Four Sides

Sunday Reading – May 13, 2012

James McCullough — Sun, 13 May 2012 19:36:53 +0000

No edition for Sunday Reading last week, because I was still recovering from my trip to Las Vegas and couldn’t find time to prepare anything.

I’m flattered to join the ranks of Barack Obama, Elvis Presley, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Tupac Shakur as the subject of a great American conspiracy theory! (I would have added Biggie Smalls to the list, but I’m westside ’til I die.) In any event, I’m either an alien life form brought to Earth to keep track of Jose Canseco, or I’m a woman named Sarah Phillips who writes sports-related columns and blogs. You decide. In the meantime … taaake meee tooo yooour leeeadeeer.
– Is an ESPN Columnist Scamming People on the Internet | Deadspin
A fascinating read into the background of an ESPN columnist and her rise from being an unknown commenter on a sports gambling site.

I have always been drawn to New York City and love the mix of culture and history found there. Here is a good read about the Village Voice: It Took a Village: How the Village Voice Changed Journalism

Mark has done two things in his twenties,” a colleague of Zuckerberg says. “He has built a global company, and he has grown up.” The second one made the first possible.
– The Maturation of the Billionaire Boy-Man | New York Magazine

Everyone who has been following Twitter, Facebook, etc. knows that Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys passed away. Over at kottke, there is a great roundup of the posts around the internet about MCA

Finally, the world also lost Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are. Wired Magazine has a good collection of photographs from his life and a biography of the man for those unfamiliar with his work: Remembering Maurice Sendak | Wired

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iPad for Work

James McCullough — Tue, 01 May 2012 12:00:34 +0000

It is not a sacrifice to use the iPad as a primary device.
– Shawn Blanc, Why the iPad is My New Laptop

Shawn writes about how he’s using his iPad more for regular tasks without missing a beat without using his laptop. I wrote about this earlier when I talked about how I am Changing My Workflow. After I wrote that, I started to explore more ways to push my work onto the iPad and migrate away from my MacBook. The iPad has essentially become my main device[1] for many of the same reasons Shawn outlines in his post.

The main reason I enjoy the iPad more for work than the MacBook is for focus.

Shawn writes:

The iPad, however, comes with a natural anti-distraction software: iOS itself. The iPad makes a great multi-use device because it doesn’t distract or beckon away from the task at hand.

I find this to be extremely important to me now. The Mac OS makes multi-tasking extremely easy, while it’s slightly more cumbersome in iOS (double-tapping the Home Button vs CMD-Tab. Because it takes me slightly longer to switch apps on the iPad, I tend to stay more focused, in my writing especially.

On my Mac, I would open a new tab to check in on Facebook, switch over to email when a new message arrived, dabble in iTunes to find the right type of music to listen to, etc.

On my iPad, I don’t open new tabs or the Facebook app to check in, I’ve turned off notifications for mail, and rarely listen to music while working on the iPad now.

The one thing Shawn doesn’t mention is how quiet the iPad is in comparison to the laptop. Right now, I have the MacBook running iTunes, and Safari, and the fan is still humming quietly. On the iPad, the only noise I hear is of my iPad keyboard clicking away. It’s rather Zen-like, looking at Byword and listening to the keyboard go clack-clack-clack.

Shawn also mentions iCloud backup and restore, which is great, and has made me much more aware of backing up my data on my computer in the cloud. I’m currently migrating all my work files into Google Drive to back them up and to have them readily available in case I need to work on them from the iPad. I do a full backup via TimeMachine to an external drive already, but I don’t think I need to backup everything to the cloud[2]. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Apple made TimeMachine iCloud-ready for the next version of MacOS X, in which case, I would backup to the cloud since TimeMachine is so simple to use.

The final piece of the puzzle for my workflow has been solved. PocketCloud allows me to not only connect to a remote desktop, I can easily log into my own computer to access the file system. I will do a full review for next week, but if you need to access a file system remotely, it’s well worth checking out (it’s free for all platforms).

My two yearold daughter loves it even more than I do, I think. ↩
Famous last words. ↩

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Death of Facts

James McCullough — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:30:18 +0000

Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion.

Facts, 360 BC – 2012 AD | Chicago Tribune

In a mock obituary of the death of Facts, Rex Huppke shares how “facts grew up” from being about “universal principles that everybody agrees on,” by Aristotle, to “empirical observations,” by Francis Bacon.

Although this obituary focuses on the political issues that Facts have survived, it could have easily talked about any other areas in life, especially those that involve stories being shared in the media. News stories based upon the same press release can display two different sides to a story, twisting the numbers around to mean whatever they want, without backing up their stories.

I was reminded of the word Stephen Colbert coined,[1] truthiness, which means “a quality characterizing a ‘truth’ that a person claims to know intuitively ‘from the gut’ or because it ‘feels right’ without regard to evidence, logic or intellectual examination.” I think truthiness still happens frequently alongside facts, but facts has been morphed into something different. It’s no longer an “empirical observation,” but an observation made through a lens of emotion.

Gone is the context of the observation. More important is how that fact makes a person or people feel, and use it to increase those emotions (generally fear).

In baseball, people may see that a player is hitting .200 and conclude that he is a lousy hitter, and the commentators will continue to push the argument that the batter may need to be benched and replaced. It’s rare for people to dig into the numbers and discover that the guy is just unlucky (making contact but hitting the ball right at someone). Student Unions are very proficient at using facts to their advantage and rallying the troops to fight their fight without presenting a defense for the University.

I grow tired of the one-sided attacks and opinion pieces that ignore the other side of the story. I wish there was more balance in life which displayed facts in a fair manner without bias.

Wikipedia mentions that the word had existed in the Oxford English Dictionary before Colbert used it, but I think his usage made it much more popular. ↩

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Sunday Reading – April 29 – featuring @siracusa, @kickstarter, @msfitbc, @fitforakingtv

James McCullough — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 13:30:44 +0000

For Us Nerds

If this is the method you have used in the past to calculate then I would have to contend that your entire list is flawed. First of all, as pointed out before, you have grossly underestimated the size of the dragon. As for the true reason why your estimate is off you stated “There are certainly other valuable items in Smaug’s hoard – rare suits of armor and so on – but the point of the exercise is to establish a minimum, conservative, net worth and the total value of a pile of ancient weaponry is probably no more than a rounding error in a fortune measured in the billions of dollars.” which is your greatist mistake. If you are going to base your research on AD&D, which was itself based on LotR, then you have to consider that all of those weapons and armor are worth ten times their weight in gold, and thousands of times that for the “ancient” variety.

You opened up a can of worms on this one sir.

This quote is from How Much is a Dragon Worth, Revisited, an article that demonstrates both the power of the internet, and the ire of nerds. Michael Noer had worked out an estimated value for Smaug, the dragon from The Hobbit, for the series about the 15 richest fictional characters. People wrote in to nitpick every aspect of the article, so he took the time to recalculate the numbers. Both the article and the final amount are impressive.

Cargo-Bot is apparently the first game to be made entirely on an iPad. It involves programming a robot to move boxes into different sequences. It’s free on the iTunes App Store, and a fun puzzle game. The link is to a story on Cult of Mac for the backstory.

Podcasts

Hypercritical #65 – Look Right into the Eyes of Your Sweetie

Hypercritical #63 – Talking to the Bear

Build & Analyze #73 – One Cell Taller

Three episodes of the shows that aired in the past few weeks. Hypercritical is hosted by John Siracusa who writes at Ars Technica who goes on some lengthy discussions about the new Gmail interface, gaming as a form of art, paid upgrades in the App Store, and other stuff. Marco Arment on Build & Analyze carries forward some of John’s ideas into his show, sparking a conversation about whether a customer will pay more than an advertiser for something (i.e. will people pay for Twitter to remove the advertisements). I would listen to Hypercritical #63 before Build and Analyze #73.

Home is where the heart lies

The first season of Fit For A King is currently in production, being filmed entirely in the Okanagan Valley (in the heart of Western Canada’s wine country), in British Columbia.

In each episode, hosts James Blonde, and Lisa Kilgour, leave their “home” at picturesque God’s Mountain Estate, in search of an outdoor adventure nearby, featuring and exploring the beautiful surroundings the Okanagan has to offer.

Fit For a King – Official TV Promo Spot

Some Treats

Chocolate Peanut Butter Protein Cups – @Angelique Kronebusch

Gluten-free Pizza Crust – @YourLighterSide

Kickstarter Campaigns

I have been aware of Kickstarter for a while now, but these are the first projects I have actually backed.

Battle of the Bulge is a turn-based iPad game in the style of gameplay like the tabletop game Axis and Allies. I’ve long been fascinated with those games, but never had the network of friends to play them. Now I can! (after the game is finished, that is)

Shadowrun Returns – I discovered this extremely late, only a few hours before it was going to close. Shadowrun is a RPG based upon a cyberpunk world from William Gibson, Neuromancer. I first got in touch with it as a teenager playing the game on the SNES and have fond memories of the game-play. When I heard that the original developer was returning to do a new game, well, I clicked on “back this project” fairly quickly, and I wasn’t alone. The original goal was $400,000. It’s going to receive $1,836,477. Here’s a World of Shadowrun Primer PDF for people who want an introduction to Shadowrun

And, finally

A Ford commercial, but rather funny.

Previous Sunday Reading editions.

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Thoughts on Google Drive

James McCullough — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:00:15 +0000

On Tuesday, Google launched Google Drive, their cloud storage service.[1]

From what I have read[2], it appears to be a quite useful and powerful tool that binds the Google App suite together. It will be great for people who enjoy working within Google Docs and collaborate with a team. It will also be great for people who want a simple way to backup their files to a system that’s easily accessible to them.

In Om Malik’s write-up about the service, he includes this quote from Sundar Pichar, SVP of Chrome and Apps:

In this post-PC world the file systems don’t matter.

Om continues:

Instead, what matters is data, which follows the flow from apps to devices. Pichar says that the key here is to provide context and add contours to all the information stored inside the Drive.

When people say the term “post-PC,” I tend to think about Steve Jobs introducing the iPad to the world, and people will quickly be comparing Google Drive to iCloud. The two services have the same mission, eliminate the need for local storage, but they have two opposing philosophies on how to approach that mission.

Apple attaches your data to an app, trapping it within that world. Your iCloud data is not accessible outside of that app[3] (i.e. this document I’m writing in Byword can’t be accessed by Pages without exporting and then re-importing it from Pages), and there is no way to collaborate with a file in iCloud with a team (unless you have the same Apple ID on each machine). In addition, it is only accessible through apps in the Mac/iOS ecosystem – Windows, Linux, Android, are out of luck.

Google attaches your data to your account, and will be accessible by any device through the web. Data is independent of both app and device, unless it is associated with a certain app (a Google Doc can only be edited within Google Docs). This allows for easy exportation of data and importing it into a new system (setup Google Drive on a new computer, download the files you want, copy to the main drive, and remove Google Drive from the system).

Some people are going to speak out about not trusting Google with their data, but I believe they are taking the right approach with this. How I access my data and how I want to share (if I want to) should be up to me, not some app or company. With accessibility in the user’s control, other products can be developed to display your data in different and better ways. An interesting example that I discovered yesterday while reading about Google Drive is Primadesk.

Primadesk allows you to access your data in 31 different services, including Facebook, Dropbox, Box, Gmail, Skydrive, etc. You can backup your data to the Primadesk servers, as well. With not too much hassle, you can easily move all of your Box files to Dropbox, and presumably in the near future, move all your Dropbox files to Google Drive. A service like Primadesk allows you to get around some of those limitations that are in place with cloud services (file size, capacity, bandwidth caps), and it is accessible via dedicated apps, as well.

After all my reading about Google Drive, my mind drifts to three thoughts:
1. Will Apple crack and open up access to iCloud to other devices (non-iOS/Mac), and allow apps to share iCloud data in the future?
2. How will Google Drive be tied into Google Project Glass (the eyeglasses)? Will I be able to view my files within the glasses, view an old picture of a location or do a quick search and discover I didn’t take a picture of the Eiffel Tower last time I was in Paris?
3. What new kinds of applications will be able to be developed using Google Drive’s API?

I am starting to think that the future is just getting started.

Here is a quick resource guide for Google Drive with links: Google Drive ↩
My account wasn’t ready yet, so I haven’t been able to try it out. ↩
The exceptions would be Calendar, Contacts, and iCloud Mail which can be accessed via web browser. ↩

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Forget About Facebook, Let’s Move On

James McCullough — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:30:00 +0000

For at least five years, we’ve been working with the same operating logic in the consumer technology game. This is what it looks like:

There will be ratings and photos and a network of friends imported, borrowed, or stolen from one of the big social networks. There will be an emphasis on connections between people, things, and places. That is to say, the software you run on your phone will try to get you to help it understand what and who you care about out there in the world. Because all that stuff can be transmuted into valuable information for advertisers.

That paradigm has run its course. It’s not quite over yet, but I think we’re into the mobile social fin de siècle.

Alexis Madrigal – The Jig is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future

This article is a definite must-read for people interested in the web and the future of technology. It was published just over a week after Facebook announced they were purchasing Instagram, and that news flooded the various tech blogs and Twitter streams. People were making a big deal out of it since the purchase price was a billion dollars. John Gruber pointed out during The Talk Show that Instagram was worth more than the market cap of the NY Times (which was just under a billion dollars).

It makes me wonder where the world is heading when we place such significance on how we share photos (Instagram, Pinterest) that it can be valued as being more important than a media outlet that has been around for 150 years. I also think about how when Google shows off their concept of the Augmented Reality glasses, the idea gets laughed at and parodied instead of generating some excitement over a new idea.

Instead of generating new products that take the next step, companies and developers are more keen on duplicating what exists already, tweaking something in how it operates or how it’s styled to increase its popularity. To make matters worse, the University of Florida is gutting their computer science department.

When a major University decides that its athletic department is more important than an academic one that researches and designs the future, and developers are more focused on getting fingers to click ads, what kind of world is that going to develop?

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Keys to Success by John Gruber

James McCullough — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 06:50:36 +0000

John Gruber’s Keys to Success

Fussy coffee drinker
Clicky keyboard
Soda Stream

The Talk Show #87 | 5by5 Network

Few quick notes:
* in order to qualify as a fussy coffee drinker, you must grind your beans on a daily basis before making the coffee.
* the more popular examples of clicky keyboards that I keep hearing about are the Das keyboard and Apple Extended keyboard
* the Soda Stream is meant not to make carbonated water, but to overcarbonate the water.

These keys to success are for anyone, doesn’t matter what field of work you are involved in. The best part is that according to Gruber, you don’t even need a laptop, iPhone or iPad to succeed. Only the above three items.

Daring Fireball
Gruber on Twitter

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A trip to watch Wrath of the Titans

James McCullough — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:53:27 +0000

Perseus (Sam Worthington) would be talking to Zeus (Liam Neeson) about what Hades (Ralph Fiennes) said to Ares (Edgar Ramirez) about Phrygian dating sites, when suddenly Worthington (Perseus) would be snatched up into the air by a two-headed fire-breathing demon-dog (MacBook Pro) and hurled into a marble column (Doric).
A Trip to Watch “Wrath of the Titans” | Grantland

The movie Wrath of the Titans doesn’t sound all too great, but I loved Brian Phillips review of the movie, from BOB the only other person in the movie complex to quotes like the one above and this one:

The heroes are mainly demigods, which is like being on oxycodone at least. They’re anesthetized by their own awesomeness.

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Sunday Reading – April 22nd, 2012

James McCullough — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 07:27:52 +0000

A little bit of everything

In honour of 4/20 that passed on Friday:

Marijuana has not been de facto legalized, and the war on drugs is not just about cocaine and heroin. In fact, today, when we don’t have enough jail cells for murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals, there may be more people in federal and state prisons for marijuana offenses than at any other time in U.S. history

The Atlantic, “Reefer Madness – August 1994”

And quite the opposite of that culture:
Where Amish Snowbirds Find a Nest

Matt Gemmell – Augmented Paper – on app development for the iPad:

Design an experience. Make it as beautiful – and as emotionally resonant – as it can possibly be. Then adorn the core experience and content with only as much functionality as is absolutely necessary. Functionality – and software-based thinking in general – is like seasoning. A little is an enhancement; any more destroys the flavour, subsumes the artistry of the chef, and may well be bad for you.

Paul Graham’s Todo List:

So I inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of 5 commands:
Don’t ignore your dreams; don’t work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.
which I then put at the top of the file I use as a todo list.

Twitter introduced the Innovator’s Patent Agreement this past week which puts control of the patents they file back into the hands of their developers and engineers. I thought Marco Arment had an interesting take on what the IPA means to developers in his post titled simply Twitter’s “Innovator’s Patent Agreement”.

Longterm readers of this blog will know I follow a mainly paleo-based diet. Over at Free the Animal there is a discussion about what is the next step for the paleo movement as more people follow it, books become published and it goes mainstream. Richard Nikoley shares his thoughts:

And Paleo, if it means anything at all, is about a little more effort, a little more care, a little more involvement, a little more time and attention. It’s about the sanctity of something fundamental about not only our physical health, but our mental and social health. Think families going out and sourcing their food with care, collaboratively coming up with menu plans, all hands on deck for the preparation, and enjoyment mutually…sitting around the table talking to one another.

Richard Nikoley, Is Paleo a Sacred Grassfed Cow?

And, finally, Ze Frank is producing some of the best YouTube videos available that are entertaining with a purpose. His latest, Robot Future starts off with a bang and concludes with a few articles that are worth looking at: Jesse Schell’s Visions of the Gamepocalypse and Geoffrey Miller’s “Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens”

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Sunday Reading – April 15th, 2012

James McCullough — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 18:30:21 +0000

I consider myself to be a fairly well-read man, and I tend to come across some fairly interesting finds each week. I tweet them as I find them, for the most part, but thought I would share some more links for your Sunday reading. They offer more variety than most sites share.

Instagram’s Growth – By now, everyone has heard about Facebook’s billion dollar acquisition of Instagram. Here is a visual representation of their growth – via Alexis Ohanian

“Facebook can be terrific, if we use it properly,” Cacioppo continues. “It’s like a car. You can drive it to pick up your friends. Or you can drive alone.” But hasn’t the car increased loneliness? If cars created the suburbs, surely they also created isolation. “That’s because of how we use cars,” Cacioppo replies. “How we use these technologies can lead to more integration, rather than more isolation.”

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?, The Atlantic.

VentureBeat Weekly – A quick rundown of the tech news of the past week, hosted by the lovely Jolie O’Dell, who is also a guest on today’s This Week in Tech

Dual Coverage From the NY Times – Tyler Cowen – Tyler Cowen is one of my favourite authors, and he has a new book coming out, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules For Everyday Foodies. The NY Times has two reviews, one in favour, one not so much.

This limitation of options suggests that fashion isn’t the universal form of self-expression that the industry says it is. I can’t help but wonder, expression for whom? When the language of fashion is dichotomized into two distinct gender categories—male and female—where is the space for bodies or styles that don’t fit? After all, languages are plastic. They can be bent, molded, subverted. What would fashion look like if it could shake off the ballasts of gender, sex, and sexuality? What would menswear look like if it could shed its anxieties around masculinity? More importantly, what would I look like?

Come As You Are – Alex Jung, The Morning News.

And finally, a quick interview with Lewish Lapham of Lapham’s Quarterly and formerly of Harper’s Magazine. Interview is part of the Put This On web series, which is highly recommended.

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Four Sides

Sunday Reading – May 13, 2012

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iPad for Work

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Death of Facts

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Sunday Reading – April 29 – featuring @siracusa, @kickstarter, @msfitbc, @fitforakingtv

For Us Nerds

Podcasts

Home is where the heart lies

Some Treats

Kickstarter Campaigns

And, finally

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Thoughts on Google Drive

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Forget About Facebook, Let’s Move On

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Keys to Success by John Gruber

John Gruber’s Keys to Success

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A trip to watch Wrath of the Titans

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Sunday Reading – April 22nd, 2012

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Sunday Reading – April 15th, 2012

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