One issue (among many!) that people are having with the transition from Picasa Web Albums to Google Photos is how to directly link to a photo from Google Photos.

Like everyone else, I have feelings about the rumoured algorithm coming to change our Twitter timelines. But maybe unlike everyone else, I have long been working on secret plan to keep my Twitter timeline intact.

Ever since Twitter started making life difficult for third-party clients and developers to create (or even make use of existing) features, I’ve been stocking the bunker with the supplies. I’ve even had to start from scratch when Twitter (officially) removed some key features and changed their API. But as of this moment, stores are replenished. And if I had to take shelter in the bunker tomorrow, I believe I could survive.

Here’s my plan for surviving an (the?) eventual Twitter apocolypse…

Yesterday, (aka “The Day that Tech Stopped Working”) after a string of tech annoyances, I figured the safest thing to do was to quickly run a backup. (I don’t have automated backups, but I do run a SuperDuper backup a few times per month, and especially whenever I’ve made major changes to my file system.) Somewhat befitting the crazy I had, for the first time, running a SuperDuper backup failed.

Although the last thing I wanted to do was to spend more time at my machine, I proceeded to research what “Error 28: no space left on device” means when you’re quite certain your external hard drive is large enough to backup your laptop’s internal hard drive.

As I’ve written before, YoruFukurou (Night Owl) is my indispensable Mac OS X twitter client. It’s the only client I’ve found that supports tweet filtering, not just simply muting of tweets so that tweets I might not to see now can still be read at a convenient time later.

It also happens to be a very good client for someone who likes to keep track of which tweets have or haven’t been read, which is useful if you choose to (eventually) read every tweet in your timeline. As long as the application doesn’t restart, it can hold tens of thousands of unread tweets, all nicely organized into various tabs. If I wanted to, I could leave Yoru Fukurou running at home on a computer, go out of town for a week, and everything would be there when I got home! This is a tall ask of an Android Twitter client, but as someone who does try to manage unread tweets, I wanted to see how close I could get.

In honour of Home Opening Day for the Toronto Blue Jays (and in lieu of the writing I should be doing today), here’s a post I’ve been meaning to write to explain exactly how my super-awesome-spoiler-proof Twitter system works.

“So, you mute keywords and hashtags?” Oh, if only it were that simple!