Saptamana trecuta, Razvan mi-a aratat acest print de pe adsoftheworld, print ce face parte dintr-o campanie a Skoda pentru a-si promova masinile cu acoperis panoramic.
Acum cateva zile mi-am amintit de el si am zis sa mai arunc o privire. Uitasem pentru ce producator auto era, asa ca am cautat Citroen, stiind ca Citroen au masinile (Citroen C4) cu acoperis panoramic de ceva vreme. Nu am reusit sa gasesc, pana la urma mi-am amintit ca numele afisului continea cuvantul “skydiver”. Am fost uimit cand am descoperit ca acel afis nu avea legatura cu Citroen, ci cu Skoda.
Printul de mai sus m-a dus prima data cu gandul la siguranta masinii si la cat de bine absorb scaunele socurile, nicidecum la un acoperis panoramic. Am continuat sa ma uit si la celelalte afise – seria incepe cu afisul “Human cannonball“-, sperand sa ma lamureasca ele.
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Am citit din nou din cartea “Copywriting” a lui Mark Shaw. Am inceput sa am un ritual pe care il execut din cand in cand. Iau cartea si citesc bucatele din ea pe care le intorc pe toate partile, le verific, incerc sa le demontez sau sa amplific puterea ideilor din spatele lor. Tot citind cartea asta, mi-am dat seama ca oamenii care ajung sa lucreze in publicitate au o obsesie pentru verbul “a crea”. Vor sa creeze. Vor sa isi lase amprenta asupra lumii. Poate suna un pic exagerat, dar nu este deloc asa.
Diane Ruggie, intervievata in aceasta carte, spune ca a fost intotdeauna interesata de puterea cuvintelor si si-a dorit sa lucreze cu ele intr-un fel sau altul. Aceasta dorinta a aparut cand a descoperit ideea ca literele alfabetului pot fi aranjate in diferite feluri pentru a face oamenii sa rada, planga, sa se roage sau sa injure. Cuvintele bine alese pot starni emotii. Daca stii cum sa intorci acest lucru in favoarea ta, vei fi foarte incantat de rezultate. Mutand acest lucru in lumea online, cat de eficiente mai sunt cuvintele? Mai sunt oamenii atinsi de cuvinte bine aranjate, de expresii care ar fi trezit de obicei amintiri sau i-ar fi facut sa priveasca increzatori spre viitor? Read more »
I think it’s a good thing that I’m starting to analyse a service before using it. I’ve had a few bad experiences with social services because I impulsively signed up. My inbox was filled with spam messages coming from these services, privacy issues appeared, and if I used some service, it turned out to be a total bore after some time.
The worst decision you can make when choosing from this ocean of social services is to use a service just because “everyone’s on it” and it’s cool. If you are choosing a service, analyse the advantages it can offer you and then decide if it’s worth it.
These should be the main questions you should ask yourself when signing up:
- Why should I create an account on “New Social Network X“?
- What are the advantages of this service?
- How can it help me?
- How will it affect my online privacy?
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I decided to install the Blackbird Pie WordPress plugin and play a little bit with it. The WordPress plugin was created after Twitter created the Blackbird Pie service. It allows you to embed tweets into your blog posts, just like you would do with other embeddable media (flash games, videos, etc.).
The plugin gives you a few possibilities to embed tweets. The most easy to use is to take the complete URL of a tweet and paste it into your blog post. I added the following two tweets by using the complete URL and the id of the tweets.
Here are two embedded tweets from my timeline:
A tweet in Romanian:
Nu înţeleg de unde a apărut ideea că oamenii nu visează în culori. Se leagă de faptul că uităm parţial visele, a.î credem că-s în alb&negru.
And one in English:
Use the force, Luke! Use that fucking thing, you moron! Oh crap, you're drunk.
I used [blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/danielvoicu/status/14483309763"] for the first tweet and for the second I used [blackbirdpie id="14439778971"].
When you use these commands, you will notice that the plugin creates custom fields. You can edit them afterwards. I didn’t edit the first tweet just to show you the plugin has a small issue when it comes to special characters, in this case some Romanian letters.
You can find the plugin here, and if you want to read more about it, visit the developer’s site.
As I wrote here, I recently got a NAS server and wanted to mount its shared folders permanently. After going through some forum threads, reading tutorials, asking around and trying stuff like installing packages that might not be necessary (like nfs-common, it didn’t change anything afterwards), I managed to mount my Seagate BlackArmor NAS shares permanently.
So, here’s what I did:
I found my user and group id by typing “id” into a terminal, as I needed them later for adding them to fstab. Most of the tutorials or help manuals suggested using the name of the server from your local network. It didn’t work this way. So I had an idea: to use the IP instead of the server name. It came after seeing this forum thread, which I found after looking for the CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -22 error on the web. I could see the most recent system errors by typing into a terminal
dmesg | tail
The next step was to modify /etc/fstab. I did it by using gedit as root, using sudo gedit /etc/fstab.
I added the following line to /etc/fstab:
//192.168.0.65/privatefolder /media/servfolder cifs username=xxxxx,password=yyyyyy,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
The final step was to type:
sudo mount -a
and I had the shares mounted permanently. I gave up on using another file for storing the credentials, as I am the only user of this computer and I don’t think I’m going to face any hacking threats soon.