Keyboard Shortcut of the day: Ctrl-W

I've found another one!

It's Ctrl-W and it closes the current tab.

Since I found it's come in useful when I realize I have 40 tabs open at once and should probably get rid of some. Using it in combo with Ctrl-tab, makes for a pretty speedy way to cut off pointless tangents.

I guess I'll keep posting these every Fridays until such time as any of the following happen:

1. I don't discover any more that I deem to be worth mentioning as an individual post and resort to posting the list of all of the shortcuts I can think of (already written as a draft post)
2. I post one of these and it gets zero hits. Literally none. Even my least read page ever got 10 hits.
3. I forget about the blog entirely and just don't post anything for months.

Shit Ticketmaster says

Most Human decisions are based on patterns, and this is something that a lot of the digital world seems to have cottoned on to. My TiVo box 'thought' I might like to watch Sunshine because I recorded 127 hours, that I might like Futurama because I gave The Simpsons a thumbs up and Last.fm suggested that I listen to Eagleowl because I've listened to Meursault and King Creosote.

They do this by making a database of all information on any film, tv show or music track with as much relevant information as possible. Then whatever I've watched or listened to is compared to other entries in the database and those which have matches are returned.

127 Hours was directed by Danny Boyle, so when another of his films, Sunshine came on TV a few weeks later, it was flagged up to me. Likewise, The Simpsons and Futurama are both created by Matt Groening, and Eagleowl, Meursault and King Creosote are all Scottish artists tagged as similar genres and have shared members and played in similar venues. It's also very possible that these suggestions were based on the habits of other users.

These suggestions and the methods for generating them are becoming pretty commonplace but one place that still doesn't seem to have bothered is Ticketmaster. As I'm sure their terms and conditions say, they have access to my entire order history. On inspection, they'd find that I've bought dozens of tickets, dating back as far as about 2006. I've since bought tickets to T in the Park,  several Fringe shows, Radiohead, Biffy Clyro, Death Cab For Cutie, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Frightened Rabbit, The Twilight Sad, Admiral Fallow, Ross Noble, Stereophonics... and so on. The vast majority of these shows have been in either Edinburgh or Glasgow.

With this information, it ought to be pretty simple for them to get a general idea of what I like to go to, where I like to go to, or otherwise pigeon-hole my habits so that they could somehow use it to target the advertising that they send me.

Instead they send dreadful weekly emails which have no bearing on any of my past purchases. One of the worst examples I remember was headlined "Don't miss Take That" when the closest show mentioned was in Birmingham, over 300 miles away. The whole point of sending out emails in the first place would be to rouse interest in anything they had to offer, but instead it just leads me ignoring the emails, and once they started piling up, I would unsubscribe. Now, even if there were anything I were interested in paying for, they have lost their chance to sell it to me. When will they learn?

Apart from this, the ticket site (and it's definitely not just Ticketmaster) ought to realize that they just aren't likely to be the place where I'd first hear about an event. It's far more likely that I would subscribe directly to  newsletters, tweets or facebook posts directly from an artist in hope of hearing about any upcoming gigs from a less crap-polluted source.

I guess it's not really a problem because as I've pointed out, I chose to subscribe in the first place, but I still manage to get wound up knowing that there is crap floating around the internet.

Keyboard Shortcut of the Day: Ctrl-Tab

As I've hinted at already, yes. I did write this a week ago at the same time as the last shortcut of the day, but when I really don't know when I'll next bother to write, I feel I have to delay posts and create the illusion of more regular activity ...However devoid of content these posts may be!

I guess I don't really even have to write this part. Anyone who read the title and had a spark of interest will have instinctively just done it. Go on, save your eyes the strain of reading this next line by simply hitting Ctrl-Tab and finding out for yourself.

No? Well this shortcut cycles through what tabs you have open.

It comes in handy when mouses or touchpads become a drag... Or when I have about 25 tabs open at once and the titles have about 2 letters each.

What Next? I guess I could make this a regular Friday feature and just start naming obvious ones. The button with the windows sign opens the start menu, guys!

No, I might be tempted to write a big one with all the ones I've known since I was 10, but other than that I'll probably stick to writing proper posts (in my view, at least).

Over.

Is the remote dead?

So the other day the TV stopped responding to the remote. Ever looking for ways to solve problems with as little standing up as possible I had to think of alternatives to looking for batteries, so I thought hey- What happens if I point the remote at the webcam on my laptop? Sure enough, it looked like this-

That pretty conclusively confirmed there was no problem with the remote, so I moved on to the next possibility.

...it turned out the pile of DVD's in front of the TV had gotten too high, so if I'd been paying attention, I might just have noticed that in the first place, but hey. I still saved myself a search for batteries.

There are usually filters in cameras to block out non-visible light, but it's seldom going to be enough to block out the light from an LED at 5cm range.

Another thing I found out while trying to take the picture I used above was that I'd managed to uninstall the software that came with my laptop for taking webcam snapshots. Not to worry though, there's a way to use VLC as an (improved, I'd say) alternative.

In VLC, "Open Capture device" from the File menu brings up this:

From there, make sure Capture Mode is Directshow, and the video device name is your webcam. The video size option is blank by default, so make sure to type in 640*480 (or bigger if your webcam supports it) then hit Play.

You're then see your own face (should that be what lies in front of the camera in question), and can take a snapshot with shift-s (or Snapshot from the Video menu). They're saved by default in the logged in user's pictures folder. You can also record video if you click the arrow next to Play (in the above image) and pick convert instead. This gives infinite options for what video stream, audio stream and container are used for the output file. It's definitely not for everyone but if I can do it the complicated way (without getting on my feet), I will.

Maybe I should rename this blog "things that I'm learning in my twenties"