Discovered a neat new site and I sent invites out to everyone who I thought initially might find it useful. The site is called Cloze and it combines email and social networking in one view. There are free apps for iPhone and iPad as well. So if you got some email from me and you weren’t expecting it, now you know who it was from. I had to use my work email because many of the addressees on the mail were work contacts and they wouldn’t know who I am if I used my gmail account.
I have to admit to really enjoying the web service IFTTT. The service stands for If This, Then That. It allows you to create recipes from a menu of popular services where there is a public API available and move data back and forth not according to anyones design but your own, with IFTTT’s help, of course.
A great practical example is Twitter. On Twitter there is an account, MichiganDOT that is the public twitter mouthpiece for Michigan’s Department of Transportation, those folks responsible for the roads and rails and such. This twitter resource is valuable for many reasons the least of which is that MichiganDOT tweets about road hazard conditions and the presence of crashes or construction that would otherwise hamper movement within the Mitten. On its own Twitter is something that you have to grope for, you’ve got to start an app and page around to find what you are after and it’s all very manual — and annoying. I hate annoying. So how can you beat MichiganDOT, for example, into a service that sends you alerts? IFTTT.
The recipe in IFTTT to make this work is clever if you know the way to run around the back-end of Twitter. Several months ago Twitter closed their API to IFTTT making it difficult to create any new IFTTT recipes that use Twitter data to do automatic things. Twitter left a back door open, in that every Twitter account has an undocumented RSS feed associated with it, and all you need to know is the trick to get at it. IFTTT can consume RSS data, Twitter produces RSS data, so it’s kismet. The code you start with is this:
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=michigandot
This plugs into IFTTT’s Feed source, then you connect that to IFTTT’s SMS destination, set it to your mobile phone number and the recipe is done! Just like that. Really easy and straightforward and now the very moment that anyone who staffs the MichiganDOT twitter account posts ANYTHING the RSS link lights up, IFTTT notices, copies it over to an SMS message and ships it out to my phone.
With the undocumented API backdoor from Twitter, MichiganDOT, and IFTTT I am able to recast the MichiganDOT twitter account as a “Michigan Road Conditions Alert Line” and I don’t need to sign up for anything or ask anyone for anything or cajole some developer to make something to make it work for me. In many ways, it is a clever way to have my cake and eat it too. I don’t have to schlep around in Twitter missing things, I get alerts, bam, as they happen.
The nice thing about IFTTT is it’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can send any channel data anywhere you want. Twitter to Evernote, Twitter to Pocket, Facebook to Evernote, Facebook to Pocket… there are about 20 channels you can fiddle around with and you can shop around for other people’s recipes and adopt them and make them work for you. If you don’t have IFTTT, then you are missing out on a huge potential of DIY convenience. The best part is, nobody is the wiser. MichiganDOT has no notion, Twitter doesn’t care, so why not use what’s out there and make it work for you?
I have created a new project to enrich the tags in my WordPress blog using the WP Calais Auto Tagger that I mentioned in this previous blog post. To do this I am working on pages of old posts in my WordPress dashboard and so I wanted to track just which pages I had completed and which ones still need my attention. I’ve got 48 pages of blog posts and so this is going to take some time to complete.
The first step was to create a list of text lines going from Page 48 to Page 1 like a countdown. I did that in OpenOffice using the Spreadsheet app. All you need to do here is type in two lines where the number series example can be made and then you can select these two cells and then grab the autonumbering control on the spreadsheet and draw it down, this is a great way to quickly create very repetitive lines where the only thing that changes is a number at the end. With this list, I copied it into a plain text file with each line on it’s own and saved it as “tagging.txt” on my desktop.
The next step is to use AppleScript to tell the Mountain Lion Reminders app to create entires automatically based on the file you just made in OpenOffice. Technically the Reminders app has an import mechanism but that’s only meant for ICS files, and that’s more trouble than it’s worth as far as I care to pursue it as a solution. Here’s the AppleScript:
set theFileContents to read file "Users:andy:Desktop:tagging.txt"
set theLines to paragraphs of theFileContents
repeat with eachLine in theLines
tell application "Reminders"
tell list "Tagging Project"
make new reminder with properties {name:eachLine}
end tell
end tell
end repeat
The only part you’d have to fix is the file location part and the list name part. Otherwise it works well. The only gotcha is it doesn’t seem to import the tasks in order, but at least they are in there.
Here are some helpful sites where I got a lot of this code and hints on how to talk to Reminders instead of iCal:
I’ve been blogging actively on and off for years. Much of it started in LiveJournal and when SixApart, the company that wrote LiveJournal were sold to a russian company it was time for me to leave. I left for a few reasons, one was because I didn’t trust my writings to a company that was owned by a foreign country – the laws get murky once your thoughts and opinions leave the USA; the other reason was a general eroding of english users as more cyrillic users started to appear on LiveJournal. The language barrier between english and russian was the little push that I needed to leave that and get on with WordPress.
My use of WordPress continued a-pace until one of my work blogs was tagged as suspect by a WordPress.com robot and the company deactivated my blog. After explaining what I was using the blog for, they re-enabled it however that identified a problem for me, mostly that my blog was being measured – if not by a person then by an automatic process and as such, it had a definite stink of censorship about it. At work, and in my private life I already had a separate hosting company and that’s when I discovered WordPress.org, the DIY blog platform based on the technology that powers WordPress.com. I installed a constellation of new blogs both for work and for personal use and that had a bunch of added extras – specifically unlimited storage of rich media which I would have otherwise had to pay for with WordPress.com as well as direct control of the content. There were no robots or censors wandering around turning off accounts willy-nilly in this other arrangement. Also, and more to the point of this blog entry, the shift over to WordPress.org also enabled the use of plugins which really extend the WordPress platform even further than the nice presentation that the WordPress.com system provides. I’ve been having a devil of a time remembering to tag my WordPress blog posts. I went fishing for a new plugin to maybe help with tags and I found the WP Calais Auto Tagger and so far I’m quite impressed with it’s quality. Now when I make a post, the post is sent to OpenCalais where it is processed for relevant tags and I get a list of possibilities that I can elect to use or not. I take the category part of my blog posts very seriously and now I can rely on this bit of technology to help me with the tags as well. If you run WordPress blogs, I suggest you look into this.
Generally speaking, if you are a friend of mine and would like a WordPress.org blog for your own, I’m more than happy to help you out. I can set it up quickly and support it even – if you are interested, just drop me a line. Those that know me know how to reach me. I suppose everyone else could leave a comment. This offer isn’t valid for anyone at Western, sorry.
I have reinforced certain habits using the gadgets that I am so fond of using. Specifically the Reminders app that is linked to my Apple ID and my iCloud account. Enter items one place and they are present on all the other devices I use – ta dah! So I have a structure of repeating reminders that I use to structure my workdays – actually my entire life – but lets just go with workdays to make it seem less sad and dependent. I schedule snacks, lunches, even the end of work because when I’m concentrating deeply on something time just flows right on past me. Without alarms and reminders I would be late for everything and I might even forget to attend something important. So my reminder went off today, for my mid-morning snack, which is a cup of fruit-on-the-bottom greek yogurt and so I went into the mailroom here at work where the community fridge is located and as I was walking to get my snack I noticed the mail. Oh! The mail! So I got sidetracked. I got my mail and brought it back to my office. Mostly it was junk, just more meaningless wastes of paper as most mail is these days and I sat back down and got back to work. Then I had this nagging feeling like I had forgotten something and I looked at my reminder list and my snack wasn’t checked off.
I would love to attribute this to anything but what it is. Technology has softened my wits. I’m easily distracted and waylaid and that in itself is just another problem. It’s not age, although I would love to blame it on something like that, but what it comes down to is that technology is a double-edged sword. Sure it enhances life and makes it easier on us, but by doing so, it eliminates the rigor we once had to not forget when we move from room to room. The only real saving grace is that doorways represent really fundamentally important context changes in the human brain that can demonstrably damage items in short-term memory. You can get up, walk out of the office with a fully fleshed out plan and each time you pass a doorway that plan gets hit by a mental tempest. Coworkers stopping you to talk, mail in your mailbox, something going on with the machines in that room that need attention, anything at all can swiftly kill even strongly made plans.
This got me thinking about an imaginary environment, a building made up of doorways, in a long linear arrangement, say 15 rooms. Each room loaded with things designed to distract and confuse. Bright lights, blaring sounds, overstuffed mailboxes, a copier machine spraying paper, a ball-pit filled with brightly colored balls being gently agitated with mystery sounds coming from underneath it, perhaps even animals and clowns, like a circus. People walk in the entrance and as they slowly make their way through the doorways and the distractions erode even the most intensely established mental frameworks. When people reach the exit, they walk away refreshed and emptied. The worries, the concerns, the issues they carried in with them at the entrance are utterly blown away by the simple act of slowly walking through this environment. At the end you could have a nice big lounge filled with soothing music and overstuffed chairs with a really long wall of excellent books that you can pick out and read for as long as you like. Perhaps another room where you can nap. You could bill such a building as a “Mind Wash” and I bet people would pay to be able to enjoy it. All your worries, all your troubles, at least temporarily blown away by all the doorways and all the distractions and then the mood music and lighting and books and napping pads on the floor. 🙂
It struck me that I wrote about the playlist on Spotify, and I’ve made it public since I created it, but I haven’t tried to embed it or share it. Time to change that. This should lead you to the playlist and you’ll see what music really moves me.
“What role does music play in your life?”
There is two kinds of music for me. The first kind is filler music. The clever hooks and poppy nothingness that I play all the time on my Spotify account while I’m at work. I keep it low and quiet and it helps to pass the time. The music is good, just because it’s meaningless doesn’t mean it’s not pleasant. It would do a disservice to declare who and what is “poppy nothingness” so I just won’t. If you think your art is deep and moving and transcendental then so do I. Whatever floats your boat. But…
There is another kind of music. The fundamental delight that it brings is beyond description. You just have to sit back and let it wash over you, changing you, as the tingles rage along your body when you hear the music that changes your life. I don’t know what thematic musical styles do it for me, but I know it when I feel it. If I’m listening to music and I feel that tingle – it doesn’t happen a lot, but when it does it’s unmistakable, then I know. I place all of this sort of music into a special playlist on Spotify and when I want to be agape with musical wonder I double-click on the playlist and shuffle. It doesn’t matter what track comes up first, they all do it for me, each and every time they play.
I used to think of music as the frilly doilies of life. Easily ignored and really compelling for doily collectors, for which I am not one. But over time, and since I discovered that some music brings the tingle, some music is more than others. I would say, much like books, going fishing for good music can lead you some truly excellent catches.
Explaining Things Simply — The Lone Sysadmin.
I read this article and started to really think about why it is that I find myself saying over and over again that Hell is Other People. I’ve faced this pressure in my professional life, the clamor to “write simpler” ends up being a 22 caliber bullet that ends up ricocheting around inside my head. The requirements for communication are straightforward, you need a common language with a common syntax, grammar and vocabulary. In my experience with IT the biggest tripping point is that vocabulary trap at the end.
When you are in IT, sometimes you have no choice but to write in a complicated fashion because the core issue is a complicated one. Usually there is fiscal risk, sometimes legal risk, sometimes even personal risk. The messages are often times important and the combined issue of complicated subject matter and limited shared vocabulary really makes communication impossible. This is where I think a lot of my particular cassandras tears originate from. I can’t hope to communicate with others about technology as the spiraling reduction of complexity required to reach a successful instance of real communication ends up making the entire statement devolve into “That is bad. We should not do it. It is not safe.” which ends up being thrown in the bin because your reasons aren’t good enough – those reasons you left on the chopping room floor because they were too complicated and there was no shared vocabulary.
After reading this article, which I can appreciate, I can’t help but get the image of Morlocks and Eloi out of my head. I’ve frequently made reference to these characters in HG Wells’ ‘The Time Machine’ story, but I think the comparison is apt and getting more so as time goes on. There are people who understand, there are people who do not, and it could lead to a fundamental separation between people – maybe even enough to be something that could cause speciation. There is another aspect of this that rankles me deeply, and that is that there is a deficit in vocabulary to start with! What ever happened to self-improvement, learning, or being curious with your average person? Years ago we all could have said that understanding technology wasn’t a necessity, but in the 21st century? Can we really say that still? Everyone needs to understand technology. Even a dog-catcher needs to understand some technology to do his work! So, if there is nothing to do that doesn’t involve some sort of technology then why do people avoid it so? Why do they remain so ignorant and incurious and so unwilling to learn?
I’ve said it many times and it’s likely going to be either a part of my memoirs or my epitaph even, that when someone ceases to learn, they begin to die. If you don’t want to know, perhaps living isn’t for you. Let a machine do it, what’s the difference?
This off-the-hip list I wrote out for a coworker to use when selecting which Apple product to buy. I thought maybe other people might find it useful.
Mac Mini
************
Pros – Inexpensive, quite lightweight, easy to move from place to place.
Cons – No iSight Camera, no video screen with device, must bring your own.
iMac
*******
Pros – Very nice screen, luggable from place to place depending on the size, even the largest isn’t too heavy. Has iSight camera. The 27″ model could also pinch hit as a TV or movie screen. The 27″ model can easily have it’s RAM upgraded, while the 21″ cannot.
Cons – Expensive. Luggable is a double-edged sword, some people don’t mind, some do.
MacBook
*************
Pros – Very mobile. Has iSight Camera. A good mix that allows you to attach to bigger screens if you want with an adapter.
Cons – Expensive. Upgrading RAM is a real pain and really can’t be done. Small screen size, 13″ can be an issue.
iPad
******
Pros – Exceptionally mobile. Has iSight Cameras in front and back. You can send the video output to an Apple TV to play out on a bigger video device. The software is totally vetted by Apple and the device is extremely safe. Cannot suffer from viruses or even any malware.
Cons – It’s a tablet, so you don’t have a physical keyboard and no mouse at all. You could attach a keyboard over Bluetooth but it can become unwieldy quickly. The limits form the App Store could eventually be stifling for some uses as you can’t download apps from any place but Apple. There is also no upgrading of the device hardware. What you buy you’ll always have.
Webmail Plus and Apple, two tastes that make for awkward WTF’ery. At work I get meeting invitations so I open up Calendar and I open the invitation up. I change which calendar it’s on over to my iCloud calendar because I do not like using Webmail Plus and if I can avoid it, I will. But when I do that single action it apparently sends meeting cancellation notices to everyone else who is invited to the meeting! So the hilarity ensues. Then I get emails from everyone confused as to whether or not the meeting is on, or not.
So, it’s an incompatibility between Webmail Plus and Apple’s Calendar application. What a shocker. The workaround? Just ignore the invitations from Webmail Plus and bang in the details manually using my keyboard. It’s low-brow, but alas, it’s what must be done.
I find it hilarious that doing this sends out a cancellation to everyone else, even though the meeting wasn’t organized by me. Seems to be a bug, but since I just laugh at Webmail Plus and it’s issues, I just shrug and move on. Zimbra. Hah. Whatever.