It Might Actually Be Impossible For The BlackBerry PlayBook To Do Native Email! | Cult of Mac.
Amateur Hour Is Over! YEEHA! (double-facepalm, EPIC intensity)
I finally got all my ducks in a row and got around to burning a copy of Joli OS to a CD-R at work. I started grunging around for a machine to use it with and got sidetracked by several UPS units which needed to have their lead-acid batteries removed so that I could eventually recycle them. When I got the batteries removed and pitched the UPS units and cleaned up the space I realized that I had run out of time to do what I originally was going to do with Joli OS. So instead of using the CD-R that I burned I just set up Joli OS in a new VirtualBox container and watched it chug along.
Joli OS really impressed me. It was mostly successful in keeping the CLI hidden from the user and I quite liked all the integration with Google Docs and Dropbox that was available. I started to muse about how one could use this new “OS”. I thought it would be a great use for a computer without a hard drive. I’m always looking for a competent operating system that can be run live off a CD-R, and mount Dropbox or Box.net as its primary user-space filesystem and run like that forever. I will have to do some more tinkering to see if I can coax Joli OS into doing just that.
So far I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen and I’m looking forward to exploring more about Joli OS and Joli Cloud.
I just got a notice that Verizon is going to be expanding their LTE service in the lower peninsula of Michigan and covering Flint, Detroit, Lansing, and Grand Rapids. That Kalamazoo isn’t on that list is only sauce for the goose of course, but it’s a particular bittersweet sauce.
What’s the problem with really fast mobile broadband traffic? The problem is twofold, and it’s partially a problem with the consumer group and partially with the carrier. First, what is the consumer going to do with 5 to 12 mbps downlink and 2 to 5 mbps uplink? It comes down to applications and the speeds at which they are most well suited. Mobile data currently is composed of streaming traffic such as XM and Pandora, PIM data such as BES traffic, email, CalDAV and CardDAV traffic, and small application data such as navigation apps and other social media applications. Currently all of these applications work well on 3G networks, and moving to LTE, well, what would that get you? The applications themselves aren’t really going to benefit from the increase in network speed, but there is one network application that will benefit and that is video. Video uplink and video downlink. Much like what drove VHS development in the eighties and nineties, it is going to be pornography that will flow over these fast circuits. It’s not productivity anymore, that putters along at 3G speeds, now it’s going to be prurient content that dominates the airwaves once LTE traffic is established. This of course is a trap. The next problem is the carrier itself. LTE traffic is going to encourage people to consume more network traffic over their mobile device and porn is just the tip of the iceberg. Verizon is going to establish data caps, if they haven’t already, and this is going to be a cash cow for any carrier. If you give a busy male executive “Broadband in your pocket” then he’s going to most likely end up trying to seek out “Broads in your pocket”. They’ll be pounding down the gigabytes. After that, the only other application that is best suited for really fast networks is BitTorrent traffic. So people will be consuming porn and illegal movies on their mobile devices and generally making both a biochemical and legal mess of themselves.
Of course we can’t discount the why behind LTE. Verizon, along with all the other carriers are pressured to always enhance their services that they provide. So much like the insipid megapixel battles when digital cameras were first being developed we’ll now have a “G” battle over ever-increasing speeds. A network that is super-fast, built for porn and huge carrier bills. This has your average white male shareholders pants filling with reproductive fluids just at the thought of the profits-to-come.
So I call bullshit on LTE. It’s bullshit because it’s core application is fapping. If that’s all there is, then LTE is just that, just so much fapping. It’s bullshit because it’s a money trap for fools dumb enough to subscribe to it. Once the population gets this mobile broadband experience they are going to blithely blow right past their data caps and land smack dab in wireless-bill-bankruptcy. I can’t wait until the wife opens the bill and sees a $1600 charge for a massive use of data and ask her husband, who told her that the reason his right arm was so much bigger than his left was because of his handedness in Tennis. Of course. Sure it is. The only people who will benefit from LTE will be the carriers. They’ll be raking in the cash and laughing their way to the bank. Mark my words.
Talk about a blast from the past! I noticed a few weeks ago @GenerationSUNY’s twitter feed talking about the SUNY report card being presented by Chancellor Zimpher and that reminded me about @ub_alumni. It’s a curious condition I’m in. I work for WMU’s Development and Alumni Relations department and here I am talking to my alma mater’s Alumni department. The things I’ve learned here at Western, things I never thought I’d actively use in pleasant conversation all of a sudden are now directly relevant.
So of course the nice people who staff the @ub_alumni account gave me a link to their Alumni connect website. This is exceptionally comic since the system I tried to get into is the same, at least thematically, that we are attempting to bring to WMU alums right here and now. So on I go. I know a few things, mostly my UB Person Number, when your grades are in a list and it’s sorted by this number, you know it. It’s a number that’s as with-me as my Social Security Number is. And I dimly remember my username that used to be on UB’s computer system, which as I remember was a Solaris Unix system. Ah, the geeky stuff you remember. And then I made contact with @ub_alumni on Twitter. They helped me remember my password to the UB Connect site and once I got in I remembered that many many months, maybe even years, yikes, I got a letter in the mail from UB offering UBMail, their email account they offered all alums through Google. This letter, as I remember, came hot on the heels of WMU’s decision to either go with Merit’s hosted Zimbra infrastructure or to go with Google’s infrastructure for email services for higher ed. There was something very deeply satisfying to know that my alma mater elected to go with Google, and that my arguments for Google and against Zimbra were at least backed up by my alma mater’s choice. I remember laughing heartily because my alma mater is nearly the same size, at least when it comes to students, as WMU is. Golly, if it works for Buffalo, maybe it’d work for Western?!? Bah, it’s all water under the bridge.
This left-field connection did get me to wander around SUNY Buffalo’s website, and I even looked at the Giving site and YES, I did think about giving. Before anyone gets all hot and bothered, I’ve given the last two times UB’s Annual Fund called me, my basic $35 donation, so keep your knickers on people. Jeesh. 🙂 But while I was looking at the site my mind started to wander and then I started to remember. At first it was funny odd little stories, things about South Campus, about the goofy city trolley that didn’t go all the way to North Campus because the rich, well-heeled slobs in Amherst couldn’t stand the idea of poor homeless people taking a trolley from the city up into their palatial bedroom community and reminding them about how hard life is, especially in Buffalo. Other memories too, from my house that I rented on Stockbridge Ave in Buffalo, with the people who I lived with, and regretted, it’s one of the few decisions that I made that was honestly really bad. And then the sillier stuff. Like being too drunk to drive, rather too drunk to walk even, and taking a cab from somewhere in the Red Jacket Quadrangle in Legoland all the way back to Clement Hall on South Campus and telling the cabbie that I didn’t have any cash. Then discovering that I had over $40 in quarters in my jeans pocket. That I couldn’t remember that little fact or the giant bulge of coinage in my pocket while the upset cabbie drove away was a memory that did stand out, and still does to this day. I also remember my classes, the halls, and as I continued to let my mind wander I realized just how much fun I had at UB. I met some of my best friends there, and at least one I still am friends with to this day. We met when I was 18, and now I’m almost 36. Oddly enough the funny memories are really quite embarrassing really. Like the rude knowledge of what the LGBT SA offices couch must have witnessed, to how many power tools were confiscated out of that office. Ahem. That sort of thing really stays with you. At least I can say that none of those drills, jigs, or saws were mine. And if you were wondering why such things were contraband, you are too pure and innocent to read any further. 🙂
After I graduated from UB I eventually ended up in Kalamazoo, Michigan and working for Western Michigan University. I couldn’t help but compare the two. One had a covered walkway system from one hall all the way across campus to the other end that kept you out of the weather. The other did not. Now that I look back, one of the smallest things that someone can remember really sticks out. Not having to trudge through a downpour or a blizzard as you walked the Spine really dwells quite prominently in my memory. But as much as WMU has foibles and shortcomings, at least both schools had some rather lame similarities. As you approach UB’s North Campus you see Cook and Hochstetter Halls, they look big and bold and grand and then… the rest of the campus. The two Universities look very much alike. Squat little brick buildings, most starting to age rather poorly. The one thing I do remember quite clearly, and why this sticks out does humor me, is that the chairs at UB were really really good. The chairs at Western are actually impossible to use, at least some of them in the very oldest of our buildings. It’s funny how the little things stick out in your memory like big sore thumbs.
So after I cleared up from my walk down memory lane I tried my hand at the UBMail thing again. That was just as impenetrable as it was the first time I tried to get into it, it’s one thing that UB really didn’t make easy, especially for alums who were out of contact for a good long while and forgot bits like usernames and passwords to student accounts the student didn’t think they’d ever need again. But all is not lost, I was able to contact the UB IT Help Desk and asked for a password reset. I have to admit to feeling quite awkward calling CIT’s Help Desk, only because contacting our own OIT is a fools errand and contacting the Help Desk here isn’t something that is done, really, ever. Oh well, what the hell, so I called the CIT Help Desk at my alma mater and talked to a nice fellow who asked me to scan and email some photo ID verifying my identity and to call back in half an hour. That was fine, and I was impressed, at least they knew what to ask for and used the phonetic alphabet when it was relevant. I wonder if the people who got my email at buffalo.edu notice the wmich.edu address. Yeah yeah yeah, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. 🙂 One thing I did notice was that the music on-hold was promotional material for UB and was designed to make you feel proud to have attended UB. Again I can’t help but compare…
All that’s old is new again. Maybe some day when I head back east to visit family in CNY I might make a stop or two on South Campus and North Campus and do a little wandering around. See what UB has done to itself in the intervening years that I’ve been away. Once I get free of my obligations, I’ll likely start giving to UB, at least more than the $35 hush-money I currently give them. *shrug* This is how it happens. Alums graduate and think nothing of where they came from until years and years later and all the good or funny things stick out in your memory while all the unpleasantness is forgotten. You get caught up in so much of those memories that you start to romanticize those memories, and before you know it, you’re writing $2000 checks to your alma mater without giving it a single thought. Huh.
Dropbox Lied to Users About Data Security, Complaint to FTC Alleges | Threat Level | Wired.com.
Read the above article, it’s quite good and covers the problems that many geeks have with Dropbox. I have to admit that I’m quite fond of finding ways to “Have my cake and eat it too” and in the spirit of that saying it’s important to highlight a core issue that needs to be covered: If you don’t manage your own security, you don’t have any.
Every service is vulnerable to a search and seizure order as long as it’s hardware exists within the United States. Any company that claims that they protect your data even from this basic assumption is lying to you. You can help them by helping yourself. The people who run Dropbox certainly have aims to secure your data, otherwise nobody but a scant few would be willing to store their data in the cloud. This situation is only half-way to what is really required to make a service like Dropbox a real charmer. It comes down to security and I’ve written about it at length before. The end user has to meet Dropbox for the other half of the way. Dropbox encrypts their data using AES-256 and they have a master key that they use along with yours so that they can maintain a backdoor in case of a search and seizure order to fulfill. Protect yourself by using any number of applications, ranging from TrueCrypt, iCrypt, openssh, to encrypted DMG files. If you create one of these encrypted files to store your private information then send it to Dropbox, even if they have to divulge the file to the authorities all they can provide them is another AES-256 encrypted file that they don’t have a key to. When the authorities try to pry open the file, all they’ll see is noise, because they don’t have your key.
It’s really quite easy when you think of it, Dropbox is at most 50% secure. You can provide another 50% making your use of Dropbox 100% secure. It all comes down to going that little extra inch with any of the tools covered above. I can’t help but really love encrypted DMG files as they are the most convenient to use with Macs. You just double-click on the DMG file, enter in your password, and the volume is mounted as if it were a drive on your computer. All the files are plain and easy to use. Ejecting the drive after you are done using it closes it and the data lives 100% secure in the cloud.
Getting bent because Dropbox only gives you 50% security is rather dumb. Anyone at all has to assume that it maxes out at 50% irrespective of what Dropbox claims. If you are smart and secure your own effects, then you’ve nothing to worry about and can get over this silly thing without a single thought. Makes sense to me.
People are asking me what I think about the location-gate kerfuffle surrounding Apple. So, it seems an apropos topic to write about here. What exactly is/was Apple doing? It turns out the iPhone 4 was recording cellular tower geographic information and when iTunes backed up the device it also grabbed a file called consolidated.db, which contained latitude and longitude data. The clever and curious started to poke around this data and discovered that the iPhone had data that appeared to indicate where the phone had been and then they mapped the data to make the entire deal visual and accessible by many people who are already very skitterish about location.
Everyone had an immediate attack over this. Claims that Apple was spying on its customers, that it was an invasion of privacy. Claims ranging from the charming right down to the purest of malevolence on Apple’s behalf. Apple noticed the powder keg of negativity that the discovery of consolidated.db brought about and changed iOS to better protect users tender privacy concerns.
Yes, I suppose if you didn’t know the intent and found location data on your phone you might be concerned, but what is this mad rush to the absolute worst possibility? That Apple is spying on you, that it’s collecting location information to use against you? This is the claim of the lazy paranoid with too much time on their hands. What is the value of that data? If you were an international person of mystery and you had grave life-or-death secrets to protect then perhaps you’d have some ground to stand on, but last I checked the average iPhone-toting American leads a very tiny life, unremarkable to anyone at all, and even if it is divulging location, with all the location-based check-in services like FourSquare and Facebook, aren’t you already giving away the keys to your very dull and lame kingdom? I’ll be the first to admit that I fall right into this slot. My life is EXCEPTIONALLY DULL. I travel in circuits that are OBVIOUS and BORING. I’m like a ping-pong ball in a game played with robots that do the same thing every time. I bounce from home to work, from home to Meijers, from home to the comic book store. Boing Boing Boing. What am I protecting? Not a god-damned thing. That’s why I don’t have a problem with online advertisements, tracking cookies, my location leaking out around the edges, or any of that stuff. It’s mind-achingly dull! It runs right along with my feelings of people turning on the iSight camera on my iMac and SPYING ON ME. Knock your socks off! First, I’m not all that pleasant to look at, so that hurts you more than it hurts me, and secondly, what deep dark secrets will you uncover? Perhaps you’ll uncover my most coveted secret of all, that once I develop 5 o’clock shadow I can’t stop itching. There, I’ve saved you all the work and trouble. Dull, isn’t it? Yes. Exceedingly so.
So what is it that people are so worked up about? I think it has more to do with how people want to be seen than actually what is seen. They want to have grand lives full of drama and intrigue, not lives spent planning on how much sour cream to buy tonight to make that one dish come out better this time. It isn’t about what they are protecting, but the image that there is actually something to protect. We are all predictable, regular, non-exceptional, and above all else, magnificently dull creatures! Whatever really awesome specialness we do possess is almost always popping in and out of existence between our ears. Every once in a while we write something down and stuff it away, sometimes we even act on it, but when you take the long view of human behavior it’s more of a dull repetitive machine with little tremors of specialness in between great swaths of inexorably dull events.
So what of Apple’s Location-Gate? Get over yourselves. You aren’t that important. Your lives, frankly, aren’t that interesting. Accept it and move on to the next thing you feel the need to squawk and twitter about ineffectually.
While talking to several of my coworkers about the ways I organize my digital life it struck me that I have never detailed the what, the how, and the why. To me organization has set me free. There are only a few places where information is kept and so finding it is just a matter of checking a few places and almost always I can find, or remember, what I need.
Here at Western we have changed our email infrastructure to what is called “WebMail Plus” and I affectionately refer to by the initialism WMP. WMP runs on Zimbra servers out of our ISP in Ann Arbor Michigan and ever since the changeover I’ve never been very comfortable in the new system. I don’t like the web-based interface and I don’t like my email to stay in Ann Arbor for very long if I can help it. It’s purely a personal thing and I don’t expect everyone to have the same resistance to WMP as I have. There is a significant amount of history between me and WMP that goes quite a bit back.To that end, I store my email somewhere else and I store some files in other places as well, depending on where I’ll use them most of all.
Tools
I use these tools in order to better organize my digital world:
Tackling the Email Monster
I’m quite fond of achieving what I like to call Inbox Zero at least once a week, and usually on Friday afternoons. For me, email comes in and usually falls into a few neat categories. There are purely informational emails, such as notices from OIT and advisories about the University Trustees and other WMU news, then there are requests for me to do some sort of task, and then there are email discussions about some sort of running topic. I tackle an inbox that has gone out of control by starting with “low-hanging fruit”. I identify and pitch all the informational emails that I don’t need to note or keep storing. Some of this mail is merely meant to expose me to some news item or some event and after I appreciate the contents, they lose all durable value. For these messages I’ll either mark them as Junk or just delete them. The next level is to identify all the tasks-in-email and redirect them to my Toodledo account. Once they are redirected I delete those from my WMP account as well. All that is left, usually are discussions and “durable value” emails that contain something I really should remember. For the latter I redirect those to Evernote and delete them out of my Inbox. The rest are conversations and usually I won’t keep a lot of these floating around anyways. Once I send a reply the entire conversation is pretty well “backed up” in my Sent Items and so there is little point to keep old conversational emails that I don’t need anymore. Any emails that remain I look at and decide if they are conversations, tasks, or something I need to remember. I keep on whittling down on the pile until I run out of Inbox messages. Some people will note that I’m just playing a cup-game with my emails in Evernote. On Sunday I start organizing my Evernote into folders and let all that information build up there. Because Evernote is bottomless I don’t really care how much information I stuff into it since I can pretty much search text and folders to find anything I might need later on. Another hidden gem is that all of these services, Instapaper, Evernote, and Toodledo all have really great iOS apps for both iPhone and iPad, so I can manage everything on any device I like any time I like. I’ve been known to knock several emails out while waiting in line at the supermarket, or waiting for a movie to start at the cinema. Every bit helps and if you are vigilant you can whittle all your Inbox down to size and then get into a habit of keeping it that way.
Cloud Data Storage: Having Your Cake and Eating It Too
Another need I’ve found is to store data in an easily accessible way between many devices. I have an iPhone, and iPad, a MacBook, a iMac and a Mac Mini. There is always a need for me to keep a certain set of files available on each device. It makes life easier to have them conveniently located and every single machine having the right set of files no matter what. Dropbox suits this need very well. For run-of-the-mill data Dropbox can’t be beat for convenience sake. There is however a problem when it comes to security. Dropbox is secure, but they are vulnerable to search and seizure orders from the government and so they *can* break security on your files in order to comply with a government action. There are some files that I really would like to have available, but I really don’t want to risk having these files exposed. If I’m willing to sacrifice a bit of compatibility (really secure use of Dropbox precludes iOS devices) I have a way to secure files even from Dropbox itself, while still making use of their syncing services. Here’s how you do it. Dropbox is a free service and they kick in 2 gigabytes worth of storage. On a Mac open up Disk Utility, create an AES-256 encrypted sparsebundle disk image file and save it to your Dropbox. Put a nice long password on it and don’t save that password to your Mac’s Keychain system (that makes it really secure, because the password is just in your head) and then you can have your cake and eat it too. The disk image file can be mounted by any Mac computer, you have to type in your access password to mount it. Even if Dropbox were to ship the file to a third-party for analysis the file’s AES-256 encryption (at the moment) ensures that the data within the file is safe. The neat thing about a sparsebundle with Mac computers is that a sparsebundle can be assigned a maximum size, say one gigabyte, and if you only fill it with say 200 megabytes worth of data then the disk image itself isn’t one gigabyte, but instead right around 200 megabytes. The sparsebundle is a lot like a bellows, it expands to contain only the data it needs to. It has a capacity of whatever high-water-mark you’ve set it up for, but it’s efficient in that it only takes up what it’s contents need versus a standard disk image which is a monolithic file. Another neat part of sparsebundle images is that you can issue a rather straightforward CLI command to compact them if you’ve removed data from them. That command is:
“hdiutil compact image.sparsebundle”
So even if a sparsebundle were temporarily carrying a big bulge of data, you can get the storage back out of it by running this command. It’s quite neat and tidy. The only thing that would seal the deal is if the sparsebundles would automatically compact themselves on-the-fly, but even with this command you can still quite enjoy having your cake and eating it too. As it turns out, every removable device I own has an encrypted sparsebundle file stored on it. This is the best way that I know how to have the convenience of this sort of technology and the peace of mind to know that if you lose it, nobody but you can make sense of the contents.
I hope that this makes sense to you all. I’ve found this entire procedure to be quite effective and useful and makes organizing my life much simpler and less burdensome. Perhaps it can do the same for you! 🙂
Only rarely am I impressed with vendors and companies in general. They serve no interest but their own and it’s almost always thoroughly spiritually corrupt. I just received an email from our database vendor, Sage, and it made me do a triple-take:
“I hope this message finds you safe and unaffected by the recent severe weather and storms. We are very concerned about the damage you may have experienced. We know you may have lost infrastructure and connectivity at your office or have employees that are scattered around the region who cannot return for a while to help you resume business operations.If you have been affected by the severe weather and storms, we’d like to offer some assistance.
We are willing to help get you on our hosted systems and operational at no charge to your organization until you are able to resume normal operations. We do have capabilities to host Millennium on our secure platform. However, a backup of your Millennium database will be needed to restore your operations. Please contact us at ***-***-**** so we can discuss and determine your needs.
It is my sincere hope that you are unaffected by these storms. In the event that you are, Sage would like to help. “
Jaw slack. Eyes goggling. Surety that vendor is inherently malevolent, shaken to the core. Bravo Sage, Bravo. I am impressed.
There is a new startup site called Bouncr.com. This web service allows you to link your real email address, such as mine, bluedepth@gmail.com with a wholly new named account hosted at bouncr.com. The service just auto-redirects all mail inbound to your Bouncr account on to your “real account” and if someone steals or misuses your address you can log in to Bouncr.com and just generate a new address and use that one instead. I love this idea and effectively renders having to create and maintain ‘shield accounts’ meaningless. Everyone really should head over to Bouncr.com and set up their service and use it!
My night was going very well. I was very pleased with how practically flawless my afternoon progressed. At work I have two very small computers in a very public setting and they are performing as usual, wonderfully. Around 2am I woke up with a start because a nagging feeling that I was forgetting something hit me square between the eyes in that fuzzy zone between being awake and just falling to sleep. I had exposed two of my machines into the cold dangerous world without getting their MAC Addresses or Serial Numbers!
In many ways my work computers feel a lot like beloved pets. I care about them and look after them, and in this case worry about their safety. They were rather far away and in a particularly exposed condition where it’s terribly infeasible to go to them, flip them over, and get the information off their cases.
ARD to the rescue! Once again Apple Remote Desktop saves the day and quiets my worried mind. I opened my MacBook, connected to my workplace VPN, opened ARD, found my two little ones happily chugging along and remembered that ARD has some rather good reporting features baked-in to the software. I clicked on the first machine’s icon and went to Reports. I asked for Serial Number and the MAC Addresses for both the Airport wireless network adapter and the wired Ethernet adapter. I did this for both machines and printed the results as ‘PDF To Evernote’. Now I have all the information I forgot to get earlier stuffed into my Evernote archive.
Now, if, light-forbid my two exposed machines get stolen I won’t be sitting there facing the police with my pants around my professional I.T. ankles utterly unable to conjure on the spot Serial Numbers and MAC Addresses.
Now perhaps I can get some sleep!