!titled

inter-medium foibles

logand — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 20:30:19 +0000

Note: Written in 2008 and revised slightly. The same observations apply now, so I have an active project to roll my own newspaper.

Awhile back I decided to see if it would be worth my time to indulge in new-fangled physical news delivery mechanism: Newspapers. Sure I know that pundits have repeatedly declared newspapers to be dead, but they’ve got some cool features going for them – they’re portable, balanced (more or less) and you can even rearrange everything with scissors and make your own news if you don’t like the way the world’s going.

So I jumped on the web (oh the irony) to see if any decent papers were still drawing breath. There are still a few papers out there, but on most websites, it was a chore just finding information about how to subscribe to the paper. Their front-pages were plastered with the obligatory news and summaries, but subscription information is usually relegated to some minor out of the way link, often hidden behind a menu or down at the bottom of the page. You know, where they usually hide important things like “Terms of Service” and other stuff which has to be there but that they really don’t want you to notice.

A rare exception is the venerable New York Times, with well-placed front-page links to subscription information. I was all ready to be impressed until I noticed that if you want to get the print edition of the New York Times you have to call them. On a telephone. If you’re on the internet and already went to all the trouble of finding their page, there’s no excuse for forcing someone to pick up a telephone and spend even more time in order to become your customer; you should have all the information right there, with multiple payment and delivery options, nice flashy graphics and text describing how much better the NYT could make your life. You can’t even see how much delivery of the paper edition will cost online. No wonder they are losing customers. Even with a spiffy R&D Lab (doing some very interesting work), they haven’t bothered to design software to automatically calculate the cost of regularly delivering a newspaper to a person’s door so that people can sign up to become their customers without picking up the phone.

logand — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 01:06:59 +0000

I was recently coveting this Sparkfun Thermal Printer module (still want it ) to use as an output device for digital content, turning out mini printed “newspaper” pages or pushing out a ticker-tape type feed, or just using it as a small-format printer. I even checked ebay for teletype and thermal printers, not to mention printing calculators, to see if there would be something I could modify to create a small, cheap printer which could print onto a small format but nothing looked very promising; the guts of a printing calculator would work but can only print a limited character set, so the best option is still the Sparkfun Thermal Printer.

Lo and behold, a few weeks later the “Little Printer” from BERG popped up in my RSS reader, and it’s almost exactly what I envisioned in one of my project ideas for what I would create in a DIY project, except their version looks better and will have cloud-based processing power behind it to be able to pull in a huge variety of feeds. Have a look:

Hello Little Printer, available 2012 from BERG on Vimeo.

I think this type of technology is great, it’s a combination of the best of old and new, paper technology and screen technology. Paper is durable, renewable, made in the USA and infinitely adaptable; it should stick around.

We love physical stuff. Connecting products to the Web lets them become smarter and friendlier – they can sit on a shelf and do a job well, for the whole family or office – without all the attendant complexities of computers, like updates or having to tell them what to do. Little Printer is more like a family member or a colleague than a tool.

Plus paper is like a screen that never turns off. You can stick to the fridge or tuck it in your wallet. You can scribble on it or tear it and give it to a friend.

Announcing Little Printer and Berg Cloud

I’ll keep a DIY version on my project list (mini printer project) as a possibility, I’d love to create this type of system using an Arduino or Server/Arduino hybrid, but if the price is reasonable this Little Printer project could be a great option as well.

power and perspective

logand — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 03:48:30 +0000

It occurs to me that the reason the UK is peculiarly aligned with the Americans is that we are the only two countries to have ever ruled the world. It’s lonely at the top, as it were, and having been there tends to inspire empathy. The sun may never have set on the British Empire 150 years ago, but now the sun never sets on the American way. We forget, having become too fond of it, just how much power we wield. Power is not something you notice when you have it; it is something you notice you do not have.

government largess: changing the world

logand — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 23:39:01 +0000

It turns out the Internet was not the first major world-changing communications tool to be paid for by the government:

Morse obtained a patent for his telegraph in 1840, and four years later he sent his famous first message _ “What hath God wrought?” _ over a line he’d strung from Washington to Baltimore with $30,000 in federal money.

logand — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 08:59:34 +0000

Yeah.

Elizabeth Warren:

“No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Source: WashingtonMonthly

logand — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 07:11:08 +0000

Battery life is king. How come nobody seems to understand this? Nobody is really going to really use a device which gets three or four or five hours of battery life, no matter how cool it is. Six hours is nice, eight hours is ok, but what if I have to work late…

Ten hours or bust.

That’s why the iPad sells so well.

frontiers of modern empire

logand — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 18:53:45 +0000

The Afghan National Army (ANA) has really taken off in the past few years, but it’s expensive. With a cost of $6-$8 billion dollars in cash per year to operate after foreign troops pull out, this means Afghanistan will need a constant flow of foreign support to keep their army going. Because UAV-originated direct action has decimated the command structures of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the last 2 years, we at least have this as an alternative to keeping tens of thousands of our own troops stationed in Afghanistan, but we are left in a situation reminiscent of the late Roman empire, paying foreign armies to defend our borders and hoping they won’t turn on us. We just have to decide whether we can really afford either choice.

the wanderer

logand — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 00:49:43 +0000

I learned this song as a kid and looked it up recently to refresh my memory. The song is called “The Happy Wanderer” and was originally written in German. The version I learned was a bit shorter and I have made a couple of changes so this matches what I remember more closely.

The Wanderer

I love to go a-wandering,
Along the mountain trail,
And as I go, I love to sing,
(with) My knapsack on my back.

Chorus:
Val-deri,Val-dera,
Val-deri,
Val-dera-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
Val-deri, Val-dera.
My knapsack on my back.

I love to wander by the stream
That dances in the sun,
So joyously it calls to me,
“Come! Join my happy song!”

I wave my hat to all I meet,
And they wave back to me,
And blackbirds call so loud and sweet
From ev’ry green wood tree.

High overhead, the skylarks wing,
They never rest at home
But just like me, they love to sing,
As o’er the world we roam.

Oh, may I go a-wandering
Until the day I die!
Oh, may I always laugh and sing,
Beneath God’s clear blue sky!

Technology Wishlist

logand — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:27:43 +0000

Automated Bicycle Racks: Walk up with your bike, insert into a slot, pull out the key and go. Could involve buy-in ($10 for a key, you exchange your private key for the key of the slot you used) or a credit card swipe. Cities could easily implement such a system. Racks should be wireless, so they can automatically send alerts for problems (bike left in rack for over 1 week, broken rack/vandalism, rack closed without bicycle in it).

Text to email – Be able to text an email to someone. SMS sending already exists (in gmail, for example), but not the reverse. [Edit: SMS Text to email already exists as a service from most mobile carriers, but is reliant on them and does not truly dovetail with the email system very transparently]

Longer Text Messages: Double the possible length of text messages from 140 characters to 280. This would let text messaging replace many functions of basic email.

Ubiquitous Wireless Internet: Low-speed (in effect, text/html only), ubiquitous internet which can be accessed by any and all devices. Mesh networks could be used to augment the network infrastructure. Could trigger a real communications revolution: Cheap internet-capable devices available to anyone, anywhere. There is real democratization potential here. Cellphones are wonderful, but they are usually proprietary, behind paywalls and are potentially a privacy nightmare (users data is associated with their devices, cellphones usually have GPS), while internet-only devices could be built cheaply, be cheap to own (practically free) and would not (necessarily) have any user information associated with them.

Bandwidth Donation/Sharing Framework

logand — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 18:24:18 +0000

Through a commercial webhosting service, I have available to me a few terabytes monthly bandwidth as part of my hosting package. I don’t anticipate using that much bandwidth myself, so naturally I’ve considered donating some bandwidth to some worthy organization. I’ve been surprised to discover that there isn’t really a way to do this apart from running a full-on mirror site, but since I can’t run the risk of going over my bandwidth quota, this is probably out of the question.

My concept is for a bandwidth donation system where people sign up to donate their bandwidth to another individual or organization through a system which would refer or link downloads to the various donating web servers based on geographical location, similar to existing widely-used mirroring systems, except that this system would be distributed and track donated bandwidth. Registrants would be able to specify how much bandwidth they were willing to donate; the organization website would simply not refer any more downloads to the site after it calculated it was near the limit. People could also opt in to be available for additional bandwidth during high volume bandwidth demands lasting 12-48 hours, setting normal and upper ceilings for the amount of bandwidth the site would be allowed to refer to it. Mostly I see this as a way of sharing bandwidth among users who have dedicated rack space or who are purchasing hosting services from someone else. Integrity of the data is the biggest concern, which would only be solved with fool-proof automatic hash verification of all files against the centrally-provided key.

A centralized P2P system (P2P bandwidth, central coordination through an open framework) could centrally track bandwidth donation about numerous sites, metering out bandwidth to sites in much the same way as many torrent trackers do for users downloading the latest Ubuntu release – fail to share alike and the tracker downgrades your priority. Participants would be able to choose to donate bandwidth, and/or share bandwidth on the “open marketplace” in exchange for bandwidth credit in turn (or maybe convert into digital currency?). In this system, bandwidth would become a du-facto currency; I see comparisons to the BitCoin digital currency in this respect, possibly using a similar verification framework to enable true peer-to-peer exchange without a central trusted third party.