Last night we watched the Last ever Nicholas Cage movie I’ll ever see. I’m so sick of wasting my life on that guy’s movies. People always recommend them to me, claiming that this one is different, and I’ll love it even though I hate him, but they’re always wrong. Please, no-one recommend me any more movies starring Nicholas Cage; you’re likely to get ranted at.

Being as I have an awesome new distraction, Charlotte and I decided to break out the cool new Penultimate app and do some sketches inspired by the movie (interwoven with pure id). I can’t draw with a pen, let alone my finger, so most are shit but it’s an esoteric look into how we experienced the movie “Knowing”.

Amelie told me (through the medium of being a cat slag) that she’s sick of all these little cats and dogs having their photo taken. Why not her?! She can be just as cute as any of those other things (her words, not mine).

Yes, I am one of those people who talks to animals. And plants. And computers. And furniture. And food. Working from home can be lonely.

Artie, Benjie and Jem’s kittens are around 3 weeks old now. There’s loads of images, so hit the drop for more. They’re very cute, but not very willing to have a photo taken!

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Lightboxes are really irritating. No users I ever speak to like them, but all website owners love them – communication problems there, maybe?

Here’s why I don’t like lightboxes:

• They usually override keyboard functionality. I use my escape key to clear fields and I use my arrow keys to navigate pages – don’t overwrite that. I know best, not you.
• They’re unnecessarily schmancy and animated – if I opened a lightbox, chances are I want to look at a picture and nothing else. Leave me alone otherwise. I don’t want to see your great “close” icon or any of that crap so just drop it!
• Some are nearly impossible to close

There are probably a bunch more reasons, but you get the idea.

My lightbox stays out of your way. It doesn’t override any standard keyboard behaviour and it doesn’t use visual fluff to irritate you. What it does do is open a big version of the picture you clicked on so you can see it in more detail. When you’re done, it closes. Here’s how you use it:

• Click a flickr image to open the lightbox (this might be the last time you need your mouse/trackpad)
• j = next
• k = previous
• o = open the flickr page for this image
• q = close the lightbox
• You can also click anywhere to close the light when it’s open

If you’re wondering why j,k,q; use Vim for a day. I would’ve used e to open, but who’s going to remember that?

I’m probably going to implement a resizing thing for people with small monitors so that screens don’t get flooded – if this affects you, please tell me whether you’d like the process to automatically detect your browser size, or whether you’d prefer to handle it yourself. I’m aware that this will affect basically all portrait images – this will probably make me make it automatic. Pictures are pretty pointless if you have to scroll, but I’m tired now and can’t be bothered.

If you want the code for this, view source and find the javascript yourself. There’s a PHP file to make Flickr API calls, but that encapsulates my API credentials. If you can’t figure out what to do here, holla so we can all have a good laugh.

So much better than the crap you get in sweaty, sludgey bags at Sainsbury’s.

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Sudo has a girlfriend. She’s really helping him with his confidence with other dogs, which is quite comforting. He’s still very subservient with other dogs (including her – he spends most of his time getting bowled over!) but he plays a lot and seems to enjoy it and that’s all I care about.

Action shots are not my forté so these aren’t great, but you can tell how much fun they have.

I have really not been interested in the old camera recently. I’m riding a video game, inflammatory writing and coding wave at the moment. My poor guitar.

Guys, this bickering has got to stop. The problem you’re having is that you’re both as good and bad as each other. This could go on forever, but I detect that you’re also both equally stubborn and have reached an impasse. This is why I have decided to try and make a couple of things plain to you. I really hope it helps.

Apple; you make amazing computers. Your hardware is sturdy and reliable, and when it’s not reliable you have great customer services to back it up. Your operating system is Unix-compliant, attractive, relatively stable and easy to use. Your phones are well-made and have a pretty decent OS, which is improving at an acceptable rate. You as an entity are the only weak link in the chain. You are the overbearing mother of the technology world; you refuse to ever let your products truly go to their new owners.

Without the indie software scene, OSX would be nothing. Sadly, some parts of the OS are so frustratingly closed that some things become almost prohibitive. The software you build and sell is fit for purpose (on-par with industry in some cases, below in most), but not nearly adequately varied to rival Windows or Linux.

When you released your phone, it was like the popular girl in school – looked so good in every way, but forced to spend more than 10 minutes with it and you wanted to smash it against a rock. Then came the App Store, and things were good for a while. You still, however, refused to let go control and some trivial things became impossible. This prompted an incredibly talented and generous group of people to start hacking the device so that people were free to use it as they wished. This was, after all, their right (regardless of terms and licensing – you part with outrageous amounts of cash, the right is yours!). You struggled for a while, but now you seem to have given up, which is nice. Thanks.

All of this meandering leads me to the crux of my point. You might be able to pull the wool over some people’s eyes regarding Flash on your devices, but you don’t fool me. I hope your hypocrisy left a horrible taste in your mouth when you wrote your letter to Adobe. If you think that any piece of Mac hardware or software is open, you must be kidding yourself as well as everyone else. How dare you preach openness whilst you supply us with phones and iPods that you can’t even change the fucking battery in?! How dare you preach openness when I have to run the risk of rendering my phone useless just so I can install software I want on it?! How fucking dare you preach openness when you actively and vocally restrict Flash from being installed in any capacity on a device that I own?!

And another thing; HTML5 may well be relatively open compared to Flash, but if I want to use HTML5 video, I guess I’ll be needing the H.264 codec (at time of writing). That famously open source codec. What’s that? It’s not open source? So Firefox (truly open) will never be able to support it? Sounds great.

Before you preach openness, maybe you should do some research into what that actually is! Give your devices to your customers and let them do what they wish. If I want to deplete my battery in 10 minutes using Flash and all my simultaneous processes, that’s my prerogative. If I want to consequently complain, you’ve got leverage to tell me where to get off! Honestly, sometimes your smug sense of superiority makes me hate you and everyone who makes excuses for you.

I hope I’ve made my point.

Onto you now, Adobe. This will be shorter.

Hey, Adobe. I see you’re getting all upset because Apple won’t let Flash run on their mobile devices. That’s pretty annoying for everyone involved. Whilst I disagree with their methods, I am totally with their justification. If you can’t even write a Flash plugin for a device with 2.66Ghz Dual Core processor, 4GB RAM and 512MB graphics memory without resorting to slowdown, memory hunger and frequent crashing, then you shouldn’t be writing plugins for devices with a fraction of that power. Seriously, Flash is the number one reason I scream at my laptop every day, and I’m almost certain that there’s plenty you can do about it. I wonder why you don’t.

I heard that Apple also now ban apps from being distributed using their nice, open App Store if they’ve been compiled using IDEs you wrote. Man, that sounds just like something they’d do, but have you ever actually used one of the apps compiled with your IDE? As a technical exercise to prove it’s possible, you’ve nailed it. Go you. But try using one. My God, it borders on harrowing it’s so terrible.

Your problem is really quite similar to Apple’s when you think about it. You give developers all of these great tools that can theoretically do amazing things, then you totally screw them by making a horrendous platform for their use. This subsequently screws their users, too, because people just don’t want to use apps that frustrate them. I’m now at the stage where I close any website that looks like it’s full-Flash. It’s that bad.

In case I haven’t made it apparent what might help you – make Flash better. Make it not crash browsers and eat memory and slow computers down all the time. I know it’s not as simple as that, but if anyone can do it it’s you. Seriously, no-one else could because, well, they’re not allowed!

And now, to my avid reader. There you have it; Apple and Adobe are just as bad as each other. So bad, in fact, that it’s created a convenient little blind-spot to badness that both of them can live in until the mighty Google comes along and sells the world to aliens after America accidentally signed it over to them without reading small print.

If you really care about open, buy an Android phone. Wait, that’s Google. Buy a Palm. Wait, that’d be a pointless waste of your time. Uhh. Sell all your stuff and go live in the woods with hippies and the squirrels so that none of this inane shit really even matters any more.

Privacy is really important, no doubt. The boundaries between what we consider private and public are constantly changing as the availability of vehicles for sharing become easier to access. However, they’re not changing as much as you think.

As a for instance; I write on Twitter (and, subsequently Facebook) things that I would talk about with my friends at the pub. I am probably in a minority here, but everyone freaking out about privacy online is jumping off the deep end for a substandard reason. If you restrict what you say online to things that you don’t mind people knowing about (does this seem obvious to anyone else?) then your privacy isn’t really at stake. I don’t mind people knowing how old I am or what city I live in or who I’m married to. I understand that this is valuable information to some people, but it’s also information that I’m comfortable to have in the public domain. Similarly, I quite like my music and film taste to be public, because there’s a chance that I could be on the receiving end of targeted ads that could broaden my horizons.

The important thing to bear in mind is that privacy is a huge word and it covers everything about you. If you drew a set diagram of privacy and security in this context, security would be a relatively small subset of privacy, and it’s the only thing that’s really worth concerning yourself with. If I say on Twitter that I just ate an enchilada, that’s me shrinking the size of my privacy set, but it doesn’t decrease my security set, so I’m not worried. It’s not really surprising to me that Facebook are trying to make money out of the information that people give to them, but I trust that they’re not in the business of dangerously impinging on people’s privacy – that sort of thing would easily earn them a reputation and that’s not good for business. Similarly, if 5% of their user base ruins their lives because they got tagged in a drunken photo and lost their job/spouse/medical licence/whatever, that earns Facebook a bad reputation and that’s not good for business.

The key isn’t to just abandon ship and become a Facebook martyr – it doesn’t solve anything. If you really care, educate your friends. If someone shares something inappropriate that you think isn’t going to do them any favours, tell them and tell them why you’re telling them. If you’re uploading photos and is unflattering/incriminating, think before you upload it and, if you must be a jerkoff, don’t tag the culprit.

Finally, most reputable social networks have privacy settings. Study them. Understand them. Check that they work. Go to some of your stuff, copy links and sign out. Can you still access this stuff? Create a control account and check if that can access your links. If not, you’re safer to trust. Most importantly, read terms and conditions. No-one reads terms and conditions, but you absolutely should. They’re often written in pretty archaic legalese, but persevere and understand. If there’s something you don’t like, you’re justified in leaving (do remember, though, that granting a website a licence to publish the things you upload is not the same as relinquishing copyrights and IP rights).

Disclaimer: I’m not expert on this, but I can exercise some common sense, and I urge everyone to do the same. I am also an idealist. Life’s too short to run around worrying about everything all the time, so I conduct myself with caution and common sense so that, in the event I do get bitten, it won’t be too devastating.