Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Tag: facebook

  • How to use Facebook without using Facebook

    How to use Facebook without using Facebook

    It was a cold, dark day, November 24, 2006, when I joined Facebook and posted this gem:

    I’m assuming it was cold and dark since it was November. The date is the day after Thanksgiving, so I’m blaming the turkey.

    For several years, it was all fun and good, but I’ve become disenchanted with FB over the years. I’ve moved to my personal site for sharing and only push links out to social media. The final straw was Facebook’s decision to let anything go in political ads. These can be total fabrications and Facebook will let them run. I will not promote such terrible behavior.

    If you are on Facebook, know that ads you see and posts that are shared are not what they seem. These posts are designed to enrage you for maximum engagement. They are not for information. You are being treated like a trained dog, being offered treats for likes. Facebook wants you to keep scrolling.

    Unfortunately, I still need to have my account and I also have others that send me messages through Facebook. Over the last year I’ve been working on ways to use Facebook without being on Facebook.

    For starters, this will not allow you to see any friends posts. Since Facebook has changed their algorithm to keep you scrolling, the only winning move is not to play. I rarely go on FB anymore, and I’m happier for it. If you want me to see what you write, create a blog and let me know. I’ll subscribe to it!

    Messenger notifications are also hit and miss. I don’t like Facebook giving me ads based on what I say in a chat anyway, so I don’t use it and I don’t recommend you use it either. There are better options.

    Filtering Facebook notifications

    The first step is to set up a filter for emails from Facebook. I use Gmail, so I created a filter that will take emails from Facebook, skip the inbox, and label them.

    For bonus points, you can set the label for your FB notifications to only show if there are new emails. Out of sight, out of mind.

    Tame FB notifications

    The second step is to get Facebook to only send notifications if someone messages me or if I’m mentioned. Go to your Notifications page and turn off almost all notifications. This is a good time to trim down the notifications from Facebook.

    To set notifications, go to Settings (the little triangle in the upper right corner) and click Notifications on the left side.

    I turned off everything except for the first two, Comments and Tags. There isn’t an option for Messenger, but as of December I was still receiving notifications for new messages.

    FB also doesn’t seem to send out notifications when someone comments on a thread you are in either, which is unfortunate. See that Updates From Friends notification? Wouldn’t it be nice to get those in your email? Yes, it would be, but FB will only send them to your logged in browser.

    Enjoy life!

    Go, enjoy your life! The internet is a great resource, and you are in control.

  • Deactivating Facebook and more – This Geek in Review for 14 Feb 2020

    Deactivating Facebook and more – This Geek in Review for 14 Feb 2020

    There are good discussions going on now about mental health and wellness, but not enough talk about the little things that one can do to help themselves. By deactivating Facebook one can not only increase their happiness but also decrease their political polarization on the issues. Sounds like a win-win. I read so much about how everyone sucks in politics, but not anything on what we can do to fix it. The scariest realization I have on politics is that many voters will vote against their self-interests if it means people they believe are undeserving will get something. We saw this with the rise of the Tea Party. “Too many people are on welfare, but don’t you dare touch my Social Security and Medicare.” Wow, that’s enough of a rant today!

    Finally, you can turn off those lousy Netflix previews! I didn’t understand why they were so long in the first place, they are basically a mini-version of the movie, giving away way too much about the movie. Unfortunately, to de-activate the preview you have to do it from the website and not the client.

    What happens when you give Chrome 1.5TB of RAM?

    Programmers re-use code all of the time for games, and now we benefit. Some very smart people figured out how to put Star Fox 64 Arwings for the Nintendo 64 into Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time. An amazing hack.

    If you have bought an Apple device in the last 6 months, you get Apple’s Streaming service, Apple TV+, free for the year. It’s estimated that less the 10% of purchasers have done so. I’ve only watched (and liked) a few episodes of For All Mankind. They base it on an alternative history of the first moon landing.

    I’m not a big fan of articles that should be a blog post instead of spread across 11 tweets, but I liked Ally McBeal. One of the first “viral” moments in internet time was the dancing baby. Well, the model has been found and rendered in full 1080p glory.

    Dates are hard on the computer, but I would think after all the Y2K shenanigans that storing only the last two digits for the year would be in the past (see what I did there?). That is not the case for a 101 year old man in the UK. The computer would like his parents to confirm his ID.

    I’ve read that Tesla’s Cybertruck is a good rendition of what we thought in the 80s cars of the future would look like. And now an SFX company has given us this gem:

    A New Time Machine? Cybertruck 2020 in Back to the Future – YouTube

  • Updating Twitter and Facebook with blog updates

    Now that I’ve switched from WordPress to Pelican I’m face with the dilemma on how to update Twitter and Facebook when I post to my blog. In WordPress I used the Social Plugin by MailChimp to automatically post, but plugins are not an option with a static website.

    But as I was working on a recipe in If This Then That – IFTTT this morning it hit me, I can use IFTTT to automatically post a link to my new blog posts in Twitter and Facebook. To create the recipe:

    1. Create an If This Then That account at IFTTT.
    2. Click Channels and add your Twitter account and Facebook page (or your Facebook account, depending on how you use Facebook).
    3. Click Create
    4. Use an RSS Feed for This and your Twitter account or Facebook account (or page) for That.

  • Ping.fm bookmarklet for multiple Ping.fm accounts

    Since Ping.fm doesn’t allow you to add multiple Twitter
    accounts to one Ping.fm account, I’ve resorted to have two accounts with
    them, one for my personal accounts (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace) and one
    for my professional accounts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn). To
    update my status for either Ping.fm account I use the special email
    addresses they offer and my email client.

    My problem was when I wanted to post the current page I’m reading to
    either account. Ping.fm offers a bookmarklet, but it uses the current
    logged in ping.fm account, so I would have to continually log in and log
    out. I decided to put together my own bookmarklet that starts up a new
    mail message in my default email client addressed to the correct Ping.fm
    account. To get started, drag the following link to your bookmark bar:

    Ping.fm

    Once there, right click on the link, select edit and replace
    YOURPRIVATEPINGADDRESS with your private Ping.fm email address (just
    the part to the left of the @). Would you like to do it with GMail? Drag
    this link:

    Ping.fm

    And once again, right click on the link, select edit, and replace
    YOURPRIVATEPINGADDRESS with your private Ping.fm email address.

    You can drag the links multiple times, editing the email address and the
    name of the link so you can associate each one with a different Ping.fm
    account.

  • Facebook’s new privacy settings

    [![Screen shot 2009-12-13 at 9.35.36 PM.png][]][]
    [![Creative Commons License][]][] [photo][] credit:
    [ekurvine][]

    Facebook has begun rolling out new settings for who can see your
    Facebook profile and what they can see on your profile. I suggest you
    double-check what is viewable about you. I try to keep my personal FB
    totally separate from my Facebook Page, so my profile is pretty much
    locked down. Over at Digital Inspiration they’ve written an article
    on How to Cross-Check Your Facebook Privacy Settings.

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    [Screen shot 2009-12-13 at 9.35.36 PM.png]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/13257277@N00/4182535184/
    “Screen shot 2009-12-13 at 9.35.36 PM.png”
    [Creative Commons License]: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/
    “Attribution-NonCommercial License”