Of course, once I got home I immediately upgraded my iPhone 3G to the latest 3.0 firmware. After the interminable download, sync and install process, I got my first glimpse at the new front page. Almost immediately, I noticed that I not only had a battery icon, but also the percentage of battery power remaining!

My first thought was that it was a new feature of the OS. I was pleased, but not completely surprised, because I had a bit of a secret. You see, once upon a time I used a jailbreak on my phone. It was a heady time for me, running two apps simultaneously, recording video with Qik, and most importantly using a hack that turns the battery icon to a percentage view. And, once I decided to un-jailbreak, all my various interface hacks and other things vanished, except for that surreptitious little battery percentage toggle.

Through a couple of iPhone OS updates the battery hack stayed with me, apparently hidden away in some configuration setting or firmware file. And apparently, that setting triggered a feature that is only meant for the iPhone 3Gs when the firmware installed. Excellent!

What’s weird is that this is distinctly different from how it appeared on older firmware revisions. Gone is the ability to tap on the battery to toggle it to a percent.. now both appear, all the time. And of course, since I don’t have a 3Gs, there is no setting in the Usage menu for me to turn it off. Good thing I like it.

Now how do I tell my iPhone to play music through my bluetooth headset? sigh.

More discussions on this:

Phone 3.0 comes with battery percentage meter – The iPhone User Guide
How to get battery percentage in 3.0- [Archive] – Mac Forums
iphone 3g battery percentage.. am i lucky-
Battery % Hack – Mac Forums

We have had our web experience controlled by the sites we visit for so long that for a lot of us, the web browser defaults no longer even come in to play when controlling what the text on a web page looks like, except in the case where we want to override whatever choice the site we are visiting has made.

This isn’t a rant. I actually think, by and large, that this is a good thing. CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets) allows precise control over the overall look of web sites, and when you are trying to walk that line between clean and detailed, CSS can be the razor that keeps your site from looking too busy or too cluttered. There are many precise tweaks that can enhance the presentability of a site, like the vertical spacing between lines of text.

But, as you have no doubt noticed, this site doesn’t employ CSS to force a particular font type, size, style, or color. Those are all left up to the choices you have made in your browser settings, and if you are anything like me, you probably haven’t even looked at your browser font defaults for years.

Then end result? 10-point Times New Roman, with blue unvisited links and purple visited links.

If you absolutely hate serif fonts (fonts that have little twiddly bits on the letters like Times New Roman), take a moment to go in to your settings and select a different font that is more pleasing. You can choose any font that you have installed, from Helvetica (or Arial for you Windows folks) to something more exotic like Calibri on Windows (the new MS Office default font) to Monaco on the Mac.

All the browsers except Chrome have a font setting in their options. Google Chrome, created with minimalism in mind, forces you to edit a configuration file to change your font defaults. I found where this configuration resides from a Chrome Help Discussion Board:

Using text editor to open:
   ...\Documents and Settings\User_Name\Local Settings
   \Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Preferences

You will find the "webkit": {  "webprefs": { in the file.
Those settings are for WebKit.

In my setting example:
   "webkit": {
      "webprefs": {
         "default_fixed_font_size": 11,
         "default_font_size": 12,
         "fixed_font_family": "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono",
         "minimum_font_size": 12,
         "minimum_logical_font_siz": 12,
         "sansserif_font_family": "Times New Roman",
         "serif_font_family": "Arial",
         "standard_font_is_serif": false,
         "text_areas_are_resizable": true
      }
   }

The minimum_font_size and minimum_logical_font_size prevent Chrome to use
very small font size for display.

Remember to close Chrome first before you edit the file, or the file you saved
will be overwritten by Chome after exiting.

If Google Chrome has the most annoying default font configuration, Safari 4 possibly has the best.  Not only is it easy to find, but if you are viewing a page that uses the default browser font (like this one) selecting a font will immediately update the page with that font, allowing you to see immediately if it’s a good choice or not.

Of course, as more and more sites adopt CSS-heavy themes in an attempt to give you a unique and identifiable look, these settings become less relevant. Maybe that’s the lesson we can take away about Chrome – they’ve already decided that default fonts should be set once (by the developer) and forgotten.

I haven’t been doing much writing recently.

Anywhere.

After an extremely fun couple of months writing for ReadWriteWeb (thanks again for making that possible, Richard! Your team is absolutely the best folks to work with!) I found a full-time job working for CyberSource, working on the operations/support piece for a new product they (we) are developing for electronic payment processing. Sounds boring, doesn’t it?

In fact, I am learning and applying new technologies at a prodigious rate. I’m using Linux admin and deployment skills that, frankly, have gotten a bit rusty in the year I spent immersed in new media. And it is challenging me.. which also means that when I meet goals and deadlines, I feel good.  Also, I am writing a lot – but now in the form of documentation around the project. That combined with just wanting to come home and relax after a hard day has definitely made me step back from the active role I had on various social media sites and blogs.

But there are still times I find myself with an hour here or there, and I fire up Feedly or Google Reader, hit GA (go-all) and start skimming from the top. And the blog-o-sphere continues apace, weaving its own curiously compelling tapestry of news, insights, discussion, and often overwhelming coverage of larger events, and it makes me a bit nostalgic (if such could be said for something that I’ve only been away from for a couple of months).

In any case, these changes have made me see my own works from a fresh perspective. I’ve decided, for now, a fancy blog theme is not important. A lot of bells and whistles are not important. I just want something simple, maybe even too simple, that I can use as a framework to build upon.  To that end, I have chosen a theme that is fast and doesn’t waste a lot of time with CSS. I’m hoping with its limited potential for distracting eye-candy, it will also help me to focus on content.

I do need to figure out how to show the number of comments a post has on the front page though.  That’s a big omission.  For now, you can click on an article title to get to the comments (if there are any).

I don’t know if there’s still a lot of you out there cheering Scribkin on, or even just patiently (or bemusedly) waiting for a new post to appear, but if you are, thanks. I’ll try to write here at least every weekend.

Update: I figured out how to add a comments link. Time for a nap.

I’ve been criminally lacking on updating this blog since taking a writing position at ReadWriteWeb. I admit it. But I do have an idea about the direction I want to take this blog, and hopefully, if I keep plugging at it, people will find it to be useful.

However, I’m mostly writing this today for two reasons:

1. To figure out if writing a post will ‘reboot’ my broken FeedBurner feed into working, and
2. To gloat a little about just how much I’ve been blogging over at RWW recently.

Of The First Part

So, starting with the Google FeedBurner issue.  I have no idea what it is, and I honestly haven’t had much time or motivation to futz with it recently.  I suspect it is similar to something that happened to Louis Gray recently (which you can read about here), but I’m not sure at all. If I view the RSS feed in Mozilla, I get something that looks like this:

But if I look at it in Chrome (which strangely has absolutely NO support for viewing RSS feeds), I get this:

So, I’m not sure what’s going on.  I’m going to post this, and if that doesn’t fix it I guess I’ll go into the Feedburner "hit it with a hammer" section and see if I can knock something loose.

Of The Second Part

They’ve been keeping me busy over at RWW. Generally, three posts a day, every weekday. That’s 15 posts a week, and I’ve been doing it for several weeks now. There’s actually a handy little RWW link that lists all the posts I wrote, and the number of comments on each.  So, that’s awesome. 

Plus, week I went to SXSW Interactive on a press pass, and that was a total blast!  It was so amazing to finally meet everyone that I have been reading and following in online, I forgot about blogging at all until a couple of days in. Sorry, RWW.

Update: I figured out the RSS feed issue.  It was a plugin called GooseGrade.  Updated the plugin and the feed is fixed.  Yay!

Last week, literally out of the blue, I got an email from Richard MacManus, founder of ReadWriteWeb. He said that the blog had an opening for a news blogger, and would I be interested? Say no more, I replied. I am just a bit more than slightly interested.

In fact, I was thrilled.

So, after setting some timetables and learning the ropes, I can finally announce that I am RWW’s newest daily news blogger! I will be providing the tech and new media communities updates every weekday afternoon. In fact, I’ve already begun, you can already check out my very first RWW post here. We slipped it in Sunday night as a sort of test.

That’s not all the good news, however.

Apparently, though a series of what I can only believe to be fortuitous coincidences, I managed to score a press pass to South by Southwest Interactive this year! Oh my yes, I’ll be there representing RWW!

It took me a while to pick my jaw off the floor when the team revealed this news to me, as you may imagine.

Now before you start wondering if I somehow deposed a more capable, seasoned writer.. as far as I know, I didn’t. It happened to be the case where due to prior commitments (and perhaps the fact that I live near Austin) it was available. But I’m not looking this gift horse in the mouth! I’m just going to try my hardest to prove that their gamble with me pays off for everyone concerned.

So that’s my news. I honestly don’t know how it is going to affect my posting frequency here and other blogs that I write for, such as Louis Gray’s site yet. Time will tell. But please do follow me over on RWW as often as you can, and know that I am certainly open to post ideas, suggestions and recommendations.

This is part 1 of Scribkin’s I Am Blogger series, which started out with this post.

A lot has been written about, and by, a guy who has seen his reputation in social media grow, often exponentially, over the past year.  He has been writing about technology and new media for just a hair over twice that time period on his own eponymous blog.  Oddly, his income is not based in whole or in part by his blog, as evinced by the lack of any advertising on it.

The man in question is Louis Gray.

You might be wondering, as I have, why he has kept at his hobby of writing blog entries up to three times a day, for at least a year without any significant readership or an aspiration of monetary compensation in the technologies he was covering.  The answer, as far as I can tell, is simple:  He loves to write, and he writes about stuff that interests him.  Fantasy football, TiVo, Apple stuff, iPods.. the list is diverse and changes over time.

Louis may have started his blog as a way to codify his thoughts on these subjects, but he was also ‘home schooling’ – in this I mean that all that writing was practice.  Sure, hardly anyone saw his first 100 posts until well after they were posted.  But when people did start to notice his blog, he had already taken his blogging game to a new level.  Full opinion pieces on technology, new media, and corporate politics.  In-depth statistical reports. Honest assessments of new technologies and software, as well as a number of exclusives.

No wonder people were drawn to his writing.

And Louis has become very popular, probably thanks in no small part to Robert Scoble ‘discovering’ him on FriendFeed and hyping him as only Scobleizer can do for a while. All that attention would go to anyone’s head, and they would probably parlay that fame into a better job, higher-profile gigs, etc.  Louis, however, stayed modest.  He decided to open his blog to other voices, other bloggers.

I should interrupt myself here and explain that, at least in social media circles, it’s fairly common to see ‘guest author’ posts on blogs.  They are a good way to expose an established blog’s audience to a new voice, and afford a little cross-promotion.  But here again, Louis never referred to his contributing bloggers as “guests,” he felt that they have a stake in the welfare of Louis’ blog as well.

For full disclosure, I am an author on Louis Gray’s team.

So Louis is a great guy.  But why is his writing compelling?  First, he has a very conversational tone.  It’s easy to dive in to anything he’s written.  He maintains a clear thread of thought through each piece, and he prefers to write from a perspective that isn’t just a re-hashing of the same news and memes that have been covered on other sites.  Often, he will present a different opinion, or attempt to reconcile the logic made on different sides of the same issue.  He is a mediator as much as he is a pundit.

Most of all, Louis hardly ever writes ‘from the hip,’ so to speak – you can be sure that if he is sitting down to write about something, he has given the matter a lot of consideration, and taking as much information as he has available to him (which usually is a lot more than I notice, I can tell you that!) and synthesized it into a thoughtful, comprehensive post.

Generally, it takes him about 20 minutes to write and less than an hour to post.  Another benefit of all that practice.

I do envy him that.