Data speed record broken with existing copper wire

One of the big problems we are having these days is that our Internet speeds simply aren't fast enough. If the extent of your Internet usage is reading webpages and checking email then it likely is, but anything beyond that and you've probably said to yourself 'this connection is slow.' Slow connections can manifest in many ways including blurry video, slow file downloads, long page-load times, and others. Not only that, even if you have a fast connection, many, many other aspects can affect your speeds. Speed of the transmitter, conditions on the network, type of conduit, and so on.
Cable companies offer tiered packages, but do you really get faster speeds? You might, but as any cable company will have written in their agreement with you, those advertised speeds are not guaranteed.

Coupled with the fact that the U.S. lags woefully behind many other countries for high-speed Internet access and the much-vilified potential merger of not just the two largest cable companies in the country but the two most hated as well - Time-Warner and Comcast - the future doesn't look good. (Below graphic from gottabemobile.com)

 

That was the U.S.'s ranking in 2013 for average Internet speed.

But there are some bright spots. Google has been laying down superfast fiber in some cities, and some regional ISPs are doing the same even while those cities try desperately, and I mean desperately, to stop it. Even CenturyLink offers high-speed fiber in some areas of North Las Vegas. Traditional cable companies are scared.

The big problem with fiber is it requires a whole rebuilding of the network infrastructure, ripping up roads, yards, and utilities, putting new hardware in place: The cost for Google alone could rise into the billions, with the cost of a country-wide revamp costing much, much more. And even with fiber, the wire that actually goes into your house, known as the last mile, is still copper although similar advancements have been made there as well.

 

Copper wire. Faster than we all thought.

But there may be hope for us all yet, and perhaps a hidden respite for the beleaguered cable companies. Researchers at Bell Labs managed to create record-breaking speeds of 10 Gigabits per second across plain old copper wire (press release from Alcatel-Lucent at this link). That's crushingly fast, especially since most of us deal with speed in the Megabits per second, and even fiber provides around 1 Gigabit per second. In other words, it's one thousand times faster than what most of us deal with right now.

If a technology like this could be deployed, it could be a huge boon. Existing infrastructure could be used, costs could be kept down, availability of fast broadband could be accessible to almost everyone, streets wouldn't need to be ripped up, and the U.S. could hopefully not be in the embarrassing position of having such poor broadband access. On the other hand, this was a lab experiment, and the L:R ratio (lab-to-reality ratio, a term I just made up) can be years for this kind of thing. Still, it's a promising development.

Using Bing to test a new method for creating animated gifs

If you’re unfamiliar with GIMP, a little background: It’s an open-source, and free, photo-editing and image-manipulation tool with capabilities similar to Photoshop, although not necessarily with the same usability. It’s not impossible to use, but there’s a steep learning curve. That’s an image of the GIMP environment below: 

 

 

Anyway, I learned there was a plugin for GIMP called the Gimp Animation Package that allows for the creation of animated GIFs from a video, so I thought I’d give it a try. An animated gif is a file that is actually animated; made up of multiple images that run one after the other, like a flipbook animation. GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format, and it used to be used mainly for images like clipart and small photos because it can only display 256 colors and compresses photos like crazy to maintain a small file size. CompuServe introduced the format in the late 80s when sending large image files over phone lines was not practical. Recently, however, there have been HD GIFS and even a huge debate on how the acronym is actually pronounced. There are whole pages dedicated to the pronunciation debate, with the developer of the GIF himself saying it’s pronounced ‘jiff.’ He’s wrong, of course.

I brought up the Bing homepage animation from Friday, loaded up screen-recording software called Action! that I’m testing, and recorded one animation loop off the webpage. Then I loaded the video into GIMP, converted it to a series of individual frames, and exported those separate frames as a single GIF image. It wasn’t easy; I used this site to step me through the process, and even their instructions didn’t match up perfectly with what I had on my screen.

But I’m impressed with the result, that’s it below – my first animated gif ever. It’s a huge file; 800 pixels wide and 11 megabytes, but I kept it big for the purposes of the test, and so I could see it. It’s unlikely to run very smoothly in your browser, however. It also doesn't glitch over on the WordPress version of this site, only here on Blogger for some reason.

The result of my animation experimentation

All of the software I used to create it is available as a free download and I have provided links in the post where appropriate. If you would like to experiment and see what you can do then I would encourage that. If you create something you’re proud of, send it to me! I’ll make a post showing off your creations.

Can you go 99 days without Facebook? Also, Why I Deactivated My Account and the Posts That Made Me Do It.

(Equally long Wordpress site here)

This is long. I’m just warning you ahead of time that this is long. In fact, I’ve been working on it for a few days. I think it might be getting longer on its own – I’ve created the first living, breathing post. Bow down to your new overlord!

So, apparently Facebook is pretty popular. Over 1 billion users. The determinant of whether you are cool or uncool. The ability to affect your mood. Something known as Facebook Stalking. Academics using it for sneaky research. People all over the world, and even all over time, connecting. What I wouldn’t give to see how Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, whose 158th birthday is today (or July 10th for those reading later), would have argued over who invented what on Facebook. It would have been glorious.

Now, in response to the previously linked-to article about the social experiment Facebook was complicit in running, in which posts were selectively presented to affect users’ moods, there is a new movement that is asking people to leave Facebook for 99 days and see how they feel. Called ‘99 Days of Freedom,’ participants will be surveyed at equal intervals in their absence to see how their moods, and lives, have been affected. After all, some are saying Facebook makes you sad, so it makes sense giving it up for a while would have the opposite effect, right?

Could you go for 99 days without Facebook? It’s like the phone question I asked in the first class. If you feel you can, sign up at their site and keep us informed of your progress. Sadly, only about 4,000 people have signed up thus far.

 

I was on Facebook for a little while. Not too long, and I was a serious latecomer, only signing up in, perhaps, 2011. Even then, I only did it at the behest of my now ex, who – just to add to my points above – claimed a relationship couldn’t be considered official until it was something known as “Facebook Official.” I didn’t know what that meant, but everyone else I knew was on it, they were all talking about how great it was, so I figured this was as good a reason as any to jump in to the fray.
Almost immediately I started getting friend requests. And not just from my regular friends, but from people I hadn’t seen in years. Sometimes many, many, MANY years. People from other countries I knew from my youth, my piano teacher when I was a kid, high school buddies, it was exciting.

 

I made my first post with but a little trepidation, as I wasn’t familiar with this new social medium, but everyone who knew me knew me, and I assume knew the types of post I would make, and it went over well. Acceptance! That was quite nice too. I’d make posts about music, and random things that struck me, I’d read with interest what other people were up to, even administered a page with 500 followers that displayed incredible photographs of spiders. Over the couple of years I was a member, many interesting social experiences happened. I participated in a distant kind of way in weddings and even a funeral. Four of my exes, spanning the years from high school to college and all long since married sent friend requests, as did people I barely knew, or didn’t know at all (but they knew me). An old friend who lived in Sweden that I hadn’t seen or spoken with since I stayed with his family for a summer in 1983 sent a friend request, saying he had been looking everywhere for me, then never contacted me again. I watched a married couple I know have Facebook conversations with each other when they were clearly in the very same room. And that’s when it started to happen.

I became disenchanted. What was once a fun, interesting place to be where friends would share vacation and wedding photos and make posts about things that were interesting and fun to read about began to morph into a place that was not what it once was. Instead of a broad range of posts, I would see the same types of posts over and over, and they weren’t interesting, they were…irritating. This isn’t a condemnation of my friends (for the most part), but rather an effect of the medium; It doesn’t encourage deep, thoughtful conversation or meaningful debate, I’m of the opinion it actually discourages it. After a while, I had had enough, I was becoming agitated when I would log on because of the posts I was seeing, not entertained or enraptured, and it was then I knew I had to do it.

It was in March of this year that I deactivated my Facebook account, although since I didn’t delete it outright if I log back in it will apparently all come back. There were doubts; Facebook is so popular that I wonder if I have missed out on someone who is trying to find me, although I have a LinkedIn account they could find. Honestly, LinkedIn is no better, it’s the same inanity couched in the thin veil of professional networking, as opposed to Facebook’s social networking. I even had someone I used to know contact me through LinkedIn, tell me how excited they were to have finally found me, then never responded to my response, just like what happened on Facebook. Maybe it’s me.

Perhaps.

Anyway, I realized that part of the problem is that there were really only about ten different kinds of posts/posters I was seeing, the variety that used to be there was gone. Occasionally there would be a gem among the nonsense, but it was rare. So I have decided, for cathartic as well as informative reasons, to share with you my take on the most common types of posts and posters I saw. These had to make up at least 90 percent of everything that came across my feed. They may not apply to everyone, they may simply be a result of the type of people I know, but that made them no less aggravating.

Here we go:

The Foursquare Check-In

 

Foursquare, apparently, allows you to check in at a location so friends know where you are. But does anyone really care? I’d see them all the time: “So-and-so is with their husband/wife/Significant other/dog/cat/religious leader/function/whatever.” Do people actually see that and say “Hey, so-and-so is there, let’s go there too and interrupt them!” Why would you want people to know where you are all the time? Isn’t one of the privileges of adulthood *not* having to do that? One person would make these Foursquare posts ten times a day, letting us know every movie/restaurant/retail store/dog park/wedding/whatever else they were doing at all times. All it told me is they weren’t home and their house was unprotected. Thanks, that’s good to know.

The “One-like-equals-one-prayer” post

 

This might be not only one of the most offensive types of posts that can be made, but one of the most offensive things I’ve ever seen. A picture will be posted of someone suffering from a terrible disease, and the poster will have the audacity to claim that if you ‘Like’ the post that is the equivalent of one prayer, and if you ‘Share’ the post, that is the equivalent of ten prayers.

Everything is wrong with this, and nothing is right. First of all, who designated these quantities? What authority came up with these numbers? Why is one ‘Like’ not two prayers? Or four? or one hundred? Same for shares. Also, is this really implying that G-d himself is sitting up there somewhere allocating prayer reserves based on Facebook interaction? Is it implying there may be some hope for a terminal disease if enough people just ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ hard enough?

The intention behind these posts may be genuine, but the result is nauseating.

The self-promotion flood

 

One of my friends plays in a band. A good band. Another friend plays in the same good band. I liked the band page to be supportive. The problem was, when there was a gig, or after a gig, all the members would blast each other with “Awesome gig dudes!” and “We were tearin’ it up at Vamp’d tonight!” and post tons of pictures and that kind of thing. The problem was, they’d all share each others posts and soon my wall was flooded with 75 copies of the same pictures, the same posts and the same people over and over. I didn’t want to block them completely, but when these happened Facebook was almost unusable. It was like being at one of their shows.

The deliberately vague plea for sympathy

 

These were the first types of posts that really started getting under my skin. This is the post that clearly lets EVERYONE  know something is wrong, yet provides exactly no information. Posts like “Well this sucks” or “I guess it’s all happening again” or “Could it get any worse?” Instead of simply confessing the problem, this type of posts begs you to respond and shower pity on the poster. You’re supposed to say things like “Oh no, what’s wrong?” and “Is there anything I can do to help?” and “I’m here for you!”

These bug me because they’re asking for expressions of generic pity. If something is wrong, say it. I don’t mean to sound like a heartless jackass, if someone needs my support I will be right there for them. I am very aware that a support structure is the most important thing anyone can have in a time of crisis, but you need to tell me what’s happening, don’t require me to deduce the situation. If you tell me what’s wrong I can help; if you don’t, I can’t.

It’s like the person who runs up to you completely agitated saying “Oh god, oh god, this is terrible” and when you ask them what’s wrong they say “I can’t talk about it right now!”

The “Please Like and Share!” posts

 

Don’t tell me what to do with your post. First of all, the concept of Facebook ‘Likes’ rubs me the wrong way. Saying “Like my page” or “Like me on Facebook” sounds SO pleading and desperate I don’t even ‘Like’ the use of the word ‘Like.’ I dislike ‘Like.’ I’m also not sure why I keep putting the word ‘Like’ in quotes. Or capitalizing it. I don’t ‘Like’ that.

So when a post wouldn’t just make its point but also ask me to “Please Like and Share!” I immediately didn’t want to. The post is on Facebook, that’s what people do. They ‘Like’ and they Share. You don’t need to make a pathetic plea for validation. If I like it, I’ll ‘Like’ it, and if I want others to see it, I’ll share it. But if I don’t think it warrants either of those, or even one but not the other, I’ll take care of it.

I don’t ‘Like’ those.

The Drinker

 

All this person does is make posts about alcohol. Where they’re drinking, what they’re drinking, why they’re drinking, where they’ll be drinking next, where they were drinking before they were drinking, where they’ll be drinking tomorrow, who they are drinking with, where they were drinking yesterday, where they’d rather be drinking, what they’d rather be drinking, who they’d rather be drinking with, why aren’t you drinking with them, drinking is awesome, they can’t wait to start drinking.

And now they’re hungover. There’s a pot and sports version of this person as well. In fairness to them, I don’t drink, use drugs or follow sports and never have, so maybe I’m just missing the point.

The out-of-nowhere (or phony) sorrow

 

It’s always sad when someone passes away, even the posts about animals moving on to the great beyond are heart wrenching. However, when a person who used to play a bit-part in a 70′s sitcom passes away, while I don’t get any joy from it, I wonder why some people seem to be devastated. “I just heard the guy who played drunk #21 in Barney Miller passed away. Very sad. You were one of the funny ones, you’ll be greatly missed.”

Yes, by his family and friends. But prior to today, I never heard you mention Barney Miller, never knew you to watch Barney Miller, never heard you mention that actors name, now all of a sudden it’s a great loss and you’re in mourning? Again, I’m not minimizing anyone’s death, but where does this come from?

I hope I get the same recognition when My time comes. Don’t let me down! I can see the posts now: “I just heard that dude with the hair who taught me about disk drives at NSC bit the dust. Very sad day. I think his name was Hank. Maybe Bill.”

The chronic petitioner

 

Some of us convinced a mutual friend of ours to sign up for Facebook since we were all scattered all over the country. We had entered into a venture with him and it was a good way to communicate. Once he joined, the only thing he ever posted were pleas for us to sign various petitions. Random petitions, too, no apparent theme. Petition to not tear down a drive-in, petition to remove Soylent Green from chocolate milk, petition to require penguins to wear long pants, petitions to change the spelling of ‘turtle’ to ‘blarty,’ and any other weird sort of petition you can imagine. And he meant business; each post came with a lengthy, passionate explanation of the cause and why he believed in it. He wasn’t being facetious, he really felt that penguins should wear long pants.

The generally inappropriate post

 

Random posts can be really funny. With this classification however I’m referring to the posts that just make you want to shower, or go outside, or call your mom, or something to dilute what you just read. “Met a girl last night, ended up back at my place doin’ the worm.” “Hey everyone, look at this picture and tell me if this is a wart or a boil, I can’t tell. Part of it came off in the bed if that helps.” “It’s time to overthrow the Communist American government! Who’s with me? Meet up at Bennigans to begin the assault!” “I’M DRUNK!”

These are the types of posts and people that finally caused me to deactivate, but not delete, my account.

When I tell people the things I’ve expressed in this post, I get a lot of feedback about how I can just block people or unfriend them. I get that, but why would I do that? I’m glad to have connected or reconnected with them, why would I accept a friend request and then block or unfriend them? I’ll say it again, it sounds like this is a condemnation of the people I know, but it isn’t. They’re not dumb, they’re not inane, they’re not vacant, if they were we wouldn’t be casual acquaintances, let alone friends. Everyone is idiosyncratic and has their own character, that’s what makes us great. What I needed was a general break from the overall experience. I haven’t missed it.

I also haven’t tried the new, trendier networks like Instagram or Snapchat or Twitter, although I have considered a Twitter account for this class, although I’m not convinced of its value as a pedagogical tool.

My very close circle of friends, who frankly you could count on one hand, I am still in touch with through email, texts and calls. They were all very understanding of my thoughts about Facebook, and even expressed some similar feelings.

Let me say that I have nothing inherently against Facebook, and I’m not one of the virulent anti-Facebook preachers either. It actually is a great way to keep in touch with, and reconnect with, people from all over the world and even across time that you may not have seen in ages. I just needed a break. Perhaps someday I’ll take another look and see what’s going on.

(This was my cover image. Bask in its glory.)

Firefox, some alternative browsers, and a nifty trick

There is a much better version of this post at the WordPress site. Also, for followers of this blog, you know I love you all so I would implore you to follow the WordPress site as I anticipate closing this site down in the next week or so and moving the WordPress site to a dedicated domain. Speaking of which, if you have a good idea for a domain name, let me know!

Last night in class we talked about the nasty memory leak that has plagued the Firefox browser for years. We learned that ‘memory leak’ is a misnomer because it happens when a program doesn’t release the memory it was using when you close it down. It’s because of that that I moved to what I felt has been the best browser for a long time, Opera. You can read all about the browser in this post I made all the way back in January. I was also a fan of the Pale Moon browser, which is the Firefox browser only without the developer tools and therefore without the resultant memory leaks.

That being said, I always had a fondness for Firefox. A product of the Mozilla Corporation, itself a part of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which had developed the first publicly successful browser, Netscape, it represented a rebirth of sorts for browsers. It also just celebrated its 20th anniversary. Internet Explorer had dominated through what some considered the heavy-handed and illegal business practices of Microsoft, exacerbated by the fact that Internet Explorer is not, and never has been, a good browser. It’s better now, but it’s still not good. Either way, it successfully defeated Netscape in the first-ever browser wars.

Even so, with the breaking away of the Mozilla foundation and its subsidiaries form parent company America Online, development continued on its internal project, Firefox, and from it was born one of the most successful post-Netscape browsers. It was the first to truly offer competition to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and was very popular. A user could download add-ons that enhanced the browser’s functionality (I personally run one that blocks flash ads, automatically starts YouTube videos at their highest available resolution, and provides a very customizable speed dial with multiple groupings which you can see in the image below).

Then the memory leaks started. Version after version was released, and with each one the leaks became worse. Complaints were lodged to message boards and forums, blog posts and guides were made, articles were written, yet for years and for reasons unknown, they were never addressed. They became so bad that I was forced to choose other browsers, my machines just couldn’t handle the oppressive commandeering of their RAM.

Now, however, version 30.0 has been released and I am cautiously optimistic that the problem has been solved. I have gone back to it after years and years, I am very pleased with its interface, its functionality, and most of all its utilization of system resources.

Even with all this, one of Firefox’s most valuable capabilities is the developer tools it provides to allow website designers to evaluate many aspects of a webpage. And now that this release appears to be stable, I have decided to show you a neat Firefox trick using those tools that will let you see the construction of a webpage from a very unique perspective.

First, you’ll need to bring up the developer dashboard. You can do this pressing the Function (Fn) and F12 keys together, or you can click on the options menu which is the three horizontal bars in the upper-right corner of the browser. That will open up the options menu as seen in the screenshot below:

Click on the ‘Developer Wrench’ at the bottom of that window, then in the new menu that appears click ‘Toggle Tools’ and the developer dashboard will open.

Once the dashboard is open, if you are using the newest version of Firefox you will need to click on the small gear at the far left of the developer toolbar, circled in the following screenshot (If you’re using an older version, you can skip this and the next step):

That will open up a menu with some checkboxes on the left hand side. Scroll down until you see ’3D view’ under ‘Available Toolbox Buttons’ and check that box if it is unchecked.

Once you do that, you will notice a little 3D cube has appeared in the toolbar icons on the right. Again, if you are using an older version of Firefox it will be there by default. I have circled it in the following screenshot:

Now the fun begins. If you click on that little cube, your page will fall back into the browser and be rendered in 3D. Using your mouse, you can spin the page, you can see it from the top or bottom or even from behind. You can click the little ‘x’ to the far right of the cube to see the page in all its 3D glory, or you can leave the developer tools up. The advantage to developers is that the 3D view actually shows all the individual elements of the page and how much nested HTML (Hypertext Markup Language, the base language in which web pages are developed) they use. In other words, to display an ad, there may be HTML that allocates the space, more HTML that selects an ad, more HTML that ensures the ad is appropriate, more HTML that positions the ad, more HTML that displays the ad, and so on. Each of those layers would be represented. If you click on an element and have the developer dashboard open, the relevant code will be highlighted in the dashboard. Clicking the cube again or pressing escape will return the page to normal (NOTE: Only once that didn’t work, and I had to close then restart the browser, so be aware).

But don’t listen to me! Try it, and be amazed. It works on any page. Here are some screenshots of this blog with the 3D view in full force.

You can even view the page from behind!

Below you can see a page element highlighted, and the related HTML highlighted in the dashboard underneath.

LED lights are a surprising security risk

(Wordpress site)

We're all familiar with LED (Light Emitting Diode) lights, they've been used as decorative and accent lights for years. We are only recently beginning to see suitable LED replacements for the warm light of incandescent bulbs - bulbs that use filament in a gas-filled globe - in standard household fixtures, and with the manufacture of regular incandescent bulbs now banned by federal mandate and major efficiency standards put in place, the switch to LED takes on more importance.

LED bulbs are a marked improvement over incandescents in many areas; They use substantially less power, about 95 percent less than an incandescent (The seven gigantic pine trees in my backyard are wrapped with LEDs, and if I were to leave them on all year long, the total cost would be about $6), they last for decades, they emit almost no heat and what heat they do emit is re-absorbed by a tiny heatsink.

They have had some major limitations, however, but with the cost rapidly dropping the two most glaring become their design and the quality of light they give off. Many LED bulbs have an unsightly plastic base, and until only recently they tended to give off a 'cool blue' light that looked very artificial. That's in contrast to the warm, yellowish light of an incandescent.

 

How Color Temperatures are Measured

Now, however, LED lightbulbs have finally improved their design and are being made with a wide range of color temperatures that should suit any home. Not only that, we now have color changing LED bulbs whose color choice and cycling can be controlled from a smartphone! Pretty neat stuff.
But therein lies the huge, hidden problem.

We are seeing a major push for the creation of the Internet of Things, in which all electronic devices are connected to the Internet. This would allow for additional functionality, such as a refrigerator being able to monitor what is left inside of it and order more food, or a door lock that be remotely locked or unlocked, or a thermostat that can be remotely set and monitored. Incidentally, that Honeyell Lyric from the last link is actually the first in what is expected to be a whole host of connected devices, all under the Lyric brand.

 Honeywell Lyric and Google Nest Smart Thermostats

In order for connected 'things' to work however, you have to have credentials, such as a username and password, that allow you to access them. And it is because of that, and with little surprise, that LED smartbulbs have been hacked to provide a third party with the username and password used to connect them. Specifically, it was the Kickstarter-backed LIFX bulbs that were hacked, however any bulb that becomes part of a network of connected bulbs within a location would be susceptible. If you're wondering why all the bulbs in your house need to be connected together in a network, it's so they all act accordingly, and you don't have to, say, dim all of them in a room one by one; just tell them to dim and they all do it at once. The LIFX bulbs are, to be fair, pretty remarkable. I've considered adding a few for when I listen to disco. 

The vulnerability has been fixed, but it shows the danger of having things that are always connected. If they are always connected, you are always connected. Even your lightbulbs aren't safe.

Now this is how you record fireworks!

(Wordpress site here)

This was surprisingly incredible. A hobbyist used a remote-controlled drone - the only kind of drone, really - to film fireworks displays from above and within. I'm not normally a fan of music behind videos, but in this case it really adds to the visuals. Plus, if you ever heard what a drone sounds like, you neeeed music.
 
I also should make a clarification about drones: We often think of them only in terms of their military applications, especially here in Nevada since almost all military drones around the globe are piloted from right outside Nellis Air Force Base. However there is a vast community of private drone pilots who use them for all kinds of fun stuff, this video being just one example. Here you can read about someone crashing a quadcopter, there's another site for people who want to try building their own, and on this page you can tour locations all over the world through the use of drone-filmed footage. You can even buy them on Amazon, who wants to deliver your drones using drones in the drone future.

Anyway, on to the fireworks!

So this is what it has come to

(Wordpress site here)

As someone who has spent the last 20 years teaching about technology, about its development and history, its use and impact on society, its capabilities and concerns, I have also attempted to impress upon people the importance of not becoming burdened by it or dependent upon it.

We've all seen the family at a restaurant - mother, father, kids - sitting around the table with their faces buried in some electronic device. That isn't good, it's not how a family unit is meant to interact. By allowing that, the risk is that it becomes the only way individuals know how to be, that the skill of communication, like a muscle that goes unused, starts to atrophy until it is all but lost. Then, when actual communication becomes required or necessary, the individual is incapable of response. As an additional clarification, this type of thing is not limited to the scenario I have provided here; texting someone in the same house or having a Facebook-based conversation with someone in the same room as opposed to talking directly to them are also examples.

Don't be like these people

Now, the fears I've had for almost two decades are, it appears, starting to come true. In a study conducted jointly by the University of Virginia and Harvard University, researchers asked subjects to sit in an empty room and do nothing, for periods ranging from six to fifteen minutes. Around fifty percent of those subjects indicated they really did not like that experience, so the researchers asked them to do the same thing at home. Most of the subjects admitted they cheated, and did so by checking their phone or tablet.

But the most shocking part (foreshadowing!) is that when given the opportunity, well over half of the men and a quarter of the women administered electric shocks to themselves rather than sit quietly, alone with their thoughts, and this was after admitting they would pay to avoid being shocked!

The issue I'm bringing up here, and the authors allude to as well, is that we have such short attention spans thanks to always-on and accessible digital devices, that a mere fifteen minutes alone in thoughtfulness and repose is, if not something completely adverse to us, something we would prefer less than to a self-administered electric shock. Perhaps that's why there's a market for this thing.
Keep in mind that people who tend to be dreamers, as well as people who are generally happy overall, did much better in the study than others.

The research itself is behind a paywall, however you can read more about it at Ars Technica, The Verge, and ScienceMag.org.

It's the Fourth!

(Wordpress version here)

On Fridays, I usually post something so random it defies classification, such as How Long Can You Watch Ned Flanders Riddly Diddly? or Twitter being the source of the announcement for Ronald McDonald's overly-creepy makeover.

However, since today is the 4th of July and you should be out celebrating the ultimate in Freedom and Liberty, I'll just put up a brief post talking about the technology behind putting together a fireworks display.

As you can probably guess, with the spectacular fireworks displays you see today like we have right here in Las Vegas for the Fourth and New Year's Eve, sync'd to music as they often are, it requires not just the fireworks themselves but a major amount of computerization and automation as well. Besides the mechanical triggers and fireworks themselves, there is actually software that is designed solely for the purposes of controlling and synchronizing the firing, timing, and music of the displays.

 CueMaker fireworks controlling / timing software

If you've ever used music-editing software such as ProTools or Audacity or anything in-between, then you already have an idea of how the software works. You use a timeline to indicate when specific triggers should launch, and if necessary make them in-line with music. It's pretty nifty.

If you're interested, here is an interesting, interactive explanation of how a firework gets launched. Keeping that in mind, Disney, which puts on some of the most unbelievable fireworks displays I've ever seen, developed a method for launching fireworks with compressed air as opposed to gunpowder all the way back in 2004! That's a good use of technology.

Bing!

(Go to the WordPress site already!)

Before you read this, go visit Bing then come back. If you are reading this after Thursday, July 3rd, click on the little 'left arrow' in the lower right corner of the Bing homepage until you get to the panda to see what I'm talking about.

So as I mentioned in class, while I have nothing against anyone having a favorite company, to direct undue hate or vitriol against their competitor is unnecessary. I like all companies equally for what they contribute, and I'll castigate any company if I feel they've gone the wrong direction. That being said, one of the services that seems to get a lot of ridicule is Microsoft's Bing. If you're unfamiliar, Bing is Microsoft's search engine, a competitor to Google. No one bats an eye if they they hear the phrase "Google it," there's even a webpage that will do it automatically, but if someone says "Bing it" they risk getting beaten up.

I personally use both. Bing - in my opinion anyway - is better in some aspects such as  image, travel and technical searches, while Google is better for pop-culture, academic and news searches. In the interest of full disclosure, when I took the Bing-it-on challenge, Google won hands down. It was a rousing defeat of Bing.

These things happen.

Even so, what I like most about Bing is their homepage. Google has always prided itself on its superlative user interface, which has since the beginning consisted of not much more than a search bar - or has it? When it was released, it competed with disasters like Alta Vista (which now looks a lot like Bing, surprisingly enough), Dogpile, and Yahoo, which made it a breath of fresh air.

Bing is similar, however it includes a usually stunning image as its background, with hotspots that provide additional information about the picture. Back in 2011, though, they started occasionally animating their backgrounds using the HTML 5 specification, and some of those animations have been spectacular. The collapsible, filmstrip-like news stories along the bottom are a nice touch as well, although they are sometimes entertainment-heavy in their stories.

In this recent image from the Bing homepage, you can navigate around the mountains. it's still available if you click on the little 'left-arrow' button in the lower right of the page a couple of times.

I mention this because for all the hate and ridicule it gets, it's not a bad search engine, and I have had just as much difficulty with Google providing me relevant results as I've had with Bing. One isn't better than the other, they are just different, and on Tuesday we'll find out why. You want to be careful not to dismiss something simply because it isn't Google, or isn't Microsoft, or isn't Apple, or because it is.In the future I'll be talking about alternative web browsers you can use, alternative operating systems you can use, even alternative search engines you can use. In the meantime, animated pandas!

It's still a clever idea.

 Have any of you heard of Christine? You may think of the car that killed people, I think of my friend's ex who we think also killed people, but in this case we should be thinking of a very clever idea for PC design by none other than the purveyors of premium performance PC peripherals, Razer.

Well known for their outstanding, competition-grade mice and keyboards, they decided they would get into the custom PC market with the concept of a modular PC they dubbed project Christine. It's a unique idea for a PC, in that whatever you need to add or swap out can be done so with modules that are easily replaceable, and adding or removing one doesn't affect the rest of the PC or require complex installation. Not only that, it's fanless and silent thanks to its liquid cooling.

The concept of modularity is not new, in fact Google is right now working on a cell phone with a similar modular design known as Project ARA, which allows the user to upgrade parts as necessary; for example you could upgrade the camera just by swapping out the module rather than replacing the whole phone. If it can work there, it makes just as much sense for a PC. Plus, Razer's concept just looks incredible - a true vision of the future. Here is a great video that goes into great depth about the machine.


Unfortunately, it also looks like it is now on indefinite hold. Apparently, in order to get it designed and built Razer would have to partner with other PC manufacturers, however those PC manufacturers are, according to Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan, more interested in selling what they have rather than designing something new.

That's too bad. I love this concept and want to see it succeed. The language used is dire, but not terminal, so I will hold out the thinnest sliver of hope. In the meantime, I am more excited about their Nabu project than I am about any other wearable tech. So I'll latch on to that instead.

Happy 35th birthday to the Sony Walkman!

The Sony Walkman, precursor-of-sorts to all things portable-audio, turns 35 years old today! Back in the glory days of '80s analog audio - which is still alive today since analog is a superior sound reproduction process than digital as we will learn - walking around listening to Iron Maiden on cassette with a Sony Walkman was the ultimate yet understated way to let everyone else know you were cool.

They went beyond being simply a music listening device. Some had very advanced features, some looked like they were waterproof (but weren't), and in the ultimate proof of their dominance, they became a fashion statement, especially for exercising (that was actually the image on the box the player came in). Their ultra-creepy ads couldn't put a damper on that. I had one and loved it. I may still have it around somewhere; my garage is the technology version of the Island of Misfit Toys.

They never skipped, something that happened with early portable CD players and hard-disc based digital music players, but since they were mechanical there was always the risk of an eaten tape. You can buy digital media players that still bear the Walkman name, but I'm not confident of their quality.

A couple of side notes: it appears that cassettes might be making a comeback, and the video below shows that backwards, technologically-deficient kids these days have no idea how to operate even the most basic of machines. Get those kids some technology!

Welcome!

Welcome to IS301! As you should know by now, this is the blog to which I make posts about all aspects of technology, whether it be regarding its impact on society or us as individuals, how technology is used in business, robotics, security, mobile technology, law, policy, prosthetics, history (this deserves its own post, I love seeing early predictions of what today would be like), ethical use of technology, anything technology related is fair game.

I used to use this Blogger platform here at is301fornsc.blogspot.com, but you knew that because you're here now. Now, however, I have transitioned to the Wordpress platform, with the website located at is301atnsc.wordpress.com. I have been making dual posts to both sites because the Blogger site has so many followers, so I will likely continue to make dual posts to both sites while I use this summer class to determine which platform is ultimately better as an educational tool. It is the Wordpress site that will be used for comments and guest posts for the summer session, however. If it is successful, I will most likely give it its own domain (www.is301atnsc.com or something like it) which will give me much more flexibility.

You will need to register with Wordpress in order to make comments on posts, which is a requirement of the class as laid out in the syllabus. I will talk more about it in class, and I will also allow students to make guest posts for a little extra credit (not too much!).

Beyond that, if there is something you feel is interesting - a news story, a personal experience, if you have a question or would like more clarification about something related to technology, let me know I will be more than happy to consider making a post about it.

You'll learn a lot through this blog. You'll be surprised!