tech
BEEP: A child’s computer timer
Every now and then an idea comes along that is such a no-brainer, it makes me wonder how it took so long for someone to finally think it. BEEP is just such an idea. My pals Vega, Nico, and Justin Lund are developing it on Kickstarter. Check it out and support them!
The trade-offs of trading up
This past week alone, two pals of mine, who have historically resisted change, have traded their old-school cell phones (of the Symbian variety) for next-gen SmartPhones. One, an Android, the other, an iPhone. Upon getting home and beginning to introduce themselves to a new paradigm in communication technologies, each contacted me separately to ask what they need to know to get each to work the way they want, having discovered things about each that come up short.
Technology, by the way, is always a trade-off. For each convenience offered, there are always new obstacles to overcome.
As far as operating systems go, this is a seemingly timeless (and predictably endless), Coke vs. Pepsi debate. The two leading mobile/tablet platforms, Android and iOS are both far from perfect on their own. While they do have much in common, such as superb haptic interfaces and decent battery life, this is true especially when it comes to making each work the way we want, out-of-the-box. There is a tradeoff involved in each of them. This overhead includes installing and configuring them to work just the way we like.
iOS, for example, while far more mature, stable, and predictable in performance, is missing a great deal of core functionality, requiring that each be jailbreak it in order to fully realize the device’s potential as a tool, both for work and play.
Android, on the other hand, is friendlier in this regard, however, lacks much of the stability and ease-of-use, requiring third party ROMs installed for seemingly every other app. This is reminiscent of Windows’ driver requirements, each of which further contributes to a system’s unpredictable performance.
Much of this is due to the Android Market being less discerning in terms of the quality of apps it allows into the wild. We do complain about Apple’s App Store for not being as utilitarian as we’d like, however, it is far more discriminating about the quality of apps offered. This, in addition to superior hardware design, contribute to making iOS the more stable and predictable platform.
The best of breed, IMHO, is jailbroken iOS. The addition of tools, such as coreutils, Terminal, OpenSSH, and SBSSettings, adds the invaluable functionality of Debian to the stability of the existing platform atop the elegant design and usability of the hardware.
As stated earlier, though, not without a little time and effort ; )
As an example, one of the additional steps required on iOS (post-jailbreak) occurs after installing and configuring OpenSSH. Upon connecting to devices, we see the following error once we are logged into a shell and perform the ls command to view contents of the current directory:
>ls
>ls: unrecognized prefix: hl
>ls: unparsable value for LS_COLORS environment variable
This issue is well known and documented in a Debian Bug report log:
#544871 – coreutils: ls complains about LS_COLORS: unrecognized prefix: hl, color define has been changed from hl to mh, which produced the error.
There is a simple solution to this. Do:
vi /etc/profile.d/coreutils.sh
modify the dircolors value thus: eval “$(dircolors -b | sed s/hl/mh/)”
then do: source /etc/profile.d/coreutils.sh
Well-known is documented is great, however, it is preferable to not have to modify anything at all and without requiring additional time researching and/or sleuthing. Things are indeed getting better, though, and as each evolves, we will continue to see improvement in the way each is used and developed, requiring less and less overhead at the outset in order to have access to the modern Swiss Army Knife that each can and will eventually be – out-of-the-box : )
Neil Postman
From Wikipedia:
Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University. Postman was a humanist, who believed that “new technology can never substitute for human values.”
What was he like? You can get an idea from this brief interview
Mr. Postman worked closely with Marshall McLuhan
In 1977, Marshall McLuhan defined media ecology as:
…means arranging various media to help each other so they won’t cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. And so you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others. And, therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one canceling the other out.
Inspired by McLuhan, Neil Postman founded the Program in Media Ecology at New York University in 1971. He described it as:
Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people.
Xuggler
If you’ve ever fumbled around with ffmpeg and other tools, there is a superior alternative I was turned onto today by Paul Gregoire via his blog: Xuggler!
The Media Tools are particularly of use to folks like me – how suhweeet is this?
On Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing: Sound as Image
translating information from one sense into another, especially sound to image, is one of the things technology does well
case in point is Close Encounters of the Third Kind
is this captivating? in the case of Close Encounters it is. however, personally, i can only say that in other cases, such as the one below, watching the patterns go by while experiencing the familiar audible sensations of this music is sometimes satisfying and sometimes not. it surely depends on multiple factors. sometimes my eyes want to be free of this structure, preferring to let the imagination wander around and let the sound just be it’s own thing. sometimes yes, sometimes no
the idea of translating the input of one sense into or through another…hmmm…
brings up questions. sometimes, though, my own nature seems to want to focus on just one complete sense or at least in bursts of intensive focus. for example, to the music and let the other senses waft the in-between moment in
senses can be wrestled. this meditation is about giving each attention with care, rather than throw jumbled mass at them all without consideration. that’s sure easy enough to take for granted, too
cheers to Kurt Vega for the link:
Solution Evolution
Over the years, I’ve had many different backup solutions in place in my home to back up the now >3TB of data I deem worthy of the trouble. I’ve used RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 6. I’ve used complete solutions and DIY on all the major platforms, as well as Linux flavors like Debian, Yellow Dog and Slackware. I’ve automated these processes, backing up crucial data online, offline, near-line and off-site, and de-automated them whenever I’ve slacked off on my documentation and have forgotten what’s backing up to where and when. Through this experience, I have a decent idea of what works well and what doesn’t.
To bolster available storage to these various configurations over time, I’ve added both internal and external drives, using LaCie almost exclusively for the external side of things. I’ve purchased dozens of these drives over many years and, up until the last couple, have had good experiences with them.
Case in point: yesterday morning, I woke up to find that backups had failed overnight, making this the third set of their products (I always buy them in pairs) that have failed me in the last 2 years. Over the last two years, I’ve lost 6 total, in each case just days after the manufacturer warranties expired. I purchased these drives based on logic that by spending $300-$400 on each, I was getting an acceptable level of reliability for less than it would cost for an enterprise-class solution costing significantly more. Note, it’s not the hard drives that fail, rather the enclosures LaCie builds around them. I end up using the drives in other ways, as noted below.
Thus, I found myself slowly starting to wake up from more than a good night’s rest. I started to realize that I have all of my critical project data in only one location. I had to decide how to proceed in order to keep it safe. Unsatisfied with my past methodology, I set out for some solution evolution.
After spending the morning reading reviews, again comparing complete vs. DIY solutions, I purchased a DroboPro:
Here’s the front:
Internal pic:
Back:
Yes, you can see a USB 2 port, 2 Firewire 800 ports and indeed that’s a Gigabit Ethernet port for iSCSI : )
The DroboPro was $1,289.95
The new drives: 4 x $119.99 = $479.96
Total cost: $1,769.91
That may seem steep, and it is, however, compare this to the cost of 6 failed drives over two years @ $300 each. And my time and worry.
The logic is that spending $1800 on consumer-grade hardware, while thinking it a less-expensive route, is actually more costly as time spent installing, configuring, maintaining and replacing these *solutions* is far more pricey than spending more upfront on a solution that will stand the test of time and allow for more flexibility, security and reliability.
You can count on me sharing my thoughts here on the DroboPro after it’s been in place in my studio for a few months.
* thanks to Chris Connaker @ Computer Audiophile for the images
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satellite browser
NASA hopes we enjoy J-Track 3-D.
Clicking on the thumbnail below or here or there will activate JTrack3D and it will appear in its own window and begin loading a database of over 900 satellites.
What you will see (presuming the system you’re on supports Java) is a plot in 3-dimensions showing the position of these satellites. Choose them all from the pull-down menu.
If your system isn’t currently supporting Java, skip the conniption, there are also some satellites that can be viewed without it:
MIT Media Lab: Personas
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Here’s one of mine but you can click on it to make it bigger and easier to read: 
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Linux on your celli? Yes plz
Nokia decided to put aside its favorite S60 platform and switch to Maemo, which is all another way of saying that they ditched S60 for Linux.
We like that and so should you. For one, the browser is pretty stable, and it supports flash, video and applets. No more harrumphing when the iPhone loads a Flash-based site, showing us the blue-square-question-mark thing.
Ho hum.
Plus, this phone is fully configurable in ways the iPhone may never be, at least, not without spending an inordinate amount of time hacking away.
The N900 is expected to be available later this year and the price has only been guessed at but will likely be in the $600 range.
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Remembering the contributions of Phil Dodds
Mark Oehlert, an acquaintance of mine via Twitter, turned me onto his friend Phil Dodds, who turns out was not only in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but contributed a great deal to our culture in his short life, including, but not limited to, SCORM:
From Wikipedia:
He was the chief architect of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) under the guidance of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, a project of the United States Department of Defense. The ADL SCORM is widely perceived as a means to achieve interoperability, accessibility and reuse of the component pieces of web-based instruction, irrespective of Learning Management Systems. Philip’s work on SCORM will continue as hundreds of organizations around the world continue their collective efforts to resolve remaining issues associated with SCORM’s Simple Sequencing Models, such as a lack of common instructional strategies and taxonomies (common definitions) for learning objects.
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Walks the walk: Jim Rossignol
Jim Rossignol is an interesting fellow, particularly in the context that he writes in a unique way about gaming and its influence on culture. Not to mention, the trajectory and contrast of his own story against what he writes makes him an authentic source IMO.
I am anticipating the arrival of his book, This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities published by the University of Michigan Press.
Amazon’s product description reads like this:
“In May 2000 I was fired from my job as a reporter on a finance newsletter because of an obsession with a video game.
It was the best thing that ever happened to me.â€
So begins this story of personal redemption through the unlikely medium of electronic games. Quake, World of Warcraft, Eve Online, and other online games not only offered author Jim Rossignol an excellent escape from the tedium of office life. They also provided him with a diverse global community and a job—as a games journalist.
Part personal history, part travel narrative, part philosophical reflection on the meaning of play, This Gaming Life describes Rossignol’s encounters in three cities: London, Seoul, and Reykjavik. From his days as a Quake genius in London’s increasingly corporate gaming culture; to Korea, where gaming is a high-stakes televised national sport; to Iceland, the home of his ultimate obsession, the idiosyncratic and beguiling Eve Online, Rossignol introduces us to a vivid and largely undocumented world of gaming lives.
Torn between unabashed optimism about the future of games and lingering doubts about whether they are just a waste of time, This Gaming Life also raises important questions about this new and vital cultural form. Should we celebrate the “serious†educational, social, and cultural value of games, as academics and journalists are beginning to do? Or do these high-minded justifications simply perpetuate the stereotype of games as a lesser form of fun? In this beautifully written, richly detailed, and inspiring book, Rossignol brings these abstract questions to life, immersing us in a vibrant landscape of gaming experiences.
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3G vs 3Gs : Video Comparison
Some of us have been capturing video since the beginning via Cycorder on the 2g. The 3G had little or no differences in its capabilities from the 2G. That isn’t the case with the 3Gs.
First, there is a distinct advantage to the 3Gs due to its frame-rate capabilities. 30fps beats the snot out of 15fps any day of the week under any conditions. Double it!
Since this capability is tied to hardware, in this case the processor in the 3Gs has a significant advantage, in addition to the camera itself being upgraded. The example below shows that the difference is clear.
This demo was put together by iPhoneArena [thanks, man]:
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Wind Power Will Save Us All
Wind power has already sparked a clean energy revolution, however, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science finds that wind power could provide for the entire world’s current and future energy needs.
In order to estimate something like the planet’s capacity for this, researchers first sectioned Earth into areas of ~ 3,300 square kilometers while surveying local wind speeds every six hours. According to the paper, if 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossed the planet, excluding “areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban”, this would work. The possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines was also considered, though restricted to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters.
Using this criteria researchers found wind energy could supply not just the world’s energy requirements, but over forty times the world’s current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs.
Good news – thanks, Slashdot
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Sirikata : BSD-licensed platform for virtual worlds
Sirikata is an BSD licensed open source platform for virtual worlds. The aim is to provide a set of libraries and protocols which can be used to deploy a virtual world, as well as fully featured sample implementations of services for hosting and deploying these worlds. The team is aiming for an alpha release in Q2 2009 and this video teaser should give us some sense of what to expect.
Exciting stuff.
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