I mostly share my photos on Flickr, but want the uploads announced on Facebook so that my friends know about them. Flickr has long offered a way to do this; it hasn’t always worked great for me. (It worked up until a few months ago when Yahoo redid their notification system to use Yahoo Pulse; after that it stopped working; I disabled the feature and re-enabled it and it started working again, then stopped working again, and I didn’t have time to figure out why.)

Lately since it hasn’t been working at all for me but has for my friends, I decided to get to the bottom of it, and started with Flickr’s help system. I found it somewhat noteworthy that of the help topics linked directly from the top of their help system, which asks “What are you having trouble with”, “Facebook updates” is the 2nd thing in the list. Good, so I’m not the only one.

Anyway, this link rapidly takes you to a list of troubleshooting steps; kidding aside, this is really useful. It basically says to make sure your images are public, safe and searchable, shows you how to verify this for your existing images and change it for future uploads, and says if this doesn’t work, unlink and relink your Yahoo and Facebook accounts (which was the big hammer I already tried twice, once with and once without success.)

Looking at my own recently uploaded images, they were marked safe and public but not searchable. Huh? Flickr’s settings confirmed that I haven’t disabled this globally; hmm; it must be something to do with the way I’m uploading the images, using Jeffrey’s “Export to Flickr” Lightroom Plugin. First I check the settings I’m using and they look fine; then I check Jeffrey’s release notes and sure enough, there was a bug with image visibility, fixed newer than the version of the plugin I’m using.

Hopefully, once I update the plugin to the version that fixes this bug, it actually works end to end for me now.

Vanessa and I visited Machu Picchu yesterday and today; beyond visiting the ruins of the Inca citadel itself, we also climbed the higher of the two surrounding peaks, Montaña Machu Picchu.

While at the top, we sat down to rest and enjoy the view for a while; Vanessa was drawing and I was reading, leaned up against a convenient boulder. I noticed but didn’t fully appreciate that there was a smallish hole under the boulder on which I was leaning, leading to a largish cavern, about which more later.

Here’s the “before” setup: note iPhone already starting to crawl out of left pants pocket.

To make a long story short, as I stood up to leave, the iPhone launched itself out of my pocket, well, really, just slid a few inches, then hung on the surface of the ground for maybe a fraction of a second — these things always happen in slow motion — as Vanessa and I, still in slow motion, perceived: iPhone on ground, proximate hole in ground, iPhone continuing to slide toward hole, Matt’s hand grabbing madly at where the iPhone had just been fractions of a second before, iPhone entering hole, iPhone swallowed by hole — then there remained just the peaceful gaping maw of hole.

I mean, it could have gone very differently, but it didn’t, and suddenly the phone was gone, down the hole. I looked down the hole and it was visible, but way out of reach — maybe 4 feet down — possibly retrievable with a fishing net or one of those grab-it-for-me things elderly people use, but we had neither, we’re a couple hour hike from even a modicum of civilization, and it was starting to rain. I tried to fashion a net out of the hood of my raincoat and a stick Vanessa found, but squandered my one chance, knocking the phone farther down and out of reach.

Here’s the “after” scenario: note me sticking as much of my head and one shoulder as will (not much) fit through the hole under the rock, floundering around trying to reach the phone.

Anyway, hopefully this is not a major international environmental disaster — littering in a national park, as it were — we did try pretty hard to get it back, but without advanced technology or a trained monkey, it wasn’t happening. As for the phone, I’m sorry to see it go, but it was already pretty severely injured — due to a previous accident involving water, the vibrating ringer and internal speaker were broken, meaning it worked great as an iPod Touch but poorly as an actual phone handset; also the wi-fi radio range was severely compromised, probably by my repair efforts when drying it from said unfortunate water accident — suffice it to say this was already on its last legs. RIP. With luck, it may make an interesting archaeological find for someone in the future.

This is my Kindle 3 after trying to use the experimental web browser to check my Yahoo! webmail.

I’ve seen quite a few hard browser crashes, which are usually recoverable by holding the power switch long enough to reset the Kindle. This time, no amount of hard resets has restored it to life.

Meanwhile, check out that crazy texture on the screen.

I just found a useful answer on Amazon Askville and wanted to vote it up. It says you have to be signed in to vote, so ok, I’ll sign in. It’s Amazon, so I should already have an account, right? Not quite.

On the sign-in page, it says “Amazon Askville is an Amazon company that uses Amazon for credential verification”, and asks for a username and password. Looks like Amazon username and password would work, right? So I enter those, and it just says no. Then I click the create account button, and then there’s a link to sign in with Amazon credentials, so I enter the same Amazon username and password again and that works.

So to summarize: Askville’s initial signin page implies it uses Amazon credentials, but doesn’t, but actually does after 2 extra clicks which aren’t particularly intuitive.

Say you’re at a friend’s house, or in a hotel or cafe, and they have a wi-fi network you haven’t used before, and you try to connect, and it’s password protected so you get asked for the password.

If you already know the password, great, you enter it and join the network and go about your business. Let’s say you don’t know the password, so you ask your friend or a clerk or waiter; they give you the answer a minute later, and you enter it, and your computer fails to join. What happened?

If you wait too long between when the wi-fi network asks for the password and when you provide it, the join request always fails, tells you an error occurred, and doesn’t ask again.  I think there’s a challenge in the initial association response that expires so a client isn’t allowed to take that long to associate, but your computer could know it’s been that long, and reassociate before using the credential you provide.  Or at least just tell you you’ve taken too long and dismiss the auth dialog.  Or at least show a useful error message and bring back the auth dialog when it fails.  But no, it just acts like you gave the wrong credentials, and leaves you to figure out the problem. (OK, even if you don’t figure out the underlying problem, the natural thing is to just try again and that will work, but it’s a waste of human effort.)

(As far as I know, Windows, iOS and Mac OS all act like this.)

If you subscribe to a periodical on Kindle, each issue of the periodical can only be viewed on one Kindle device, ever.

In some ways, Amazon makes this pretty obvious up front, but in other aspects, not at all.

First, unlike Kindle book content, periodical content has a designated device, and only downloads to that device, and once one Kindle device has downloaded one issue, other Kindle devices can’t. This is pretty clear in the purchasing UI, e.g. here for The Atlantic, and click “how subscriptions work” near the Subscribe button.

Second, also unlike Kindle book content, periodical content is only available on real Kindle devices, not the software app for Windows, Mac OS, iPhone, Android, etc. (This is supposed to change soon.)

Third, and this is the part that I find non-obvious, once a given Kindle downloads an issue from a subscription, it can’t be transfered to another Kindle. This means that if you break, or lose, or sell, your Kindle, and buy another one, all your old subscription issues are gone. I find this annoying because I didn’t know this when I subscribed — I thought I was buying something to keep as long as I wanted, and of course an individual Kindle device isn’t going to last forever.

Plus, I can’t find anywhere that this limitation is documented publicly (unless you count the terse “Issues are only available for download to one Kindle” statement as covering this case, which I don’t). I found out when I broke my Kindle and bought another one — Amazon makes it easy to transfer the subscription itself to the new Kindle device, so future issues show up on the new device, but it said nothing about the old issues. I then asked Kindle customer support how I could transfer the old issues I paid for, and they said I can’t. Since then, I’ve asked them 3 times if they can point to a public web page with a policy statement on this, and every time they just answer that old subscription content can’t be transfered.

I suspect this comes down to license revocation, and that they never built a revocation capability into their DRM technology, and this is just another one of the lame facts of life about DRM. It’s not the first time that Amazon’s Kindle DRM in particular has reminded people that you’re not really buying content, you’re just licensing it, and the licensing party has undue control over what they’ve licensed you.

Why is the Kindle keyboard so awfully hard to type on? It sure seems like Amazon wants us to use it — it’s part of the original Kindle vision (it’s been there since the first version), it’s visually prominent and uses a lot of space on the device, and it’s necessary for a lot of Kindle features beyond plain reading.

But I find it horrible, and they haven’t improved it since the first version.

a) the layout is bad — the rows are aligned vertically, not offset like real keyboards. So, N is under H instead of between H and J; I often hit M instead of N. (A lot of smartphone keyboards like Blackberry, Treo, Pre do a better job in less space!)

b) The key feel is bad — hard to tell when you’ve pressed a key (again, smaller cell phone keyboards do better)

c) The Delete and Enter keys are easily confused — they’re both in the wrong position (with respect to real keyboards), and enter’s symbol looks almost like a backspace symbol — to the point where even after years of using it, I still mistake enter for backspace.

d) The Kindle drops keystrokes when typing at all quickly. I realize the e-ink display can’t keep up with rapid changes, but I don’t see why the Kindle can’t buffer faster than I can type.

All this means that I avoid typing any more than I have to, and when I do type, it’s slow going and results in a lot of errors.

If this was the best it’s possible to do in the space they can afford to dedicate to it, I’d be more understanding, but given how many cell phones have demonstrated smaller keyboards that are much easier to type on, I wish Amazon would just borrow that knowledge.

Since we were going to be spending so much time on the road this year, Vanessa and I bought a $300 netbook to bring with us. (Rationale: I didn’t want to bring something heavier or more expensive all over Asia and South America; I also don’t want to type any of my account passwords into any computer I don’t control.)

Well, I found netbooks starting at $300, but at the time I was looking (March 2010) there were newer models available with double the battery life, which seemed useful for traveling, costing $350… and that’s with Windows 7 Home Basic edition, and 1GB of memory.

First things first, running Windows 7 in 1GB is an exercise in pain. (Well, running it on a slow netbook will be anyway, especially once we try to do photo processing in Lightroom, but so it goes; again we didn’t want something heavier or much more expensive. But the memory we can do something about.) So we upgraded it to 2GB of memory for $40 — this part at least we figured out before we left home.

What I hadn’t predicted was how limiting the Home Basic edition of Windows would be. Two Windows features that are really valuable for travelers sharing a computer are

• fast user switching, so two people can switch between their own accounts without completely logging out

• internet connection sharing, so if one person is using the computer, the other can use a spare smartphone like an iPhone over the same network connection

and it turns out these features are only available in the Home Premium edition of Windows 7. Microsoft lets you upgrade between editions at any time, but charges $70 for the privilege.

So, the $300 netbook turned into a $450 netbook. It works a lot better now, though.

OK, this rules — ask and you shall receive.

You can tell the Kindle to show foreign language translations, instead of same-language definitions, with its builtin dictionary feature. This is something I had reason to want, wondered if it were possible, and it turns out that it already exists.

Here’s the background: one of my favorite books in any language is Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges, an English translation of works originally published in Spanish as Ficciones. (OK, that’s an oversimplification — Labyrinths is not exactly a translation of Ficciones; both are collections of short stories, but not exactly the same set of Borges stories. Still, Labyrinths is the preeminent English-language translation of Borges, and it’s a great collection of stories.)

I’ve read the English translations several times (the stories are extremely rich and deeply layered and get better with multiple rereadings), and it’s long been a goal to eventually read them in Spanish, but I don’t know Spanish. Now, however, I’m learning Spanish; also it turns out that Labyrinths is not available for Kindle, but Ficciones is. I figured this was a good excuse to jump in and give it a try.

Once I started reading the stories in Spanish, I found it possible but extremely slow going, as reading in a tentatively acquired foreign language always is. Partly the problem is slowing down and making sure comprehension occurs, and partly it’s vocabulary. Looking up each unfamiliar word in a separate dictionary is really slow and takes you out of the original book, but if you skip too many unfamiliar words without understanding them, it’s hard to understand the overall writing.

Meanwhile, the Kindle has a builtin dictionary lookup feature, where you move the cursor over any word and it shows the definition of the word (at the edge of the screen, and you can push a button to jump to a longer definition). This feature shows English definitions of English words, but driven by the above need to improve my Spanish vocabulary, I started wondering if the Kindle dictionary feature could show me Spanish –> English translations instead of English –> English definitions.

I did a web search for this, and immediately found some questions and answers indicating it is possible — the technique boils down to: buy a dictionary with the translations you want, then from the Home screen’s menu go to Settings, then from the Settings screen’s menu go to Change Primary Dictionary, and select the new dictionary. (This process is nicely documented here, but the dictionaries they link to are in the wrong direction. I bought the Merriam-Webster Spanish-English Translation Dictionary instead.)

It’s not perfectly seamless — you have to pay for a separate dictionary for each language, buy the dictionary ahead of time, tell the Kindle to use it, and only one dictionary is active at a time — but still, I expect this to be immensely helpful both for my reading of Ficciones and for my learning of Spanish overall.

Here’s what I really want from the mobile phone market: I want to be able to

1. Buy my choice of phone at a fair market price (not one distorted by subsidies)

2. Use that phone on whichever network I want

3. Pay for the network service I actually use, at a fair market rate (not restricted by available fixed-usage plans)

Right now, especially in the U.S., none of this is true. Phone purchases are heavily subsidized by mandatory service contracts, hiding the actual cost of the phone and allowing the unsubsidized price to be absurdly high. Phones are generally sold locked for a specific network, preventing you from using it with other networks — even after you’ve paid off the subsidy, if any. And in the US, in addition to this artificial economic barrier, we’ve managed to build separate networks using different incompatible technology (Sprint and Verizon run CDMA networks; AT&T and T-Mobile run GSM networks). Finally, the networks rope you into paying a fixed monthly cost regardless of how much or little you use their service, by pricing ala carte service (for voice and SMS, but especially for data) ridiculously high.

So the status quo, especially in the U.S., is that you have to pick your phone from what’s available for your choice of network (or vice versa); then you get a shiny fancy new phone for a deceptively low price (but woe to you if you break it or lose it or have it stolen or want to upgrade on your own schedule); then you pay back that deceptively low price in your monthly fees for the next couple years (and woe to you if your usage patterns don’t map closely to one of the available “plans”).

I’m not holding my breath, but the above 3 freedoms are what I wish for.