I’m still playing with trendio and I’ve had a nice increase over the past week with the stock value. It’s not monetary but I have finally started to make some “profit”. It’s gone up by 16 percent in a week.
I need to keep it increasing more so I need to keep watching to see which are the best words to get.
Several years ago I broke my most important rule. Never take a laptop with you that you are not willing to carry at all times. I had a Mac Book Pro stolen and this was extremely frustrating. The reason for which it was frustrating is that this Mac Book from still had normal USB ports, an SD card reader and more. New Mac Book Pros have four USB-3/Thunderbolt 3 connectors.
Some people love this, because it’s smaller, lighter, and faster but I hated the move because it meant that all my hard drives needed a dongle to work. All my charging cables for watches, cameras and more needed a dongle to work. You need a dongle for a wired connection and you simply always need a dongle. What’s worse is that you don’t need one dongle. You need two or three, or more.
You need to keep track of the dongles. Sometimes they’re in one room, or drawer, and if you use them every few days or weeks they like to vanish so that instead of just plugging in a device you need to find the dongle, plug the USB cable to the dongle and the dongle to the laptop.
Yesterday I plugged in a USB C drive to one port, and a USB C flat adaptor drive to the apple dongle with the other. The transfer speed was much faster but I didn’t test whether the difference was due to the dongle I was using, the Apple dedicated USB dongle or the other third party option for most drives.
I should do a read/write speed test with both dongles to see if there is a difference between dongles, or I’m using slow, old drives. As I write this I’m transferring 900 gigabytes from one drive to another and it will take “about 4 hours”.
Linux reads Mac OS Journaled and APFS drives when configured. Instead of blocking a mac in time and space ato run for hours it makes sense for a Pi to do this chore. A Pi is not fast. It doesn’t matter if you’re moving files from an APFS volume to an ExFat or Ext4 drive.
Over the years I have had USB A, B and C devices with various adapters. I have also had Firewire 400 and 800 drives, as well as Thunderbolt 2. The firewire drives and Thunderbolt two drives become unusable due to the move away from one standard to another. Luckily drives often come with two or three standards, and the aim should be to migrate from old drives to new drives every few years. Old drives can be backups, and new drives can be the working, drives, until they are retired to backup status in turn.
In the good old days I would plug my drives straight into the computer and move data between drives. Now that I need to go from drive, to USB-C cable to dongle, to computer, between two or more drives I find that transfer speeds are very slow and I suspect that it’s the third party USB-C dongle that is slowing things down. Tomorrow I can recover my second dongle and test to see whether my suspicion is correct or not.
Glympse is a real time location software that allows you to share your location with twitter, facebook, by e-mail or via a number of other social networks. It is simple and intuitive to use. Connect your facebook, twitter and other services with the application. When you are heading to work or to the mountains for a ski trip you can start to share your location in real time. You can set the amount of time that the location is shared.
This is better than google latitude, foursquare and other services because it requires nothing from the receiver of this location sharing offer. Instead they simply click a link and they are kept up to date with your location progress.
The flexibility of this service gives the user good control therefore fearing for your privacy is not so relevant.
What I would like to see in future versions is the ability to play back the route we have taken. I would like to playback the train trip from one city in Switzerland for example.
The fake Steve Jobs linked to this video before writing a short commentary.
 “Phone Bill Girl and one of her fellow Ph.D. candidates are discussing the work of Roland Barthes and narrative theory in the context of Derrida and Chomsky, with a deftly handled digression into the recurring sexism of Norman Mailer’s work”
I have no idea where the inspiration for the video came from but the little remark is amusing. Fake Steve’s comment is about citizen journalism and by referencing Ijustine’s video he brings a satirical look at the question. In effect we hear so much about problems with accuracy and mis-information that this video is a nice break. it’s satirizing the idea of citizen journalism.
“Somewhere in heaven, Marshall McLuhan is weeping. Either that or laughing his ass off.”Â
This comment is particularly relevant to the quote I used two or three days ago.
…makes each of us present and accessible to every other person in the world. To a large degree our co-presence everywhere at once in the electric age is a fact of passive, rather than active, experience.
Marshall McLuhan wrote that last comment fourty three years ago and today it’s a reality, but not as he envisaged it. The video of Justine having a little fun with a friend is a perfect representation of what the Web has become. Having spent some time researching the Operator 11 movement I have been surprised to find that people are video chatting to each other in a public place. Some of them are without shirts, others have a glass or a bottle next to them and yet more are falling asleep.
People are living their lives online. They’re going out to meet friends but they’re also social from the comfort of home. Looking at what several people have done on operatr 11 I found myself thinking that this is beavis and butthead web 2.0. The reason behind this thought is the nature of the programs. Users like Rubberbangirl start a “show” and users connect to the stream and comment both in video and through the text chat. As they do so we get a sense of community and well being. Anyone anywhere in the world can participate at any time of day and McLuhan’s thoughts are getting more concrete with every day that passes.
At this moment in time Justine and other participants of Justin.tv are walking with the cameras life casting their lives. At the same time hundreds of people are sitting behind their computer screens at home watching as a number of lives occur in real life. Within a few months I expect that we’ll see these streams straight to mobile phones so that as one person lives and broadcasts their life so someone else is living their life as they watch another.
We’re living in the digital/electric age where everyone can talk to everyone else. Whilst Fake Steve is having fun in his way so we see a little snippet of how Justine has her own fun. Neither of them is write or wrong. They’re reflections of trends that are active. The only difference is that whereas Fake Steve and Justine have a high profile so most users are still relatively anonymous.
I like casual gaming. I like to play games on the iPhone when commuting or waiting for something to happen. The problem is that casual gaming is about seeing adverts at the end of every puzzle or challenge. For every game of solitaire, every game of Woodoku and more games, you see adverts.
The problem with these adverts is that they’re awful, and they’re for games that are all paid for by adverts rather than by people who enjoy the games enough, to actually pay for the game.
Clash of Clans Etc.
I played Clash of Clans and Hay Day for what could be years, until finally I reached a level where the game became unplayable. Everything takes hours to do, unless you pay to play, but if you pay to win you end up in a never ending cycle that could cost thousands of francs, for nothing.
Hay Day and Clash of Clans are games that you can play, without spending any money, and without seeing ads, if you choose not to.
The Watch Ads to Play Games
Tap Away, Woodoku, Stormshot, Solitaire and others require you to watch adverts after every game, whether you win or lose. They show adverts to other crappy games that also require you to watch crappy adverts for other crappy games in the same series and game style. If they spent time and money on making good, engaging games, they could ask those playing their games to pay for an ad free experience.
The games are designed to give you just enough reward to play, watch an advert, play watch an advert, play watch an advert. With games like woodoku it feels as if they are deliberately making you lose, to watch adverts. The game feels dishonest, especially since it uses the tetris shapes, without allowing you to flip the shapes to flip the appropriate gaps.
There is a reason for such crappy games requiring us to pay, or to watch adverts. Cloud services. The game interacts with cloud services. Cloud services cost money, so we are paying for a crappy game, via crappy adverts, when, if the game was available offline, there would be no need for such high server costs in the first place.
It is a shame that so many iOS games are so awful. It’s a shame that they don’t produce high value games that we can play, and pay for.
Diminishing Returns
There was a time when every search you did with Ecosia was enough to plant a tree, but as more people used their search engine, so it began to cost more and more requests, to plant a single tree. That’s because the more ads we see, the less value our seeing an ad has. With the “watch ads to play games” model we’re watching ads, but our time is being wasted, and the revenue that is generated from us seeing a single ad is dropping. They are devaluing ads, by forcing us to see so many. If we play five games we might see five or more ads. We see ads for games with the same design flaw.
And Finally
What really bothers me is that the games feel as if they were designed to show people adverts, rather than to provide people with a good gaming experience. It feels as if the game makers are simply producing several dozen games, and attempting to hook people, to watch the maximum number of ads.
This morning rather than use the phone, check twitter, look at Facebook, or look at Instagram I took one of my two e-book readers. I have a Kobo and a Kindle device. I have both because I don’t want to lose all of my books if one company goes out of business.
Twitter and Facebook are filled with pushed content that we are not interested in. When we’re browsing our timelines it used to be to see what friends were doing or thinking about. For months now it has been re-shares and other impersonal content.
Twitter recently expanded the character limit and with this move, they also added threading, things that we had right from the start with Jaiku. I wouldn’t mind threading if it was designed in the way that forums had threading. Instead of writing a threaded tweet sequence why not take fifteen minutes to half an hour and write a blog post? With a blog post, you immediately say “I want to be verbose about what I’m thinking about”. It is also an opportunity for us to take back our right to the content we create because the adverts beside our content generate revenue for us.
Instagram is the latest “social network” to increase the amount of noise we get in our streams. They show images from strangers and companies instead of content from our friends. They also start to push hashtags to encourage us to follow topics rather than acquaintances.
Facebook,
The Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) that we felt in the past has been replaced by NAGO. ;-). We’re being nagged to follow specific accounts. Specific accounts post the same content in the morning and the afternoon, sometimes multiple days in a row. In so doing we have no compulsion to check our feeds.
We can dedicate hours to reading a book without interruption. We can leave aside our mobile phones and pick up the e-reader knowing that we are not missing out by not checking our feeds.
