In response to Reader’s projected demise, I wonder if I can mirror my G+ shares here, rather than find out in years to come that they’re shuttering that service as well? I have used Google Takeout to pull a copy but I wonder if anyone has built a parser/extractor to turn those shares into WordPress or whathaveyou posts?
To my 44 subscribers
So Google is closing down Google Reader July 1. How do you read this site, in Reader or something else? What works?
This is a test
If you are a subscriber to this mess, leave a comment. I’m trying to decide if I should dump it all down the memory hole. I think indexers spend more time here than actual humans. And it’s not like I update it ever…
A post I read this weekend got me thinking about this online writing business, the difference between amateur and professional, the virtues of doing it without concern for payment. When your most-read post yields exactly zero return, even with thinly-veiled pleas for some recompense, you know where you stand.
So I may accept the value assigned by a discerning public.
I got started with this as an extension of my work in publishing and the Internet, but it may be an experiment that has run its course.
Open source voting systems?
How is it, given the concerns over election system security, that the US doesn’t have open source-based voting systems, based on off-the-shelf components, running published and verified software (or even a mechanical tabulating engine: it’s harder to hack gears than flip bits in registers), and owned by the American people?
Given the wide use of public key encryption in online retail, banking, why are systems for the recording and tabulation of votes owned by private companies, controlled by them with no oversight by or accountability to the people?
I found this but it’s not clear it’s advanced to more than proof of concept or call to action.
Some states have moved to voting by mail (which poses a different set of questions if the USPS is successfully dismantled) but for those that favor the community aspect of public democracy, standardized ballots and publicly-owned voting technology is overdue.
I wonder if Richard Stallman, Bruce Schneier or Ed Felten haven’t proposed this. I haven’t found anything on it.
Maybe this is a corollary to the The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity: idealists are theorizing while thieves are getting away with it.
sometimes it’s that easy
Helping someone out after a phishing attack — quarantining her hard drive, imaging it, and then restoring the personal details to a new larger drive with a clean install of Windows — I was trying to figure out how to mount the disk image I created. Some googling and head scratching. Hmm, I wonder if
hdiutil attach [image file name]
would work or at least give me an informative error message? It worked. Silently and as expected(?). Lots of pages about various NTFS drivers and arcane apps, but for whatever reason, OS X Leopard was able to manage it.
Time Capsule wish list
After my PSU replacement/hacking issues, I have been looking into what else can be done with this long-out-of-warranty beast, assuming the cooling issues are resolved, 5 generations on.
- internal file copying/manipulation, meaning if I copy files from one disk to another, for archiving or to move a sparseimage to a different disk, the copying is done locally, not from disk A over the network, through the computer where the request originated, to disk B which is physically attached. Maybe a limited internal console for file operations or something
- better SNMP support (CPU usage, temperature, fan usage). Or log it through syslog and we’ll graph it from there
- SMART status on attached disks. This may require working with vendors or developing their own enclosures…
- external SATA support, allowing the Time Capsule to support fast SATA transfers, maybe even the ability to attach JBOD or array (Hmm, this may be outside the scope of what most people need but the Time Capsule seems to be the gateway drug to NAS).
Hardware hacking: Time Capsule PSU failure.
My 1st generation Apple Time Capsule failed last night, specifically the power supply unit overheated for the final time. Frustrating, as the device does a lot of work, between handling the dsl connection, routing wired and wireless traffic, and backups. After reading over my options here, here, and here, I ended up hacking in an external power supply after finding a nice dual voltage unit at Goodwill, of all places.
Not the prettiest work but work it does…
The joints were trimmed and taped before trying to seal the case, which proved to be a challenge. The SATA connector collides with the power connection to the board, so it’s a tight fit. So tight, it just shut down. Perhaps I’ll run it without the cover for now…
I have found a spare unit, without a drive, that I will swap in for this one after I replace the PSU with a future-proofed one from Chris Fackrell.
Looks like this one lasted two years longer than it should have/was expected to. I attribute that to a drive swap I did years ago, replacing the “server quality” 500 gb drive with a Green drive — slower and quieter — double the size. The stock drive was noisy and ran too hot, shutting the unit down more than once. Swapping the drive was a big win. I just wish I had realized how ineffective the fan was, based on the design.
Where Kirby Ferguson gets it wrong
I had hoped this would be more about remix culture but it turned out to be one more “Apple is doing it wrong” screed. The difference as I see it is that in the folk song examples, he clearly shows the before and after, where Dylan took his idea from and what he did with it. He doesn’t show any provenance for the iOS Slide to Unlock gesture, while ridiculing the patent, nor does he mention the obvious – that no alternative has yet emerged. Here are some ideas:
One could
- press and hold a specific section of the screen for a few seconds or
- press/tap in a user-defined pattern or
- use key press combinations with the volume or part switch.
Those may not be any good but I’m not a trained industrial designer nor did I spend a lot of time on them. But instead we fixate on Slide to Unlock. There is no one right answer.
The Picasso quote about artists stealing is misused here: by stealing, he means to make it your own, to transform it into something that looks like you did it yourself.
You steal the idea of a self-propelled wagon – an automobile – but not the implementation. Henry Ford didn’t make the first car, after all, but who remembers who did?
You steal the idea of a windows/icons/mouse pointer interface but you make it look original. No one would confuse the Xerox Star with a Macintosh though they would see obvious similarities. A Model T and whatever Ford makes now have similarities but would a buyer confuse them?
That’s what’s missing in the Android vs iOS distraction. Steve Jobs wasn’t angry at Android as a smartphone that offered the same basic functionality: it was the similarity in the implementation that he resented. I don’t think anyone cared when the first Android phones looked like Blackberries.
Think about it: the Samsung products look a lot like the iOS products – Google warned Samsung about that – but that’s secondary. What should be worrisome is how that suggests there are no alternative ideas, that the shiny glass slab is the Platonic deal. Does Android really want to concede that?
The two step
After the recent news of a reporter having his digital life ransacked as a result of someone applying some social engineering-fu to amazon and apple, I re-enabled Google’s two-step authentication. The pitfall for me last time I tried it was discovering that there was no way to accommodate relaying email through gmail with two-step authentication. It didn’t occur to me or I objected to it on principle but all I needed was an additional gmail account just for that. The username is an md5 hash of…something, as is the password.
Interesting to see how many third parties I have allowed to use my Google ID as a credential. The dilemma there is, do I continue that with any attendant risks of linking them or do I set up accounts with every website that requires authentication? Of course, once Google buys them all it will be moot. But in the meantime…
What people talk about when they talk about their Android phone
What I hear when someone goes on about their Android phone:
I need you to buy what I bought so I can feel like it was a good idea because I’m not sure and I hate those smug Apple people because they don’t bug me to buy an iPhone because they don’t want me to have one because they don’t like me/think I’m cool enough/give a rat’s ass and that makes me want to get anything that isn’t an iPhone so I can show them I don’t care and you should totally get one look it’s got 4G that you can’t use without killing your battery but you can carry an extra one that you can’t do with the iPhone because they don’t have 4G or you could add this extra battery pack that makes your phone really big and it has HDMI so you can play movies on your tv since android doesn’t have AirPlay but whatevs cables are cool everyone has hdmi and it has a microSD card which is cool cuz it’s not like your phone is a networked device you could transfer files with and you should totally get one before the next OS release drops and you hafta wait for your carrier to make it available.
All this angst is about a phone. I don’t think cars or even guns, back when survival was dependent on them, elicited so much noise. There’s probably a word for the inverse relationship between fetishism and utility.