That was the first tweet that I posted, back on the 1st June 2007. I’ve waited quite some time to find out what that was, because Twitter hasn’t allowed users to view more than their previous 3,200 tweets, and to date I’ve tweeted more than 13,000 times.
Shortly after you request the download (which was a couple of minutes in my case), you get an email with a download link. This downloads a zip file. Your tweets are presented in a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file, for importing into Excel for example, and as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) for which there is an HTML file allowing you to view your tweets in a web browser.
The browser view resembles Twitter’s web site, and lets you search your tweets as well view tweets by month. It’ll even tell you how many times you tweeted in a given month: July 2007 was my quietest month with 10 tweets, and July 2011 was my busiest with 517 tweets. There’s a notable increase in my Twitter activity after September 2010 when I bought a smartphone.
Early tweets don’t have clickable links; this was before Twitter introduced their own t.co URL shortener around November 2010, so you have to copy and paste the URLs into the address bar to view them. It’s also odd seeing links being shortened with TinyURL which few people use nowadays.
Other than nostalgia, and ensuring you have your own backup of your tweets, there’s not a whole lot that you can do with a Twitter Archive right now. However, if you are a Timehop user like me, go to twitter.timehop.com and upload your Twitter Archive so that you can get daily reminders of what you have tweeted over the years. I’m hoping that ThinkUp will support Twitter Archives in the next release as well, so that I can get an analysis of all of my tweets.
For many years I was a Mozilla Thunderbird user; I even used the beta builds back in 2003, long before its final 1.0 release. Though I still use it at work, where I deal with large volumes of email, at home it was overkill, and so I bought a copy of Sparrow which was simpler and lighter. Except last summer development of Sparrow basically stopped, thanks to Google taking over the Sparrow team.
Sparrow still works okay but with its future looking similar to that of Twitter’s official app I decided to start looking for alternatives. And I found one in a very unexpected place – already on my Mac.
When I switched to a Mac back in 2005, I carried on using Thunderbird, as back then I was still keen on its extensions and its flexibility, so I never bothered with Mail, which is the native email client available on all Macs. And in the almost 8 years since I’ve never bothered to revisit Mail, bar a couple of times out of curiosity when I’ve found it to be a bit over-complicated.
But then I found this article: Turning Mail.app Into the Best Mac Email App, linked from Lifehacker, which explains how to customise Mail to make it more effective. The article has a number of workflow suggestions which I don’t bother with, but it does also suggest how to simplify the interface to make it look, well, more like Sparrow.
It took some time; I have three personal email accounts (one on this domain, plus Gmail and Outlook.com) and Mail defaults to storing saved messages and drafts on local folders, so I had to teach Mail that I actually wanted to use the relevant IMAP folders for this. This involves opening each folder – which Mail confusingly calls ‘Mailboxes’ – and then marking it by clicking the Mailbox menu and using ‘Use this folder for’. Sparrow and Thunderbird both do this through Account Settings, and they both correctly configure Gmail automatically anyway.
Once done, though, I had a nice, clean and simple setup, with a unified inbox view of all three email accounts. Mail’s actually relatively efficient when it comes to system resources and, broadly speaking, uses about the same amount of RAM as Sparrow did.
Maybe I should have taken a fresh look at Mail sooner. It gets an update in each new version of OS X, and doesn’t cost anything extra.
Recently my Mac Mini has been running very slowly, with some programs freezing for as much as several minutes. I pruned the list of items that were running on startup but this didn’t seem to make much difference.
So I opened Activity Monitor (the OS X equivalent of Task Manager) and found a process called ‘mds’ was consuming huge amounts of RAM and virtual memory. MDS is the process which builds an index of your disks for use by Spotlight, the tool that lets you search your drives, and also by Time Machine for backups. Sometimes MDS requires a fair amount of RAM, but it was using almost 2 gigabytes of virtual memory and almost a gigabyte of RAM in my case. I only have 4 gigabytes of RAM in total, and so this was causing major problems as OS X had to regularly swap data between RAM and the paging file.
I’d tried looking into this before and got nowhere. Most of the results in Google were discussions on Apple’s support forums, which were devoid of any real solutions. But eventually I found this post on iCan’t Internet which actually had a solution.
Firstly you should run Disk Utility. Repair your hard disk, and also repair the disk permissions. This may fix your problem, but it didn’t in my case so I moved on to the next step.
Open up Terminal, and type in the following command: sudo mdutil -avE . This runs a tool called ‘mdutil’, and tells it to completely rebuild Spotlight’s index. It turns out that the index on my hard disk had got corrupted somehow, and this was causing problems with the ‘mds’ process. It took a while for the command to run, but afterwards a huge amount of RAM and virtual memory became free. Unsurprisingly, my Mac ran much more happily after this.
Hopefully if you’ve have the same problem this will help. It has certainly breathed new life into my increasingly sluggish computer.
Today Christine and I took advantage of the fact that we both had annual leave and went on a day trip to Harrogate. Unfortunately it was rather cold, wet and very windy, so it wasn’t the most enjoyable visit.
We visited the Royal Pump Room Museum, which is built above two of Harrogate’s famous wells and charts the history of the town. It’s a nice little museum in an interesting building, which takes around an hour to get around. Oddly there’s also a small exhibition of Egyptian artefacts there as well.
No visit to Harrogate would be complete without a visit to Betty’s. Admittedly Betty’s isn’t unique to Harrogate; there’s two in York, one in Ilkley one in Northallerton and a second tea room and tea house at RHS Harlow Carr, but unlike the team rooms in York the queue for lunch isn’t usually snaking out of the door and around the block. In fact, we could pretty much walk straight in when we visited at midday today, although it was, of course, a Monday in February – not exactly peak tourist season.
I like Harrogate because it has character, and many of its Edwardian and Victorian buildings have been well-preserved. We don’t go there very often, as it takes a good two hours to get there by train from Sowerby Bridge, but it’s a nice day out.
Some of the photos that I took are already on Flickr. I also uploaded several from our last visit in May 2010, as apparently I didn’t upload those at the time. Which makes me wonder what else I haven’t uploaded to Flickr over the years.
Previously, the reason why I hadn’t joined app.net because of the cost – $5/month, or $3/month if you pay for a year up front ($36). I didn’t want to pay for something to find that no-one was using it and I was paying for nothing. At least with a free trial, I can test the waters and see if it’s worth it.
I’ll do full reviews of app.net and NetBot at some point in the future. I only signed up this morning and so it would be a bit premature to do give an opinion about it just yet. In the meantime, you can follow me on app.net as @nrturner.
It’s taken almost four months but I’ve finally uploaded the photos I took in Chester in October last year. They were sat in iPhoto, waiting to be edited and sorted but until today I hadn’t actually got around to doing anything with them.
Note that these are just the photos taken in Chester city centre. I also took quite a lot of photos at Chester Zoo whilst we were there, but I’ve not yet processed those either. Hopefully they will be online soon, and not in another 4 months time.
The Trafford Centre is one of Britain’s largest shopping centres; indeed, it is third largest by floor area. Its lavish mock baroque design was intended to attract more upmarket brands, such as Selfridges and John Lewis, who have large anchor stores there. Its location in south-west Manchester means that it is easily reached from Cheshire, a largely affluent county which is home to, amongst others, a number of millionaire footballers who play for teams like Manchester United, Manchester City and Liverpool.
Consequently the centre provides ample car parking and is located just off the M60 motorway. This is essentially Manchester and Salford’s outer ring road and connects with all of the major roads going into the city, so getting there by car is quite easy.
However, if you’re not a car driver, and need to use public transport, then buses are your only option. There is a bus station with 16 stands at the Trafford Centre. But it’s almost an afterthought – it’s located at the far end of the site, accessible via one of the car parks. It’s rather open to the elements with just one canopy providing some shelter for the rain.
No railway station
Unlike other big shopping centres, like Meadowhall in Sheffield and the MetroCentre in Gateshead, a railway station was not built at the same time. In fairness, those two shopping centres already had railway lines nearby – the Trafford Centre does not, so any requirement to build a station would also require a new railway line at a considerable extra expense. A light rail link, however, would have been cheaper. When the Trafford Centre opened in 1998, Manchester Metrolink had been running for six years, with construction already underway on the second phase to Eccles.
So why wasn’t a Metrolink line included in the building project? The simple answer is that the plans to build the Trafford Centre pre-date Metrolink. The original planning application was submitted way back in 1988 – a full 12 years before the Trafford Centre opened, and indeed 8 years before construction began in 1996. The 8 year delay was due two public enquiries, a rejection of the planning permission by the Court of Appeal in 1993 and eventual intervention by the House of Lords.
By comparison, work to build Metrolink only started in 1988, and it would have been premature to require the construction of a tram line for a system that didn’t exist at the time. And considering the battle that the developers faced in getting it approved, I doubt that they would have been receptive to demands to change the planning permission to include such a line. So, in summary, the developers of the Trafford Centre, Peel Holdings, were under no obligation to provide a Metrolink station.
Section 106
The Trafford Centre expanded in 2006, after Peel Holdings were granted planning permission in 2005 to build Barton Square. This could have been an opportunity to force the developers to build a tram line, using a ‘Section 106′ agreement. Section 106 refers to a section of Town and Country Planning Act 1990 which allows local authorities to include extra conditions when granting planning permission, usually to insist on associated infrastructure improvements. For whatever reason, this never happened; the only transport-related improvements that Barton Square brought was yet another car park.
Essentially, plans to build a new Metrolink line to the Trafford Centre were at an impasse. The local authorities, represented by Transport for Greater Manchester, were keen for private sector funding for the new line. And the private sector owners of the Trafford Centre weren’t particularly willing to pay for it; after all, they’re a more upmarket shopping centre aimed at affluent people who can drive. So the plans were essentially shelved and have not formed part of Metrolink’s recent expansion plans.
The situation today
This leaves the present situation where the quickest way to get to the Trafford Centre from central Manchester is actually by bus, using the X50 service from Manchester Piccadilly station. This, however, takes around half an hour, and costs £3.90 return. Alternatively, it is possible to get a tram to Stretford Metrolink station, and then catch a connecting shuttle bus (the ML1) to the Trafford Centre. The trams also serve Victoria station, but it’s slower, requires a change of mode at Stretford and is more expensive at £4.40 for a return ticket.
Stretford isn’t even the closest Metrolink station to the Trafford Centre – it’s around 2.5 miles away. The nearest tram station is actually Eccles, which is a little under 2 miles away. But it’s at the very end of a line which takes a rather slow and circuitous route around Salford Quays and therefore not ideal. Trafford Park station, on one of the national railway lines between Manchester and Liverpool, is also a little under two miles away. But with trains every two hours and no Sunday service it doesn’t compare favourably with Stretford’s 10 trams per hour from Manchester. For now, at least, the X50 and the shuttle bus service from Stretford probably provide the best compromise.
A future Metrolink station?
There may, however, be some hope in the future. In 2011, Peel Holdings sold the Trafford Centre to Capital Shopping Centres (CSC), who own many other shopping centres in the UK, including the MetroCentre and the large Lakeside centre in Kent.
As an aside, CSC is rebranding as ‘intu’, which will see all of its properties gain the ‘intu’ prefix, so later this year the centre will become the ‘intu Trafford Centre’. Personally I doubt anyone will use its new name in casual conversation.
Perhaps the Trafford Centre’s new owners may be more amenable to part-funding a new Metrolink line. Although the plans are on hold, it is still a long-term aim of Transport for Greater Manchester to get trams running out there. We shall have to see what the future holds.
Last night, it was announced that HMV was to appoint administrators to run the business as it was no longer viable on its own, putting the jobs of over 4000 people who work there at risk. HMV is the last remaining music store in the UK, as over the years Tower Records, Track Records, MVC, Borders and, most recently, Zavvi and Woolworths (to name a few) have all met a similar fate.
Thinking back, the last time I went into HMV was over two years ago, ironically enough to buy some headphones for my iPod, so I could listen to all of the music that I’d bought online. Which is one of the major challenges that HMV faces – many people are now buying music downloads rather than physical CDs, and music downloads in the UK are dominated by Amazon and Apple’s iTunes.
Sure, HMV does sell music downloads and owns 50% of online retailer 7digital, although it’s not as popular as its rivals and tends to be more expensive. But then HMV actually does pay its fair share of taxes in the UK, unlike some other businesses, and its prices are probably higher as a result. Supermarket competition is also a big factor, as Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Asda all sell music and DVDs in their larger stores.
But people still buy CDs. It’s hard to give an MP3 to someone as a gift – especially at Christmas – and there will always be those who prefer to own physical objects. Downloads are great until you realise your in-car CD player doesn’t have an iPod adaptor, or your computer’s hard drive gets corrupted and you lose all of your music files.
How much of HMV will exist in future remains to be seen. It has around 35% of the UK’s CD market and quite a lot of its stores are profitable; hopefully once the failing stores are closed then the business will be able to continue trading, as happened to GAME recently. GAME is an interesting example; in Bradford, through its mergers with Gamestation and EB Games, it ended up with 3 shops within five minutes walk of each other. And this was a pattern repeated across many other towns and cities. Now it generally just has one store and seems to be doing okay. It’s sad news for the staff laid off from the stores that closed, of course, but at least it didn’t disappear forever.
But other recent high street failures haven’t had such a happy ending. Last week, camera retailer Jessops went into administration and within two days had closed all of shops for good. Unfortunately Jessops were in a hard market; few people buy compact cameras any more, as more and more people have smartphones which can take almost-as-good photos, and have the ability to share them on Facebook and Instagram straight-away, rather than waiting until you get home and empty your memory card. And independent camera shops seem to be holding up the top end of the market, especially with second-hand lenses and cameras. Jessops seems to have disappeared into the widening gap between the two.
Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor, is quite philosophical about HMV’s collapse; in essence, it’s a sign that banks are letting almost-dead businesses fail, to free up money to lend to those that are doing well and growing. That’s not good news for the people working for these ‘zombie’ companies but a sign that, in time, things will get better.
Whilst changing shopping habits, with a move to digital downloads, are one of the reasons for HMV’s problems, another big problem for all retailers is that many people just don’t have much disposable income nowadays. We’re only just out of a double-dip recession, but last year our economy was bolstered by the Olympics and so it’s possible that Britain will be back in recession for a third time since the credit crunch later this year. Public sector pay is increasing at a measly 1% – less than the rate of inflation – and MPs voted to do the same to benefits. Unemployment isn’t as high as it could be but the fall of Jessops, and Comet just before Christmas, has resulted in thousands losing their jobs just recently. So to me, the economy is also to blame, and by extension those in charge of this country’s economic policy as well.
I’m near the end of this post, but before that I’ll come back to the topic of Bradford. In Bradford, HMV is on Broadway, a street that should, by now, lead into the new Westfield Shopping Centre, had it been built (construction will hopefully start later this year). It’s one of the few shops left there; GAME closed, as mentioned earlier, and children’s clothing retailer Adams closed down a couple of years ago. Jessops was around the corner until last weekend. What was once one of Bradford’s main shopping streets barely has anything left on it, as more and more struggling high street chain stores fall by the wayside.
I really hope that at least some of HMV’s stores stay open. It would be a shame to lose such a big name, especially as it’s the last of its kind.
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Today is this blog’s 11th blogiversary – or, 11 years since I first started writing this blog. Obviously it’s not quite as a big a milestone as 10 years was last year, but every year counts. Arguably, of all the things I do or have done, this is the thing that I have done for the longest time without giving it up. I’ve been close to giving up a few times, but, 11 years on, it’s still here.
There have, of course, been changes over the years. In January 2002, I was 17, single, living with my parents in York, at college, a few months away from my A-level exams. Now, in January 2013, I’m 28, engaged, living with my fiancée in Sowerby Bridge, working and a few months away from my wedding. But, some things have stayed the same, and wanting to write a blog is one of those things that hasn’t changed.
