The Golden Hammer

Marine Computing Part One

Darusha — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:47:48 +0000

I’ve been fairly silent around these parts for the past while, mainly because I’ve been focussing on preparing myself and my boat for an imminent long sailing adventure. For those who are interested, my sailing blog has all the skinny on that.

However, I’ve been doing a lot of work on board to get the computer stuff all up and running. I’m still maybe only halfway there, but it occurred to me that it might be time to lay out the basics so far.

We moved on board with an iBook G4 and a PPC Mac Mini with an LCD monitor. We got a contraption called, unoriginally, a TV Box which allows the monitor to act as a tv monitor for using with our Wii. It’s quite an excellent set up, actually. The screen is crisp, and with the tv box connected to external speakers, the sound is great, too. We could hook up the cable to the tv box also, and we do have a tv antenna that terminates in a cable, but we’ve never bothered so far.

The Mini and monitor is not an acceptable set up for when we’re underway, though, and we also have another issue which persuaded us to invest in another laptop. We have a Pactor modem, which allows us to send and receive packet data over high frequency radio. This is useful for using email when we are at sea, which is a boon for communication as well as a great way to get reliable weather data. The trouble is that there is no non-Windows port of the mail software which works with the Pactor. Therefore, I wanted an Intel Mac laptop for running Windows or Darwine to use SailMail.

As a result, we picked up a 15″ MacBook Pro as part of the new plan. We chose the Pro because it has the ExpressCard slot, and we are thinking about using a cellular data card for internet when we are on the US coast. We haven’t yet gotten AirMail set up on it, or even tested the set up, but that’s on the list.

We’re using GPSNavX as our charting software, and it’s been fantastic. A very reasonable cost to do pretty much everything the well known Windows programs do, and without having to run Windows. It makes me very happy, and we saved a few BOAT units (bring out another thousand) by not getting a dedicated chartplotter.

Finally, when it was first announced, we participated in the Give 1 Get 1 promotion by the One Laptop Per Child organization, and got ourselves an XO laptop. I’ve been breaking it pretty mercilessly since I got it trying to see what it can do, and particularly to install a non-pdf ebook reader. I have a bunch of titles in plucker format, which I really like, and want to be able to read on the XO. The screen is a great size and the tablet and low power features seem to be ideal for ebook reading on the high seas. So I’ve spent a few days trying to install FBReader, with success coming only after completely screwing up the machine and having to reflash the OS. I did get the program installed by following the instructions and using the file found here. Now I’m starting to load a bunch of ebooks to an SD card and try it out.

More to come as the project progresses.

[Cross-posted to the sailing blog]

Kindling

Darusha — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 19:54:48 +0000

As everyone probably knows, Amazon made a big stink recently with the launch of its ebook reader the Kindle (and the associated ebook store). I’m on a mailing list for authors who distribute on podiobooks.com, and the Kindle set that normally very quiet mailing list on fire. Everyone seemed to have a very strong opinion.

Now, I haven’t seen a Kindle, so I can’t comment on the use of the thing, though I know others who can. But I can talk about ebook readers in general from my own particular perspective.

I think it’s a pretty good guess the I am the target audience for this device. I love to read, and even though I’m quite fond of dead tree books, my lifestyle requires that I limit my physical media. I’ve been reading books primarily onscreen for a few years now, starting with pdf file on my laptop and most recently using Plucker on my old Palm Tungsten C.

I recently was looking into purchasing ebooks from the eReader store, and even though there are several titles I desperately want to read, I stopped short. It’s not the cost - they are reasonably priced compared to a paperback (particularly since I live in Canada, and book pricing here is insane). The problem is the DRM.

I’m convinced that my Palm device is dying, and I’ll probably have to replace it with something. I don’t know what I’m replacing it with, but whatever it is, I want the books I already have to be able to be used with the new device. DRM means that I’m locked to a particular device or reader, and I’m not willing to buy multiple copies of a book just to be able to read it wherever I want.

And that’s the main problem with the Kindle and Amazon’s ebook store (and other products like it). In a world where even the iTunes Music Store realizes that people don’t want their media locked to a product or device, ebooks that are crippled this way are just uninteresting to me. I’ll go to the library for books that I can’t get electronically, and stick to independents authors and public domain works that I can get in the formats I want. And that, my friends, is why the Kindle and ebook DRM sucks for authors. Because those are lost sales.

Oh yeah, and $400 for an ebook reader? You’ve got to be kidding.

Space Money Invented

Darusha — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 21:33:21 +0000

I checked Snopes in case this is a hoax, and they don’t have anything about this yet, but apparently currency dealer Travelex has developed cash money designed to be used in space.

From the Travelex site:

The QUID has been designed to withstand the stresses of space travel and the extreme environment found in orbit around the Earth. It has also been created so that it can be purchased on earth in any one of the 176 currencies used around the globe.

Professor George Fraser from the University of Leicester commented: “None of the existing payment systems we use on earth – like cash, credit or debit cards – could be used in space for a variety of different reasons. Anything with sharp edges, like coins, would be a risk to astronauts while the chips and magnetic strips used in our cards on Earth would be damaged beyond repair by cosmic radiation. What’s more, because of the distances involved, it is more than 230,000 miles from the Earth to the moon, chip and pin technology is also out of the question.”

Banality of social networks is a feature, not a bug

Darusha — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 19:08:09 +0000

I came across a great metaphor for relationships awhile ago - bricks and mortar. Bricks are the “big things” - the events of life that you share with friends. Mortar is the little, everyday stuff, that the people you are closest to just know about, often whether they want to or not.

As Scheherazade wrote in her original blog post that caught my eye, bricks get all the attention. When we think about communication, we think about the bricks. But mortar is what makes it all stick together, and without it there’s no solid foundation.

As I mentioned in what is now clearly the last Tech Watch podcast, I’ve been investigating online communities this year. At first, I was all about the bricks, here, too. I was posting in forums, making new friends and even trying to be a better email correspondent. Email, blogs, podcasts, forums - these are the online versions of going for coffee.

Meanwhile, I’d occasionally ignore a request to join facebook or Twitter, wondering what was the point? If you want to know what I’m doing just ask me or read my blog. It’s not hard to find me online, after all. But eventually I succumbed to facebook and now I’m flirting with Twitter. And yes, the updates can be overwhelming, and yes it’s almost always banal. But this is the mortar of relationships.

It’s true that I don’t need to know (or honestly, really care) if you’re pulling the weeds or late for work or getting a haircut today. But knowing that mundane boring stuff adds real context to the actual conversations we have, context that makes existing relationships richer and new relationships stronger.

I’ve come to realize that the banality of social networks is a feature, not a bug. It is the ability to tap into the mundane that is the reason why these kinds of social networks are so popular, and so annoying. We crave the mortar of relationships, even as we find it maddening. It’s addictive and repulsive. And surprisingly useful.

My podcast novel, Beautiful Red, launches

Darusha — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 01:00:57 +0000

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been focusing on my fiction a lot more lately. And as a part of that, I’m really excited to be launching the podcast of my SF novel, Beautiful Red.

You can have a listen to the promo here, or even better, head over to the site at http://darusha.ca/beautifulred to subscribe to get the episodes automatically.

Prison Industrial Complex

Darusha — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:35:23 +0000

For a number of years I’ve been interested in prison systems, particularly the current counter-productive nature of the US system. So, I was really interested to hear this week’s Tech Nation on IT Conversations, which is a discussion with Sasha Abamsky about the state of prisons in the US, the history of the penal system and some of the things going on today that curdle my blood.

Whether you know anything about the state of the penal system or not, this is important information. The more you learn about the prison industry, the more you understand some of the surprising causes of the increased prison population.

Give this show a listen here.

Very short very free sci fi story

Darusha — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 23:53:45 +0000

In honour of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, I give you Career Opportunities, a very short story I wrote for the flash fiction contest run earlier this year by the awesome Escape Pod science fiction podcast.

Such a Wiinie

Darusha — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 20:31:28 +0000

I somehow magically got a Wii for my birthday, and have been meaning to post about it. Lots has been said about it, but there are two main points I think are worth mentioning.

It’s the first game system I’ve ever used that really is good enough out of the box.
I’d really like to get a hold of another set of controls for 2 player boxing, and Wii Play looks pretty decent, but I’ve been using the thing almost daily for over a month, and it’s still fun. We rented a shoot-em-up game for an evening, which was okay, but I still have no compelling desire to get a new game. This, of course, isn’t great news for the game companies, but as a consumer I’m thrilled with the replay ability of the included Wii Sports.
It’s incredible to watch someone who’s new to games play with this thing.
A friend of mine isn’t much of a gamer, but she is an amateur softball player. She came over and I handed her the control and turned on the baseball game. She asked me how to play and I said “just play baseball.” She was confused for a while, and eventually swung the bat. You’d think I’d just stuck her in a time machine or something, she was so amazed at the technology.

Those of us who follow tech advances think that waving a controller around to play a game is almost old hat by now, but watching someone play a video game that way for the first time is totally eye opening.

All in all, the Wii has totally exceeded my expectations and it’s still as fun as it was the day I got it. Now that’s return on investment.

Podcast Feed

Darusha — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 04:57:04 +0000

The podcast feed may have been wacky for the last little while. It’s been fixed, but you may see some duplicates. Sorry.

Moving Online

Darusha — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 03:49:15 +0000

I’m making some changes this year, including paying more attention to online communities. Maybe they aren’t all spam and trolls after all.

Link: Dave Slusher’s Evil Genius Chronicles

Subscribe [?] to the feed using your podcatcher of choice; see the links in the sidebar.

Apple iPhone

Darusha — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 20:22:28 +0000

I know everyone and her dog will be talking about this, but I have to admit that it’s the first announcement Apple has made that actually excites me. The iPhone is an entirely new design, with a wide touchscreen as opposed to buttons. It’s a phone, iPod and tiny computer that runs a version of OS X. It has wifi and bluetooth and is a quad band GSM phone on the Cingular network.

I’m not that interested in phones, and this is about as converged a device as you can get, but I’ll honestly think about ponying up the $599 USD (8GB, $499 4GB) for it as a pocket computer if the following functions exist on this device:

it can be unlocked and used on different GSM carriers worldwide
the non-phone functions (wifi, iPod, browser, email) still work even if there’s no phone functionality - no SIM card, no contract, nothing

Ideally, I’d want one without the phone part. But, even if it’s not for me, it’s a surprisingly cool device. Heck, I’ve been wanting the combination of iPod and wifi for years now.

Podcast Academy 3 Talk

Darusha — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 20:25:54 +0000

My talk from the Podcast Academy 3 at Yahoo! this past summer is up now at the Podcast Academy channel. Check it out.

Kicking the iTunes Habit

Darusha — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 05:49:33 +0000

It’s not exactly that I don’t like iTunes - when I first started using it I was blown away by how great it was. And it just kept getting better until it hit that point. The point where it’s trying to do so many things that it doesn’t do anything right for me.

I admit that I’m not a lover of converged devices - I have a pda, a phone and a music player; they are all separate devices to perform separate functions. I like it that way.

I loved iTunes when it just played mp3s. I liked the music store, and it managed to suck some cash out of me over time. I even gave up iPodder (now Juice) for iTunes to manage my podcasts when iTunes 6 came out. But finally I had enough of putting up with things that weren’t exactly the way I wanted them in order to have it all in one place.

iTunes 7 takes a long time to load on my G4 iBook, and I was becoming less and less enchanted with the way it was handling podcasts. I also was having a harder time reconciling my strong dislike of digital rights management (wik) with my purchases from the iTunes music store. Something had to be done.

I’ve already written about switching my podcast management from iTunes to PodcastReady. It’s somewhat imperfect, but it’s better than iTunes alone was for me. The success of that change has spurred me on to try and make a break. It’s not a clean break - I still use iTunes to update my iPod - but on the whole I’ve found better solutions for the individual tasks for which I used to use iTunes.

MP3 playback

Most of the time, I listen to audio on my iPod. On the go, I’m obviously using the portable player, but even at home I hook the iPod up to a small set of speakers. Combined with a third party remote control, I find using the iPod/speaker system ideal. When I do listen to audio on my laptop, I tend to use Quicktime player for single files - it opens a lot faster and seems to run a lot better than iTunes.

I have also been experimenting with Songbird, an open source music player that has some really great features. One of which is that it’s a web browser as well as a media player, which means that it plays mp3 streams and embedded audio files on websites when you use it to browse.

Thanks to Songbird, I’ve been poking around various audio blogs and discovering all kinds of cool new music. Songbird isn’t a stable release yet, so it still has some problems, but already it’s showing so much promise that I think I might be able to really ditch iTunes when it’s ready for prime time.

Podcasts

I’ve fully explained my solution for audio podcasts using PodcastReady and an automator workflow previously. I’ve been using this solution exclusively for almost three months now, and I have no interest in going back. Being able to micromanage my podcasts on an individual level from my desktop or online, plus being able to share episodes with friends are worth the extra step.

For video podcasts, I’ve been relying on the Democracy player and aggregator. I never use the player feature because it has the same problem for me as the iTunes video player - it’s choppy and slow and just doesn’t work right. So I either copy videos to my iPod or, more usually, I watch them using VLC.

Democracy’s great features include being able to set some feeds to automatically download new episodes while others don’t, and it’s a bittorrent client, so I can subscribe to bittorrent feeds. Altogether excellent. And it’s an open source project.

Music store

The iTunes music store is handy. Distressingly handy. I remember that when it was going to be made available in Canada, it was a few days late, and I spent those days in a state of great distress. I couldn’t wait to browse and buy by track and get what I want instantly (or at least without getting dressed). I never was a huge music buyer, but I’d add things here and there to my cart, then every few months I’d remove half of it and buy the rest. I picked up a lot of great tunes that way.

But the DRM restrictions on iTunes music really piss me off, and while there’s a ton of music, most of it is the same stuff everyone else listens to. I wanted free (as in speech) music, and I wanted something different. So I got a subscription to eMusic, which is a subscription-based music download site. You get 30 tracks a month for $9.99 USD, which you get to keep (unlike music rental subscriptions like Rhapsody), they are DRM-free MP3 files and the catalogue is great. It’s not necessarily full of the chart toppers, but there’s a bigger selection of well-known names than a site like (the also awesome) Magnatune.

And I discovered that there’s a fantastic extension for Songbird that incorporates eMusic downloads right into Songbird. If I browse eMusic using Songbird, I can preview tracks without opening another application, and if I like them I’m just one click away to adding them to my library. The extension makes it actually easier to buy music from eMusic than it is to buy from iTunes. And since it’s a “use it or lose it” subscription, I can try out new things without as much of a guilt trip. Plus, it works out to about 33 cents per track. What’s not to like?

Summary

iTunes is trying to do too many things for my liking. Preferring to have standalone solutions, I’ve found a bunch of great apps and services which take care of all my media needs. With the exception of eMusic, all of the items I’ve listed are free as in beer and most are free as in speech.

I’ve tried some other iTunes replacements over the years with varying degrees of success. Here are some of the also-rans (as in all things, your mileage may vary):

Yamipod - an alternative iPod manager
Transistr - the podcatcher formerly known as iPodder X, now on hiatus or something
djdownload.com - a pretty good selection of electronic-type tunes and dj stuff (note: IANADJ), but I could never get my account to work

How to watch podcasts

Darusha — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 04:00:19 +0000

I recently discovered that a lot of visitors find this site searching for information about how to watch podcasts. Obviously, that’s because the name of my podcast is Tech Watch.

However, I can provide the answer to that question. Most video podcasts have a website where you can watch the episodes online in your web browser. If you want to subscribe, though, you’ll need both a podcast aggregator and a video player. This is where it can get tricky.

Formats

Unlike audio, which is almost always in mp3 format, video on the web comes in many different formats. If you want to learn more about the ins and outs of video formats, check out the wikipedia article (warning: it’s not for the faint of heart). Because of all the possible formats, you need a video player that will handle the different types of video your podcasts are delivering.

Player

Since iTunes is both a podcast aggregator and a video player, a lot of video podcasts are built to play in iTunes. This means they’ll also play using Quicktime player, and many will play on a video-enabled iPod. But those players won’t necessarily play everything you find on the web.

To be sure, I’d recommend VLC. It’s an open source media player for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and others, and it plays just about everything. I’d argue that if you’ve found a video on the internet that won’t play in VLC, its creators don’t actually want anyone to watch it.

Subscribing

In order to subscribe to a video podcast and have the episodes automatically downloaded to your computer, you’ll need a podcast aggregator. iTunes is probably the most popular one, and it’s available for Windows and Mac.

However, I have to recommend Democracy (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux), which is specifically built for web video. It is both an aggregator and a player, and the player is built from the VLC code, so it plays just about everything. Democracy also is a bittorrent (wik) client and will save files from YouTube and Google video.

Regardless of which aggregator you choose, you can subscribe to a video podcast by clicking a link in the software’s directory or copying the feed URL from the podcast’s website into the aggregator. Whenever new episodes are released, the aggregator will automatically download the episodes to your computer. You do need to have the aggregator running in order for the downloads to happen.

Podcasts

If you already know what you want to watch, great! But if you are looking for new video podcasts, there are a few ways to find them. iTunes and Democracy each have directories where you can search for podcasts, and both offer recommendations.

You can also use a service like AmigoFish, where you rate shows and get recommendations based on your ratings. You can also check out popcurrent, which is like digg for podcasts, and - oh yeah - there’s now digg for podcasts.

If you’re really stuck, or just want to know what I watch, here are my personal picks:

New look

Darusha — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 08:28:39 +0000

Maybe it’s the season, or maybe I just got sick of the old look, but I spent the last day or so redesigning the site. I’ve changed the entire concept of navigation to one that’s based on topic rather than time. Makes more sense to me, anyway.

I hope y’all like it!