jr conlin's ink stained banana

This past week, i've been listening to A Life Well Wasted, which was presenting an episode about the death of Electronic Games Monthly. Amongst other tales, however, one of the sub themes was the general lament that blogs and other more immediate options have killed off long form magazines.

Now, granted, there's some validity to that, but let's not forget that in an era when a game can be released, made available, promoted, played, completed and shelved within a month, it's going to be a bit hard to justify purchasing a monthly publication that describes what you already discovered. Hell, you can download games directly onto your platform of choice, so you needn't get off your sofa to get thee to the game store in many cases.

Still, what struck me was that folks were lamenting the death of the glossy paged monthly publication that they loved. Honestly, that struck me as folks weeping about the death of rotary phones.

Folks are still going to want to consume the data. i still want someone's advice or suggestion about whether or not a game is actually playable and worth the $5-$60 i may plunk down for it. A magazine is merely one way to provide that. There are other ways.

We're a commuting society, but our methods of commute are different than most of the rest of the planet. We don't pile on buses or trains and are more likely to be part of a carpool or driving ourselves than standing shoulder to shoulder with our proletariat brethren. Publishers could take advantage of that and do things like make podcasts, PDFs, and other forms of content that can be electronically delivered onto the various gizmos and gadgets that we use. Hell, i listen to podcasts while driving and waiting around because an MP3 player fits in the pocket better than a magazine.

If you've been reading this, you know darn well that i keep saying that the time is ripe for Golden Age Radio type shows to re-emerge onto the new stage. Heck, the most popular podcasts are shows from NPR and PRI. No reason that the same thing can't happen with newspapers and magazines. In fact, at least one has. (Note: while it's possible to show this on the Sony PRS-505, you may need a jeweler's loupe to read it. As for the iTouch, sure do wish there was a way to load PDFs directly onto the device so that the apps could render them, Apple. Ok, so pretty much any mobile device short of the laptop had problems with rendering that file, but hey, it's a start.)

Getting away from buggy whips is a good idea for more than the music and movie industry, huh?

Sadly, Hallmark has yet to make Data Privacy Day cards, so you're forgiven if you didn't know it's being celebrated today.

Then again, i had no idea either.

Still, anyone who knows me knows that i pretty much live every day like it's Data Privacy Day. i know that if you don't own your data, you have no control over it. This is why data i share to things like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook or any other of the myriad of clouds big and small, is not important stuff. It's copies of things, for the most part and when those services go away, i'm not particularly bothered.

For what it's worth, allow me to contribute to the Data Privacy bits by noting a few things you can use right now to help with said data privacy, but still give you control over your data.

Step 1: Get a domain. (preferably one that allows shell access, WebDAV, PHP and MySQL). i'm a fan of Dreamhost for crap like this, but feel free to use any other. Why the need for shell access? Because it's far easier to do snapshots using programs like rsync than it is to do FTP fetches.

Want a network accessible Calendar? i use PHPiCalendar and store the ICS files behind a WebDAV share. Honestly, you can skip PHPiCalendar and just store and update the files using SunBird and/or Lightning, but having a web view of the calendar can be handy when you want to bring it up on your pocket mobile device.

Speaking of Firefox as your browser of choice, i already mentioned that Weave is a fantastic plug in for syncing your bookmarks, passwords, browsing history, and pretty much everything else, right? Did you know that you can have it write out to a WebDAV service hosted on your own server? (Go to the "Advanced" tab in the Weave configuration screen to set the server location to your WebDAV partition of choice. Use the WebDAV username and password you've set up, and yes, Weave encrypts what is stored so that idle eyes won't be able to decipher it.)

Want somewhere to store interesting bookmarks? Scuttle. You can also provide feeds of tag categories allowing for a nice "Tumblr" kind of experience should anyone want that, although if you're going that route, i'd probably recommend mindof.

Honestly, for a lot of other things, (images, "tweets", microblogs, and what-not) i'm always a bit surprised that folks don't use existing blogs and just do a better job with the categories. Damn near every single hosting service provides a one click install of blog software, so it's not like it's particularly hard to set up.

Ah well, here's to keeping your data safe. Me? i plan on celebrating the day by bashing open a piñata and being pleasantly surprised that it's empty.

i've been struggling to figure out what the general appeal of Facebook was, but i think i've finally figured it out, and frankly, i'm stunned by how obvious it was.

Facebook is the new Yahoo.

Why do i say that? Well, it helps if you get what Yahoo started out as. Back when the interwebs were just a single tube, Yahoo was a way to find things of interest. That was really useful, but got boring so they expanded into multiple other areas and eventually became what was known as a Portal. Sure, you could search on Alta Vista, do your email on email.com, chat with folks via AIM and read up on the daily news from CNN.com, but if you went to Yahoo, you could sign in once and do everything. That sort of "one call does it all" is mighty attractive to folks raised on AOL, TGI Fridays and Walmart.

(Note: While Yahoo can't really argue that AOL was the first portal, AOL had more of a "walled garden" approach and wasn't really up on the idea of sharing. Yahoo got the fact that there are other companies on the web and set the walls a great deal lower, so i'll pick them as the parent rather than AOL. )

Sure, you could use twitter, friendfeed, flickr, upcoming, wordpress and any number of other targeted services, or you could use Facebook. Is that a bad thing? Well, no. If using those services make you happy, that's fine. If using Facebook makes you happy, that's fine too. Facebook isn't really geared to folks that are willing to put the effort into building things out themselves, and that kinda explains why i wasn't seeing the value behind them as a portal.

i use all the other services for that stuff, and seeing them on facebook just kinda struck me as being redundant. But then, that's me. i tend to be an early adopter and like having control over stuff like that. Lots more folks like the path of least resistance and would absolutely go for a social portal like Facebook.

i guess one could say the same thing about Facebook that used to be said about sites like Yahoo. Facebook is Social Media with training wheels.

Today, i converted Anne Marie.

For the past mumble-plus-nearing-double-decades, she's been a staunch user of Yahoo! Mail and Calendar. She's used classic, new, zimbra, and nearly every other flavor that's rolled out. She was even really hoping that she could have used the new Y!Calendar beta that came out a year ago, but it never really materialized.

She finally got fed up with it all.

She hit her limit of 500 blocked email addresses. And she couldn't easily move a bunch of calendar appointments. And the camel's back broke and she started fuming at me about how frustrated she was.

So i converted her. She now stores events in Google Calendar and keeps her email on an IMAP connection to unitedheroes.net. i've set her "reply-to" address to her new account and loaded everything into thunderbird. Suddenly, she's blissfully happy with the configuration. She can move events easily, and the sort of email filtering she can do is literally infinite (or at least as infinite as i can create .procmailrc rules). It's pretty much the same configuration i use. We'll both retain the @yahoo.com addresses for historical purposes but they're by no means the primary accounts.

Once she gets used to things, i could always yank the data out of Google and drop it into my own ICS server, but i'm not particularly worried that Google gets to find out about when she wants to water plants and make sure the bathroom drain is cleaned, so Thanks for the Bandwidth, Google!

Compared with what she's had to use before, the current configuration is far more intuitive to her. She's happy, and we're in more control of things than before.

This week (today, actually) would have marked the 10th anniversary i started at Yahoo! i've moved on. It's just kinda sad that it's true in more ways than one.

So, after a week with an iPod, have i conceded? Has this pod had the usual effect a pod does upon someone who spends time with the device?

Yes and No.

First the good. (Yes, there is some good.) As a portable internet device, it works amazingly well. There are obsessively annoying things about it (like the lack of form auto completion and password remembering), but by and large it's small and thin enough to be wearable. Tied onto that is the fact that you can run mini apps on the device that also work somewhat less than annoyingly bad is a nice bonus. Plus, you can download apps without using your computer, which means avoiding iTunes.

And that about does it for the good.

As a music device, it's barely tolerable. The sound quality is "fair", and absolutely has everything to do with the bitrate of what's stored on it. 192K is the floor i would recommend, while 256K is preferred. Yes, AAC allows for smaller bitrates because of some acoustic chicanery, but if you're grabbing tracks from apple, you're getting effectively 256K, just like you get from Amazon. It plays back the media, but since it's not a tactile device, you have to look at it to ensure that you've touched it correctly (finger meat only please) at the right location. This is something i'd recommend you not do while driving.

It's also heavily limited in the types of media that it accepts, meaning that unless it's MP3 or AAC, you're DOA. Plus there's the whole iTunes nightmare (which hasn't gotten better over the years, but at least there's MediaMonkey which doesn't toss up unskippable ads for Apple Millenium Edition before letting you do anything with your iPod.)

As for Video? Don't bother. Seriously. It's fine for little YouTube streams, but considering that it only does a subset of codecs for QuickTime, doesn't do scaling (No HD for you!), and chews through the battery even trying to keep up with that, unless you're desperate to stare at something other than your fellow bus passengers and can only hold one device, there are FAR better media players out there.

And now for the other things that absolutely annoy the hell out of me:

1. You used to be able to mount your iPod as a drive. Now you can't. Screw you.
2. Condenser circuits can act as either speakers or microphones. Hard pressed for a cheap, external mic? Plug your headphones in and speak into the "left" speaker. Trick works great on everything except the iTouch, which requires magical Apple headphones. Screw you.
3. Even if you tell iTunes not to convert WMA and other formatted music, it does it anyway because iPods can't understand anything other than MP3 and AAC, potentially eating up a few gigs of disk space. Screw you. (Did i mention that Media Monkey writes to iTouch and iPhones too and it's FAR less annoying? Thanks Mookie!)
4. i really don't have any clear idea how long the battery lasts because i'm continually having to plug it in to do things to it like remove old podcasts. And for that matter, why is it i can fetch podcasts wirelessly, but there's no way to drop them without connecting up to a computer?
5. Why can't i delete the preloaded apps that suck? The "weather" app was replaced by the Weather Channel one, Calendar and Contacts are completely useless outside of using Apple's FUF Mobile Me crap, Photos is a joke as is "videos". i'm sure they're not taking up more than a few K, but they're currently sitting on the last page of my home screen because i couldn't make them go any further away.

Considering that i live on the net, i do find myself carrying around the bugger. The 8GB version is just fine, thankyouverymuch since i've got 5GB of free space on the beastie even with all the apps and other bits loaded. i'm using my Sansa for music and podcasts since it work FAR better in the car, and the Archos is doing duty on videos and long trips because it does video. Pretty much any video i can throw at it, including DVDs. Based on using this, i'd never get an iPhone because adding a communications device to this would be a recipe for nearly constant disappointment and frustration, plus since iPhones are art, most of the really useful comms features are disabled (e.g. bluetooth features like sync, voice dialing, and other bits)

Still, as a small net device, the iTouch currently sates the need, provided i can find a wireless port to attach to.