The Diary of A Simple Man

It was awesome, watching one subreddit after another go dark last night. I don't imagine that it will affect Reddit's IPO at all, of course; money doesn't care about the wishes of ordinary human beings. But with any luck at least SOME permanent damage will be done.

I set up new accounts on Lemmy, kbin, and BookWyrm - all part of the Fediverse, which I'm hoping is resistant to the cancerous corrosion of venture capital. I did try to suggest DreamWidth as an alternate destination, but nobody seemed that interested. They never are, although I'm not sure why. Apart from being privately owned, DreamWidth seems an outstanding alternative to me. But what do I know?

I've worked out a way to automatically cross-post to Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal from Google Plus. This allows me to make ONE post to Google Plus, and have it go automatically to almost all of my other social media. You can throw in LinkedIn as well, incidentally; I didn't mention it initially because I don't use it.

The only thing that's left out of the mix is, sadly, Dreamwidth.

Anyway, here's how it's done:

1. You'll need a Google Plus account.
2. Set up a Friends+Me account. Their site is at http://www.friendsplus.me/ . The accounts are free.
3. On Friends+Me, link your Facebook, Twitter, and/or LinkedIn accounts to your Google Plus account. You can also link Google Pages (i.e. communities) to other accounts, apparently.
4. When you post publicly to Google Plus, include a hashtag in your post. Hashtag t (i.e. #t) reposts it to Twitter, f reposts it to Facebook, l (that is, "L") reposts it to LinkedIn. You can combine them in any order, so #flt would repost to all three.
5. If your LiveJournal is set up to aggregate and repost your Tweets, all G+ posts which were reposted to Twitter will appear in your daily 12pm Twitter aggregation on LiveJournal.

It's that easy! Once you've set it up, all you have to do is include the proper hashtags in your public G+ posts. There's nothing else to do.
The drawbacks:

1. Your LJ reposts are in the form of Tweets, i.e. a collection of one-liners. However, they each come with a link to the full-length original on G+.
2. Formatting doesn't carry over.
3. The LJ reposts are done at 12pm. They are, therefore, not timely.
4. Dreamwidth can't get the posts at all, as far as I can figure.
5. There is no way to commingle comments and responses that you receive to the various copies on different social media.

All that said, it's still a huge improvement!

Almost forgot: you could, in fact, re-import your LiveJournal into Dreamwidth, assuming that you have both. However, as far as I can tell there is no way to automate this, so you'd have to actually go and DO it every so often. I'm also not entirely sanguine about re-importing. Dreamwidth says it won't duplicate posts, but it's apparently a big process that Dreamwidth "schedules", so doing it on a daily basis is probably not a good thing for DW.

Just to be clear, once you've set things up the chain of reposting is:

G+ > Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn
Twitter > LiveJournal

 just a quick post about voice dictation aundry with and LiveJournal. Shit. I can already see that I'm going to have some big problems. LiveJournal 0 mobile sites really sucks when you try to do voice dictation or 1 time what I do from my samsung Galaxy Nexus. I am NOT making any corrections to this post.

Skype is in a war of sorts with Google Voice. And today, I discovered that Skype had taken my system hostage as a prisoner in that war.

I used to be able to use my Google Voice account to call any phone in America for free from my Gmail home page; just type in a phone number or the name of a contact and I'd be connected, with a clarity that actually stunned some of the people I spoke to. Apparently Google Voice uses some sort of astonishing new sound-processing algorithm.

And then recently I installed Skype, since several friends had urged me to try it. Today I tried to use Google Voice to call my parents in Massachusetts. I typed "Dad" in the Google Voice box...and instead of his home and mobile numbers appearing, they appeared with Skype icons surrounding them along with a dollar sign. When I hovered over the numbers, I was told I would be making a "low cost call with Skype".

Now, just to be clear: the call should have been free, via Google. Instead Skype blocked my ability to make that free call, and tried to force me to pay them for it. As far as I'm concerned, that's stealing.

I tried to find a way to make the call WITHOUT using Skype. No matter what I did, Skype wouldn't allow me to do that. I shut down Skype; when I went back and tried to call with Google Voice, Skype immediately restarted itself and invited me to pay them if I wanted to make the call.

I began to seriously consider uninstalling Skype. I have a temper, but I don't think anybody would take it well when some company takes over something on your own system and basically holds it hostage. Boiling with rage, I began to research a solution.

It wasn't easy to find, but I found it. The problem was an add-on that had apparently come bundled with Skype. So I had to go to the Windows Control Panel, choose Add/Remove Programs, and then removed the program called "Skype Click to Call". Mind you, I wasn't told that the goddamned thing would be installed when I installed Skype, and I damned well wouldn't have installed it if I'd known that it was replacing my option to make free phone calls with the requirement to pay Skype for those same calls.

But Skype, here's a message for you: I will never spend a penny on any of your services, EVER. I'll use the free stuff because my friends are on it. But otherwise, you can go screw yourselves.

I gave in and bought Motorola Phone Tools today. Had to spend an hour or so on the phone with Motorola support, trying to figure out why it didn't work. Finally I got it fixed up, and was able to download a year or two worth of pictures and videos from my phone.

The videos are of surprisingly poor quality, but the photos are decent. And now I can take as many photos as I want with my cell without worrying about filling it up or paying $$$ to send them to myself via the net.

Now I can sleep.

Congratulations, LJ, the new posting page has broken the spellcheck feature of the Google Toolbar - and believe me, I miss it already. For one thing, it was a HELL of a lot more convenient to use than the built-in LJ check. And it had a customizable dictionary, with a lot of words I'd added over the last year or so.

In fact, I actually took my last post, opened up a comment box on an entry in my journal, and pasted it there in order to spell-check it. And then I copied the results, closed the comment window without posting, and pasted the comments back into the posting page.

Sigh.

Has anyone else had this problem?