Twitter has had an official app for a while. Now it has become less accessible, and it has also become integrated into iOS. Twitter must make the same commitment to accessibility which Apple has.

Accessibility refers to making something usable by everyone. In this case it refers to making an application work well with VoiceOver so that the blind can use it. Sites like Applevis post accessibility ratings for different apps. If an app does not play nicely with VoiceOver then the blind cannot use it and it may as well not exist for us.

This can seem very annoying, as you can imagine. For example, several friends have asked me to play Words with Friends. As you can read, everything works except for the game board, a rather important feature. I played a lot of Scrabble as a kid and would really enjoy playing again. The official Facebook app also sucks, and many have found alternatives. App developers can choose to improve accessibility, and many do. Many apps also work with little or no modification. All well and good, and normally I wouldn’t write a blog post about this.

The Twitter app falls into a special category however. Apple has chosen to integrate it very heavily into iOS 5. The Twitter settings has a link to easily download the official app, and iOS accesses it if using its built-in Twitter integration. This puts the app in a special circumstance. If a blind person wants to use iOS’s Twitter integration, they have to use the app. Because of its unique position, Twitter must care about accessibility.

Since it came out, Twitter has provided a clutter-free social network which the blind have enjoyed. I know many of us prefer it to Facebook for that reason. And don’t even get me started about Google+! Twitter must recognize this and continue along these lines.

Apple has become the leader in accessibility. Every Apple device talks out of the box. This includes the iPhone, iTouch, iPad, Apple TV, and Macs. No other company has done this. The blind have come to expect that anything Apple does will have accessibility in mind. Turning over their Twitter integration to a third party means that third party must have the same commitment. If they don’t it makes Apple look bad. Apple must recognize this and demand appropriate action.

In summary, the blind have come to know Apple as the leader of accessibility. Steve Jobs insisted that Apple’s devices should have universal accessibility. Having a Twitter app with less than full accessibility goes against this philosophy. Twitter must fix their official Twitter app as long as iOS depends on it. The Me tab has serious issues and unlabeled buttons. Oh well, back to using Tweetlist Pro!

I love Emacs. I love using Twittering-mode to read Twitter from within Emacs. Only one thing bothered me about twittering-mode, and quickly browsing through its source-code showed me the fix. I also modified a tip on their page to give a text notification of new tweets. Just place these lines in your .emacs and enjoy. Modify as appropriate. Send me a tweet if you found this useful.


(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/twittering-mode") ; if non-standard
(require 'twittering-mode)
(setq twittering-username "yourtwittername") ; replace
(setq twittering-notify-successful-http-get nil)
(add-hook 'twittering-new-tweets-hook (lambda ()
(let ((n twittering-new-tweets-count))
(format "%d New Tweet%s" n (if (> n 1) "s" "")))))


Every Full Moon has its own adventures, and seems to follow a similar pattern. Skeptics will say that the full moon doesn’t feel any different, or cause people to behave differently, but many would beg to differ. I would argue that if one becomes aware of it, and if one does something to commemorate the cycle (listening to the Dark Side of the Moon while taking a salt bath, for example) then they will notice the effects much more. It seems repeatable, and thus subject to the same laws and methods as any other repeatable phenomena. It starts out feeling pretty normal, gradually escalates, then things start feeling really weird at about the halfway point, and by the end you feel ready for it to end. This full moon proved no exception, and I thought I’d just document a few of the little things I wanted to write down in one post.

The weirdness started after I took an awesome salt bath, which I love to do on full moons because a salt bath helps the body detoxify, which apparently happens during full moons. I slept for a few hours, and woke up very early (or late depending on your point of view.) I learned that Asus had just released the successor to my Netbook literally the day before I ordered mine. I felt kind of upset, and for about ten minutes, considered returning mine for the newer model. I decided not to, however, because it didn’t differ too much – 6.4 ounces lighter, an extra hour of battery life, and a new case design didn’t seem worth the hassle.

That prompted a rousing discussion about Microsoft versus Linux on a Netbook. I will not rehash the whole debate, as many have already become familiar with the various arguments. Blind people may know Windows, but having something forced on them by a monolith does not make it the best. As for the argument that the manufacturers design the Netbook for Windows, I would just say that without people with the hacker spirit, wanting to do things with their machines beyond their design, we wouldn’t have Netbooks in the first place!

After I simmered down from that, I read a rather disconcerting and poignant email from my friend Chuck Young. You can find him on the blog roll, though I doubt he will publish the article he sent me! By this time it had gotten onto about eight o’clock in the morning, and I need to take a power nap, prepare a shopping list, and meditate.

As well as declaring this the Summer of the Netbook, I also declared it the Summer of Zazen. They don’t call the hara the Golden Stone for nothing!

After recharging and getting my shopping order, it had gotten on to around three o’clock, or noon Pacific time. Ordinarily this wouldn’t matter, but today something extraordinary happened, at least in the eyes of many: Michael Jackson’s Memorial. Oh no! I feel awful blogging about this. I only watched small amounts, as I couldn’t stand hearing people going on and on about Jesus. Viewing it reminded me of viewing Twitter in the past week: lots of #moonfruits! Ha, I saved that joke for now! Things felt kind of creepy, and a kid cried. I tried to enter the mind of a Michael Jackson fan, and feel some remorse. It worked for around two minutes. I still don’t know what the scene looked like, but I heard they had a solid gold casket on stage. I kind of hoped that something cool would happen, like they would lower it down on air, or that the lid would creak open and Michael Jackson’s ghostly countenance would emerge. Alas, nothing of the kind happened, but as with the initial event of his death, I could feel the collective pull. Every channel showed it, and within minutes of it ending they had sound bytes and collages. Programs continue to run as I write this. It also sort of weirded me out that it happened under a full moon. Did they know?

As I sit here outside typing on my lovely netbook, I realize how much I love blogging under the night sky with a full moon, the cool feel of the summer air mingles with the sounds of a suburban town, and the astral light of the full moon permiates my spirit and this entry. I can sense it with my third eye. I only ever saw moonlight once in my life, when a September full moon reflected off the ocean. It looked like a glittering mirror.

I have some tech blogging to do, as I received my EeePC 1000HE Netbook yesterday, but I wanted to get this down. Earlier, a friend asked on twitter why bad days propagate. I responded that it happens due to the Law of Attraction, and joked that it had become newagy pop. Within hours, I had five new followers, all of them spammers. It didn’t take long to figure out why.

The fact that the law of attraction attracted a bunch of spammers seems to have some universal irony, albeit only due to them automatically searching for a popular keyword, “Law of Attraction” in this case. It seems especially funny because I even referenced how the law of attraction had become a pop newage thing, despite its basic truth. It simply states that you attract what you focus on. A bunch of documentaries, self-help books, websites, and the like have sprung up around this simple concept, giving it somewhat of a bad reputation. Despite the fact that a bunch of marketers have latched onto it as the latest fad of 2006, its universal truth remains, though I don’t care for the greed or selfish aspects it has since inherited. A song plays in the background: “I trust I always will have love, I trust I always will receive love” which synchronistically and concurrently proves all my points.

Did those spammers prove the law of attraction, or the inevitability of parasite marketers? Whether or not one believes in it, or whatever one thinks of the various dreams and schemes which have recently sprung up around it, one objective truth does exist that we can all agree on, and one from which all the marketers of the world cannot escape: Spammer Saturday happens in three days! Use it as a tool for self-improvement. It won’t give you riches or that perfect partner, but it will help elevate the collective spirit of humanity in some small way. Just use the #SpammerSaturday tag on twitter, followed by all the spammers who have followed you this week. For a real bonus, tweet about the Law of Attraction. In a way, this entire post serving as a promotion for Spammer Saturday proves yet another point in somewhat of a self-referential way. I love metahumor!

Do things happen for a reason? From our point of view, they do. From the universe’s point of view, they don’t. Meditate on that, acai berry farmers! While on the subject, this reminds me of another thought I had during meditation: Good intention paves the way to Hell. Good attention paves the way to Heaven.

Hello everyone. I just came up with an idea, and I hope it goes viral. It has to do with Twitter, on which I have an account.

Some time ago, I started seeing #ff or #followfriday. Hash marks denote keywords for easy searching. A friend explained that it simply referred to when people would post other users for people to follow, prepended by an @ sign of course. For instance:

#followfriday @omeron23

would suggest that others follow me on Follow Friday. The idea seemed novel and cool for about a week, but I quickly started seeing friends complain. It makes it easy for spammers to harvest addresses, and many people notice an influx of spammers on Fridays now. This gave me an idea: Spammer Saturday!

In contrast to Follow Friday, Spammer Saturday will serve as the day to identify and delete all the annoying spammers that latch onto your account, largely on Follow Friday. Just do it on Saturday, and use the #spammersaturday hash tag. For example:

#spammersaturday @spammer1 @spammer2 @spammer3

You might also like to add the word unfollow to contrast with Follow Friday.

I hope this idea catches on. It seems simple enough, and makes an easy way to identify spammers for the good of all. Feel free to retweet. I DON’T LIKE SPAM!