Fanboy Scouts has launched a series of Merit Badges for Geeks including achievements for Speedster, Mt. Doom, Tie Fighter Pilot, Away Team, and more.- Privacy in terms of contextual identity. How you present yourself to your friends is not how you present yourself to your colleagues, and what you’re willing to share in each context is going to be different.
- XKCD is probably right about the future of “old-timey” speech. “Forsooth, do you grok my jive, me hearties?” We have a hard enough time getting the mid-twentieth century right, and that’s with people around who lived it!
- Darryl Cunningham debunks the Moon Hoax in comic-strip form.
- The new Kindle looks nice. They’re starting to get to the price/feature/polish point where I’d be tempted. (Well, except for that pesky DRM…) Also, Amazon launched Kindle for Android recently, but I haven’t tried it out. While it will run on Android 1.6, it’s a bit big for my G1 unless I clear out some other apps.
Category: Computers/Internet
Internet Access at Comic-Con
As near as I can tell, there were two main wifi networks at the San Diego convention center this year: “Comic-Con 2010” was open and free…and bogged down. It was enough to post snippets of text one line at a time, but it took forever to start the console for Cover it Live, though, and it wasn’t worth it for uploading photos.
AT&T also had a wireless network, but it required you to either be a customer already or buy access. One of the perks of U-Verse service: free access to AT&T wifi hotspots! Since only paid customers were using it, it was a lot faster. Faster even than our home internet access, in fact.
This was in the lobby, hallways and meeting rooms at the convention center itself. I never really tried to access wifi on the exhibit floor (who has room to sit down, other than people staffing a booth?), and didn’t spend much time on my phone either, except for sending and receiving text messages.
Over at the Hilton, however, access was virtually nonexistent: No wifi as near as I could tell, and even phone access was spotty. I saw people texting in the Indigo Ballroom, but the ones nearby were all on iPhones (AT&T) or Verizon. I had absolutely no T-Mobile signal in that hotel, even though it was perfectly fine everywhere else. Katie had the same problem at Indigo last year, and we were hoping it might have improved. No dice.**
One reason I didn’t worry too much about having constant net access: I spent way too much time last year online. Liveblogging aside, this year I wanted to focus more on actually being there. Last year I posted about 30 messages a day to Twitter. This year it was closer to 10 posts total.
So of course, now I’m spending lots of time after we get back writing things up…online.
*Yes, I know the photo is of a cell phone tower, not a wifi hotspot, but I didn’t take any pictures of wifi routers and this is the next best thing.
**Actually, there was a whole booth full of dice, but it was over on the main floor.
»Full index of Comic-Con posts and photos.
Thoughts on Screenshots for Tech Support
I used to get annoyed when someone would send a complete screen shot along with their tech support request. I thought it was a waste of bandwidth when a simple text message would do just as well, and be faster to send, receive and display.
But the thing is, screenshots have their advantages. For one thing, they’re exact. There’s no risk of an error code being mistyped.
More importantly, a screenshot can tell you other information that the user hasn’t thought to mention. This is critical, because the reason people call tech support is because they don’t know how to solve a particular problem…and that often means they don’t know which information is relevant.
Like, say, the fact that they’re running another program which happens to conflict with the one that they’re calling about.
Still, I wish Windows would create a file instead of copying the screen to the clipboard. Users need to paste it into something, so they paste it into what they’re most familiar with: Microsoft Word — something even less suited for sending images by email than a .BMP file created by Paint.
Netbook, Phone or Tablet?
Comic-Con International is rapidly approaching, and you know what that means: it means I’m thinking about mobile computing again!
Right now, I’ve got a G1 Android-based phone, and Katie and I share a MacBook. The G1 is showing its age, and it would be nice to have a second computer to do things like manage photos with while traveling.
So. Options.
1. Upgrade the phone. I’d like to stick with T-Mobile, but unfortunately after being the first network to take a chance on Android, they kind of dropped the ball on high-end Android phones. It looks like they’ll be getting the Samsung Galaxy S as the Vibrant, which might solve that problem. (Downside: no camera flash, no physical keyboard, both of which are in the Galaxy S Pro — but I don’t know when or even whether it’ll show up on T-Mobile’s network!)
Also, this doesn’t solve the photo management problem…and if I get a touchscreen-only phone, it’ll really slow down typing until I get used to it.
That and the rumored launch date for the Vibrant is July 21: the day before Comic-Con! That’s not the best time to try to get used to a new device.
2. Get a tablet. As much as I love Apple’s laptops and think that tablet PCs are a great idea, I can’t get behind the iPad. I don’t like the walled-garden approach where Apple gets to choose what you’re allowed to install on your computer. As for other platforms, Windows and Android tablets don’t seem to be comparable just yet.
In short: not gonna happen this year.
3. Get a netbook. I keep coming back to this, don’t I? Last weekend I checked out the selection at Fry’s and Micro Center, and decided on several things:
- Never, ever buy a netbook without trying out the keyboard first! I found one that was so bad that I’d rather type on my phone for an hour than this netbook.
- Smaller is better (up to a point). There’s no point in getting a large netbook when I could get a more fully-functional small notebook.
- A lot of netbooks have truly awful trackpads.
- While I’d rather get one with Windows 7 than Windows XP, it’s not critical. (Vista, however, is right out. Not that I saw any Vista-based netbooks…)
- I like the Splashtop instant-on mini-network OS. It’ll be sufficient for 90% of what I’d be doing with a netbook.
- A big chunk of that other 10% would be photo management! Or at least pulling photos off the camera and uploading them. Managing stuff within Flickr should work.
- Most netbooks are still above my personal “Oh, just buy it and get it over with” price point, which is $200. MicroCenter had two, one of which was the one with the horrible keyboard, and one of which had Windows XP, didn’t have SplashTop, and had a mediocre trackpad. I really had to think about whether it was worth it or not.
Even so, It’s going to be hard to justify a netbook and a newer phone, and if I have to pick one, it’s going to be the phone. At this rate, by the time I decide to go for it, a tablet may actually be more practical!
Links: Doomed Data, Web Services, WTF Textbook Questions & More
An experiment: I’ve modified* Twitter Tools to create digest posts as drafts instead of publishing immediately. That gives me a chance to edit a week’s worth of random thoughts and links down to the interesting stuff, clean things up a bit, expand things that could use more detail, and remind myself of items that I wanted to write more about later.
If it works out, and if the plugin still offers digests after it’s rewritten to use OAuth, I’ll probably use this same setup to make sure I keep on top of linkblogging at Speed Force.
*It was pretty simple. I just looked for the function that creates digests, then changed the post_status from publish to draft.
The Links
- Why information storage is hard: The Universe Hates Your Data.
- Interesting analogy: Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone aren’t quite ecosystems. Maybe it’s better to think of web services as governments. (via ma.tt)
- WTF of the week: A book I was looking at on Amazon didn’t have any active discussions related to it, so Amazon showed me some random forum threads. They included this question on used textbooks: “Is it Ok if I used it to bludgeon several people to death with it?” Be sure to read the responses. [Edit: Amazon’s forums have been shut down.]
- I love how Twitter’s status blog describes Wednesday morning’s outage as “high whales.”
- Dear CNN: A 4.0 earthquake in California, especially one that didn’t cause any damage, is not breaking news. It’s more like business as usual. (It’s worth noting that a full day later, they haven’t updated the story with anything substantive…probably because there isn’t anything to add!)
- Very cool: the Sci-Fi Airshow is a gallery of photorealistic images of spaceships from various science-fiction TV shows and movies set at, well, an air show. (via Bad Astronomy and SciFi Wire)