn't that mad.

So list.her.sh now lives on Posterous, with a modified theme from Bill Israel.

Permalink

From 2004:

Zuckerberg said that the extensive search capabilities are restricted by a myriad of privacy options for members who do not want everyone to be able to look up their information.

“There are pretty intensive privacy options,” he said. “You can limit who can see your information, if you only want current students to see your information, or people in your year, in your house, in your classes. You can limit a search so that only a friend or a friend of a friend can look you up. People have very good control over who can see their information.”

Zuckerberg said that he hoped the privacy options would help to restore his reputation following student outrage over facemash.com, a website he created in the fall semester.

Stunning. It’s incredible how history repeats itself; Facebook is still dogged today by these same sorts of privacy concerns and criticisms.

Be sure to see EFF’s timeline of direct quotes from Facebook’s privacy policy as it changed over the years.

Permalink

The full theatrical trailer for the upcoming Facebook movie, “The Social Network”, is out — and boy, it sure doesn’t disappoint. After all, where else can you get

• Everyone’s favorite math cliché: writing formulas on a window
• A strange, breathy, choir-style rendition of Radiohead’s “Creep”
• Justin Timberlake

…all within two and a half minutes?

Permalink

An interview with Australian designer Yiying Lu, the mind behind Twitter’s Fail Whale — a beast so infamously popular it has its own fan site. Lots of great pictures of her artwork.

Permalink

Eric Kerr details a deviously brilliant vulnerability in Facebook’s open graph:

1. User navigates to your page, like button is embedded invisibly
2. As user moves mouse, JavaScript is used to keep the button beneath the user’s cursor.
3. User clicks what they believe is a link on the page and “Likes” the attacker’s content instead.
4. User doesn’t see any notification of Liking the content, which results in a News Feed story.
5. News Feed contains mention of attacker’s content, which allows it to grow virally.

Included is a demo where you can see the vulnerability in action.

In short, common sense still holds true: beware where you click. Concerned users may wish to log out of Facebook when they’re not actively browsing facebook.com.

Permalink

Blizzard-Activision, developer of the immensely popular Warcraft and Starcraft franchises, has just announced a major change to its online forums:

The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID — that is, their real-life first and last name — with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it. These changes will go into effect on all StarCraft II forums with the launch of the new community site prior to the July 27 release of the game, with the World of Warcraft site and forums following suit near the launch of Cataclysm. The classic Battle.net forums, including those for Diablo II and Warcraft III, will be moving to a new legacy forum section with the release of the StarCraft II community site and at that time will also transition to using Real ID for posting. 

A fascinating experiment in online privacy. How will the community behind the most successful MMORPG in history react to being forced to use their real names in the forums? 

The reaction thus far has been swift, harsh, and massive. At time of writing, the official World of Warcraft thread has nearly 2500 pages and 50,000 replies, almost universally condemning Blizzard’s “attempt to become Facebook”.

Update: The experiment is over, less than 72 hours after it began. Blizzard is backing down and will not require real names on its forums.

Permalink

This tumblr has been rebooted, both in visual design — a suitably Verdana-fied theme by eric hu — and in focus. The new goal is to be less of a blog and more of a linked list; an extension of the technology, social media, San Franciscoisms, and miscellany I post to @jhersh. Some things require more than 140 characters.

Permalink

I’ve just received notification that FedEx is holding a package for me:

Attention: Dear Valued Beneficiary,

This is to notify you that your parcel is still in our possession, thisparcel contained an International Cashier Bank Draft Cheque worth the sum of $1,500,000.00(One Million five thundred Thousand USA dollars)only and it is ready for delivery to your door step. Anyway, your cheque was brought to this office by a Lottery Fiduciary Agent Or Claim Agent, signifying that you are a rightful winner to their Lottery Award selected randomly from 10 lucky email addresses which your email address is one of the lucky email address.

FEDEX COURIER MANAGING DIRECTOR
Mr. Julius Crown
Tel (+234) 7041667987
fedexgroup_agent02@yahoo.com.hk

O happy day! What fortune! What fantastic luck! I’ve won the lottery! And all I must do is submit a payment of US $220 to handle customs fees.

Fortunately, as I am in Hong Kong this week, I’ve offered to meet in person with the claims agent and hopefully bypass any customs fees. I’ll notify you as further events unfold.

Permalink

Hong Kong is cloudy, foggy, rainy, and you can’t see the tops of skyscrapers.

…so, in other words, it’s a lot like San Francisco.

Permalink

The number of Crayola crayons has been doubling every 28 years on average, from 8 colors in 1903 to 120 today.

Permalink

Gaze ye upon the demon pizza.

It began as a yeast formed from the ashes of the fallen, gathered diligently by minor demonesses under the burning red sky of the underworld.

It was slathered liberally in a sauce formed from the Tomatoes of Torment, harvested locally (and sustainably!) from the devil’s own backcountry farmland. The cheese? Extracted forcefully from demon goats.

Satan himself baked it in his Oven of Unyielding Terror at a sweltering three million degrees — kelvin — for three aeons until it was crispy, crunchy, and piping hot. Finally, he saw that it was good, and sanctified it with a grandiose, gaseous belch — the foulest eructation in this universe or any other.

It was delicious.

Permalink

Our upstairs neighbor is eighty-seven-odd years young, and she causes a most impressive cacophony of banging and crashing noises on a daily basis. Possible explanations we’ve considered:

• Breakdancing rehearsal
• 25-meter ceramic dish throw
• Epic battles against her staircase
• Bitten by a radioactive spider, she now wields super-strength*

* Most likely explanation; corroborates with existing evidence (how did she move all our heavy boxes in the garage that one time?)

Permalink

Featuredusers.com interviewed me today as their weekly featured user!

Permalink

Nightmare to remember
Rite of passage
Long petrucci and rudess solo
Hollow years
Dance of eternity
One last time
Solitary shell, long jam session
In the name of god
 
The Count of Tuscany (!!!)

Permalink