The other day I posted some Goldfinch photos that I took on my folks' back deck. I included that post's lead photo on my Google Plus "Select Blog Photos 2014" photo album, where I put a photo or two from most of my blog posts.

Google Plus has an "Auto Awesome" feature that can automatically do things to copies of your photos if you opt in, and in this case it decided to add the snowfall to a copy of the goldfinch photo. It's a simple snowfall animation that repeats every 4/5th of a second. Simple but nice.

They've since [...]

I hate to have any negative articles on my blog, much less two in a row, but wow, it's difficult to count how many ways Garmin's products are so much worse than they need to be, from devices designed for the pocket but without a way to lock the buttons from being bumped in pocket, to worse-than-nothing "features" you can't turn off, to memory-card slots buried behind batteries (really? How does one screw up something as simple as a memory card slot? Ask Garmin.), to any number of additional "what on earth are they thinking?" observations.

From hardware to software [...]

The user-interface (UI) design of iOS 7 seems to be of the radical variety. Not quite as radical as the initial iPhone was to the cell-phone world at the time, but also not as universally lauded. A lot of people really hate iOS 7.

(Except the first, the photos on this page have nothing to do with the text; they're just random photos I've taken recently.)

Until recently I'd never actually used iOS 7, but from seeing it in news and advertisements over the last few months, I knew I didn't like the new look. The same aesthetic that [...]

What is it about taking photos with an iPad or other tablet that makes it look so stupid?

My iPad has no camera so I've never been tempted to take a photo with it, but even if I could, I'm not the kind to take advantage of its social-networking benefits (like immediate posting to Facebook or Instagram or whatever the current fad is). So I'd probably not use it for photography any more than I use my iPhone, which is to say, not at all unless it's the only camera around and my quality threshold happens to be low.

But [...]

Recent versions of Firefox inexplicably removed the ability to set a custom search engine, which one used to be able to do easily via the keyword.URL configuration. However, you can accomplish pretty much the same thing by installing a new search-engine profile that you craft yourself in an XML file.

Here's a sample profile file, for a custom Google search...

You'd copy this to an *.xml file and update the highlighted areas for your needs, adding/removing "ParamR 21; tags as appropriate for your search. (The "tbs" parameter in the example is the one that limits results to those updated in [...]
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