Rumor has it

Posted on May 27, 2013 by

If the Internet is good at anything, it’s spreading information really, really fast. It’s even been shown that the reports of an earthquake actually travel faster than the shock waves, acting as a sort of early warning system for people relatively close to the epicenter. Unfortunately, it’s also used to spread completely untrue things just as fast. I’ve seen an uptick of this lately, and it’s time to say something.

It takes all of about two minutes to search for a snippet of whatever story is being passed along to make sure it’s the real deal. I’ve seen fake accounts of missing kids, allegations of non-existent teachers being fired, and half-true stories that heap in a lot of speculation with the few facts reported. Most of these stories exploit your existing positions (read: confirmation bias”), the relative ease with which the information can be spread (even more so than the old-school email forward way of doing it), and/or your urge to help out someone in need. By spreading around things that can be quite easily proven untrue, nobody is going to take your seriously when a real kid goes missing or there’s a real scandal that should get greater visibility.

So, please, for your own good and the good of those around you, start exercising at least a small amount of skepticism and do at least a cursory check to make sure the information is true. Failing to do so just makes you look silly.

PS I left a stack of tin foil hats in the corner for those of you believing that Snopes is a plot by politically-motivated multi-billionaires to spread disinformation. Help yourself.

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Another parenting win

Posted on May 24, 2013 by

image

Yes, Liam is paying Pac-man on his Kindle. Next up: some Missile Command.

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Leave your comfort zone and amazing things can happen

Posted on May 23, 2013 by

For almost seven years now, I’ve been blogging about broadband over at Free UTOPIA. It was born out of a sense of frustration that phone and cable companies both suck, and neither of them is going to do something about it. Only a handful of cities decided to do something about it, and most of them seem to not have the stomach to really push it through, at least not to a point where other cities would do it too. I made the decision that it was time to do it myself.

Comcast drives me nuts, CenturyLink is even worse, and I didn’t want to be trapped in moving to get in on the kind of next-generation services offered by UTOPIA and now Google Fiber. That’s why I started the White City Telecommunications Cooperative in March. This week, after a few weeks of getting my ducks in a row, 2000 postcards trying to drum up interest went out to my neighbors. I really had no idea what I was doing, but it seems like the only way to reach that many people in a very short time span.

The results have been amazing. So far, less than two days into it, I’ve gotten over 40 people interested in signing up. (For those unaware, a 2% response rate to untargeted direct mail campaigns is phenomenal.) Lawyers and accountants are offering to help me setup the legal entities and books. I’ve even got a resource offering to help finance the thing. By this time next year, I could be posting from a sweet gigabit connection for not a lot more than I pay for 1/20th that speed.

I couldn’t have done this without help. Pete Ashdown, you’re a rock star. I asked if you’d cover the cost of the postcards to get things rolling and you didn’t really give it much of a second thought before saying yes. Alex Lawrence, you’re the man too. If you hadn’t invited me to Startup Weekend Ogden, I wouldn’t have thought I’d be willing and able to take on a project so much bigger than I am. Bob Derber and Dave Shaw, your offers of help in places where I’m totally weak gave me the confidence that I could actively (instead of passively) move this forward. Todd Marriott, your endless pursuit of improving broadband by whatever means are available should inspire us all.

Being comfortable sucks. I’m going into some wild and uncharted territory, and it’s both terrifying and exhilarating. You should try it and leave your own mark on the world.

Posted in Geek, Life, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Children are not the worst thing on a plane

Posted on April 1, 2013 by

Conventional wisdom is that screaming children are the quickest way to ruin a flight. Personally, I feel more empathy for the parents than anything else because we’ve been there multiple times. Our last flying experience revealed, though, that there is something more annoying by an order of magnitude: drunk college kids on a flight to Las Vegas for Spring Break. They’re just as loud, just as obnoxious, but they have the additional downside of being old enough to know better.

I’ve never been more thankful for noise-cancelling headphones and a smartphone full of movies.

Posted in Tender Lumplings, Travel | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Sennheiser: Great Product, Even Better Service

Posted on March 22, 2013 by

sennheiser-logoA number of years ago, Shauna bought me what are arguably some of the finest headphones you’ll ever slap on your noggin. Prior to that, I hadn’t even heard of Sennheiser, but it didn’t take long for me to become a fan. The mid-range PXC-250s always impressed me with clean sound and amazing noise reduction. I was also impressed with the speed with which they did a repair the one time they broke. Even though it was basically my fault (I had a static discharge when I picked them up), they fixed them and sent them back with no questions asked.

I was sad, then, when they finally started really failing out after about six-ish years. For a while, I’d have to thump the noise-cancelling electronics against my palm a few times to get sound in both ears. A couple of months ago, even that stopped working. I sadly thought that I’d have to buy a brand new set to enjoy that sweet, sweet audio goodness.

And then I got a great idea: why not see if there’s a repair service? Lo and behold, there is! For just $50, I could send in my busted pair for headphones for a quick fix. Given that it’s a good $150-200 to replace them, this was an absolute bargain. They even provided a shipping label so I could just drop off the box at a UPS Store on my way to work.

Today, I got a box from them. When I opened it, it didn’t contain my headphones. No, apparently Sennheiser decided to send me a brand new pair of PCX-250 IIs, the upgraded model! They’re lighter, use only one battery instead of two, and fix a cord design from the predecessor that I hadn’t much cared for. It was one of the most pleasant surprises in customer service that I’ve had in a long time.

If you’re looking for a great set of headphones that keep on giving, you should buy Sennheiser. They’ve made me a big fan.

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Why and How to De-Google Your Blog

Posted on March 22, 2013 by

As part of the blog clean-up, I spent a fair amount of time cleaning up plugins and figuring out what I really want my little corner of the Interwebs to do. My mission with bringing blogging back is to own more of my own content, and after the announced closure of Google Reader and subsequent good experiences with Tiny Tiny RSS, I found myself wondering if I really wanted to keep on using more Google services to power my blog. Inevitably, I came to the decision that while I like many of Google’s services, the ones I used here needed to go.

Continue reading →

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A fresh coat of paint

Posted on March 21, 2013 by

It was way overdue, but the blog has gotten a few facelifts and important changes to be aware of.

First off, yes, that’s a brand new theme. The old one was not only quite stale, but it was starting to barf up all kinds of visual glitches on modern browsers. This new one looks much nicer on widescreen monitors, and the text now wraps around images the way it was intended. If anything looks funky, please let me know.

Second, email notifications have changed slightly. Instead of using FeedBurner, all subscriptions will now go through the Subscribe2 plugin. Don’t worry; you don’t need to do a thing. I already migrated all existing email subscriptions.

Third (and related to the above), if you’re using RSS, you should change your feed to point to the site feed instead of FeedBurner. No, I’m not shutting off FeedBurner, but once Google gets around to doing it, don’t you want to keep on getting those updates? Of course you do.

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Replace Google Reader (and own your data too!)

Posted on March 20, 2013 by

In my search for a Google Reader replacement, I’ve decided that letting someone else be in charge is not really an option. Who’s to say that whatever I pick won’t alter the terms of the arrangement or disappear at a moment’s notice? I decided right then and there to be firmly committed to a product that would let me keep on using it even if every single person who created it died in a plane crash. Of course, this is mostly right up the alley of people who are either computer nerds or have access to one and pay a hosting company. If this isn’t you, maybe you should keep on moving.

The first option I really played with is Fever. It’s an interesting approach to RSS. Sure, you can use it like a standard Reader-like program, but the real power is that it is intended to figure out what stories are the hottest and provide you an at-a-glance view of what the big news stories are. While most of us carefully curate our feeds based on what gives us the best signal-to-noise, adding a lot of low signal-to-noise feeds as “kindling” helps it figure out what the top news stories are. It’s not perfect, but it does well enough that you might decide it’s worth the $30. If you’re a news junkie and don’t want to read 20 different takes on the latest iDevice, Fever may be worth checking out.

The second option (and the one I’ll probably be using the most) is Tiny Tiny RSS. It’s a free open source application that almost entirely mimics Google Reader’s information-dense view. It takes more work than Fever to install; the config file has to be set by hand and you have to manually import the initial database. There’s also some odd plugin holes. The current distribution has Twitter and Google+ sharing plugins, but nothing for Facebook. You can grab one off of the forums, though, and I imagine it’ll be included in future releases. I even wrote a Hootsuite plugin in about 10 minutes and added it. In additional to being open and extensible, Tiny Tiny RSS also allows multiple users and is entirely free.

Both apps have decent mobile sites, though Tiny Tiny RSS also offers both official and unofficial Android apps. Fever won’t officially support Android browsers, so you’re on your own if something goes wrong. Both run on any setup with PHP and MySQL, though Tiny Tiny RSS will also let you use PostgreSQL. If you want to keep both apps up to date, you’ll want to have access to crontab. Importing your feeds from Google Reader is fairly easy, though you’ll need to grab your data via Takeout and upload the OPML file. It’s not as easy as a service like Feedly that will simply scrape your account.

One self-install option I didn’t try out is NewsBlur. It mostly touts their paid accounts, but you can download and install it as well. I haven’t gotten around to doing so and, since Tiny Tiny RSS perfectly fits my daily needs, I don’t know that I’ll get around to it. The demo I played with was Reader-esque, but it didn’t achieve the level of density I was looking for.

What about you? Have you already found an alternative to Google Reader, or are you now inspired to roll your own?

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Google has declared war on the open Internet

Posted on March 18, 2013 by

I’ve been a self-described Google whore for a long time now. I started using the search engine not long after it first went public (and displaced then-giants like Yahoo and AltaVista), I got in on the Gmail beta way back in late 2004, and Chrome has been my go-to browser for the last several years. I’ve owned Android phones for over three years, Google Reader took over my RSS duties in 2008, and I got into Google+ on the second day of the beta. To say that my online life is heavily Google-centric would be an understatement.

And yet, I’m seeing that Google has decided to throw its motto of “don’t be evil” right out the window. It started last week when they announced that Google Reader was going to be killed off in less than three months. I was floored at this decision. I’d built a finely-tuned workflow around Reader that made wading through 800+ posts a day a matter of maybe 30 minutes. I was even perfectly happy with killing off the social features of Reader for Google+ since the latter would show in my search results. So what if it hadn’t been updated? It was working great for me and, as I’ve learned, hundreds of friends and acquaintances.

The statement they released, that they wanted people to focus on Google+, sent an absolute chill up my spine despite being an enthusiastic user of their service. It reeked of “like my Facebook page” or “follow me on Twitter”, approaches that stick people in walled gardens. The message is clear: stop following RSS feeds, stop publishing RSS feeds, and put your content on our service instead. I wouldn’t be able to quickly scan the headlines anymore, and sharing content outside of the walled garden would be an incredibly difficult task. All of the utility of open standards would go right down the drain in Google’s pursuit of lock-in, a tactic reserved for giants protecting their turf, not innovators who attract and retain users through best-in-class products.

Google says it wants to pursue a social strategy, but it has just revealed that it doesn’t really understand what that means. The entire point of Google+ is to add increasingly useful curated search results from your social connections. Reader feeds that by providing an easy way to find and share content from the sources you trust most without an information overload. By removing a major source of that curated layer, arguably from the most influential user base, they’re shooting themselves in the foot. “Reshare content in the walled garden”, they say, but Google+, as good as it is, doesn’t handle drinking from the fire hose very well.

The entire decision seems to be thinking that forcing people into Google services, rather than demonstrating their utility and letting that speak for itself, is some kind of winning strategy. It’s not. It’s pissing users off in a way that I think they seriously miscalculated. As someone else pointed out, the whole “focusing on our core strengths” nonsense rings pretty hollow when their hottest projects are a fiber network in Kansas City, fancy glasses with a built-in camera, self-driving cars, and notebooks that nobody is actually buying.

This knife in the back of RSS is big enough to signal that Google isn’t interested in openness anymore, but it’s not the only sign. An early warning shot was when Google Shopping went from a relatively useful (if often gamed) pricing search engine to a pay-for-play listing service. More recently, Google blocked anyone outside of Gmail from inviting Gmail users to chat. Their explanation is that it’s an attempt to curb spam (which I’ve seen maybe twice since Talk got introduced), but it’s pretty darn hamfisted for a company that manages to only drop one piece of spam every three months into my inbox while sending thousands of others into the digital dustbin.

How long will it be before Google kills tons of other services the same way? Feedburner likely has a target on its back since its only purpose is interfacing with the RSS standard that Google now seems to despise. Blogger will probably get killed and you’ll be told to post on Google+ instead and like it. Google Groups? Go use Google+ Communities. It’s only a matter of time before your favorite service could end up on the chopping block.

I’m starting to very seriously reevaluate my relationship both with Google and any other service provider. I already started blogging again as a way to own my content. Now I’m dedicated to making sure that my replacement for Reader is similarly self-hosted so that it can’t be turned off. I’m going to switch my accounts away from using my Gmail address to the one associated with my own domain (and I will be backing up email locally just for good measure). As much utility as I get from a homogeneous hosted platform, I need to be able to have a contingency when those services get pulled. I suggest you consider doing the same.

Posted in Geek | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

SimCity, New Releases, and the Value Proposition

Posted on March 12, 2013 by

A little game by the name of SimCity was released last week after a decade since the last release (or, in Internet terms, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth). I’ve personally been pretty excited about it, but I don’t really like paying full price for games.  After getting totally burned on the train wreck that was Master of Orion III, I swore off buying any title when it was first released. (I made a special exception for Borderlands 2 and I REGRET NOTHING.) This has since proven to be a smart move. Not only does the game end up getting properly vetted by the gaming public, it also gets patched, comes down in price, and runs exceptionally well on newer hardware.

I’ve managed to play some spectacular A-list titles without breaking the bank. Arkham Asylum? Fantastic game with a great story and top notch voice acting. My patience saved me $52. Borderlands? Same deal. Civilization V? Half off and I got a bunch of DLC that otherwise would have been much, much more. I’ve enjoyed a lot of games more by making sure the value proposition is more in my favor. (My general rule of thumb is that if I end up paying under $1 per hour of game play, it’s a good value.) On the flip side, it’s also saved me from some gaming agony. I’m glad I waited to see how Diablo III would pan out because none of my friends play it anymore and I doubt I would enjoy it based on their feedback.

I’m now having similar feelings about SimCity and have even gone so far as to dust off my old Rush Hour discs to play that instead. EA managed to completely bungle the entire game launch by making an Internet connection mandatory to even load it. This hasn’t sat well for a variety of reasons. The consensus is now that EA forced the issue in a ham-fisted attempt to curb piracy. It has since backfired in such a way as to make all other launch fiascoes look like mere hiccups.

Here’s the problem: you don’t really own the game you purchased. EA has decided that if they don’t feel like keeping the game servers up and running, they can and will disconnect you without any obligation. Meanwhile, industrious pirates are working tirelessly to circumvent what an anonymous Maxis programmer called entirely unnecessary. It’s only a matter of days before anyone who doesn’t care about the “social” aspects of the game will be using a patch to make sure they can’t get disconnected on a whim. Pirates will have to wait a few days, but so do many of your paying customers.

This debacle (which will hopefully be followed by EA’s retreat from using game-as-a-service connectivity on something that isn’t) highlights the big problem with buying early, that you pay more for the privilege of additional uncertainty. That isn’t creating value, and it’s part of why I have an upper boundary of maybe $40 for an individual game. Heck, I’m spoiled enough that I often wait for titles to be under $10 on Steam even if I’m sure I’ll enjoy it. I have a very limited budget for that kind of entertainment, and doubly so when I consider the time investments required.

The next time you’re thinking about a new release, ask yourself if you’re better served by waiting a year or two. Odds are good that the answer is yes.

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