Computing on Nanikore

Over to a Nexus 5 and a Thinkpad E440

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 13:06:40 +0000

My mobile setup doesn’t change very often. My iPhone 4 was three years old in August, my old Core Duo MacBook (2006) died last year, and I was saving to replace it, having borrowed the netbook from the kids as needed, so it was time to move over, to a Nexus and a Thinkpad!

The iPhone’s button and battery were both on the way out, and the iOS7 mandatory upgrade had slowed the thing to a crawl. Having had a Nexus 7 for a couple of years, I wasn’t wed to the iOS ecosystem, and SoftBank’s LTE based plans for the iPhones all carried big price increases per month over my 3G plan. I shopped around and found virtual carrier Y! Mobile (what was WillCom and E-Mobile, and ironically piggy backs off the SoftBank network) was cheap, and had the LG Nexus 5 phone for a smaller monthly fee than my current 3G plan with a 3GB cap. As it’s an unlocked phone, it’ll also make trips outside Japan a little simpler with SIMs, which will really help.

Six weeks on, as a physical device, I like it, it’s very light after the iPhone, and even with the fairly chunky Spigen case, it’s still light but solid feeling. I tend to get a case which will survive well. It feels speedy, but I accept that’s relative after the disaster the iPhone 4 became with iOS 7 (not helped by Apple refusing to let iPhone 4 users update to a secure iOS6 train release after the goto fail fiasco). There are plenty of reviews though which will do a better job than I could. I do like Android, but you’ll notice I tend to get Nexus devices, and that’s because I like that they don’t ship with the ridiculous carrier and manufacturer apps, and you’re almost guaranteed to get OS updates quickly.

For the laptop, I looked at the MacBook Air - it’s a beautiful piece of engineering, but truthfully, outside of my 80,000 yen budget (it’s almost 110,000yen with 8GB RAM, 13" screen but a relatively slower CPU). I looked around at a lot of laptops, but kept coming back to Lenovo’s relatively unsung Thinkpad E design and pricing.

After prioritizing my wants, I got a unit with 8GB RAM, the higher definition 1600*900 screen (matte), and the dual antenna ac wireless. I debated i5 vs. i3 on the CPU, which had an ~8,000yen price differential, but since the only difference appears to be the turbo on the i5, and since this is mainly a movable writing rig, I went for the lower CPU. For a decent review of the unit, stum.de did a great review, especially on the BIOS.

Having installed a 128GB Crucial MX100 SSD, this thing flies with Mint Linux 17 Cinnamon on it. The only issue I have right now is suspend is a bit unreliable, and it would appear to be the continuation of a Linux tradition; in my case it may be anything from the Intel graphics driver, to the lack of a swap space under LVM with 8GB of RAM. Hibernate is fine though.

As for real world performance, I was ripping a CD to FLAC, transcoding other FLACs to OGG format, watching a 1080p video over the N based wifi from my old Buffalo NAS with a few IRC chats, and browser tabs going, and the thing never missed a beat. I think that should cover my average usage.

Physically, it’s really nice, much more solid than I was expecting, and the keyboard is probably the best I’ve had on a laptop. I’ve been a general Linux user for a long time, so it was nice to use it on a dedicated laptop, having kicked the idea around for a while. It also doesn’t seem to get very warm either, especially near the keyboard, where the old Macbook would get a little uncomfortable after a while. I have not yet tested out the spill resistant keyboard, and don’t actually plan to.

Using the Windows 8.1 the laptop shipped with and the horrific dance it likes you to do through first boot was enough in itself to put you off - really Microsoft, that obsession with linking to an MS account before you can play with your new machine is really annoying, and the first thing I switch off afterwards anyway.

For what it’s worth, if you do want to continue using it, it comes with less crapware than I’ve seen elsewhere, and is easily removed. The fact I even had to cover that tells you something. To cover performance, the machine is very snappy in Windows 8.1, and I had no problems with it, even though it was running through a 5400rpm HDD.

In the six weeks I’ve had it, I’ve taken it on an international trip, and it performed excellently, even if it is a little bulkier than a more expensive ultrabook. I’ve dragged it around the house, sat in the park with it, and generally lugged it about, and it’s done exactly what I wanted from it.

So there we are, that should be me done for several more years. Also, this is not an Apple vs. Linux vs. Google thing. Brand loyalty is a silly thing, you should buy on your needs and your available money. For me the Nexus and the E440 are exactly what I need for the foreseeable future, and whilst I like the alternatives, they don’t represent good value for money to me.

Leaving Product: Microsoft Technet

Fri, 26 Jul 2013 14:52:28 +0000

Actually, to be more accurate, Microsoft is retiring it’s venerable TechNet, with renewal only available until the end of August 2013 for one final year. Mine was actually due for renewal this month for one last time, but I’ve decided to bite the bullet and not renew. It used to cost ~ 20,000yen to start, and 16,000yen to renew, so that’s [sort of] saved.

TechNet [Standard] was a way people in the IT business could get a massive range of Microsoft products to install, test, break and generally play with and get to understand, all at a reasonable price. The caveat: no production use - should really be for lab and test setups.

I started mine in 2010 and have used it a lot for learning bits about aspects of Windows and other MS products I didn’t know about, and trying to get time with systems I would never have otherwise been able to touch, or have reason to use.

Microsoft hasn’t definitively stated a reason they’ve retired it, but many things point to, if not piracy, at least abuse of the system. Some sites, including reputable places like LifeHacker had suggested Technet Standard as a cheap way to get all your software. Over the years then, Microsoft had dropped the number of licenses per application/OS, from 10 to 2, and whereas previously the EULA said the licenses for installs would work after a subscription had ended - that’s no longer the case. That does point a finger in the general direction of abuse in some ways

I actually asked Technet support how long my installs would work after my July 31st finish date, and all they would say was that I was required to remove all Technet subscription software by the end date. That’s fine.

The only long term installs I had was a Windows 8 Pro box, and a recent Server 2012 server I was using on my home server to play with Storage Spaces, both of which I’ve already rebuilt - the former with a Windows 8 Standard license I bought, and the server with a GNU/Linux Mint install, using LVM to replace Storage Spaces.

Microsoft has said that many wont need Technet going forwards, since their 30-90 day trials should be enough. Given that many of my installs were VMs, that sounds fine to me, and since it’s taken very little effort for me to get off Technet, I don’t have too negative a view of it.

However, I can understand a lot of IT Pros, small businesses and such feeling a bit annoyed by this by this - the Action Pack may be an option for some, but a full blown MSDN license is likely to be too expensive, and rebuilding machines every 90 days may be a burden (if it can’t be scripted). We’ll see.

It’s possible Microsoft’s shift to cloud offerings means these small system builders and integrators will no longer be needed by the mothership - don’t build an Exchange server, use Outlook.com, don’t have a file server, use SkyDrive Pro and so on. I can see it, but what with Microsoft’s erratic view of it’s customers of late, and that most TechNet users were the people who build for end users it may cause some ill will, but what would their alternatives be? Suddenly offer Open Source alternatives? That’s a lot of retraining.

For me then, not much change, except I have to get the time limited versions, so I can no longer tinker when I have time with a VM as I used to. A good thing is that it’s putting me back into GNU/Linux for servers again, and that’s already been fun - it’s been a while.

Leaving Product: Google (?)

Fri, 03 May 2013 08:23:33 +0000

Leaving GoogIe? I use e-mail a lot. I know it’s not as cool to talk about in these social website times, but the truth is, I do like to correspond with friends and groups of friends via good old e-mail. I have two types of account - I have my ‘web company’ accounts such as Gmail, MS Outlook, Yahoo for those company’s services, and for dumping signups into. Then I have a couple of accounts for myself and family members based on my own domain names where we communicate with friends and family.

I started using these domain named accounts about 8 years ago, settling on IMAP, and moving away from ISP based addresses and even from the above mentioned webmail apps.

For a while, they were based on Pair.com’s SquirrelMail implementation, and that was fine, but we’d sometimes see odd issues now and then. I looked around, and at the end of 2009, as I blogged, I moved to Google Apps. In those days, Google Apps was pretty much free for everyone, and you could even use Gmail as a web front end.

Over the years, they reduced the number of mailboxes each domain could have and originally at least, it wasn’t simple having multiple domains under one account. I could understand that - this was still a free service.

Last December, they killed the free option, and now it’s pay only, and I’m fine with that, I just wanted to put some back story in there as I’m grandfathered in with the 5 mailboxes per domain for free.

For a while now, I’ve not liked the ads on the web interface, or that theoretically my mail was analyzed for that mail targeting / profiling. Again, this is free, and when it’s free *you* are the product, as the old saying goes. I’m not a tinfoil hat fanatic, but I do like privacy, and decided it was time to pay for my email hosting again.

I looked at the Google (Apps) paid option - 5 USD a month for my 5 users. I then looked around and had a look at what MS is doing with Outlook on custom domains, and also at other hosting companies like Pair, and finally Rackspace.

It was tempting to stay with Google and Apps, but I don’t use the other Apps, just the email, and the way Google does things with it’s ‘AllMail’ philosophy irks some people, and there’s a whole post’s worth there on configs I’ve tried from app setup, to subscriptions and quite a few other things to improve that - but basically, I’m a simple Inbox n folder person. There are definitely upsides to the AllMail approach, but in my situation, people are preferring things in folders.

I decided to pitch a move to Rackspace on Twitter with a #rackspace hashtag, and quickly received several positive responses from users (and former employees) and a couple of contact people, who I followed up with, and who answered a few of my queries on quirks of my setup.

A couple of months ago, I signed up with Rackspace for a trial two weeks. Their product seems to be what I need - I can hold my two domains under a single Rackspace account, and each mailbox will cost me 2USD / month with a minimum of 5 (10USD / month). This actually works as I have 5 main mailboxes to move!

They support migration of data from various services via a migration assistant including GMail. I should note that this did not work for me from Google Apps using a preset, as my actual mail server was googlemail.com, not gmail.com. Not a problem - the manual setup worked fine. Having uploaded my from & to details in a provided spreadsheet, the script went to work, effectively logging in to Google as me, and copying the data across, and being reformatted by Rackspace.

Moving email hosts, like moving houses/apartments also gives you the opportunity to get to those things you’d been meaning to do, but never did. For me, it meant killing a few mailboxes, and rolling them in as aliases to my core addresses, meaning I have an ‘address’ for each of my two twitter accounts and a few other things, and they route into my core account, which means fewer accounts to own/check, no forwarding, and I can see where addresses have somehow attracted spam. Keeps it simple.

The web interface is very clean, very simple, and though I did need to set up some contacts, it wasn’t arduous at all. As far as my usual window onto my email - Thunderbird - it was all fine, and it pulled all my email down and let me re-sync it, so I’ve been tidying that all up as well, and slowly removing the AllMail. All in all, it’s been painless for me, and transparent to family members using their accounts, once we’d gone through phones and setup draft, sent and trash folders correctly!

It’s odd that in parallel, I’ve been moving my RSS reading habits from the soon to be retired Google Reader, to Newsblur. On my iPhone4, I used to use a syncd Reeder app with my Google account, but now just use that as a local RSS / OPML reader, as well as playing with the Newsblur app.

So, a few months on, I use Google products to very little extent - an email drop, and the odd G+ post. No more ‘core mail’ or RSS involvement, and I rarely even use the search any more (Twitter & Pocket pretty much take up my link following time). It seems a bit odd, but yes, I’m very happy with the move, and that I’ve actually managed to make it simpler.

Arduino and Raspberry Pi

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 13:41:36 +0000

Like many, it seems over the last few years, I’ve been getting more interested in some simple home brew hardware hacking. Thus, I’ve recently taken delivery of an Arduino Starter Kit, and a Raspberry Pi model B. If you’ve somehow missed these, then a quick summary on both.

The Arduino group are an open source team, bringing that philosophy to hardware. The upshot is a collection simple circuit boards, bread boards, and simple electronic components - in the fact the whole thing makes me think of school electronics classes when I was 17. I got the starter kit, which contains all the important things you’ll need to do the 15 projects contained in the guide, from a Spaceship Interface to Touchy Feely Lamp. The book is well put together, and a great introduction to the system, but a brief search around the place shows people are doing some great things with their systems. (Starter Kit costs around 100USD / 9000JPY)

The Raspberry Pi is a little different - it still has an open source basis, but is essentially a basic computer - CPU, memory, the whole thing. You just add USB power, a case, an SD card for storage, and on a simple level, install a special Debian Linux release called Raspbian. From this you have a computer which can run media at 1080p over HMDI, to simple tasks and desktop over the RCA video connector. the base board costs from 20GBP for the Model A, to 26GBP for the Model B, which is the one I bought. So far it:s been a lot of fun, and impressive something so cheap and simple can be used to stream video off my home NAS, and on a different install be a normal desktop for learning a bit of Python on.

Addendum: Note that most of my tech posts are now over at brightblack.net

New PC Build

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 13:18:13 +0000

For over 15 years, I’ve built my own PCs. The first was a 486/DX2-66 based machine just before Windows 95 came out. I’ve done it out of interest, but also to give me control over what I buy, and make replacements and upgrades cheaper. My build was getting a bit old, the parts being between 2 and 3.5 years old and was missing some current technologies, so I decided to replace the main components, and sell the parts on to cover some of the cost of the new build:

Old build: AMD Athlon II 645 4 Core CPU, AMD 5750 graphics, ASRock motherboard, 430W Antec PSU, Lian Li case, DVD-R drive, 12GB RAM.

It was a good build, and still had some legs, but was deficient in some areas. The CPU was capable, but for the increasing amount of virtualisation and editing/encoding/rendering I’m doing, something faster was definitely going to be better. Moreover, though the ASRock was a great motherboard, it lacks PCIe 3 and USB3. The 5750 is a good card, but after nearly three years, is showing it’s age, and though I don’t game like I used to, I decided it was time to get a PCIe3 1GB card and play older games with more detail, and get a bit more out of newer games. The Antec PSU has been great - so much better than the Enermax I had previously, but I felt I needed something with a bit more capacity, to handle the extra GPU load, but potentially more from CPU and other components. The DVD-R drive had survived a few rebuilds, but I’ve wanted a BluRay drive for a while since I actually have some BDs now. The RAM is actually one set of 2*2GB from an older build, and 2*4GB I bought a couple of years ago - I’m going to re-use the latter only - they’re all fine, but I expect to add a further 2*4GB kit later this year.

So what’s new?

For the first time since the very early 2000s, I’ve gone with a retail Intel CPU. That last one was a Celeron 333 I think, and I used to overclock the hell out of it. Since then, it’s been AMD all the way, but now I’m back with Intel and the i5 3470, based on the Ivy Bridge architecture. Interestingly, this model has HD2500 graphics built in, rather than the more common 4000 part, but since I have a discrete graphics card, it doesn’t make much difference, and I think results in a lower power wattage rating. Perhaps for the next upgrade, the Bulldozer/Piledriver cores from AMD will have evolved a little more.

For a motherboard, I chose to stay with ASRock, and got one of their H77 based boards, the H77 Pro4/MVP. It’s an ATX sized board, and though there is a Micro ATX version, that was more expensive, so I stuck with this one. I find the ASRock board to be reliable and well laid out. I used to swear by Abit, but again, I had some bad run-ins, and moved on. The board has PCIe3 for graphics, SATA3/6Gb, and USB3, as well as some of the tweak utils they use, and for the first time for me on a PC, UEFI instead of the old BIOS. Also, it has enough monitored fan connectors to match my case for a change.

For graphics card, I basically trawled Tom’s Hardware, and went with the AMD HD7770, which sports an acceptable price, but also a good power efficiency. I went with the Gigabyte model, which is moderately quiet, and was a little cheaper, instead of having a pile of cables and bundled games I didn’t need.

I bought a new power supply - essentially the 650W version of the previous one. I’ve always had good results from Antec and SeaSonic PSUs in all the builds I’ve done for myself and for friends, and when I’ve tried something different, I’ve been disappointed. It’s not a sexy part of a build, but it’s the one part which has the capability to blow the rest of the machine, so choose wisely.

Lastly, I picked up a cheap, bulk, LG BluRay player, so I can watch some discs on my PC, which will be convenient.

I’ve kept the memory, and my aluminium Lian Li case, which I really like, all the peripherals, and drives, and my X-Fi audio card.

I bought pretty much all the parts in Akihabara, from Dos Paradise (DosPara), which is a great set of shops, and they always seem to have decent prices. Pricing was mainly done on kakaku.com, with research from Tom’s Hardware, PCper.com and Anandtech.

Addendum: I now put tech posts over on brightblack.net .

[Not] Unlimited Mozy

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 13:40:22 +0000

Something interesting happened on February 1st. in the incredibly exciting realm of online backups we found that it’s not unlimited at Mozy. Let’s just address one thing first: backups. Please make backups and make them regularly. Even better, have an onsite and an offsite backup. For me, offsite used to mean burning to DVD-R and shipping to the parents, nine time zones away, and thus preserving all my family’s pictures, video and a few other bits in case something Bad (™) happened.

Initially I went with JungleDisk/Amazon S3 for this, but in November 2009 shifted to Mozy - unlimited backup for 5USD a month which made more sense for me and meant I could also backup all the .dv videos and music, then about 140GB in total, now about 175GB.

As I say then, on Feb. 1st. Mozy dropped their unlimited plan, and implemented a tier based system. Instead of unlimited for 5 USD/month, it would be 50GB for 6USD/month and additional fees per 20GB above that. For me then, that would be about 21USD / month - a decent price increase.

As I posted on their forums, on the now 847 post complaint thread:

“I appreciate storage (even with EMC behind you) costs money. Bandwidth costs money. I can understand your move to a tiered, non unlimited plan, I really can. That said, here’s my two thoughts:

- you set the baseline too low - I see a lot of people on Twitter, and myself between 150-200GB, and for us, there’s just no economic reason to stay once our plans expire. For me that’s 10months, though I need to be careful to avoid the auto-renewal if I decide to leave (and unfortunately take my parents with me). I don’t think we’re abusing your generous unlimited offer with that amount per month. My fee likely covers my cost to you.

- but honestly, what irks me most is that I learn about this on Twitter, and on Lifehacker. I don’t have an e-mail from you, I don’t see anything on the blog from you. That just seems to imply you’re not interested in customer relations. As I implied above, that I only get mail from Mozy after they’ve charged my credit card, but not for a product offering shift like this means that I think you’re going to have a painful reaction from users who don’t watch every product announcement not in their mailbox.

Again, it’s a bold move by Mozy and I’m sure others will follow, and users will chose to stay or go, but really, whoever handled the rollout of this announcement needs to be given a little talking to.”

The first company blog entry for the change came on February 3rd. A touch late for many. That support forum thread is 99% complaints, accusations, as you can imagine.

I didn’t get the email notification Mozy say they sent. I use Google Apps for mail and had a look but found nothing. I asked about this and Community Manager Mike responded that so many e-mails going out at once probably set many ISPs spam alarm bells ringing. I find this fairly plausible, but given I’d already seen it on Twitter it was essentially moot within 24hours anyway.

“Mike, thanks for posting, and I wish you all the best too.

Business needs change, strategies change, sheer costs change, and that’s part of the world. Per my previous post in this thread, one thing I hope Mozy is hearing, aside from people’s unhappiness with the costing, is the communication. I found out via Lifehacker - no email for me. That’s not impressive. When I went to the blog at http://mozy.com/blog/ there’s nothing there either.

Given this thread, and the pounding #mozy is taking on Twitter and elsewhere, which I’m sure Mozy anticipated, it’s obvious a lot of people liked the service as it was, and many will leave due to the change. I hope those who work in Mozy stay employed in whatever direction Mozy is going. A company is always made up of it’s staff and it’s customers.

As for me, I have a few months for myself and my parents until renewal, so I’ll likely wait and see what happens.”

To which Mike responded:

“Thanks. The emails went out last night, however because of the volume of emails, it took a while for all of them to be sent. Also, because of the volume, I wouldn’t be surprised if it hit a lot of spam filters. The Mozy blog was supposed to contain this content here, but they moved it because of the high traffic (they didn’t want to bring mozy.com to a crawl).”

I’m actually finding this quite interesting, both in how to manage this from Mozy’s point of view, and how to seize some advantage. You only have to check out some Twitter streams for Feb. 1st. to 3rd. to see how this works: mentions of Mozy, #Mozy

Note that the hashtag seems to have a lot of spam like entries still pimping the unlimited and free plans - it’s fair to say Mozy has zero control over this.

Basically, it’s a pounding at best. Mozy in their Twitter stream is obviously on the defensive and they don’t really have any carrot to dangle. Also, note that up until the end of January, Mozy would go for days without posting - now it’s more than hourly.

Now see how competitor Crashplan is working this with their ‘mozyonover’ 15% discount link thrown out all over. @crashplan.

There’s a key couple of key phrases repeated in there such as “We appreciate your business.” and “Welcome” as well as careful retweets, and the re-iteration of their migration discount URL.

What comes out of things like this is that it makes people go and take a look at competitors - I looked at quite a few but I should say that I’ve gone with Crashplan. Crashplan have an interesting client which allows me to use their app to backup to another local machine as well as their online service (or even a friend’s PC).

Sustainable?

One thing that did occur to me is why. Obviously Mozy wants out of the large storage consumer market - chances are it just doesn’t have the profit margin they need and is more trouble than they feel it’s worth. I suspect the sweet spots are indeed these sub 50GB people, and the small business users. I wonder how long till others decide to drop ‘unlimited’; I suspect that may depend on how Mozy fares.

I think there are questions over anything called ‘unlimited’ though I honestly believe 170GB isn’t a huge amount of data, people backing up terabytes is almost impressive. Perhaps its because to me Mozy was a last resort - my main machine, a Mac - has a Time Machine drive as live backup, and I take weekly snapshots to a couple of attached hard drives.

Mozy, with it’s download speed even on my nice fibre connection, isn’t going to rival an eSATA2 HDD for restore. However, if someone walks off with that drive and the diminutive Mac Mini, then Mozy just paid for itself.

As you can see from my posts, and some of the others, I just can’t get angry about this. Yes, it’s a pain uploading all that data to another site, but my Mac is happy to do that whilst I sleep, and it’s still on Mozy whilst I move. If anything, I hope it makes people think more about offsite storage.

Cool Graphics

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 09:52:05 +0000

Since building my new PC, I’ve been feeling like tinkering a bit, and one thing I’m trying to do is keep my PC quieter. As much as the Elsa 6800GS is quieter than an nVidia stock part, it can get a little noisy after a couple of hours play, so I wondered just how much a GPU cooler would cost, and whether there were any decent ones out there. A few reviews led me to the Arctic Cooling 5NV Silencer.

After about 30 minutes I had the new cooler attached (it takes up another space on the back of the PC effectively!), and not only is it much, much quieter (nigh on silent in the case to be honest) it also keeps the GPU and the temperature around it much, much cooler. Here are some very un-scientific numbers I got from the nVidia control panel:

Elsa Cooler vs. Arctic Cooling Silencer

At boot / rest in Windows
GPU core: 46 C 38 C
Ambient temp.: 35 C 32 C

After 3DMark05
GPU Core : 61 C 42 C
Ambient temp.: 41 C 35 C

After 30mins in Half Life 2
GPU Core : 65 C 50 C
Ambient: 50 C 40 C

So as you can see, not only is it quieter under load, it’s much cooler too. The benefits to me of this are that in the summer I don’t have to worry as much(!), that the rest of the PC stays a little cooler, and that if I like, I’ve got a bit of overclocking headroom there.

US$100 laptop is GO! (Sort of...)

Sat, 19 Nov 2005 23:54:04 +0000

It was good to see some good news come from the project to produce a USD100 laptop for poor regions and developing countries. Nicholas Negroponte, MIT MediaLab personage, and co-founder of Wired magazine was at a UN forum, and along with the project’s CTO unveiled a prototype of the laptop which they’re hoping will help the developing world get on the internet ladder and bring awareness and communications to those people who currently just don’t have the means to get it.

Basically, they’ve developed a small laptop running Linux, and using a very clever LCD, a wind-up battery, wireless, speakers, microphone etc. which by late 2006 will weigh in at USD100 (currently it’s 110 apparently), which they’ll sell to governments, charities etc. for exclusive usage in poor areas of the world. Go to the site above, or check this link to the pics - the machine looks very cool, and hopefully they can sell them in wealthy areas at a big profit sometime to fund even more into poor areas.

Overall, I think this kind of project is really useful, and combined with things like Geekcorps might help a lot of people get on the ladder to help their own countries. Of course, this kind of relies on bringing food, shelter and safety to huge numbers of people beforehand!

Original Comments

Comments from the original WordPress blog post.

wayan — 2005-11-20

You’re right, the MIT laptop, in combination with training, support infrastructure, and well thought-out distribution, will be a geat boon to the developing world.

Its only too bad we’re not hearing an equal amount of hype about that implementation environment for the shiny, flashy, new thing. Then again, as one of those building that environment, I’m a little biased.

gurahamu (the nanikore guy) — 2006-01-25

Sorry for the delay. I actually considered joining GeekCorps (or at least trying to!), but got waylaid with marriage en route! However, I have tried to follow it’s progress, and yes, I do think it’s doing valuable work. I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t get their work mentioned along with this little hype bubble. Whilst Negreponte’s heart may be in the right place, a little more inclusion may help.

Distributed Karma Returns

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 01:15:48 +0000

It occurred to me the other day whilst I was clearing out some old bookmarks that it’d been a long time since I’d been involved in any distributed computing projects. These are projects where you download a client, and maybe in the background, or as a screensaver, it analyses a tiny fragment of data, part of a larger experiment which would take a university mainframe months to assess, but when split into small chunks and a few thousand home PCs, it can be done much quicker.

Along with a few friends I’d been involved in Seti@Home about five years ago (July 30th 2000 to be exact). That had reached almost fanatical levels for about a year, then I suspect in late 2001 we got a bit tired of it, and they’d made certain changes which had lowered our interest.(I had a page over at brightblack about it here. Later, the Seti team, in parallel with their funky little client (they also had a command line app which ran on pretty much any architecture you can name) also set up a BOINC based system, which I tried once, but it never got much time on my PC for one reason or another.

Towards the end of the Seti involvement a couple of us moved to a United Devices campaign to look into cancer cures (April 4th 2001). Unfortunately the client only ran on Windows and after a very short time it seemed to get lost in a PC re-build.

Then nothing, for a few of years until this week when I dug up that bookmark, and decided it was time to get back into using my PCs spare time to help somehow, so I downloaded the current client, figured out what my old login was, and checked how things were going for United Devices. It seems a few things have changed, projects added, and it’s now run under the umbrella or grid.org, which is quite a nice site. The client still only seems to work on Windows though. That said, it’s a worthy cause and it’s nice in some ways to have the client as my screensaver again, and to think that my tech fetish in some way is helping people again. Incidentally, the project I’ve chosen is under the World Community Grid.

BBC RSS Strikethrough

Thu, 05 May 2005 10:57:34 +0000

Like many, I use RSS a lot. Really. Not as much as some, but more than most. It means I can browse the headlines of about 20 sites in the time it would take to looks at one of those site’s HTML pages. Most of these RSS feeds are auto-generated by the companies themselves, so I was curious to see this as part of the BBC feed today:

Er…looks like an editor changed the story there! No biggie. Out of curiosity, here’s how that story looked on the page:

Original Comments

Comments from the original WordPress blog post.

Ken Ming — 2005-05-05

haha.. really..? or is that just photoshop edited… :D

graham — 2005-05-07

Nah, that’s real. Actually, in the few days since I posted this I’ve noticed a few more examples in the BBC RSS feed. Ah, workflow systems, I know them well. Actually, I’ve seen documents from companies in Word format who have neglected to remove edits and revisions which make for some pretty ineresting reading.

Old Audio Laid to Rest

Sat, 13 Nov 2004 06:34:20 +0000

The digital music revolution, many believe, was sparked by the MP3 format, and is now transforming into a DRM/paid for download market of iPods, Windows Media, AAC and a whole raft of other things which may or may not be a good thing for artists and home users and their rights.

However, it was interesting to me in the last few days to see 2 old apps from simpler days effectively disappear from active development - Winamp and Audion. Actually, I should qualify that - Winamp will continue, but all of the original team has now left the parent company and it has been in a state of lacklustre development for a while. Audion, on the other hand, has been officially put into retirement and is now officially freeware.

I used Winamp in about 1998 when I was working for a ‘digital media’ company [sic] - with it’s llama themes demo track and it’s different skins Winamp really was a nice way to listen to MP3 and CDs at the time on Windows - add in visualisations and it was a nice little app. Unfortunately, it (Nullsoft) was bought by AOL and it seems the bloat began - the small app added more and more windows and popups. Version 3 wasn’t as good as 2 and as if to admit this, version 4 was skipped and the next one was (to me) the equally disappointing version 5. Added to this that other players in the Windows market such as Microsoft, Real, MusicMatch and even Apple with their iTunes had better apps it was obvious that Winamp had become an add-in to AOL and not much else, as mentioned here as the last Nullsoft person has now left the building.

Audion was around since OS 8 (and still works on 9 I believe), and I used it a lot, and even licensed version 1 - it was a nice app, and the company who made it - Panic - are a great bunch of coders who have released a lot of very cool applications. I bought it, and the N2MP3 encoder and between the two of them, put in as many MP3s from live recordings I made in Japan’s live bars as I could on a Powerbook 190 (68K processor running at 66MHz on a 1GB hard drive). I liked Audion - it’s faces were cool and it did what you wanted - had simple functionality and was nice to look at, but faded into the background when you needed it to. What happened? Well, the long and the short of it was iTunes, the iPod and the Music Store. Panic founder Cabel Sassar has written an amazing page on this situation, and I encourage everyone to read it - and to click on the pop-up links - there’s some great things in there. Ultimately, iTunes and it’s iPod and store were just too big a juggernaut to overcome. I commend Panic for retiring the app though to conserve a small company’s resources to move on and live to fight another day. Another Panic person, Steve Frank has put some more thoughts on his Blog here.

Ultimately it shows how a market place can change and how competition truly works. Winamp I think was the victim of a corporation and a startup just not understanding each other, whereas Audion seems to have been the victim of the market convergence between a player, an encoder, hardware and a music shop.