Super Duper Acknowledgments

SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner and Others

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

In 2007 I bought a copy of SuperDuper that I used to backup my laptops for a while. I bought the licence for fourteen GBP in 2007 and it is still valid to this day. That’s less than a GBP per year of use. The tool is simple. It allows you to backup your mac’s system disk or other drives and make them bootable when relevant. This means that you can run your laptop or desktop either from your local drive or an external drive.

Superduper

If the internal drive fails you can switch to the backup drive within seconds. Just hold option at boot, select the backup drive, and boot into your external hard drive. Continue working. The same licence now costs 27 CHF but since this is a lifetime licence it’s worth having.

Carbon Copy Cloner

I heard about Carbon Copy Cloner regularly through various podcasts, and work, so I decided to play with that backup solution but it requires you to pay for an upgrade every few years. It’s 50 CHF now, to buy for the current version, and half off for the next version. I stopped using Carbon Copy Cloner around 2017 or so because MacOS changed to APFS and broke backup solutions. At this point we had to switch back to slow and clunky Time Machine.

The issue with apps today is that they’re built on the ‘pay yearly’ and ‘pay monthly’ model, which both makes sense, and makes no sense. It makes sense that in the age of incremental upgrades we would pay constantly to have apps updated but at the same time this constant paying for apps becomes expensive.

Apps are Expensive

For a long time I would download a dozen or more apps per week from the iOS app, to play with, and enjoy. Over time every single app began to cost 27 CHF per year or more. At this point a dozen apps at 27 CHF per year comes to 324 CHF per year. This is too expensive. It’s good for Apple but awful for users. The worst thing about paying per year is that the companies that are charging are not even making enough to survive, so we’re paying for nothing. Apple benefits but we, and developers, just pay through the nose, just to exist.

And Finally

I am grateful to Shirt Pocket, the company behind SuperDuper for updating the app and allowing us to use it for over a decade without having to pay a yearly upgrade fee. Paradoxically they thanked me too, in their aknowledgements too. If you’re looking for an affordable bootable system disk backup solution then I would still recommend them today.

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Ingress Walks – A 12km path to Level 13

Byrichard

I stopped playing Ingress a few years ago because of how much time it requires. I have started going on Ingress walks again – a 12km path to level 13 in yesterday’s case, because I’m combining the daily walk that I would do anyway, with listening to podcasts and audiobooks, anyway.


By walking and listening to audiobooks and podcasts I am constantly learning about new things. Recently I’ve been listening to current affairs podcasts, I listened to 13 minutes to the moon, I listened to podcasts about the Swiss Watch Industry and more. Every walk is a journey in learning. I also learn about the fifty objects that made the world and more.



I also listen to books when I walk. These aren’t the most inspiring of books but four of them were free, as part of the books I get by being an audible member via Audible originals. Every walk I go on is an opportunity to learn, without feeling that I am not as productive as I could be.


According to my blog stats, I should have lead with writing about the game Ingress, which I took a break from for years, because of how much time it takes to level up, especially when you live in the countryside.


Luckily as time has progressed so has the ability to suggest and have new portals approved. A 12-kilometre walk had three or four portals. Now it has twenty or thirty. This means that during a walk in the countryside it is worth playing Ingress. Going to a polluted city is no longer required. Even country bumpkins like me can play and progress.


By having portals in the countryside it also opens up the prospect of Ingress bike rides. Last week I cycled from Nyon to Rolle, and from Rolle I went up into the vineyards and I destroyed and captured portals. My health benefited because it was a 40km bike ride with four hundred meters of climbing in between vineyards and some of these climbs are steep.


That’s where you see that cycling in Spain has its advantages. I cycled up steep inclines without suffering or worrying I wouldn’t make it. I also cycled up those steep inclines clipped in. I don’t feel comfortable with cycling up steep hills when clipped in because I’m afraid that if I lose power in my legs I will lose forward momentum, not be able to unclip and fall.


Having said this the swiss hills are nothing compared to the Cumbre Del Sol climb. As you cycle up from Mercadona there is one bit of road that is so steep that you can’t start up again. I know because I made the mistake of stopping there and had to walk a hundred meters or so before I found a portion flat enough to start up again.


In Switzerland, you almost never find such gradients on roads, for the simple reason that it snows and water freezes. Snowploughs and other machines need to go up and down Swiss roads.


The graph shows my Ingress progression from 2015 to today.


To get to level 13 I participated in an Ingress Saturday for the first time in years and I participated in two fielding events, to get one of the medals I was lacking the first time, and for the Didact Field Challenge medal currently taking place.


This month I visited 735 unique portals, discovered one portal, collected 4.7 million XM, walked 117 kilometres (low because most of my walking is without playing ingress) and more. I could bore you with the stats but I’d bore myself too. I also spent three weeks in Geneva as part of a favour for a friend so during my daily walks I got back in the habit of playing Ingress.


I don’t make time to play Ingress. I take advantage that my walks and bike rides take me by Ingress portals and play. By combining Ingress with cycling I go down many more roads than I would otherwise go down. I explore villages that I have no reason to stop in. I treat cycling as a journey, rather than a challenge to get segment personal records. I slow down., to experience the locations. It results in me having a more relaxed bike ride.


Ingress walks are also interesting because local people, who know about features that could be portals suggest them, and as a result, we see a portal off to the side of where we’re going, and we investigate. We capture the portal but we also increase our mental map of the area where we are walking.


Ingress, for a while, was a game for people who lived in town and cities. If you lived in the countryside you had to make time to play. Today Ingress can be played in short bursts and yield better results. It has been from a “chronophage” (waste of time/time consuming)activity, as french speakers would call it, to being, for lack of a better word, integral to our daily activities.


The Return on Investment of time, and distance traveled, to play Ingress, even in the countryside has decreased to the point where it is feasible to level up, without devoting half a day. One hour yields the same result.

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The Modern phonebook

Byrichard

Recently I have been trying to categorise websites and how they are used into single words. To this end I have recently started to view facebook as a self actualising phonebook. There are a number of factors which help to contribute to this feeling. One of these is the ability for me to add all “real life” friends without adding any “virtual friends” – friends I do not know in person. In so doing it limits the number of people in my contact list to those I have talked to in person at least once, but occasionally spanning two decades or more.

What is great about facebook is that those you have not seen in a decade are once more part of your daily life. I look at what people are posting and I know they’re in a number of countries. I can see which are their favourite films, whether they have recently travelled, whether relationships have crashed and burned or more. I can also see what they’re up to.

Twice in the last week I have noticed events put on by friends. One event was by friends whom are part of my University of Westminster days whilst others are from when i was a Bournemouth University student (albeit in Weymouh an hour away). When I went to the Westminster event I recognised quite a few faces since they are part of my recent history. It allowed me to meet new people and one comment was interesting. The girl who organised the event commented that most of these people did not know any others. She was the degree of seperation between all of us. As the night progressed so the links would strengthen and people who had been strangers just a few hours before would become familiar once again.

The next day saw me going to another facebook event but this time with people I had not seen for half a decade. By taking a look at the newsfeed in facebook I could catch up with these people. I saw that one friend was having their birthday that night and that another friend from the same time period was also going to be there. Looking through the photo stream I could see what the latest adventure had been. If people think that it’s important to mention something then it’s easy for you to notice and aknowledge this once you meet them next time.

When  you think of a phonebook you usually associate a limted amount of details like phone number, address, business and address. Facebook gives these details but it also gives us so much more. It’s a great tool for those of us who are mobile and willing to travel.

There are three contributing factors which help make facebook popular; the first of these is mobility, the second is international travel and the last is broadband.  The first two factors are related. I am thinking about the distance and time it takes to get from where you live to where the friend lives. If you’re in North London and your friend is in North London then it’s easier to keep in touch via the facebook newsfeed than to commute over an hour to see that individual. At the same time as more of us have international groups of friends so the cost of phone calls and ability to see how friends regularly declines. We need technology that allows us to keep up to date with friends and that’s why we need the enhanced phonebook. Broadband is the enabling technology.

There is a lot of information. Imagine taking two hundred pictures of an event where twenty of your friends are. If you have to mail each of these to each friend then this is going to take a lot of time and effort. Facebook allows you to do this without hinking about it, hence keeping friends you may not see frequently current to the life you are currently leading.  In effect the more open your network of friends are the easier it is to remain up to date with current developments.  At this moment in time Facebook is one of the best adapted to these needs

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Google Arts & Culture

Byrichard

Google Arts & Culture App

Google Arts & Culture is an app that allows people to look at Arts and culture from around the world easily and intuitively.

This app allows you to learn more about arts and culture based on your current location as well as by topic, art medium and more. With this app, you can look at 360 images of monuments and locations. You can also zoom into artworks. When we were teenagers we studied the history of art. We looked at artworks in books and in documentaries. We then went to Florence and saw some of these artworks in person. We saw Michelangelo’s Statue of David and more. As children in Europe, we went to Pompei, to the Vatican museums and many other locations. When you walk in the Sistine chapel you see this art in context and you see how large it is.

This app, by Google allows you to do the same thing. It allows you to study art from your phone as you commute or as you queue or do other things. In effect it helps to educate and inform us about Art and culture. We are no longer restricted to small pictures in arts books.

Google Arts & Culture Experiments.

Google Arts & Culture Experiments is looking at ways in which to present arts & Culture in new and interesting ways. It uses VR, machine learning and other technology to establish connections between works of art and more. It teaches people about the context of art.

We Wear Culture

Our culture is also reflected in the clothes we wear as well as the wearable technology we use. By wearing event t-shirts we tell people about culture. People wear band t-shirts with tour year and destination information and others wear t-shirts for film festivals, World VR forums and more. In this region of Switzerland you often see people with Paléo t-shirts from the years when they worked as volunteers.

Wearable culture is also reflected through the fitness tracker we wear, whether it’s a smartwatch, a step counter, breathing sensor or more. Google’s WeWearCulture project brings attention to the cultural significance of what we wear as well as provides context.

 

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There Are Two Parts To The World Wide Web

Byrichard

the future of the web

the search engine was the king, now it’s social networking.

People had their own home page, now it’s grown to their own website. The blog was grown and grown, replacing webrings

to be developed

For several years the search engine was king. This was the place where everyone went to find content because all the information was so disorganised. Recently though this has changed. The way people use the world wide web has evolved. Whereas people in the past would create just one webpage with a little content people are now creating entire websites.

These websites are not websites  in the sense that they were back in the late nineties, rather they are profiles. It used to be that you’d create a static HTML page that would need to be updated manually through the hot metal code. With CGI-bin and later technologies, the nature of the homepage has changed.

Remember Geocities? It’s been replaced by myspace. Remember the discussion about web portals and yahoo and google were trying to corner the market to get the highest audience. That has changed. Look at Digg, Facebook, Bebo, twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. All of these websites are about one thing. Community. They are only interesting as long as your friends are members; no friends means no way of using it. I was a member of myspace for months before anyone I knew joined and by the time had joined I re-created a profile having forgotten the other profile.

It’s the same with Facebook. I joined it a few months before anyone from my environment started using it but recently everyone has started using Facebook to communicate. Not just this, they’re also uploading their lives to the web. So am I. There are two issues that are interesting to look at. For anyone wanting to do a dissertation why not look at the changing nature of privacy with the rise of the social networking website. When I was studying for my HND privacy was key and release forms were essential. Now it’s as though everyone is a publisher and the nature of privacy has changed. It goes along the lines of “Don’t upload anything too compromising or embarrassing”. Your network of friends can see everything. Friends from your high school days can see all your university friends and vice versa.

This promotes the expansion of social circles. Whereas in the past networks of friends were mutually exclusive due to location they are joined online. Take some videos of when you’re at a party in Switzerland and those in England can see it, and so can their friends if you so choose. It’s a shame you can’t select for only one network to see videos rather than others, for example, only London friends can see the London videos and Switzerland friends can see those. It would make uploading certain videos possible.

Anyway, the web has become personal. Within the last 6 months or so I’ve seen the web go from being about avatars and nicknames to being about real names and real networks. It’s about bringing the offline world online and vice versa. This is where I believe for there to have been a shift in perception of what the web is for. Almost everyone I know and see regularly is now on Facebook. It’s amusing to see how it’s become mainstream.

It’s as though Facebook has become a portal although not in the 1998 sense of the word. There is a new part of the internet. If you imagine the web to be like drupal then imagine that Yahoo and Geocities are the old gateways to the World Wide Web whilst various social networking websites are a new ad important portal with one major difference. These portals aggregate and distribute your content to your friends around the world. You’re no longer going online for research. You’re going online because you’re socialising. It’s replaced, at least partially, socialising in the real world whilst nonetheless providing a great way of sharing content. Both “user-generated” and “interactive” have become keywords in describing what the web is today.

In summary, whereas two or three years ago the Web was somewhere people came to find information for future use the web has evolved into an interactive user-generated medium. As a result of this, I think the world wide web has added another node to what purposes it serves.

Web 1.0: static and hard to interact anonymously vs web 2.0: highly interactive user-generated content where real names are now used, especially in places like Facebook.

ClassicPress and the Fediverse part deux
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ClassicPress and the Fediverse part deux

Byrichard

After my first post about playing with ClassicPress and the Fediverse it was suggested that I try the nightly build of ClassicPress so I did. The result can be seen here.

Mastodon and Firefish

I have tested integration with the fediverse via Mastodon.social but also firefish.social and mastodon.social is faster, but mastodon.social eventually catches up. I tried posting a blog post, and commenting on blog posts and it works although not instantly. You need to wait for the changes to be propagated to where they are needed.

A change in tact

Initially I was going to try using a different domain but I struggled with getting the SSL certificates to work so I decided to create the subdomain ClassicPress.main-vision.com for ClassicPress tests and blog.main-vision.com for WordPress. In the case of ClassicPress I wanted to be able to play around, without making too much noise with my daily blog.

With the WordPress blog I wanted to test whether the webfinger json file for individual users would work, and it does, at least partially. When I looked up the usernames on webfinger it did show the users, but mastodon and Firefish do not detect them.

ClassicPress and WordPress Are Viable Options

I spent most of yesterday playing around with the two, and seeing if ideas worked, and so far the answer is “yes, if you’re patient” but that’s because the idea is still relatively new so progress has to be made. WordPress does work well, and ClassicPress is close behind. If you write a post, and check for comments the next day, then it works fine.

Sub-Domains count

The other question was whether it had to be example.com or whether subdomain.example.com would work and the answer is that subdomains work. If your blog instance is two or three subdirectories deep, then subdomains are a good alternative to manually generating webfinger files.

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