tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15741985809288948892024-03-05T15:53:45.355-06:00TulsaMJ's Tech BlogTulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.comBlogger39125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-16216580244353052912015-07-23T10:49:00.000-05:002015-07-23T10:49:35.812-05:00ColdFusion and FOR XML AUTOI had a task: given a SQL Server query using <span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">FOR XML AUTO, XMLSCHEMA</span>, build a file using ColdFusion. Easy peasy, right? It returns one column containing the entire XML document. Get that and you're home free.<br />
<br />
NOT easy peasy.<br />
<br />
When the query is returned to ColdFusion, it is broken up into smaller pieces, each in its own row (I understand this is because of the database driver). The column name is dynamic; you can't depend on it being anything in particular, or even staying what it was yesterday. I found various solutions on the Web, using a number of weird techniques (Query of Queries, looping, etc.) but I ran across one that utilizes several powerful features of recent versions of ColdFusion to output the whole thing in one hunk.<br />
<br />
<b>First:</b> In your <span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><cfquery></span> tag, make sure you specify the "result" attribute. I believe this was added in ColdFusion 8. We need it to figure out what the name of the column is from its property called "columnlist". (I almost always call it "<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">query_result</span>", but you can name it whatever you want.)<br />
<br />
<b>Second:</b> Understand that you can reference a ColdFusion query using Struct-like notation. So you can see the contents of any cell by referencing it this way:<br />
<br />
query name: <b>my_query</b><br />
columns: <b>column_1, column_2, column_3</b><br />
fifty rows returned<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">my_query["column_1"][10]</span><br />
<br />
This would return the information in the 10th row of "my_query", in the "column_1" column. (Never forget that this is <i>not</i> an array of struct - the row number comes <i>last</i>, <i>after</i> the column name.)<br />
<br />
<b>Third:</b> I discovered that you can supply a blank delimiter to "ArrayToList" and all of the elements of the list are concatenated. So:<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><!--- Create my_array[1]='A', my_array[2]='B', my_array[3]='C' ---></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><cfset my_array=['A','B','C']></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><cfoutput>#ArrayToList(my_array, "")#</cfoutput></span><br />
<br />
Will output a three-character string <span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">ABC</span>.<br />
<br />
<b>Now:</b> Put those pieces of information together and you can do this:<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><cfquery datasource="my_datasource" name="my_xml_query" result="query_result"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; padding-left: 50px;">SELECT * FROM my_table FOR XML AUTO, XMLSCHEMA</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"></cfquery></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><cfset my_xml_string=ArrayToList(my_xml_query[query_result.columnlist],"")></span><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I'm certainly no <a href="http://www.forta.com/" target="_blank">Uncle Ben</a>, but I thought this seemed like a pretty cool trick.</div>
TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-82081487327194540322015-04-09T23:34:00.000-05:002015-04-09T23:41:31.867-05:00Cox and their "Nerd-Level Wi-Fi"Cox Cable, your "nerd-level Wi-Fi" commercials are not only an insult
to the intelligence of nerds everywhere, but they are spreading
misinformation in the name of marketing.<br />
<br />
For those who may not have seen or heard these breathless commercials, Cox has been advertising heavily that they have the "fastest Wi-Fi available", which they are referring to as "nerd-level Wi-Fi". Here's an example (double-click it to go full-screen):<br />
<br />
<iframe width="425" height="239" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/40lQGssg7rg?rel=0&controls=0&showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
<br />
Cox's offerings are fast, sure, but they're going over a line my saying they are giving their customers the "fastest" <i>anything</i> available. Here's my evidence:<br />
<br />
<br />
1. My mom just
got a brand new cable modem from Cox a month or two ago, just like the one in the TV commercial above. It is, I
believe, a Ubee Ddw365 modem, and it supports the 802.11n Wi-Fi
standard. This is indeed the fastest Wi-Fi standard which is in common
use right now, but a true nerd is not going to be satisfied with that
when it is easy enough to find Wi-Fi routers that use the newer and much
faster 802.11ac standard. According to Wikipedia, 802.11n tops out at
600 megabits/second, and 802.11ac can potentially reach 1300
megabits/second. "Nerd level" on the Wi-Fi side: myth busted.<br />
<br />
2.
A true nerd is not going to be satisfied with the admittedly fast Internet access from the cable TV company if there is any chance that he can get a
fiber-to-the-home connection, which can potentially run <i>five to ten times as fast </i>as
the maximum speed of a cable connection. On top of that, what Cox isn't
publicizing is that cable Internet technology relies on a shared
connection to the Internet. When your next-door neighbor is watching
movies on Netflix through his cable modem, there is less capacity for you to watch your movies
on Netflix through yours, and your connection slows down a little. The more people around you have cable Internet, the less
likely you are ever going to approach maximum speed with your cable
modem. Best case, your cable modem will top out at around 100-107
megabits per second; business accounts may be able to get as high as 400
megabits/second. In my area, Cox's fastest residential package offers 150
megabits/second. Fiber can reach speeds of 500
megabits/second or more - in the area I live in, the
newer houses all have
fiber-to-the-home capability, and the ISP offers
up to 1,000 megabits/second to homes (and 10,000 megabits/second to
businesses!) "Nerd level" on the speed side: myth busted.<br />
<br />
3.
Real nerds don't use Wi-Fi for tasks that require serious speed anyway. A real
nerd is going to have Gigabit Ethernet, which means that he will have
his whole home network delivering a steady 1,000 megabits/second down
the wire to his computers. His 802.11ac Wi-Fi access points may suffer
temporary slowdowns due to radio interference, sunspots, or whatever,
but his wired connection won't have that problem. If he has a great job
and can afford the REALLY new hardware, he might even have 10gb (10,000 megabits/second!) running
in his house; the technology exists, although his Roku 3, which is wired
into his network and not using Wi-Fi, is still toddling along at
"10/100 Fast Ethernet" speeds (100 megabits/second). But his computers will be pulling down data so fast it will make your head spin. (Actually, he
probably isn't using a Roku - he's probably built his own media
streaming box from a spare computer, so he's streaming considerably
faster than that. But that's neither here nor there.)<br />
<br />
<br />
And don't even get me
started about all that "writing binary poetry" junk, and the other
flights of fantasy that are in the commercials in a clumsy attempt add
humor. It only highlights the true fact: that these commercials are an
example of something written by people at ad agencies who, instead of trying to learn the technology and speak intelligently about it, are trying to "talk
dumb" so that people who deep down feel dumb about all this
inter-network-mubo-jumbo will feel like Cox is all chummy, on their
side, helping them to binge-watch HBO Go a little easier.<br />
<br />
The fact is,
it IS a lot to understand. You have to do research if you want to have
"the fastest". Heck, I had to do some quick research to make sure I'm
more or less factual in what I've written here (and it's entirely
possible I've got some errors or outdated information in what<i> </i>I've
written). I don't have any issue with it if they are going to say "We
are faster than DSL" (which, in general, barring heavy load, they can
be). I don't mind if they say "Fastest Internet available in the area"
(even though several parts of my geographical area do have fiber to the
home). But don't tell me I can become a cool nerd by getting my new
Cable modem. Just tell me it's fast enough that when I spend all night Friday watching episodes of <i>Daredevil</i>, I won't have to wait for them to buffer. That's fast enough for me.<br />
<br />TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-21925629554477654102013-07-10T17:21:00.002-05:002013-07-10T17:21:57.409-05:00Named Map Pins - get it right, Google!Marking a location in Google Maps and remembering what it is has pretty much always been a pain in the neck.<br />
<br />
Don't get me wrong... I know how to mark a place. I can pull it up in Google Maps on a computer and "star" it, or I can do basically the same thing on my Android. When I do, it comes up as a star on my phone or on my computer whenever I view a Google Map.<br />
<br />
I also know the convoluted way to get the location to have a name. You star it in Maps, then of all places you go to <a href="https://www.google.com/bookmarks/">Google Bookmarks</a> (!) to change the name. Once you've done that, the place name comes up on Mobile when you view "My Places".<br />
<br />
<i>Sometimes</i> it does, anyway.<br />
<br />
Actually, more often than not, I still see the address in My Places, even when I've given the bookmark a name in Google Bookmarks. I've tried and tried to find a rhyme or reason to this, but I just can't figure it out.<br />
<br />
Why, Google, why?<br />
<br />
I don't know what person a specific address goes with, any more than I know what person a specific telephone number goes with. And if I want to find Bill's house, I'd darn well better know his address, even though the very reason I starred his house in the first place was so I would be able to find it later without having to look up the address! <br />
<br />
Actually, that's not entirely true. I've figured out some work-arounds. If Bill is in my address book, I can put his address in there, and it's clickable to go to Maps. That's terrific as long as the latitude/longitude coordinates that Google resolves to for his address are perfectly correct. But I actually wound up resorting to installing <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amlegate.gbookmark" target="_blank">a third-party Google Bookmarks app</a> just for this purpose. So now instead of opening maps, I open that app, find my bookmark for the starred location, click it, and <i>then</i> the Maps app opens.<br />
<br />
Don't even get me started on how the stars in the desktop version don't display my bookmark name... <i>at all. Ever.</i><br />
<br />
Come the heck on, Google. Knock it off fiddling with Google+ for just a day or two and get these technologies working together.<br />
<br />
If you don't, I may never find Bill's house again.TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-50192713155098687872013-04-11T14:00:00.000-05:002013-04-11T14:00:05.244-05:00Sandisk Memory Zone: Bleah.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/YzU71DgWMtO05AgOjt_2UCoRYl4UgM6_3pYkOjv5HQiXcDMTdxcrC4X57nTls5FpQ9I=w124" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="app logo of a squirrel" border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/YzU71DgWMtO05AgOjt_2UCoRYl4UgM6_3pYkOjv5HQiXcDMTdxcrC4X57nTls5FpQ9I=w124" title="The Sandisk Memory Zone Squirrel" /></a></div>
I'm a firm believer in backing things up. In my four decades of messing around with computers, I've lost things and had problems because of it often enough that when I finally caved in and got myself a smartphone, my first thought was to figure out a way to back it up with a minimum of fuss, preferably into "the cloud" instead of filling up my already bursting-at-the-seams hard drive. As a <a href="http://tulsamjtech.blogspot.com/search/label/Google%20Voice">Google Voice</a> fan, I knew that my contact information was safely stored in Google Contacts, but what about pictures? Videos? Ringtones? I wanted that stuff to be backed up in the cloud so that I wouldn't have to worry about it.<br />
<br />
When I bought my spacious new Sandisk MicroSD card, I found a little piece of paper in the package that claimed it was going to solve this problem for me. It was a QR code with a link to an Android app made by Sandisk which can back up your stuff to any of a number of cloud providers. It could do it on a schedule, so I could set it and forget it. And copying things back to my phone is as easy as copying anything using a phone. Sounded great! (<a href="http://www.sandisk.com/products/software/memory-zone/" target="_blank">Here's the link</a>.)<br />
<br />
What I found was an app that does what the hype says... but does it slowly, awkwardly, and unreliably. I had so much trouble with it that I finally quit using it, but only after it apparently <i>lost</i> some of the information I was trying to back up!<br />
<br />
First of all, loading up the app in the first place is excruciatingly SLOW. Apparently the app thinks that every single time it is loaded, it needs to fully index not only the contents of your MicroSD card, but the entire contents of your phone's internal storage, and also all of the files on any cloud storage you've configured (!) This takes an incredibly long time. A better strategy might be to cache the information scanned from the user's resources the last time the app was used and let the user get started poking on things, and re-scan everything in the background. That's more complex to program (I ought to know, I write software for a living), but it would be a much better user experience than "click to launch, go to lunch because it will take that long to start up."<br />
<br />
I would be willing (but not happy) to tolerate the long startup time, however, for an app that performed well on what I wanted it to do, which was back up certain kinds of files at night when I'm asleep and not using the phone. I set up my backup schedule, and found that it backed things up to my cloud storage as expected... <i>sometimes</i>. I never figured out exactly what the reason was that it would back things up sometimes and not other times, but I did learn early on that if the app crashed, there was no easy way to get the darn squirrel out of my notifications tray. I rebooted the whole phone many times just to clear the icon so things I <i>wanted</i> to be notified about were more visible.<br />
<br />
It worked often enough, though, that I would have been OK with even that, as long as it backed up the stuff I want to keep fairly often without screwing any of it up. Obviously, this was too much to ask. This app attempts to reduce backing up and restoring to very simple steps - there are categories for your photos, music, videos, documents, and so forth, without having to navigate your phone's folder structure (which is one reason for all of that initial scanning). So no matter where the app finds a picture, for example, it winds up in the "Photos" bucket. Picture of your children? Photo! Ad for beer from your browser cache? Photo! Image file used internally by an app you use once a month? Photo! MP3 of your favorite song? Oh wait, that's "Music". 10-second ringtone you bought three years ago and forgot you had? Music! Alarm sound that came preloaded on your phone? Music! "Ding" sound from your instant messaging app which you could recover by reinstalling the app? Music! There is no way I could find to select or unselect specific folders or files from being scanned, so every image on my phone was backed up to "Photos", and every sound on my phone was backed up to "Music" (I did un-select "Documents" and "Apps" because I keep documents in Dropbox and back up Apps with Titanium Backup, but those are two other stories).<br />
<br />
I could have lived with this... after all, as long as the stuff I <i>did</i> want backed up was safe, having a few extra files is a fair price to pay, right? Well, I found out about that price the hard way when something - and I'm pretty sure it's this very app that's supposed to <i>save</i> me from disasters like this - deleted all of the photos and audio files from the phone. Eek!<br />
<br />
The app is supposed to be able to copy files from your cloud storage back to your local phone storage with no trouble - Photos to Photos, Music to Music, etc. However, the app seemed to have forgotten where my backup on my Box.net account was (the default folder which the app itself had created), so I opened up the folders on my computer and took a look. When I realized that the app had backed up all sorts of superfluous information, my heart sank... this was going to be quite a job! But I set to work, and was able to find my ringtones and notification tones fairly easily and get them back on my phone where I wanted them. Getting my photos back, though, was another matter. <br />
<br />
Ultimately, I restored less than 300 pictures that I had <i>intended</i> to back up. To get to them, though, I had to delete <i>2,476 superfluous images</i>! These included hundreds and hundreds of album covers from Google Music, dozens of images of the covers of books from my Logos Bible software, images of the spaces and board layouts from Words With Friends, images from articles I had saved in Pocket to read later, pictures I've posted on Facebook, pictures I've saved in Evernote, and tons of stuff which appears to be from my browser cache, including a number of advertising banners. I literally had almost ten times the amount of garbage backed up as useful stuff. What a ridiculous thing to have to wade through!<br />
<br />
One time doing that was enough for me. I actually had looked around for a different app to use, but hadn't found anything yet at the time, which is the only reason I put up with this stinker of an app in the first place. The concept is excellent, but the execution is lousy. The app is slow, buggy, and unreliable. It deleted the stuff I wanted it to preserve, and then gave me a hard time when I tried to restore it. I quit using it entirely months ago, and only yesterday did I look around for another replacement app - and I may have found one in <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.android.foldersync.full" target="_blank">FolderSync</a>. I've installed <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.android.foldersync.lite" target="_blank">the "Lite" version</a>, and I'm trying it out. It takes a little more doing to get it configured (you actually have to tell it what you want backed up! It doesn't back up every file you ever touched!!), but if it actually does what it's supposed to, I'll plunk down a couple bucks for the full version. This free Sandisk thing is a mess. I love their memory media... maybe they should sort of stick to that.TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-66109025711598442572013-04-05T13:20:00.000-05:002013-04-05T13:20:15.747-05:00The "Unlike" Project - First Month<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.city-data.com/forum/members/the-sweet-pickles-bus-831405-albums-do-not-want-pic61294-do-not-want-dog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.city-data.com/forum/members/the-sweet-pickles-bus-831405-albums-do-not-want-pic61294-do-not-want-dog.jpg" width="281" /></a></div>
Just over a month ago, I wrote <a href="http://tulsamjtech.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-unlike-project.html">this post</a> explaining that I was beginning a campaign to "Unlike" things on Facebook. The idea was to start reversing one of my "Likes" on Facebook ever day, and then tweeting about it using the hashtag <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23UnlikeProject&src=hash" target="_blank">#UnlikeProject</a>. The experience has been interesting in a lot of ways - I thought I'd give my "first 30 days" report (although it's actually been more than 30 days) and let you know what's been going on.<br />
<br />
The first thing I noticed is that it is incredibly difficult to decide what to Unlike. Fact is, the things I've "Liked" are things that, in real life, I in fact <i>do </i>actually like! It feels a little bit like a betrayal, especially when you are Unliking things like The Bible or your favorite sports teams. It's also difficult to find the things that are less important to me so I can Unlike them first - I wound up making myself a list to make prioritizing easier. I don't intent to Unlike <i>everything</i>, so I need to make sure I find the things I want to free myself from first. (Pages set up by friends of mine, for example, or organizations that I genuinely do want to stay in touch with will probably stay in my "Likes".)<br />
<br />
Some of the earliest casualties were Pages that post a lot. The reasons those got the axe first was that I was more likely to see their posts in my News Feed and remember "Oh yeah, it annoys me when I see them there!" or "Their posts are never interesting," and then I could wipe them out and be done with it. But even with the easy pickings of those frequent posters and with my "Unlike first" list, I still didn't Unlike something every day - once I Unliked two things in one day, and four or five days I forgot altogether.<br />
<br />
Two different organizations actually saw my "Today I Unliked..." tweets and responded to them, apologizing for whatever they did that put me off. Fact is, they didn't do anything, and I told them so! This is all about cleaning things out and simplifying... and insulating myself and my friends from invasive advertising as much as possible. I do have a positive opinion of those organizations, thought... kudos for keeping an eye on your Twitter mentions (I didn't actually even mention them by @ handle, so they're watching keywords) and reaching out to people based on that! That's the way to DO social media!<br />
<br />
During the month, I also discovered a few facts that back up my reasons for doing this: <br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2416495,00.asp" target="_blank">Things you reveal online can say more about you than you intended</a></li>
<li><a href="http://uk.news.yahoo.com/facebook-spam-scam-secret-revealed.html" target="_blank">Liking something on Facebook may be doing nothing but putting money in a scammer's pockets</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Facebook Graph Search will make it incredibly easy to find out sometimes embarrassing things about people</a></li>
</ul>
I'm actually enjoying the project - there's a sense of freedom in it, like when you've cleaned out the junk from the garage or gotten all the bills paid for the month. Maybe you'll give it a try? If you do, make sure you remember to tweet your Unlikes with hashtag <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23UnlikeProject&src=hash" target="_blank">#UnlikeProject</a> so I'll know you're in!<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Is it nuts to just start Unliking things that you actually do like? Why will you be joining the project, or why not? Sound off below by clicking the "Comment" link!</i>TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-47604186519154108522013-03-16T14:27:00.001-05:002013-03-16T14:29:44.438-05:00Google Collects Things People Shouted From Rooftops - Ordered to Pay Someone Else As Punishment<i>from <a href="http://www.dailytech.com/" target="_blank">DailyTech</a>:</i><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Google Ordered to Pay $7 Million to U.S. States for Wi-Fi Snooping Incident</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Google is finally settling a three-year investigation this week into a Wi-Fi incident that occurred when compiling data for its mapping service.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Google's Street View mapping cars had accidentally collected personal data, such as home wireless network passwords, between 2008 and 2010. The cars were out collecting images and data for the Street View mapping system in Google Maps, and were using an experimental computer code in the cars' software while doing so. This led to the accidental collection of personal data.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The settlement orders that Google split $7 million among 38 states in the U.S. and the District of Columbia, which were involved in the incident. </span></blockquote>
Read the rest <a href="http://www.dailytech.com/Google+Ordered+to+Pay+7+Million+to+US+States+for+WiFi+Snooping+Incident/article30111.htm" target="_blank">here</a>. <br />
<br />
First off, some background. A few years ago when Google's cars were driving around the country taking the pictures that are now part of the popular "street view" part of Google Maps, the cars were (accidentally, Google says) also taking snapshots of something else. As they were driving around photographing streets, businesses, neighborhoods, apartment buildings, and everything else, the cars also had software running that was recording Wi-Fi signals.<br />
<br />
Why did this cause a problem? Because whatever you do with your wireless laptop, smartphone, tablet computer, or anything else that communicates over Wi-Fi could be intercepted and recorded. This is a basic principle of radio communication. This can include instant messages, emails, Web browser requests (like what URL you are visiting)... <i>anything</i> that you do on your Wi-Fi.<br />
<br />
Does this creep you out? Well, it <i>shouldn't</i>. Because you should have the sense to do something very basic on your home Wi-Fi: <i>put a password on it</i>. Don't leave your Wi-Fi in the open. When you put a password on your Wi-Fi, it is encrypted, and although traffic can be recorded, it doesn't make any difference... because it's in a code which nobody likely cares enough to try to break. It's secure enough that recording it doesn't make any difference.<br />
<br />
On top of that, if you are logging into a site... say, your bank, or your credit card provider... the URL on your Web browser should start with "https://" (and not just "http://" - the "s" is the important part). If it does not, it's time to choose another bank. The "s" means that the bank is encrypting (encoding) all of the communication between you and it, so even if you are on an unprotected Wi-Fi network, your password and other communication is still in a code that is too strong to be worth trying to break.<br />
<br />
So despite the fact that most everyone has gotten the clue and set up passwords on their Wi-Fi, and despite the fact that even email services lik Gmail encrypt your password with https://. and despite the fact that Google admits that it recorded the Wi-Fi signals and says it was an accident, and despite the fact that they have promised to erase the recorded information... Google is being told to pay some sort of punitive damages.<br />
<br />
But not to the people who had Wi-Fi signals recorded. Not to the individuals. Directly to <i>the states</i>.<br />
<br />
How were state governments harmed by this? They weren't. Really, the consumers weren't harmed either. This is a tempest in a teacup. And how does a $7 million settlement teach anything to a $100+ billion company? It doesn't. Google probably contributes that much to the United Way every year. Heck, Google probably spends that much in fuel for the Street View cars every year!<br />
<br />
This whole thing is silly. I hope at least part of that settlement with the states goes to pay the salaries for the judge and other people the courts employs to hear cases like this, so none of my taxpayer dollars paid for it.TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-37269924438227451832013-03-14T14:00:00.000-05:002013-03-14T14:00:00.904-05:00A Situation - And A Recipe<div class="MsoNormal">
I just got an email. The email says "<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Your
cell phone battery is getting low!" I checked my phone, and sure enough, the battery was down to 15%, so I plugged it in to charge during the afternoon so I don't run out of juice before bedtime tonight. Who emailed me? Well, the cell phone did, of course! Actually, it texted me... but let me start from the beginning.</span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/ReUadhrDwHzErQ-tsDJgyssYenzsSHYdj3HQY8nTUKodPb5mGDF2-7VgmkrPr1JvL1M" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/ReUadhrDwHzErQ-tsDJgyssYenzsSHYdj3HQY8nTUKodPb5mGDF2-7VgmkrPr1JvL1M" width="180" /></a><br />
<small>A Locale Situation</small></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">One afternoon a few weeks ago I realized (when I was already on my commute home from work) that my phone battery had run down. I have charging cables in the car, of course, but my commute is only long enough to charge it partway... I ran out of power again later that evening. I realized that I had already set up something to check the battery level of my phone: a "Situation" in an app I use called <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twofortyfouram.locale" target="_blank">Locale</a>. In a nutshell, a Locale Situation monitors "Conditions" (such as your physical location, the time, or whether your phone is face-up or face-down) and when they match a set of Conditions you have configured, it activates "Settings" which can be settings on your phone or might be other actions. The app allows you to add new Conditions and Settings through a plug-in architecture. I've set it up to do things like make sure Wi-Fi is on when I'm at home and turn off the ringer when I'm at church.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I had also set it up to turn down the brightness of my display automatically when the battery power is below 15%, on the theory that this will stretch the battery just a little longer. That didn't help me realize that the battery was getting low that day, though, so I wanted to do something more.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Enter the <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.appstalk.sendsms" target="_blank">Send SMS Plug-in</a>. When you install the plug-in, you get a new "Setting" in your options - the "Setting" does not change a setting on your phone, but instead it automatically sends an SMS message from your phone to whatever recipient you like. This is terrific, but I didn't really want to be notified via SMS on my phone. When I'm at work and my battery gets low, I want to get an email... I monitor my work email closely when I'm at my desk, much more closely than I monitor the SMS stream on the phone itself. I tried sending an email through the Send SMS Plug-in, but even though you can do that through the stock SMS app, you couldn't do it through Send SMS. There are other apps (like <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stedo.sendsilentmail" target="_blank">this one</a>) which I could have used, but SMS messages can often be sent even when the phone is having trouble connecting to the Internet. I wanted to send an SMS message, but receive an Email.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Enter <a href="http://ifttt.com/" target="_blank">IFTTT</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">IFTTT (pronounced exactly how it looks, like the word "if" and then the letter "t") stands for "IF This Then That." And that adequately describes what IFTTT does - you associate it with things you do (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, CraigsList, Evernote, the time, the weather, etc.), and then configure associations so that if a certain condition exists on one of those things, something happens on another of them. The "things" are called "Channels" and they may act as either the instigator or the recipient of an action. For example, when this blog post is published, IFTTT will see it in the RSS feed and will automatically schedule it to go out to <a href="http://twitter.com/TulsaMJ" target="_blank">my Twitter stream</a> via HootSuite. In this way (if a condition exists, do something) it is similar to Locale, except almost every IFTTT Channel can be checked (like a Locale "Condition") or do something (like a Locale "Setting").</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">IFTTT has Channels for SMS and Phone Calls. Once you've set them up to match your phone, an SMS message from you can trigger something (for example, automatically save the SMS to a new note in Evernote), or IFTTT can send an SMS to your phone. The Phone Call channel can either receive a call (which it then can transcribe) or place a call using text-to-speech. Finally, IFTTT can send an email, using the Email channel, to any address you like.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Bingo!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I set up an IFTTT "Recipe" to receive SMS messages from my phone with a Twitter-style tag which indicates that I am at work, and forward those messages to my work email address. Then I set up Locale to check my battery level and my SSID, and if I'm on my work WiFi network, Send an SMS reading </span>"<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Your
cell phone battery is getting low!" with the special "I'm at work" tag to the IFTTT SMS number. I also set up a separate Locale/IFTTT combo to actually call me via voice if my battery gets low and I'm not at my desk! In theory, I should never again discover that my phone battery is discharged below the point of no return... I should always know about it ahead of time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">So that's how I wound up today getting an email from my phone that the battery was low. Pretty cool? Yes. A little convoluted? Kinda. Pretty geeky? Definitely. Useful? ABSOLUTELY.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><i>Do you use Locale or IFTTT? Have you set up any groovy Situations or Recipes that you'd like to share? Have you ever used synergy between multiple online services to build something cooler than the component parts? Tell us about it below in the Comments!</i> </span></div>
TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-6886065975891598652013-03-07T15:28:00.000-06:002013-03-07T15:28:31.035-06:00Terrestrial Radio Needs to Step It Up!<a href="http://www.wylio.com/credits/flickr/5972915587" title="license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ - click to view more info about 'Radio Transmission Towers Atop Mt. Wilson' or find more free pictures via Wylio"><img -="" adams="" alt="'Radio Transmission Towers Atop Mt. Wilson' photo (c) 2011, Andrew " by-sa="" creativecommons.org="" fastlizard4="" height="389" http:="" license:="" licenses="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsuKQLKBfziqubCRdJDrrH7pMUGGVcPfBqMWGhNuePQwB15Vcq8G4pHARhwvEqlieMfmTHdWO6zRVEdI32kkKpNF1tNwl5hNxWquq7eREuAwYwOzTdz1iYcU2HzSfL6avTRxaHpS1S2Fw/" style="float: right; margin: 0 10px;" width="260" /></a>The radio industry has been in quite an uproar in the past ten years or so. Out of the sight-lines of most people, there has been a real struggle involving traditional "terrestrial" radio (which comes to you directly through the air to an old-fashioned AP or FM radio), satellite radio, and Internet radio. Each has its advantages and drawbacks; terrestrial radio is free and has the advantage of being local in scope (paradoxically, some stations have switched to a syndicated format with no local programming, giving up their biggest trump card over the others); satellite radio is available pretty much wherever you are for a monthly subscription fee which never changes, and there are a zillion channels to choose from; Internet radio offers even more stations than satellite, with the added benefit of being highly customizable (like Pandora or Songza).<br />
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Each of the three also has its drawbacks (terrestrial radio has a limited range, statellite radio requires the purchase of expensive equipment and has an ongoing subscription cost, Internet radio can be expensive based on your bandwidth usage and can be glitchy if you have a slow connection). Terrestrial radio stations have tried to fight back by broadcasting online in addition to their on-the-air signal; my guess is that this strategy meets with some degree of success, because these days it's not easy to find a terrestrial station which doesn't also have an online stream. But I think terrestrial radio stations are not doing everything they can to make technology work to their advantage.<br />
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For example: one of my cars has a radio that can display the name of the song you're listening to as it plays... if the radio station's transmitter is broadcasting that information. I'm amazed at the number of stations that either don't provide that information at all, or just continuously broadcast the station's call letters and station motto. Come on, people! This tech has been in place for years now! You KNOW you have this information. You've got a computer logging every song that is played anyway, and even if you don't, in this era when any smartphone with Soundhound or Shazam or Midomi or any number of other apps can instantly identify a song based on just a few seconds randomly selected from the middle of the song, there's no reason to not automatically provide that information to your listeners. And you don't even have to burn airtime having your DJ say the title. It's just THERE.<br />
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But if the terrestrial stations really want to keep people from heading to Best Buy and picking up that Sirius or XM box, I think there are things they could invest in as an industry that might keep people in their court.<br />
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I think every new automobile radio should have a GPS sensor in it. I don't think they should necessarily have navigation information built into them, but I think they should know where they are in the world. Why would this be useful in a radio? Because if you know where you are in the world, and you know what stations exist there, then you can provide a list of available stations to choose from. If there was a list that could be downloaded periodically, I'll bet people would go to the trouble to set it up. If you park your car in your garage and you have WiFi in your home, chances are your car could access that signal (maybe even using the car radio antenna!) and download. If you don't have a signal where you park but your cell phone has hotspot capability, you could use that to periodically update your list. Or you could park out in front of McDonald's or Starbuck's or somewhere else that has a free WiFi signal, and in a few seconds your list could be updated.<br />
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Or maybe there doesn't have to be a master list at all! It would be entirely possible for a radio, over time, to gauge the availability and strength of radio signals in places where the car goes, and build its own list over time. With digital memory as cheap as it is, you could store a great deal of information. Heck, it would even be possible to share that information with other radios nearby, so if you're sitting in a traffic jam or parking lot, your radio could be comparing notes with other radios about what frequencies are available where. You might find that you drive to a new place and your radio already knows what stations are there!<br />
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But let's back up even further. There are only a few places I frequent... I live in the Tulsa Oklahoma area, and my brother lives in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Sometimes we drive to Oklahoma City, and I have family in Shreveport Louisiana. In each of those places I have stations I like to listen to, but I only have twelve or so radio presets to play with. Just my Tulsa stations fill up those buttons; when I visit my brother in DFW, I have to reprogram my radio presets. Why not have an arbitrary number of preset banks, which are sensitive to location? Why can't my radio show my Tulsa presets when I'm in Tulsa, and when I'm in Dallas, show me my favorite stations down there?<br />
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And let's go even one step further. In Tulsa, one of the stations I listen to has three separate frequencies that all broadcast the same programming. Depending on where you are in town, any one of the three might have a stronger signal than the others. Why shouldn't I be able to group the three so that, based either on my physical location or signal strength, the channel automatically changes to the best signal? And even better: that station is one of those local stations that is actually part of a national network. They just launched a frequency in Dallas. Why can't my button for them in Tulsa be the button for the same programming when I get to Dallas? Stations could provide a downloadable list of their own frequencies that could be used to program this new, cool, technology-enhanced terrestrial radio. Heck, stations could even provide an internal link to their Internet streams if they wanted, so Internet-capable radios would be able to switch to the online stream when they are out of range of the over-the-air signal. I think it would make sense for the terrestrial radio industry to invest actual money in developing these technologies, because when they become available, it will benefit them tremendously.<br />
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I won't even go into things like the possibility of the radio being able to make suggestions based on genre (rock, country, talk, etc.) because those capabilities are already out there in some existing radios. That technology suffers from the same problem the Song ID technology suffers from: stations don't always provide that information in their signals. I could also brainstorm from the perspective of the marketers: transmit the station or show's call-in number with the signal so your radio could dial your cell phone for you (there's a "distracted driving" case for the lawyers) or use the GPS capability to let you know when one of the station's advertisers is nearby. There are so many ways that car radios could be enhanced, it's kind of sad that in general, car radios still do basically the same thing they did in the 1970s when you knew what station you were on by looking at where the stick was over the list of numbers.<br />
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Terrestrial radio hasn't been making the effort to beat out their competitors in outer space and on the Internet. Many new car radios come with a line-in jack; mine doesn't, but I have a small FM transmitter that I can use to play music from my cell phone through my car radio. Even now, I can choose Internet radio over terrestrial if I like. As bandwidth continues to get cheaper and Internet music services continue to get better, traditional radio needs to step up its game, or it's nothing but downhill from here.<br />
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(Since I wrote this post, I've learned that <a href="http://kurthanson.com/news/high-speed-car-connectivity-could-be-threat-also-opportunity-radio" target="_blank">4G is coming soon to a car near you</a>. Get on the ball, radio stations!) <br />
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<i>I'm not a radio industry professional, and it's entirely possible that I've gotten some of my details wrong. Do you know something that contradicts the ideas I've presented here? Any more ideas that could be incorporated into car radio technology that would make listening to over-the-air radio easier or more enjoyable? Has the terrestrial radio industry made an effort to help technology along? Join the discussion below in the comments section!</i>TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-86774493503046488782013-02-28T13:30:00.003-06:002013-04-05T13:21:45.004-05:00The "Unlike" Project<a href="http://www.wylio.com/credits/flickr/5683562879" title="license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ - click to view more info about 'dislike button' or find free lpictures via Wylio"><img alt="'dislike button' photo (c) 2011, Sean MacEntee - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" height="103" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8LgLXnaFY9EluJV3yNNfvWaVnRBjg4_EeSesZ2mogOVo_ktR3_mY8EfDscGiulPrYREaFkRliHuv235Vg3AKNH-xUHsTvIDZWliTFmpbTK2ZY4YfSIXC7eHEMD_JYrxaesKk9l-4kaLE/" style="float: right; margin: 0 10px;" width="309" /></a>Today I made a rash decision. I decided to Unlike stuff on Facebook.<br />
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The reasons for this are not irrational. The reason I've clicked "Like" on TV shows, musical artists, movies, and whatever, is usually because I want my profile to say things about me when people visit it and look at my details. You take a good look at that stuff when you look at people's profiles, right?<br />
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What do you mean, you never look at people's profiles?<br />
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Basically, I've come to believe that my reasoning for wanting to click "Like" on stuff (to tell my friends I like it) is flawed. My friends don't typically see it. If they do, they don't care.<br />
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You know why?<br />
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Because <a href="http://lifehacker.com/5987248/how-facebook-is-using-you-to-annoy-your-friends-and-how-to-stop-it" target="_blank"><i>they see it in advertising</i></a>.<br />
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The main reason Facebook has "Like" is so they can sell advertising to you and your friends. "Michael likes Coke, so maybe you, his friend, will like this ad from Coke!" (This is why, by the way, there probably will never be a "Dislike" button.) I find this annoying, and I've decided I'm not going to be complicit in it anymore... but I have far too many "Likes" to "Unlike" them all at once. Besides, I've "Liked" a few of them on purpose. I want to see updates from that band on the road, or hear what's going on with that software package I use, or whatever. So starting today, I've decided to "Unlike" one single thing I've "Liked" but have no reason to continue to "Like".<br />
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I'm tweeting my daily Unlikes in <a href="http://twitter.com/TulsaMJ" target="_blank">my Twitter stream</a>, using the hashtag <a href="http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23UnlikeProject" target="_blank">#UnlikeProject</a>. Would you like to join me in this quest to stop littering our friends' Facebook feeds with advertising that looks like it came personally recommended? Great! Tweet your unlikes to Twitter when you do, and use the <a href="http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23UnlikeProject" target="_blank">#UnlikeProject</a> hashtag. Let's see how many people are freeing themselves from being stooges for Facebook's advertisers!<br />
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(After the first month, I wrote a followup post. <a href="http://tulsamjtech.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-unlike-project-first-month.html">Here it is</a>!)<br />
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<i>Do you have a different take on Facebook "Likes"? If you do, please click the "comments" link below and join the discussion! And if you are tweeting your Unlikes on Twitter, feel free to link to this post (a short link is <a href="http://bit.ly/FBUnlike">http://bit.ly/FBUnlike</a>) to explain your reasoning.</i>TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-53580559022075218202012-04-15T17:05:00.000-05:002012-04-15T17:05:58.276-05:00Google Play Music: it's ALMOST there.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://play.google.com/about/" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="53" src="http://play.google.com/about/images/play_logo.png" width="231" /></a></div>
"Music in the Cloud." The phrase itself sounds sort of like "Pie in the Sky," doesn't it? Well, so far that's kind of been what cloud-based music has equated to. A year ago <a href="http://tulsamjtech.blogspot.com/2011/03/music-in-cloud.html">I blogged about this same thing</a>, shortly after Amazon had released their music locker and many months before Google finally released their "Google Music" service, which has now been merged with their app store, the Google eBookstore, and movie rentals to be rebranded as "<a href="http://play.google.com/about/" target="_blank">Google Play</a>." (This post is about the music portion of Google Play, so I'm going to refer to it as Google Music for now to avoid being ambiguous.)<br />
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When Google Music was released I was pretty stoked. I had quickly bumped my head on the free space available in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/cloudplayer" target="_blank">Amazon Cloud Player</a>, and Google Music offers virtually unlimited space (you can upload 20,000 songs, which is way more than are in my library!) for free. Also, you can reportedly stream your music over the Internet to almost any device. This works pretty good on the Web, but I find the experience less than flawless on Android.<br />
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But before I tell you about my Android frustrations, I want to touch on a few problems with the Web player. I won't go into uploading music with the Music Manager; it's a little weird to not be able to upload them directly but instead have to point software at them and let it do it for you, but <a href="http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/google-music-manager-a-frustrating-way-to-download-your-music-library/" target="_blank">that's been covered already by others</a>. I didn't find the upload experience particularly painful myself, and you only have to do it one time for the main body of your library, and then only occasionally (unless you buy your new music from Google, of course, and then it automatically shows up in your account without any uploading at all!) I find the player to be serviceable, but there are some things missing:<br />
<ul>
<li>There's no good way to eliminate duplicates. This was never a problem for me until I tried to upload a new CD worth of songs in FLAC format when I had already uploaded them in MP3 format. There's no way to tell which is the higher-quality copy, and there's no way to mark several files for deletion all at once. I'd like to re-rip all of my CDs to FLAC (which is lossless) at some point and eliminate the old MP3s I ripped years ago, some at embarrassingly low quality to save space on old hard drives, but when I do so it will be a real pain in the next to replace them on Google Play.<br /></li>
<li>Playlist functionality is pretty limited. I guess I'm spoiled by years of using <a href="http://www.mediamonkey.com/" target="_blank">Mediamonkey</a>, but I would love to be able to have the player randomly select songs to play based on the star rating I give them, or some other classification, like "Christmas Music."<br /></li>
<li>Oh, wait. There IS no star rating system. It's thumbs up or thumbs down, and that's the best you can do on Google Music. And the rating isn't uploaded with the file; I know some of the MP3s I uploaded had ratings on them already. Actually, I know that ALL of them had star ratings already!<br /></li>
<li>Oh, wait again... there IS no way to assign a classification to the file, other than "Genre." In Mediamonkey I have a number of fields that I can use to classify files... I can automatically generate a playlist of songs for Christmas or Easter, or high-octane songs to keep me awake during my work day when there's no caffeine available. In the Google Play player, there's none of that.</li>
</ul>
But enough of that complaining; the Web player is serviceable, and it gives me instant access to my tracks from any Internet-connected computer. Could be cooler, but it gets the job done. My <i>real</i> gripe is with the Android app.<br />
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Come on, now. This is a Google service on a Google OS! Shouldn't it be AMAZING? Well yes, it should, but it's not... at least not on my lower-powered phone, a Samsung model that is called <a href="http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/cell-phones/SCH-R720ZRACRI" target="_blank">Vitality</a> <a href="http://www.mycricket.com/cell-phones/details/samsung-vitality-r720" target="_blank">on Cricket</a> (which is what I use) but which is called <a href="http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/cell-phones/SCH-R720ZRAXAR" target="_blank">Admire</a> on other carriers (I know <a href="http://www.metropcs.com/metro/detail/Samsung+Admire/SCHR720ZAAM" target="_blank">MetroPCS has it by this name</a>). The internal memory of this phone is a little cramped in this phone... only 125MB... and this is where many of the problems with the Google Music app seem to lie.<br />
<ul>
<li>The app seems to keep the catalog of music you're storing in the cloud, plus complete copies of any tracks you have recently played, stored in the phone's internal memory. This, friends, is <i>madness</i>. There is no reason to stick this huge file in my 125MB of phone memory when I've got a perfectly good 8GB MicroSD card riding in there (and the phone can support up to 32GB!) There are certain things that are required to exist in that internal memory, including some uncooperative apps which refuse to be moved to the MicroSD card. At least the Google Play Music app itself can be moved to the MicroSD card!<br /></li>
<li>Since the app fills up the internal memory with its own huge data file, after I use it for a while I wind up not being able to install new apps any more. Even if the app is going to wind up on the MicroSD card eventually, some free internal memory is required in order to install it in the first place. There are other high-profile apps that are offenders in this way as well... Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader, and some others are the usual suspects on my phone.<br /></li>
<li>So, in order to install new apps, I have to choose a few of these badly-behaved apps and do a "clear data" to free up some space. By the way, the fact that all of these apps are fighting for the same few MB of storage space also means that when I've got my huge Google Play Music file on my phone, I stop receiving new Gmail. Facebook, Twitter, Reader and the other members of this crew seem to somehow figure out how to keep operating... why not the other two apps from Google? On the Google OS? (Wait, did I mention before that this is Google software running on a Google OS?)<br /></li>
<li>When I "clear data" on Google Play Music, I have to wait for EVER for it to re-download its data file. I have no idea why this would be. I've currently got 9,312 songs in Google Music. There's no reason that at least a list of the albums couldn't be downloaded via a good WiFi connection in less than a minute. Track names and album art could populate over time, but at least with the list of album names I could start to select albums, and if I select album the app could quickly download the track list, and then I could start a song streaming. As it is now, I usually have to wait overnight for the songs to populate.<br /></li>
<li>Even then, even after waiting overnight, often the newest songs in my library aren't there. In fact, sometimes even days later, with WiFi available for a good 18-20 hours of the day in my home and workplace, those new songs don't show up. It's positively ridiculous.<br /></li>
<li>Sometimes after a "clear data" I can't get the song library to re-download <i>at all</i>.<br /></li>
<li>Fortunately, there is a "Refresh music from Google Music" link in the settings. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it doesn't do squat.<br /></li>
<li>It is possible in the app to flag a track or album to be made available offline; when you do that, the audio data is downloaded to your phone (to that precious internal phone memory, apparently) so you can listen to it without streaming it. There is also a setting to allow that to happen automatically when you play a song, so that Lady Gaga track you listened to yesterday is automatically available offline today. Problem is, once you've downloaded that offline data, there doesn't seem to be a way to reclaim the space on your phone; if you flag it as <i>not</i> available offline, the size of that darn data file stays huge.<br /></li>
<li>Every time you open the Google Play Music app, it reports the name of the last song you listened to to Android, even if you don't start it playing. This is not a problem except that I scrobble my song plays to Last.fm (<a href="http://www.last.fm/user/TulsaMJ" target="_blank">want to see what I listen to</a>?), so every time I open Google Play Music it scrobbles the last song I played again. I've sometimes wound up having to delete three or four consecutive scrobbles of a single song from my list.<br /></li>
<li>Don't even get me started about automatic side-loading of tracks from my phone to my Google Music account. Dictate a shopping list into Evernote? It winds up in your Google Play Music. Record a radio talk show with TuneIn? It'll wind up in your Google Play Music. I don't know of any way to turn this off, or exclude files created by specific applications. I'd prefer to turn it off entirely... how often do I have an MP3 on my phone that I didn't already have on my computer? Here's a hint: NEVER.</li>
</ul>
I eventually gave up on the Google Play Music app. I haven't removed it from my phone, but it was so difficult to get it to work that I quit using it. Maybe if I had the snazziest Droid from Motorola and it had eighty zillion terabytes of internal memory I would be happy to let Google Play Music save a file in the phone's memory. But why should it take such a large file? This is supposed to be a <i>streaming</i> solution. It's supposed to mostly live on the Internet, not actually on the phone. I would prefer for the app to be mostly a front-end for a Web back-end, not a traditional music player that supports downloading the song automatically when you play it. I was so looking forward to using Google Play Music on my phone, which I got last December shortly after Google Music was released... now I'm pretty disappointed. I hope Google gets their act together and refines their app into something those of us with more modest Android phones are able to use.TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-86026599357988706312012-04-03T18:00:00.000-05:002012-04-03T18:00:04.100-05:00Long Distance Calls: Oh Please.I feel the urge to rant briefly about something that is ridiculous. Pick up a phone right now and dial a long-distance number, but <i>do not</i> dial "1" or "0" first. What do you hear? Why, you hear a recording that says that you have to dial "1" or "0" first. Now, since you were directly dialing the number, it stands to reason that you are not interested in visiting with an operator... in fact, I doubt most people even know why you would even want to dial zero-plus-area-code (you do it to place collect calls, person-to-person, the sort of call where you need an operator's assistance). People who do need zero-plus dialing know how to do it and aren't likely to forget. It seems to me that if the computer is smart enough to know that you need to dial "1" it could default to that, don't you think? Or how about letting you dial "1" or "0" right there while you're listening to the recording without having to hang up and re-dial the whole number?<br />
<br />
And what about local calls that are mistakenly dialed with the "1" prefix? In the area where I live, you now have to dial the area code even for local calls, but if you dial with a "1" you hear a recording that you shouldn't have dialed the "1". Here's your hand slap, the recording implies, now go back and do it right this time you smelly gorilla-fingered cretin. Come on... we can route full-motion video around the world instantaneously using satellites, but we can't build a phone system that can intelligently ignore the digit "1" when it is not needed, even though we <i>know</i> that's the problem and will happily play a recording for the caller to tell them so? It's like there's some passive-aggressive person at the phone company giggling every time someone dials or doesn't dial that one extra digit.<br />
<br />
Get real, phone companies. Get rid of the superfluous initial-digit recordings.TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-14081348477093753532011-09-26T12:28:00.000-05:002011-09-26T12:28:15.091-05:00Spotify vs. RhapsodyI've been listening to Spotify a lot lately - particularly since they
got the whole "social with Facebook" thing happening. It's pretty snazzy
to have my tracks automatically coming up on Facebook, and of course
being able to instantly play just about any song in creation on my
computer whenever I want is pretty awesome. But here's the thing... my
wife and I have been sharing a Rhapsody account for several years now.
Rhapsody also allows me to play any song in the world on the cheap...
plus, Rhapsody also allows me to transfer those songs to our
non-Internet-connected portable music players. So I haven't seen a
reason to switch to paying Spotify, although frankly Rhapsody has a
pretty bad track record as far as their PC music playing software is
concerned (frankly, it sucks, especially if you have a lower-powered
computer to begin with).<br /><br />So here's the thing. Today Spotify
announced something that they apparently see as a "Great news, this is
so cool!" moment, but which I see as an "Oh, I didn't realize <i>that</i> was how it works" moment. Here's the blog post:<br /><br /><a class="ot-anchor" href="http://www.spotify.com/us/blog/archives/2011/09/26/good-news-for-spotify-open-users/">http://www.spotify.com/us/blog/archives/2011/<wbr></wbr>09/26/good-news-for-spotify-open-users/</a><br /><br />Other
Spotify users: did you know that the free all-you-can-eat buffet is
only a six-month thing? I didn't realize that. After that time you can
still listen to songs for free, but not as many as before. (Rhapsody
used to have a similar listen-to-so-many-per-month-for-free policy, but
recently I tried to listen to some tracks that way and I got 30-second
previews, so that may not be the way it is any more.)<br /><br />On top of
all this, the new social features on Facebook will complicate our
Rhapsody situation. Reportedly, soon Rhapsody will have some kind of
integration with Facebook that resembles what Spotify has now. The
problem is that since my wife and I share an account, if I link it with
my Facebook, tracks will get scrobbled to Facebook if she listens to
them even if I'm not around. I don't want that.<br /><br />I also use Last.fm (say hi if you do too: <a class="ot-anchor" href="http://www.last.fm/user/TulsaMJ">http://www.last.fm/user/TulsaMJ</a>),
and Spotify also scrobbles there. Rhapsody does not scrobble to Last.fm
natively like Spotify does, although I've found a way to make that
happen (usually). My workaround works by scrobbling tracks from the
Rhapsody RSS feed, so I have to be on a computer or at least have a
computer running in order for it to work. And I still want to scrobble
everything to Last.fm - my media player that I use with my own MP3s
scrobbles there, and actually, since Spotify doesn't seem to scrobble
tracks that aren't on Spotify to Facebook at all (although it does
scrobble them to Last.fm) - quite possibly when Last.fm gets their
Facebook Open Social application working, I'll turn off the scrobbling
in Spotify and just use Last.fm for all of it. It sure would be nice if
Rhapsody supported native Last.fm scrobbling like Spotify does!<br /><br />So
let me get to the point. For ten bucks a month, I could get my own
separate Rhapsody account going. It won't scrobble natively to Last.fm,
so if I play songs on a cell phone they won't scrobble, but it should
scrobble to Facebook once they've got that running (should be pretty
quick... they're one of the "media partners" Facebook keeps trumpeting
about). That would allow me to listen to music on portable devices and
on my computer, and it would also eliminate the problem of getting my
wife's plays scrobbled to my Last.fm and my Facebook. This would also
allow me to downgrade my wife's account, which now supports three
portable devices, to the cheaper one-device version:<br /><br /><a class="ot-anchor" href="http://www.rhapsody.com/discover/pricing.html">http://www.rhapsody.com/discover/pricing.h<wbr></wbr>tml</a><br /><br />OR,
for ten bucks a month, I can subscribe to Spotify. I can listen on
portable devices, scrobble to Facebook and natively to Last.fm, but I
don't have the option of using tracks on my non-connected portable
device. The added bonus is that the PC client for Spotify works better
than the comparable Rhapsody application:<br /><br /><a class="ot-anchor" href="http://www.spotify.com/us/get-spotify/overview/">http://www.spotify.com/us/get-spotify/<wbr></wbr>overview/</a><br /><br />The
services' music offerings are pretty comparable - I haven't run into
music on one that I couldn't find on the other, although I know Rhapsody
does have exclusive content (interviews and stuff) from time to time
and I believe Spotify has their own exclusives of the same nature. I see
them as a kind of Coke and Pepsi comparison: they're both dark colas
that cost about the same and will quench your thirst, and it's a matter
of which one you like better. For me, if Rhapsody had native Last.fm
support, it would be the obvious choice; if Spotify had support of
downloading music to non-connected devices, it would be the obvious
choice. An added benefit of Rhapsody is that if you are on a computer
that doesn't have their client software installed, you can still log in
and play tracks using their Web interface - try THAT with Spotify!<br /><br />What
do you think? I'm interested in any opinions, differences you notice in
the $9.99 plans of the two, advice or comments. If you'd like to visit
me on Spotify, here's my public profile:<br /><br /><a class="ot-anchor" href="http://open.spotify.com/user/tulsamj">http://open.spotify.com/user/tulsamj</a>TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-10476676671149720272011-09-23T18:00:00.000-05:002011-09-23T18:00:03.112-05:00Facebook's Timeline, Online Privacy, and TMIYesterday around noon, my mind was officially being blown. I was watching the keynote presentation at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/f8">Facebook's f8 Developer Conference</a>, during which Mark Zuckerberg showed this to the world for the first time:<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="253" src="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/hzPEPfJHfKU?rel=0" width="440"></iframe><br />
<br />
What you see in that video is a rather sentimental look at <a href="http://tulsamjtech.blogspot.com/search/label/Facebook">Facebook</a>'s new version of the Profile, which they are calling "<a href="http://tulsamjtech.blogspot.com/search/label/Timeline">Timeline</a>." Timeline will organize all of your past Facebook activity chronologically, selecting the "most important" things via an algorithm (or via your own later editing) so that your profile is (more or less) a look at your entire online life. In fact, you can add things that aren't already present on Facebook, so your offline life (even pre-Internet) can be a part of your Timeline. I was amazed, and a little bit shocked! This is the first time I can remember an update to Facebook that strikes me as a win for the users, as opposed to a ham-handed attempt to bring in more ad revenue for Facebook. This is a way for users to present themselves online so that people who find them actually can know what's important to them. A way to get to know your friends better, or catch up with life events of old friends you'd lost contact with. A truly comprehensive online presence.<br />
<br />
To make Timeline even more personal, Facebook also announced some enhancements to the "social graph" which will make sharing content even more comprehensive, personal, and immediate. Last night I was able to get <a href="http://tulsamjtech.blogspot.com/search/label/Spotify">Spotify</a> to start "scrobbling" tracks to Facebook. "Scrobbling" is a concept that originated (if I understand it correctly) with social music site <a href="http://tulsamjtech.blogspot.com/search/label/last.fm">last.fm</a>. What it means in concept is that every track you listen to is automatically recorded somewhere. In practice that doesn't actually happen (what if you hear it on the radio? A speaker at the grocery store? Using a portable player with no Internet connection? Using software that does not support scrobbling?) but with a little bit of work, long ago I managed to get most of the music I listen to during my work day to scrobble to last.fm. Getting Spotify to work with Facebook, by contrast, was actually very easy; I had already linked them back when I got my Spotify account, and it just started working... suddenly I got a comment on a track I was listening to right on Facebook, without me even actively mentioning it. According to Facebook, although I haven't had occasion to try this yet, you're supposed to actually be able to listen to the same song a friend is listening to, <i>as</i> they listen to it, <i>synched up with their player</i>. So they hear the same part of the song I hear. Now <i>that's</i> a social music experience!<br />
<br />
The same thing is supposed to be coming to more music services, and also to video-on-demand services <a href="http://tulsamjtech.blogspot.com/search/label/Netflix">Netflix</a> and <a href="http://tulsamjtech.blogspot.com/search/label/hulu">hulu</a> (among others). Over time, all of this information will be aggregated to your Timeline, so people will be able to find out, for example, which movies you watched on Netflix in September of 2011, or which album or artist you listened to the most in October. It will also function as a sort of social recommendation service, automatically endorsing the things you enjoy for all of your friends, who presumably have similar tastes to yours.<br />
<br />
This all will have a few effects that people in general may not have thought of. For one thing, your Timeline/Social Graph will be an absolute <i>bonanza</i> for Facebook's advertisers. Is there a new Johnny Depp movie coming out? The people who've watched all of Depp's recent movies will be easily targetable by Facebook, because it will be chronicled in their Timelines. What about when an artist - let's go with someone a bit obscure, not a Lady Gaga or Eminiem - with a new CD coming out. The artist is relatively unknown, so the record label may not have the money to run a bunch of blanket advertising, but the people who have listened to that artist will be easily findable and targetable via Facebook, likely for much cheaper than it would be otherwise. And with the low barrier to listening to those tracks via Facebook + Spotify, those people who see the ads and then listen to the new tracks will automatically generate advertising for the music too, and for free! This is a marketer's dream coming true! Did you think Facebook was "free"? It's not. You're paying for it by giving it more and more information about yourself, every time you log in or do anything.<br />
<br />
Another effect, when Timelines become available for everyone, is that everything you've ever done on Facebook will potentially be available to view, handily indexed in reverse-chronological order. This is going to be great if you've been judicious in what you've posted online, but if you have a habit of posting drunken beer-bash photos of yourself, you're going to want to get in there with the privacy and editing tools and make sure people see only what you want to see.<br />
<br />
But what about privacy? you may ask. Well, I reply, what about it? What if things come up on your time line that you don't want people to see, or that you don't want to remember yourself? I'll quote a friend of mine on this topic: "<span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text">What I didn't want to remember, I didn't post as a status update." If you don't want people to know it, was it really a good idea to put it on the Internet? Social networking has, for some people, created an atmosphere where oversharing is OK. "TMI" is what my friends and I call this: "Too Much Information." And this TMI factor gets worse when you figure in those "scrobbling" applications.</span><br />
<span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text"><br /></span><br />
<span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text">What if I listen to something on Spotify that I don't <i>want</i> to broadcast to my friends? What if I watch a movie that I don't want everyone to know about? And what if I forget to turn off the social sharing aspects of those applications before I do my watching or listening? </span><span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text">Or, what if my daughter watches ten episodes of Hello Kitty on Netflix and I don't want that on my Facebook? </span><span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text">Currently I don't see any tools for "un-scrobbling" my Spotify tracks - not that I intend to listen to or watch anything I wouldn't want to share, but occasionally I've been known to clear a track from my last.fm history if I didn't want it in my "library," and it would be nice to see those kinds of tools here. As it is currently, once you enable those social apps, the firehose is open... and once it's on the Internet, you can't <i>really</i> ever take it back. You can't un-shoot a gun or un-throw a rock, and even if you retrieve the bullet or the rock, if it hit someone on the way, you can't take that back.</span><br />
<span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text"><br /></span><br />
<span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text">That concern aside, I think people are going to dig this stuff. Personally, I already share all kinds of information online anyway: I scrobble my track plays on last.fm <a href="http://www.last.fm/user/TulsaMJ">here</a>, record what movies I watch <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/TulsaMJ/lists/55349">here</a>, record what books I read <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4615416-michael-jones">here</a> and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/TulsaMJ/lists/55296">here</a>, and keep a list of all those links <a href="http://claimid.com/TulsaMJ">here</a>. You probably keep online records of some of the things you already do somewhere too; you may have online records of your cooking or your diet, your running or your vacationing, your family or your friends. All Facebook is really doing here is centralizing all of that information in one place. It's a masterstroke of genius, and I think it's going to be successful.</span><br />
<span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text"><br /></span><br />
<span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text">But again... what about privacy? What about the privacy of someone who doesn't <i>want</i> everyone in the world to know everything they do, so they never get on Facebook, or maybe never even use a computer? Well, I've got news for you: in 2011, "privacy" is just short of a myth anyway. If you use a checking account, debit card, or credit card, there are records somewhere of every time and place that you used them to pay for something. If you bought a house or a car, if you went to college or got a driver's license, there are records somewhere of all of it, handily indexed (if you live in the United States) by your Social Security Number. There are security cameras in most public places, and there are satellites with who-knows-what resolution of surveillance up in the sky, maybe looking at you and maybe looking at me. If you carry a cell phone, some computer somewhere knows exactly where you are, probably to within a few feet. The cell phone company potentially has a record of every phone call you make and every text message you send. Your email provider probably has logs of every email you send; on top of that, there are records of that email on the recipients' mail servers, and on every piece of equipment on the Internet that the message traveled through on the way from server to server. Your Web browser has, and probably your Internet provider also has, a record that you've visited my blog today and read this post. There are millions of datapoints of information about you out there right now, and you have control over very few of them. In actuality, though, just making your way through life, even in pre-computer days, you left a trail of information behind. Ask anyone who enjoys researching ancestry about the kinds of records that still exist for almost anyone... birth and death certificates, tombstones and land ownership records, journals and diaries and photographs and newspaper announcements. It's just that nowadays, that information is accessible and able to be cross-referenced in mind-boggling ways. If you'd like to see an imaginary but plausible account of how that data might be able to be used to aggressively control people, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003L1ZXCU/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=theguidetopetra&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=B003L1ZXCU">take a look at this fictional novel</a>... or if you'd like a real-world example, pull down a copy of your own credit report and see how much it knows about you.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text">So privacy, as many people see it, is an imaginary thing. Somebody's always watching you; get used to it. But that doesn't mean you should do just any old thing online. Don't post things publicly that will allow someone who would like to hurt you, to easily find you (although your address is probably in the telephone book anyway). Don't broadcast information that will make it easy for someone to commit identity theft on you (although with information that most everybody has on their profiles, someone could probably call your place of business and convince a coworker that they are related to you). It's the same common sense you use when you're in an unfamiliar place: keep your eyes open, think about what's going on around you, pay attention if anything looks suspicious, and don't walk into trouble.</span><br />
<span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text"><br /></span><br />
<span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text">BUT: do enjoy yourself while you're there. Use social networking to enhance your life. But just be aware that sometimes when you're using a social network, that social network is also using <i>you</i>.</span>TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-6357990923327438192011-09-16T17:04:00.001-05:002011-09-16T17:04:23.945-05:00Google PlusMy first post on Google+ was made on July 1 at 9:06am. My boss had scored an account over the weekend, and was wondering if I was using it too. I actually hadn't heard of it until he told me; I had been a little bit out of the tech news loop because of a big project at work, but when I heard, certainly I was interested! He had "shared" something with me - at the time this was the only way to get an account - and so I was in. The post was a link, shared only with him, to <a href="http://mashable.com/2011/07/01/gmail-new-look/">this Mashable article</a> about the then-upcoming Gmail update.<br />
<br />
I was immediately hooked! This was like Facebook, minus <a href="http://tulsamjtech.blogspot.com/2009/10/facebook.html">all of the things about Facebook that constantly annoyed me</a>! This was awesome! This was... this was... well, sort of empty. It was like arriving at a party at the newest, coolest venue in town, but nobody had arrived yet. The primary attraction of Facebook is that <i>everybody</i> is there. All your friends. Everyone you've ever met, it seems, is on Facebook. The only people on Google+ at the time were you and the person who shared something with you, and the other guy who you shared something with and talked into trying it out. All the coolness, but none of the people.<br />
<br />
On those counts, things haven't changed too much 2½ months later. It's a little easier to get an invitation (in fact, if you need one, <a href="https://plus.google.com/i/KWzF-dj86W4:wB6ARZ0esxs">feel free to use one of mine</a>), but so far the general public hasn't particularly seen a reason to jump ship on Facebook, or even bother to try out another social networking service. And heck, after <a href="http://tulsamjtech.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-wave-what-id-like-to-use-it-for.html">Google Wave in 2009</a> and <a href="http://tulsamjtech.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-buzz.html">Google Buzz in 2010</a>, who could blame anyone for not jumping on a Google social networking site right away? I think Google is getting it right this time, though. The interface is Facebook-like enough that it's not too hard to understand what's happening, but it's different enough in good ways that the experience is much nicer. I have several friends who actually <i>have</i> jumped ship on Facebook for G+ (although I doubt most people will completely abandon Facebook any time soon... too much history there). I'm not deleting my Facebook account, but I'd love to go all-Google+. Problem is that there are a few things that are making that difficult at the moment... and there are a few more things that, should they happen, would make a move to G+ almost a no-brainer for me. Keep in mind that G+ is really still officially "in wide beta-testing" which means that the public has access, but it's not to be considered a complete product yet. It's entirely possible that some of the things I'm going to mention are in the works. I think it's <i>probable </i>that a few of them are on the drawing board. Let's see how prescient I am!<br />
<br />
I'm so impatient about the lack of an API for programmers. At this writing Google has released a very minimal, first-iteration API limited to only reading public profile information and public posts. I can't wait for the release of something more substantial; I use TweetDeck for posting to Facebook and Twitter, and I would love to be able to use it (or Hootsuite, or whatever) to post to all three. Right now it seems the only way to post to G+ is using the Web interface or one of the mobile apps. I have a mobile phone, but it's a Java-only "messaging" phone, a free feature phone from several years ago; it doesn't run Android or iOS.<br />
<br />
That leads me to another thing I'd like to see: better SMS support. I have G+ set up to forward status updates from several of my friends to me vis text message, but I can't respond to those messages via text, and I can't send posts of my own via text. I text posts into Twitter and Facebook several times a day most days; I'd love to be able to do the same with Google Plus. Even just sending new posts that way to a default bunch of circles that I specify ahead of time would be useful. I'll be getting an Android phone when my contract runs out on this phone, and at that point I'll install <a href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.plus">the G+ app</a>, but even then I could see SMS as an easier way of firing off a quick post than starting up an app. And with SMS posting, I can actually cross-post to several services very easily, just by sending to multiple recipients.<br />
<br />
I'd like to see RSS feeds made available for posts. You can already use third-party hacks like <a href="http://plu.sr/">this one</a> to pull down a feed of your public posts (or roll your own using the API that was just released), but it would be nice to be able to create "private" feeds based on your circles (something you can do with calendars in Google Calendar). I'm using the hack I linked to above to cross-post my public G+ posts to Facebook by running the feed through Feedburner and <a href="http://tulsamjtech.blogspot.com/search/label/twitterfeed">Twitterfeed</a>. It would be SO awesome, instead, to just share a post with a "Facebook" circle or a "Twitter" circle and immediately shoot the post out via a custom RSS feed!<br />
<br />
<br />
Part of the talk when G+ was first launched was about incorporating it with other Google properties... Picasa was of course a launch-day incorporation, but what about other properties? Here are my two favorite no-brainer Google properties to incorporate into Google Plus:<br />
<br />
<b>Google Reader</b>. G+'s "Sparks" functionality mirrors some of the functionality of Reader; how difficult would it be for G+ to represent your Reader feeds or lists as Sparks? Or, coming from the other direction, wouldn't it be cool for Reader users to be able to easily do a one-click share to G+?<br />
<br />
<b>Blogger</b>. Many G+ users are very nearly using G+ as a blogging platform anyway; why not optionally integrate Blogger blogs into Plus so that there's none of this post-the-blog-entry-then-share-it-on-plus nonsense. Just magically allow the blog post to show up on Plus when it is posted to Blogger. An added bonus: combine blog comments and G+ comments so that if I post a comment on a Blogger/G+ entry in Blogger, the comment also shows up in G+, and vice versa. I would LOVE to automatically have more comments on my blogs because comments flowed in from Plus users! Another bonus integration: automatically (but optionally) convert a blog to a Spark, so when you see a blog post from someone you like (say, a friend of yours reshared it) you could follow that blog without having to circle the blogger.<br />
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There's a lot of potential in Google Plus! I hope to see some of this stuff happen in the near term. If Google suddenly today rolled out all of the things I've mentioned in this post, for me it would be like knocking the walls out and letting the sunshine in. I really would love to be able to use Plus as my social networking hub and flow information out from there. With these kinds of adjustments, it could happen.TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-54117742429703380602011-08-09T23:05:00.000-05:002011-08-09T23:05:16.000-05:00NetflixSo, I <i>finally</i> broke down and signed up for the free trial of Netflix. The main idea is to stream through our Wii; I signed up for the 1-DVD-at-a-time service too, but I'll likely cancel that and just go with the streaming. The streaming is much more economical... watch as many movies and TV shows as you have time for on Instant Streaming, vs. watch as many single DVDs as you can receive in the mail and send back, one at a time, for the same monthly price? No contest! There are, however, a couple of things about Netflix Streaming that annoy me a bit, and I wanted to blog about those things... maybe someone from Netflix will read this blog entry and take it to heart. (Fat chance, but a guy can dream, can't he?)<br />
<ol><li>I'd like to see separate Instant queue profiles made available. Obviously, the shows in my queue (Bond movies, Star Trek, The X-Files, etc.) are going to be incompatible with the shows my 3-year-old daughter is going to want to watch (Care bears, Caillou, Strawberry Shortcake, Hello Kitty, Wonder Pets). Recommendations are going to be different, too. It would be nice to be able to select an Instant Queue to view, and maybe even select who's watching. It would be smart marketing, too.</li>
<li>I'd like better parental controls. Right now all you can do is limit the programs that can be viewed based on the MPAA rating... only allow shows rated PG or less, for example. This is a joke! For one thing, "NR" (Not Rated) movies fall in the area on the other side of "R" from "G", which means that the Mario Brothers Super Show cartoon from the 1990s, which my two kids like, is prohibited if I restrict my account to PG-13 or less. And if I turn on parental controls, I can't watch documentaries or more grown-up movies <i>myself</i>. "Control" indeed!</li>
<li>What's with the Android app only being available for like two-and-a-half phones? Make it available to all phones, but just "support" it on your shorter list. If people want to try it on their non-supported phone, why stop them? Worst case, they call support and you tell them their phone is not supported... and then you not which not-supported phones keep getting called in, and you add them to your support matrix as soon as you can!</li>
<li>What's with not being able to exit Netflix and go back to the Wii menus? Apparently you just have to turn the Wii off. User Interface FAIL.</li>
<li>Scrolling to a certain point within a program, or fast-forwarding/rewinding, is positively painful. You're telling me that after I select a new spot, you're going to re-download the <i>entire show</i>? Even YouTube does better than that! Software FAIL.</li></ol>In general, we LOVE the Netflix service. I have a poky Internet connection (on purpose, to save money) so it's fairly easy to push it over the edge and cause the streaming to re-buffer, but that's not the fault of Netflix; I'm sure with a faster connection I'd get faster buffering. With a few tweaks, Netflix could be not only a killer service, but a killer application as well. Hoping that day comes soon!TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-29998309930544909722011-03-31T13:00:00.000-05:002011-08-09T23:05:49.389-05:00Music in the Cloud<span id="wylio-flickr-image-5187487629" style="display: block; float: right; line-height: 15px; margin: 0pt 10px; padding: 0pt; position: relative; width: 320px;"><img alt="music notes with violin key" height="206" src="http://img.wylio.com/flickr/12078/397/5187487629" style="border: medium none; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt;" title="music notes with violin key - photo by: photosteve101, Source: Flickr, found with Wylio.com" width="320" /><span class="wylio-credits" id="wylio-flickr-credits-5187487629" style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% rgb(255, 255, 255); clear: both; color: #aaaaaa; float: left; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-style: italic; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt; width: 100%;"><span class="photoby" style="margin: 0pt; padding: 2px;"><span style="display: block; float: left; margin: 0pt;">photo © 2010 <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/42931449@N07/" style="color: #aaaaaa; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank" title="click to visit the Flickr profile page for photosteve101">photosteve101</a> | <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/42931449@N07/5187487629" style="color: #aaaaaa; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank" title="get more information about the photo 'music notes with violin key'">more info </a></span><span style="display: block; float: right; margin-left: 5px;"><b style="margin: 0;">(via: <a href="http://www.wylio.com/" style="color: #aaaaaa; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank" title="free pictures">Wylio</a>)</b></span></span></span></span>I've been looking for a feasible way to stream my music from the Internet since before the Internet was being called "the cloud."<br />
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My first stab at it was something like seven or eight years ago. I found a service that would let me upload some of my MP3s and play them back. It worked, but it was SUPER-clunky, and frankly it was unreliable as well. I used it a little bit, but eventually I just got tired of it and gave up. I don't even remember what the name of that company was; they've since been swallowed up by another company which is all about cloud-based storage and not particularly interested in music. Good thing I kept copies of my MP3s!<br />
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In the years since then, I've occasionally taken a look at music-locker services as they appeared, but nothing has really met the requirements of what I wanted. The last service I really remember looking at didn't actually allow you to upload music at all... it just scanned your local copies of your music library and then allowed you to play the (licensed) copies of those same MP3s from the cloud! Ingenious, but no good for some of my more obscure tracks... the ones I prize the most because I've had them a long time or because I worked hard to track them down in the first place. So I didn't waste my time with that service. Others felt so obscure and fly-by-night to me that I decided not to waste my time again until something came up that I felt I could trust to stay around for a while.<br />
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Meanwhile, I had discovered that for less than the price of a single CD per month, I could listen to almost any song I could think of by <a href="http://www.rhapsody.com/-discover">subscribing to Rhapsody</a>. With the right subscription, I could even download the tracks to my portable music player and listen when I'm not at my computer! (Notice that this marginalizes the "scan your tracks and play back our copies" to complete irrelevance... with Rhapsody I can play <i>any</i> track, even if I don't have it in my library already.) Rhapsody doesn't take care of some of my most obscure tracks, but it adds a lot more tracks to the mix, some of which are more obscure than any in my collection. (Rhapsody isn't the only "subscription" music service by a long shot... the retooled <a href="http://www.napster.com/">Napster</a> is another contender with a similar plan, and there are others if you look for them.) Color me VERY satisfied with Rhapsody, but it STILL doesn't let me play the rare songs from the dusty corners of my music collection from the cloud.<br />
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Earlier this year when I heard that Google was working on a new cloud-based music service I got really excited. I already use Google for my <a href="http://docs.google.com/">documents</a>, my <a href="http://reader.google.com/">RSS feeds</a>, my <a href="http://calendar.google.com/">calendar</a>, my <a href="http://voice.google.com/">telephone calls</a>, and of course my <a href="http://www.gmail.com/">email</a>, so a streaming music service would fit in there nicely. (I don't use them for everything I keep in the cloud; I keep my bookmarks in <a href="http://www.xmarks.com/">Xmarks</a>, my passwords in <a href="http://www.lastpass.com/">LastPass</a>, my pictures in <a href="http://www.flickr.com/">Flickr</a>, etc., but I generally have good experiences with Google's services when I need them.)<br />
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After weeks of waiting impatiently for Google to release their service, suddenly this week there was a surprise: Amazon beat them to the punch! <a href="https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/learnmore">Amazon Cloud Drive</a> was introduced a couple of days ago: 5GB of free space to store any files you like, but the part of that service that has garnered the most attention is that MP3 or AAC files stored on your Cloud Drive can be played back using <a href="http://www.amazon.com/cloudplayer">Amazon Cloud Player</a>. This was <i>exactly</i> what I had been looking for! 5GB is nowhere near enough space to store my whole music collection, but it's a start... and it's enough space to store the rare gems... anything I can play back through Rhapsody, I don't really <i>have</i> to store in a music locker, do I?<br />
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So I tried it out. It works as advertised: you upload your music, you see it, you play it back through your browser. You can also play it back using an Android phone if you have one, but I don't have one so no luck there, but I happily filled up most of my 5GB with songs that aren't on Rhapsody that I might want to listen to on the go. The player isn't particularly feature-laden, but it plays back the songs. It starts the playback quickly enough, and you can even "scrub" through to the part of the song you like, provided that part has streamed out to your browser. There's playlist support, play entire album, play all songs, that sort of thing. Not a bad start!<br />
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But what of Google? When I found out that Amazon had actually thumbed their nose at the music industry (who inexplicably believes that people who have purchased music should have to pay again to listen to that exact music online) and told them that they don't need any stinkin' license to do what they're doing... storing users' files and allowing the users access to those files. The music industry is seething, but they don't seem to have figured out a way to attack Amazon yet; I'm sure they <i>will</i> try to penalize Amazon somehow, because if they don't then other music locker services will also turn their noses up at licensing (it's pretty obvious that this is what's holding up Google, and probably Apple too; both of them have similar plans in the works). Kudos to Amazon for having the guts to push the issue. There is no technological reason why we don't have cloud-based music delivery of this kind; it's all music industry foot-dragging. This forces their hand; after the courts decide what's legal and what's not, I expect these other services to pop up almost immediately.<br />
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Will I continue to use Amazon's service after Google and Apple and whoever else get their services running? That remains to be seen. There is of course a lot of Google inertia in my case, and if their service is comparable to Amazon's and not inferior, I'll probably use Google's just because I'm using Google for so many other things. It's unlikely that I will use Apple unless they have a positively amazing service in store; iTunes is such awful software on Windows that it would take a totally mind-blowing service to get me to use that.<br />
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But let's look at another option. What if Rhapsody, or Napster or one of the other subscription music services, adds a music locker option to their offerings? Would I use that? Certainly I would! That would put all music that I had any interest in in the same place, behind the same login. I would likely even switch, for example, from Rhapsody to Napster if Napster offered a good music locker and Rhapsody did not.<br />
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The thing that makes me the happiest is that thanks to Amazon, the cat's out of the bag. They are too big to ignore, and the next move the music industry makes will determine how quickly or slowly more cloud music services appear, but they will definitely appear. People want them, and people will pay for them if they are good enough. People wanted to be able to obtain music online; the music industry didn't want it so people did it illegally anyway, and eventually, we got iTunes and Amazon MP3 and Rhapsody and hundreds of other legal outlets. If Amazon had to go a little bit rogue to get them to make this next advance, so be it. It will be fascinating to watch what happens in the coming weeks and months. It's going to be an exciting time for music lovers!TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-65508225965504687862010-11-02T12:04:00.000-05:002010-11-02T12:04:25.367-05:00Swimming Out of the Shallows (a book review)Today I reached the end of a unique experience. I finished a book which I found interesting and highly informative... but I <i>completely</i> disagreed with the author's conclusions. I don't dispute any of his facts, but in my opinion, he's adding two and two together and getting five. Or maybe he's adding two and two and getting <i>negative</i> four. Whatever it is, I think he's placing the blame for bad things in the wrong place, and I think he's seeing evil where evil doesn't exist. He's looking at Benjamin Franklin flying a kite and he's saying, that flimsy kite proves that there will <i>never</i> be a 747 carrying passengers across the Atlantic.<br />
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Before I go deeper into my thoughts on the book, I'd like to let the author of the book have his say. His name is Nicholas Carr, and the book is a highly-expanded version of an article he published in The Atlantic Magazine. <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/" target="_blank">Here it is</a>. Go take a look... I don't mind. I'll wait right here until you get back.<br />
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<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px;"><iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=theguidetopetra&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0393072223&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe></div>The book I read is called <i>The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains</i>. The basic premise behind the book is that the Internet has caused us to become shallow thinkers, incapable of deep, sustained thought. Carr says that he first started to notice this phenomenon in himself and in his friends. Journalists who no longer do thorough research, instead opting for the easy "click a few times on the Web and find what you need" method. Literature majors who no longer read complete books. That sort of thing. He believes that this is a trend which has to do with heavy use of the Internet, which is making changes to our brains as we surf, rendering us incapable of creating, or even following, longer trains of thought. He takes a great deal of time describing how the adult human brain, once thought to be quite set in its ways, is actually very flexible, changing all the time. Every time you or I do something, a physical change takes place in our brains, creating a memory or cementing a habit. He then goes into the history of writing, starting from brief scratches on ancient shards of pottery and proceeding through several technological changes: writing on clay tablets, the invention of paper, the refining of single-sheet paper into scrolls and eventually the codex (which we usually call a "book" - sheets of paper bound in a cover); the idea is that the computer is the thing that will usurp the role of the codex, in much the same way as paper usurped the role of clay tablets.<br />
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And, Carr believes, the Internet is designed with distraction in mind. Emails arrive. Tweets tweet. Ads flash and distract. Hyperlinks take our attention away from the text in which they are embedded. SMS messages come in our our phones. New blog entries hit our RSS readers. Spending our time being variously distracted by all of these things is, Carr insists, making changes in our brain that make it impossible to <i>not</i> be distracted. I agree with everything Carr says, up to that last sentence: I think that the Internet plays a role in our being distractable, but the Internet is not the perpetrator: the Internet is just the tool that the real perpetrator is using to make us distractable. The actual perpetrator is: <i>ourselves</i>.<br />
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A book is a highly static medium. I'm talking about a physical, bound book. It doesn't change on its own. It doesn't react to signals from elsewhere. If you tear a page out or drop it in the toilet, of course <i>that</i> will make a change to it, but it doesn't change on its own. Carr explains that before the codex was invented, human beings thought in shorter bursts. A verbal lecture might hold the attention of someone for a longer period, but other than that, your attention didn't really have to last any longer than it took to read the words scratched on that clay tablet. Because writing was time-consuming and difficult, it was generally reserved for extremely important (and brief) documents such as legal documentation. But when the bound book was invented, and particularly when the printing press came to be and books became quite cheap, anyone could have something in his hands that required many hours of sustained concentration to take in. This resulted in changes in the brains of the readers, strengthening their abilities to concentrate on one thing and filter out distractions. Carr had concluded that because our computers interrupt us almost constantly, the constant barrage of interruptions (which we respond to) train our brains to be distractable.<br />
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Let's think about that argument a bit. If ancient man was distractable because his (eat or be eaten) environment demanded it, and "codex" man became a "deep reader" because books demanded it, and "Internet" man is becoming distractable again because his computerized environment demands it, isn't that a return to the more natural state of mankind? I'm not sure there is a way to determine whether "distracted" or "immersed and oblivious to surroundings" is a better way to be, but it seems that it would depend on the lifestyle and needs of the individual. For example, someone who lived in a dangerous part of the world would be well-served by being distractable; it could save their life if something in the corner of their eye makes them instinctively duck.<br />
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And really, what is it about most books that makes it so helpful for us to immerse ourselves in that environment? When you have immersed yourself in a book, you have allowed one human being to insert whatever he or she wants directly into the world of your experience. That author is controlling, to some extent, your thoughts and your interpretation of events or facts. Is that actually so much better than a quick jaunt across the Web, picking up facts from many sources and building your own composite picture of reality? I say this as a pretty avid reader myself; I love books, but there are definitely advantages to having instant access to multiple trains of thought. The tyranny of one author controlling your thoughts for an extended period is replaced by many voices competing for your attention, giving you the chance to choose best-of-breed for yourself.<br />
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There are a number of reasons people have trouble reading long articles on the Internet, and it's not all because of their email "ding." Reading on a computer screen basically is <i>not fun</i>. I say this as a person who has read an entire book, in pdf format, on a computer. Backlit computer screens are hard on the eyes, and people don't necessarily have the most comfortable reading environment set up in front of their computers. It's not that people <i>can't</i> read a long article on their computer; it's that people <i>don't want to</i> read a long article on their computer. But given a strong enough desire, they can and will. I've done it many times. If you've read this far, you're doing it right now. It's completely possible. You are the captain of your own fate. I predict that as e-readers such as the Kindle and its brethren become more and more popular and inexpensive, people will read longer articles, and even books, much more frequently in digital formats. The technology will continue to adapt to become more comfortable for human beings, just like reading and writing technology progressed to ever more useful forms.<br />
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So, does Internet use make it impossible for people to read physical "codex" books? Of course not! You can't say that just because you've trained yourself in such a way that it is difficult for you to focus, your brain is ruined for life and you'll never be able to focus again. The mere existence of technologies does not force you to enslave yourself to them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And their existence doesn't mean that you even <i>have</i> to use them at all!<br />
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I like candy. Most everyone does. I'd like to eat lots of candy! But if I eat a lot of candy all the time, my body will become sick and fat. Candy is okay in moderation, but too much is too much. Burger King is convenient and always available, but if I eat Burger King every day, all the time, I'm going to become very unhealthy. Burger King is okay sometimes, but it shouldn't become your constant diet. Too much is too much. And if your constant mental diet is making your brain sluggish and fat (or hyperactive and ADHD), maybe it indicates that you are being irresponsible with your use of the technology. The tech is not at fault; your bad habits are.<br />
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And really. Distractions are nothing new, and they are not limited to technology. I spend about an hour and a half every weekday reading physical books on my bus commute to and from work; and believe me, distractions are everywhere. Someone behind me having a loud conversation on a cell phone. People getting on and off. Things outside the bus. Announcements by the driver of which intersection we're at. Some of these distractions are important for me to respond to (for example, I need to remember to get off the bus when I get to my stop!) Some of them are unimportant, and some are just a nuisance. But I get through my books eventually, because I've learned to tune out the unimportant distractions. The same goes for the Internet; I've unconsciously learned to tune out the things I don't need to concern myself with, and only respond to distractions that matter. In fact, sometimes I tune out distractions that <i>do</i> matter, which is why I have to change my "new email" sound every once in a while... I've spent whole days not noticing that I have urgent items in my inbox!<br />
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Let's talk about some of those distractions. Let's talk about that email indicator, that Facebook ding on your phone, that text message from @AplusK on Twitter. Are they distractions? Do they break up your work day and keep you from concentrating? Yes? They do? How about this: TURN THEM OFF. If they're a problem, eliminate them. The distraction is not forcing itself into your life; you have brought it on yourself. Eliminate your own distractions. Simplify. Your brain will respond to that, just like it responds to the opposite. If our brains are so elastic that they can be negatively changed by negative environmental factors, then they are also elastic enough to be positively changed by better environmental factors.<br />
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It's nonsensical to blame distractability on information overload, too, although it's true there is a real glut of information available to each of us on the Internet, information about pretty nearly anything you can think of. One thing I've seen computers bring a huge change to in my own personal life is Bible study. When I was a kid, Bible study was, obviously, all about books. If you wanted to study a topic, you looked it up in commentaries, topical dictionaries such as Vine's, or study Bibles such as the good old Thompson Chain Reference. You could also take a word-based attack, looking up your word in Strong's Concordance (which contained every English word in the King James Bible, along with original language dictionary for translation assistance). It was kind of slow, but it could get you where you wanted to be. Fast-forward to today, when that Strong's Concordance lookup that took you two hours with the book can happen on your cell phone in seconds. But do you really want to find every verse in the Bible that contains the word "love," or do you want to learn about a specific kind of love? How much God loves people? How a husband loves his wife? How a man loves his neighbor? For that, your speedy word-based lookup is only a good starting point. Those commentaries, topical dictionaries, and other study helps are all out there in digital form, accessible at the click of a mouse, but to really understand the Bible, you have to go deeper. You have to do it on purpose. You have to <i>not</i> take the easiest way out. The problem is not a glut of information; the problem is intellectual laziness. The same goes for journalists that go for the "easy kill" without really checking out their facts (like <a href="http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/trivia/fivedays.asp">this utter nonsense</a>, which I heard reported last weekend on my local TV news... reporting the 823-year urban legend as fact). You have to actually care enough to take your time, even on a computer, or eventually you're going to wind up looking like a fool. You have to be wise in your use of the tools at your disposal; scatterbrained research leads to scatterbrained thinking.<br />
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Let's talk about communication, because Carr seems to think that digital communication is de-humanizing us because when we text message or IM, we are not face to face with the person we're communicating with. Hogwash. Consider people who, in centuries past, sustained long-distance romantic relationships via letters which had to be carried across oceans in ships. Consider people who stay in touch today with distant loved ones via telephone. Those lovers with the quill pens would have <i>loved</i> to have been able to pick up a telephone, but they used the technology at their disposal. Communication is communication, no matter what form it takes, and over time, communication becomes more human and personal, not less, with the introduction of better and better technology. Today I can start up Skype and see and hear moving video of a friend on the other side of the world. For free! I can call or text my wife's cell phone, and no matter where she is (within coverage, of course) I can reach her. In the past year or two I've become involved again in the daily lives of friends I haven't seen for 2 decades, via Facebook. Without those technologies, none of that communication would be possible at all. Okay, so it's digital; that means that the communication is carried on electronic impulses instead of through the air or in an envelope on a ship. It's not a sign of the decay of human interaction; it's a sign that people <i>will</i> communicate, and if it takes a computer to do it, so be it.<br />
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Carr also seems to think that there is a chance that people will try to (and already are trying to) sort of "outsource" their human memory to computer memory. But then he explains himself that that is impossible, and gives the physical reasons why it is impossible. Your brain, despite what may have been taught to you in fourth-grade science class, is <i>not</i> a computer. It's not even very much like a computer. Computer memory is not like organic memory, if only because computer memory is digital and organic memory is not digital. You can have a strong memory and you can have a distant, hazy memory; a computer can only have "yes" or "no". Either the computer knows it, or it doesn't. And most of your memories aren't things that you could even figure out how to offload into a computer anyway; your brain is full of pictures, sensations, smells, sounds, ideas, impressions... all things that cannot even be communicated to a computer, and even if you "offload" them to a computer somehow, they remain in your brain as well. The only thing computers are really good at is "computing" (math), and they do a fairly good job as storage devices for data which is <i>much</i> less complex than the things inside your brain and mine. Tools like Evernote can help you remember your shopping list or the date of the Gettysburg Address or what your kids want for Christmas, if you store those things there, but those tools can't help you remember how the meadow behind your house during your childhood smelled in springtime. I know they call it "computer memory." It's not. It's storage space for ones and zeroes.<br />
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Does the Internet cause some kind of brain damage? You might argue that; every single thing you do all day long causes minute changes in your brain, and if those changes are unwanted, you might call them damage. Is this damage irreversible? Not according to Carr's book... it says that the human brain is quite flexible and adaptable. The argument that your brain is so flexible that Internet use changes your brain, but then that the changes are permanent and damaging, is circular, self-defeating, and illogical. At any point you can choose to change your environment. Ironically, in the chapter on "how I wrote this book," the author tells about how he did just that... shut off the email and the IM and the feed reader and Facebook and Twitter, and re-taught his brain to focus. Even he, the arm-waving paranoid alarmist, found that all he had to do to work with no distractions was to <i>remove the distractions</i>. Why is this rocket science? Turn off the "ding" and your brain remembers how to concentrate on one thing at a time. The "can't" automatically becomes a "can."<br />
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My best take-away from this book is that it has reminded me to re-examine my own work habits. What is distracting me? What do I need to cut back on so I can work uninterrupted? Am I wasting whole days by remaining distracted from morning to night? More than once since I began reading the book, I've considered my environment and adjusted things, or turned things off, or un-followed or un-friended. or whatever I needed to do in order to simplify. That's certainly been a good, helpful thing. The information in <i>The Shallows</i> is fascinating, but the freaking out is unwarranted. If the brain is as flexible as the book says, it can snap back from almost anything... including Gmail and Twitter. Take charge. Don't sabotage yourself by creating a hostile Internet environment! Use a little common sense, and the Internet will be your friend and not your enemy.TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-83297002517316319122010-08-28T09:03:00.000-05:002010-08-28T09:03:13.455-05:00Voice Calls in GmailThis week Google released something that <a href="/2010/07/google-voice-desktop-app.html">we've been expecting for a while</a>... <a href="http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/make-and-receive-calls-in-gmail.html">Google Voice calls from Gmail</a>. Actually, you apparently don't even have to be a Google Voice user to use it, but if you are a GV user, the calls route through your GV account. I waited nearly 48 hours after the announcement before it finally showed up on my account, and when it showed up, I immediately used it to call my wife, who was standing next to our land-line, about 12 feet away. She was not particularly amused, but it did work! :) There seems to be an uncomfortable pause between "dial" and "ringing," but it certainly seems to work as well as <a href="/2010/07/sipgate.html">the other VoIP service I'm using</a>.<br />
<br />
Speaking of <a href="http://www.sipgate.com/">sipgate</a>... after I blogged about it here, I ditched their client software to try out other softphones. I used <a href="http://www.qutecom.org/">QuteCom</a> for a while (once I finally figured out how to find my SIP credentials on the sipgate Web site) and liked it pretty well, but it seemed a little bit clumsy in certain situations (trying to answer a call, for example; I have to answer the call and then press the "1" button, and I missed calls several times) and it didn't <i>really</i> do that well at using my headset when it wasn't the default device... so I tried a few other free softphones and wound up discovering <a href="http://www.counterpath.com/x-lite.html">X-Lite</a>. Not only does X-Lite have an "Auto Answer" button, but it can "restore" from a "minimized to tray" state automatically, so when my Google Voice rings, I just pick up the headset and click "1" and I'm on the call. Pretty snazzy!<br />
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It's still a little bit weird originating a call through X-Lite/sipgate/Google Voice, though... I have to open a Google Voice window, place the call, wait for X-Lite to come up, and finally I'm on the call. Placing outgoing calls through Gmail is a lot more straightforward; all I've got to remember is not to close my Gmail while I'm on the call! I'm still hoping for that desktop app... in fact, I've been reading about Python with the general idea of rolling my own VoIP application which will work seamlessly with Google Voice's phone book and be SIP provider-agnostic... but the new Gmail integration has an interesting (and useful) niche.TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-42465456382279695492010-07-23T14:00:00.000-05:002010-07-23T14:00:21.704-05:00sipgateIt seems so simple. I just want to be able to receive calls on my computer using my headset. I also listen to music on my computer all day long, though, and I use the speakers for that. I don't want the headset plugged in all day, because Windows automatically switches everything over to the headset when it gets plugged in, so if I keep the headset plugged in I'll have to listen to my music (not to mention all my other system sounds and alerts) through them instead of the speakers. I want to be able to hear or see that my phone is ringing, then plug in the headset, and then answer the call using the headset.<br />
<br />
Finally, VOIP provider <a bitly="BITLY_PROCESSED" href="http://www.sipgate.com/">sipgate</a> got some more phone numbers (they had run out!), and I snagged one (I think it's in California, because there are no Oklahoma numbers yet, but that doesn't matter to me). I downloaded <a bitly="BITLY_PROCESSED" href="http://www.sipgate.com/faq/article/451/Download">the sipgate softphone software</a> and got it all installed and set up. I saw that I could set my USB headset as the default audio device... awesome!<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: all; text-align: center;"><a bitly="BITLY_PROCESSED" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHMpIyZs7dvGpAtHsm1Z7zQJoJdHFihTcz9Hi9TXBDBc68WJSmvwR8CbYDVgTVZgArVA7ha6GnzuJo9rVHvDL7iY-K1_ZBCljxT4TwnyfQ1tfQliBwQbO8WJ8cBt5JzeI7IHkh9I01fg0/s1600/sipgate.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHMpIyZs7dvGpAtHsm1Z7zQJoJdHFihTcz9Hi9TXBDBc68WJSmvwR8CbYDVgTVZgArVA7ha6GnzuJo9rVHvDL7iY-K1_ZBCljxT4TwnyfQ1tfQliBwQbO8WJ8cBt5JzeI7IHkh9I01fg0/s640/sipgate.png" width="329" /></a></div><br />
So I got everything set up right, tested it (success! A crystal-clear phone call on my headset!), and then unplugged my headset and got back to my regularly scheduled work. And that's when the problem happened.<br />
<br />
The next time I received a call, I heard it ring... on my PC speakers! No problem, I thought... I can plug in the headset real quick. After all, my other software switches over automatically when the headset is plugged in. Some of it (like Rhapsody, for example) doesn't switch until a certain point (Rhapsody will continue to play the song it's playing through the speakers, but when the next song comes on, it comes on the headset), but they always switch.<br />
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Not sipgate! The only way sipgate will work with the headset, it seems, is if the headset is plugged in both when I start up the software, <i>and when the call initially rings.</i> If the headset isn't plugged in on the first ring, no luck. It won't even switch when you actually answer the call; presumably the software keeps the audio device open the whole time, from first ring to the call is terminated.<br />
<br />
Now, when the headset is unplugged from the machine, it automatically disappears from the Control Panel "Sounds and Audio Devices" applet's Audio tab selectors, so if the headset is the default device (which it is on this machine), it is the default device only when it is plugged in... when it is disconnected, another device ("SoundMAX HD Audio" - my speakers) automatically becomes the default, which means when I'm ready to get on Skype or WebEx, I just plug the headset in and I'm ready to go. But just to experiment, I plugged in the headset and then opened up Sounds and Audio Devices from Windows Control Panel and automatically set up SoundMAX HD Audio as the default Windows device. Then I made sure the Logitech headset was the default device in sipgate settings. My music was coming through the speakers (the default device), but, in theory, sipgate should use the headset, as configured on the settings page.<br />
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Guess what happened? <i>My calls went to the speakers!</i> The setting in sipgate was not honored at all. I would accept having the computer speakers as the default output and having to switch other software manually from time to time, but the sipgate softphone apparently doesn't allow me that option. I even tried out some software called "<a bitly="BITLY_PROCESSED" href="http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.html">Virtual Audio Cable</a>" which I was hoping would allow me to intercept traffic coming from sipgate and send it directly to the sound card, but I'm pretty sure even it won't do that for me... or if it will, it would be an advanced configuration of some kind, and I don't have the time to explore it in enough depth to figure that out.<br />
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For the record, the sound quality of sipgate seems very good. The features of the service look impressive. I could definitely see myself using it on an ongoing basis... I could even see someone using it as a kind of voice mail-only drop box that was never even used for outgoing calls. If my company ever starts looking for a PBX in the cloud, I'll definitely throw their name into the hat (assuming they obtain some Oklahoma numbers before then, or make it possible to port over existing numbers). Presumably, sipgate works exceptionally well with hardware VOIP phones (that seems to be a core of their business). But they're not making it easy for poor little me, with nothing but the softphone and a USB headset.TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-82425974811905637872010-07-20T06:00:00.001-05:002010-07-20T06:00:10.691-05:00Blue-Screen MashupYesterday my computer started unexpectedly rebooting. At first it happened sort of randomly during sessions, but after four or five reboots, it became completely unusable. It would boot all the way up into Windows, but as soon as we tried to start up an application, the screen would go dark, then a blue stop error screen would flash up there for a split second, then it would go back to the BIOS screen and start again from scratch! I had no idea what I was going to do, until I remembered a suggestion I read years ago from Fred Langa. The suggestion was that you could document an error screen using your digital camera. Since the screen was gone before I had a chance to read it, I figured that was the only way I was going to find out what the error was!<br />
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After a few tries to get the timing down, I got this blurry-but-mostly-readable shot of the screen:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi67HqUAWagQGzkAthYCxsiPHlw6u51Y1IYGVmoR9i7MiKvYggHkTCbw-dPp8zuLI4kGWwrb1lhwSuKnWaeg1wWIsMfl-ioXpRcRcp8x7a8Qj7muw0HC0ZHXXSQwc2IbtZWtCznK2t9QGM/s1600/100_3979.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi67HqUAWagQGzkAthYCxsiPHlw6u51Y1IYGVmoR9i7MiKvYggHkTCbw-dPp8zuLI4kGWwrb1lhwSuKnWaeg1wWIsMfl-ioXpRcRcp8x7a8Qj7muw0HC0ZHXXSQwc2IbtZWtCznK2t9QGM/s400/100_3979.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br />
By zooming into the shot on the camera, I was able to make out enough of the text to guess that I had a full hard disk. This made me wonder if I would be able to boot into Safe Mode so I could clear out some space. The Safe Mode trick worked, but it turned out I was not low on space at all! I ran <a href="http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner">CCleaner </a>anyway, and then rebooted, and after that the machine worked fine. I suspect it may have had something to do with corrupt files in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetcher">Prefetcher</a>, but I don't know for sure... all I know is that after clearing out unnecessary files with CCleaner, the machine started working again. So even though the camera may not have directly helped me in the long run, it did help me get past the mental block of not knowing what to do. Try it!TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-54945433367060125632010-07-08T06:00:00.002-05:002010-07-15T13:12:16.542-05:00Google Voice Desktop AppIt all started back up in April, with a TechCrunch article. Either that or it started in November, depending on how you figure it. Sit back for a minute and I'll review things for ya.<br />
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Okay, let me back up. If you've been reading this blog, you know that <a href="/search/label/Google Voice">I'm a HUGE fan of Google Voice</a>. You also may remember <a href="http://tulsamjtech.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-piece-of-google-voice-puzzle.html">the post when I discovered that Google had bought Gizmo5</a>. At the time I speculated that Google was incorporating the Gizmo5 dialer into <a href="http://www.google.com/talk/">Google Talk</a>, Google's (somewhat confusingly-named, since you "Talk" with your "Voice") IM client. (I didn't realize then that Google Talk is a Windows-only product... which probably has something to do with what comes next.)<br />
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This past April, <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/07/google-testing-google-voice-desktop-app-internally/">TechCrunch broke an article</a> that said that Google was "dogfooding" their upcoming desktop application for Google Voice (the term "dogfooding" taken from the phrase "eating your own dog food," meaning that they were testing it internally before "feeding" it to anyone else). Pretty exciting news! It made it sound like the app was right around the corner!<br />
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Hopes were dashed in June when <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/11/google-voice-desktop-app-launch-delayed-may-be-scrapped/">statements from within Google</a> made it clear that the desktop app was probably never going to be released, in favor of incorporating the Gizmo5 technology into Gmail. But then last week, TechCrunch somehow managed to get their hands on something pretty amazing: <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/01/exclusive-video-of-unreleased-google-voice-desktop-app/">one of the internal versions of the application</a>! For Mac, no less! Since then, there's been quite a buzz online about it, at least in tech blogs and news sites. There is even an online petition asking Google to release it (if you're interested, please visit <a href="http://www.giveusgvdesktop.com/">GiveUsGVDesktop.com</a> and sign it!) Who knows if that petition and the online noise will even figure into Google's planning at all, but it couldn't hurt.<br />
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In the meantime, I've been looking for other options. I saw in <a href="http://lifehacker.com/5571978/top-10-clever-google-voice-tricks">this article</a> that it was possible to simulate the Gizmo5 experience using a free service from <a href="http://www.sipgate.com/">sipgate</a> (yay!), but then learned that sipgate is also out of commission (they're out of numbers... D'OH!) My other best idea is to use <a href="http://www.skype.com/">Skype</a> with a free service called <a href=" http://www.ring2skype.com/">ring2skype</a> to simulate the same thing. Sure would be nice to not have to do that, though. Come on, Google... let's have the desktop app!<br />
<br />
<i>update: Ring2Skype won't work with Google Voice... you have to key in an extension number to make the call to Skype. It's still a pretty cool service, though!</i>TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-67387082521224606462010-05-10T06:00:00.002-05:002011-09-16T17:06:12.133-05:00Google Chrome browserI've been a <a href="http://www.GetFirefox.com">Firefox</a> browser user for quite some time - gosh, it must be at least five or six years at this point. But a month or so ago, I read something that convinced me that I should give <a href="http://www.google.com/chrome">Google Chrome</a> another chance. From the beginning, Google has claimed that Chrome was more stable because of it's architecture; each new browser tab is its own process, so crashing one will not, in theory, crash all of them (they even made <a href="http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/">a virtual comic book</a> about it to explain it better). The article I read said that Chrome has made some strides in speed over the other browsers, and I had been increasingly dissatisfied particularly with startup time in Firefox. Chrome also recently (finally) started supporting <a href="https://chrome.google.com/extensions">extensions</a>, which are a favorite feature of Firefox, so I decided to dip my toes in and give it a try!<br />
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First I had to try and find some extensions that resembled the ones I use every day on Firefox. I had been using <a href="http://www.echofon.com/">Echofon</a> as my Twitter client; I didn't find anything I was happy with as a Twitter client, but eventually I tried out the desktop version of <a href="http://www.tweetdeck.com/">TweetDeck</a> and now I use it instead (I even uninstalled Echofon from Firefox). I installed the Chrome version of <a href="http://www.shareaholic.com/">Shareaholic</a> (which, incidentally, I like better than the Firefox version... come on, guys, let's implement that "save your services in the cloud" thing on Firefox!) and <a href="http://www.wisestamp.com/">WiseStamp</a>, and both were wonderful. The Chrome version of <a href="http://www.xmarks.com/">Xmarks</a> is also terrific. I couldn't find a direct port of <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/173">Gmail Notifier</a>, which is a staple for me, so I tried <a href="http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/notifier_windows.html">Google's tray app</a> (ew) and finally discovered the excellent Chrome extension <a href="https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cfkohgkpafhkpdcnfadadcibfboapggi?hl=en">One Number</a> which not only notifies of new Gmail messages, but also handles notifications for Google Reader, Google Voice, and Google Wave. Nice!<br />
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On the whole, I was able to find Chrome extensions that either are the same thing as Firefox extensions, or have basically the same functionality. The one cross-browser extension that I was really disappointed in was <a href="http://www.iopus.com/imacros/">iMacros</a>. The Firefox version is pretty solid, and in fact I use it almost every day, but the Chrome version (which, to be fair, is still in beta) is slow and buggy. I actually had to resort to opening up Firefox whenever I needed to use iMacros... <i>not</i> high praise for their Chrome development efforts.<br />
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Another thing I use quite extensively on Firefox is called "search shortcuts". If I type <b>g Google Chrome</b> into my browser URL bar, it's the same as if I loaded up Google.com and typed <b>Google Chrome</b> into the search box. If I type <b>gn Google Chrome</b> instead, it looks it up on Google News. Setting this up in Firefox is incredibly easy (if you don't know how, <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html">check this link for details</a>), and it uses regular bookmarks, which means that my search shortcuts get synchronized through Xmarks so I only have to set them up once for many installations of Firefox. It is possible to set up something similar in Chrome, but it is convoluted and it does not use regular bookmarks, so you have to set it up on each installation of Chrome. That was my first sign that Chrome might not work out for me.<br />
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My next indicator came on my underpowered old machine at home. The first time I tried Chrome, the day it was first released, I found it too memory-hungry to run reliably on a computer without gobs of memory for it to chow down on. I discovered that things haven't gotten much better; eventually I had to quit using Chrome on my home machine. I did keep using it at work, though, hoping that it would prove more stable than Firefox. Firefox is by no means a crashy browser, but it does crater every once in a while; I wanted to see if Chrome could best it in the stability department.<br />
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Once again I was disappointed. In my experience and with my usage patterns, Chrome seems to crash just about as often as Firefox... it just has its own special ways of crashing. And it's not at good at recovering my session when I restart it, either. With Firefox, when I crash usually I get most or all of my tabs back when I restart; with Chrome that rarely works, even though it's supposed to. In addition, Chrome doesn't seem to like to be left alone for any amount of time; if I left it running for an hour and went to lunch, often when I tried to use it again it would be non-responsive.<br />
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Yesterday I gave up on Chrome and went back to using Firefox everywhere. Except for a few extensions that I liked a lot on Chrome and which aren't available for Firefox, I couldn't really find anything about Chrome that would give it an advantage. Firefox is a solid, mature browser with lots of functionality and a large user base; Chrome is a fairly young browser with some style and flash, but not as much substance behind the glamor as I had hoped. I wish Chrome the best, and maybe at some point I'll give it another spin, but for now, I'm still a Firefox fan.TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-82645065638136292442010-04-26T06:00:00.112-05:002010-04-26T22:20:20.288-05:00Online PrivacyRecently a friend of mine posted this on her <a href="/search/label/Facebook">Facebook</a> profile:<br />
<blockquote>WARNING! As of today, there is a new privacy setting called "Instant Personalization" that shares data with non-facebook websites and it is automatically set to "Allow." Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites ...and uncheck "Allow", then repost this to your profile.</blockquote><br />
A few hours later, another friend posted this:<br />
<blockquote>FYI EVERYONE- There's a site called Spokeo.com and it's an online phone book that has a picture of your house, credit score, profession, age, how many people live in the house. Remove yourself by the Privacy button on the bottom right. (passing along, scary stuff!) I personally checked it out and it is really there!! some of the info was off but its there!!! COPY, PASTE AND REPOST</blockquote><br />
These are basically unrelated issues, but they both touch on something that I don't think people understand very well: Internet privacy. Let's take the first one first, and think about each them a little bit.<br />
<br />
<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=theguidetopetra&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1742442013&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="float:right;padding-top:5px;width:131px;height:245px;padding-left:10px;"align="left" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>If you are using Facebook, some information about you is publicly available, and that's that. There's a lot of stuff that you can hide from public view, but some of it you can't. Your name, for example. Your profile picture. Some of the stuff you are a "fan" of. To find out what of your profile anyone doing a Google search can see, simply log into Facebook, click "Profile", create a bookmark, log back out of Facebook, and then click your bookmark. You may be surprised at what you see... your status updates may be public, for example. There are several levels of security, including "Friends Only", "Friends of Friends", and so on. I won't try to go into very much detail here (because chances are, Facebook will change things and my blog post will wind up being inaccurate) but you really need to look into a few things:<br />
<ol><li>Take a look at <a href="http://www.facebook.com/policy.php">Facebook's privacy policy</a> to see if you <i>really</i> agree with everything it says.</li>
<li>Read over articles like <a href="http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/02/facebook-privacy/">this one</a> and <a href="http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/facebook-privacy-new/">this one</a>, which will explain some of the privacy issues to you and maybe help you tweak things.</li>
<li>Really, <a href="http://www.sophos.com/security/best-practice/facebook/">be aware of your privacy settings</a>. Currently they are under Account > Privacy Settings (like the post mentions) and you might be able to go right there using <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/settings/?tab=privacy&ref=mb">this link</a>, if you're logged in. But don't look at only that one checkbox; click through every page, and carefully consider every option. Only allow the stuff you really want allowed.</li>
</ol>Now, as far as the "Instant Personalization" setting is concerned: my opinion is that the concern is a bit overblown. Basically, what that setting does is it allows sites that you are visiting anyway to know what Facebook knows about you and shares with people who are on Facebook but who are not your "friends." It's how <a href="http://Pandora.com">Pandora</a> knew who my friends were when I started messing with it earlier this week; it told me which of my friends prefer Big Band and which of them prefer Sade. When a song from a favorite artist of theirs comes up, I see their Facebook profile picture.<br />
<br />
<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=theguidetopetra&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0787985112&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="float:right;align:left;padding-top:5px;width:131px;height:245px;padding-left:10px;"align="left" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>Does that creep you out? Well, then be creeped by this: any child-molester on the Internet has the same access to your information. Every serial killer and wacko can know what "Instant Personalization" knows, just by having a Facebook account and looking you up. Kind of puts Pandora knowing who your buddies are in perspective, doesn't it? If you don't care for that idea, maybe you shouldn't be on Facebook at all. Signing up for Facebook essentially equates to making a very minor celebrity out of you, so expect paparazzi if you go there.<br />
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(And if you are worried about Instant Personalization, allow me to introduce you to the privacy implications of Facebook Applications, such as Farmville, Farm Town, Mafia Wars, etc. which have access to <i>much</i> more information than Instant Personalization does. Might want to check those settings, too.)<br />
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So let's consider the second post, the one about <a href="http://www.spokeo.com/">spokeo</a>. This is a service that compiles publicly-available information and repackages it for sale. The creepiness isn't the spokeo site; that's just plain old commerce. The creepiness is that the information is publicly available somewhere in the first place! Spokeo is like a used bookstore; they don't create the information, and they aren't even the primary source; they just compile it and sell it at a price. In fact, if you check <a href="http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/spokeo.asp">the Snopes article about it</a>, you'll find <a href="http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/zabasearch.asp">this link to another panic about a similar site</a>, <a href="http://www.zabasearch.com/">ZabaSearch</a>, which was freaking people out by doing the exact same thing five years ago (they're still doing it). In fact, I'll add another one: put your land line phone number or address into <a href="http://www.whitepages.com/reverse-lookup">WhitePages Reverse Lookup</a> and you're likely to find your name (and maybe others who live in your house; it found my wife's name as well). And they'll sell you more information for a price, too. (Cell phone numbers don't turn up the same granularity of information as land lines because of legal differences.) Heck, type your land line phone number into <a href="http://www.Google.com">Google</a>, and with one additional click you'll see a map to your house. So the fact is, spokeo isn't anything unique or frightening... or at least it's not unique. It's fairly common on the Internet.<br />
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<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=theguidetopetra&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=076454280X&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="float:right;padding-top:5px;width:131px;height:245px;padding-left:10px;"align="left" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>For the record, all of these services have "remove me from your list" functions, but before you get wrapped up in that, consider this: it is possible to get your phone number unlisted from the telephone book, but the majority of people do not. Why? Because you <i>want</i> to be found. The phone book (probably) has your name, phone number, and address in it. That's easily enough information to physically locate you, if someone wants to. And if you've ever told a stranger that it was your birthday, and if you also told him your name, that's just about enough information right there for identity theft (never tell a stranger anything that someone from a bank would ask you as a "security question", particularly your Social Security Number!) In the thoroughly-networked, cameras-everywhere, cell-phone-toting, information-addicted, credit-driven society we live in, information about you is literally in the very air. If you want to get off the grid, throw away that phone with the GPS capabilities, close out your bank accounts and credit cards and go cash-only, and then quit your job and move to the woods, because almost everything you do in this day and age leaves a footprint.<br />
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Hundreds of years ago when most of the world was very rural and communities were small, everyone knew everything about one another. To some extent, in small communities (little towns, schools, workplaces, churches) this is often still the case, but otherwise as a society we've somehow gotten the idea that we have some kind of anonymity, that unless we want them to, it's not nice for someone to know things about us. But the fact is, there have <i>always</i> been reams of publicly-available information about each of us out there somewhere. It's how modern society has always functioned. A bank that can't find out anything about you won't lend you money to buy a car; a prospective employer expects the chance to talk to your previous employers to find out if you fit into their organization. We use information to make educated decisions, and computers do nothing more effectively than they store and compare information. Don't be surprised to find details about yourself on the Internet, but do consider which pieces (for example, your Social Security Number) need to be protected, and which pieces need not be guarded as closely. Pick your battles wisely. Otherwise, that cave out in the wilderness might as well be your home.<br />
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(To find out what kinds of things about you that Facebook might be sharing with the whole wide world, visit <a href="http://zesty.ca/facebook/">http://zesty.ca/facebook/</a> and click the "How do I find my Facebook ID?" link to get started. Most of the categories will likely show you nothing, but check these categories, which might show you some information about yourself or others: "feeds", "likes", "links", "tagged", "posts")TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-16296040943345454782010-02-17T06:00:00.003-06:002010-02-17T07:21:34.335-06:00Google BuzzOne week ago, nobody outside of Google had ever heard of Google Buzz. Even those in the tech news industry were mystified, although <a href="http://mashable.com/2010/02/08/google-gmail-social-event/">there were rumors out there</a>: "We have just received an invite to attend an event at Google’s headquarters where it will be `unveiling some product innovations in two of [its] most popular products'," one tech blog said. There was speculation on all sides (I was hoping for a rebirth/reopening of <a href="/2009/11/new-piece-of-google-voice-puzzle.html">Gizmo5</a>, myself) but I don't think anyone quite expected what they showed us that day. Facebook and Twitter were the front-runners in social networking; MySpace was nearly a distant memory, and <a href="/2009/10/friendster-helped-me-spam-my-friends.html">Friendster</a> was <i>already</i> a distant memory. Google's social networking site was Orkut, and it was very popular... in Brazil. Nobody expected them to try again!<br />
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Since then, Google claims that <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/11/google-buzz-security-stats/">like nine bazillion posts have been made to Google Buzz</a>, and I'm pretty sure that at least that many articles about Buzz have appeared on tech news sites... but honestly, my social contacts are still all on Facebook and Twitter. The people I'm connected with on Google Buzz are largely the same people I'm connected to on Twitter. Despite all of the hype about how many built-in users Buzz has because of the integration with Gmail, I haven't seen a lot of activity on Buzz quite yet (except mostly stuff that's getting imported from Twitter or Google Reader). I love the idea of Buzz, and I think Google has every chance of building a service that beats the pants off Facebook for sheer robustness (if you've read <a href="/2009/10/facebook.html">my rant about Facebook</a>, you'll know that I think Facebook is a very good idea which is very broken), but I have a serious wish list for Buzz... it's good as it is, but as far as I'm concerned it's just not at the point yet where I can tell my friends, "You've GOTTA try this! It's SO much better than Facebook!"<br />
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Now, in some ways, Buzz IS better than Facebook. I think it embeds pictures and videos better. It's much less crash-prone. It loads quickly, and it certainly is handy to have it right there in my Gmail. And you can even EDIT your own posts... it's like magic! But there are a few niggling things that Google could probably roll out fairly quickly that would make the experience SO much better. For example, Google needs to set up a way for users to automatically activate <a href="http://lifehacker.com/5468067/hideremove-google-buzz-updates-from-your-gmail-inbox">the much-described "get the Buzz messages out of my inbox" filter</a>. I honestly wonder if <i>anyone</i> is really using the "Buzz to my inbox" feature... I mean, Buzz is basically ALREADY in my inbox! It takes more clicks to delete the Buzz email than it does to actually check Buzz for new stuff. Google needs a "no Buzz to my inbox" setting.<br />
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Buzz needs WYSIWYG editing. Now, Buzz has <a href="http://aext.net/2010/02/12-undocumented-tricks-for-google-buzz/">hidden support for boldface, italics, and strikethrough</a> (does anyone actually use strikethrough?) by enclosing your text in _underscore characters_ for italics or *asterisks* for boldface (or both for strikethrough), but come on, Google... give us WYSIWYG. This is not a hard thing; it already exists in Gmail and Blogger. That <i>alone</i> will give it a leg up on Twitter and Facebook, neither of which has any text formatting capability.<br />
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Why is there no "Re-Buzz" or "Share" feature? Twitter and Facebook BOTH have this, and people love to share stuff they've found. I even saw an article today that <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/14/BUU51C0AMN.DTL">more people use Facebook as their jumping-off point to the Web now than use Google</a>, which blows my mind! People want to share stuff they find, even if they find it on Buzz. Come on, Google... how hard can this be? There's a lot of potential there for users to meet like-minded friends-of-friends and begin to share directly with those new contacts, too.<br />
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And hey... what about a link (other than <a href="http://techsplurge.com/web-buzz/add-google-buzz-buton-blog-2/">the now-common Google Reader hack</a>) to "Buzz This Page"? Such a thing exists for Facebook and Twitter, and I use them all the time. Maybe this is going to be part of <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/">the upcoming roll-out of hooks into and out of Buzz</a>, but it would have made a lot of sense to give us that capability right from the first.<br />
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One thing that's cool about Buzz is that you can "mute" a post. The post slowly fades into invisibility, and it looks pretty cool. But in order to make that happen, you have to select "Mute this post" from a drop-down menu, and I mute posts so often that I can't imagine why you wouldn't want this to be an icon or top-level item instead of a 2-click thing. And I can also see people getting pretty cranky about the fade-out, too... it's just long enough to get on people's nerves. I think it ought to be something you can turn off (although I would leave it on, myself).<br />
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There needs to be an easy way to collapse a bunch of comments on a post. Facebook doesn't have this, and oddly it never felt like it was "missing" on Facebook, but on Google Buzz it seems like a glaring omission. A "collapse all" would be nice, too.<br />
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And there really needs to be an OBVIOUS way to turn Buzz off. There is <a href="http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2010/02/11/how-to-switch-off-google-buzz/">a link at the very bottom of the screen</a>, but that link is not "obvious"... I would never have found it if I hadn't seen it referred to in a news post. For something as intrusive as Buzz, there needs to be a big red "off" switch with neon arrows pointing at it, because otherwise people are going to be really unhappy about it (in fact, <a href="http://news.softpedia.com/news/Google-Buzz-Is-a-Privacy-Nightmare-134873.shtml">people have ALREADY been unhappy about it</a>).<br />
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There needs to be a landing page for links into a particular Buzz account. The <a href="http://www.google.com/profiles/108832005200552016386">Google Profile</a> basically serves this purpose but it's not particularly Buzz-specific. How about a single page where a friend can see all of my public Buzz posts, and only my public Buzz posts? Twitter has it. Why not Buzz?<br />
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Now that I've got all of my "tweaks" off my chest, I want to move on to something else: things I think need to be added to Buzz. With some or all of the tweaks I've recommended, Buzz could be at least as good as Facebook and Twitter, and maybe a little better where finesse is called for. With the additions I'm calling for, Buzz could truly be a SERIOUSLY killer app.<br />
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My number one wish is for Buzz to use existing hooks into Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites to turn buzz into an aggregator for existing sites as well as a new platform. I'd like to see a dual-screen situation where you can flip over to another tab and be able to see what you would see if you were on other sites, and maybe even add comments to those sites, and then flip back over to your Buzz account and add posts to that. (Using the tips from <a href="http://mashable.com/2010/02/12/facebook-twitter-buzz-gmail/">this article</a> I've actually set up my Gmail account so that I can access Facebook and Twitter directly from Gmail anyway, but it would be wonderful to not have to resort to add-ons to do so.) Even more critical is the ability to post something to Buzz and simultaneously cross-post it to Facebook and/or Twitter (and any other social networks that will be supported.) The advantages of doing this are, to me, fairly obvious... the user has the advantage of one-stop status update posting, and Buzz can have the advantage (especially in the case of 140-characters-only Twitter) of getting to link through to the Buzz version of the post. This functionality alone, I believe, will bring new users to Buzz. And once they are using Buzz for all of their publishing, Buzz will quickly become their network of choice, with other social sites becoming at best places to play Flash games, and at worst, simply convenient avenues to get status updates into Buzz.<br />
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There really needs to be a standalone, not-in-Gmail experience of Buzz. Google has acknowledged that this is a possible upcoming addition, and I think it would be a great idea, if only for people who are maybe a little bit Gmail-phobic and don't want to feel like they are creating a new email account that they don't want. (<a href="http://gizmodo.com/5470854/google-might-pull-buzz-out-of-gmailthats-why-">This may yet happen</a>.) Another new incarnation I could see for Buzz would be adding more Buzz functionality directly into Google Reader. Right now Reader works fairly well with Buzz, but it would be nice to see some Buzz flow back into Reader instead of just having Reader content flow into Buzz.<br />
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A consequence of tighter integration with other sites will be something that has come up for me already: feedback loops. If I have my Buzz posts flowing out to Twitter AND my Twitter posts flowing back into Buzz, I will get every post showing up both places twice! As it is right now, I would like to syndicate my Google Reader posts out to Twitter, but they are already flowing into Buzz, and if I syndicate them in Twitter, they will turn up on Buzz twice... and because of that, I haven't syndicated my Reader posts out to Twitter.<br />
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One way that could be eliminated would be to incorporate Gmail's filtering capabilities into Buzz. For example, I would love to be able to filter my Twitter posts and never Buzz the ones that, for example, start with "Read this: " and then I could prefix my Google Reader tweets that way. It would be great to filter posts from some of my contacts, too... kind of an "auto-mute" so that (for example) I never see posts containing the word "beer" from a college-partying friend, or never see posts with pictures attached from a friend who posts way too many photos of his car. <br />
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I like that Buzz already has "allow-only" private posting, so if I have my family members organized into a group called "Family" I can create a buzz that is only visible to my family. Google should follow Facebook's lead and add the inverse of this, so that I can "deny" a group as well. So if I have a group called "Denver" and some of my "Family" group members are also living in the "Denver" group, I could "allow" the "Family" group and "deny" the "Denver" group, and only family members who do not live in Denver would see the post.<br />
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Last but not least, I really think Google should allow syndicating RSS feeds into your Buzz stream. Third-party sites (like <a href="/2009/10/twitterfeed.html">Twitterfeed</a>) are going to do this eventually anyway, and this would allow information from a multitude of other sources to flow easily into Buzz. Allowing input from RSS feeds is a key to getting even more of people's online identity into Buzz. I would also like to see customizable RSS feeds out from Buzz, so that I could create feeds that do not include information from certain sources or that are filtered by keywords or other criteria. This would be another way that users could deal with the feedback loop problem I mentioned before... if I could generate a feed from my Google Buzz that includes all sources <i>except</i> my Twitter information, I could syndicate that feed back to Twitter and never get a duplicate post. It would also be useful to be able to customize the titles of the items in the feeds; the single outgoing Google Buzz feed is configured in such a way that it really needs some post-processing to be useful... and I don't have time to learn Yahoo Pipes (and does Google really want their information to be processed through a Yahoo service anyway??)<br />
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Google Buzz has so much potential. Google creates very solid online software... much better than Facebook's unattractive and accident-prone offering. And although Google doesn't have a perfect record on this account, they do have a much better uptime track record that Twitter, whose "fail whale" page that informs users that the system is down has become something of a pop-culture icon (and when your "our site is down" page is famous, that is known as a BAD thing!) My take on the first week of Google Buzz is that Google has gotten off to a somewhat feeble start, when they could have come out of the gate like a race horse if they had only implemented ALL of the functions of FriendFeed, which Buzz is unabashedly modeled after. But in the current online climate, I think Google has a lot of motivation to make the service better, and they have a lot of potential to make it really dynamite. Even if you're not actively using Buzz yet, I think it's a good idea to keep an eye on it. It may be the next revolution in social networking!TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574198580928894889.post-77994563343920552462010-01-27T06:00:00.008-06:002011-09-16T17:06:12.139-05:00Google Voice"GrandCentral is the BOMB!" I read on a message board. It was late 2008, and I had never heard of GrandCentral before, but I looked it up and it was looking pretty cool. Using GrandCentral I could get a brand-new phone number <i>for free</i>, and set things up so that calling that number would ring me up at work or at home! I wouldn't have to give people an either-or on a phone number any more! And since it is frowned upon where I work to give out the private "direct" number to people other than immediate family (instead having people call the switchboard and speak to our very sweet receptionist), I figured I might be able to give out this number to friends and not give them the direct line number.<br />
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Well, I was right on all counts... I was able to set things up so people could reach me at home or at work, and there are a number of other great advantages I gained as well. GrandCentral, now re-branded <a href="http://www.google.com/voice/">Google Voice</a>, also allows me to get my personal voice mails in my Google Voice account (while my work voice mails land in my work voice mail), and even set up a schedule so that my Google Voice number doesn't ring my home phone during the day when my wife is at home but I'm at work. It's great!<br />
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There have been so many good tutorials and posts of Google Voice features that I'm not going to waste too much time rehashing easy-to-find information. Even I have <a href="/2009/11/new-piece-of-google-voice-puzzle.html">already mentioned Gizmo5+Google Voice on this blog</a>, and <a href="/2010/01/cell-phones.html">I've also already mentioned Google Voice's cell phone applications</a> here as well. If you have a cell phone (I do not), you can have GV ring both your land line and your cell phone, and then you can answer whichever one is convenient. In fact, you can switch your call from one to the other midstream (for example, I could answer my Google Voice call at work, switch to my cell phone for the bus ride home, and then when I got home, switch to my land line, and the person on the phone need never know the conversation happened on three separate phones). There are tons of cool features to talk about, but I wanted to mention the <i>very</i> few things that I wish were different about Google Voice.<br />
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The one that bugs me the most right now is that <a href="http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/google-welcomes-gizmo5.html">Google has not yet re-released Gizmo5 after acquiring it</a>. I even took a look at <a href="http://www.eBay.com">eBay</a> for accounts... sure enough, they are there to be had! Funny how people will pay twenty bucks for something they could have gotten for free a month ago! :) Once Google reopens Gizmo5 (I expect its capabilities to be folded into <a href="http://www.google.com/talk/">Google Talk</a>, myself) I will be able to answer my GV calls through my computer headset. And that will be AWESOME!<br />
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I wish Google Voice was able to support SMS short codes. These are the five- or six-digit "text this number with your cell phone" codes that usually connect you with services (for example, in the U.S. you can tweet to Twitter by <a href="http://help.twitter.com/forums/59008/entries/14014">texting your tweet to 40404</a>, or update your Facebook by <a href="http://www.facebook.com/mobile/">texting 32665</a>). The way I understand it, on regular land-line service the number is sent a digit at a time, but on cell phones the number is sent all at once, which makes these short codes possible, and they are by agreement between cell phone carriers. My assumption is that because Google Voice is not a cell phone carrier, it does not have access to those agreements. It's a shame, because SMS short codes are so prevalent these days that I know this one thing is enough to turn people off from using Google Voice exclusively. I use the SMS-to-a-full-cell-number feature almost daily, though, and it works great! Even without a cell phone, I can text friends. It's kind of hard to explain to them, actually!<br />
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Google Voice also does not support MMS messages, which are multimedia SMS-style messages (if you've ever texted someone a snapshot on your phone, you've used this). For some people this is apparently a deal-breaker, but honestly, these days everybody's phone has email. Why would you want to send this kind of stuff via text message?<br />
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It would sure be nice for Google to roll out wide support for porting cell phone numbers to GV. This has been <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/14/google-voices-secret-weapon-number-portability/">being talked about for some time now</a>, and I have actually read articles from people who have been allowed to do it... but it's not easy or free (actually, according to Google, it's <a href="http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?answer=115102&cbid=-49n09dxyuw8i&src=cb&lev=topic">not even available</a> yet). There is a procedure you can go through to <a href="http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-voice-with-your-existing-number.html">set up your cell phone so that calls go to Google Voice voice mail instead of your carrier's voice mail</a>, so that's partway there, but that's just a consolation prize. One more thing that might cause a long-time cell-phone user to not try it out.<br />
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Recently an idea occurred to me that would be a super-cool addition to Google Voice. I sent it in on <a href="http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=cDFfTmFSNS1WMzVhZldUcWxWRHoyV3c6MA..">their feedback form</a>, but I thought I would share it here as a dream feature that I hope they will add one day. For background, I mentioned that I have Google Voice ring my home phone, but only outside of business hours when I can be expected to be home, not during the day when I'm at the office but my wife is home. You can set up individual ring schedules for each telephone you list with Google Voice, and there are two separate schedules, a "weekday" schedule and a "weekend" schedule. So on my "weekday" schedule, I have my home phone ringing only between the time I generally get home after work and the time I generally leave the next morning, and I have my office phone ringing during our normal office hours. On the weekend I have the home phone ringing and the office phone not ringing. If I had a cell phone, I would probably set it up to ring all of the time. What I would like to see would be a third ring schedule, a "holiday" or "vacation" schedule. This would be the phones you want to ring, say, on Memorial Day, which would normally be a weekday "work" day but which you might get off work for, or say on the week that you take the family to Disney World for vacation. When I'm at home on a 3-day weekend, I do need my home phone to ring, but I don't need my office phone to ring, but when the holiday is over, I need to revert to my original settings. Right now I have to change everything manually, which is an unnecessary hassle.<br />
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Now, to digress a little bit, GV has a "Do Not Disturb" mode that automatically sends all calls to voice mail without ringing the phone at all. Do Not Disturb mode is easily activated by clicking "Settings" and then the "Calls" tab and then checking a checkbox. Turning it off is even easier; the Google Voice screen has a "'Do Not Disturb' is enabled. Disable now" link right at the top of the screen. I would like to see my proposed "holiday mode" set up to trigger in two ways: one way would be manually, by checking or unchecking a checkbox, and the other way would be on a schedule. So I could set the first and last days of my vacation weeks ahead of time, and then it wouldn't be one more thing I would have to remember between plane schedules, luggage, putting a stop on the mail, etc. With enough flexibility, I could set up the holidays in my Google Voice the first week of January when the yearly holiday calendar is distributed at work, and not have to think about it again until twelve months later. How cool would that be?<br />
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I could go on and on about Google Voice's amazing features... voice-mail notifications in my email in-box, receiving and replying to SMS messages via my email account, email-style spam filtering of phone calls, customized outgoing message per contact (I could set it so my mom hears "Hi mom!" when she calls me, for example), contacts shared with Gmail address book, contacts available on the Web and on your cell phone, call "screening" by listening in (like you used to do with your Code-a-Phone machine back in the day!), free calls any time of day to anywhere in the United States. But I'll just end by saying that Google Voice has succeeded in making a huge number of telephone-related things much easier for me. I'm excited to see what Google has in mind for Gizmo5, and I'm interested in using a cell phone with Google Voice integrated into it, and I think Google Voice is a product that just about anyone could use and be thrilled with. I would pay for it if it cost money to use it; that's how indispensable it is. If one of the cell-phone carriers had anywhere near this kind of offering in their plan's online site, they would win customers because of it.<br />
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I'm just glad that my mom only has to remember one number to call me at work or home. "Hi mom!"TulsaMJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15945834114006833482noreply@blogger.com0