my sometimes-skeptical social commentary

Archive for the ‘computer stuff’ Category

You can watch the video on YouTube by clicking this link. YouTube user horseattack wrote this about the video:

“Lego felt tip 110″ printer connected to an Apple Mac. This is not mindstorms, I designed/built/coded it all from scratch including analog motor electronics, sensors and printer driver, the USB interface uses a “wiring” board.

FAQ: Track name? “Christopher and Raphael just popper Shinichi Osawa distortion disco edit”

FAQ: How long did this take? Hard to say, maybe 3 weeks working evenings.

FAQ: Just a remake of the 1092a? No, I’d never seen the 1092a until now. However some of the parts came from a 8094 kit amongst others many years ago. It is made to my own design, but I acknolwedge influences and the great work of the official lego designers !

FAQ: Does this use mindstorms? Nope, wiring demo board + homemade analog electronics and sensors.

FAQ: DPI? Dots per inch? Approx 75 DPI

FAQ: PPM? Pages per minute? Maybe 1 is pushing it, I sped things up a little in the video editing to keep it interesting to watch

FAQ: Helvetica? Yes of course, respect to those who noticed

FAQ: Full color version/more colours? Originally I was going to do 3 colour version, but I had to simplify as only have 4 lego motors.

FAQ: Open source, schematics etc? Yes, I’ll try to get around to this soon.

FAQ: Wrote your own driver? Yes, how sad is that!!

FAQ: Are? you using some sort of MCU demo board(the black pcb)? Yes. [1] http://wiring.org.co/hardware/

FAQ: re: Mac vs PC abuse? Video not meant as a Mac advert and I’m sorry if the Apple logo offends anyone. I just find them easier to use.

FAQ: Felt tip damage drying up? Yes this is a problem, but one felt tip usually lasts for quite a few pages.

FAQ: Felt tip auto-capping? Nope, sorry.

FAQ: Sensor info: Horizontal positioning using homemade shaft encoder? (black/white rotating lego squares you see in the vid) with a SY-CR102 photo reflector from Maplins, (only £0.89 or $1.30). This is into a sampled analog input as I couldn’t get full enough saturation to trigger the ext interrupt pins. There are also push buttons built into lego bricks for left and right end stop detection.

I’ve announced on my facebook page that I’m leaving facebook’s privacy problems behind. Rather than re-write the arguments that persuaded me, I’ll just link to them in this post. (Each link opens in a new window.)

• first, here’s a bunch of news articles related to the problems people are having with facebook: Google News Search
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: Six Things You Need to Know About Facebook Connections
• New York Times: Facebook Glitch Brings New Privacy Worries
• C|Net News: Five hidden dangers of Facebook

Leaving facebook means that I have to figure out how to communicate with the people I’m connected to there who don’t have my phone number, email address, this web site address, and whose contact info I might not have. I’m letting my facebook “friends” know in advance, so hopefully I can make the transition without losing those connections. If you don’t think I have your contact info already, would you send me an email? thomas@woodswebdesign.com

I’ve considered that there are “real life” friends of mine who aren’t even using facebook, and I’ve managed to stay connected to them, using the old-fashioned methods like phone calls, and going to see them in person. I know that’s not possible for everyone on my facebook friends list, but facebook has been bugging me for a while, and it’s time to make the break.

I was one of the first grown-ups I know to start using FaceBook. I encouraged a lot of people to sign up, because I wanted to use it to (a) keep in touch with them, (b) play them in Scrabble, and (c) it’s just plain entertaining. Lots of my friends use their status update to say something very funny.

I’ve become re-acquainted with long-lost friends from grammar school and summer camps …where I haven’t been in a couple decades. I’ve played Scrabble against my mom, against geographically distant friends, and even against my girlfriend Valerie, because, even though we have been dating seriously for months, there are plenty of evenings when our schedules don’t allow us to play in person. So facebook has its value, right?

And yet, I have withdrawn from facebook again. I’ve withdrawn from facebook several times in the past, mainly because I find that it frustrates me more than it entertains me.

I have two close friends who still don’t use it, despite my many urgings that they just give in and “get on the facebook” like everyone else. I wonder if the frustration:entertainment ratio is something that my two hold-out friends have taken into consideration as they avoid joining the throngs of their friends and family who are on facebook.

There’s a good chance that anyone reading this post is a facebook user (there are more facebook users than there are Americans). So, you might be wondering, What are these frustrations?

To start with:

1. No filters.
2. No context.
3. False sense of community.

These problems are not exclusive to facebook, because there are other web sites that have the same problems. But facebook is so ubiquitous that these problems are exacerbated, in my opinion.

So let me explain:

1. Let’s start with No filters.

   No, I don’t mean that facebook should be censored. I mean that people don’t use their own built-in filters, and write a lot of junk that is just too much information (TMI). I suppose TMI is a terribly subjective qualification, isn’t it. Well, I think we all know TMI when we see it. The problem with facebook is that, once I am someone’s friend, I get their status updates, TMI and all (unless and until I hide their updates from my update stream, but then it’s too late, you can’t un-ring that bell).

2. No context is a problem, because what someone says in a Wall post or comment or status update can mean something completely different than what is intended.

   The nature of the internet is pictures, video, and short sentences. Non sentences. Smilies and non-word TXTs. Most people reading for entertainment won’t get this far into an article online. (But not you, because you just read this!) But, real life is complex, and what we say requires context in order for its real value to be implicit. What we “say” in facebook posts is not like “saying” at all, because 80% of the meaning we convey in conversation is communicated through body language and facial expressions.

3. The no context problem is related to the problem of facebook’s False sense of community.

   We don’t really know each other through our status updates and wall posts. How could we, when they say 80% of communication is through body language? Of course we know the facebook friends who are our real-life friends, but that’s what fraction of our social network?

   Another problem is caused by how easy it is to post something or post a comment on someone else’s post. No, I’m not arguing that we should go back to writing letters on paper and mailing them in envelopes (anyone have any stamps?), but there is an intentionality in letter-writing that is skipped–deleted–in the process that facebook and other Web 2.0 web sites employ to make it easier to use their sites. Is easier better? Is the movie better than the classic novel?

For example, to use a recent issue that’s still in the news, two different views on health insurance reform are going to come head-to-head in the short bursts of status updates and Wall posts. The perspective of an uninsured family who has a sick parent is not the perspective of the small business owner who has to decide on whether to expand the business or provide health insurance for existing employees. Because there’s no context, the false sense of community betrays us when our different points of view turn into flame-wars (personal attacks) or regress into ideological parroting.

So, what am I expecting from a technology? Nothing. It’s a tool, just like any other tool we have at our disposal. Remember when they said email would kill off letter-writing? When wikipedia was considered a threat to truth? When there was fear that Google would kill off research? Well, the TV has already killed off a great hunk of community and electronic media is working over public discourse…what’s left?

I’m suggesting that we should be more intentional in the way that we use web sites like facebook. I don’t know the full answer, and that’s why I’m taking a break from facebook, but I’m sure that I know people who have an idea–people who are already engaged in real community–and might have some helpful suggestions that they could post here as comments.

Will I go back on facebook? Sure, it’s just a question of when. Before I start logging in again, I want to have a better sense of why I’m there, a plan. I need to have more in mind than just “play Scrabble and find old friends” in order for there to be more value than frustration.

I love that there are so many tech gadgets available now. When I was a kid, I was the 2nd person in my Area Code to buy his own Commodore VIC-20. (No, I have no way of proving I was the 2nd…. But I do know that I wasn’t the first, because my friend Craig bought his first.) I never would have dreamed that things like the iPad would ever be created, much less at a price that we commoners could afford.

I am not shopping for cool tech gadgets myself, but I like to know about them. So, I look at their specs, their features, prices, and I even read background articles about how the designs were developed, how they affect (or are affected by) other tech gadgets that are available, etc. With all that info, it is easy to form an opinion, and it is easy to picture how I might use the gadget. But it is not any easier to choose one gadget out of the available set of gadgets.

If I had to actually make a decision and pick one of the new gadgets that has come out in the past month, I don’t know which I would choose. First of all, I don’t think I actually need anything. It’s all a matter of want, which I think most commoners would agree is also the case with them. What can’t we do without gadgets? I probably have more gadgets than I can fully utilize as it is, but please don’t ask me to be circumspect about my consumerism, I don’t know if I have enough headache pills to handle that.

One of my best friends bought a Kindle, and when he showed it to me, I was amazed. It is very good at what it does. And it does some things that aren’t necessarily advertised, which my friend was quick to show me. Cool. If I were a person who does a lot of reading (oh, I miss grad school), I would need a Kindle.

And then along came the iPad, which also lets you do a lot of reading, but it does a lot more than the Kindle, too. And a lot of the things that the iPad does are things that I like to do: look at photos, read web sites, listen to music, find stuff on a map, etc. Cool. If I were a person who didn’t already have a laptop computer, I would need an iPad.

But then I read in the tech news web sites that Google is going to try to get in on this game too. Google published some pictures of what a portable flat computer thingy might look like if it were running the Chrome web browser (which Google gives away for free). Google is also putting out operating systems for mobile phones and computers now, so the only cost involved in using their product is the hardware, which is mainly produced by other people.

You may know that I prefer Apple computers over Windows computers, but I do use Windows (I’m writing this blog entry on an old Windows XP desktop), and I use Linux a lot, too (specifically, ubuntu). My newest computer, a netbook I use for meeting with clients on-site, runs both Windows 7 and the netbook remix of Ubuntu, and I like both of those systems about the same. So, at least in terms of operating systems, I don’t have to choose one–I use whatever is handy at the moment, and whatever best suits the activity or project that I’m working on.

And that’s what guides my decision-making process for the mobile gadgets I started this post with. I have a mobile phone that is not a smart phone. Would I like a phone running Android? Sure, you bet. Would I like an iPhone? No doubt. But neither of those mobile gadgets is better suited to accomplish what my current phone does for me. And while they are cool, I won’t be buying a Kindle, an iPad, or a Chrome-something, because, as far as the developers have brought them so far, they don’t suit me any better than the gadgets I already have.

At my day job, I occasionally come across things that I want to remember to do at home, but by the time I get home, I forget…does that ever happen to you?

So today, I’m marking a couple To Do list items down on this blog, so that, when I get home, I’ll remember the web addresses of the programs I want to try out at home.

1. The first is a free application for syncing the files between computers.
   • Dropbox

I use use three computers at home (an Apple notebook, a Linux desktop, and a Windows desktop), and there are times when I have to stop and think, on which computer is the file I need? (Okay, I admit that often, when I think of such questions, I don’t use proper grammar, so what I really think at those moments when I need a certain file is more like “where’s that file at?”)

And the beauty part is that it works with Linux, Windows, and Mac computers! It’s perfect for my needs.

2. This next program I came across is going to help me get rid of a different free application that I haven’t been able to uninstall from my Mac. It was only free for a trial period, and it wasn’t that great, so I didn’t purchase the program when the trial period ended.
   • Apptrap

   Even though I dragged that application into the trash on my notebook, the program still gives me pop-ups when I start Firefox. It’s annoying, but as far as I know, it doesn’t cause any problems with my system or with Firefox’ I just have to click Quit every time.

Let me know, if you have tried either of these programs, how they have worked for you. Or, if you use other programs to accomplish the same thing, let me know what they are, and how well they work. FREE is preferred, but if you know of a low-cost file-syncing program that works on Mac, Windows, and Linux, let me know, in case Dropbox doesn’t work.