My wireless SD card, an Eye-Fi Pro X2, bought in 2013, was a nice little card that went in my camera. When I took photos the card synced them to my phone, geotagging them in the process. The photos would then sync to Flickr when the phone was next connected to Wi-Fi. If I wanted to use mobile data I could share them from my phone almost immediately. Most of the photos on this site used that process. There was also a desktop app which didn’t reinstall when I upgraded my desktop PC to Windows 10 last year as I rarely needed to use it – the phone app was still working fine and I was very happy with it.

When I bought the Olympus Pen E-P7L in 2015 and found the wireless features to be effectively unusable I quickly bought another Eye-Fi card which was available at that timne, the Eye-Fi Mobi. I didn’t put much research into it, so I can only blame myself for not realising that its features were more limited. I do remember reading about Eye-Fi Cloud, but had no intention of using it because I was happy with the Flickr syncing with the other phone app. In practice I didn’t use two cameras at once, didn’t find the Mobi reliable and wasn’t impressed with the features so I kept using the Pro X2.

I haven’t been posting anything recently or taking many photos. I also managed to miss and email that I received in June saying that the Pro X2 would stop working in September. So I when I took some photos yesterday for the next review and wondered why they wouldn’t sync to Flickr a few minutes searching on Google reminded me why we can’t have nice things (or we can have them until someone realises they aren’t making enough money out of them).

If I believe the official line the Pro X2 had security vulnerabilities which could not be addressed through software. So for my own good the card won’t work any more, other than as a standard SD card. A desktop application has been provided which is supposed to allow wireless transfers, but I can’t get it to work and in the process it had eroded any remaining confidence I had in Eye-Fi to provide reliable software.

The Mobi card will still work (lucky I could still find the activation code), but with a different app now confusingly called “Keenai”. Oddly this wanted access to my contacts – should I be worried? It wouldn’t even show a thumbnail of a transferred photo until I rebooted the phone. It doesn’t sync to Flickr, although Google Photos will see the transferred photos and sync them, at least at the moment. It doesn’t seem to GPS tag either – I’ve read somewhere that the card is supposed to, but can see no option to do it in Keenai. It looks like to get full use of the Mobi I need to pay for the Cloud service which at $49 per year is nearly as much as I paid for the Pro X2 in 2013. Alternatively I could get the latest Mobi Pro version which has a year’s free Eye-Fi Cloud however based on my recent experience that’s not going to happen, so I’ll blunder on the the Mobi and its limited features until something better comes along.

To conclude, my suspicion regarding the Pro X2 is not that it had a security flaw but that it was just too good. It had all the features I needed so there was no need to upgrade or buy into the Cloud service which provided essentially the same features at a higher price. I have no illusions that this is about me individually – but I think that enough people didn’t use Eye-Fi Cloud that the company realised it had a problem. It was being denied the income stream that its investors expected, so it appears they decided to go the route of enforced obsolescence. This post dating back to 2012 seems quite prescient SmartBear, especially as 2012 is the same year that phasing out of the Pro X2 began. Of course other companies try this on a regular basis – I’ve already been on the receiving end of it repeatedly. However my direct experience of that so far has been to stop receiving software updates – not a piece of hardware that abruptly stopped working as it has previously. I am aware of the Revolv and the publicity over that has has been enough to put me off ever buying anything from Nest. This latest experience will put me off buying anything from Eye-Fi ever again.

Better get back to work on the overdue reviews.

The post Why we can’t have nice things appeared first on Stationary Journey.

And don’t get me started on “Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content”, which seems to be baked into the core of WordPress – only way of stopping so far has involved accepting a Flash of (or even permanent) Unstyled Content, which in 2016 I’m not prepared to do. So I’ve taken things as far as I can for the moment and the only negative at the moment is that my Gravatar doesn’t appear properly on posts. Any more substantial PageSpeed improvements would involve a fundamental redesign of the site and to do that I think it would be better to stop changing the existing site and instead set up a test one and gradually build it back up from scratch. I know that’s really just good practice but this experience has reminded me that what starts out as a bit of apparently harmless tweaking can open up a world of pain on a live site.

The day job also hasn’t helped but without that I doubt I would be posting in the first place. Now I have a serious backlog on reviews and limited time, so no more wittering on a bout the server. A links posts will follow this one – it will be obvious that I’ve not been reading much in the last 3 months either!

The post Situation Normal appeared first on Stationary Journey.

The post More Server Problems appeared first on Stationary Journey.

Until I can make sure the new setting are okay there may still be some instability. Hopefully normal service, i.e. almost complete silence, will resume soon. I am going to do a quick links post though to more thoroughly test out posting later, as it’s well overdue.

The post Server Problems appeared first on Stationary Journey.

I recently had the need to timestamp/datestamp a large number of image files using the EXIF data stored in the files. A shell script under Linux was my preferred choice for this, but I’ve always found shell scripting to be cryptic and ImageMagick difficult to master due to the range of tools and command line options. After some searching I came across some useful advice which I adapted for my own needs. The changes I made were to ensure the date followed the UK format, tailoring the colour and size of the stamp to my preferences, as well as providing more useful feedback on progress.

The results are here in case anyone else finds them useful. I haven’t attempted to break long lines in case that introduced errors.

#! /bin/bash

# Based on code here: http://superuser.com/questions/649033/add-timestamp-to-image-from-linux-command-line
# Stored as ~/scripts/stamp.sh, included in path with the following added to .profile:
# PATH=$PATH:"$HOME/scripts"
# Made executable with:
# chmod +x ~/scripts/stamp.sh
# Uncomment the next command for more verbose feedback
# set -x

textcolor="rgb(43,255,0)"
ext="*jpg"

count=$(ls -1 $ext | wc -l)
echo "$count files to be processed"

for img in $ext;
   do stamp=($(identify -format %[EXIF:DateTime] $img))
      full="${stamp[0]:8:2}/${stamp[0]:5:2}/${stamp[0]:0:4} ${stamp[1]}"
      convert "$img" -gravity SouthEast -pointsize 84  -fill $textcolor -weight bold -stroke black -strokewidth 3 -annotate +30+30 "$full" "ts_""$img"
      ((count -= 1))
      echo "Image $img processed, $count remaining"
done

echo "Finished!"

The post Timestamping Images appeared first on Stationary Journey.

The post Website Update November 26, 2014 appeared first on Stationary Journey.

The following features of Jetpack are now unavailable and will affect the appearance of this site:

• Jetpack Comments – which allows commenters to use their Social Media accounts to post comments
• Likes
• Contact Form – although I’ve switched to a different plugin so this page still works
• Related Posts
• Shortcode Embeds – which are used to embed, for example, YouTube videos

Several other features which normally work behind the scenes (such as Markdown support) are also now unavailable.

Once I know more about this problem I will post an update here.

The post Website Issues November 23, 2014 appeared first on Stationary Journey.

Things have been a little quiet here recently (I won’t bore you with any excuses) but four ink reviews should appear in the very near future. The writing tests are done, as well as the photos, I just need to scan in the samples and write up the text. This is the first time I’ve tried running four tests at once, and you will see that the inks are all in the orange/red area. Next time around I plan to do five at once!

However, as I uploaded the photos for the current round of tests, I stumbled across a problem with the Inkpourium. Basically the tagged images imported from Flickr were no longer appearing on the individual pages. I already knew that changes to Flickr’s api were coming and when the an update to the plugin I use with WordPress appeared a few days ago, I dutifully installed it. I didn’t check to see if it worked at the time, but it’s not working now.

I don’t know whether the problem lies with the plugin or with Flickr. To be honest I have neither the time nor the inclination to look too deeply into it – even if I did the next change that came along would only break something again. I will wait for a fix, but in the meantime will add direct links to the relevant Inkpourium pages. That’s a nasty kludge, but as the combination of Flickr and WordPress seems to be be so unstable at the moment I can’t see what else I can do.

I’ll quit now before this degenerates into a Flickr / WordPress Plugin / Life in General rant.

The post Update May 27, 2014 appeared first on Stationary Journey.

The quest for the new Theme is over. After spending what felt like an eternity reviewing lots of different responsive themes, I finally settled on – wait for it – “Twenty Fourteen”. The view on Mobile devices really swung it for me. However, not content with that, I wanted to put my own stamp on it and in celebration of the fine Spring weather here at the moment, I decided to create my own “Fantasia on a Theme of Twenty Fourteen”.

Well, that was the plan. The stock Twenty Fourteen is quite dour, all that black and green, but no combination of Spring colours I came up with looked half way decent. So I threw that idea out of the window. My next few attempts ended up looking far too much like other mods of Twenty Fourteen out there. Quickly going nowhere, I started a web search for colours I liked the look of and finally found inspiration with a couple of paint colours on an old Art Deco paint palette – no surprise then that it looks a little old-fashioned. So here we are – hardly Spring-like, but I’m happy with it. At least until I see something I like more. I’ve spent more time that anticipated recreating my old customizations, or modifying them to the new theme, but that comes with the territory. Still need to tweak a few things, like the pagers (again) which I’m not happy with at the moment. I’m also trying to get my head around the “Featured Image” which I’d never really considered before. In the case of this post it was downloaded from Pixabay.

As the title of this post is completely misleading, I will finish with a real work of art (one of my favourite bits of English Pastoral).

The post Fantasia on a Theme of Twenty Fourteen appeared first on Stationary Journey.

Yes, the name of this blog has changed along with the domain name. When I first started the blog I already had the domain name terryfinney.com and as this would be a personal blog, not devoted to any topic in particular, I thought using my own name would be the thing to do.

However, after looking a a lot of other blogs recently, and listening to the inestimable Ed Jelley on a recent Pen Addict podcast I realised that I had made a mistake. I must stress that this is not intended as a Pen Blog, but I have drawn a lot of inspiration from Pen Blogs. I also though that if I was going to change the name (and domain), the sooner the better.

Even though this isn’t a Pen Blog, I still wondered if every play on the words pen, ink, notebook, stationery, desk etc, etc, etc, really had been exhausted. After much thought I came up with “Stationery Journey”. I patted myself on the back for the clever wordplay but assumed somebody must have used it already. To my surprise (apart from a mesmerising YouTube video and a couple of fleeting references), it hadn’t been, and the domain name stationeryjourney.com was still available. Then I reminded myself that this is not a Pen Blog, and such a domain name would be easy to mistake and mistype (probably as stationaryjourney.com). Wait a minute though – “Stationary Journey” would do just fine – and it appeals to my sense of humour. The domain name for this was available too, so I immediately picked it up, along with stationeryjourney.com (not sure if that was being greedy or a genuine attempt to point mistypes in the right direction).

Following the instructions at How to Properly Move WordPress to a New Domain Without Losing SEO I made the changes today. Not sure if my SEO really is intact, but it sees to be such a black art that I’m not sure how I would ever be able to tell. Old links at terryfinney.com should redirect to stationaryjourney.com, as should the domain stationeryjourney.com

So, excuses to type in some real content are running out. Just the theme left to go.

The post What’s in a Name? appeared first on Stationary Journey.

I’ve also made a few more changes intended to resident he visual clutter, especially where the content rarely changes. The about.me widget has gone, replaced with a Connect widget with smaller icons. The About page has been knocked into shape though. I have also removed the 500px and Picasa widgets. I really liked the 500px site when I first joined, there are some fantastic photos there, but I rarely visit now so this widget would have been rarely updated. Picasa used to be my main cloud storage and sharing site for photos but its being slowly crushed under the Google+ heel and I’m finding sharing so cumbersome that I would rather concentrate on Flickr for that.

I’ve swapped Disqus for the Jetpack commenting system. Still not sure about that, but as there are no comments yet I won’t worry too much for the time being.

The Official sharing buttons for social networks won’t work properly in Chrome, and that one is really annoying me, but I can’t track down the cause. Update: Almost immediately after posting this I found the cause – the “Disconnect” extension for Chrome – when disabled the official buttons work fine – so that’s what I’m using now.

Finally, I’ve reduced the number of posts appearing on the home page and reordered the widgets in the sidebar to balance things up a bit. Ultimately I plan to change the theme when I can find one that works well with everything (such optimism).

The post Keeping up Appearances appeared first on Stationary Journey.

So I have reverted back to editing in a browser. I had previously found this to be too distracting, so I also tried out WordPress’s “distraction free” full screen editor. Coupled with the “full screen” mode in the browser (F11 in Chrome and Firefox) it really gives a minimalist approach which I think I can live with.

I have also disabled the Visual Editor – I only switched to it once during drafting this post and it mangled some html I had entered. So I have now removed the temptation to use it at all (the profile page in the Admin Dashboard is the place to disable it.)

Having done that and gone into full screen mode, most of the handy buttons (apart from those to insert images and links) have gone. Although I’m fairly competent with html I need the easiest way to show a few words in bold, or insert a heading when necessary. This is where Markdown comes in, which is now available through the Jetpack plugin (it just needs to be enabled).

The following are a few examples of Markdown (Hosted on Pastebin because WordPress insists on transforming some of the characters in the links to html entities):

And here are the results:

This is a level 2 heading

This is a level 3 heading

This is some normal text. Here is some text in italic, bold and monospace.

• This is a bullet point (the preceding blank line is needed)
• This is a second bullet point

1. This is a numbered list
2. This is the second line – the number used doesn’t matter!

This is quoted text
This is a second line of quoted text

Say I want to put something in *asterisks*

This is a simple link: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics

This is another link example with a title.

The Markdown Mark comes from here: https://github.com/dcurtis/markdown-mark

The post Distraction Free Writing and Markdown appeared first on Stationary Journey.

A test to see how the Posterous bookmarklet works.

The post Why Self-Hosted WordPress Should Power Your Social Media Hub – Danny Brown appeared first on Stationary Journey.