Tag: software

Yes, that’s a new laptop. Yes, I know what year it is.

lenovo-thinkpad-x230-frontI know it’s 2013 and as far as “mobile computing” goes, I’m supposed to be pinch-zooming and app-buying and poorly-typing on a tablet like the cool kids. And I do — my  O.G. Nexus 7 (the 2012 model) sometimes makes a nice companion1 to my Galaxy Nexus Android phone, by being slightly faster and having a slightly better screen. However, over the 15 months I’ve owned the Nexus 7, it never quite became the second mobile device that I wanted. Useful, yes… transcendent, no.

I knew something was still missing, so I recently went and bought a small laptop computer, a Lenovo ThinkPad X230, to carry around. It runs Debian Linux. It does the things I want. It’s a wonderful thing to have.

I needed this because…

The laptop that the ThinkPad replaced was from 2007, and while a decent computer from back then would likely still be good today, my old laptop was not a decent computer, even when new. Back then, I didn’t know just how painfully slow an ultra-low-voltage, low clock-speed CPU could be… I guess I thought it being dual-core would somehow make up for it. Also, the cooling fan was a bit of a whiner, and would constantly and very vocally disagree with Linux’s style of power management. The darned thing would constantly sound like a mini-jet-engine — too obnoxious to use around people I actually like.

Low on power, high on noise — not a good combo.

But these days…

In the last half-decade or so, mainstream humans seem to have accepted the smartphone, and seem to be doing the same for the idiot camera (“tablets”). It’s the “Post-PC era,” or something. Plenty of people seem to be doing okay without spending much time on their general-purpose personal computers, but over time I realized that as I tried to go along with this trend, I was missing out. For me, a computing life centered around mobile “smart” devices was one of unacceptable compromise. Composing more than a couple of sentences without a keyboard makes me want to just not bother to write, devices without expandable storage make one dependent on rent-seeking “cloud” services, and the mobile app ecosystem has handfuls of well-known problems (privacy, lock-in, and so on).

There’s a place for these devices, even in my life, but they just don’t replace a general-purpose computer. Ever.

So I did this…

I made sure not to make last time’s mistakes when buying this computer. The i5 CPU is more than adequate, and I have a ton of RAM. ThinkPads are known to play nicely with Linux, because they’re used by that awesome kind of geek who figures that shit out (and wouldn’t put up with a jet engine laptop). It runs Debian Jessie (“testing”) with only minor annoyances — not perfect, but nothing I can’t handle.2

Hardware build-quality and durability are major plusses for an everyday carry machine, and that’s what ThinkPads are known for. And of course, TrackPoint is truly the best way to mouse. A lot has been said about the new ThinkPad keyboards, and while this one suffers from the bullshit key layout (compare it to the awesome, ugly 1337-geek classic style), the keyboard actually feel pretty nice to type on, even if the bizarrely-placed PrintScreen key occasionally enrages me.

And finally…

In the spirit of burying the lede, here are some things I intend to enjoy while toting around this rock-solid, large-screen-and-real-keyboard device:

  • Full desktop OS that does all the things
  • Better web browsing; approximately 1,000 open tabs
  • Actually writing things, blogging silly ideas and such
  • Tons of local storage (SSD + HDD = yay!)
  • Semi-modern PC games, including lots of Humble Bundle goodness
  • Codecademy
  • Interactive fiction, perhaps (now, where did I misplace my patience?)
  1. My most common tablet uses are as follows: gaming, viewing TV episodes and movies, and web browsing. I’m putting this in a footnote so as not to sidetrack myself, but it’s an important point. One of the best things about having the tablet was that it gave me another 16 GB of storage, on top of the 16 GB available on my phone. A lot of people seem to think that Google intentionally limits the storage available in their flagship devices to push people into using their monetizable “cloud” media offerings instead of local storage. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true, but honestly, the #1 reason I’d like more local storage in my devices is not to carry around more media, but more and larger apps — something you can’t put in the cloud.[↩]
  2. I imagine Debian Stable or Ubuntu would be better.[↩]

Toolbogged

Oh, hey guys — I just invented a new word.

toolbogged /ˈtulˌbɒgged/
(v. intr; past participle of toolbog)

To become so consumed by the process of researching and selecting gear (often software) for a given task that one never actually completes the task itself

I’ve been completely toolbogged trying to automate fixing the date and time on hundreds of RAW files from vacation last fall… that I never even sorted the pics themselves!1

  1. Based on a true story, sadly.[↩]

On wishing for boredom

This is not a post about Steve Jobs. I read enough of them in the days and weeks after his death. I read in these a lot of what I already knew and learned some new stuff for sure, but one Steve quote stood out to me in Wired’s obituary:

I’m a big believer in boredom,” he told me. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, he explained, and “out of curiosity comes everything.”

I’m not sure if I’d head this quote from him before, but it put into words something that has been troubling me for some time: I haven’t been bored in years.

The first time I noticed this was in the mid-2000s, and  I only realized part of it, and I saw it through the lens of my Internet usage, particularly RSS. Even today, as the cool kids have moved on to following Twitter feeds (really, talk about a step backwards) of websites and blogs they find interesting, I’m still a huge fan of the no-bullshit, user-in-control, decentralized power of RSS.1

What occurred to me back then was that having posts pushed to me daily gave me more reading material than I needed. And since I could never get all the way through the unread glut of posts from blogs I’d subscribed to, my need to ever go foraging for interesting things to read basically disappeared. RSS gave me tons of serendipity (thank you, linkblogs!)… and at the same time, practically none at all. I miss the old days — some would say the bad old days — when I’d get my online entertainment and random bits of enlightenment by browsing aimlessly from link to link, being personally pointed to interesting things by friends on AIM, following latest links posted to proto-blogs like Pixelsurgeon, and… I don’t know, however else we found cool shit back then.

The second time I felt this effect of this was at some point over the last few years, but this time in a more general sense. This time it was bigger than RSS; this time it was about everything in my life.

I realized I have far too many options for entertainment. There are two reasons for this: massive digital storage devices and the fact that, being employed gives me an actual entertainment budget for purchasing paid media and fancy devices on which to experience it. Between a pile of unread books and bunch of e-books; more unwatched movies, seasons of old TV shows and anime series than I can name; and games galore that I’ll never finish (thank you Nintendo Wii and DS, Android phone and a still-kickin’ Atari 2600), I’m pretty much set for… forever.2 Even if I don’t seek out anything new, it’ll be years and years before I get through all of this. And it’s not like I can just ignore new releases and stuff I become aware of in the meantime!

I might be able to enjoy this world o’ plenty, if I could forget about what life was like when I was growing up, before we had the computing power, storage and network capacity to experience all the digital riches of more entertainment than we’ll ever need. I spent so much time being bored growing up, aimlessly thinking and daydreaming and such. This was before my first computer; I had tons of books and had probably read almost all of them, made good use of the public library, played with toys, action figures and stuff a whole lot and still found time to be bored and daydream because it seemed like I had run out of things to do.

If you live a similarly full, media-rich and employed first-world life, and can still ever find yourself so luxuriously bored, how do you manage? And can you teach me?

  1. Google Reader, please don’t die.[↩]
  2. I didn’t mention music here, because the way I consume music is a little different. I still clearly have more than I “need,” but I don’t feel the same sort of pressure to get through it all, thanks to shuffle mode.[↩]

Steve Jobs on unintended uses of tools

A choice quote from an all-around interesting interview:

The point is that tools are always going to be used for certain things we don’t find personally pleasing. And it’s ultimately the wisdom of people, not the tools themselves, that is going to determine whether or not these things are used in positive, productive ways.

–Steve Jobs, 1985

Google+, the best Multiply.com clone ever

First, a word of disclosure: I worked for Multiply for nearly four years. This means I know what I’m talking about. I also no longer have any financial interest in their success. This means I’m probably not that biased. Oh, and I only wrote this because I felt like it. This means nobody asked me to.

I had the good fortune of receiving an early invite to join Google’s vaunted, Facebook-killing, world-saving, next-generation-social-network Google+. There’s a lot of shiny newness to be excited about; Google seems to have brought a few new interesting ideas to the table vis-à-vis sharing and communicating. They also seem poised to introduce the masses to a few good ideas for privacy.

In terms of privacy options, Google+ lets you:

  1. …separate your contacts into distinct “friends,” “family,” etc. buckets
  2. …share content privately with each of these groups
  3. …filter your view when consuming content posted by each of these groups
  4. …use this ‘extended network’ concept to share beyond your direct contacts, but still less than the entire world

They’re also rather old ideas.

I joined Multiply in late 2005 as a marketing copywriter/company blog writer/customer service person/wearer-of-other-hats, and by that point, Multiply had already figured out a solution to the problem of sharing content privately among all the groups of people you know. In fact, by then they had been at it for about two years. See the features listed above? They were all at the core of the product.

Not impressed? It’s important to remember what the social networking landscape looked like back then:

  • People had already figured out that Friendster was kind of garbage.
  • People hadn’t yet figured out that MySpace was complete garbage. It was hugely popular by mid-2000s standards, but many times smaller than the Facebook of today.
  • Facebook (okay, “thefacebook.com”) was open to users at a bunch of colleges, but outside of that, wasn’t really a big deal.
  • Twitter (“twttr”) didn’t exist.

Oh yeah, and here’s what privacy looked like:

  • Friendster: Who the fuck remembers?
  • MySpace: Gave you the option of making your profile entirely public to the world or entirely private to your contacts… all of your contacts.
  • Facebook: Your profile was available to all of your contacts, and everyone else in your “network” (which at the time meant everyone who went to your college). You couldn’t make anything public.
  • Seriously, you guys… Twitter didn’t exist.

Okay, so we’ve established that privacy wasn’t much of a consideration in services of the day. But maybe it is today…?

All the Google+ privacy features you love — here’s how Multiply did ’em:

1. …separate your contacts into distinct “friends,” “family,” etc. buckets

Google+ today gives you the option of putting your friends and family into neat little buckets (they call them “circles”). Multiply made you do it. When adding a new contact or inviting someone to join you on Multiply, you’d have to pick a “real world” relationship type. There were dozens to choose from (friend, cousin, neighbor, boyfriend, work supervisor, etc.). There was also “online buddy,” which was for connections to people you didn’t know very well. Online buddies would be kept slightly at a distance, kind of like “acquaintances” on Google+.

2. …allows you to share content privately with each of these groups

Having these relationship types on record let you share everything in friend/family/professional buckets like Google+ does now with circles (oh, but minus the professionals). You could share privately with one or more of these groups, giving you essentially different networks under a single account. It boggles my mind that even today, some people have multiple Facebook accounts just for the sake of keeping their worlds separate.

3. …filters your view of content posted by these different groups

You’d mostly be consuming content on Multiply through a tool that went through a few names (“Message Board,” “Explore Page”) but ultimately became known — somewhat unfortunately — as the “Inbox.” What was this like? Think of the Facebook “News Feed,” only a few times better… and a few years earlier. On Multiply you could use the Inbox to view the latest posts and content from your contacts. On MySpace and Facebook, you’d be bouncing from profile to profile to see what was new with your friends — great for page view metrics, crappy for user experience. :-) The Inbox also let you easily filter your view to include content and updates from many of your contacts’ contacts, and optionally (and to a lesser degree), your contacts’ contacts’ contacts. How far ‘out’ into your network you could see depended on the relationship types you and your contacts had chosen.

4. …use this ‘extended network’ concept to share beyond your direct contacts, but still less than the entire world

With this information, Multiply would provide context when exploring your network. Enforced relationship types made it clear to your contacts just who the other people you knew were, which provided extra context for social interactions on Multiply. Wouldn’t it be nice if when you’re about to meet a new person in real life, someone would tap you on the shoulder and whisper in your ear “that’s Alice, your friend Bob’s sister.” You’re damned right it would. You’d see this information all over Multiply, whether consuming extended network posts in your Inbox or reading the comments on a friend’s post. Google+ can’t do this, because it doesn’t know who these people are, and Friend/Family/Acquaintances/Following is something Google+ considers a private distinction… which on the other hand makes some sense, due to some complexities of interpersonal relationships.

My point is…

But when you hear someone ask why it took until 2011 to develop a system that allows you to share in a somewhat sane sense, kindly enlighten them. I was there, I heard the world cry out for a better mousetrap, and I watched the world not beat a path to Multiply’s door. If there were a prize for being first, it’d be a plastic-gold turd trophy inscribed “LOL.”

I’m not saying that everyone should go join Multiply. Odds are, nobody you know uses it anyway.

So, congrats on the splashy beta, Google, but remember: people say they want privacy, but just want to be where their friends are. Good luck combining the two.

goatse mobile

I had a strange moment of serendipity earlier this evening.

I was reading some RSS feeds and I saw there was a new post to the Flickr tag “firstgoatse.” (If the term goatse is new to you, I’m not sure what to say except: don’t blame me when you look it up… now. The above link is safe to view, by the way.)

I felt like I hadn’t seen a ‘firstgoatse’ in a while, so I checked it out. The photo itself was unremarkable, but I was viewing it on my Nexus S phone and happened to glance away from the screen, at the phone itself. Something clicked in my head, and I thought of a way to breathe new life into the age-old pastime of showing your friends disgusting images and capturing their horrified reaction for sharing on the Internet.

HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS WE ALL HAVE SMARTPHONES WITH FRONT-FACING CAMERAS!! (It must be the future!) These tiny pocket devices are cornucopias of giving: lulz for us, lulz for the Internet, and horrific, can-ever-forget memories for our friends!

Basically, what the best app ever would do is display a horrific image of your choice… self-supplied of course, in case your poison is more tubgirl, or whatever kids these days show other kids these days. It would also capture the reaction of the person holding the phone via the front-facing camera, at the very moment of exposure.

A series of photos leading up to the moment would work nicely too. Heck, what about capturing a video of the entire reaction? For all I know, kids these days are showing each other the video equivalent of that guy bending over and… ugh. For bonus points, it might even combine the original and reaction videos into one, side-by-side, not that anyone would want to ever view that.

I’m ready to believe that a mobile app like this already exists. It clearly, however, can’t exist for iPhone, because Apple doesn’t allow that brand of awesome, and I can’t be bothered to check the Android Market (aside from, okay, my quick search for “goatse,” which turned up nothing), but this is clearly the kind of app that the wold today could use.

Well, there’s a Mac app, but who can fit that in their pocket?

Hey world — somebody make this!

IT work for no fun and no profit

Hey non-heartless geeks, how do you avoid becoming some random person’s computer guy1?

I was just blindsided by my friend’s aunt and before I knew it, I was showing her how to use her laptop’s right-click button to delete unwanted desktop shortcuts in Windows XP. Then, she wanted to know how to delete a bookmark from her Internet Explorer bar.

She scared me on the last one, though; through her broken English, she seemed to be describing an unwanted browser toolbar, and warning sirens went off in my head as I started thinking I was going to be asked to remove one of those. Then, as she cursed Internet Explorer while it took nearly a full minute to load, I had to fight the urge to make a quick exit through the window—closed and locked, of course—before I could be asked about removing spyware or defragmenting. I almost suggested she just buy a whole new computer, before realizing that I could just as easily be conscripted into helping with that.

Ugh. It turned out to be simple stuff in the end… but this is how it always starts.

Before I know it, I’m going to be fixing her router, before troubleshooting her DSL problems, before being roped into advising her on which of the programs that she installed on her computer she no longer needs and can be removed to free up space on her hard drive.2

Proof that there is no god: I look the part.
This is bug #2. Let’s fix this.

  1. Did that term sound sexist? I meant only to refer to Nick Burns, my tech support hero.[↩]
  2. This is actually a true story.[↩]