Monthly Archive for June, 2008

Posterous: blog via email, and then some

Posterous (by acroamatic)

The idea behind Posterous is preposterously simple: blog by email. (hat tip to Michele Martin).

Anyone who can email can now blog. Just send a email to post@posterous.com from your regular email address. (Hmmm… wonder how they filter out spam!)

You’ll get a reply which tells you that you’ve posted successfully.

The first time you get this reply, you’ll be asked to click a link to create a password. With that, you’ve created your account.

Easy peasy.

Each time you email/post on posterous, after the initial one, you’ll get a confirmation email saying that you’ve successfully posted. This is to prevent someone from spoofing your email and posting stuff to your blog without your knowledge.

Ok, those in the know are probably saying, “But you can also email blog posts via Blogger.”

But that still requires account creation to begin with.

Besides, Posterous has a few tricks up its sleeve.

You can email word docs, powerpoints, pdfs, photos, links, and Posterous will automatically try to present it in the nicest way it knows.

For example:

  • Post one photo, and Posterous resizes it to fit the blog.
  • Post a bunch of photos, Posterous creates a mini gallery.
  • Post a document, spreadsheet or pdf, Posterous embeds it in the post using Scribd’s iPaper (don’t worry what this is, the process is entirely invisible - you just email the attachment).
  • Post a YouTube URL, Posterous automatically embed the video.
  • Post an mp3 file, Posterous creates an embedded mp3 player in the post for the file.

Just by clicking Send.

Check out the FAQ, which shows some of these features in action:
http://posterous.com/faq

Apparently, comments are also handled entirely through email. I haven’t tested it out though. Check out Siva’s post. Looks like normal comments but they were posted via email, except the first one. I suspect if I subscribe to Siva’s Posterous site, I will probably be able to email/post a comment to his blog without even visiting it.

I tried embedding a PDF, but that didn’t go too well. All the text ended up as gibberish. Also, they claim to have some ways to determine if the email really originated from you, so less worries about security.

Posterous is pretty new, so no bells-and-whistles yet. I suppose they want to get the basic features working properly before adding things like different themes, sidebar customization etc. Well, they’ve said there’ll always be a free basic service but they’ll have premium features for which they will charge.

But right now, it’s dirt simple.

Just the thing to get people who’ve been holding out on blogging to start.

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EnviroFest & NParks website redesign

Toddycats - Marcus (by acroamatic)

The photo above shows Saving Gaia winner and fellow Toddycat Marcus Tay talking to kids about Pangolins this morning at EnviroFest.

The pangolin was there, among other animals specimens, at the Toddycats booth. Most visitors to our booth are surprised to find out that all the specimens on display can be found in Singapore!

The booth is definitely a hit among the kids, who drag their parents along sometimes. The location of EnviroFest - in front of Toa Payoh Community Library - lends itself to being a kid-rich environment. Heh.

Check out the photos here.

While annotating the photos of the respective organisations’ booths, I found out that NParks has redesigned its website.

NParks website redesign (by acroamatic)

Much nicer than the old one. I was going to pan the navigation though, as there seemed to be more steps to get to the individual park pages. Parks > North/South/East/West/Offshore Islands (or use the embedded Google Map!) > then click on the park.

Then I realised there are quick links to the parks if you scroll down. Hmmm… that should be right above on the website!

One more thing, if you’ve ever linked to anything on their website, it is quite likely that the link is now broken.

Oh, anyone recognise the lady in the photo on the website?

UPDATE I’ve been exploring NParks use of Google Maps. The Green Map is quite nice. The Park Connectors can be improved though. It doesn’t show the full connections, especially for the Eastern Coastal Park Connector.

And get this, they’ve linked to my Google Map from their Southern Ridges page!

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I hate Math, but I am open to persuasion

Learning maths contextualize as a teenage girl's diary

If the lady above looks sort of familiar, she’s the actress who played Winnie Cooper in The Wonder Years.

I was aware she is some sort of maths whiz, but I didn’t know she had a book out.

The question is, who is going to buy her book? *scratch chin* Definitely not Singaporean students. “Fractions, decimals and percents”? Our primary school students eat those (unfortunately) for recess. Perhaps I shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.

While I have no idea what’s in the book, maybe something like this would have gotten me interested in mathematics. Sine, cosine, tangent, what? Differentiation? Integration? Proving this equals that?

Could never see how it was applicable in my life, and I still wonder how knowing (or at least, trying to know) all that helped me. The exception was statistics, which was mildly intriguing and probably the only reason I didn’t fail both O and A Level Mathematics.

Thanks, Kevin - incidentally, the male lead character’s name in The Wonder Years - for this (reminder of Danica McKellar, not Mathematics) little blast from the past. =)

Original photo by Kevin Lim, from here, reproduced under a cc by-nc-sa 2.0 license.

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My F1 tickets

I finally got my hands on the tickets for Singapore’s first Formula 1 race. Yes, I realise the irony of a post about Formula 1 just after one about Envirofest, but I don’t claim to be an environmental saint.

Unfortunately, the tickets came in a big box, meant for 10 sets - the maximum any individual can buy.

Hmmm... what is this?

Inside, mostly empty space, since I bought two sets of tickets.

A mostly empty box... with F1 tickets

The actual ticket holder: still lots of paper being used.

Ticket holder

Inside, a pass for each day of the race: Friday (practice), Saturday (qualifying) and Sunday (race day).

Individual passes for each day

Now, I feel I need to do some penance for my participation in this environmental monstrosity…

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Envirofest 2008 this weekend

Envirofest 2008

Envirofest 2008 is on this weekend. It will be held in the open area in front of Toa Payoh Community Library from 11am to 8pm on Sat 28 and Sun 29 June.

Lots of nature and environment groups will be there! Me? I’m going to be at the Toddycats booth from opening to 2pm on both days.

Hmmm… what’s this SWITCH mentioned in the banner? Apparently, it stands for Simple Ways I can Take to Change my Habits.

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