----------------------------------------------------------------------
Boing Boing Blog
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| 1. |
PVR anxiety: the tyranny of the to-do list. I ditched my TV and my cable and my beloved TiVo a couple months back (saving money, saving time), and one of the first things I noticed is that I lost a huge amount of unconscious anxiety that I'd been lugging around: every time I turned on my television, I'd be confronted with a "to-do" list from my TiVo, all the shows it had captured that I hadn't watched yet.
When I first got my TiVo, having a lot of programming on the drive felt like someone had done me a large favor; but over time, it felt almost like a nag: here's all this "work" I've got piled up for you to do.
Of course, this isn't specific to TiVo -- any PVR has this effect, as does an RSS reader, mail reader and so on: the unread/unwatched/undealt-with flags that define my life multiply, and my personal time does not.
I'm not the only one: Sign on San Diego has a piece on other PVRs owner who're drowning.
"For something that is supposed to be relaxing and unwinding at the end of the day, you (think) 'Wow! I have a lot of shows to watch,'" said Scott Bedard, technology director at an online media company in San Francisco...
"I get to the point now where I skip going to the gym so I can keep up with watching "Dawson's Creek" reruns," which are broadcast for two hours each day, he said. "I look forward to when they end so I won't be stressed."
Link
(via Gizmodo) |
| 2. |
CVS as a means of keeping track of your life. This is a habit of the alpha-geeks if ever there was one: Joey Hess keeps all of his email, config files, and all of his work files in a CVS repository. CVS is a free software tool that programmers use to keep track of, and synchronize, changes to documents. It's optimized to keep groups of people spread out over time (multiple versions) and space (multiple contributors) in synch, but Joey's had the key realization that he, on his own, is separated from himself by time (the file he edited yesterday, last month, last year) and space (his laptop, his desktop, his work computer). Keeping everything in CVS means that he can keep all of his user-environments in synch, it means that he never loses data. This is the kind of thing that Passport is meant to solve, and the sort of thing that LifeLog was supposed to do, but Joey's solution has the signal advantage of using free software with a robust developer community that is completely, 100 percent under his control.
It only took a few more weeks before the advantage of having a history of everything I'd done began to show up. It wasn't a real surprise because having a history of past versions of a project is one of the reasons to use CVS in the first place, but it's very cool to have it suddenly apply to every file you own. When I broke my .zshrc or .procmailrc, I could roll back to the previous day's or look back and see when I made the change and why. It's very handy to be able to run cvs diff on your kernel config file and see how make xconfig changed it. It's great to be able to recover files you deleted or delete files because they're not relevant and still know you've not really lost them. For those amateur historians among us, it's very cool to be able to check out one's system as it looked one full year ago and poke around and discover how everything has evolved over time...
I'm told that the best backups are done without effort--so you actually do them--and are widely scattered among many machines and a lot of area so that a local disaster doesn't knock them out. They are tested on a regular basis to make sure the backup works. I was doing all of these things as a mere side effect of keeping it all in CVS. Then I sobered up and remembered that a dead CVS repository would be a really, really bad thing and kept those wimpy backups to CD going. But the automatic distributed backups are what keep me sleeping quietly at night. Later, when I left that job, the last thing I did on my work desktop machine was: cvs commit ; sudo rm -rf /. And I didn't worry a bit; my life was still there, secure in CVS.
Link
(via Smartpatrol) |
| 3. |
VoIP use-case: mindblowingly cheap telephony. Dan Gillmor's on his annual teaching stint in Hong Kong, but he's still on the job for his newspaper in San Jose. Normally, this would entail enormous phoen bills and patient hand-holding by email for Americans who've never dialled an overseas number in their life. But this time around, Dan's got a Voice-Over-IP box plugged into the Ethernet in his place in China and a phone plugged into that. This box is a portable phone-number: dial a number in San Jose, and it rings in Hong Kong (or wherever Dan has plugged it in). So all of Dan's communications with the home office are free. What's more, the long distance charges for US-Hong Kong on the service are only $0.05/minute, so Dan can simply forward his VoIP number to a Hong Kong prepaid mobile phone and take his San Jose number on the go with him throughout the city.
Companies around the world are already moving to VoIP in big numbers; now it's getting easy enough -- and the quality is getting good enough -- for individuals and families.
This shift is inexorable due to the nature of technological improvement. The main questions are a) how soon; and b) how the existing phone companies and regulatory agencies will deal with that reality.
Link |
| 4. |
FCC moving to break VoIP. David Isenberg points out that federal regulators have Voice-Over-IP telephony (see below) squarely in their sights, and are working hard to make it just as broken and screwed up as the old phone system:
I've known for several weeks that the FCC will be holding a hearing on Voice Over Internet Protocol on December 1. I had thought it would be like the delightfully informative and informal Rural Wireless Internet Service Provider Workshop that the FCC held on November 4. But this is not to be.
Apparently the December 1 meeting is to be a formal FCC hearing designed to legally circumvent the more normal, deliberative Notice of Inquiry process, which is designed to solicit, collect and consider a wide range of public comments.
The FCC is in a hurry. "Things have greatly accelerated over the last year," writes Powell to Wyden, "and so have the FCC's actions."
Link |
| 5. |
Merriam-Webster stands its McGround. Despite having taken down its Web defintion of McJob, Merriam-Webster has now publicly announced that it will not remove McJob from the print and pay-for-click versions of the dictionary.
"For more that 17 years 'McJob' has been used as we are defining it in a broad range of publications," the company said, citing everything from The New York Times and Rolling Stone to newspapers in South Africa and Australia.
Link |
| 6. |
Mayberry gets WiFi. Mount Airy -- the town that provided the location and the inspiration for Mayberry in The Andy Griffith Show -- is rolling out an 18-blog-wide WiFi network.
Working with Mark Spencer of 8021Link Inc., Mount Airy set up a Wi-Fi network covering 18 blocks. Several merchants already have signed as for hot spots and have added "Internet Hotspot" signs. The network augments the community's use of the web to tout business and tourism. It's web site (www.visitmayberry.com) is a treasure trove of Mayberry information. Wi-Fi was a logical next step.
"You already can see people coming downtown – not in droves but in 1s, 2s and 10s, carrying not only pocketbooks but also computers," says Bradley, who has run the Chamber since 1998. On a recent Saturday he stopped in at the Good Life Cafe. "There was a guy on one of the PCs set up in the coffee shop," he says, "and another guy was at a table with his laptop.
"This is just pretty darn cool!"
Link
(via WiFi Net News) |
| 7. |
Sputnik ships new AP. Sputnik has shipped the latest version of its WiFi router, built out of commodity hardware, running an open, Linux-based firmware, with tons of cool management and access-control/connection-throttling services. At $185, it's a lot cheaper than other "managed" APs and not so much more expensive than a bog-standard Linksys router.
Link
(via WiFi Net News) |
----------------------------------------------------------------------
CNET News.com - Front Door
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| 8. |
Investors snub Friendster in patent grab. Alarmed by a potential expansion by Friendster on their turf, two competitors who are also investors in Friendster team to buy a patent they call key to the social networking market. |
3:34:15 AM 
|
|
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
