Software on Nanikore

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.

The Blender Open Source Film Projects

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 14:07:11 +0000

One aspect of open source which perhaps people aren’t aware of are open source films - creative, original content, created by open source software and open source themselves. One of the best ’ studios’ for this is the Blender Foundation and its open source film projects. Blender is itself an open source 3D modelling and rendering system, and they use foundation and industry sponsorship to produce content where all of the source materials - models, music, renders, all of it, is available open source, with the CG works mainly done in Blender itself.

I first got into open source in 1998 when I installed Caldera’s OpenLinux. Open source worked for me as I could barely afford hardware, let alone software, and I’ve always kept a Linux (or FreeBSD) box running for various tasks and for tinkering with. Today, most people have heard of open source, or at least use some open source software, whether they know it or not.

I first bumped in to these film projects in 2008 with their " Big Buck Bunny" short film, which was well written and well made, taking on the childrens animation genre.

Then I went back to their 2006 project ’ Elephants Dream’ , which is darker and more for adults, a grainy, atmospheric tale of two workers who inhabit a seemingly almost sentient machine.

Next up was ’ Sintel’, a fantasy short about a young woman searching for the dragon cub she nursed, and lost.

Their latest work is ’ Tears of Steel’, which is unique as it’s goal was to use Blender to create the CG parts of a mixed live action VFX short film, based on a science fiction premise.

It’s another well executed short film, which brings home the flexibility of the open source tools, but also the wealth of talent of the people who use Blender and the strength of the community.

I quite like the idea of artistic works like this being open, so just as programmers and tap into source code to learn how things work, aspiring film makers and also take a look inside some of these high quality films and maybe learn a few things.

Instagr.am

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 12:23:12 +0000

Just a quick post here for an iPhone app I’ve been playing with this week. Up front: this isn’t going to change your life. However, it is a bit of fun - instagr.am, but allows you to apply to some filters and such to make them look quite interesting, and then to add an extra feature in comparison to the other apps which do that, it allows you to very simply send them to several social networks from within the apps such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. If you set the GPS, you can check in to Foursquare there. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support Wordpress yet.

It is kind of fun. Here’s a couple I’ve done over the last week, and if you do post from your phone regularly, it might add a bit more atmosphere. Of the currently available filters, I quite like the ‘1977’ one, since of late I’ve been scanning some old family pictures from that time, and they do indeed now look pretty like that, so I took a picture of my battered iPod Classic in that format; I quite like it.

Tokyo Game Show 2005

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 07:14:03 +0000

Yesterday I went down to Makuhari Messe to check out the last day of the Tokyo Game Show 2005. The big events this year were the XBox 360 as it ramps to launch in a couple of months, and a preview of the PS3, due out in about 6 months.

Overall, I think the Xbox outflanked Sony on the home console side. It was obvious that Sony had virtually no games ready to preview and relied heavily on CG rendered movies, especially for Metal Gear Solid 4, which ran to nearly 10 minutes, but which featured virtually no in game footage, though Sony claimed the movie used the game engine.

Despite it’s revelation of the Revolution controller on Friday (Press Day), Nintendo didn’t really have a presence, leaving Sony a clear run on the handhelds, which they took, offering ‘shared versions’ of some upcoming games, providing you had the 2.0 firmware in, and if you didn’t you could download that there and then too. I’m still yet to be impressed with a lot of PSP titles - many are badly shoe-horned PS2 titles, and often don’t take account or advantage of the mobile form factor. However, Metal Gear Acid 2 looked interesting, as did Puposaru Academy 2. DS owners can at least look forward to ‘Akachan wa doko kara kuru no?’ (literally, ‘where do babies come from?’. To be honest, It looked more like a variant of the dating games which are getting more and more popular.

Of course, the booth girls were there, and provided a good distraction to their legions of fans, whilst others tried to squeeze past to actually check the games out. Of course there were the amateur cosplay people there too, as usual holding court between the two halls, and as usual they ranked from amazingly authentic to wacky, to just downright odd (the girl in the junior high school swimsuit - I’m talking to you).

Anyway, I’ll stick a full review up on Brightblack.net at some point. Needless to say, it’s always worth going and all the more so as it’s only 1000yen if you get a ticket before hand, so it’s quite a cheap day out.

2005 Tokyo Game Show

EU software patents revisited

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 15:03:40 +0000

As most of you know right now, the EU rejected the software patents bill by a huge majority (648 - 14 (18 abst.)) which has made a lot of people in small/medium enterprises very happy.

I think this will be a good thing long term, but it’ll be interesting how the supporters of the patent rules try to get this other ways. I think eWeek are premature to say the nail is in the coffin and this doesn’t mean that patent law in general doesn’t need tidying up across the EU.

Just say NO to EU software patents?

Sun, 03 Jul 2005 02:54:11 +0000

Ah. It seems we live in an age where the big player *must* be right, and people don’t like buying something from that small shop, by a maker they’ve never heard of. Sigh. However, there have been glimmers of hope, especially online where the barriers to acquisition (i.e. download) are so low, and there aren’t any real national boundaries, no matter what the FBI and US Secret Service would have you believe.

It looks of course like that’s being threatened to via the EU Software Patents Bill currently due to go through the EU Parliament this week (July 6th). For deeper info, check on the NoSoftwarePatents site. Even Slashdot have covered it a fair amount.

There’s been a lot of FUD on this long running issue, and a lot of it seems to be confusion on what is a patent and what is a copyright. Copyrighting of a way of doing something is fine, patenting it really restricts innovation, especially in software.

I think what’ll happen here is that the rule will pass and big companies will claim patent on all manner of things, rightly or wrongly and subdue the nascent European software scene, meaning fewer big innovations. Sigh.

MiniMacWorld 2005

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:31:01 +0000

It has to be said that some people were saying Apple had wrung everything out of the iPod with the rather lackluster iPod Photo and the bizarre U2 model a few months back, but this week’s MacWorld came a shot in the arm to everyone who likes Apple gear.

Apple stole the show with the iPod Shuffle and the Mac Mini. Both of these are excellent products in my opinion - the new iPod not only gives Apple a contender in nearly every sector of the portable music market, but at USD100, it might even appeal as a second iPod for some, wanting something for sports etc.. The MacMini is similar - it’s after people wanting to get into Macs, but is really targeted as a 2nd machine for Windows owners who have iPods and want to check the Mac out - hence the lack of keyboard mouse (and monitor), which also of course, helps keep the price down. I can’t help thinking this is ‘Son of Cube’, though at the correct pricepoint - something it’s predecessor lacked. For all Apple’s new toys, check out their website.

Macworld is also a time when software vendors release and preview upcoming products. As usual there were some stunners, such as a sneak peak at the new Transmit 3 from Panic, but to me, the biggest announcement was not just that Barebones would release TextWrangler2, but that it would be free (it was USD50 I think). I got into BBEdit via the old BBEdit Lite, a free editor with a subset of the features, and I ended up mpoving up the the incredible full version. Although Barebones deny TW2 is the modern equivalent of BBEdit Lite, in the market, I think that’s how it’s seen. I wish them luck with this, they’re a decent company, and they make good, solid Mac software.

Beer = Ogg

Sat, 22 Feb 2003 13:17:25 +0000

The weekend … you have to love it. Well, after a night on the beers last night in Nihonbashi" first as it’s a classic. I’m using Audacity as the recording software. Whilst all this is going on, I think I’d better clean my balcony. The fun never ends.