Whither LTE?

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.

SUNY Buffalo

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.

Calling out the Licensing Bullshit

A very good friend of mine on Twitter had this to say:

maybe if we all were told up front that we don’t actually own the tech we purchased, we’re just buying a license to use it, we’d be happier

And this brought up an old straw-man that I am fond to beat up every once in a while. It comes down to purchasing software or hardware from a company that hides this sneaky shit in their End User License Agreement. For much of it, you don’t even get a chance to read the EULA until you’ve opened the package and forfeited your rights to get your money back. Then you read the EULA and find out that you didn’t buy chattel, you bought a license. That you don’t own anything but the right to use whatever it is that you purchased. Anyone with a shred of common sense knows this entire affair is composed of nothing but the most rarefied load of bullshit ever perpetrated on mankind. The courts have upheld this obnoxiousness and so it’s legally binding.

So we have to swallow this pure bullshit. But what I think would be fair is to have these facts printed prominently on the box before you plunk down your hard-earned money to buy whatever it is. I’m sure it would only enhance the bottom line of the sales department if the big shiny box prominently had printed on it “By buying this box, you own a revocable license to use the contents, but you do not own the contents of this box. You cannot resell the contents or transfer it to anyone else legally.” Then whip that out on consumers and see how they react. I know I wouldn’t buy it. My work might buy it, but that’s not my money and not really my concern. Life goes on without buying something like that and these companies that insist (along with the courts that support them) that this legal bullshit is binding should starve and die when nobody buys their product. If these companies want to push products that you don’t own but only hold rights-to-a-license, then I say we should just stop buying those products outright. It used to be that if you tried that you couldn’t get anywhere or do anything, but nowadays that isn’t the case. There is a huge collection of software that exists that is licensed under the GPL. It’s all free for the taking, it costs nothing, it works arguably better than the alternatives and you don’t have to spend your hard-earned money and have nothing but a revocable license to show for it.

That’s how we progress. This “buying a license” bullshit has to stop. We can progress by starving these bullshit peddlers and encouraging and supporting the GPL. It’s enough to start a socialist revolution I say. Y’arrrrrg! 😉

Dropbox Lied to Users About Data Security, Complaint to FTC Alleges | Threat Level | Wired.com

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.

Upgrade Your iPhone or iPad’s Storage With Seagate GoFlex Satellite | Cult of Mac

Upgrade Your iPhone or iPad’s Storage With Seagate GoFlex Satellite | Cult of Mac.

I’ve thought about an item like this when I was standing in line two April’s ago waiting for my iPad at Best Buy. What could enable me to buy the smallest device (16GB) without having to sacrifice a huge pool of storage? When I bought the device I was sure that someone would eventually come up with something. I was right, there were at least two apps:

  • http://projectswithlove.com/streamtome/ – Stream To Me
  • http://www.zumocast.com/ – ZumoCast
Both of these services allow you to place twin applications, one on your computer at home or at work and the other application on your iOS device. This design makes much more sense to me than the Seagate drive linked to above. If you’ve got access to the web, why not use it? Plus this way your data is more secure than some drive that can be stolen or confiscated. Both apps could arguably access every last shred of your content if you had a storage system big enough to handle all of it. Arguably way more than 500GB and you wouldn’t have to contend with a rather weak battery and wondering when the drive will stop working because it’s out of juice. Just having one device where you have to watch the battery is surely enough for anyone! I can’t see this option being useful when you have other options like Stream To Me or ZumoCast handy.

Cleverness is Punishable

Chock one up in the oops column. This whole past week I’ve been yarking at OIT to put my Savin Copier on an access control list for our plain-jane SMTP server here on campus. Through a labyrinth of miscommunication it turns out the task was done in December 2009, but I didn’t learn of that fact until a week ago, somewhat through 2011! Oh well, bygones. So now I have my copier set up to send email and yesterday I started to clean my office.

Let me repeat that bit. I. CLEANED. MY. OFFICE.

Yes, that’s right. God help us all. So I started putting order into the bitter waters of the chaotic sea. Mostly it was sorting wheat and chaff. There is only a bit of wheat (the mac stuff) in comparison to the chaff (everything else). Mostly it was sorting legacy bullshit into legacy bullshit containers, so everything with a PS/2 connector, bullshit. Everything that was vogue pre-2005, bullshit. The blizzard of little Blackberry devices? Utter bullshit. So all of it went into boxes, marked with a Sharpie and stacked neat as ya please. I even got a chance to move Frankenserver into the machine room. For those that don’t know, Frankenserver is the nickname I gave to a Mac Mini that is running OS X Snow Leopard, then that runs VirtualBox, which has a Windows 2003 Server image loaded on that. In there is SQL Server 2000 SP4, IIS 6 (or 7, don’t care which) and a copy of our production database’s sample database for training. It’s slow, but it works and I got it done without having to buy a single G-D thing.

Along with all of this meandering malarkey, I also had a giant pile of dead paper that was in a Z-filer on a platform that now supports a rather viney plant. The paper mocks me. It just sits there, dead and cryptic. Yes I could leaf through it, but the minute I do I feel this odd laziness come over me. It would be so much better if all of it was in PDF format and up on Evernote. Frankly my dear, everything ends up in Evernote. I drank the kool-aid, and I liked it. So I got it in my head to pull all the staples out of this paperwork and try out my copier’s new handy-dandy Scan-to-Email which is set to my Evernote Email Address. I loaded up the giant stack and let the ADF chew through it. Voop veep voop veep. I then gathered it all up and threw it in our fancy new “Security Level 4” crosscut shredder. Done and done.

I felt quite satisfied that I had tamed a bit of the paper tiger in my office and confident that what I had scanned was safely stuffed away in my Evernote archive. This morning I opened Evernote and looked through the results. This is where my punishment reigns supreme. A list of files, “FILE 1/5” and when I looked into them, they weren’t PDF’s but 2MB chunks of text! Hells Bells. What had happened was I had scanned so much that the scanner in the copier converted all my PDF files into base64 text files and then split them up into 2MB segments and mailed them out. So there they were, all my files, in a funky format and not very handy to have. I extracted the files, one at a time, renamed them, then used the ‘cat’ command to join them all together in the right order, stripped off the SMTP wrapper at the beginning and fed them all into this neat little command:

openssl base64 -d -in-out

Thanks for this little gem goes to Mac OSX Hints and a fellow named Chris Janton. I knew that openssl did a lot of heavy-lifting in OSX, but not this far! I should have assumed it did. So passing my stupid base64 text chunk into openssl, spit out my hefty PDF files and then I cleaned up Evernote, re-added the hefty PDF files and alls-well-that-ends-well.

Discovering this wasn’t how I wanted to spend my morning, but at least I wasn’t lost on how to fix it. I spent only a bit of time considering what your “average computer user” would have done, and they would have likely just deleted the Evernote bits and declared the entire thing a loss. It’s rather a shame that my estimation for other people’s cleverness with computers is so abysmally low. But that’s another blog post altogether. 🙂

Location, Location, Location!

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.

Overcast

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:

  1. Mail.app
    1. The native Mac Mail.app is set to pull in my WMP Mail over the IMAP protocol. This protocol allows me to select the Mail.app interface and bolt it on, covering up the less liked WMP Native website interface. Several key benefits to this are how I can configure all the aspects of Mail.app’s fonts to suit me and make it easier for me to read text. Mail.app also has a Bayesian Filter for identifying Junk Mail. I teach it what is and what isn’t Junk mail and it does a pretty kickass job identifying future Junk and getting it out of my way. The other feature of Mail.app that I have come to rely on is the “Redirect” command. This command allows me to effectively ‘resend’ an incoming email somewhere else as if it was always destined for that other address. This feature is a ‘killer feature’ when combined with other cloud services that I’ll write about further along in this post.
  2. iCal.app
    1. Just as much as I don’t like WMP when it comes to email, I also do not like it when it comes to Calendaring. I prefer to use iCal for my calendaring needs. Thanks to Zimbra’s adherence to standards I can have my cake and eat it too. WMP provides a CalDAV service which I can subscribe to using iCal. Not only can I have my local calendars off my home server subscribed on my iCal, but I can also have my WMP calendars as well.
  3. AddressBook.app
    1. As with iCal, the AddressBook.app application can subscribe to CardDAV Services that WMP provides. With all three in concert I have effectively replaced my need to use the native WMP interface and instead replaced it with a far more friendly Mac-based interface.
  4. Evernote
    1. Evernote is a cloud service that “remembers everything” and is only limited by the amount of information you send to your Evernote system, but not how much material you store there. Each free Evernote account comes with an “Evernote Email Address” that is private to the user and can be the destination of emails and when you do send an email to that address it is just like you have clipped the text directly into Evernote with a client. In this regard, the “Redirect” command and the “Evernote Email Address” are a match made in heaven.
  5. Toodledo
    1. Toodledo is an online cloud-based To Do List manager. There is a website that manages the Toodledo system very well and Toodledo provides a CalDAV compliant feed so I can subscribe my iCal client to my Toodledo task calendar and see everything, including my tasks, on one central iCal calendar. Toodledo also has its own “Toodledo Email Address” that inserts Redirected email into my task list. I can use a shorthand notation in the subject line to enrich the task so that when it is added to my Toodledo system it gets the appropriate context, date, time, and folder. Within Toodledo I have three contexts, Home, Work, and None. I have a gaggle of Folders such as “Email” and “Millennium” and “Personal” and the date system is very flexible. I can write an email to my Toodledo Email Address, set the subject as “Add Files to Folder @work #tomorrow =5pm *email” and the task is created with the body of the incoming email being the attached note of the task and the context is set to Work, the due-date set for 5/6/2011 (tomorrow), the due-time set to 5:00pm and the folder set for Email.
  6. Instapaper
    1. Instapaper also has a “Instapaper Email Address” and anything you send to that address gets queued up in your Instapaper queue. It’s really quite useful if you get a link in your Inbox and want to read it eventually, but not now.
  7. Dropbox
    1. Dropbox is a cloud-based file storage system that synchronizes a folder on every computer or device you use and a central folder stored in the cloud.

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! 🙂

Barnes & Noble's Nook Color Review

Today I got a chance to sit down in private with a Nook Color from Barnes & Noble Booksellers and give it a thorough try. After I’ve used the device for about half an hour, I have many good things and some not-so-good things to say about the device.

The Good

  • The device is small, but not too small. It most resembles a paperback book and that’s both a pleasing shape and comfortable in the hands.
  • The resolution of the display is sharp and crisp, there was very little eye strain.
  • The charger is a standard wall-wart and the plug is a universal mini-flat USB cable. I give B&N mad props for not reinventing some awkward or fragile interface and going with an industry standard.
  • Touch sensitivity is a welcome feature from the original Nook device. The entire screen is touch-sensitive and that goes very far in making the device very person friendly
  • Buttons are where I expect them and function well, except for one which ends up being in the bad column.
  • Apps allowed to work in the background was a nice surprise, also the notification system was pleasant after I noticed how it worked, being in the lower left corner of the display.
  • The keyboard click is surprisingly clean and very crisp. That was a very nice surprise and very good feedback.
  • You can download ePub books from the Internet. I visited Project Gutenberg and downloaded the Brother’s Grimm Fairy Tales. The device opened the ePub book competently and all the features of reading a book worked as I expected them to.
  • Being able to add extended storage via the SD card was a pleasant surprise.

The Bad

  • The Volume Buttons on the right side appear to be too close together. This presents a volume control issue. When I pressed the + Volume button the volume went up, but if I pressed it again, the volume went down. I think it’s because the two buttons, for volume up and for volume down are too close together or the rocker has been damaged by too much use.
  • The keyboard is both too laggy and too sensitive. When I get to entering web addresses I find myself typing in wwww accidentally. Also, related to this problem is the Search bar. When I touch on Search to look for something I notice the Nook volunteers the last searched item, this is fine, but when I go to tap on the X on the right to clear the field, the keyboard expands and pushes the X up and out of the way. Unless you are very watchful and expect this keyboard behavior, you end up searching for whatever was searched before over and over again, or at least until you master the knack.
  • While playing Pandora in the background I couldn’t help but notice that whenever I did something that taxed the processor, the music would stutter. Perhaps Pandora needs a bigger cache, perhaps there is something else afoot. It wasn’t an awful flaw, but it was noticeable.
  • The lack of Bluetooth Technology precludes wireless keyboards which would render the Nook Color a poor blogging tool.
  • Despite the device being run by an Android Operating System it cannot run Android Apps. It will only use Barnes & Noble’s App Store and not the Android Marketplace. This fragmentation may prove to be an Achilles Heel for this class of device and most certainly will detract from someone comparing the Nook Color to an iPad.
  • The device comes with 8GB of storage, 3 of those are reserved for Android itself, so that leaves the user with 5GB of storage. This pales in comparison with the 16GB iPad, and doesn’t even show up on the field when compared to the 32GB or 64GB model of iPad, however, the presence of the SD cards does mitigate this failure somewhat
  • The Nook series of readers can only consume content from the Nook store, there is no way to get iBooks or Kindle content on a Nook.

The Ugly

  • The device is HEAVY. It’s about as heavy as my iPad, or at least it feels like it is. It’s surprisingly heavy for it’s size and I did have a little trouble holding it like I would a paperback book, in the way it’s design most clearly points that it should be held. It wasn’t enough to upset me, but it was enough to comment on.
  • The built-in speaker system is rather tinny and dinky. I suppose if I tried it with headphones the audio experience would have come out better. There is a part of me that really likes to listen to classical music as I read on a device. This was minimally acceptable.
  • The way the Nook Color scrolls with a touch is disconcerting at first, there is almost no scroll inertia and when you scroll quickly the display stutters and you get the sensation that you’ve missed something in the list as it has gone by. After a while of use you get used to this little idiosyncrasy and it wasn’t a show-stopper.
  • While the Nook Color can download and display ePub book files, I didn’t find a way to move those books into the Books section of the Nook. For these files you are relegated to mucking about in the file system explorer in the Nook to get your books and it does shatter the “All My Books In One Place” theme. I would be far happier if the ePub books that I downloaded off of the Web were immediately shunted off the File System itself and off to the Books function where I could see everything I have in one convenient place.

Final Verdict

The Nook Color is certainly a capable and useful device now that it has a more complete and up-to-date Operating System. The ability to access email, calendars, iCal, Exchange, and use of ePub books are all quite nice to see. I assume that if you copied MP3 files over the Nook Color could be an acceptable music player as well. What it really comes down to here is price. The Nook Color retails at $249.00, and with an Employee discount it hovers around $200 flat. This is in comparison to it’s nearest rival, the Apple iPad which hails at $499.00 for the base model. For half the price of an iPad you can get yourself a very good tablet that can do a majority of the things most people would do with tablets. If you are looking for a “Desktop Replacement Tablet” you won’t find that with the B&N Nook Color, for that you’d be better off going with the Apple iPad. For avid readers who aren’t interested in the Apple App Store or doing Desktop tasks with your device, the Barnes & Noble Nook Color is a fantastic device.

Class Act

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.