Category: Computers/Internet

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After way too long, I finally upgraded the processor on my desktop. I’d held off because that always involves upgrading the motherboard, which is major surgery on the computer, and with a small child who wants to grab everything, that wasn’t really a good idea. Replacing phones and tablets, and replacing the Windows box, sure, those are relatively simple. Nothing fragile is open for several hours, and we use them all the time.

But I’ve recently done some small maintenance with him around and he’s been able to keep his hands to himself and just look, and I’ve trusted him to help with a few things like clipping in the panels on unused drive bays and opening/closing the main case screws.

I ordered a processor/mobo/memory combo from NewEgg, and it showed up on Saturday. I waited until Sunday morning to get started, knowing that these things always take more time than you expect (and typically at least one extra trip to the computer store). No surprise, it turned out I needed a new power supply for the new motherboard. In an odd echo of the last time,* I drove out to Fry’s and found one with the connectors and wattage I needed, with a rebate on it, then picked up some takeout for lunch.

The kiddo was able to leave the half-disassembled box alone while I was out. Things were strained by the time I was finished around four, and he had a full-on meltdown at the grocery store later, but I got the new hardware installed.

It’s amazing how much smoother everything runs now. I feel like I can actually use the computer again!

*I may have done another upgrade between then and the time we moved, but I only remember adding the wireless card in 2010 so that I could move the computer desk to another room and put the crib in its place. I definitely hadn’t done anything this major on the home desktop since he was born.

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I finally removed the floppy disk drive from my desktop. I don’t know why it took me so long, except that it wasn’t in the way of anything. Living with a small, inquisitive child means either making hardware changes at night or keeping the work brief, and timing it so that he still has enough metaphorical spoons to keep his hands to himself.

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Sophos reports that Facebook is testing a feature to hide new posts from your timeline so they don’t feel so permanent. Of course they’re still searchable until you actually delete them, so they’re still permanent in that sense.

What’s odd: Facebook posts don’t feel permanent to begin with, even though they effectively stick around forever.

Thinking about it, two things make an internet post feel permanent to me:

  1. Can I count on it sticking around?
  2. Can I count on finding it again?

Facebook, despite a lot of improvements over the years, is a mess. The newsfeed algorithm means you can’t just keep scrolling back. The timeline view isn’t reliably complete. Search is kind of a crap shoot. Don’t get me started on trying to find a particular old post on Twitter!

And that’s dealing with sites I can expect to stay online over time. A post on a forum, or a comment on someone else’s blog, or any social network could easily vanish in someone’s server crash or business shutdown.

If I can’t count on being able to find what I post a few years down the line, it feels like it’s temporary, even if it isn’t.

This is one reason that my Flickr portfolio feels more permanent than my Instagram photos: I can find them without resorting to third-party apps. If I want to find a particular photo on Instagram, I have to page down through my profile until I find it. On Flickr, I can find a 10-year-old photo of a fountain in seconds by searching for “fountain” and expanding the “Your photos” section of the results.

Then again, running my own site is only reliable as long as I can afford it. If something happens to me, and I can’t pay for hosting anymore, what then? I figure I’d simplify things down to where I could get a basic, super-cheap hosting plan. Make the blogs read-only so they can be served statically from a shared server or S3 bucket, or move them to WordPress.com, or just be willing to let them crash under load. But what if I’m incapacitated and can’t convert it? Or just plain not there anymore? If I really want to keep my corner of the web up “permanently,” I’m going to have to make a plan ahead of time.

Otherwise my carefully preserved photos, articles, and extended musings will be toast…leaving behind as context only broken links and all my supposedly (but not really) ephemeral offhand remarks on Twitter and Facebook.

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It’s weird to look back on all the posts I made agonizing about whether or not to buy a netbook.

It was never anything I would have used on a regular basis, and I knew that (which is why I never went through with buying one). It would have been something I used on trips, mainly conventions, and only to overcome the shortcomings of late 2000s smartphones.

Mainly: photos and typing.

Photo by VIA Gallery from Hsintien, Taiwan - HP 2133 Mini-Note PC (front view compare with pencil) uploaded by Kozuch, CC BY 2.0
Photo by VIA Gallery from Hsintien, Taiwan – HP 2133 Mini-Note PC (front view compare with pencil) uploaded by Kozuch, CC BY 2.0
Back then, I always carried another camera to get the “good” pictures, because phone cameras were still crappy. So if I wanted to post something online, I had to get it off the camera, onto a computer, and then upload it. Today’s smartphone cameras and apps are so much more capable that they mostly solve the photo issues.

It’s still painfully slow to type anything of length on a phone, but tablets have emerged since then and are a lot easier to type on. Hybrids like the Surface Pro and add-on keyboards make it even easier.

Touchscreens have solved the crappy trackpad problem netbooks had.

Faster phones and cell networks, and a more mobile-friendly web, have made a lot more things possible directly on the phone.

Netbooks, meanwhile, are pretty much forgotten, at least in the form they existed in at the time. Chromebooks are doing OK, at least in schools, but they aren’t quite the same thing. You’d think “netbook” would refer to something more like the network-dependent Chromebook, but it typically referred to the tiny form factor of a mini-laptop.

Looking back at the Tori Amos signing that I mentioned in the series’ first post: These days I probably would have taken the pictures directly on my phone and posted to Instagram within minutes. As for the blogging, I might have powered through on the phone and added the pictures directly, or I might have done so on the tablet and added the pictures that would already have synced from the phone over WiFi.

I wouldn’t carry a laptop of any size around the convention floor, that’s for sure. And I probably wouldn’t bring one on a short trip at all unless I was planning on working during the evenings.

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The thing that takes me longest to set up on a new phone is the notification settings. It’s configured in each app individually, and it seems like everyone wants to get your attention.

Too many notifications end up one of two ways: tuned out so you don’t notice the important ones, or so much of a distraction that you can’t focus on anything. There are studies showing how long it takes to get your train of thought back after interruptions.

I pare audio alerts down to calls, text messages, and work-related IMs. Then I set custom alert tones for each and for specific phone numbers, so I know instantly which it is. (Assuming of course I remembered to turn on the sound, and it’s not drowned out by ambient noise.) Unfortunately every new phone or OS comes with a different set of alert tones, so it’s a pain to either transfer over the old tones or get used to the new ones.

I have silent email alerts. Social media, but only some sites and only replies or mentions that I might be expected to react to. (Not Facebook, though.) Sure, I want to know if someone’s commented on one of my photos or posts, but I don’t need it to break my concentration. I don’t need an alert for every new post on some site, or every new follower, or some auto-generated roundup.

And it takes me forever to find all those settings, turn off everything else, and change the audio for what’s left. Sometimes it’s several days before something pipes up the first time. I suspect I’m not done yet.

As much as we make all these things interactive, they’re still asynchronous. Except for calls and active chat conversations, I’m better off checking in on email or Twitter or Facebook on my own schedule, not when I’m in the middle of something else.

I can distract myself just fine. I don’t need my phone to do it for me.

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It shouldn’t make any difference that Twitter renamed Favoritesā˜… as Likes♥. It’s a coat of paint. But labels do matter. Just like “friend” and “follower”, “like” and “favorite” (and hearts and stars) conjure up different expectations.

Twitter says, “You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.” Paradoxically, I find “likes” to be more specific. The star-and-favorite model comes out of Internet Explorer*, and modern browsers still use stars for bookmarks. This made “favorite” seem a little more versatile, anything from a stamp of approval to a simple check-back-for-later.

“Like,” on the other hand….

After years of requests for a “dislike” button, Facebook finally admitted that “like” isn’t sufficient to respond to everything, and will be expanding to multiple reaction buttons. I know Twitter keeps trying to be more like Facebook, but c’mon — even Facebook knows people don’t want to “like” sad news.

*Microsoft didn’t want to call their bookmarks “bookmarks.” Nobody wanted to use the same terminology as anyone else back then. They tried to call links “shortcuts” too.

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Friday afternoon my phone finally got the OTA update for Android 5.1. After several hours stuck on the swirling boot animation, I decided it was time to admit that the phone wasn’t going to finish booting on its own.

I tried everything: Pulling the battery. Clearing the cache from recovery mode. Removing the SD card. Even a factory reset. I’d tried to avoid that, but eventually decided all the important stuff was backed up, and dammit, I needed a phone for the weekend!

If it had been a carrier phone or an actual Nexus device, I could have flashed a fresh system image, but it’s a Samsung Galaxy S4 Google Play Edition. Nobody wants the responsibility of supporting it.

In the end I bit the bullet and installed CyanogenMod. Even if I messed it up, the phone was already unusable and long past any warranty it might have had two and a half years ago. I didn’t really have anything to lose.

I had to read through the instructions a couple of times, but the process was actually pretty simple since I already had the ADB tools and could install Heimdall on my Linux desktop through Fedora.

  1. Flash a more capable recovery partition.
  2. Upload the right CyanogenMod .zip and the corresponding Google Apps .zip.
  3. Install the images from the recovery partition.
  4. Sign in to Cyanogen and Google.
  5. Reinstall apps.

It’s a bit weird because the UI feels like I’ve gone back in time a couple of years.

But the phone works again, and I was able to do it overnight. I didn’t have to spend three days emailing tech support back and forth. I didn’t have to go into a store on Saturday and be told I can either buy a new phone or wait a week while they send it in for repairs.

I may still end up replacing it in the near future — it is 2 1/2 years old, after all — but I don’t have to, which makes a big difference!

Update!

The phone worked great for camera, navigation, texting, and everything else I wanted to use it for at an event Saturday and at Long Beach Comic Con on Sunday.

Unfortunately, the dial pad doesn’t always respond during calls, which makes phone menus unusable. It’s not just the problem with the proximity sensor thinking my face is next to the phone and blanking the screen — I’ve had that on the official firmware for ages. I can get the keypad to display, but it won’t react to touch.

My carrier has an app for voicemail, but I’ll have to do something to be able to deal with other phone menus.