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!

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 : )

This piece speaks for itself:

Even though the 5Dmkii has the capability to capture at 24p natively, it’s still a cool effect to capture @ 30p and conform to 24p:

thinfilms is pleased to have the honor of working with Gever Tulley this summer in San Francisco.

Gever is a gifted, self-taught computer scientist and developer, having started his professional career at age 16. He is an inspiration to me and to many, many others. His work with the Tinkering School enables children as both learners and teachers, working towards the goal of bringing the next generations back into touch with play, discovery and the other whimsical tools that put our minds in closer natural proximity to innovation.

Here’s Gever’s most recent talk at TED, worth watching because he explains this like no one else can:

This is an astounding metaphor for our culture and the gravity of our situation as lifeforms on a planet we know next-to-nothing about:
enveloped by the inelegance of our current technology, with wires and all kinds of ugly schwack running up and down the walls surrounding and protecting him, Ed Lu is aboard the International Space Station. Technically, he IS out of our atmosphere and orbiting in space, though, he is only BARELY off-world. Consider the resources and history it took just to get him THIS far.
Meanwhile, he engages in this arguably “unproductive” act of pure beauty, playing a sonata written by a composer who’s been dead almost 200 years.
Ever so slowly but surely, this clip seems to make it all worth it:

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.

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?

hats off to @brainpicker for the nod