Category Archives: Technology

Mr. Technical Support Guy

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While sitting enjoying some nice tea, in this case Chocolate Chai Pu-erh tea at our local tea shop I had my iPad and my Bluetooth keyboard set up and I’ve been wandering through my Drafts-stored blog-prompts looking at things to write about. While writing about my Nook HD a pair of ladies approached me and asked me about the setup they saw me using. What it all was and how much was it and how did it work. So I gave them an impromptu sales pitch for Apple technology, the iPad, the Smartcover, and the Bluetooth Keyboard. They asked why I was using a physical keyboard and I confessed that I type a little too fast for the processor in the iPad to keep up. When I try to write The, the t and h are usually missed because my taps are too fast and I end up with E. Almost always. So I use a physical keyboard because that can keep up with my typing speed. They were impressed and wandered off to their table to enjoy their chocolate treats.

I was marveling at being an Apple Store employee without of course being one, yay for Apple evangelism (!) and I got back to work writing. Then another lady came up to me with her Kindle Fire in her hands and she asked me for help. Something about sitting here with a tablet and keyboard marks me as “Mr. Technical Support” and her problem was as she described to me “My Kindle says I have too many windows open. I went to Best Buy and the Geek Squad guy was no help, I was wondering if you knew how to fix this problem?” and I smiled at her and looked at her Kindle Fire. It’s worth noting that I’ve never really ever touched a Kindle Fire before, I don’t know what it’s system is like (I assume it’s a variant of the Android OS, maybe) and I invited her to sit down next to me while I looked at her Kindle Fire device. I suggested the best path would be to open up a browser on my iPad and bring up Google and search Google for “kindle fire too many windows open” and see if there was anyone else who had this problem and how they fixed it. As it turns out, there is no clear way (from what I could see) to actually close apps in a Kindle Fire. Now, it’s important to note that I’ve never actually touched a Kindle Fire and I’m not actually a part of Amazon’s Technical Support team, and all I really have is cleverness and Google. I found the solution for her and showed her how to hard reset her Kindle Fire. It’s like it is for any tablet device, hold down the power button and keep holding it until the device is forced off and then press the power button again to turn it on. Once her Kindle Fire came back on I asked her to try to bring the error on again and she opened an eBook on her Kindle Fire and said “It should show the error now… wait, it’s working! You’re my hero!”

And now she knows how to fix her own problem with her Kindle Fire.

Apparently I am “Mr. Technical Support Guy” after all. I should wear a shirt and have a Square reader and take credit cards for my services. $10 for Answers. LOL.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook Update

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They updated the OS for the Nook HD and Nook HD+ a few weeks ago and boy, what a difference does it make! These devices are no longer jailed to the Barnes & Noble's experience with their nascent App Store, but instead they are open to the entire Google Play infrastructure.

I've had an on-again/off-again love affair with the Nook series of eBook readers. I started with the Simple Touch and that lasted until the devices page turning buttons started going “hard of hearing” and I stopped using the device to read books when paging through became a maybe-yes/maybe-no proposition. I upgraded to the Nook HD, which is the smaller model that they offer and the HD+ is the iPad size model. The Nook has a bunch of really great features going for it, like having a place to insert a MicroSD card so getting a device with a big amount of internal memory is really quite meaningless, the bargain-basement model is good enough as the material that eats up the most space can be easily stored on the MicroSD card.

The challenge to really loving the Nook wasn't about the device itself, the device itself is built very well, almost Apple well, it's reliable and is smartly designed. The challenge I have always had with my Nook was the eBook reader software that B&N ships with their stock Nook devices. Please do not misunderstand, the app itself is exceptionally good if you are a general user, someone unlike me who is perfectly fine with the certainly competent eBook reader app. I however was not fine with the app. It came down to being ever so slightly irritated at certain little niggling issues that while I was using the device would wear me down. It's like having a very small pebble stuck in your shoe – you can walk without a problem, you don't limp at all, but you know there is a rock in there and over a long period of time it just irritates you and makes everything just a little less “right”. This stock app lacked some features which I really wanted. The primary feature was having the ability to configure the reader to use the font I prefer to have my eBooks rendered as. I have fonts I really find easy to read, those are OpenSans from Google and Helvetica Neue from Adobe. This was the little pebble in my shoe.

Then B&N let go of their Nook devices and upgraded them all to full Android devices that could use the Google Play Store as well as the B&N App Store. That night, after downloading the update and starting my Nook HD with this brave new world running on it I discovered just how incredible my Nook HD could be, freed. I found, bought, and installed a new eBook reader called Moon+ Reader Pro. The cost of the app wasn't too bad, at $4.99, it had a free version which gave you a taste of much of it's great features and once I saw just how perfect a match this eBook reader was for me I decided that I could spend the money on the full-blown app. This one app makes my Nook HD awesome as an eBook reader, and here is why:

  • Custom Fonts (!) – This was exactly what I wanted all along! It turns out that Helvetica Neue has a labyrinthine licensing model so I gave up on that font but instead switched over to my other favorite, Google's OpenSans. This font is freely available and it wasn't hard at all to find it as a “TrueType Font”, aka a TTF Font version. I copied the TTF Font file to my Dropbox and used another great Nook HD/Google Play app called File Manager HD to copy the file out of my Dropbox and create a folder for it in my Nook HD's file system called “Fonts” and copy the TTF Font file there. In Moon+ it was a cakewalk to navigate to my new Fonts folder, find OpenSans and that was it. Every eBook now is rendered in OpenSans, the way I really really like it to be.

  • Adjustable screen brightness with a swipe and font size adjustment by swipe – This actually wasn't something I thought I would really need until I found myself using it a lot. It's quite handy to skip out on having to adjust settings when trying to find the right font size and brightness to suit your reading preferences.

  • BookPlay – It's a feature of Moon+ where you can play a book, it slowly (with an adjustable speed) advances the lines of an eBook smoothly while your eyes fixate at the center of the screen and you don't have to paginate at all. The book automatically, slowly, smoothly advances along like a scroll attached to an adjustable winding player. I don't really know what the feature is called, but I call it BookPlay, and it's nice when I don't want to tappa-tappa to advance eBook pages on my Nook HD. The speed of advancement can also be set to a swipe adjustment, which I find to be really quite handy and super-clever.

  • Many canned custom themes and theme colors – You can configure the Moon+ app to switch display themes with all the settings saved per theme or turn off everything but color changing so the theme selection system does double-duty as a screen color picker. Sometimes I like reading black text on white backgrounds. Sometimes yellow text on a textured blue background and sometimes dark blue text on a black background. Each color theme is useful for different reading conditions. It's nice to be able to set my Nook HD to it's brightest highest contrast black-on-white for reading outside or on the bus on my way to work, then to the yellow/blue one for leisurely reading at home and then the dark blue on black to read in bed without staring at what amounts to a flashlight in the shape of a tablet.

  • Formats? Every format! – I have a few books in the B&N Store that I “bought” because they were “Free Friday eBook deals” that I took B&N up on when the opportunity struck. For those books I will gladly go back to the B&N canned eBook reading software and that's fine for those books. In general however I prefer to obtain my eBooks in the ePub file format. To that end, I have all my ePub books loaded on my MicroSD card, so they don't take up space on my Nook HD. Moon+ has a great bookshelf organizing metaphor and installing books that are stored on my MicroSD is a cakewalk. I love having all of my eBooks available and here's something that I've always been a little grumped about when it comes to the canned B&N eBook reader app, and that is, you have to get your books from B&N to have them in the B&N “Locker” so that you can make use of the “magic bookmarks” so you can pick up your eBooks on any device and read and when you stop that new place where you stopped is synchronized across all your B&N connected Nook apps and devices. This is really quite nice, especially when you have multiple devices or one of your devices has an exhausted battery but you don't want to stop reading your eBooks. There is no way to import your own ePub files into this B&N “Locker” system so you're shit out of luck. Moon+ returns this feature and makes it more generalized, open, and way more convenient. You can set up your “magic bookmark” sync with your Dropbox account! That's the way to do it! Have individual ePub files on Dropbox or on a device and use Dropbox to store the tokens needed to make the “magic bookmark” feature work without having to rely on the closed garden that B&N provides! This is so cake and eat it too, and I love crowing about that sort of thing when I discover it.

  • Reading Statistics – Moon+ also watches you read as you use the app and records your reading speed, how quickly you read books, and it also includes per-chapter ETA so you know generally speaking how long you have left in the chapter you are currently reading and a per-book ETA to let you know how much longer the book will last if your reading rate is constant. If you slow down or speed up, these values change and you can display them on a very thin status bar that is always visible at the bottom of your eBook screen. This little status bar can also display your battery level in your Nook, so you know how much juice you have left before you have to plug your Nook back in and charge it up. It's wonderful, for example, while reading “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” to know that the chapter you are currently reading has only 15 minutes left in it. That is quite a nice feature.

  • Access to Project Gutenberg – Moon+ makes it easy to connect itself to the largest collection of publicly accessible eBooks in the world. Project Gutenberg scans public domain books, lots of classics really, into ePub format and makes them freely available online. Moon+ has a interface to Project Gutenberg so the entire archive is just a few taps away and you can download your eBook right to your Nook and start enjoying reading, without having to pay one red cent.

All in all, for $4.99 Moon+ is a steal and makes the Nook HD a wonderful eBook reader. Moon+ has single-appedly eliminated any desire I had for the iPad Mini. That Moon+ only exists in the Android marketplace (Google Play) makes this one app the central pillar that tilts the playing field in favor of B&N and Android when it comes to tablets and reading eBooks. The iBook app for the Apple infrastructure is still quite good, as much as the B&N canned eBook app is for the Nooks themselves, but Moon+ blows it's competitors out of the water.

PAD 3/18/2013 – Impossibility

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“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – the White Queen, Alice in Wonderland.

What are the six impossible things you believe in? (If you can only manage one or two, that’s also okay.)

I have lived too long and witnessed too much inexplicability to not believe in astrology, Tarot cartomancy, and the subtle presence of magic in our world. It’s always a soft arrival too, if you try to force it or put it under a spotlight it evaporates as if it was never there. I don’t think that any of it will ever be in any way “explainable” by science. These things really can only be apprehended by faith. When I write of faith, I don’t really mean religion. I’ve always found religion to be stultifying and so I try to live without it as much as I can. The faith for these impossible things has been borne out by event after event where upon reflection the accuracy of all of it, any of it, is utterly remarkable.

I even run into it in my workplace. I have lost count of the number of times I have received notices from my coworkers that the systems that I support have failed them. When I walk in, even just walking by, the problems appear to evaporate. It’s just my presence that seems to do it and after a while you start to notice this remarkable phenomena and after a while I got to thinking that one possible explanation is that my office is beset by gremlins, brownies, manitou, or domovoi, or they are all there and acting in collusion with each other. I fancy that my presence scares them off and so the technical systems that I support, when I use them, work perfectly fine for me pretty much all the time, but when my coworkers try to use them, it’s a crapshoot for them. Until I appear, and then it’s back to being perfectly fine. I suppose there might be a more rational explanation about why this is, perhaps something to do with my bioelectric field or something subtle and clever and measurable like that – but I prefer to live in a world where everything is slightly tinted by the mayhap of the hidden world of magic. I select to live with a world that is enriched by tiny mysteries, because living in a world where everything is a field, particle, or wave is just too banal and bankrupt for my ability to endure such a stark emptiness. I think, for me, it comes down to the hidden pleasure that comes from the doubt that we may all live in a world more complicated and wonderful than we can ever possibly know and more complicated and wonderful than we will *ever* be able to know. I find value in that little layer of maybe that hides right underneath the surface of our mundane world. Skeptics and debunkers would claim that all of this is so much fantasy and magical thinking and that it doesn’t serve any purpose other than to encourage ignorance and the folly of a false make-believe world. In response to them, I embrace the bunkum. If you can’t prove it really isn’t there, then what is the harm of belief? Wouldn’t it be a right hilarity that the world is exactly the way I think it is, a mechanical universe with a touch of mystery overlaid on top of it. You could swap out magic with God and then Voltaires comment that there is no proof for God doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe in him, on the off chance that he does really exist. Perhaps magic really does exist.

Impossible things are important.

Iron Man 3

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Last night Scott and I went to see Iron Man 3. The movie was a nice summer movie that came out too early. It should have been released in June or July. Generally the best part of the movie was the time spent in the dialogue between Tony Stark and the kid was the best section of that movie.

The movie was okay, it wasn’t as good as the first two movies and it squandered the Mandarin character. Sir Ben Kingsley was pretty much wasted in the role of the Mandarin, and casting the Mandarin as a shill ruins the central tale behind Iron Man. Tony’s primary battles are alcoholism, his relationship with his father, Pepper Potts, and on a grand scale the battle between Technology and Magic. The Mandarin is supposed to be in command of supernatural powers provided to him by the Rings of Makulan. Tony is the expression of humanity wielding Technology and the central story is this battle between the supernatural and the technological. This movie also trots out Extremis. The comic books and the Iron Man Anime forged a canon that Extremis was a tool for Tony to use to bridge the gap between the organic and inorganic so that Tony could be on-par with his technology as much as the Mandarin is on-par with his magic.

The movie pretty much squashed Extremis as a sideline curiosity, elevated AIM to primary villain status and squandered the Mandarin. In the comics AIM was always the bumbling army of grunting henchmen, they weren’t clever or particularly villainous, they were principally retarded thieves. But the movie pretty much just shat all over all of it.

Marvel’s excuse that they trot out to calm the criticisms down is that the movies exist in a parallel universe called the ‘cinematic universe’ so these issues don’t matter. That feint gives them an out to write whatever they want, essentially giving a pass to all this character mangling.

I would not see this movie again, once is enough, and due to a rather prolonged free fall scene I would definitely not see this movie in IMAX. The content is okay, but not worth 3D or DBOX prices. I would give it 7/10 stars. It is qualitatively worse than the previous movies.

One Slipped Key

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Death By ChocolateWhile working I wrote a little bit of SQL, trash really because it was just a one-shot query, real short too, and I wanted to show off the SQL code for making the iModules degree info pretty. Instead of clicking open, I clicked the save button. I found the file I thought I was opening and double-clicked. The computer asked me “Are you sure you want me to save using this file, overwriting the old file?” and I absent-mindedly clicked Yes.

The little useless fragment of SQL code replaced my huge SQL script. Boom. All gone. So sorry.

So then I was thinking about how I could recover the file, that it was on my laptop at home and so if I could turn off the Wifi at home and start my laptop I could copy the file before the Dropbox sync app replaced what I needed with my mistake.

But then I thought there should be something in Dropbox that helps address my stupidity. Turns out there is. Right click on your oops file, click on “View Previous Versions” and it opens a website and shows you all the previous times you saved your file on the service. Oh look, there’s all my hard work, right there. Click. Whew!

So, how much do I love Dropbox? Even more.

 

photo by: JD Hancock

C2E2: Creating Comics with Comixology

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While sitting in listening to the Comixology staff hawk their Submit technology, which is quite nice to see especially for independent comic book creators there was a point raised at the end of the panel by one of the attendees. That some people are hesitant to engage with digital comic books because they perceive their purchases not as licensing but rather as chattel. When I buy an issue of Comic X for $1.99 in paper, I have that comic and I can put it somewhere safe and always go back and enjoy it. What then for the digital comics? What if Comixology collapses? This touches more than just comics and the real discussion is actually cloud escrow. Cloud services could collapse at any time taking their content with them, right down the drain. Evernote, Dropbox, Comixology, and even Google itself could founder and collapse leaving behind a smoking corpse and no way for customers to retain the data they consider as theirs.

The industry has perhaps accidentally selected this as a possibility by only conducting business in a cloud infrastructure way, it’s a thin veil on digital rights management — a way for content creators to secure their goods for sale (DRM) without driving away their customers, that veil works quite well. Except for when things utterly fail. What happens when fail comes to call?

When this fear pops up in other, more serious business discussions there is usually a section devoted to source code escrow services from escrow surety companies. So is there room for cloud escrow services in today’s world? Would that be enough to help keep people feel safer so that they would presumably give digital comic books a chance?

I can’t deny that this could be a great niche for a middleman company to step up and offer a kind of data presence insurance. The cloud products you buy are safe, permanently so, not by the companies that fail, but by the escrow service that vouchsafes the data in question.

What’s to keep the escrow service safe? This may be a irreducible hall-of-mirrors. There may be no way for people to feel absolutely safe until content is delivered in an open non-DRM format. I seriously doubt that DRM will go anywhere soon, so this may all have to be sidelined as an argument for some other time.

What started out as a blog post about escrow services has apparently turned into a railing against DRM. There may be no way out of the argument over DRM. It all comes down to “Who do you trust?” And “Can you?”.

C2E2: Thrillbent and Comixology Panel

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Today I learned about a new comic book site hosted by Mark Waid. The site is called thrillbent.com and I’m quite interested in taking a deeper look. I asked Scott about Mr. Waid and if I’d like his work and he said “Duh, yes. You’ll love him.”

After the digital comics first panel and a recent look at the @comixology app I feel it is only fair and appropriate to blog about how they have improved because they definitely have.

Use Drafts, Dumbass!

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Turns out blogging with the iPhone has a hidden trap. Turn the phone to landscape orientation and you run the risk of accidentally sending your blog post and then you have to mop up in the WordPress app. Duuuur.

Then you remember you have Drafts app and smack your forehead with how dumb you were in not using it in the first place!

Fixed that… 😉

C2E2: Digital Comic Panel

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Attending a panel from a company called iVerse about Digital Comics. Lots of talk about price points, acknowledging the 800 pound silverback in the room, Apple, and talking about digital libraries. Social networking is still the red-headed stepchild, phrases like “… Twitter, whatever.” which I find *hilarious*.

What I find really interesting is when these digital comics will become so mainstream that they feel comfortable moving forward with a Netflix model where you pay a monthly fee and can access as much as you like.

Now we’ve entered the dimly lit world of licensing versus ownership, flooding, fire, or company collapse. How can you secure your digital goods if you lose access one way or another? Thinking about this topic with some of the things I’ve experienced in my professional life you would just need a source-escrow agreement so when the company fails, the content you purchased is made available to you in an open format. This doesn’t exist now, but it could.

PAD 4/16/2013 – Million Dollar Question

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Why do you blog?

I enjoy blogging because it provides me a way to share more, which has become after a manner of speaking, somewhat of a therapy for me. I can express thoughts and feelings and that’s the primary thing, that they are shared actually is quite incidental. If I have readers, then I have readers and if not, that’s just as acceptable to me. I feel like these posts are letters that I write, and the writing itself helps me explore my feelings and in some cases helps me vent my frustrations, and then I leave the open letters just lying around for others to gander at if they so desire. Before the advent of social networking I used to blog on LiveJournal and there was a vibrant community and I had friends there that would comment on my blog posts. Alas, time and conditions change and LiveJournal is no longer appropriate for me nor is it a place that I feel safe to share my thoughts or feelings. WordPress, a much better platform for writing actually wasn’t such a great move because the community on WordPress is absent. I got to wondering why I wasn’t getting anything but spam comments on my WordPress blog and it struck me that people have organically decided to move their commenting to the social networks of Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. That’s where all the comments are to my WordPress blog posts. Twitter is dead to me, I pretty much just link dump there. Facebook is only slightly more useful and I haven’t posted on Google Plus without the aid of a “oh yeah, hit the Google Plus option…” in about a year.

It’s actually quite fine because comments actually aren’t why I blog. Over time I came to understand that on some social networking systems the only people who I would find willing to engage with me were people who were trolls – making obtuse obnoxious comments just to get a rise out of me. That’s when I learned that in some situations the best retort to a trollish comment is to not make one at all. So the absence of comments actually became a blessed silence. Trolls ruined it for everyone, and once you go without that sort of engagement, the experience does actually improve.

There are things that I write that aren’t meant for open-letter-on-the-table distribution. Those I put passwords on and only hand that password out to people whom I value enough to trust with everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Not to say that if I don’t share the password with someone means I don’t value them as much as the others, it’s just that I write some things that I feel I should protect the people who do not have the password from having to be exposed to. Usually the password protected posts are written in times of distress, and it’s better this way for everyone – those who know and those who do not.

In general the platform on which I blog, which used to be WordPress.com and now is WordPress.org is a tale all to itself. I used to make heavy use of WordPress.com until I ran afoul of one of their well-meaning automatic protection systems that ended up accidentally censoring one of my blogs. It was a misunderstanding and a poorly designed automatic system that led to the falling out, but I no longer trust WordPress.com with my blog. In many ways, the shift to WordPress.org, self-hosted, became more important to me in terms of control and liberty to write what I truly think and feel. I am no longer beholden to a company like Automattic with risking my thoughts and feelings, instead, it’s all on my own recognizance. I thank Automattic for contributing to WordPress.org, and for me it’s the perfect combination of power and liberty.

So in a way, all these posts amount to cheap therapy. One of the added values is that I won’t fall in love with my therapist. In some ways, therapy this way is ideal. I can be brutally honest with an absence of someone than I ever could if there really was someone there playing that role. If nothing more, therapy with an absent therapist is wholly more hygienic and extremely more convenient. As a value added extra, these blog posts also get added to my Day One Journal, so at the end of my life, I won’t have to worry about encroaching Alzheimers or senility robbing me of my memories, all the very best will be written down. For someone who will die childless, this is my bid for some form of immortality.