| | | | |

Tourism and Ingress

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

If you’re a geek and you like mobile phones with a data plan then ingress is for you. Over the last two days I walked 18 kilometres playing ingress and winning back the City of Nyon for the Resistance. It didn’t last long. The same evening the enlightened players destroyed my hard work. I will just have to go back and liberate the city later. I have more important tasks this weekend. Tomorrow Ingress FS Neuchatel will take place. At least twenty of us will be playing, walking around the city, looking for portals and trying to take over the city.

Staring at a phone while walking around a city may sound counterintuitive, or absolutely normal for those who still use text messaging apps or tweet. In this case though you discover details of cities that you would not notice. You notice plaques, the names of places which you always walk by but never knew about and more.

Playing the game has two parts. Attack and defence is one part and farming the second. Attack and defence are good because they don’t require much walking around. They just require having a lot of “toys” to play with. The drawback to having a lot of toys to play with is that you probably walked around like I did going from portal to portal and hacking it. You get weapons, modules, resonators and more. They are good for game play.

There is a cultural aspect to farming. Missions designed by L9 players of ingress have portals related to a certain theme. If you walk in the old town of Geneva you can follow the Calvin track, the park brunswick mission or the Geneve, around the Cathedral mission. There is a good chance that you will know some of the monuments and you will discover others. With each portal players can write a description. These descriptions can provide you with a new understanding of the places you pass by. In essence it could serve as a guide book for those who like to see things in a different light.

Similar Posts

May-21st for a twit-out, boycott of twitter

Byrichard

I’m not the only person that’s annoyed with the vast amount of downtime suffered by twitter and there is a call for an international boycott of twitter on may 21st. During that day we’ll be using other more reliable services to show that twitter is nothing without the community that makes it what it is.

Twitter has been having some serious issues over the last few weeks. It seems that the service is down almost as much as it’s active. Exaggeration or not, it’s a problem, and it seems to be worsening rather than improving. As a result, a bunch of us Twitter power users were using FriendFeed to discuss a way to hit Twitter where it hurts in order to send a message to the powers that be.

Sourc

| | |

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.

Farming In Switzerland

Farming In Switzerland

Byrichard

The Pandemic is alive and well and I am still walking around in circles. I would go for bigger, more interesting adventures but no one is publicising those events until after the fact. During a pandemic it helps to be misinformed, an alcoholic and a festival goer.


If you like real sports, like climbing, cycling, group hikes etc then you have to wait for months, or at this point, probably years, for the pandemic to end. Last year when the government made the mistake of opening too early you could believe they were silly. By making the same “mistake” again it starts to look like government policy. That leads to the obvious conclusion that at the current level of incompetence the pandemic will never end.


A tractor tending to a field with the alps in the background.


The way that countries around the world are making the same mistakes, in the same way, at the same time, is leading people to discuss whether eugenics is being experimented with. I prefer to think of it as incompetence, rather than deliberate.


Israel, England and the United States are clear indicators of what Switzerland can expect from the pandemic and yet they fail to take the lessons and warnings on board. Instead they let the situation degrade and get worse. We are now at 20+ percent of ICU beds taken up by COVID patients, out of 79 percent occupancy, according to the RTS.


The Swiss have a strange threshhold limit. They prefer for it to reach a certain critical limit. I’m impatient for the next soft lockdown, as that is when the numbers will decrease again.

| |

Why Audiovisual Content That’s Not On-Demand is Dead to Me

Byrichard

I’m online from 10-15hrs  a day on average and as a result I’m used to having everything available within a short amount of time. I also had access to a PVR with a hard disk upgrade for quite a long time. As a result of both these developments anything that is not available to me when I want to watch it goes unnoticed. That’s because “It’s an on-demand world” as was concluded in one edit I worked on for a client about the future of broadcasting.


From a young age I had quite a choice of channels. Some were French, some were Italian and others were German. That’s because it’s Geneva and you get the French tv channels as well as the Swiss national channels. That’s access to about 7 channels over the air in analog form. With Sky digital the number of channels increased from 10-30 and finally to several thousand. Recently Sky started to broadcast a greater range of international content.


The next move was the PVR. The ability to record up to three hundred hours of program content to disk from two receivers at once. If you allow for a backlog to develop then you’ve got a fake video on demand on service. That’s great. It means that when you know which programs you want to watch the machine will take care of it.


A cheap version of this is available online through platforms such as Itunes where it’s powered by RSS feeds. At the beginning you’ve got very little content as you learn more about the technology but over time you end up with over four hundred podcasts in the back catalog. That’s quite a bit of choice.


Youtube, Revver, Myspace, Dailymotion are true video-on-demand services in browser form. Each of these websites allows you to download and watch thousands of short video clips without a dedicated time. That’s great. A housemate wanted to watch some comedy so we went to youtube, downloaded, and watched a selection of programs on demand.


Of course, the next step is Joost like platforms. It’s like a television channel but you can select when it’s convenient to watch the program rather than setting your life around the program.


There are two reasons for this. The first is an increase in capacity. The second is progress in technology.  We went from having four channels to 10 times that number with Freeview and with satellite broadcasting we’ve gone from 20 channels to several thousand. We’ve also gone from one user interface, the television set with five channels to the computer, and unlimited choice. That’s why media content that is not on-demand is almost dead to me.

Threads and the Fediverse
|

Threads and the Fediverse

Byrichard

A few weeks ago I was completely opposed to Threads being connected and accepted by the Fediverse because I hated the idea of 100 million users flooding a social network with 10 million users. Now that threads has imploded I feel differently.

Now that Threads is the same size as the Frediverse, or at least closer to being the same size, the impact of the two joining up would be diminished. Now is the time when, theoretically, the impact of Threads and the Fediverse merging would be less dramatic.

Still Unwanted

[caption id="attachment_10494" align="alignnone" width="300"]A human looking a Threads, with the Fediverse visible behind. A human looking a Threads, with the Fediverse visible behind.[/caption]

Although the Fediverse and Threads could merge, and be on equal footing, for now, I still don’t want it. Facebook users have a different social media ethic than the Fediverse does. I don’t want to see posts by utilitarians, rather than human beings. I want human connections, not marketers.

The Algorithm

[caption id="attachment_10492" align="alignnone" width="300"]Threads and the Fediverse where the Fediverse is the milky way Threads and the Fediverse where the Fediverse is the milky way[/caption]

Algorithms use machine learning to read posts, assess them, and decide how to share them. The Fediverse is about sharing, and re-sharing, in chronological order. How could Threads read toots, notes, articles and more, without breaching privacy rules?

For now the Fediverse behaves according to who we follow, and what the people we follow share. With algorithms machine learning would make those decisions, destroying the chronological order of things

The question is “how can Facebook adapt to be compatible with the Fediverse?”. In theory it can’t because we’re talking about two different philosophies. One where chronology and follows are king, and the other where algorithms dictate what people see, feel and buy.

A Different Age

[caption id="attachment_10495" align="alignnone" width="300"]A hand holding threads with the Fediverse behind it A hand holding threads with the Fediverse behind it[/caption]

Although I really liked the old Twitter, and social media landscape, when it was unprofitable, that reality has vanished and now we are in the age of Influencers, clickbait, social media as addiction, and more. That’s why the thing that fascinates me the most now, is using WordPress and ClassicPress to play with the Fediverse. When they play nicely together I will be able to blog, and converse from my blog posts, without spending too much time in the Fediverse.

And Finally

Threads Posts get more likes for brands than on Twitter which illustrates why Threads is not interesting for human beings. Social media, for me, is about sharing and caring, rather than utilitarian apathy.

To summarise: Threads is a network for brands to market to people, whilst the Fedivere exists for people to converse, share, and collaborate. If the utilitarianism of Threads comes to the Fediverse, then the Fediverse will lose some of its allure.

| | |

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.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.