I’ve had a new fibre optical broadband and telephone service installed. The BT Openreach vans have been busy in our area for months. The fibre optic cables were laid under the streets and up the telegraph poles, ready for anybody who wants to take advantage of the higher data speeds available with fibre optics, and to future proof homes connectivity. I’ve always had a pretty good service through the copper wires though, and since reliability rather than speed is my most important criteria, I elected to remain with my current sluggish and expensive but very reliable broadband provider. Well I would have done if I could have, but they had been taken over by another company, and then another in turn. So I was left on a legacy system yet again. Finally, BT made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Six months totally free broadband and landline phone usage, including up to £5 worth per month calls to mobiles, no setup fee, no line rental, no charge for the modem, free to opt out again at any time. Supposedly it’s a trial to test the new voice over fibre service. Whatever. I notice Sky TV are offering similar broadband deals so it’s probably more of an enticement, because we all know how powerful the force of inertia can be, once you’ve plumped for one service or another. Fibre Optical Broadband I’m happy to have my house cabled up with fibre optics, all the way to the modem. The old copper wire system is still there, and working as I type, so I have a choice of two broadband connections, luxury. The fibre optic system is about two or three times as fast for downloads and browsing, but more like six or ten times as fast for uploads, which is great when I have a series of half a gigabyte music videos to upload to YouTube for example. Even running in the background, the three or four hour uploads used to degrade the general internet access quality for everybody else on the network, but that’s no longer the case. And I can watch live streaming HD TV channels such as the BBC iPlayer at the same time as uploads and other stuff going on simultaneously. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogFibre Optical Broadband
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Fibre Optical Broadband
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2012/04/29/fibre-optical-broadband
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April 29 2012, 6:47am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Delete WordPress Plugins with ManageWP
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/11/20/delete-wordpress-plugins-with-managewp
I’ve just been using ManageWP beta – the web utility for managing multiple WordPress installations – to delete an obsolete plugin from several of my older blogs. The functionality to delete or deactivate plugins was a much requested feature that was added to the many useful operations that ManageWP can perform for you just a couple of weeks ago, and it really does make this web service indispensable for anybody with more than just a couple of WordPress installations. I was recommending before, but even more so now. The plugin I wanted to deprecate in my installations was called Viper’s Video QuickTags, very handy in it’s day for embedding youtube videos withing blog posts, but that functionality was added into the core WordPress code several versions ago, which renders the plugin redundant for me. Plugins and Themes With ManageWP I could select “plugins and themes” from the sidebar, then chose All Websites, tick plugins, active, and search by keyword: “viper”. That gave me a list of five blogs that still had the old plugin active. I could have deactivated the lot in one fell swoop just like that, but I wanted to make sure all my old posts with videos embedded would still work so, without even leaving the ManageWP dashboard, I went to each affected individual WordPress dashboard in turn, and searched through the posts for the string “[youtube”, that being the way the old plugin recognised source posts needing to have the embed code added. I then removed the shortcodes from each end of the video identifier leaving just the youtube url on one line by itself, which WordPress now interprets as a request to embed video inline. Once the legacy code was removed, I could then deactivate and delete the plugin, leaving me with a nice feeling of having tidied up a longstanding loose end.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogDelete WordPress Plugins with ManageWP
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November 20 2011, 7:03am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/23/my-new-ubuntu-flavoured-thinkpad-is-computing-heaven
As antidote to all the iPad2 hype, Cory Doctorow is pleased with his Lenovo ThinkPad X220, pleased as punch about how undramatic, yet graceful, his computing life has becomeThis article titled “My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven” was written by Cory Doctorow, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 17th May 2011 07.21 UTCThis week, I finally got my new Lenovo ThinkPad X220, the latest and skinniest in the Lenovo X-series of fast, skinny, rugged, all-black, no-nonsense machines. This – my third X-series ThinkPad – is shaping up to be everything I expected from the line and more: it is slim, 2.5cm (1in), configured with its smallest battery and very light – 1.5kg (3lbs 4oz) or so; size up to the biggest battery and you get eight or nine hours of work at a mere 1.8kg; snap on the “Slice” battery, which snugly fits underneath the machine, fattening it up to 4cm, and the weight goes to 2.5 kg – but the Slice delivers about 24 hours of continuous operation without plugging in.I haven’t yet taken the machine on the road, but 24 hours’ worth of battery means that I’ll be able to leave my mains adapter at home for the next all-day conference or travel day, which saves weight overall. It’s got a 64-bit, 2.7GHz Sandy Bridge processor, 8GB of RAM, and I’m about to slap in a 600GB Intel solid-state drive that’ll increase its speed and battery life even more.I had some snags getting this machine in, partly because of supply-chain problems with Japanese components from factories affected by the tsunami and earthquake, and partly attributable to Lenovo’s less-than-stellar ordering system, which stands in sharp contrast to the quality of its machines.I switched to ThinkPads full time in 2006, after owning practically every model of Apple PowerBook released to that date, starting with a PowerBook 145 in 1992 or so. They were generally good machines, design-y, and they ran the Mac OS, which was the only operating system I used on my desktop. I’d administered various flavours of Unix before then – some Silicon Graphics Irix machines, a couple Apple A/UX machines, and then a series of GNU/Linux servers – but by the time I bought my first ThinkPad, I hadn’t done anything Unix-y in years and couldn’t do much of anything without intense search-engine assistance.My ThinkPad switch was inspired by a desire to try out the Ubuntu flavour of GNU/Linux, which I’d heard great things about. So I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu – Canonical, the company that oversees Ubuntu, does two releases per year – burned it to a CD and stuck it in the computer, and, a few minutes later, I was up and running. At the time, I promised to document my joys and frustrations with GNU/Linux, but a few months later, once I’d been soaking in the OS for a while, I went back over my notes and discovered that there was practically nothing to report on that score.For a week or two I did a lot of mis-mousing and mis-typing as I learned where Ubuntu’s equivalents to MacOS commands were. A few years later, I experienced the exact same sensation after we redid our kitchen and the builders insisted that regulations required us to move our cutlery and dishes to new places and I spent two weeks opening the cutlery drawer and finding myself looking at a load of pots and pans.One day, I woke up and I just knew where everything was, which is exactly what happened with my Ubuntu switch.The problem with writing about switching to Ubuntu is that there’s very little to report on, because it is just about the least dramatic operating system I’ve used, especially when paired with the extended warranties Lenovo sells for its ThinkPads. By this I mean that Ubuntu, basically, just works as well as or better than any other OS I’ve ever used, and what’s more, it fails with incredible grace.This graceful failure is wonderful stuff, and after a lifetime of using computers I’ve decided that it’s the thing I value most in my technology. Ubuntu is free – free as in beer, costing nothing; free as in speech, in that anyone can modify or improve it. That means that on those occasions where I’ve had a bad disk or some other problem, I could simply download a new copy of the OS, stick it on a USB drive and restart from the drive to troubleshoot and repair the OS. I don’t have to take a rescue disk on the road with me, don’t have to try to run out to the Apple store at 8:55PM to try to buy another copy of the OS before the shop closes. Anywhere I’ve got a working computer and an internet connection, I’ve got everything I need to fail gracefully.Ubuntu is a GNU/Linux “distribution” – that is, a carefully curated collection of free tools, gathered together, tested and packaged so as to provide an elegant, coherent computing experience. In this regard, it’s not so different from any other OS. There is a committee of design-oriented, thoughtful people who make aesthetic and technical decisions about what I should be doing with my computer and put them all together – this committee includes passionate users, developers and Canonical employees. Ubuntu has its own version of an App Store, though Ubuntu’s version, derived from a GNU/Linux project called Debian, has been around for years longer than the Apple, Android and Microsoft versions. Practically everything in it is free – and it’s been tested and reviewed and described to a nicety, so that whenever you have a need you can just search the Ubuntu Software Centre for something to solve your problem, evaluate the small list of returned options, find the app you want, click and install. If you don’t like it, you can install another.But this free business has serious knock-on effects in the graceful failure department. Ubuntu’s Software Centre can be instructed to spit out a simple list of all the apps (“packages” in Ubuntu-speak) you’ve installed. Any time you need to set up a new machine or recover an old one, you simply feed the list to the package manager and it will fetch all your apps and install and configure them without any further intervention. This is nothing short of miraculous when compared with the clumsy, desperate fumbling with original disks and serial numbers from the commercial software world. That’s what free-as-in-beer gets you.But free-as-in-speech also delivers benefits to the failing computer and its user: any time you want to do something with your computer that Canonical hasn’t countenanced (or has rejected), it’s pretty trivial to do so. You don’t have to jailbreak Ubuntu to get it to run unapproved software. In fact, Ubuntu allows you to add programs from unapproved third parties with the same Software Centre, and hooks those programs up to its automatic updater. For example, I subscribe directly to the updates to Banshee, an excellent, powerful, free, open replacement for iTunes. These updates tend to be a little ahead of the official Ubuntu releases, where each revision is tested before it is packaged and updated.This is “curated computing” at it absolute best: you get all the benefits of obsessive, bold design from a closely coordinated team that shares a coherent vision for the way the computer works. But you also get to disagree with them as much or as little as you want. You can sit down and use Ubuntu and it will get out of your way and just let you do whatever you want your computer to do for you, with no drama. But when you find the need to tinker, Ubuntu reveals as much configurability as you could care for, starting with installing unapproved programs and drilling all the way down to rewriting parts of the OS if you have the ability and desire to do so. It’s a system you can trust, but not a system that you must trust.I must disclose that Ubuntu’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth, once made a donation to my former employer, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which helped fund my position at the time – there were no conditions attached to this funding – and that he subsequently personally commissioned a short story from me. Neither of these interactions had any bearing on my decision to try and continue using Ubuntu – I tried the OS on advice from Google’s Chris DiBona, and continued to use it due to my overall great experiences with the technology.Speaking of great experiences, I mentioned the Lenovo hardware warranty above. This as graceful as failure gets. For £127.44, I get three years’ worth of on-site, next-day, hardware replacement service. I used to keep two Powerbooks on the go at a time so that when one suffered a technical disaster I could switch to the other one while I waited one to three weeks for Apple to fix it. With my ThinkPad, I just call a toll-free number and the next day, or sometimes the day after, a technician comes to my office or hotel room practically anywhere in the world and fixes my computer. This warranty is provided through IBM Global Services – IBM flogged its ThinkPad business to Lenovo years ago, but held on to the services division – and it has been almost impeccable in the three or four times I’ve used it.Nine years ago, I quit smoking. My doctor asked me what I planned to think about when I craved a cigarette. I told him I would concentrate on the health benefits, and he shook his head. “You’re 31 years old. The major health benefit you’re going to get from quitting smoking is that you’re not going to get cancer in 20 or 30 years. That’s not going to shore up your willpower when you crave a cigarette tomorrow.” So I thought about it and realised that I was spending one or two laptops’ worth of money on cigarettes every year. And from then on, whenever I got a cig craving I just thought about all the lovely laptops I’d be able to buy in the years to come by not giving my money to the death merchants whose products were killing me. Every time I get a new lappie now, I get a real thrill, a funny phantom association with good health.I was once a computer hobbyist. I loved to geek out about computers. I can still really get into the subject, but for the most part, I just want to Get Stuff Done with my computer. I am pleased as punch to have arrived at such an undramatic place in my computing life. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogMy new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heavenRelated posts:SocialSoftwareWiki – Design Patterns of Social ComputingFree FTP Client Software – Using Filezilla to update WebsitesI opened my Mac mini
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May 23 2011, 4:20am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Some things I can’t do on the ipad 2 yet.
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/03/some-things-i-cant-do-on-the-ipad-2-yet
So this is an experimental blog post feeding the output from a mind map directly via email to the blog. The mind map software is ithoughtsHD as recommended by Ed Dale and MacSparky, and it’s an addition to one I made early in order to accumulate some tasks I needed to do when I get back on my iMac again. So the first one was a kind of to do list, which is against the spirit of action logging I know, but sometimes I need the memory aid in special circumstances.
I’ve had an intense unplanned two weeks or so learning curve with my new iPad 2, and it’s been enlightening and fun on the whole, but occasionally frustrating as well. In theory there are only about 20-30% of activities which cannot be done easily on the iPad, but in practice they can soon mount up into a bit of a backlog. I’ve tried to avoid getting involved in really complicated workflows which are basically workarounds to make up for the deliberately isolated structure of the IOS apps system.
Other things I haven’t mentioned are native OSX apps such as Market Samurai, or Firefox plugins, which haven’t been ported to iPad yet, if at all.
The iThoughtsHD output to email process includes a number of different formats and here they are:
cant do on ipad
adding autolinks into wordpress blog posts of course this is a bit like thinks to do on the iMac
the difference being here I might try to find ways to do them on the iPad eventually
podcasts
broadcast with livestream edit sound files in audacity
facebook
leave groups manage pages on 2nd page
Google Reader
add subscriptions unsubscribe
gmail
add filters
WordPress
edit longer posts add categories after the first few in the list
reorganise categories?
cant do on ipad.itm Download this file
cant do on ipad.itmz Download this file
cant do on ipad.opml Download this file
cant do on ipad.pdf Download this file
Andy Roberts
http://distributedresearch.net/blog
via posterous Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogSome things I can’t do on the ipad 2 yet.
Related posts:iPad2 mind maps Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers iPad 2: where can I buy one in the UK?
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May 3 2011, 9:28am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
The cyberplague that threatens an internet Armageddon
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/01/the-cyberplague-that-threatens-an-internet-armageddon
The unchecked rise of malware could culminate in a massive global event that would change forever the way we use the broadband internet
This article titled “The cyberplague that threatens an internet Armageddon” was written by John Naughton, for The Observer on Saturday 30th April 2011 23.04 UTC In 1971, Bob Thomas, an engineer working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the Boston company that had the contract to build the Arpanet, the precursor of the internet, released a virus called the “creeper” on to the network. It was an experimental, self-replicating program that infected DEC PDP-10 minicomputers. It did no actual harm and merely displayed a cheeky message: “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” Someone else wrote a program to detect and delete it, called – inevitably – the “reaper”. Although nobody could have known it 40 years ago, it was the start of something big, something that would one day threaten to undermine, if not overwhelm, the networked world. For as we became more and more dependent on information and communications technology, we were also subjected to a plague of what came to be called “malware”. It’s an ugly term, as befits something that covers a multitude of sins, all involving computer code designed with destructive or malevolent intent. It includes not only viruses, which are programs that replicate by copying themselves into other programs, but also worms (self-replicating programs that use a network to send copies of themselves to other machines on the network, with or without human assistance) and Trojans (similar to viruses but instead of replicating they infiltrate a computer and perform some illicit activity, possibly under remote control). Malware also refers to other evils: the junk mail we call spam; “phishing”, or trying to hoodwink internet users into revealing bank account passwords etc; page-jacking, which makes it difficult or impossible for a victim to get rid of a web page; and other scams. The malware plague has gone through several phases. It began in a harmless and experimental way with the creeper and a worm released on to the internet in 1988 by Robert Morris, a student from New York State’s Cornell University. Morris wanted to find out how many computers were connected to the internet so he wrote a small program that would install itself on every machine it found and send back a “present and correct” message. But there was a flaw in his code that meant the worm replicated. On 2 November 1988, network administrators realised something was up because their machines – and the network itself – had slowed to a crawl. In the end, the culprit was identified and carpeted, though it doesn’t seem to have done him any lasting harm: Morris is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Malware began on the internet, but its next phase involved the stand-alone machines we now call personal computers. In 1982, a Pennsylvanian teenager named Rich Skrenta created the “elk cloner” virus that infected the Apple II, then the most popular personal computer in upmarket US households. Skrenta’s virus covertly altered the floppy disk needed to boot up the computer, displaying some doggerel on the screen on start up. It was annoying but harmless. Early PC malware tended to be like that – irritating but not terribly destructive. And malware spread slowly, because most of these PCs were not networked; infections spread by “sneakernet” – ie users sharing floppy disks. The real trouble began when domestic internet use exploded in 1993. From then on, an infected PC was a potential menace not just to its owner, but to other machines with which it communicated. For many people, early malware was a baffling phenomenon. It was seen as something akin to physical vandalism in the real world – hooligans despoiling an environment for no obvious reason. What motivated them? Nobody knew, though several psychologists had a go at explaining it. The notion that malware was motiveless destructiveness was fuelled by the fact that much of it was imitative, carried out by “script kiddies” – non-programmers who downloaded DIY virus-construction kits. In the 1990s, malware development accelerated. When Microsoft released Windows 95, it rapidly became the de facto standard for the PC industry and the world’s IT systems came to exhibit the characteristics of a monoculture: millions and millions of PCs across the globe, all running the same software, all sharing the same security vulnerabilities. At the same time, domestic broadband connections became common. Suddenly, there were millions of machines, operated by people with little understanding of computer security, with shared vulnerabilities and fast connections to the network. Most importantly, malware found a business model in the late 1990s. The fragility of the monoculture could be exploited for profit. Spamming – junk emailing – could now be done on a truly gigantic scale. Hitherto, it had required identifiable servers with broadband access to the net. But the new broadband environment offered a better infrastructure. All you had to do was find machines with fast connections, unpatched security vulnerabilities and non-savvy owners and infect them with a Trojan that would turn them into relay stations for spam (and which could be turned off just as easily, to avoid detection). Spamming works because it can be very profitable. It costs very little more to send 10m emails than it does to send 100. If you’re selling a packet of Viagra for $20 and you have a response rate of 0.1%, you’ll make $20 from 1,000 emails. But if you send out 10m and have the same response rate you’ll be earning $200,000 a day. This is the kind of serious money that makes organised criminal gangs sit up. The idea of covertly suborning networked PCs was a critical breakthrough for malware because it enabled malefactors to set up “botnets” – networks of compromised machines that could be remotely controlled. Nobody knows how many of these botnets exist, but there are probably thousands of them worldwide and some are very large. A list of the 10 largest in the US in 2009, for example, estimated that they ranged in size from 210,000 to 3.6m compromised machines. In addition to spamming, botnets can be used for a wide variety of purposes. They can, for example, launch “distributed denial of service” (DDOS) attacks on e-commerce or other web sites. Each machine in the botnet bombards the targeted site with simultaneous requests, repeated incessantly, to the point where the site’s servers buckle under the load or the site becomes unusable by legitimate customers. More sinisterly, botnets can be used for blackmail, effectively extracting protection money from retail sites to ward off the threat of a DDOS attack. Nobody talks about this in public, but it goes on. Domestic PCs that have been compromised by Trojans can be put to other uses too. For example, they can covertly monitor their user’s keystrokes when logging into banking and other sites, thereby stealing passwords and credit card details. At a recent presentation by officers from Soca (Serious Organised Crime Agency), I was struck by a slide that showed how highly developed the online market in stolen credit card data had become. It showed a marketplace for “USA 100% APPROVED TRACK2 DUMPS” in which Visa debit card details were going for $8 and American Express details were $10. On another such marketplace, American MasterCard details cost $15 while European credit card details were going for $40 a pop. “Buying large quantities,” it said, “prices are negotiable for every customers.” (Grammar and spelling are not a speciality in this particular netherworld.) We’ve come a long way from the creeper and elk cloner. The driving forces behind contemporary malware are financial gain and organised crime, much of it with its headquarters in Russia and other parts of eastern Europe. One of the most blatant examples of an online marketplace in stolen credit card data was CarderPlanet.com, a website ostensibly based in Vietnam, but operated by people based in Russia and Ukraine, and now shut down. A senior US secret service official described CarderPlanet as “one of the most sophisticated organisations of online financial criminals in the world” which had been “repeatedly linked to nearly every major intrusion of financial information reported to the international law enforcement community”. Some of the principals behind CarderPlanet were arrested after an intensive campaign by the US authorities. But one of them, Dmitry Ivanovich Golubov, was subsequently released by the Ukrainian authorities and has allegedly started a political organisation called “the Internet Party of the Ukraine”. The latest round in the malware saga came in June last year when the Stuxnet worm finally broke cover. Stuxnet infects Windows computers and spreads mainly via infected USB sticks, so it doesn’t require the internet for dissemination. Once a USB stick infects a machine, it uses a variety of tricks to infect other machines on the local network and to take control of them, but with an added twist. It looks for a special kind of programmable logic controller (PLC) made by the German company Siemens. If a PLC is found, the worm infects it using a vulnerability in the controller’s software and changes its code and thus its behaviour. This is scary because these Siemens controllers play a critical role in virtually every industrialised plant in the world, including water treatment plants, electricity grids and oil refineries, and nuclear reprocessing facilities. One target of Stuxnet was Iran’s controversial nuclear weapons programme, specifically the gas centrifuges it uses to enrich uranium. It is claimed that the worm reprogrammed the Siemens PLCs to cause over 900 centrifuges to spin uncontrollably while at the same time feeding back “normal” data to the plant’s operators, thereby concealing the problem until it was too late. The fact that this has set back Iran’s nuclear programme by several years has led to speculation that the worm was the creation not of criminal hackers, but of a state agency (possibly Israeli or American). This hunch was supported by the fact that Stuxnet seems a pretty sophisticated piece of malware. Bruce Schneier, a leading security expert, estimates that it would have taken eight to 10 accomplished programmers six months to design, implement and test it under laboratory conditions. It’s difficult to imagine the criminal hacking fraternity having the resources to do that. Why has malware become so pervasive and so difficult to combat? The main reason is that malevolent innovation is the downside of the open architecture of the PC and the internet. The combination of an open, programmable PC and a network that is open to anyone created a “generative system” which was uniquely hospitable to what has come to be called “permissionless innovation”. This had some amazing benefits – it gave us the world wide web, for example, Wikipedia, the Linux operating system and the Apache web-server software that powers a majority of the world’s web sites. But it has also given us the malware plague. There is another, deeper, fear – that the mysterious botnets that have been assembled by the merchants of malware may one day be used in some co-ordinated way to engineer a massive global event – cyberspace’s equivalent of 9/11, if you will. If something like that were to happen, then the response of governments everywhere would be draconian. Just as civil liberties in western democracies were massively eroded by the aftermath of 9/11 and the ensuing “war on terror”, so the freedoms we have hitherto taken for granted in cyberspace would be correspondingly curtailed. The day might come when you’ll need a government licence to connect to the internet. Bob Thomas’s creeper could have a creepy inheritance.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogThe cyberplague that threatens an internet Armageddon
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May 1 2011, 9:06am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/25/jemima-kiss-how-i-kicked-my-digital-habit
Twitter, Facebook, emails, and voicemail – we are overwhelmed by digital data, is it time to rebel against information overload? I wondered whe Jemima Kiss had gone too. But of course, managing the information overload IS your job.
This article titled “Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Observer on Saturday 23rd April 2011 23.05 UTC We were brushing through wet grass in the early morning when we saw it – a flash of white drifting behind a small patch of trees, backlit by the sun. Crouching down next to my small son, we watched the unmistakable shape of a barn owl until he disappeared into the wood. The look on my son’s face was part of a brief moment of magic, the kind of memory that we live for. Ordinarily, my next thought would have been to pull out my phone and take a photo, send a tweet or record a video. Connecting is something I do unconsciously now. Tweeting is like breathing and photos and video have documented nearly every day of my 21-month-old son’s life. The meaningful merged with the mundane, all dutifully and habitually recorded – my enjoyment split between that technological impulse and the more delicate human need to be in the moment. This is how we live. That weekend, however, our whole family – my partner, my son and I – were offline. Swallowtail Hill Farm, in Rye, East Sussex, is a pretty soft option when it comes to a digital detox; a charming small farm with a diverting collection of animals and four vintage tractors. Camping was an easy option for an offline experiment, but there wasn’t much choice outside that for a UK break. High-end hotels in the US are now promoting their offline credentials, from boutique luxury to remote donkey trekking, but the UK has some catching up to do. Anyway, blessed with two days of good weather and some delicious local food, I barely even noticed I wasn’t online. What I did notice was my partner, Will. If my worst digital habit is incessant tweeting, his is allowing his phone to be the single most disruptive thing in our relationship. Country walks, dinner, bathing our son – no moment is safe from the seemingly irresistible ringing, vibrating, nagging phone that demands – and wins – his attention when he should be enjoying the moment with us. Any objections of mine are swiftly defended by explaining the importance of dealing with that email/text/voicemail now, though it never seems anything that couldn’t wait half an hour. I take equal responsibility for our connectopia – magnetically drawn, as I am, to any screen that can feed my addiction.
We handed our phones in at the gate. The only interruption during lunch was from two woodpeckers and the entertainment during dinner by the fire was our own conversation. There was a moment when Will was distracted by a buzzing sensation and reached for his phone, before realising it was a bee. Without our phones, we had no idea what the time was. I reached for my phone when I wondered about local property prices and whether it is normal to see a barn owl during the day. And those moments when Artley, my son, was leaning out of the steam train window, having his bath outdoors under a woodburner-powered shower and being read his bedtime story in front of an open fire, I’ve had to try and commit to my own fallible memory. Breaking away from my connected life, I could feel how the compulsion, the divided attention, the multitasking has permeated my way of being. Early adopters, the heavy technology users who throw themselves at every new device and service, will admit to an uncontrollable impulse to check email, tweets or Facebook. Researchers have called this “variable interval reinforcement schedule”; we have in effect been trained into digital message addiction because the most exciting rewards are unpredictable. We’re no better than slot-machine addicts. The hustle we develop as we struggle to keep up with the pace of digital information has produced a restless, anxious way of engaging with the world. Desperate for efficiency, this seeps into our physical lives; I feel compelled to tidy while on the phone, to fold the washing while brushing my teeth. No single task has my undivided attention. A study by the University of California, San Francisco, last week concluded that constant multi-tasking gradually erodes short-term memory. And interruptions are a massive problem, taking anything up to 20 times the length of the interruption to recover. For those of us compelled to check email every few minutes, that revelation explains where the day goes. As consumer web technologies mature, so too does our desire to understand the impact they are having on our lives. Few books on digital dystopia are more resonant than Hamlet’s BlackBerry, an imaginative and thoughtful book that explores philosophical reaction to new technologies throughout time and the lessons we should have learnt from those. The author, former Washington Post journalist William Powers, is, like me, a true believer in the power and potential of digital technologies, but concludes that we need a little discipline to restore control over our unsettling, hyper-connected lives. “The more we connect, the more our thoughts lean outward,” he writes. “There’s a preoccupation with what’s going on ‘out there’ in the bustling otherworld, rather than ‘in here’ with yourself and those right around you. What was once exterior and faraway is now easily accessible and this carries a sense of obligation or duty.” That feeling that we should be reaching out, or be available to be reached out to, is tied to the self-affirmation the internet provides. “In less-connected times, human beings were forced to shape their own interior sense of identity and worth.” Powers offers practical solutions, including advocating the use of paper as a more efficient way of organising our thoughts. The theory of “embodied interaction” asserts that physical objects free our minds to think because our hands and fingers can do much of the work, unlike screens where our brains are constantly in demand. The eponymous technology he describes in his book is an intriguing Elizabethan version of a PDA, pocket-sized notebooks with pages coated in an erasable, plaster-like material. “Writing tables”, as they were known, were used for note-taking and checklists. While we can’t be sure Shakespeare used one, we’re shown that Hamlet was a keen user of the latest screen technology. “Yea, from the table of my memory,” Hamlet reflects, after meeting the ghost of his dead father. I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there Hamlet wants to clear his life of all the superficial detritus so that he can focus exclusively on avenging the death of his father. The development of print culture was adding to the tumult of life in Elizabethan England, just as we are overwhelmed with the explosion of always-on digital information today. Exploring Seneca’s “spa of the mind” as a way of escaping the commotion of a busy city, Powers explains that the constant demands of being overwhelmingly connected need to be balanced out by reintroducing a little disconnectedness. That’s exactly what Powers did at home, banning the internet at weekends. It took six months for the family to adjust. “Because we were now away from our connectedness on a regular basis, we grasped its utility and value more fully … There was an atmospheric change in our minds, a shift to a slower, less restless, more relaxed way of thinking. We could just be in one place, doing one particular thing, and enjoy it.”
At home, my concern about our digital addiction is most acute when I catch my son looking at me while I’m checking a screen. It’s reinforcing how much more important the screen is than him, as if I’m teaching him that obeying these machines is what he needs to do. Our fireside conversation that night, against a backdrop of a moonlit wood, was about Hamlet’s BlackBerry and what Powers calls the “vanishing family trick”, when a seemingly sociable family would gradually dissolve away to screens in different corners of the house. It’s a familiar story. “What’s lost in the process is so valuable, it can’t be quantified,” Powers despairs. “Isn’t this what we live for – time spent with other people, those moments that can’t be translated into ones and zeros and replicated on a screen? I sometimes felt as if love itself, or the acts of the heart and mind that constitute love, were being leached out of the house by our screens.” As we left the farm, the real work began, trying to resolve our new promise of balancing work and home life by introducing phone-free zones and offline days. Best of all, when the farmer handed back our phones, we didn’t have a missed call or message between us.
Jemima, Will & Artley stayed at Swallowtail Hill Farm, 01275 395447; canopyandstars.co.uk
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April 25 2011, 10:45am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Google’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’
Marissa Mayer of Google products expounds at SXSW on Google and the proliferation of products. Where will it all go next?
This article titled “Google’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 12th March 2011 17.18 UTC Dubbed “the gatekeeper of Google products”, Marissa Mayer knows what she’s talking about. Ultimately, it falls at Mayer’s door to ensure the internet giant remains as agile, innovative and willing to experiment as it was a decade ago. “The challenge is how to stay true to what originally built this big and successful brand, with a lot of experimentation and still moving really fast,” Mayer said on Friday. “Now, when new people come in [to Google] who say their products are ‘not good enough for the Google name’ you have to tell them that the Google name was built on building stuff, throwing it out there, getting feedback, seeing how it works, ramping it up, making it a success and then managing resource afterwards.” What you end up with, then, is a proliferation of products. This is where Google has fallen short, Mayer admitted. “Some of our products should be features, like Latitude and Google Hotpot,” she said. “One of the things we need to do more is merge these products into core technologies, consolidate into Maps or Places. There’s probably more than one product [Latitude and Hotpot could fit into] but we still need to condense somewhat.” Mayer, an upwardly mobile Stanford University graduate who joined the Mountain View company almost 12 years ago, also admitted that Google Maps needs some form of customer support. (Late last year, Nicaragua refused to withdraw troops from a disputed parcel of land along its border with Costa Rica after Google Maps wrongly labelled it Nicaraguan territory.) “We do need to have some support there, and step up our customer service,” Mayer said. About 40% of Google Maps usage is local, according to Mayer, with 150 million people using the mobile Google Maps. (And drivers across the world travel 12bn miles a year using Google Maps navigation – who needs satnav?) Location-based services, including new releases of Maps for mobile, check-ins, deals and augmented reality, are evolving into quintessentially Google products. The world of “contextual discovery” – organising information, reviews and deals around a given location – is the local play on Google’s longest-standing ambition. Asked by the Guardian how Google manages to assuage privacy fears with cutting-edge consumer products, Mayer said that its Street View technology had got “better and better at blurring” licence plates and other opt-outs. Mayer said Google is “transparent” about the data it needs to inform its products, adding: “There are actually a lot of places that have a lot of data about you that people don’t know. I read the other week that credit card companies know with 98% accuracy two years before that you’re going to get divorced – that’s crazy. “But it means that there’s things that you don’t even know about, like changes in your spouse’s buying power. The real question is: because that data’s always been there but now it’s been recorded, the question is how are they handling it?”
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March 14 2011, 6:28am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Forget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire
If Google is the new Microsoft, is Apple the new Google or is it Facebook? Well no, not exactly. Google Apple facebook
This article titled “Forget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire” was written by John Naughton, for The Observer on Sunday 6th March 2011 00.18 UTC Once upon a time, when Apple was mainly a computer manufacturer, people used to liken it to BMW. That was because it made expensive, nicely designed products for a niche market made up of affluent, design-conscious customers who also served as enthusiastic – nay fanatical – evangelists for the brand. It was seen as innovative and quirky but not part of the industry’s mainstream, which was dominated by Microsoft and the companies making the PCs that ran Windows software. This view of Apple was summed up by Jack Tramiel, the boss of Commodore, when Steve Jobs first showed him the Macintosh computer. “Very nice, Steve,” growled Tramiel. “I guess you’ll sell it in boutiques.” That was a long time ago. Now, with a market capitalisation of just over $331bn, Apple is the second most valuable company in the world – bigger than Microsoft ($220bn), Oracle ($167bn) or Google ($196bn). The quirky little computer company has grown into a giant. But not necessarily a giant of the Big Friendly variety, as the world’s magazine publishers have recently discovered and as the music and software industries have known for some time. For Apple now controls the commanding heights of the online content business and it looks like doing the same to the mobile phone business. At the moment, it looks as though nobody has a good idea of how to stop it. Every year, Fortune magazine polls a sample of US CEOs asking for their opinions of their competitors. The results for 2011 have just been released and they show that Apple is the “most admired” company in America. This is the sixth year in a row that it has held that title. The reasons are obvious. On the product side, Apple creates beautifully designed, highly functional and user-friendly devices that delight customers and provide fat profit margins; it has a corporate culture that reliably delivers these products by specified dates; it’s much more innovative than any of its competitors; and it has a unique mastery of both hardware and software. On the strategic side, the company has displayed a deep understanding of technology and a shrewd appreciation of potential devices and services for which people will pay over the odds. Most CEOs would kill to run a company that possessed a quarter of these competencies. Apple appears to have them all. Its current dominance is built on three big ideas. The first is that design really matters. It’s not something you can outsource to a design consultancy – which is what most companies do – and design is as much about ease of use as it is about aesthetics. The second insight was that the maelstrom of illicit music downloading triggered by Napster couldn’t last and that the first company to offer a simple way of legally purchasing music (and, later, other kinds of content) online would clean up. And third – and most important – there was the insight that mobile phones are really just hand-held computers that happen to make voice calls and that it’s the computing bit that really matters. Most of the media commentary about Apple attributes all of these insights to Steve Jobs, the company’s charismatic co-founder, on the grounds that Apple’s renaissance began when he returned to the company in 1996. This may well be true, though it seems unlikely that such a comprehensive corporate recovery could be the work of a single individual, no matter how charismatic. What’s more plausible is that Apple’s corporate culture took on some of the characteristics of its CEO’s personality, much as Microsoft was once a corporate extension of Bill Gates, with all that implied in terms of aggression and drive. Whatever the explanation, the fact is that Apple now has a dominant position in several key businesses (content distribution and mobile computing) and is having a seriously disruptive impact on the mobile phone industry. In particular, its iTunes Store gives it control of the tollgate through which billions of paid-for music tracks and albums, videos and apps cascade down to millions of customers worldwide. It levies a commission on everything that passes through that gate. And every Apple mobile device sold can only be activated by hooking up to the gate. This gives Apple unparalleled power. Lots of other organisations offer paid-for downloads, but none has the credit card details of so many internet users who are accustomed to paying for stuff online. This was one reason why proprietors of print magazines began to slaver when the iPad appeared. Here at last was a way of getting people to pay for online content: just make it available on iTunes and let Apple collect the money. Sure, it rankled that Apple took 30%, but – hey – at least it would bring to an end the parasitic free riding that was endemic on the web. Henceforth, the web was dead: publishing magazines as iPad apps was the future. Then Apple abruptly changed the rules, stipulating that any publisher selling a digital subscription on a website must also make the same subscription offer within the app, from which Apple would take a 30% cut. Publishers have been furious about this, but there’s nothing they can do about it. If they want to do business on the iTunes store, then they have to do it Apple’s way. In itself, this was just an example of the Big Unfriendly Giant flexing its muscles, but it could be a harbinger of things to come. Umberto Eco once wrote a memorable essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven. Eco’s metaphor applies with a vengeance to the new generations of Apple iDevices, which are rigidly controlled appliances. You may think you own your lovely, shiny new iPhone or iPad, but in reality an invisible virtual string links it back to Apple HQ at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino. You can’t install anything on it that hasn’t had the prior approval of Mr Jobs and his subordinates. And if you are foolish enough to break the rules and seek your own route to salvation, then you may find when you next try to sync it with iTunes that it has turned into an expensive, beautifully designed paperweight. If that isn’t power, then I don’t know what is.
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March 5 2011, 6:28pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Government ready to get agile?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/03/government-ready-to-get-agile
What are “agile development” and an “agile approach”? What do they mean by a “platform” This report doesn’t say.
This article titled “Government ready to get agile?” was written by Mark Say, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 3rd March 2011 18.04 UTC It was a feather in the cap for the Institute of Government (IoG) when Ian Watmore stood on the podium at the launch of its System Error: Fixing the flaws in government IT report. The head of the Efficiency and Reform Group gave a thumbs up to the work, saying its emphasis on platforms and agile development provide a viable way forward for IT projects. His contribution amounted to a government approval, of sorts, to the idea, although he was careful not to go along with the report wholesale. Its preamble characterises the past record as a vicious circle, while Watmore claimed that the failed projects may have got the headlines but they have been outnumbered by those that have been successful. It was enough, however, to suggest that Whitehall is beginning to think about how to ‘do IT’ differently. The report holds nothing back in declaring that the combination of platform and agile holds the key for turning the vicious circle into a virtuous one. It defines the first element as a shared, government-wide approach to simplifying elements of IT, with the aim of cutting costs, reducing duplication and establishing shared standards. This entails three changes: increasing the amount of IT, including infrastructure, that is purchased as commodity items across government; setting up common support functions and shared infrastructure; and developing common standards and promoting existing open standards where possible. The IoG says this does imply a large recentralisation, but would require effective governance and accountability, and that the centre should establish which elements of IT are part of a platform. It should also manage compliance. This is quite familiar, much of it echoing the central thrusts of government IT strategy in recent years, but the agile approach provides a more distinct department. According to the report it comprises four features: modularity – splitting up complex problems into smaller components which can be worked on individually; iteration – testing elements, using feedback and learning from mistakes; responding to changes in business needs and responding as new technology becomes available; and placing users or business champions within teams to ensure the result meets their needs. The latter can also ensure that business users become closer to developments in IT. This leads to a number of recommendations. Among the stand-outs is that the government chief information officer should decide which elements of IT fall within the platform and which should remain outside for agile development. This means staying independent of department interests. Others include the need for an arbitration procedure for disputes between departments; that agile should be included in the training for government employees working in IT and project management; and that all departments should look at ensuring their governance, project approval and legal arrangements are compatible with agile. In addition, they should include a more flexible and iterative approach within future contracts, and look to run projects using agile principles during 2011-12. Much of this is thought provoking, although it is notable that Watmore did not refer to the recommendations in his speech. In fact, it’s possible to see some sticking points with the government approach. For example, the call for the government CIO to stay clear of departmental interests is hard to square with the fact that the new man in the post, Joe Harley, combines it with the role of CIO at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Also, it would be a big job to adapt governance and legal arrangements to agile, and including it within future contracts would take government onto new ground that could involve some pitfalls. But it has already made inroads. The report cites examples of the Home Office and Metropolitan Police using the technique in work on fraud prevention, and it is being used by the DWP in its programme to create a universal credit for benefit recipients. In addition, the leader of the Cabinet Office Skunkworks team for IT development, Mark O’Neill, also took a place on the IoG’s podium and emphasised the importance of agile in its approach to the job. At the very least, the heralding of platforms and agile development provides the opportunity for the government to declare this a turning point, and that it has broken away from an approach that too often failed to deliver the goods under its predecessor. Whether it comes to prevail throughout government, and raise the success rate of IT projects, remains to be seen. Like any methodology, it may be tempered by the cultural forces at work in departments, and run up against objections that the incremental approach could allow major projects – and some in government are large scale by their nature – to drift off track. There will also be questions about how it fits into some of Whitehall’s long term contracts with suppliers. The Cabinet Office seems willing to accept the spirit, if not the letter of the IoG report. It must hope that spirit is enough in itself to create a more positive perception of government IT. This article is published by Guardian Professional. For updates on public sector IT, join the Government Computing Network here.
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March 3 2011, 12:13pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
WordPress 3.1 Category Bug
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/25/wordpress-3-1-category-bug
I found a bug after upgrading WordPress to version 3.1 , a bug concerning the display of category content which can go unnoticed for a while. The category pages were redirecting to the blogs home page. The category RSS feeds were affected as well. The culprit seems to be a combination of WordPress 3.1 and the plug in “Simple Tags” The solution is either to disable the plugin, or else to go into the setting for Simple tags and uncheck “Active tags for page:”. Then wait for an update to the Simple Tags plugin, which is quite a useful one, I’d rather not have to do without. There may well be some other problems with WordPress 3.1 and some themes compatibility as well, so I’d be wary of automatic upgrading. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWordPress 3.1 Category Bug
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February 25 2011, 6:35am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
How to beat technology addiction
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/14/how-to-beat-technology-addiction
I don’t suffer from technology addiction, I could give it up any time i – oh, hang on, new facebook comments! This article titled “How to beat technology addiction” was written by Lucy Tobin, for The Guardian on Monday 14th February 2011 17.00 UTC You’re in the middle of reading a long, important document, but suddenly find you can’t concentrate. It’s not because the topic is snore-inducing or because it’s chocolate o’clock, but due to a tiny, red light, flashing insistently in the corner of your eye. A BlackBerry silently screaming for attention forces you to stop reading to see what the messagesays. Two minutes later, you do the same again. Whether it’s an iPhone or a trilling landline or a pinging email, the latest technology interrupts us all the time. But if you’ve ever wondered exactly what effect the myriad interruptions have on your working day, research by academics at the University of Kent is a worthy interruption. The faculty of psychology at Kent set up a “reading laboratory” with an eyeball-tracking camera to monitor eye movements. It then linked up just over 100 testers and asked them to read a passage of text on a computer screen, before interrupting the participants with one-minute messages – like phone calls. They were then told to return to the original reading, while the eye-tracking camera analysed how they did so. The researchers, led by Ulrich Weger, a senior lecturer in psychology at Kent, found that participants re-read a substantial portion of text before reaching the point where they left the original task – so much so, that each interruption caused an average 17% increase in the total time it took to read the whole passage. Weger was inspired to carry out the research by his own procrastination. “I noticed how easily I was distracted when working on my computer,” he explains. “I wasted time by reading emails whenever they came into my inbox. I noticed that once I had started reading the name of the sender, I read the first line of the text. Once I mastered that, I continued reading the entire message, and once I got to that point, I felt compelled to respond because there was no point in leaving an already half-finished task. Then sometimes I needed extra information to answer the message, so had to add other tasks.” Weger says his many disruptions meant he “often wasn’t making any progress with what I was originally working on – and in the end felt quite breathless and exhausted. I thought I couldn’t be the only person struggling with this.” Talking to colleagues confirmed the scale of the problem, and Weger secured funding from the Economic and Social Research Council to start investigating. He believes the Kent research is important because our modern working environment is “full of tempting – and sometimes not so tempting – sources of interruptions”, but admits it’s tough to find ways to deal with them. “The best thing to do is to try and avoid interruptions in the first place – often people don’t really need to respond to an interruption, but do so because it’s tempting,” he says. Weger’s research showed that simply leaving a mark on the page before responding to an interruption can allow you to resume reading much more efficiently afterwards, cutting 10% from the time it takes to return to the same point in the text. The academics also looked at the impact of background speech and music, and found that when participants were exposed to simultaneous background speech while reading a text, it took them significantly longer to get through it. Some workers might seize upon those findings as a reason to kill off open-plan offices. But Weger says there will always be other distractions. He advises turning off attention-sappers such as automatic email notifications, and arranging desks so they don’t point towards anything interesting – like people walking around outside, but admits: “Sometimes these strategies come with their own costs – turning off your iPod or mobile, for example, can trigger a yearning or even pressure that can get quite distracting in itself. “The best way to overcome our addiction to new information is to learn to control yourself: you can do exercises to help … using thought-control exercises like concentrating on a simple imagined object for a few minutes every day,” he explains. Weger says a concentration exercise he found in a book written by Rudolf Steiner 100 years ago is still useful. “As soon as you notice that you have diverted to another thought, pull yourself away from the intrusive thought and turn back to the image straight away. After practice, you get more competent at shielding yourself against the countless tempting stimuli in our world of information overload.” It sounds very virtuous, but Weger admits he still gets lured into the trap of time-wasting procrastination – even while writing up his research into it. “I still struggle with distractions all the time,” he says. And as for BlackBerrys and their smartphone cousins, Weger says they’re not all bad, and have a “mixed effect”. He explains: “The upside of these devices is that you don’t have to go home to get the information you need. But the downside is that if you allow yourself to become dependent, they will haunt you. As with all things: if you can make use of something that makes your life easier while maintaining enough inner strength and freedom to avoid dependence, you are the master. If you do not cultivate this inner strength and freedom, you become the slave.”
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February 14 2011, 11:32am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
I Declare Google Reader Bankruptcy
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2010/08/20/i-declare-google-reader-bankruptcy
I’ve just gone and done it, I’ve declared Google Reader bankruptcy. That means not only that I’ve marked hundreds of unread items as read (I do that regularly anyway) but that I’ve unsubscribed from everything and deleted all tags and folders as well. Here’s the screenshot to prove it: Google Reader I’m sure it’s not difficult to guess why I did this, because of the technological pseudo-complaint they call “information overload”. It’s simple to subscribe to newly discovered feeds, all too easy to accumulate hundreds of unread items, and satisfyingly tempting to hit the big “Mark As Read” button, thus rendering the whole exercise pointless. By having so many feeds in my feed reader that I could only scan through the headlines in “List View” I had become victim to the copywriters’ ploy of adding stand-out, shocking, intriguing or provocative titles – only to be disappointed so often by the substance of the article. Now I want to go back to the old method of choosing top quality feeds that I wish to follow properly, bringing up the full text of the article in front of me before deciding whether I need to read it fully, take action as a result, or skip to the next post. So here I am at day one, with an empty feed reader open to suggestions from my own readers here. Are there any RSS feeds you would like to recommend to me for the purpose of subscribing, reading regularly and inwardly digesting?
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August 20 2010, 2:45am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Free FTP Client Software - Using Filezilla to update Websites
Free FTP Client Software for Windows Filezilla is a free and open source FTP client software program used for connnecting to a webserver to update websites. Here’s a short tutorial video which deals with downloading, setting up and connecting Filezilla FTP to a website. I describe the twin pane approach, and show you how to download a website file, edit it , test and then re-upload so the new version is live on your website.
This Filezilla video can be watched from right here below as an embedded YouTube video, do try the HD (High Definition) and full screen options:Or you can download the full original 84Mb video file onto your computer using the free file hosting service at divshare: Download Filezilla FTP Video Tutorial Filezilla FTP client software is available in Windows, Mac OS X and Linux versions.
Good alternative FTP clients apart from Filezilla are Cute FTP for Windows and Mac (small charge) , and on a Mac there are also Fetch and Cyberduck.
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May 8 2009, 4:41am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Seashore Image Editor for Mac - Better than The Gimp
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2009/04/18/seashore-image-editor-for-mac-better-than-the-gimp
I can’t remember where I first came across Seashore, but its been sitting in my applications folder and dock for a couple of months and on the odd occasion when I need to do do some image editing I’ve come to rely on it without really feeling the pain of a learning curve. So here’s my software review: Seashore is a native OS X application which does image editing on a Mac. Free and Open Source, it’s much smaller and lighter than Photoshop and easier to use than The Gimp, and being an installed application is much more responsive than an online image editor such as Picnic. So Seashore fits in nicely for anything a bit more than than basic iPhoto tweaking, and a bit less than full blown Photoshop pro tools. Seashore loads very quickly indeed on my underpowered Mac mini, and immediately presents a simple and recognisable tools palette. So you can get up and running doing simple stuff with images really quickly, but when it comes to more advanced operations, and inevitably the need arises sooner rather than later, then the shortcomings of Seashore in its present state become apparant.
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Technorati Tags: gimp, image editing, image editor, images, Mac, mac mini, open source, os x, Photoshop, picnic, seashore, software, software review
Related posts:image manipulationPhixr ArtHow to make image links in MediaWiki
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April 18 2009, 6:37am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Twitter lists gathered on a wiki blog or forum
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2008/08/02/twitter-lists-gathered-on-a-wiki-blog-or-forum
As the use of twitter continues to spread despite the restricted service and downtime, a commonplace event for communities is to start compiling lists of links to each other’s twitter accounts. These are handy for anybody who hasn’t already built up their network because you can quickly add a bunch of people who are all involved in the same interest or practice. Acting as a kind of jump start into twitter for groups, it feels like a community indicator of some sort. If the community is based mainly on a web forum or email list then it can start with a message from one member who is a twitter enthusiast, that turns into a long thread with the same message re-quoted and a new line added at the bottom. That’s not ideal, but it works for a while and builds up a volume of attention to the activity. Over on one bloggers’ forum we tried compiling the list of member’s twitter links and putting it into a new service called “dropio” where anybody could upload new files and links, but that service proved problematic. When the same process broke out at E-mint, a community for online facilitators, ‘community managers’ and moderators it wasn’t long before somebody - Ed Mitchell - said “Definitely a wiki job, this one” and so here we have the …. E-mint twitter list on DARwiki The advantage of having the twitter list on a wiki is that you can link to what will be always the latest version and that members can easily add themselves or make corrections. If it’s a person-centric or blog-centric community such as Darren Rowse’s pro-blogger readers, the twitter list is gathered from the comments left on an invitation post and then published on the blog. If the community is forming in a friendfeed room then there’s probably no need to compile a twitter list at all because the aggregator sort of does that automatically in that each member’s tweets are in their own streams and twitter links in their services page - which stands in as a profile page on friendfeed. What other formats and processes have you seen out there for gathering twitter lists?
Posted by Andy Roberts Twitter lists gathered on a wiki blog or forum
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August 2 2008, 5:56am | Comments »
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