Is an Internet connection as assumed as electricity now?

 Posted by on 7 April 2010  Modern Life
Apr 072010
 

I’ve been reading a bit about femtocells, recently. Here’s the explanation in a nutshell: If you get crappy cell phone coverage at your home, you can get a femtocell. It’s a tiny box that looks like a router, and you plug it into your internet connection, and it creates a miniature cell phone “tower” that basically covers your home and yard (and maybe a little bit of the neighbours, too.

A New York Times article gets into the details a little bit:

[AT&T] which has been testing such devices in a few markets, plans to officially start selling this month what it calls “MicroCells” in a few places for $150. …

Sprint sells its mini-tower, the Airave, for $99, along with a $4.99 monthly fee that it markets as “having your own miniature cell tower.” Verizon introduced its “Network Extenders” in January 2009; the company sells them for $250 and says they are meant for residents whose homes have unusual geographic constraints that limit cellphone signals.

Here’s the catch — you have to plug them into your own existing broadband connection. The calls will be routed over your internet service, perhaps interfering with streaming movies or bit torrent downloads. If you’re on a tiered service plan, or if you pay by the data you use, you may end up paying extra to your ISP for these voice calls.

And, at least in AT&T’s case, you’ll still have to pay for the minutes you use!

CNet writer Stephen Shankland says the phone companies should be falling all over themselves to give you these femtocells for free:

Carriers already are faced with tremendous, never-ending costs to build and upgrade their mobile phone networks, and when those networks fall short, they suffer dissatisfied customers and churn as those customers leave for the competition as soon as their contracts expire. Femtocells can deliver capacity quickly to the painful patches on the network coverage maps, distributing communications duties more evenly and targeting the loudest complainers.

He adds a couple of ideas to target the femtocells where they’ll give the most benefit — poorly-serviced neighbourhoods with good broadband, for example, and rigging them to that they’re always open to your neighbours, to encourage sharing.

But no one’s pointing out the one thing that struck me: For all that people are up in arms about “OMG, they’re going to hijack my internet connection to provide their service!” there is a complete lack of worry when it comes to them using your electrical service. You’ll plug in these femtocells, they’ll stay plugged in 24/7, and your electrical bill will go up.

It’s a marginal cost increase, and there are probably no worries about saturating your wire, or tripping the breakers.

Has it come to that for your internet service? Honestly, unless you’re doing some heavy video downloading or uploading, you probably wouldn’t even notice the voice traffic. And most internet plans are sold on a fixed-rate basis, at least where I am.

Thoughts?

Well hell, why didn’t I think of this: Website garners free cake

 Posted by on 3 April 2010  Modern Life
Apr 032010
 

Genius, absolutely genius.

Jessica Hische has started a website called “The Internet Sends Me Cake.” It’s brilliant in its simplicity. In her own words:

If you send me a cake, I post a link to your work on the internet (both on this site and on twitter). You will be judged solely on your cake rather than your work, which makes this an equal opportunity link site. It is that simple and that awesome (for me and my studiomates) …. I have a preference for lemon cake with buttercream icing, cakes with fruit in them, or any cake with cream cheese frosting, but by all means be inventive. Cupcakes, pastries, and pies will also be accepted, but anything sent would preferably be handmade. I can buy fancy cakes if I want to, but I want YOUR weird lopsided handmade creation.

She’s had two people send her free cake so far, and this is exactly the kind of thing that will go viral and will drown her in free cake. I wish I had thought of it.

I’ve blogged about Hische before (she’s the designer behind Daily Drop Cap) and while perusing her site, I also notice that she did a great design that I noticed in a Chatelaine magazine a little while ago.

But I think her latest endeavour, ahem, takes the cake.

(via Coudal)

Who got fooled?

 Posted by on 1 April 2010  Modern Life
Apr 012010
 

It was April Fools Day.  Who got caught?

TechCrunch has gathered up some of the best gags that were online this year.  Some of my favorites:

  • Youtube:  watch a video in TEXTp or text only mode
  • Google:  search anything on their main search engine, and instead of telling you the amount of time it took to run your search it will use an arbitrary term like “jiffies” or “epochs.”
  • Gmail:  Google’s webmail service suffered a vowel outage

TV theme song medley

 Posted by on 17 March 2010  Modern Life
Mar 172010
 

Damn. This guy is good! It furthers my theory that people seem to have a lot of time on their hands, but, at the same time, I’m glad they do.

Turns out, he’s the same guy who did a video of the Wind Waker theme song that I thought I posted but couldn’t find. Hrm. Anyway, the musician’s name is Frederik, he’s from Sweden, and he’s super talented!

(via)

Newspaper watch: To comment, or not to comment

 Posted by on 5 March 2010  Modern Life
Mar 052010
 

I’m personally on the fence when it comes to newspaper websites allowing comments. I feel that there are a lot of great viewpoints out there in the public sphere that don’t get heard, and newspapers have a duty to seek them out. Comments on stories are an easy way to fulfil that repsonsibility.

On the other hand, comments on the Internet? Have you read any? Yikes.

For a while, I thought that the solution might be to require that commenters use only their real name. Perhaps require that they have a credit card or other ID to sign up. Not to charge, but to verify a real, actual name. Like letters to the editor.

But there’s something to be said for anonymous/pseudonymous comments, too. Sometimes people have valid reasons for not exposing their identity.

On this site, I automatically allow any and all “true” comments (ie. no spam) — so long as you’ve commented once before. Once you’re trusted (and, assuming you use the same nickname and email address) your comment is automatically approved. The volume of comments on this website is low enough that it’s easy to police for any offensive comments. And there haven’t been any yet, anyway.

But for some large newspaper websites, I imagine it’s a full-time job just to moderate comments. And so they delegate the duty to computers and to readers (asking them to “flag” offensive comments, for example). That doesn’t always work, as you will have noticed if you read comment sections on, oh say, the Washington Post.

Now, the Post is feeling some heat. No one’s threatening to sue, that I know of. But the vitriolic comments are starting to scare off potential interviews.

Any first-year reporter knows that lots of people are timid about “being in the paper.” They’re worried that they will be portrayed in a way that they don’t approve of. They’re worried that they’ll be misquoted, or that they’ll be taken out of context, or that the story will attract unwanted attention.

Most reporters know several techniques to soothe these fears. Now, though, sources need to be worried about how anonymous internet commenters will snipe at them. And it’s costing the Washington Post at least one source, according to this column:

He wasn’t happy with the comments that readers posted on washingtonpost.com about the story.

You could hardly blame him …. among the comments were these hard-to-stomach posts:

“What scum….Scam-acne-face-Sutherland and all his little minions, scum….special place in Hell for them,” wrote someone who went by the screen name griffmills.

“They should be hung up by their private parts and shot,” wrote billdinva2.

Sutherland said such comments were “why I was so hesitant in doing an interview” in the first place. “Lesson learned,” he wrote, “I will never allow for another interview.”

Thoughts? I guess you could, uh, comment.

The dangers of predicting the future. Or, why the Internet will fail, according to 1995

 Posted by on 27 February 2010  Vintage/Retro
Feb 272010
 

Trying to predict the future seems to be a natural human tendency. What’s happening now is pretty interesting, sure, but figuring out what it all means requires looking into what will happen tomorrow. And that’s tough.

Even when we pour endless amounts of money into predicting something relatively scientific, like the weather, we fail more often than we succeed (at least, if we’re trying to make useful predictions on specific weather — like, should I go camping on a weekend, two months from now).

Predicting the stock market? A mug’s game.

Predicting elections? Requires polls so big you may as well just call a vote.

But there’s an endless market for people to prognosticate — and you saw tons of it this year, as one decade ended, and a ton of writers were hauled in front of their editors and told: “Why not do a story on what’ll change over the next decade.”

So it’s funny to go back a few years and see what people were predicting then, for now.

Which is exactly what the blog Three Word Chant has done, unearthing a 1995 Newsweek essay about why the Internet will fail:

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

The problems identified by the cranky original author haven’t gone away. The internet is still a wild wilderness of competing voices, with poor navigation, anonymous sniping and zero accountability.

But he made the classic rookie futurist’s mistake: assuming that things will never change. Some sites have risen to the top with a reputation of accountability and accuracy (news websites, for example, if you try to forget about the financials). Other websites have business models based on making sense of the senseless (like Google, and other search engines). Still others seem to have self-assembled order out of chaos (three cheers for Wikipedia).

It’s humourous to read how much the essay got wrong. But it’s sobering when you think about how those criticisms, often, still exist. We’ve just jury-rigged ways around the worst of it.

How Gordon Lightfoot died and then didn’t, as told by the person who first tweeted the ‘news’

 Posted by on 25 February 2010  Modern Life, Music
Feb 252010
 

Gordon Lightfoot, a singer and Canadian icon. Not dead. Although, for an hour or so earlier this month, everyone thought he was.

Starting with one single tweet — “RIP Gordon Lightfoot” — the false news was picked up, retweeted, and amplified until it hit the mainstream media (all of which took a mere 10 minutes, frighteningly).

Lightfoot himself, apparently on his way to a dentist appointment when he heard the news of his own demise on the radio, was actually alive and well, and everything was quickly cleared up.

Now, though, the author of that first tweet — let’s call her Tweeter Zero — has written an essay in the Globe and Mail about how the whole thing got started, and how it brought the wrath of the internet down on her:

By the time I went back online, Gordon Lightfoot was officially undead (phew!) and the witch hunt was on (uh-oh!). Media guru and sleuth Ian Capstick was hot on my trail, and even had my picture and the dreaded tweet in question on his blog. Commenters were gleefully posting personal information about me: my full name, where I lived, whom I worked for. So I did what anybody in my situation would do. I opened a bottle of wine, and began to drink.

(Full disclosure: I was briefly acquainted with the aforementioned Mr. Capstick during my days at Canadian University Press.)

Lest you think the poor Tweeter Zero is fully to blame, she broadcast the message only to her meagre 100 Twitter followers, and she blames the origination of the whole episode on a telephone prank call (“But nobody seems to be interested in him. He used the telephone. And dude, that’s just so 20th century.”)

A lesson, perhaps, in the power and speed of the information superhighway.

Now, we came not to bury Gordon Lightfoot, but to praise him:

Interesting new micropayment system: Flattr

 Posted by on 10 February 2010  Modern Life
Feb 102010
 

So, this is an interesting stab at a new micropayment system, which would supposedly allow content creators to get paid for their content, while not being too onerous for users or consumers.

Unfortunately, as this video describes it, I’m not 100% on board. They seem to be saying that someone who consumes (and enjoys) 100 bits of content a month will pay the same amount as someone who consumes 10 bits. Although, intriguingly, the more selective consumer’s “Flattr” clicks would each be worth more.

You can sign up to learn more at the Flattr site, here. It’s still in invite-only beta.

Now I am even MORE excited for Lost. Two days!

 Posted by on 31 January 2010  Modern Life
Jan 312010
 

One of the things I love about the Internet is how people far more industrious (possibly unemployed?) than me take the time and effort to create the coolest things. Video mash ups, songs, short films; you name it, they make it.

Add in some serious fandom, and you’ve got yourself a viral sensation. I see that happening with this video: a real-time look at the crash of Oceanic flight 815.

Wow. I, just … wow. It’s videos like this that remind me why I love Lost so much: the mystery, the connections, the complicated story lines (yes, I like the complicated story lines).  And it was actually kind of thrilling to watch what took four seasons to explore unfold in ten minutes.

I couldn’t be more excited for Tuesday!

(and for a refresher on said connections, check out this link, which shows the off-island connections between the characters)

Better 3D effects require thinking about texture

 Posted by on 24 January 2010  Modern Life
Jan 242010
 

I’ve been known to fiddle with a design here and there, but I always like seeing stuff behind the scenes — when a designer pulls back the curtain, so to speak, and gives me a glimpse into the process of design.

Not only is it a great way to get to learn new design methods and ideas, it’s also a neat look into someone else’s thought processes, especially as they work through their creativity from spark to finished product.

Sometimes, though, it’s easy for a designer to say “and then you do this, to accomplish this” without every laying out the logic behind that reasoning.

I was impressed with the detail that went into a post over at Flyosity.com, where designer Mike Rundle posts about icon and interface design fairly regularly. I just learned a ton from this post, on Crafting Subtle and Realistic User Interfaces.

Yeah, I know how to make a 3D button, and I know how to add a drop shadow that doesn’t completely suck (I hope) but some of the subtleties that Rundle exposes are very well thought-out and will really add to my work when I (eventually) get around to pimping up this blog’s design.

Just this bit, on thinking about your 3D button as it would look from the side, is great, for example:

Here’s a button-shaped panel that’s designed to look slightly raised and have a matte surface. It’s thin, has a subtle convex shape, and has a small edge that goes around the outside. In a 3D space, the light source would illuminate the edges (slightly brighter on the topmost edge) and would not fully illuminate the bottom slope of the panel past the apex. The object would cast a small shadow since it’s not raised off the surface very much.

Sure, it’d be easy to play around with gradients and stroke weights until I found something that “looked right” but having a structure like this will be quite helpful.

Good read, good tips. Thanks for taking the time to write it up, Mike.

Over a decade of my Hotmail

 Posted by on 22 January 2010  Vintage/Retro
Jan 222010
 

That’s the email that I got in my Hotmail account this morning. Wow, a decade-plus of that email address? I had to check it out.

It took a bit of finagling, but if you have a Hotmail address, from your inbox, go to the very bottom-right of the page. There should be a place to click on “Account” or “Feedback.” Click on “Account.” You may have to enter your password again.

You’ll be taken to a page that shows some of your basic info — but also includes the date you registered for your email address. Turns out that I’ve been logging in to gramiq@hotmail.com since September 19, 1998.

I actually remember having a Hotmail account prior to that, but it was getting spammy, so this was my second one. At the time, I also had a Brandon University email address — I think it was hamilga@brandonu.ca — and the Hotmail one was kind of a novelty. Weird that I still use it as a semi-permanent email address.

For what it’s worth, I’ve tried to migrate to a Gmail account, but I get so much legacy stuff (bank statements, mailing lists, long-lost friends) that it’s just not practical. Adding to that, I’ve got so many other websites where I use “gramiq@hotmail.com” as a login ID. My switching cost is too high. Even my grant@absurdintellectual.com email address redirects there.

Sigh. Over a decade of the same email address.

The Internet is old.

Is a paywall the same as censorship?

 Posted by on 17 January 2010  Modern Life
Jan 172010
 

According to New York magazine, the era of free online news content may be coming to a close. The New York Times is planning to start charging for some content.

I have some thoughts on this, but I’d like to spark a discussion in the comments, so that it’s not just me ranting on the blog. Please, read the piece — the New York Times’ proposal is a little different from what’s been discussed around most newspapers — and chime in below.

To start things off, though, I’d like to say that I’m in love with the idea of the Internet as a gigantic web of interconnected links. The power of the Internet comes, partially, comes from its ability to link anything to anything. Two things break this: password protection, and unlinkable Flash content. URL shorteners like bit.ly are worrisome as well (what happens to all those links if bit.ly goes under?).

When China says “conform to our beliefs or we won’t let that site be accessed” it’s censorship. But isn’t forcing people to pay a subscription or disallowing them somewhat the same? If you think it’s not, would you also agree that it’s okay to charge people money for the privilege of voting? And isn’t the free flow of information just as crucial to democracy as voting?

New political party on the Canadian scene

 Posted by on 14 January 2010  Modern Life
Jan 142010
 

I had heard of the Pirate Party in Sweden and the amazing level of support it recieved this past summer during the elections for the European parliament.  What I did not know (at least until reading This Magazine — which, by the way, is a fantastic publication and I encourage everyone to check it out) is that the Pirate Party had also set up shop in Canada.

Although it isn’t much more than a single issue party, the Pirate Party of Canada does address some issues that most of the mainstream parties barely discuss, if at all.

Started in 2009, the Pirate Party of Canada strives to reform Canadian copyright laws, reform the patent system, and protect every Canadian’s right to privacy. It is our current goal to complete the registration process to become an official federal party.

We are in favour of :

  • Copyright Reform
  • Reform of the patents system
  • Better respect of privacy
  • Net Neutrality
  • Open Government

How can one not get behind the idea of better respect for privacy?  Net neutrality?  Sign me up!

I don’t have any illusions about the Pirate Party sweeping into office during the next federal election, but it would be nice to think that perhaps some of the issues that are of high importance to younger, not-currently-engaged-in-the-political-process potential voters might have more time and consideration devoted to them.  Then maybe, just maybe, younger voters would pay some attention to the political world.

(P.S.  Seriously, I can’t recomment This Magazine enough.  I wish I had discovered it years ago…)

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