Status-Q

In general, browsing the web with Flash disabled makes for a more pleasant experience and saves a lot of horsepower on your machine. But it's a pain switching it on and off for those few sites where it's important.

ClickToFlash is a WebKit plugin which provides a convenient solution for Safari users. Flash content is replaced with a shaded image saying 'Flash'. If you click on it, the Flash is loaded and plays, and you can right-click to whitelist a site so that their content always works.

There are, apparently, still a few rough edges, but I'm going to try it for a while and see how it goes.

Thought for the day.

All the world's a toolbox, And all the men and women merely pliers.

I can think of few greater honours one could achieve in this life than to be celebrated in a song by Garrison Keillor. Here's a little ditty he wrote last month about the crew of the Hudson River plane crash.

From the News from Lake Wobegon podcast.

Fleet St and St Paul's Cathedral tonight.

Leaving a college late last night... passed a girl talking on her phone... "Oh... Psalms are my faves..."

Part of a ceiling at Newton Hall, near Cambridge.

Most of you will know by now that my company, Camvine, makes a particularly cunning lightweight digital signage system - that's 'screens on walls' - which we call CODA.

One of the fun things about CODA is that it's entirely web-based, and can link to other internet-based sources of data. This month, on the camvine Twitter feed, we're going to be posting one example per day of fun and interesting things you can do with CODA.

The first one, appropriately, was a little PHP script that would allow you to display your Twitter feed on a CODA screen. This is an example, by the way, of what makes these social networks work for me. I don't have to keep going back to their web pages or run lots of applications that get buried on my desktop. Amidst various newspaper front pages, weather forecasts, recent photos, my CODA screen also shows me my friends' blogs, my Twitter and Facebook feeds, my diary and the company calendar... and I notice them when I walk past the screen to get a coffee, for example. it's almost a way of picking up on the activities of your social world out of your peripheral vision.

I think this needs a name. I'm calling it ambient social networking.

The back of a Sony battery pack advertises a different model, which promises 'Absolute Power'.

Well! I'm not buying any of those! Don't they know that it corrupts absolutely?

The Blackstone Key has a different title in German: Miss Mary and the Secret Document. I think they're planning on a 'Miss Mary and...' series.

My friend Phil Endecott has just released a rather interesting iPhone app: Panoramascope.

It can identify the various peaks visible from your current location, which, if you start to think carefully about what that involves, is actually quite clever. And, if you take a photo with your phone, you can overlay the app's view on your photo.

If, like me, you live in a place where peaks are things you dream of going to see on holiday, it can have more prosaic uses, like telling you where nearby pubs or tourist attractions can be found. You can also save locations, so you can look fondly back at the view you had last summer from the top of the Matterhorn.

Start by loading some overlay sets - in my case, European placenames, peaks, and pubs - and then you can search for a location, which is generally much easier than entering latitude and longitude. Here's part of the view from Coniston Old Man:

This will work on an iPod Touch, but you really want an iPhone for the GPS and camera facilities.

Available from The iTunes store, of course, but there's a lot more information available at Panoramascope.com. Update: Ha! If the thought of viewing all those glorious peaks makes you feel exhausted, and you're more interested in the pub-finding options, Phil also has something just for you!