Book Review: Everyware by Adam Greenfield
Adam Greenfield is a writer, NYC-based consultant, and professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunication Program. He’s also the guy who coined the term “moblogging” for blogging from your cellphone. He’s got a knack for inventing terms because “everyware” is such a simpler name than unicomp or “ubiquitous computing” that is used more often. This book is about the future, when software will be everywhere in our consumer electronic devices. It also touches on the other side of continuously connected devices and the social networking phenomenon.
The book is set up as a series of short essays (1-3 pages) on different aspects of the emerging future of consumer electronics. I’m a cynic when it comes to the subject — just look at the Yahoo Answers forum for iPods to see the problems real people have with what is arguably one of the best designed devices of modern times — and I found myself violently disagreeing with Greenfield within the first few pages of the book. But that was only because he begins with the promise of everyware before he delves into the harsh reality.
His conclusion is one we can all take to heart: technology doesn’t seem to improve the fundamental things that bring us joy in life. From start to finish he covers what ubicomp could be, to what it will likely be and all of the design issues in between. While I didn’t find myself learning very many new things, the book did a great job of stimulating thought. Everyware won’t give you any answers, but it will lead you to many questions which might be a better gift in the long run.
Footnote: I have to agree with the author that the printing company did a bad job of presenting everywhere. The book is missing a bibliography (that Adam Greenfield has since added to the online website), the cover art is too subtle to express what the book is about and the chosen font seems more appropriate to emails from my mom than a printed book.
My Favorite Albums of 2007
New Year’s Resolutions for 2008: release my “Best of” lists in the beginning of January, not at the end of January.
I’m sad to say that I listen to the same genre of music I did ten years ago. The list is all electronic music (house/electro) and if that isn’t your bag then you should skip it. All links go to last.fm previews of the music unless otherwise noted.
How to Make Your Own List in iTunes
Your very own “Best of 2007″ list is only a smart playlist away.
- File >> New Smart Playlist (or Ctrl-Alt-N)
- Set a range of dates from Jan 1 to Dec 31
I tried to include videos for each of the artists, so this post is video heavy.
Click on the More link to go to the music + videos.
How to Play Downloaded Videos on Your iPod, Xbox 360, or DVD Player
I’ve been slumming through the support forums at answers.yahoo.com lately and this is a question I see come up often: how do I download a video and put it on my electronic device? More and more consumer electronics devices that can play videos, but that means we have to learn more about the big, bad scary world of video codecs.
The steps are simple:
- Find a video source (source)
- video from your camera/phone, off the Internet, or from a DVD you own
- Get the video on to your computer (source/download)
- Convert the format of the video to something your portable media player can play (convert)
- Copy the video to your portable media player (destination)
…but the devil is in the details.
What is a Codec?
Codec stands for coder-decoder. It’s a mathematical algorithm that stores the video into a file. It’s like VHS vs beta or HD-DVD vs Blu-ray — different codecs have different formats and they aren’t interchangeable. There are many different video codecs, and that’s where the headache with downloaded content comes from. Your computer can play many more codec formats that your iPod, Xbox 360 or DVD player.
What Codecs Can My iPod, Xbox 360 or DVD Player Play?
This is the hardest part, especially when you aren’t familiar with video codecs. You’re going to have to do some research and find out what your portable media player supports. This is how I find information for any electronic device I’m having problems with:
- Find the model number for the electronic device
- Go to the company who makes the product and search for the model number
- Search Google using the model number and keywords about what you want to find
Once you’ve found the information make sure to save it somewhere you can find it again. I keep a folder on my computer with PDFs of the manuals for all my electronic devices so that I can quickly find the information again later.
Here’s a list of codecs for popular devices to get you started.
- Official list of Xbox 360 supported codecs
- Official list of iPod Nano supported codecs
- Official list of iTouch supported codecs
- Official list of iPhone supported codecs
How to Copy a DVD to Your Computer
These guides will show you how to copy a DVD to your computer’s hard drive so that you can work on it with other software to change the format to something you can play on your portable media device.
How to Download Videos
I’m not going to go into detail because of the questionable legality. There are videos out there that you can legitimately download but there are even more where you would be breaking the law if you downloaded them. I’ll let my friends at Lifehacker give you the skinny on downloading videos instead:
- The Beginner’s Guide to BitTorrent
- The Intermediate Guide to BitTorrent
- How to Find BitTorrent Files
- 6 Ways to Watch TV on the Internet
- How to Download YouTube Videos
- Software to Download YouTube Videos directly to your iPod
- How to Automatically Download and Covert Video
How to Watch Any Video Format on your Computer
If you’re downloading videos from unknown sources, quite often you’re going to end up with a file that your computer doesn’t know how to play back. The solution is to use the free VLC Media Player that is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and a million other operating systems you’ve never heard of.
Quick tip: always test playing a file with VLC before you do anything else with it. If it doesn’t play in VLC, chances are you won’t be able to convert it to work with your portable media player.
When VLC doesn’t work, there’s the Combined Community Codec Pack to the rescue.
How to Tell Which Codec Format the Video Uses
The best advice I can give anyone who is downloading content from unknown sources is do not trust the file extension. Just because the file says .divx or .mp4 doesn’t mean it’s is. Use the free GSpot software to find out the real details of what codec format the file you downloaded is.
I’m not going to lie to you — GSpot isn’t the most userfriendly application I’ve ever seen. But it gives you the two pieces of essential information you need: the video codec and audio codec the file is using.
How to Convert Codec Formats
The world of video codecs is very confusing, with lots of formats that sound similar but have minor differences that will prevent them with playing on different devices. I use Any Video Converter when I need to change codec formats of a file. It has a very simple interface that requires only three clicks to convert a file:
- Add a file
- Choose the profile for the output format I want
- Encode
Any Video Converter also has pay versions with added features like easy converting to iPod, Zune, PSP. But the free version works well for converting if you set up the profile for the output file format correctly. The free version also supports YouTube.
It is often easier to find specialty software that supports the electronic device you want to play videos on. When looking for how to specific software for converting video the first thing I do is go to lifehacker.com and do a search. They often discuss free software for video converting, and the comments are full of excellent information.
Specialty Software for Converting Video
Here are some examples of software that converts specifically to the file formats you need. I haven’t tried all of them, and some of them are pay software with trial versions while others are freeware and available for multiple operating systems.
- DVDFlick converts any file format to DVD
- Handbrake is a freeware converter for DVD to MP4 (iPod)
- 3GP Converter can convert 3GP/AVI/DivX/MP4/XviD to 3GP/MP4 for iPod, Sony PSP and most cell phones
- Videora BitTorrent client that supports conversion to all iPod formats including AppleTV
- Any Video Converter supports conversion to all iPod formats
- PSPVideo9 - convert to Sony PSP
- DVD Catalyst - dvd to ipod
- Pocket DVD Wizard - dvd to any portable device
- ZuneMyTube - youtube/google video to zune
This was written as part of the Daily Blog Tips tutorials group writing project.
Stupid iTunes Tricks - How to Burn a MP3 CD with Folders
You’d be hard pressed these days to buy a CD player that can’t also play MP3 CDs. My stereo, car, DVD player and XBOX 360 all support MP3 CDs as well as regular CDs. Using MP3 CDs in your car instead of the original CDs is a good idea because it saves you from losing the original if your car is broken into. Using MP3 CDs instead of regular CDs can give another big advantage — you can fit between 7-10 albums on to one MP3 CD. It’s like having a CD changer even if you can only play one CD at a time.
An MP3 CD is a regular old data CD like any CD you put in your computer. Any program that burns CDs can create an MP3 CD, but I like to use iTunes because I’m already using it to manage my music library.
How to Burn an MP3 CD in iTunes
- Put an empty CD in your CD/DVD burner
- In iTunes select File >> New Playlist (or Ctrl-N)
- Click on Music and drag the songs/albums to the new playlist you created
- Click on the new playlist and then click on the Album column header until it says Album by Artist [1]
- Rick click on the new playlist and select Burn Play List to Disc
It’s that simple.
[1] If you don’t click on the Album column then the MP3 CD will be created with all of the songs in one folder. It’s better to create it with one folder per album because then you can use the next folder feature in your car / stereo to switch albums on the MP3 CD.
Related Posts
Free Idea: Outlook Calendar Screensaver
People often guard their ideas thinking that if they let the word get out people will steal their golden shot at success. What they don’t realize is that idea are worth nothing. Implementation is the only thing that matters. Here’s an idea I had for something I’m not planning on building. Like it? Take it. Does it already exist? Let me know.
Microsoft Outlook is still the de facto email and scheduling application in most businesses. Smart managers know to make their calender public so that people can see when they are available at a glance — unfortunately its only the die-hard meeting goers who use that feature. Your average Joe Engineer still would rather drop buy every thirty minutes to try and catch him. One of my co-workers has a bad case of meetingitis and I see an average of 5 to 8 people drop buy his desk in the vain hope of finding him every day. One poor fool even tries to camp out at his desk like it’s a Star Wars movie.
The solution is simple enough: he needs a screensaver that displays his Outlook calendar for today so all the poor sods walking by can realize that he won’t be around for hours.
I haven’t found a full solution to this, but I know I’m not the first person to think how great of a screensaver your Outlook calendar would make.
- Almost but not quite: old screensaver that shows your Outlook tasks
- Hackers do it better: A trick to run DeskTask free software as an Outlook screensaver
- Great minds think alike: source code to a C# .NET version of the screensaver for Outlook 2000 and a how-to tutorial of how he did it.
Internet Duct Tape is up for an award as best sci/tech blog, so please vote!
7 Tips to Optimize Windows XP for Gaming — Playing The Witcher on Minimum System Requirements
One of the lures of the holiday season is to be able to hopefully squeeze in some time between eggnog, family and friends to exercise your vices. No, not heroin, but that other life consuming addiction: gaming. PC gaming is quickly going the way of the dodo, with console gaming taking over because it is so much easier to prevent piracy and ensure that the games will “just work” with the minimum of effort. But PC games are still my drug of choice, the combination of mouse and keyboard can’t be beat, especially for real time strategy or roleplaying games.
I decided to give the Witcher a try. It’s based on Bioware’s Aurora engine that powered my all-time favourite game Neverwinter Nights. The story is based on a long running Polish fantasy series, that has already had a movie and tv series based off of it. You can find a fan-subbed English copy of the tv show on popular bittorrent sites like the Pirate’s Bay. It is surprisingly better than I expected, about on par with the Highlander tv show.
Unfortunately the Witcher’s biggest flaw is that it’s using the Aurora engine. Game areas are split into several different area files that means changing areas becomes a complete pain in the ass. This was a huge problem when I used to do Neverwinter Nights game modding under the alias OldManWhistler, and I’m very surprised that four years later it STILL hasn’t been fixed. Playing the game will drive you running back to Bethesda’s Oblivion and their excellent background loading technology.
Load times are bad. The 1.2 “Christmas patch” of the game has improved it, but it still sucks all the joy out of the game to have the simplest of quests require up to 10 minutes of load screen staring to complete. Of course, the real culprit is that I’m trying to play the game with minimum system requirements. Let’s face it, no game plays well in the worst case scenario.
Special Witcher Tip: If your character became “locked-up” after moving to a new area it’s because you have autosave turned off. The game often moves into a cut-scene immediately after doing an autosave, and the cut-scene never starts if autosave is turned off.
In Program Files/The Witcher/System Folder/player.ini, set disable autosave to 0 instead of 1.
Getting Started: FreeRam XP Pro
Before you start optimizing your system, you should download and install Free Ram XP Pro. I don’t recommend using it all of the time, it’s pretty brutal when it decides to kick in and free up ram from running applications (it usually crashes Firefox). But it will display the amount of free RAM available in the system tray which will give you a warm fuzzy of progress as you go about optimizing your PC.
Performance Tip #1: Turn Off Your Antivirus
Antivirus software is a tax on the computer illiterate that wastes up to 50% of your computer resources. You should *NEVER* leave your antivirus software turned on while running PC games that are performance intensive (assuming they’re games you legitimately purchased)
Futher reading:
- The Culture of Fear behind antivirus software
- Choosing the Anti-anti-virus software
- The problem is trusting the user
Performance Tip #2: Buy More RAM
RAM is cheap these days. There is no reason why anyone shouldn’t be running their system with the maximum amount of RAM they can get their hands on. Crucial makes a scanning tool that will automatically tell you what kind of RAM your computer needs. It’s one of the easiest ways to make everything on your computer run faster.
If you don’t have enough RAM then your computer will have to use part of your hard drive as RAM, which is so much slower. Buying more RAM is the most time effective way to get more juice out of an old PC.
Performance Tip #3: Free Up Hard Drive Space
Most computers have a ridiculous amount of free space on them unless you download music, movies or tv shows. There are lots of free programs out there that will help you find out where your hard drive space is going. I was losing 12 GB to a log file that was automatically created by a program called PeerGuardian 2!
Performance Tip #4: Defrag Before and After Install
Fragmentation happens when you store things on your hard drive after time. The computer will write information to the hard drive where ever it fits, which means parts of the same file can be all over the place. Ideally you want to install programs so that the entire program is “contiguous” — all the bits of the file are as close to each other as possible so that they can be read all at once with the minimum amount of time. You should always defrag after freeing up your hard drive so that you can make the most out of that new free space.
Performance Tip #5: Using msconfig
The stupidest invention ever was the “helper application” that sits in your system tray, doing nothing but consuming memory and making whatever program it is supposed to “help” run faster. My worst offender is Apple’s quicktime task that NO ONE uses, but reinstalls itself every time you upgrade iTunes. There are a couple of startup applications that might be necessary because of external devices (IE: cellphone, digital camera, keyboard, scanner) but for the most part these can all be removed.
Performance Tip #6: Removing Services
The only thing left to improve how fast your computer is running is to turn off parts of the operating system that you don’t use. There’s a lot of them, and its hard to know what really does what. This is one area where you can screw up your computer if you do it wrong. GameXP provides a nice simple interface that will disable most things for you automatically (as well backup the changes). But you can do it yourself by following guides.
Performance Tip #7: Advanced Guides
The previous six tips are the easiest ways to get games running on your computer with the least chance of screwing things up. But that’s just the start and there are many other ways you can tweak Windows XP to get your system running faster. These methods are time consuming to implement, and may be too technical for the average person, and you can screw up your computer if you do things wrong.
- Create a special hardware profile for gaming that has everything disabled
- this is an important step because it means you will be able to easily restore from any changes you make
- BlackViper’s Windows XP service disabling guides for gamers
- Windows XP Game Optimization Tips
- tip #5 on page file size is quite good
- Tweak3d: 15 minute XP tune-up: Visual effects, Add/Remove Programs, Startup folder, temp files, registry cleaning, CCleaner, services, then defragment
Conclusion
You can get a lot done with an older computer if you’re willing to get your hands dirty and remove all the stuff you don’t need. Your operating system includes much cruft, and there’s always ways to extend your PC life beyond the normal limits.
Windows XP - Disable dumpprep when programs crash
I might seem like a slick, saavy geek who knows his was around an operating system but the sad truth is that I’m a complete Luddite when it comes to computer OSes. I don’t have anything against Windows Vista, but I’m not going to upgrade until its been out for one or two years, and all the tips and tricks for tweaking it are freely available.
One tip for improve Windows XP that I absolutely love is turning off that annoying “do you want to send an error report” message when programs crash. The sad truth is that those error reports rarely reach anyone who could fix the problem, so it’s a colossal waste of time — especially if the error is as innocuous as “the program ran out of memory”. Which is usually the case for me.
There’s a whole slew of steps for how to find the hidden setting to tweak to turn it off, but instead I prefer to use XP-AntiSpy or Safe XP. Both programs provide an easy interface to one-click “disable error reporting”.
Now when Firefox crashes because of memory problems I don’t have to wait five minutes for the error reporting dialog to pop-up.
Programming Best Practices: Profiling
My first task coming back from my work stress blogging hiatus is to finally fix problems with Akismet Auntie Spam that Lorelle reported over a month ago — if your Akismet spambox has over 10,000 spam comments then Auntie Spam is going to crash hard. Viewing that many comments at once will make Firefox use eight times more memory than normal web browsing, even without using Auntie Spam [1].
This means it’s time to do some code profiling [2]. In programming, profiling means to measure your code and find out which parts are using the most time and the most memory. Profiling gives you performance analysis measurements so that you can optimize your program for speed and/or memory.
“Don’t prematurely optimize” is a programming Best Practice, and it can be summed up in the words of my grandfather: “measure twice and cut once”. You can guess at what parts need fixing, but it is much more effective to measure how your program performs so that you can focus on the worst parts. They have the most room for improvement. Without profiling you could easily spend several hours optimizing a loop that executes in negligible time and ignore the three lines that copy huge chunks of memory for No Apparent Reason. Get it working, and then use your profiler to get it working fast.
Profiling is a Skill
I’ve been creating Greasemonkey scripts using javascript for a year now, and this is my first time firing up any kind of javascript profiler. It really struck me that I waited too long to do this. Don’t prematurely optimize, but also don’t waste any time learning how to run a profiler on your code and interpret the results. If you’ve never gone through the process of optimizing code in a language you regularly use, then you’ve been relying on all kinds of bad habits [3]. Learn how to integrate a profiler with your program as soon as possible so that performance analysis doesn’t become one of those “I’ll get around to it” tasks that never happens.
Another good rule is to always test with large data sets. Ideally you want a fast case for rapid prototyping of new features, and a worst case for stressful testing of that new feature. To often we use small sets of data for development and testing. We never realize how badly our code performs in real world conditions. Speed and responsiveness play a greater factor in whether or not someone becomes a regular user of your program than you might realize.
Footnotes
[1] One thing WordPress does wrong is it includes all of your comment spam in their WordPress export files. One friend saw his export file decrease from 83 MB to 8 MB once he deleted the comment spam.
[2] The best way to profile Javascript is with FireBug, but it doesn’t recognize Greasemonkey scripts unless you embed them in the page so FireBug can find them. Wikipedia has a list of profilers for popular languages.
[3] Some of the bad habits that were lurking in Auntie Spam:
- I was using a custom getElementsByClassName instead of an XPATH call. XPATH can be so much faster that walking the DOM.
- I had too many innerHTML assignments instead of leaving HTML as a string and then giving it to the web page to process as a final step
- Inefficient regular expressions
- Too many copies of the comments in memory
How to Profile Greasemonkey Scripts with Firebug
Running performance analysis on Greasemonkey scripts can be a pain in the butt. They aren’t part of a webpage so standard tools for analyzing web sites don’t work… or do they?
The Goal
What You’ll Need
The Trick
#1: You need to remove all of the Greasemonkey GM_* functions from the script you want to profile. This is easier than it sounds because all of the functions can be performed by plain ‘ole javascript (except for the open in new tab function and register menu command).
#2: You need to embed your Greasemonkey script inside of the running page so you can analyze it with Firebug’s profile tool. I have a function below that can embed a function inside the current web page.
#3: You’ll need to call the function either using unsafeWindow or by embedding a call to the function in the page.
#4: Litter your code with calls to Firebug’s console.profile() and console.time() functions.
Sample Code Template
(function() {
function embedFunction(s) {
document.body.appendChild(document.createElement('script')).innerHTML =
s.toString().replace(/([\s\S]*?return;){2}([\s\S]*)}/,'$2');
}
function myKickassGreasemonkeyScript() {
console.profile();
// Put everything you need for your Greasemonkey script in here
// Don't use any of the GM_* functions!
function kickass() {
console.time("Block1");
// Block of code that might take a lot of time
console.time("Block2");
// another block of code
console.timeEnd("Block2");
console.timeEnd("Block1");
}
// more cowbell
console.profileEnd();
}
embedFunction(myKickassGreasemonkeyScript);
// Method 1: embed the function call into the current page
document.body.appendChild(document.createElement('script')).innerHTML = "myKickassGreasemonkeyScript();";
// Method 2: directly call the function using unsafeWindow
// window.addEventListener("load", function(e) {
// unsafeWindow.myKickassGreasemonkeyScript();
// this.removeEventListener('load',arguments.callee,false);
// }, false);
})();
Firebug Tutorial
Michael Sync has a tutorial on using Firebug that describes the console.time() and console.profile() functions. The official website has a nice list of Firebug keyboard shortcuts and a brief description of all the console.* functions.
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How to Subscribe to RSS Feeds with Google Reader and Internet Explorer
In August I was being the dutiful son and trying to get my father hooked on RSS feeds. (It’s like the Ring — if you get someone hooked on RSS you no longer have 700 unread items in Google Reader)
I hit a snag: his browser of choice is Internet Explorer and there wasn’t a simple way to “one-click subscribe” like there is in Firefox. I couldn’t come up with a quick solution while I was there, but I did bitch about it afterwards which lead to one of my readers coming up with a solution using Google Toolbar. Thanks!
To Install
Step 1: Install Google Toolbar (if you don’t already have it)
Step 2: Install the Add to Google Reader button for the toolbar
To Use
Step 1: Click on an RSS feed link
Step 2: Click on the RSS icon in the Google Toolbar
Step 3: Choose the Subscribe with Google Reader option
The only gotcha is that you have to click on the feed URL before clicking on the Add to Google Reader button. This is because the Google Toolbar Button API doesn’t support RSS feed autodiscovery (something they’ll hopefully rectify). It’s still not as simple as subscribing to a feed with Firefox, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Thanks for helping me with this Eric, this is a great example of the lazyweb in action.
For the geeks in the audience, building a custom button is quite easy. I’m going to have to give it a try some time.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<custombuttons xmlns="http://toolbar.google.com/custombuttons/">
<button>
<title>Add to Google Reader</title>
<description>Add to Google Reader</description>
<site>http://fusion.google.com/ig/add?feedurl={url.noescape}</site>
<search>http://fusion.google.com/ig/add?feedurl={query}</search>
<icon>...snip...</icon>
<update>http://www.zouric.com/geek/addtogooglereader.xml</update>
</button>
</custombuttons>
Avoid Prime Real Estate for Live.com Email Address Landrush
Microsoft’s live.com is offering email addresses, and the usual land grab rush is on to “secure” your identity on the service. What most people don’t realize is that securing a “prime real estate” email address is probably the LAST thing you want to do.
An obvious email address suffers from an insidious kind of spam you’ll never be able to properly filter or get rid of: I’m talking about wrongly addressed email.
(photo by planeta)
As a gmail beta tester I was lucky enough to grab several firstname@gmail.com accounts and a couple of firstinitiallastname@gmail.com accounts. It was fine for the first year, but it has rapidly gone downhill as Gmail has risen in popularity. Now when I check my primary email account I’m lucky if one in four emails were intended for me.
I’ll get university class mailing lists, church lists, hotel bookings, and account signups by the handful. [1] It’s the digital equivalent to rifling through the magazine rack for subscription cards to sign up your ex. Except there’s no malice behind it; only ignorance and carelessness.
Good |
Bad |
| jqpublic@live.com | john@live.com |
| jpublic77@live.com | jpublic@live.com |
| johnqpublic@live.com | johnpublic@live.com |
| gilesb@live.com |
Possible email address for John Q Public
What makes it doubly-worse is that with many email programs automatically collecting any correspondence to your address book means that telling someone they have the wrong address might be enough to get you added to their address book forever. If you choose an email address with your last name, chances are that the people emailing you might have the same last name — automatic address collection means that you’ll be on the receiving end of each other’s Christmas newsletters for who knows how long.
I know I sound ridiculous, but you really can’t appreciate the number of similar email accounts on services like @gmail, @hotmail, @yahoo and now @live until you get a popular email address and start seeing the effect of several people who give out the wrong account name — yours.
Related Posts
- Password Recovery — The Achilles Heel of Your Online Security
- Why Posting Your Email Address in Plain Text is Never a Good Idea
- How to access Gmail when it is blocked at work or school
[1] And out of all those wrongly addressed emails there was only one mis-sent dirty letter.
Password Recovery — The Achilles Heel of Your Online Security
I had a fun surprise when I woke up this morning: I was locked out of my Gmail account. I sometimes play in bad neighbourhoods on the internet, and this immediately brought up worries of that I might have a keylogger Trojan, but a system scan revealed nothing. The actual truth of what happened was much stranger…
Like most people who grew up in the last quarter of the 20th century I have been inundated with information technology since a very young age. I had one email address in high school, two others during university, and new email addresses with each job and change of internet service providers. For the last few years I’ve been stabilized on Gmail, but I still switch between four different accounts (real name, nickname, gaming, blog). Schizophrenic? Yes.
Email aside, I use around twelve different online user accounts over the course of a week, and many more irregularly. When it comes to those dusty accounts I often have to use the password recovery feature to retrieve my login information over email. Despite my distaste for OpenID, I have to admit that I see the appeal. Password recovery works fine only if you can remember which email account you used to sign up with and you still have access to it. Jobs change, ISPs’ switch, and that free web-based email account you got in 1999 eventually goes down.
It was that last scenario that blindsided me. Like any other web account, Gmail’s recover password feature will send a verification message to your secondary email address on file. In my case that secondary email address was a free account I used infrequently in the hazy years following the turn of the century. Because I used it so infrequently I had no idea that it had been sold and was under new ownership. And I would have remained ignorant for much longer if I hadn’t been using a common name for my gmail account.
Being a Gmail beta tester had it’s perks, one of which was being able to grab the good names before anyone else could. But as Gmail became more popular, that perk changed into a disadvantage: the world is full of idiots who don’t know what their email address is and put down your email address instead. The amount of spam I receive is almost equal to the amount of misdirected email I get because Erica T. put down the wrong email address when the professor was handing the sheet around the classroom. Often these savants trigger the Gmail password recovery cycle as they try to log in to “their” account.
I ignore these password recovery emails the same way as I ignore the misdirected emails. Unfortunately, the good Samaritan who bought the domain my password recovery email was pointing to wasn’t as laissé-faire. Things were eventually sorted out, but not before I had a heart palpitation when he tried to do me a favour by changing my Gmail password and trying to find an alternate means of contacting me. Don’t let this happen to you, and make sure you know what email address the password recovery feature is going to use for your most important accounts.
How to Change Your Secondary Email Address and Your Security Question With Gmail
Click on the Google Accounts Settings link. (It’s hidden in Gmail under Settings >> Accounts).
Click on the Change Security Question link.
Change your security question or your secondary email.
The Moral of the Story Is…
Well, I’m not quite sure what the moral of the story is, to be honest. Obviously, there is something to be said for having one email address and keeping it for as long as you can. There is something else to be said for using an email provider who requires voice confirmation with personal identifying information before changing your password. Don’t get me started on the benefits of having an account name that other people are unlikely to use.
I know that I’ve got a long boring task ahead of me over the upcoming weeks. I have to assume that any other accounts that were linked to that email address could have been compromised in the 12 hours I lost control of my account. Searches of the trash and sent folders showed no tampering, but that means nothing since a smart person would have just downloaded all of the mail and started data mining with a copy. Can I safely assume because the guy went out of his way to contact me to restore access to my account that nothing bad happened to it? Would you?
How I Use Google Reader
“How I Use” is a new series I’m starting about the software I use on a day-to-day basis. I want share tips and tricks and to learn tips and tricks from readers sharing with me in the comments.
Google Reader is a web-based RSS reader. Because it’s web-based I can access my Google Reader from multiple places (home PC, home laptop, work PC, visiting family, etc) and all of my information is stored and updated in one place. I use the Firefox web-browser with the Greasemonkey extension.
Google Reader is an RSS reader
RSS can be best described as a stream of news. Instead of visiting different websites at a time, you subscribe to them and you get all of the updates from the websites you follow in one place. For me that one place is Google Reader. This video will describe RSS and why you would want to subscribe to an RSS feed.
Subscribing to a Feed
I subscribe to feeds either by clicking on the feed link directly or by using the autodiscovery feed option in Firefox.
The first time you subscribe to a feed, Firefox will display the feed in a nice, human readable way, with a yellow box asking you what you want to use to subscribe to this feed. Choose the Google option and chose the option to always use Google to subscribe to feeds.
Unfortunately, Google isn’t smart enough to remember your preference between Google Reader and Google Homepage — so you have to always chose the red pill or the blue pill. There is a handy Greasemonkey script to fix that though: always subscribe to Google Reader.
Accessing Google Reader
I access Google Reader by typing reader.google.com into my address bar or by clicking on the Google Reader icon in the Google Toolbar.
Setting Up My View
Google Reader lets you save your view settings which ever way you like them. I like to view all items at a time instead of sorting them by tags (I’ll switch to tag view if I don’t have time to read all my feeds and I want to focus on a specific subject).
I click on the Expanded view tab in the top right hand so that I can see titles and the body of each item.
I turn off the left sidebar by clicking the left margin or pressing ‘u’ on the keyboard.
Then I click on the View Settings drop-down and choose sort by newest and set as start page.
Now Google Reader will remember these settings every time I log in.
Navigating Feeds
I read feeds by
- using the middle mouse wheel to scroll down the page with my right hand
- my left hand hovers over the ‘j’ and ‘k’ keys on my keyboard
- ‘j’ jumps past a post that I don’t find interesting enough to read completely
- ‘k’ jumps back to the previous post if I decide that I do want to read it
I find quickly scanning through full posts like this lets me read many more feeds than if I have to click on the titles I find interesting.
Opening Links
I open links I want to read by
- clicking on the link with my middle mouse button to open it in a background tab
When I get around 10 links I take a break from reading feeds and go through all of those open tabs, closing them as I’m done with them.
Read a Post Later
If I come across a blog post that’s too dense to read at the moment I’ll use the Readeroo extension to save it to delicious with the toread tag. Readroo will let me fetch it later, and mark it as read.
Leaving a Blog Comment
When I find a blog post I want to comment on
- I hit the ‘v’ key to jump to the post on the blog
- hit the ‘end’ key on my keyboard to go the bottom of the post
- press ‘alt+c’ to fill in my name / email address / blog url thanks to the handy prefill comments Greasemonkey script
- write my comment and click send
- press ‘ctrl+w’ to close the tab and return to my Google Reader tab
Bookmarking a Blog Post
When I find a blog post I want to save for my ‘Best of Feeds’ series
- I hit the ‘v’ key to jump to the post on the blog
- click on the ‘TAG’ button in my toolbar to save it to delicious
Google Reader has it’s own mechanism for sharing and bookmarking posts but I don’t find it nearly as useful or as fast as delicious. That might change with time.
I’ve seen a Greasemonkey script that lets you bookmark the post from within Google Reader, but I prefer using the official delicious extension to bookmark posts because of other enhancements I’ve made to it.
How Do You Use Google Reader?
The reason for writing a post like this isn’t only because I want to share how I do something, but because I also want to learn tricks I might not know about. Got a trick I’m missing out on? Please leave it in the comments, or write your own blog post about it and send a trackback.
The Attention Age: Accelerando, Software Agents, Filters and Gatekeepers
Last night I finished reading Accelerando by Charles Stross. Like many of the books I read these days, I heard about it from another blogger. It feels like a spiritual sequel to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, John Brunner’s the Shockwave Rider and Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan. It is about information overload to the nth degree and too much change in too short of a time.
Accelerando is broken into 9 fragmented stories with decades passing in between them. This is too bad because it was the initial segment, only a few years in the future, that I found most interesting. Our protagonist is hooked up to a portable computing network of software agents that he uses to continually data mine and plug-in to a “river of news”. As he communicates with other people he spawns off parts of his “distributed brain” to research more information and get back to him.
The greatest inventions usually come from seeing the possible connection between two separate things (eg: peanut butter and chocolate). Like in the Shockwave Rider, our protagonist is successful because of his ability to gather and process information is so far beyond an average person’s. Being immersed in the information stream he sees the connections and trends that other’s can’t see.
These connections lead to so many successful ideas, that he can’t possibly execute on them himself - because the time it takes to implement them would take away from the information processing that is his true talent. He makes a career of giving away his ideas and surviving off of the reputation gain and support of his sponsors he’s made so successful. Very much like Doctorow’s concept of whuffie - reputation as currency.
The book progresses to talking about the post-human experience after digitization has reached the point that we can successfully digitally encode human personalities. Post-death society, heads in jars and living bodiless on the internet. There’s a really good bit on how the next major species will be intelligent corporations and artificial spam intelligence. But what really interested me was the initial chapters so close to the beginning 21st century: how do we use technology to deal with information overload?
(You can get a copy of Accelerando for free online - which is very useful because the copy I borrowed from the library was missing the last page - now that’s frustrating)
It’s Getting Harder to Find Information
We’re in the middle of a great revolution where anyone can become a self-publisher. But that’s the crux of the problem, isn’t it? Anyone can become a self-publisher. The low barrier to entry makes the competition for attention fierce. At some level we’re all on par with the lowliest spammers, trying to compete for other people’s attention. There is so much new content being created all the time at the only way old content stays in the public record is if the Great Google God returns it in a search result.
This is only going to get worse because Google has created a new caste of blogging serfdom. People create content and splash Google ads on it with the hope of that it will do well in Google search results so they can get paid.
There’s many a “business model” that relies completely on Google-Google Search for traffic and Google AdSense for revenue. And there’s an even larger amount of so-called business models that rely almost completely on Google for traffic, even if the money comes in via other means.
I think you know what happens to the money when the traffic stops.
I use the term “business model” above loosely, because a model that is entirely dependent on an outside company, for either traffic or revenue or both, is not really sound. You’re not in charge and you have very little control, because if Google decides to change the rules, you’re out of luck. Based on that, I would argue that relying on Google is not a business at all.
I’d say you work for Google.
From the Teaching Sells e-book
Where are the Smart Filtering Agents?
One of the things I remember clearly about the idea of intelligent agents in the early 90s was how it was going to revolutionize how we consume information. Instead of having to *gasp* pick up a newspaper, autonomous software agents would search the net finding tidbits of information what we were interested in and adapting and learning from how we interact with the results. Sci-fi books like John Varley’s Steel Beach dealt with the relationships between humans and these evolving artificial intelligences.
Take a moment to glance at the Wikipedia page on software agents; it’s quite good.
The 90s hope for intelligent agents has congealed. RSS has gotten us part of the way; now we can pick voices out of the chaos that we allow to push information to us. We can subscribe to alerts on search subjects that interest us. But aside from custom recommendation engines like Netflix and Last.FM there isn’t really a bot out there for finding information for us.
The Future: RSS Filtering
I see the fledgling baby steps of software agents delivering news. There are several sites competing for being able to filter through a list of RSS feeds and recommend the best news items to you.
There’s also the “build your own” filtering agent approach.
And let’s not forget the ability to monitor search terms.
One of the more enlightened concepts I’ve come across is FaveBot that wants to bring you the custom information you want about your favorite actors, authors and musicians.
Is the Answer Better Gatekeepers?
Is having an intelligent software agent the right approach or is it better to let humans do the filtering? The past year has seen an incredible rising in using crowdsourcing to decide what is the best information available. This is how digg, reddit, stumbleupon and the delicious popular page find interesting information by using the wisdom of mobs. Unfortunately when the user-base grows too large it becomes watered down to only common denominators.
The other approach is to find human editors to act as your gatekeeper. I’m not talking about hiring your man in Mumbai, but rather niche news sites like Slashdot, BoingBoing and Fark, and to a greater extent using the network of blogs you enjoy to act as your information gate keepers.
The last.FM music service is an amazing tool for finding new music to listen to. What makes it even stronger is its ability to find your “neighbours” - people you don’t know who have similar musical tastes. Listening to your neighbourhood radio is like having a friend who’s a DJ and always pushing new and interesting songs at you.
I don’t know any of these people, but I like their musical tastes.
Maybe instead of software agents we need software that connects us to other people who have similar interests? I read LifeHacker because I know the editors have very similar sensibilities to what I find interesting. Jon Udell shares my same love for information organization and manipulation. Jeff Atwood has perhaps one of the most engaging blogs for general geekery and love of programming, and his twitterstream is always full of interesting links.
The only downside to filtering information is that restricting your input to the people you already agree with creates a reinforcing feedback loop and destroys your patience and your ability to be around people with differing outlooks.
Related Posts
Distraction Free GTD: 32 Todo List Web Applications
The fine folks at LifeHacker have forced me to tip my hand with their post on using Web Runner as a distraction free browser. Web Runner is a tiny site-specific web application that runs using less resources than Firefox or Internet Explorer.
The whole idea behind a site specific web browser is that you want to access a web application without being tempted to access other sites. You want to access a site without being distracted by the rest of the Internet. A good example is an online todo list or GTD application. You want to be able to quickly access your todo list to add or checkoff items without getting caught in an Internet black-hole.
(via Coding Horror)
To make things easier for everyone I’ve created a huge bundle of Web Runner web applications centered around accessing ToDo/GTD web sites. This is a list of the supported sites.
- Vitalist, https://vitalist.com
- Treedolist, http://treedolist.com/
- Toodledo, https://toodledo.com
- Ta-DaLists, https://tadalist.com
- RememberTheMilk, http://rememberthemilk.com
- Nozbe, http://nozbe.com
- Hiveminder, https://hiveminder.com
- doOh, http://dopointoh.com/
- WebToDo, http://webtodo.wndmll.com/
- SimpleGTD, http://www.simplegtd.com/
- TracksTrain, https://tracks.tra.in
- 30Boxes, http://30boxes.com
- stikkit, https://stikkit.com/
- GTDTracks, http://www.gtdtracks.com
- TaskToy, https://tasktoy.com/
- gubb, https://www.gubb.net/
- Todoist, https://todoist.com/
- JoesGoals, http://www.joesgoals.com/
- Tedium, http://www.mcqn.com/tedium
- iCommit, http://icommitonrails.de/GTDV2/
- Neptune, https://www.neptunehq.com/
- Nutshell, https://www.gonutshell.com/
- OnlineCEO, http://roughunderbelly.com/
- BlaBlaList, http://www.blablalist.com/
- TuduLists, https://app.ess.ch/tudu/welcome.action
- Voo2Do, http://www.voo2do.com/
- Zirr.Us, https://www.zirr.us/
- SproutLiner, http://sproutliner.com/
- Jjot, http://jjot.com/
- MojoNote, http://mojonote.com/
- Backpack, https://www.backpackit.com/
- TaskFreak, http://www.taskfreak.com/
- ZohoPlanner, http://planner.zoho.com/
- Basecamp, http://basecamphq.com/
- YahooCalendar, http://calendar.yahoo.com/
- GoogleCalendar, http://calendar.google.com/
Want more sites added? Leave a comment.
Step #1: Install Web Runner
- Go to this page on the Mozilla Wiki
- Choose the Windows, Linux, or Mac installer
- Here’s a quick link to Web Runner 0.7 for Windows (latest as of 2007/10/05)
- Run the installer
Step #2: Download My “Distraction Free GTD” Web Bundle
- Download this zip file (Update 2007/10/10)
- Unzip the contents to a folder
- Click on a .webapp file to launch the web application you want
Every web app has hotkey history navigation (ALT+LEFT, ALT+RIGHT and ALT+HOME).
Leave a comment if you have any problems.
When is it time to get a new iPod?
Death Clocks use statistical information to let you know when you are going to die based on your habits (with smoking and obesity being the worst factors). The iPod Death Clock (via) is an interesting little web app that figures out how much longer your iPod has to live based on the serial number (how old it is) and how you use it (while running, on the bus). Needless to say my 3rd generation iPod is getting on in years.
I happened upon a blog called Contester the other day that tracks Internet freebies being given away by other bloggers. Blog contests are a great grassroots way to advertise your blog (if you aren’t too spammy about it — some of them are). They’re usually worth entering because you have a 1:20 to 1:50 to 1:200 chance in winning depending on how popular the blog running it is. A few people are giving away iPods, and hope I win one as my iPod is on it’s last legs.
- Future Shop Canada is giving away an iPod Touch
- Success for your blog is a blog about making money through blogging and they’re giving away the new iPod video nano
- It’s Write Now is a blog about writing tips and they’re giving away an 8GB red iPod video nano
- Darin’s Search Marketing is giving away a Free iPhone
- FiddyP is giving away Vmoda Vibe headphones (he’s the guy who does the Hello Stumblers! plugin)
One of the downsides to owning an iPod is the iTunes music store. The music has DRM copying protection measures that are a huge pain in the ass. Enter the new Amazon MP3 store that sells music for cheaper than iTunes without any copying protection — you’re free to do whatever you want with the music you own. Luckily there are also quite few blogs giving away Amazon gift certificates or straight up PayPal.
- Mac’s Money Blog is offering $50 gift certificate (he also does FinanceFavorites.com, a digg-like site for financial tips)
- Anton is offering $50 over at his Halloween Blog
- Ryan444123.com is offering $75
- John Cow make money online and micfo web hosting are offering $500 (that’s a lot of songs)
- Blog Contest and Black Stork action sports are offering a chance to win $75
- Nanashi-Inc is offering $50
- Live Learn Invest and climb kilimanjaro are offering a $50 Best buy gift card
- NutsAndMilk tech news & online tips & tricks are offering $250
Becoming a Better Blogger
There’s also a couple of sites offering books for bloggers that I want to read.
- Male Wail (a blog about men’s gripes) is giving away a copy of the 4 Hour Work Week
- John Cow make money online is offering Purple Cow, SEOBook, and BlogMastermind
There’s also a contests for professional logo design
- The Prize Blog is offering logo design by SOS Factory
It’s crazy how this idea of promoting your blog via holding a contest has taken off like hot cakes. It makes me a little sad though that it seems like some people are losing their focus and writing/participating in contests all the time instead of writing blog posts that share information, help people, or at the very least entertain.
And on a slightly different note, someone is finally doing one of these contests for a real cause instead of personal gain:
Ultra-runner Tim Borland is running 63 marathons in 63 days in order to raise funds and awareness for the A-T Children’s Project in their quest for a cure or life-improving therapies for ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T). A-T is a rare, neurodegenerative disease that affects children, giving them the combined symptoms of cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, and cancer. Children with A-T — born seemingly healthy — are usually dependent upon wheelchairs by the age of 10 and often do not survive their teens.
To run with Tim, join a tailgate party, or make a donation, please visit the A-T CureTour website. There, you can also view the daily video blog produced by filmmakers who are making an independent documentary on the A-T CureTour and enter a contest to Win a Nintendo Wii.
Hard not to participate for something like that.
9 Techniques to Promoting Your Social Web Application
This is a continuation from The Problem with Social Web Applications.
“web applications are created as social software where you have a friends list, collaborate on a document with multiple people and it is easily to share information and communicate. The downside is these networks consume a lot of attention and too much time is wasted building profiles and adding friends - for some of these sites building a profile and adding friends is the only utility they have.”
Putting the inherent problems of social web apps aside, how do you build a web app that has traction, gain users and hopefully explodes virally? I’ve been paying attention to this space for far too long and this is a round-up of the tricks and techniques successful and not-so-successful social web applications use to promote themselves.
I’m completely excluding any technique that relies on spending money. It’s a given that you can buy traffic and attention through various mean. Instead, I’m focusing on the self-powered techniques companies can use to build organic buzz and word of mouth advertising around their web application.
Technique #1: Beta Invitations
The easiest way to generate buzz for your social web app is to create an artificial scarcity for applications. You can email invitations to people every day and they won’t give you a second glance, but if invitations are hard to come by then the invitation becomes a valuable commodity instead of easily ignored spam. Gray market economies grow around beta invitation trading, even if the accounts themselves are seldom used.
Beta invite success stories: Gmail, Joost, Pownce
Gotcha: “Blog Friendly” Beta Invitations
The gray market beta invitation economy that you want to generate buzz is built off of the back of bloggers. Invitations are an easy way for bloggers to provide value (or the illusion of value) to their readers at no cost other than time. How bloggers feel about your beta invite campaign, and your application, will come from how easy you make it for them to send out invitations.
Medium lets me invite people by posting a URL on my blog. All of my readers who click on that URL can get into the Medium beta and are added as ‘friends’ with no effort on my part. Compare this to Joost invitations require a cut-and-paste of every email address into a desktop application. Sending a single Joost invitation will take me at least a few minutes because I have to load a desktop application. It could potentially take much longer if the desktop application needs to be updated.
Gotcha: Scarcity of Beta Invitations
One way sites screw up is by giving away too many beta invitations up front. If you are using manipulation to create buzz around your product then you need to create artificial value by implying that the people who have access to your service are more privileged. If anyone and their lolcat can get in then how do you create the false sense of hype that comes from people talking about a product you don’t have access to? It’s like the false economy around diamonds.
Technique #2: Social Engineering Trickery
A social engineering technique that works very well for getting people to accept their user account is to say “your friend created a profile for you!” It’s cheesy but it gets the invited user to sign-up. The easiest way to engage someone’s curiosity is to make it about them. People are always interested in themselves, and in what other people may have said about them.
Examples: Spock and Yahoo Mash
Technique #3: The Video Demo
A very effective technique for creating interest in your product before the doors are wide open is creating a video to promote the service and show how people can use it. The iScrybe calendar is a great example of a video that went viral and created a lot of buzz around a product that still hasn’t materialized (disclaimer: I’m a beta tester).
CommonCraft has created a business behind making videos that explain product in simple no-frill terms that somehow work better and remain more interesting than the flashiest demos.
Gotcha: Leaking Features to Early
The only problem with giving a video demo of a product doesn’t exist is you give your competitors that much more time to copy your features. By the time you release you’re competitive advantage might no longer exist.
Technique #4: The Press Release
I’ll let this video CommonCraft developed for PRWeb discuss the value of press release kits for generating buzz.
Gotcha: Spamming Bloggers with Press Releases
As a blogger, one of the dangerous of having your email address on your About Me page is the number of press releases you receive. I’ll reluctantly admit that I do occasionally write a blog post about a service that catches my eye. However, the method of contact has also made me ignore sites like CrossLoop.com that I later realized was very awesome and solves a problem I often have about how to fix someone else’s computer remotely. Why is your application different than any other of the many emails I have received?
Technique #5: The Address Book Import
Always make it as easy as possible for people to invite their friends to use your social web app. The email address book is the only existing workaround to the “social graph problem.” Make it as easy as possible for users to invite or connect with their friends using address book import and supporting the major webmail sites (Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail) as well as instructions on how to upload from Outlook or Outlo