I have to admit, I haven’t given much thought to QR codes, or how to use them, over the last year. I keep sort of waiting for a reason to really learn what there is to know about them. But, when I saw this post about QR code malware, my mind immediately flashed upon something.

Haven’t we been telling people for years now to always check the URL before clicking links, so that you won’t be taken to a malicious site? Not to click on any links in emails from people you don’t know, not to open unexpected attachments, to type in the URL for their bank or PayPal instead of clicking links, etc.? Doesn’t encouraging the use of QR codes sort of undermine that?

The whole point of QR codes, it seems,  is for the end user to scan it using their smartphone, and have information presented to them or be taken to a specific site immediately. In the interest of security, do we really want to encourage that sort of behavior?

I’ve talked before about the things that show up on procedural TV shows (I’m looking at you CSI) that simply aren’t possible in the real world. Think about the number of times you’ve seen a crime drama take a crappy cell phone picture, for example, and using “technology” get a crystal clear image of a license plate 200 feet behind the subject of the photo, for example? It drives me up the wall when attorneys expect those of us who work with electronic evidence to just magically be able to do something similar.

I’ve always wondered how much of what we see on television in areas that I’m not as familiar with, is completely wrong as well.

Worse yet, as someone who’s worked in technology for awhile, it’s somewhat shocking how many incorrect “facts” show up in actual news articles about technology. Articles that complain about missing features, that aren’t missing, or reviews that seem very biased written by people with a clear agenda, etc.

The other day I was listening to a hockey game and one of the announcers started talking about the schedule having “back to back visits by teams from British Columbia”, which seemed odd to me, as Vancouver is the only BC team in the NHL that I know of. Of course, I checked the team’s schedule and saw the next two games were against those great BC outposts of Edmonton and Calgary.

The point is not to poke fun at hockey announcers and technology writers, however. As I thought more about this mistake, I started to think about how many American’s probably do think those cities are in BC, or just don’t have any idea. I’ve been a hockey fan since childhood, and following the game means I probably know more about Canada than most Americans. Given that, I knew the statement being made was incorrect. But, how many areas of knowledge can I be expert enough in to make sure I’m getting “facts” from journalists? For most of us, when we hear economic, health, geopolitical, or scientific “news” reports, we don’t have the expertise to know an inaccuracy when we hear it, or the resources to fact-check the reports. The best we can hope is that someone who does know differently will point out the inaccuracies, or the misleading uses of statistics, etc.

But what if they can’t reach most of us? Are you looking for the corrections, or just taking what your favorite news sources tells you at face value?

No this is not a blog post about Apple’s backup system. This is about a couple of pretty useful plugins for WordPress. One, which I’m pretty sure got it’s name from the Apple backup software, I’ve been using for quite a while. The other I just discovered the other day and thought would be kind of cool to have on the blog.

WP-Time Machine is a plugin that will create a backup of your WordPress install. It includes options to store your backup files offisite, with Amazon AW3 or Dropbox accounts. It’s a nice, easy way to create a backup of my site, files and database, and store it on my Dropbox account for easy access if I should ever need it.

Of course, I have to remember to go and make a backup, so it’s not foolproof. Let too much time go between backups and you’ll lose quite a few posts!

The new plugin I discovered is just plain Time Machine. It’s a little difficult to explain what Time Machine does, so if you’re reading this somehwere other than the site itself, you may want to click through and see it in action. On the right hand sidebar there’s a section titled “On this Day…” and then a list of posts that were published to the site on this day (within a day or two.) over the 10 plus years that I’ve been blogging here. I thought it would be a good way to highlight some of the old stuff, though I also admit to being a bit fearful of some rather poor writing from the time I was still figuring out this blogging thing will be resurrected. (Who am I kidding? There’s a possibility of poor writing, or statements that have been proven ridiculous, all through the history of this site!)

The lesson, as always, is that if there’s something you might want to do with your WordPress install, there’s probably a plugin that will help you.

This being the end of the year, I’ve been doing a long overdue cleanup of some of my various information sources, the first being Google Reader. After taking a look at the over 300 subscriptions I had there, and removing all of the ones who haven’t posted in 2011, and a number of ones I simply don’t care about any more, it occurs to me that a large part of why I’ve been struggling to find things to write about outside of eDiscovery and Litigation Support is due to an utter lack of good sources of information about Tech or Photography, for example.

Of course, this seems odd. The tech blogosphere is where I first learned about blogging, and where I used to find a ton of inspiration. However, I realize now that I’ve really lost touch with it. It seems the only tech news sources I’ve been following have mostly been consumed with iPhone/Android comparisons, and Google +/Facebook/Twitter comparisons. What happened to all the folks working in IT sharing their learning experiences? Where have the tech support folks gone?

So, now that my subscription list has gone from over 300, to just about 180, I’m looking for suggestions. What are your favorite blogs? What are the best sources of information about technology, photography, and yes, litigation support and legal technology, as well?

My RSS reader needs some new content!

I hope everyone out there has a wonderful holiday weekend!

Added as an update to this post:

As of Dec 20, the new version of the Currents app does work on my iPhone 3GS, so I can actually see that the published edition of the site is working correctly. The published edition of my other site, however, seems to be pulling a months old version of the RSS feed, so maybe not all the bugs are worked out just yet.

I’ve written many times that I’m very appreciative of tools that allow me to post to various networks, with one-step. RSS feeds, for example, are great to feed from WordPress to Twitter or Facebook to allow a new blog post to show up in multiple places without any extra effort from me.

In that same vein, one tool that isn’t really new, but that I’ve only recently started playing with is Instagram. On it’s face, it’s a neat little add-on for the iPhone camera, that allows you to take photos, apply some neat filter effects, and share those photos. It’s behind the scenes that I really see the value though. After taking a photo, and applying a creative effect, I am then presented some options to Geotag, and share across other networks.

In my own workflow, I can take a cool little photo of a place we are visiting, like walking around the campus at Furman.

Now I can push the photo out to Twitter and Facebook, letting folks know where I am, what kind of cool things I’m seeing right at that moment, and I can also store a copy of the photo along with my other online photos at Flickr.  And, I can do all this in one iPhone app, not by making visits to a bunch of different networks.

To me, having the ability to share information to the people who are interested in seeing it, wherever they happen to be, without me having to take extra time, is a huge benefit. Instagram gets that.

As I’ve said before, a ban will keep people from using cell phones while driving, it will not make driving safer. Eliminating a symptom of bad driving will not make good drivers. But, I’m pretty sure it will happen, because it allows politicians to say they have “done something”.

As many of you mat be aware, Google recently announced their new reading app, Currents, for tablet and smartphones. It seems to be a bit like Flipboard, or other apps that make a nice, magazine-style layout for reading your favorite online content.

Being the curious techie that I am, I wanted to both check it out, and see how I could work with my own sites to “produce” editions for Google Currents. If you’re interested in adding this site to Currents, I think you can at this link.

The reason that I say that I think you can add it there, is that my attempts at actually using Currents on my iPhone were largely unsuccessful. I haven’t seen any official statement from Google that an iPhone 4 is required.  (The system requirements mention needing at least iOS4, and my iPhone 3GS has the latest OS, just not the latest hardware.) However, I’ve seen some unofficial reviews mention it not working on a 3GS, and it most assuredly did not work on mine. It runs, and I can get into the program and add editions to my library, however when I go back to the home screen to read them, the library is still empty, asking me to add items.

So, if you have an Android device, newer iPhone or iPad, have you used Currents yet? What do you think of it? Are you able to add the edition at the link I gave earlier? I’d love to know if it actually works.

Update: As of Dec 20, the new version of the Currents app does work on my iPhone 3GS, so I can actually see that the published edition of the site is working correctly. The published edition of my other site, however, seems to be pulling a months old version of the RSS feed, so maybe not all the bugs are worked out just yet.

When we moved into our new place at the end of October, and it turns out that the only available cable TV/internet bundle available to us is through Charter. It would not have been my first choice, given experiences I’ve heard from others, but it is what it is. I had U-Verse in my apartment, I want U-verse to get their stuff together and extend out to the new place, which is only 10 minutes away, but I digress.

Once we had the installation done, it was my turn to take their modem-to-PC connection and add our networking stuff to it. Yes, they make you clone the MAC address, which was easy enough. In Columbus, we had a similar setup, the cable modem connected directly to a Hawking router, and then I also had a Linksys WRT54G router that was set to work as an access point. This gave us the luxury and freedom of wireless, but also the ability to have a hard wire connection to the internet that was not touching the wireless part of the network.

I set things up here the same way, but after a couple of weeks of having to power cycle the Hawking every 4 hours, I decided to try and troubleshoot the problem by removing the Hawking router. With the WRT54G acting as the router, connected to the cable modem directly and with the desktop machines plugged into it, the problem went away. So it works.

On the other hand, the curious side of me can’t help but wonder what happened? Did the Hawking somehow get damaged in the move? It’s been a steady, stable router for almost 10 years. It’s not impossible that it has gone bad on me, but it seems odd that it would suddenly have problems after a move, it seems even odder that it would work fine for 4 hours, and then lose it’s WAN IP address.

Or, is Charter doing something with DHCP that the older router was having trouble with? Given Charter’s reputation for attempting to “solve” any connectivity issues through a network by selling you their wireless router, it’s certainly possible that something odd is happening there. Though it does appear to be working with the WRT54G, so if they are doing something, is it only affecting older routers, or are they simply using a newer DHCP technology and innocently causing problems with older routers?

Truth is, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll never know, but like most technical things, so long as it works, I probably shouldn’t care, right?