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On the Pleasure of Small Machines/Laptops

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

For a while I had a mac book air and I used it for everything. I saw the mac book air as the machine to use for everything except for video editing. That’s what the mac book pro was for. Eventually I sold the Mac Book Air and then I took the MBP to an event and it was stolen and I found myself without a machine.

I regretted selling the mac book air then, because if I had kept the mac book air then I would not have taken the MBP and it would not have been stolen.

I have looked for cheap, low cost machines recently because I wanted to get a linux box to play with. As it is just to do some simple things I don’t need a top of the range machine. I came across the Acer Chromebook 311 so I decided to play with this machine.

So far I have tried chrome, gmail, the play store, and I took a few minutes to install atom.io, connect it to github and download a repository. I have not written code with this machine yet, but so far writing a blog post is fine. The machine is fast enough and the keyboard is comfortable.

The machine has twenty gigs of storage and it is connected to Google drive so I have plenty of storage. It has two USB c ports and two standard usb ports. These are one of each type on each side. Although internal storage is small it is easy to expand with external disks and drives.

In theory you can monitor aranet devices via the laptop but as my mobile phone and aranet devices are already paired it was buggy. If you pair them then I expect the interactivity to be flawless.

I chose this device for three reasons. The first is that it is the cheapest device they had. The second is that it was available the soonest. The third reason is that it is always good to have a light, portable machine, from which you can work and do things. This machine is easy to put in most bags, take to an event, use, and then return home. With a 15″ machine that is not possible. It gets heavy, fast. When my laptop was stolen a few years ago I had broken my own rule. Never take what you’re not ready to carry at all times, to a conference or event.

I am now at the end of this blog post and the keyboard was fine to type with. It’s quick and intuitive. No hunting and pecking, and few typos. This is a nice, and yet cheap machine. Better than the EEEpc and other options I played with in the past. This cheap machine is usable. I am happy with this purchase.

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Playing with NextCloud

Playing with NextCloud

Byrichard

Google, Apple and Microsoft have cloud storage solutions. So does Evernote, Kdrive and other products. The issue with all of these solutions is that they are owned by corporations. They are simple and convenient to use but at the cost of being locked in to an OS in some cases, and to corporate interests.


NextCloud is an open source alternative with hosting solutions that offer people with the choice of choosing between hosting solutions that are as local, or as remote as they want. I could choose between a German and a Dutch hosting solution. I chose [tab.cloud](https://tab.digital/) simply because they offer 8gb rather than 2gb like another solution. You can upgrade to 128 gigabytes, or to a maximum of over 500 gigabytes in the paying tiers.


You can install Nextcloud locally too. I installed it on a raspberry pi but I haven’t configured it to make it usable yet but I also installed it on a windows machine via Docker. That was quick and easy to do. I was thinking of playing with NextCloud on Linode but will do some local experimentation first. It seems intuitive and simple to use after several minutes of experimentation. That’s how quick and easy it is to get up and running.


The price for Google One is 100 CHF per year for two terabytes, and 120 CHF per year for iCloud with the same amount of storage. The price for theGoodCloud is 240 for one terabyte of data shared with five people. With Linode/Akamai the estimated cost could be 206.88 Dollars per year. The cheapest solution is Kdrive at about 60 CHF per year for two terabytes.


And Finally


Buying two terabytes of storage to keep at home costs from 63 CHF upwards. You could easily setup NextCloud on a Raspberry Pi and plug an external drive to that computer and keep it on 24/7. When you get home you could back up all the photos from that day. You would save on storage costs. One of my biggest frustrations with online storage solutions is that if you want to retrieve your data you need to spend several days downloading the data.


With a solution like NextCloud and the mobile phone app you could setup a local machine to backup all your photos. You would have the tertiary backup online but keep the pictures on your phone, the primary backup in your own home and the tertiary backup online.


I will setup a NextCloud system locally.

Google Latitude

Byrichard

Google latitude is an interesting app available at least on Nokia phones that allows you to see where your friends are according to their mobile phone. At the moment it’s limited just to your gmail friends but expand to include more.

What makes this application interesting in the near future is that as more of the early adopting friends of yours install this app you’ll see which city they’re in quite easily. If the friends are in a public space then you can get more accurate directions.

It’s an interesting application.

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Google Latitude and Automatic stalking for only your closest friends

Byrichard

logo of google latitude Google latitude is the perfect tool for anyone that works and has a life where logging into locations would be an unsightly thing to do. By that I mean that you can’t arrive at work and log into the location. It gives colleagues the impression you are not serious about your work.

Now take this same situation in a social context. You go hiking and the people around you are not necessarily as passionate about technology. They’re walking around with paper maps after all.

That’s where Google latitude comes into it’s own. Location is tracked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week every single day that your device is on.

Why am I doing this? Am I not mad? Do I not have this location information to hide, and no shame? Well of course I have things to hide and shame but with this network only your closest friends can see where you are. And they only know your current location, not your previous locations.

That’s where the service differs from foursquare, gowalla, yelp and all the others. Your location history is private. Only you have access to it.

Then why use it in the first place? Well that’s simple. It’s a lifelog that’s not broadcast. You can keep track of how much time you’ve spent at home, at work and out socialising. Once a week I get to find out whether I was at work for more than fifty hours, whether I was at home for too many hours. More importantly i get to see whether I should not be a little more active in going out, from a personal life point of view. That’s where I’m lacking at the moment. Google latitude’s dashboard will help change that.

Now, how could it improve? First of all automatic location check in. If I’m by starbucks in Geneva airport log me in if I’m seeing that network more than ten minutes. If I’m at the apple store for that amount of time log me in there. If I’m at a bar and I lose signal in that region due to poor network coverage then assume I’m in that bar.

By being automatic and private location information could be quite a bit more interesting. More to the point that data is being collected anyway by mobile operators so why not take advantage of this?

I believe this to be the future of mobile geo-location. With more android phones out there and more devices capable of multitasking this could easily become the norm.

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Two very different types of Qik videos

Byrichard

We climbed the ladder for two different reasons.

Today both a friend and I are among the top qikkers of the day. Whilst Documentally of Ourmaninside.com was in Milton Keynes getting an iphone 3g and streaming a number of videos on the experience I was filming dancers at the Geneva lake Parade. Both these events have appeal for different reasons.

We’re used to watching videos of Americans getting the iphone and doing a variety of geek events and for once we had the English experience. It’s not a very visual occurrence but at least it’s been streamed and shared. He also took the opportunity to speak about lifecast, a new way of sharing the media you generate over a day.

The Lake Parade is a very different type of event. It’s the type of event photographers and camera oeprators go to in order to get video and photographs of girls dancing to music. It’s only once a year and previous years have been better. I like the fact that I can go to the event with a phone, stream video straight to the web and all without the hassle of a camera and laptop.

I’m commenting on the latter because it’s the second time I see someone walking with a laptop in order to do some live streaming of an event whilst I’m very light. I could have shot in high definition but everyone’s doing that. What interests me is going to an event, finding some action, sharing it live as it happens and not have any real post production concerns.

In general live streaming from mobile phones is an interesting way of covering events that does not get much publicity. As a result the audiences are not as large as they could be but that will change. It’s just a matter of getting people used to the idea of webcams and live streams being more interesting than a static twenty meters from where the action is happening.

How To Block Twitter and Facebook Using The Hosts File On A Mac.

Byrichard

If we’re not learning every day then we’re wasting our time. If we’re not up to mischief every day then we’re likely to become unhappy. In light of both of these things let me give you a quick tip for blocking Twitter and Facebook.


My motivation for doing this is the following. Twitter doesn’t trust us with the retweet button so we can take a three or four week break from them. Facebook is dormant, so experimenting with them will have little effect.


The first step is to type “sudo nano /private/etc/hosts”. The Hosts file is a file that the computer uses as a DNS lookup. It is useful to tell computers on a local network where to find the intranet site, or to give IP addresses for sites or servers that do not have a human readable address.


127.0.01 is the localhost default address. So is ::1. The long one is IPV4 and the short one, ironically is IPV6.


By adding a line like 192.168.1.1 Twitter.com we are telling the computer that the URL www.twitter.com’s IP address is 192.168.1.1 which is wrong. On plenty of networks this is the wifi router. The result is that twitter will no longer load. For additional fun I decided to make www.facebook.com resolve to 20.20.10.21. The IP address was arrived at through the highly scientific process of thinking “What is today’s date, let’s use that.”


The last step is “dscacheutil -flushcache” to ensure that DNS addresses address according to the latest host file.


www.facebook.com now resolves to the wrong IP address.


For a while i was trying to think of ways to block myself from accessing these websites. I tried one website blocking plugin but it blocked access to an entire range of websites that I still wanted access to.


A more serious look at how to modify hosts files.


If for some reason one day you are unable to access a website after typing in the URL you can resolve the issue by the following:


  1. Check www.google.com or some other URL to see whether the problem is with just one site or whether it is widespread.
  2. Open terminal on a mac and ping the website that is not loading. If you see an IP address that does not look right then you can check the hosts file with the sudo command mentioned above. If you know that an IP address for a URL is wrong then you simply delete the line, save, flush the cache and then reload.


Opening the cache, modifying the file, saving it, checking that it works, reopening the file, removing the change takes seconds per manipulation.

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Using leopard as an operating system

Byrichard

Leopards are a strong animal capable of lifting animal carcasses into trees to keep their catch safe. It’s also the new Apple operating system and I purchased it. After taking about two hours to install the operating I’m quite happy with the new operating system.

Safari has had some new interactivity added. With most browsers the tabs are fixed at the top of the page and there’s not much you can do. If you’re in a playful mood then open up safari in Leopard and you can switch the tabs between each other. If you feel that one tab deserves it’s own browser window simply pull down the tab and it goes to a full size browser.

The user interface for the finder is quite a bit more fun. You’ve got coverflow for you pictures. What this means is that you can go through your pictures with no need to open iphoto and other applications. As a result the ability to be disorganised is greatly enhanced. At the same time looking at photographs and documents is quite a bit easier.

The time machine is an interesting piece of software that backs up your data every hour for 24 hours, then every day for a month and after that every week for as long as there’s space on the hard disk. If you’re on a desktop and your external hard drives are always plugged in then this is excellent. If you’re like me and you’re using a laptop the idea is not that great because the time machine is only active whilst I’m taking the time to plug in the hard drive. Setup is really easy therefore anyone with an external hard drive that mirrors the space used on their computer should be able to use it.  If you’re using an internal spare hard drive does it work the same way

Items in the dock look the same as in tiger except there is a blue dot at the moment to display the applications that are currently active. The mail application has an RSS feed of apple news, just in case you’d missed the latest. You have both to do and notes  included straight within the mail application.

The calendar has had one or two improvements of which the most useful is the pop out when you’re adding an event. In previous versions you would have to go to either side and type in additional information. With this one data input is overlayed  over the calendar greatly increasing usability.

The ichat chromakey technology is quite interesting. If you want you can choose any background you want from the database of videos and photographs you have on your laptop. Simply choose the background you want. Move out of shot and wait till it’s seen the image. When you move back into frame you’ve got whichever background you chose. It works moderatly well depending on the type of background you’re using though.

Leopard is a nice operating system with a number of new features that make it fun to try out and use. The way information is displayed is interesting and the additional features like cover flow for document browsing, time machine for backup and more are taking advantage of the fact that people’s use of the computer has progressed over the years. By being better at media browsing the operating system is more intuitive to use. So far I’m happy with it.

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