A cupboard filled with books
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Andrew Keen And The Scarcity of Choice

Byrichard
Reading Time: 3 minutes

I recently noticed that I had Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur book as an audiobook on Apple Books. I have had the book for at least a decade but have only got around to reading it recently. Over the last week I have listened to him speak about the closing of Tower Records and it encouraged me to write more about the scarcity of choice, that comes with online browsing and shopping.
When I lived in Weymouth I would go to WHSmith and look for new books, and then when I lived in London a few years later I would look for books at Waterstones. I spent hours in that book shop and often wanted to buy plenty of books but resisted temptation. The beauty of book shops is that you can look within a section and quickly see hundreds, or even thousands of books.

Scarcity of Choice With Books

Compare this to book browsing today. Book shops are rare, and supermarkets have a very limited choice. It does get worse. When you shop for books online you get plenty of the top selling books recommended, but it’s hard to find the least popular titles. It’s hard to find the long tail of books. it’s hard to browse through niche interests and topics because algorithms force us to see the top selling books, rather than browse.

Lending Libraries

That’s why the lending box in Eysins, Borex, Crassier, Founex, several in Nyon and other places are so good. They do have niche books, and they do have niche books. In the age of unlimited choice our actual options are limited to what algorithms think we want to read, rathre than what we would stumble upon in a physical book shop. Today we need to know what we’re looking for, rather than exploring, and finding it.

YouTube and Content Creators

He discussed YouTube and content creators that are creating content for free on YouTube, rather than being paid to generate it. What he didn’t explore so much, related to YouTube and amateurs trying to be professional about content production, a decade and a half later, is that broadcasters and independent companies are cutting costs and reducing their output thus reducing the number of jobs available for media professionals in mainstream media and more.

Coming of Age At the Right Time

I often wish that I had come to YouTube half a decade later than I did, maybe even later than that. When I wanted to break into the media the model was still focused on mainstream media. Now it has flipped around and the opportunity, and challenge, is to think of content that would attract people to view content. If YouTube had been what it is today, when I was 18 then I would have studied the same thing, but I would have pivoted towards independent content production much sooner. I have books on the topic, but independent at the time meant finding investors to pay for ideas. Today the barriers are inspiration and motivation.
Paradoxically, despite the barrier to entry being very low, to post content on YouTube or other video sharing platforms. there is a wall. The wall of tabloid sensationalism. I watched one content creator until I noticed the clickbait nature of the headlines. In another case I stopped watching several content creators for going on and on about their million plus subscribers. The barrier to entry is the same as the barrier to watching the content.

Getting Beyond The Noise

The patience to sort through the tabloid and sensationalist crap, before getting to content worth watching. On YouTube there is a scarcity of choice, because to please the algorithms you need to be a tabloid sensationalist to appear in search results and to be recommended. Failing this you are invisible. Failing this you need to drive traffic via blog posts or other means.

On Books And Video

I speak about the challenge of finding books despite having a backlog of hundreds of books. As I have often said, finding a book you want to read takes seconds, but actually reading it takes hours. Some books require thirty hours of reading. Usually they require seven hours or so. Books require an investment of time.
My real challenge is with video content. That’s where I struggle to find what I want to watch. In the past we would watch TV and see “What’s coming next” or we would read about new shows. Now we don’t, so we just have to browse until we find something. This isn’t a new problem. I had it when looking for films in video rental shops. In another lifetime finding something to watch was easy. Go to Discovery Channel and find documentaries to watch. Problem solved.

And Finally

As I read The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen I thought that it should be updated for the 21st century. Instead of doing this he just wrote a few new books, one in 2018 and the second in 2020. I would purchase them but I might as well finish the book I am reading now, before getting yet another book. The Cult of the Amateur is an interesting look into what was perceived around 2007. The new books would reflect more modern visions.

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Cheapening the user experience

Byrichard

There are a great diversity of websites out there and each one has it’s own strengths. As a result of this it is not unusual for me to visit twenty to thirty websites on a daily basis, from the likes of twitter, my own website, news sites and more. What this means is that I find the tools that are best for what I want to do on a variety of websites. To each website it’s own purpose. That’s why I’m so dissapointed with what facebook has become at the moment.

In the good old days of e-mail use you would start with a clean account and every e-mail you received you wanted. As a result you might get one or two e-mails every few days but they were of interest. Over time spammers started sending their junk and this personal space was less personal space. At around the same time friends began sending chainmail, participating on “which character are you most like” and other activities. As a result of this there was a lot of static which meant more time would be wasted processing the influx of information.

This problem then came to social networking websites. One of the weaknesses of myspace was that everyone could put megabytes of junk on their pages and the website would slow down and crash certain browsers. In other situations people spam you via the bulletin boards in such way that you start to ignore them.

I thought that facebook was different. I used to view facebook as a mature online community that was about people keeping in touch with their friends. The sharing of personal images, personal videos and personal work was great. That is, until the api came along.

A I look at the daily requests on facebook I have zombies biting me, I have several application requests that do the same thing for music and more. The “questions for friends” api is one of those useless api that makes you sign into a service you don’t want to use so that you can read the question a friend wants to ask you. The “compare me to my friends” api is another annoying one. Yesterday I noticed that I was more likely than someone else to do something and I signed up for the api, unselecting all the elements that would advertise the api to those in my news feed. I wanted to see whom I had been compared to but found out that I had to answer fifty questions before being able to use the api. At this point I removed the api.

The beauty of the World Wide Web is the vast amount of specialised websites and tools that allow for the sharing of a variety of elements. If I want friends to know about my travels then I’ve got World66, website I used before going to Poland. If I want to talk about good food and restaurants then I’ll drop by Trusted Places and read what users have written. If I want to play games online then I’d go to Kraland, nainwak, travian and a number of other websites.

I see Facebook as the modern version of the phonebook where I can keep up to date with what friends are doing and where they are geographically. I enjoy the ability to see photographs and videos of what they’re doing but hate being spammed with movie trailers and other junk. I want facebook to be about my network of friends and what they’re doing in the real world. If there is too much extraneous content then I shall be looking for a less populist website. The fact that it’s been banned in certain work environments demonstrates it’s declining value as a social networking website.

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The Crosscall Odyssey Plus

Byrichard

 

The Crosscall Odyssey Plus fills two niches. It is a rugged weather proof phone rated to the IP 68 standard and is equipped with dual sim capability. This makes it ideal for the sports I enjoy, mainly via ferrata as pictured below and hiking. It comes with a smaller carabiner than the one pictured below. I swapped it for one of my own.

1030283

IP 68 is a code to determine how resistant a device is to both particulate matter and liquids. 6 denotes that the device is dust tight so particulate matter will not make it’s way in. 8 as defined by the manufacturer denotes that this device can be submerged for half an hour at 1m before damage occurs. If you get caught in the rain or have to cross a river the phone should survive.

Another interesting feature is the dual sim capability. This phone allows for two microsims to be used at once. In my case I have a Swiss sim card and a french one. Both sims are constantly active so you can select whether to make phone calls from Sim 1 or Sim 2. You can also select which sim card is using the data plan.

It runs android 4.3 and works fine with the TomTom app, the ingress and others. I found that battery life is also comfortable. With me as a user the battery lasts for a day.

more info

Experimenting with Paperless

Experimenting with Paperless

Byrichard

As I was experimenting with a Pi zero 2W I came across Paperless NG which is a simple to install app that allows you to catalogue paperwork automatically on a local machine rather than in the Tech Giant Clouds like Google, Amazon, Apple et al. It didn’t like being installed on the Pi Zero so I installed it on the Pi5 and it works well.

The aim of the app Paperless is simple. Every time you get a letter or document you can upload a photo of it, a PDF, or other form of files, and it will run OCR to read the content, establish who the correspondent is, and help to automatically catalogue your correspondences over time. In this way you get a letter, scan it, feed it to paperless, and it will keep an organised record of correspondences from this moment on.

The advantage of this app over projects like Nextcloud is that it has a specific purpose so you can use it to deal specifically with documents. The more you use it, the more intelligent it becomes, and the more practical it becomes. If you’re lazy a photo is good enough for OCR to work, and if you’re more meticulous you can scan documents and have them automatically catalogued.

And Finally

At the best of times paperwork can be boring, and at the worst of times it can be stressful. With a solution such as this you can scan documents in seconds, and OCR will take care of the rest. When it comes time to fill in tax documents everything is ready and waiting. Instead of taking hours to find bits of paper, everything is a keyword away.

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Excess Use of Network

Byrichard

Here is my daily good morning message from the ISP:
Yesterday you exceeded the daily usage limit of 500MB as referred to in our Terms and Conditions. This type of activity could have a detrimental affect on our network
unfortunately be forced to downgrade your service to a throughput limit of 56Kbs dial-up speed, for a period of 5 days.
I download over a gig a day when I’m at home on average, that’s 30 gigs a months or more.

Detrimental effect on our network: What about every time you cut me off for no reason, what about the interruption of service when I get beyond the number of hours allocated p0er month. What about the fact I have over 20 gigs of data transfer but can’t use it?

Limit to 56K, It’s already limited to that speed.
If you exceed these limits on a regular basis, we may be forced to suspend your account.
So interruption of service for no reason isn’t an interruption of service?

For users of Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications such as BearShare, Warez, Morpheus, BitTorrent, iMesh and KaZaA note the following:

Why not stop whining about this and block those services rather than destroy the rest of the services


Most P2P applications you install will usually be configured so other users can access your hard drive and share your files all of the time. This constant file transfer can degrade your computer’s performance and generate heavy traffic loads on the network, making it difficult for other users of the network to work well. The network is a shared resource and we all must use it responsibly.

Network bandwidth consumption is monitored. If your usage could possibly impact the overall performance of the network, your computer may be blocked until the situation can be discussed.

One gig a day is nothing. Two nights ago I downloaded over two gigs of podcasts within an hour without any problems suffered by the University infrastructure therefore why can’t these people cope. If they’re going to block internet access from my machine then that’s a Denial of servic although not an attack. Just sub standard.

Should you have any queries regarding this email, please contact Customer Services

Context and analysis

Diggnation is 120 megabytes per program and Nouvo by the TSR is around 80-120 megs as well. The BBC’s daily news is around 20 megabytes. This week in tech, this week in media and others are around 20 megabytes each.

Diggnation =1/5 of my daily allowance, nouvo = 1/5 as well. Twim etc are a little less but quickly saturate the amount allocated per day.

What’s more interesting is that they currently have at least 7 fibres for 100 people. If the Cern were using those fibers it would be the equivalent of at least 3.6 gigabits per second, as was tested at the 2003 Telecom world event.

7 fibers = 7 gigabits per second, at least theoretically. For 640 users that would be 10 megabits per second. compare that to the 50KB/s and you see why I’m dissatisfied with the service.

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Canyoning and a new camera

Byrichard

On Saturday I went canyoning, or as you Americans would call it Canyoneering and the adventure was fun. You suit up in 30°C heat and walk for fifteen minutes through a mountain path before going down to the river and jumping from pool to pool. The natural cooling effect of the water is welcome. As you go down the river so you get opportunities to jump from a variety of heights, from 7 meters to 11 meters. Land the wrong way and your palms may hurt.

That’s not actually the point of this post. The point of this post is to speak about how much fun it is to spend your time going down a river in such a fun and relaxing manner. The drawback is that most cameras are not waterproof. The Nexus one mobile phone for example would be afraid. You may regret bringing it along.

That’s why I have a new photo camera. It’s the Olympus Stylus Tough 8010. It’s a small drop proof waterproof camera rated to 10 meters below the surface. That means I can jump from 11 meters with it in my clothing and it should survive for me to take pictures of the next people jumping down.

In a little over a week I’ll be playing with this camera during a rafting trip so I’ll upload the pictures at that point, if i don’t end up in the lake before then.

I’ll leave you with a test gallery of pictures taken with the new camera.

[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157624545521618″]

Nanook Of The North
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Nanook Of The North

Byrichard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkW14Lu1IBo


Two days ago I watched Nanook of the North, a documentary about an Inuit man and his family. This isn’t a documentary in the conventional sense. This documentary dates back to 1922 when the Documentary film was a brand new genre. This is one of the first documentaries, if not the first. I read about it for years, until, when I was watching Northern Exposure I did a search and came across the documentary on Filmin.


No Voice Over


The documentary has no voice over because it’s a silent film. You get intertitles instead that explain what you’re seeing. For many decades the documentary genre existed hand in hand with anthropolgy, the idea that the documentary could be used to document old ways of life, fascets of life and more. Nanook of the North was an early experiment


The Setback


At first Robert Flaherty filmed when he had time during an expedition. He would take the free time he had to document the lives of the Inuit. Eventually, the rushes burned due to a fire. He had shot 70,000 feet of film, almost twelve hours of 35 mm film. Hee was left with just the edit print. He showed it around before deciding that he didn’t like it, so he reshot Nanook of the North. (source: A New History of Documentary film, Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane, p12, 2005)


The content


Nanook of the north is a series of static shots that show an inuit family living their lives. We see them at a trading post, discovering the gramophone tasting it and more. We read about the children enjoying some sweets, to excess, and then taking castor oil, and smiling. We also see a seal hunt, a walrus hunt and the trapping of a fox, among other scenes. We see some traditional forms of doing these various activities.


At the start of the documentary there is an amusing moment where the Kayak comes to shore, and you see the entire family climb out of it, including a dog.


If not for Nannok of the North then such a scene would be read or heard about, but never seen.


The Interior Igloo scene


Nanook of the North did some controversy because it was seen as setup, as not really illustrating inuit life, especially the igloo scene. It’s interessting to see how clear ice was used as a window, with the adding of a block of snow as a reflector to get more light inside. I mention this because at least two or three times we see scenes that are supposed to happen within the iglood.


Due to how cramped an igloo is, and due to the lack of light, and film stock of the time, it would have been impossible to film within the igloo, so they faked it, outdoors. It illustrates the morning ritual. At one point we read, and see, the wife chewing a shoe, to defrost it in the morning, due to the cold night freezing it over. If the Igloo scene had not been faked outdoors, then the interior layout of an igloo would have been lost. By taking a small liberty we preserve history.


Watchability


Although the film is 101 years old, at the time of the writing of this post it is still easy to watch today, and it is pleasant. It shows various moments of inuit life, without being boring. At moments it even feels more like a home video than a documentary. I found myself thinking that anyone with a family could watch it and enjoy it. It has survived the test of time.


The Man With the Movie Camera


For historical context, the Man with the Movie Camera would be shot seven years later, in 1929.


The Digital Age


One of the luxuries of the Digital Age is that many of these films have been digitised, and in so doing they have been made easier to access. When I was reading about these documentaries I had to imagine them. I had to rely on frames of the film and descriptions. Now with a quick Google or other search we can find and watch these documentaries. They may be old, and they may be part of history, but students of the genre don’t need to search through university libraries to find VHS copies of old films like I did. Within seconds you can find content that took me years, or even decades to find. Nanook of the North is a key film, so to understand documentary we must watch it.

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