Modern Nerd

The Pirates Who Print Shoes

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:05:49 +0000

Care to download and print your next pair of shoes? Without even paying for them?

The Pirate Bay invite you to share their vision: a world in which footwear is stolen and printable. They’ve announced a new category called “physibles” — files describing physical objects that can be made with a 3D printer.

In their imagined future you do not buy the objects you desire. You download the files and print them. “You will download your sneakers within 20 years,” they promise. Imagine that!

All you need’s a 3D printer

If you’ve used a 3D printer, you’ll know why printable shoes aren’t exciting. Not yet.

If you’re new to 3D printing, allow me to describe the experience in two words:

Wax. Candles.

“Cheap” 3D printers use an inkjet process. They build layers of soft resin into a physical object; a physical object that often — as it turns out — looks a lot like a candle.

I struggle to get excited about shoes that are a wick and a match away from mood lighting, but perhaps I am too fussy. Maybe I should become an early adopter and embrace a technology in its infancy to help shape and improve it. Then in the far future I will be able to say, “Yes! I was there! I was one of the first, I was. The first with printed shoes!”

And I’ll wheel myself over to the digifire and print a machine to rub my aching feet, correct my crippled bones, and sing me a song about the old times, when a spade was a spade and printers didn’t talk back.

But 3D printers are an emerging market!

Tip: “emerging market” is gobbledygeek for “don’t buy one yet”. 3D televisions are an emerging market. You shouldn’t own one of those either.

3D printers are — to borrow the words of a friend who lost five house cats in his experimental transmogrifier before calling it a day — “not quite there yet”.

3D printers are designed for rapid prototyping. They won’t produce objects containing a range of materials. They don’t make things engineered with the fit and finish that we’re used to.

3D printers are not — to put it more plainly — designed to create objects that normal people can enjoy.

But they’ll get better, right?

Will they, indeed? A 3D printer in every home? By 2020 we’ll be printing our own furniture, it seems.

Maybe that’s not so far fetched. By 2020, I’m prepared to believe that some of us will be printing our own candles. But only the very determined. And I’ll tell you why.

I turn 30 this year. I am yet to meet a single person who speaks favourably of their printer. Not their 3D printer. Their plain old “2D” one. This is for good reason.

Printers jam. Printers clog. Printers demand that you curse them in ever-creative ways in order to function. Printers run out of photo magenta even when you’re printing in grayscale. Printers are not generally well-liked.

I struggle to imagine a 3D printer that is much better than a 2D one.

The future of 3D printing, today

I do not wish to be told that my 3D printer is out of nanocyan when it’s doing the tricky bits around the laces. I do not dream of discarding twelve pairs of half-printed, mangled, almost shoes in order to get one wearable pair of sort-of-looks-like-shoes-if-you-stand-here-and-squint-a-bit.

The world has changed. People who hated technology are beginning to fall in love with it. New generations are growing up having never experienced technology when it was hard.

“It just works,” is slowly becoming the default rather than the exception.

Soon, others will see that too. “No!” they will say. “No more of this! To the charity shop with you, Canon S9000i. Go! Poison the home of some other poor sap! Anything that creates this much pain does not belong in my life. Perhaps I, too, can live without a printer like the Others.”

People will learn to reject machines that make things harder for them. There is no place for ubiquitous 3D printers in this world unless they can avoid the simple frustrations that manufacturers of regular printers could not. And I have my doubts.

It is with all of this in mind that I make a promise to you: that I will never steal my shoes from the Internet and print them at home. Instead, I will do what sane people do when they need new shoes.

I will buy them from a shoe shop.

Inkling from Wacom

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:51:49 +0100

Wacom just announced Inkling, a ‘digital sketch pen’ that lets illustrators and avid doodlers sketch on paper, record each stroke, and import the finished drawing as layered raster or vector artwork to their Mac or PC. All for €170 (about £150/$250). Get doodling!

Save the Web with Readability

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 10:38:00 +0000

Readability’s new service is a great way to support your favourite websites while making web pages easier to read. It looks awesome.

The basic service

Readability lets you visit any web page and view it free of ads, oversized header graphics, and all the crap that big websites put on their pages to distract, irritate, and prevent you from enjoying their content. Making a page readable is simple: just click the ‘read now’ button the service adds to your web browser. Here’s what it does:

Original version:

Readability version:

The new service

From today, you can pay a small monthly fee to support the service (you choose how much). But here’s the killer feature: Readability now tracks which websites you read and pays part of your subscription fee to that site’s owner.

How it works

Readability uses 30% of your subscription fee to support their service, then divvies the remaining 70% between the sites you visit each month. To support a site, just click Readability’s ‘Read Now’ or ‘Read Later’ buttons when you visit that site. If you click one site a month, they get the full 70% portion of your fee. If you click more than one, it’s split up accordingly.

There are two account types:

‘Readers’ can sign up here to use the Readability service and support sites they visit. You can beautify the page to read it now, or mark it to read later and store it in your reading list. From there, you can archive articles or mark them as favourites — the service doubles as a handy bookmarking system.

‘Publishers’ can claim their sites here. I’ve already claimed this one; it’s a simple three-step process. The publisher control panel displays a list of pages that Readability subscribers have read. Publishers get paid twice a year, and can add discreet widgets and tools to their sites to encourage visitors to use Readability and support them.

If you want to sign up to be a reader and a publisher, you need to log out of your publisher account to sign up for a reader account using a different email address.

If you still don’t understand what the fuss is about, see the intro here.

The future

Marco Arment is about to release a special Readability-branded version of his Instapaper app, to let iPhoners catch up with their web reading on the go while supporting their favourite writers. Users of the existing Instapaper service will be able to send their reading logs to Readability, so that site authors still get paid. Personally, I’ll be switching to the Readability app — it makes sense to me to use one service instead of two.

I recently wrote that ‘we need a better way to support indie publishers’, and suggested a platform-based revenue sharing scheme as one solution. Less than two weeks later, someone’s launched one!

Any service that hopes to build and nurture an independent publishing ecosystem is well worth supporting in my view; I’m using Readability as a reader and publisher. Maybe you should too.

Derren Brown The Artist

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 17:33:00 +0000

Many know Derren Brown as a thought-fiddler and thaumaturge, but few seem to know that he paints. His portraits have a twisted charm that mirror his whimsical stage and TV shows, and are a lot of fun to browse; check them out here.

Today he’s tweeting photos of his process. Watching this portrait of his father come together, live, is rather wonderful. And he’s not finished yet. Follow along on twitter here: @derrenbrown

Derren Brown: “I like to treat this like a blank canvas.”

Derren Brown: “Going to paint m’Dad for a family series. Sketch on canvas done, bring on the messy stuff.”

Derren Brown: “Orange phase complete. Let it dry.”

Derren Brown: “Building up some tones, dry brush, moving them into background…”

Derren Brown: “More of the same, starting to take some sort of basic shape. Might stop for lunch.”

Derren Brown: “Increasing definition.”

Derren Brown: “Glazing to soften colours. It’s 5ft tall, acrylic, will take a week of sporadic sessions. Stopping for a few hrs.”

DerrenBrown: “Couple more hours tonight painting pic of Dad… Still a way to go but here’s the latest.”

The Ears Have It

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:41:00 +0000

You can tell a lot about a person from their ears. If the eyes are windows to the soul, the ears are periscopes to the stomach.

The rule is even stronger with dogs. When the golden labrador pictured here arrived in our household, it took my mother, brother, sister, and me 10 minutes to choose ‘Yoda’ as a name for him.

The puppy in front of us, with his puddled skin and pricked-up ears, had all the hallmarks of an 800-year-old Jedi Master. ‘Yoda’ was a name you grew into. It seemed fitting not because it made fun of his physical attributes, but because we expected great things of our first family pet.

My father vetoed the suggestion less than an hour later, so today our dog’s called Toby. I was fine with this. Yoda’s a ridiculous moniker for any animal and, besides, I knew that dogs respond not to the name itself, but to the number of syllables in that name.

Shout, ‘Here, Benjamin!’ to a dog named Toby and it will think you quite mad. But anything with two syllables of equal phonetic prominence works fine. Dogs are forgiving creatures; they know full well when you’ve forgotten their name, but they’ll let you off if you get it close enough.

Toby has arthritis now. Somehow it makes his original name — the one he had for 45 minutes — all the more fitting. When I visit my folks and no-one’s within earshot, I throw his ball and call to him:

‘Yoda! Come here, you must!’

Toby’s always smiling when he hobbles back. Secretly, I think he likes his real name better too.

Doing it for a living

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 15:55:00 +0000

Imagine a web publishing platform that costs $10 per month.

$5 of that $10 goes to the platform company for the boring stuff.

The other $5 gets split evenly between the writers, photographers, videographers, designers, and other creative people you follow who also pay to use the platform, up to a maximum of — say — 20 followers, hand-picked by you.

Now imagine if that platform was tumblr, and the $10 service was called ‘tumblr PRO’. Suddenly, you don’t need advertising, feed sponsorship, affiliate products, ebook spin-offs, or a lucky break to earn a respectable side income if you wish. You just need to keep publishing the things you love and watch your (paid) follower count climb.

4,000 paid followers would give you a side income of $1,000 a month. 8,000 paid followers would give you at least $2,000. (If people picked fewer than 20 tumblogs to ‘support’, you’d get a bigger share of their $5.)

And now you have a way to choose 20 people whose content you enjoy and thank them in a way that counts — with cash.

The gift of free and easy publishing is a wonderful one. But the gift of earning a living doing something you love? The gift of never having to hear the phrase ‘monetisation strategy’ again? That’s pretty hard to beat. We need a better way to support indie publishers. Isn’t it time someone built a platform to help?

Everything you need to know about email

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 17:47:00 +0000

Reading about email kind of sucks. Here, then, is enough advice for a lifetime, distilled into the only three things you need to know about email:

Email is not work.
There is no right way, only your way.
The winner is the one who spends the least time in their inbox.

Do link to this page to bring a halt to any rambling blog comments, forum debates, twitter updates, or emails about email. Pixels are precious. Every heartbeat counts.

The Spiffing Blog

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 23:34:00 +0000

I’ve just launched my second tumblr blog: The Spiffing Blog brings quips, tips, and interesting bits on iOS development, musings on the Mac, and other miscellany. Do grab the RSS feed and/or follow me over there if you use tumblr:

http://blog.spiffingapps.com

What Browsing the Web Feels Like

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 14:42:00 +0000

A blind man turns to his friend. ‘You know, I’ve always wondered. As a sighted person, what does browsing the Web feel like?’

‘That’s a tough one,’ says his friend. He shrugs. ‘It doesn’t really feel like anything. What does eating an apple feel like, for example?’

The blind man thinks. He brings an empty hand to his face, opens his mouth, and takes an imaginary bite. He chews. He swallows.

‘It feels like falling through ice,’ he begins. ‘It feels like cutting your tongue and swallowing sunlight. Eating an apple feels like running through Eden. Eating an apple feels like tearing chunks out of heaven,’ he says. ‘Your turn.’

The friend pauses. He breathes in, raises his arms, and starts to type in the air. One hand moves to guide an imaginary mouse, an index finger tapping out the beat of the Web.

‘Browsing the Web feels like being lost in a hotel,’ he says. ‘It feels like waiting for someone to greet you, to hit the lights and offer directions. But no-one comes. So you start to wander. You start to open doors. You hope to find meaning; a reason you’re there. Browsing the Web feels a lot like life. Browsing the Web feels like slowly growing old.’

The blind man smiles. ‘That’s funny,’ he says. ‘It feels exactly the same for me.’

Best Web Books of 2010

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 16:31:00 +0000

The post I’ve written over at Goburo titled, “Top Web Books of 2010” is proving pretty popular among web folks.

This year has seen oodles of great web, graphic design, and iOS books. It’s been expensive, but I’ve learnt loads, and I recommend the four books on the list heartily; there’s very little overlap in subject matter, so it’s safe to add them all to your Christmas wishlist.

If you’d like to read more from me and Hayley about design and web stuff, do subscribe to the feed over on the Goburo blog. We plan to start posting more there.

Oh — and if you need graphic design, web development, custom Tumblr design, or WordPress help, get in touch with us. We should have some free slots in the New Year, and we’d love to hear from you.

"If you’re gonna be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to..."

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 12:06:00 +0000

““If you’re gonna be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.””

- Beautiful story (audio only) from Julio Diaz at StoryCorps, about getting robbed on a New York subway platform (via Hacker News).

Put Things Off 2

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 16:46:00 +0000

Put Things Off 2, the free update to the laid-back to-do list I made for iPhone, is now live. You can see the full preview at putthingsoff.com or buy it now from the App Store. It’s on sale for a limited time.

The app’s a huge update, and includes some fun new features you won’t have seen in any other to-do list. It follows six months of hard work, and I’d be thrilled if you’d help me by checking it out and spreading the word any way you can. Thanks!

Wacky and Wonderful Domains For Sale

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:05:00 +0000

I currently spend about $500 a year renewing domain names I’m not using. I thought it was about time I sold some of them.

As well as listing the domains below, I’ve provided the backstory behind each one; partly to share what on Earth I was thinking when I registered some of them, but also in the hope that some of you might snap them up and build the things I never found time for.

There’s no price list; just email all serious offers to ndc@me.com. Thanks!

bubl.net — SOLD!

UPDATE: bubl.net sold on flippa.com

A memorable, fun little 4-letter domain name. I bought this from someone I shall generously refer to as a ‘domain name professional’ in the hope of building a browser-based meeting room app with a twist.

My idea? bubl.net would let you create an online room (or ‘bubl’) to invite friends or co-workers into for live group discussions. Unlike similar online meeting services that charge a monthly fee for a permanent ‘room’ online, each bubl would disappear (or ‘burst’) when everyone left the page, at which point you’d each receive transcripts of the chat by email if required.

It was my intention to provide the basic service for free (ad-supported with a banner inside each ‘bubl’), with a pay-per-bubl or pay-per-bubl-pack system for users who required secure chat over https, video calling, file sharing, branded rooms, live annotation, and other more advanced features.

In truth, I still find myself needing something like this from time to time, so I’m a little reluctant to part with the domain. But it’s been many years since I’ve given much thought to building such a service. Perhaps you can breathe some life into it?

*jam.com

I went through a phase of buying and registering domains ending in *jam.com, possibly because I was eating lots of toast at the time. Here’s the full list:

hubjam.com
filejam.com
taskjam.com
fonejam.com
salejam.com
cardjam.com
helpjam.com

I had high hopes to build a group of web apps around the *jam.com name. It’s hard to find names for web apps that make them feel part of the same family, and I still feel that these domains would be a great way to do that.

I no longer have time to make something of them myself, but perhaps an enterprising soul could do well from these. Would prefer to sell the set of seven at once, but I’ll consider offers for individual domains.

twittergenie.com

Bought on a whim, the Twitter Genie would have been Twitter’s first good samaritan or — if you’re British — the Jim’ll Fix It of Twitter.

I noticed how often people begin tweets with ‘I wish…’, and thought it would be marvellous to make some of those wishes come true, either by encouraging people to tweet directly at the genie account and granting one wish a month, or by searching for tweets featuring the phrase ‘I wish’ and making the most noble or amusing come true.

I’m still rather fond of the idea of Twitter as a wishing engine, but don’t have the time or resources to make it happen right now. Perhaps you do?

For those with more business savvy than social conscience, the Twitter Genie might also be a lovely way for brands to sponsor Twitter giveaways and get their products or services in front of followers.

origarmy.com — SOLD! (via email enquiry)

A lovely compound word I stumbled upon whose domain happened to be free. I had intended to pen a non-fiction book with the title, but have been busy writing short stories instead.

I still consider it a fun play on words and am sure someone can put it to better use than I have.

inboxing.org

Another name registered on a whim, I’d hoped to use this to launch a light hearted book about email. Still tempted to try, but I’m committed to other projects for now.

—
That’s the lot at the moment! Happy to consider all serious offers. Send them to ndc@me.com.

And yes, I did consider registering a domain from which to sell my domains, but dismissed it as madness. Especially when I found that my top five choices weren’t available.

SOLVED: Protect Yourself on Public Wi-Fi Networks

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:43:00 +0100

Do you use public Wi-Fi networks to access the Web? Perhaps in a coffee shop, airport, hotel, or university campus? Maybe on a laptop or iPhone?

Did you know that anyone also using that network can currently hijack your twitter, Facebook, and other account details to log in to those services as if they’re you? If you’d like to fix that, read this post. It’s about Virtual Private Networks or ‘VPNs’. It tells you how to use one to make your connection more secure over public Wi-Fi.

Get protected

Here’s what you’ll need to secure yourself on open Wi-Fi networks. I’ve reduced it to three steps because I’ve assumed that most people reading this want to be safe but don’t care too much how it works. (If you do want to learn that stuff, read ‘how it works’ below.)

1. Get a VPN account.

I recommend StrongVPN. Their ‘Euro-America Special PPTP 1-year’ package costs $55USD a year, which is good value, and you can pay with PayPal if you like. Order it from this page.

Free VPN services do exist, but I don’t feel comfortable recommending any of them to you. If you want to stay secure but you’re not willing to pay for a VPN connection, the simplest way is to leave your laptop at home and not use public Wi-Fi.

2. Set up your Mac, PC, and mobile device to use that account.

StrongVPN have setup instructions for Windows, Mac, iPhone, and more.

3. Connect to your VPN before using the internet on public Wi-Fi networks.

On a Mac, turning VPN on takes two clicks: click the black VPN icon in your Mac’s menu bar. (It looks like this.) Then click ‘Connect StrongVPN’, or whatever you named your VPN connection in step two. The bars in the VPN icon go a light grey colour when you’re connected, and clicking the VPN icon will now display a ‘Disconnect….’ option together with a timer showing how long you’ve been connected for.

On an iPhone, a VPN connection is two taps away: tap the Settings app, then toggle the VPN switch at the top to ON. If you see a blue “VPN” icon in the title bar, you’re connected.

I’ve never connected to a VPN on Windows or Linux, but the final steps in the StrongVPN setup guides tell you how.

Two important points:

VPNs will disconnect you (or ‘timeout’) if you don’t use the connection for several hours. If you sleep your laptop, there’s a chance you won’t be connected when you wake it again. So get used to checking your VPN connection’s still active before you fire up your browser.
A StrongVPN account can only be used by one device at a time. If you’re connected to the VPN on a laptop, you’ll need to disconnect it before you use the same VPN connection on your iPhone. In general, it’s best to disconnect the VPN when you leave your computer, and reconnect it when you get back. Or just turn the whole machine off and save the planet as well as your sanity.

Want to know more?

That’s it! You’re safe. Or safer, at least. If you’re curious to discover how someone could hijack your details and log in as you, or want to know how a VPN protects you, read the following FAQ. It’s long, but it’s not too scary, I promise.

How it works

How can someone hijack my login details?

There are several ways, including watching over your shoulder as you type them. But the exploit I’m referring to in this post that lets others send requests as if they’re you is called ‘sidejacking’. Here’s how it works:

When you log in to Facebook, Twitter, and other sites, you do so on a secure page — you’ll probably have noticed the ‘https’ at the beginning of the address bar. It means your information’s being passed over a secure connection.

If you log in successfully, the site returns a random string of characters that your browser stores in a cookie. It reads the cookie and sends this string with all future requests when you, for example, update your status or post a photo. It’s why you only have to log in once each time, instead of every time you load a new page.

The problem is this: although sites like Facebook use a secured connection (HTTPS) when you log in, they currently use an unsecured connection (HTTP) for all requests after that. This means that the random string of characters that your browser sends to Facebook to identify you as someone who’s already logged in is sent openly over the public Wi-Fi network you’re connected to. Anyone on the same Wi-Fi network can lift that information out of the air by ‘sniffing’ the traffic.

Once they’ve lifted your special login string from the Wi-Fi traffic, they can use it to send requests to Facebook as if they’re you. They won’t have your username and password, but they don’t need that stuff — the way Facebook and other sites work at the moment means that the special login string is all they need.

But sniffing that sort of data is hard, right?

On public Wi-Fi it’s laughably easy. There’s even a free Firefox browser extension called Firesheep that helps you do it with a simple user interface. No nerdery required.

Anyone can install the extension, hop on a busy public Wi-Fi network, and wait for someone to log in to Facebook, Twitter, or a wide range of affected sites. As soon as someone does, a double click is all it takes to be logged into the site as them.

Why did you just tell me that?

Because the more people who know about it, the more chance there is that Facebook and other sites will take their users’ security more seriously.

The idea of Eric Butler’s Firesheep extension is to highlight how easy it is to attack users of popular sites who log in over public Wi-Fi, and to encourage those sites to start using HTTPS at all times. If they did, attackers on your network wouldn’t be able to sniff your user information because, although you’re still sharing a Wi-Fi connection with them, they can’t glean any useable information from a secure connection between you and another site such as Facebook.

Are all sites flawed in this way?

No.

How can I tell which sites are affected?

There’s no definitive list, but checking is simple: sites you log into should carry on displaying the ‘https’ at the start of your browser’s address bar. If they don’t, users who log in to those sites on a public Wi-Fi network are vulnerable to this type of attack.

What’s a VPN?

In simple terms, a VPN is just a connection between you and another computer. The important thing is that it’s a secure connection. It means that any information you send to or receive from that computer is encrypted so that others on your network can’t read it.

How does a VPN help?

Because the computer you’re connected to when you switch on your VPN connection is far away, what you’re creating is a secure ‘tunnel’ out of the public Wi-Fi network you’ve joined. Other users on your Wi-Fi network will be able to tell it’s there, but there’s no reasonable way for them to tell what information you’re sending along the tunnel, or even who you’re sending it to.

I don’t get it. Can you explain it in simple language that I’ll understand, perhaps using an imaginary room full of cookie monsters?

Sure. If you prefer analogies, try this: you’re holding a jar of cookies in a room full of cookie monsters. It’s a pretty dangerous situation. Luckily, the room has one open window. To get the cookies out of the room, you could throw them at the open window. There’s a good chance some of the monsters might notice that you’re throwing something, though. And when they see that they’re cookies, you’re really in trouble.

Instead, you decide to pick up the 10 foot blue tube that one of the monsters just finished using as a didgeridoo. You wipe off the slobber, then push one end of it through the open window. Next, you hold it high and slide the cookies down the tube, one at a time.

The monsters think it’s a little weird, but they can’t really tell what you’re sending along it, and they certainly can’t see what’s coming out the other end beyond the window, because they’re stuck in the room with you. Even if they wanted to break the tube to discover what was going on they couldn’t because, as everyone knows, puppets can’t jump.

If you haven’t guessed already, the giant blue tube is your VPN connection, and the room is the Wi-Fi network. I hope that helps. I really do. I felt quite silly writing it.

Why do I still see ‘http’ and not ‘https’ in my browser when using a VPN, then?

Because the computer at the end of your VPN connection is connecting to Facebook on your behalf over HTTP.

The connection between that computer and Facebook is still unsecured but, because that part of the connection is now far away from the open Wi-Fi network you’re on, people on your Wi-Fi network don’t have access to it. In fact, no-one should have access to it, because the only other computers on the far-away network should be other VPN servers in a locked building.

Why don’t Facebook et al fix the security flaws?

A good question. It turns out that there are some vaguely compelling reasons why big sites don’t use HTTPS for all traffic that flows across their networks but, on the whole, the consensus from security professionals seems to be that no site should gamble with their users’ privacy or security; they should force HTTPS connections at all times. Perhaps they will one day.

UPDATE: As of 26 January 2011, you can now enable HTTPS at all times via your Facebook settings. The advice in this article still applies, though. Using a VPN in public Wi-Fi areas is just safer.

Why should I have to use a VPN to fix others’ security flaws?

For now, it’s the only option if you want to use a public Wi-Fi network safely. Beyond that, I feel that anyone using a public Wi-Fi network should take whatever steps they can to secure themselves, and not rely on third-parties to do it for them. That’s why I suggest using a VPN on any network you don’t have full control over.

Frankly, if you currently use public Wi-Fi networks without connecting to a VPN, you’re taking a big risk anyway. Sidejacking isn’t the only attack you’re setting yourself up for. Any data you send in plain text (like FTP passwords), will be accessible to anyone on that network. And, trust me: there are people looking for it. For many, it’s akin to a hobby.

Is my home or office connection safe?

Probably. Most of them are password-protected by default now. If yours is too, it’s a lot harder for people you don’t know to use the network to hijack your cookies and log in as you.

Note that I said ‘people you don’t know’. If you share a home or office Wi-Fi network among family members, flatmates, or work colleagues, they can use Firesheep or similar on their own computers to steal your session information and log in as you. So you might want to be kinder to them.

If being kind isn’t an option, the good news is that using a VPN on the computer you access the Web with at home will help. It will stop people who share that network with you from capturing your cookies and posting naked photos of you to your own Facebook account. So it’s probably worth it. Or you could stop using Facebook. That would help too.

But there’s no harm in connecting to a VPN when you’re at home or in the office as well as out and about. It protects you against irritating people you share networks with. It also prevents anyone getting meaningful information from the traffic passing between your machine and the outside world should they manage to join your home or office Wi-Fi network. Perhaps by guessing that your network’s password is ‘yoda’.

Do I really need a VPN?

If you’re just using a computer at home or work and you trust the people you live and work with, it’s probably not worth paying $55 a year for a VPN connection. Just pick a good password for your Wi-Fi network, change it a few times a year, and be careful who you share it with.

Otherwise, yes, it’s worth having.

When signing up to StrongVPN, I’m given the option to choose what location I want for my initial connection. What’s that about?

You can choose any ‘initial location’ in the StrongVPN location form you see when your order’s completed. It doesn’t really matter.

In general, though, I recommend choosing whichever location is closest to you, preferably in your own country. You’ll experience a slightly faster connection that way. Choosing VPN servers in other countries can also have weird side effects, like being served the Dutch Google homepage instead of your own country’s one.

You can use a VPN to trick websites into thinking you’re in another country in a good way, too. Some people use this to access, for example, the BBC’s iPlayer and other location-restricted services when they’re travelling outside their home country. You’d just connect to a UK-based VPN from the US or elsewhere, and the BBC’s website will serve iPlayer pages as if you’re connecting from the UK directly. (And yes, the BBC knows about this loophole.)

I’ve still got questions about this stuff, but you’ve stopped typing. Who do I send them to?

If they’re questions about setting up a VPN, please send them to whoever you’re paying to provide you with a VPN service.

Comments and corrections are welcome via email or twitter.

Kill Your Keyboard Clacks

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 11:14:00 +0100

Watching someone flick through TV channels is a lot like being a passenger in a car crash. The feeling that you’re being steered towards impending doom — be it an old episode of Friends or an oak tree — is itchy and unpleasant.

It doesn’t even matter if they’re good at it; I find it just as frustrating to watch someone struggling with an unfamiliar remote as it is to watch a teen channel surf while texting. There’s just something uncomfortable about watching other people use computers.

Hell is watching friends use computers

My latest bugbear came to light shortly after reading a tweet from mpjoyn, foretelling a dark future where PCs invade our lounges:

“Living room pcs will be big, but only as touchscreens for each family member. Hell is watching someone else control a GUI.”

What a relief! I’m not the only one who sighs inside when someone takes out a phone to show me something. They might be innocently navigating to YouTube, but a thousand small annoyances soon bubble to the surface as tiny questions that would seem both elitist and asinine to ask of them:

Why did you double tap the Safari app icon?
Why did you type the full URL instead of the auto suggestion?
Why did you type ‘.-c-o-m’ instead of the ‘.com’ button?
Why are you showing me a video of a cat taking a dump in its owner’s lavatory?
Why are you laughing?
Have you no shame?

Today I decided to chill out about it. Partly because I’ve realised that everyone uses interfaces differently, and that your way isn’t any less valid than mine. For all I know, the way I’m doing it — the ‘I spend more time with user interfaces than I do with other people’ way — is wrong. But, mainly, the reason I’ve decided to relax about watching other people use computers is because I’ve found something worse.

Something worse

If you think that watching someone use a computer interface is hell, try listening to them do it. For six hours. On a train. When you can’t even see the device they’re using.

I now count myself among the world’s most familiar with the soft clacking sound that the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard makes when you type on it. You know, the sound that’s on by default. The one that I turn off as the first thing I do when I get a new phone, out of respect for myself and all mankind.

iPhone keyboard tasting notes

After six hours of hearing it, I now do an excellent impression of that sound. If I’m ever tasked to annoy someone without reaching for my phone, I’ll be fine. I’m familiar with every subtle nuance: not too harsh, like an old typewriter, but not too soft, either, like the new Apple keyboards. The ones that feel like typing on stale marshmallows.

‘Ta - ta - ta’ goes the iPhone, with each triplet of taps. ‘Ta - ta - ta,’ like a tommy gun blowing bubbles. The sound has an attack that implies a definite action has been taken, with a soft finish that speaks of the action’s relative insignificance. ‘Ta - ta - ta’, it goes again, like the world’s snootiest librarian practising mild reproofs in an empty concert hall. Well, after six hours of hearing the sound, it can ‘ta - ta - ta - ta’ right off.

Please, kill your keyboard sound

Some must find it comforting to hear an audio alert for each key press. I’m not certain why. Perhaps to reassure themselves that they have, in fact, successfully reached their iPhone’s keyboard and not, for example, poked themselves in the thigh or otherwise missed altogether.

Indeed, whichever merry chap at Apple decided that the keyboard clacks should be on by default must have thought similarly: ‘People aren’t used to software keyboards,’ he surmised. ‘They’ll want it to feel close to something they’re used to. Something like a real keyboard.’ Perfectly reasonable so far. ‘Keyboards make clacking noises when you type on them. Maybe the software one should too. I can’t see any problems with that.’

Of course, the sound is both subtle and reassuring for anyone typing on the device who lacks the hand-eye coordination to pick their own nose. But should everyone around them have to suffer the dreaded ‘ta - ta - tas’, a technological cha-cha so often magnified by 12 or 13 devices in the same carriage on a morning commute, where even ‘quiet coaches’ are anything but? Must we all wear headphones just to avoid it? It doesn’t seem fair.

So here’s how to turn them off. It’s very simple:

On your home screen, find and tap the Settings app. (One tap is all you need, but you can double tap if you like. I’m OK with that now.):
Tap ‘Sounds’:
Scroll to the bottom and toggle the ‘Keyboard Clicks’ switch to OFF.
Receive my eternal thanks.

A Bouncer and a Cleaner Walk into a Mac...

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 11:47:00 +0100

The bouncer turns to the cleaner and says, ‘This isn’t going to be a deeply disappointing joke, is it?’ The cleaner, quick to correct, replies, ‘Certainly not! It’s just a silly way to start an article about two really useful Mac utilities that Nick wants to share.’

With the great glimmering globs of attention that mobile apps get these days, I thought it would be refreshing to share some cheap, simple Mac apps I’m using every day that make life a bit better. They’re the closest you can get to employing a bouncer and a cleaner without paying full-time staff.

Meet the bouncer

App Tamer pauses open apps you’re not using. Some apps are rude enough to use your CPU even when they’re running in the background, so App Tamer reminds them who’s boss. It makes your Mac feel faster, it’s simple to set up, and it costs just $14.95.

App Tamer works like a bouncer for your Mac. It keeps the rowdy apps calm, but lets anything with a short skirt, some Jimmy Choos, and a splash of make up do what it likes: you choose which apps you don’t want App Tamer to pause automatically — like FTP applications, which often need to run in the background — and it will leave those ones alone.

It’s especially useful if you use Adobe’s Creative Suite, parts of which have the nerve to gobble up 10-15% of my CPU when they’re in the background. ‘Why are they using the CPU when they’re in the background?’ you ask. Perhaps they’re attempting to coax smaller, more vulnerable apps to try hard drugs or join them in becoming unnecessarily bloated and expensive. Who knows? With App Tamer, you don’t have to worry about it.

Verdict: App Tamer gave me faster performance and fewer beach balls of doom. If you’re on a laptop, you’ll gain longer battery life too. An instant purchase for me.

Bonus tip: I suggest turning ‘Dim the windows of stopped apps’ off in the App Tamer preferences. App Tamer seamlessly resumes apps that you bring to the foreground, and I feel it makes for a smoother experience visually if you disable this feature.

http://www.stclairsoft.com/AppTamer/

Meet the cleaner

Hazel is what you’d get if you kidnapped Mary Poppins, a sympathetic witch, and a software genius, and told them they had until tea time to get all the crap off your Mac’s desktop and make sure it never gets into that state again.

In short, Hazel moves or deletes files automatically using rules you give it. I use it to magically tidy my Desktop and Downloads folders, but it’s much more powerful than that: there are many more recipes online, together with these tips from Maclife that should prove useful.

If that wasn’t enough to convince you to try the free demo, the name of the company that makes it is Noodlesoft. Noodlesoft! I make it a habit to always buy software from companies that sound edible, and you should too. Not only that, but they cite Newton’s law of inertia NOT in a technical manual, but in the opening paragraph of their sales page. It just made me want to buy it even more. Told you it was witchcraft.

Verdict: Hazel makes filing stuff fun. Worth every cent of the $21.95 asking price.

Bonus tip 1: If you’re not sure where to start once you’ve downloaded Hazel, there’s a great article on mac.appstorm for new Hazel users.

Bonus tip 2: I set Hazel up to tidy images on my desktop after one day instead of straight away. It stops you wondering where on Earth your stuff went when you’ve just saved a file to the desktop, only to have Hazel tidy it straight away. If you want to do the same, here’s a screenshot of the rule I’m using.

http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php

Meet the other guy

I couldn’t think of a way to include Cinch in my bouncer-cleaner mini drama. It could have played a footman of some kind, but it would be a very specialist and aggressively unionised footman who refused to do anything outside his remit. Anyway, it’s very useful, so here’s the scoop:

‘Inspired’ by a feature from — shock! — Microsoft, Cinch brings the edge snap feature in Windows 7 to the Mac.

Drag a window to the top of your screen, and it grows to use the full width and height of your display. Drag it down again and it shrinks to its previous size. You can also drag a window to either side of your screen to snap it to half the width of the display, allowing you to snap two windows side-by-side to compare or copy-paste between. It’s pretty nifty, and I don’t see Apple swallowing their pride and absorbing the feature into OS X any time soon.

Verdict: I wouldn’t want to use a Mac without Cinch now. Certainly worth $7.

http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/cinch/

Advice From a Probable Axe Murderer

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 13:05:00 +0100

I have a theory that, in the average British supermarket, you’re never more than four aisles from a budding axe murderer. At least seven of the 20 weirdest encounters in my life have taken place in supermarkets, usually late at night, and often in the tea and coffee aisle, where the dozy and the dangerous gather to snort Earl Grey and plot sweet revenge.

The following meeting is unique among the stories in my wish-it-was-a-real-book-but-sorry-to-say-it-isn’t titled Tales From the Supermarket, in that it changed my life in a good way and that it took part in the cereal aisle, where some say it’s safer. It is, I assure you, entirely true.

Advice From a Probable Axe Murderer

A man stood next to me in Tesco on Tuesday. There are two types of men who shop at supermarkets: those who go with a trolley and a list from their girlfriend, and those who never buy enough to bother with a basket. The man looked across at me, saw my trolley and my list, and gave a sharp sniff in disgust.

With a bottle of cider under one arm, he paused for a moment to pull open his waist band, slide a hand into his pants, and adjust his man spuds. Confirming that all were present and correct, he cleared his throat and asked me a question:

‘What cereal’s best for fighting?’

‘Fighting?’ I replied. I’d probably misheard him. He’d said writing. Or kiting. That was it. The scars on his forearms were from kiting mishaps, I assured myself. It made sense now. This would all work out fine.

‘Fighting,’ he said again. ‘Lots of fighting.’ I considered whether or not corn flakes would prove effective in preventing his fist reaching my face, should it come to that. Then I offered him my best advice.

‘You want porridge,’ I said. ‘Cheap; simple; full of slow-release carbs. Porridge is proper fighting food. Every Scotsman knows that.’

He waited a moment as if considering whether to thank me or thump me. Then he grabbed a box of porridge, snorted, and offered me his verdict.

‘I’d ‘ave ‘im,’ he said, nodding towards the proud Scotsman on the box front. ‘Thanks, fella,’ he added. ‘Nice trolley.’ Then, as I prepared to defend myself from a wild hook or fast jab, he turned and walked five or six paces in the direction of the checkouts. That’s when he spun back and barked three orders at me, each one separated by a deep breath:

‘Live every day like your last!
Love someone with all your heart!
Never forget how lucky you are!’

I like to think that a short breeze blew at this point, the clouds cleared, and the light shifted from a dark grey to a warming orange. But I was indoors buying milk and biscuits, so who knows? By the time I glanced up from the muesli box I’d chosen in preparation as an improvised shield, he was gone.

The experience taught me not to be too quick to judge. And that it’s true about the cereal aisle being safer. Oh, and I’m trying hard to follow his advice, by the way. If I’ve learned one thing in supermarkets, it’s never to argue with a man who won’t carry a basket. Why buy a week’s worth of food when you’re living each day like your last?

Life is Beautiful

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 11:02:44 +0100

A cure for apathy: switch off your phone, retreat from your inbox, and tell me you’re not moved by this short video by Everynone. The simplest things in life can be beautiful beyond words.

An Open Letter to Support Ninjas, Web Rock Stars, and Sandwich Artists

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:48:00 +0100

To Whom It May Concern

You are not a ninja. Each time you use the word ‘ninja’ in vain, another one moves into your attic. Ninjas train. Ninjas battle. Ninjas don’t check email.

You are not a rock star. Rock stars paint on silence. Rock stars trash hotels. Rock stars use Internet Explorer 6. Rock stars just don’t give a shit.

An artist? Please. Artists see. Artists reflect. Artists bleed Tyrian purple and lapis lazuli. Artists send light into the darkest heart. Artists don’t get real jobs.

The sign of a life well lived? When your job title becomes the least interesting thing about you. And if it isn’t? Perhaps you need a hobby, a break, or a more humble title.

Sincerely

Nick

"It’s exciting to live in a world where a vibrant blogging scene complements newspapers. But it..."

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:56:11 +0100

“It’s exciting to live in a world where a vibrant blogging scene complements newspapers. But it would be a step back for civilisation if it came to replace them. This is not a debate about “dead tree technology”, but about the future of journalism as a job for which people get paid.”

- David Mitchell on paid content, writing for The Observer