Category Archives: Internet

Goodbye Netflix, hello reading

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I cancelled my Netflix subscription yesterday because I’d been using it both too much and too little. I had both the streaming service and one DVD out at a time. While the DVD option has a much larger selection than the streaming, I found myself hardly every using it. In fact I’ve only checked out out a handful of DVDs since getting a Macbook Air without an optical drive over a year ago. Even when I did check one out it took me days or weeks to actually watch and return it. At the same time, I watched too much over streaming. It’s far too easy to just sit and keep hitting the next episode button for hours on end. It was taking up far too much time that would be better spent elsewhere.

I’m not giving up TV completely. We have a large TV in the living room and my roommate has a Roku box and Netflix streaming. However I’ve been spending more time at my desk and trying not to sit on the couch for more than short periods of time. I also plan on keeping the watching down to a few hours on the weekends (if that). I have Amazon Prime (plugged into the Roku too) and while Amazon and Netflix have mostly overlapping free selections, there’s more available to rent on Amazon. That makes it possible to watch something when I really want to (like The Avengers over the weekend) but keeps me from contiuously browsing.

I do however, want to spend more time reading actual books (not blogs or websites and certainly not “social media”). I have a Kindle which I love (and would like to use more) and Amazon occasionally has really nice deals. Cornell also has really big libraries with great collections which I want to make more use of. Personally I find myself being much calmer and more collected if I spend half an hour or so just reading without thinking about anything else. It’s a pretty relaxing and it feels even better if I’m actively learning something from it.

Michael Fogus (who writes a great blog) has posts on “extreme reading” and “reading for the rushed” which offer some great advice for reading more and better. I’m already a pretty fast reader (reading a couple of technical papers a week will do that to you) but one thing I’m interested in trying out is taking notes while reading. I normally hate marking up books, so I’m getting a small notebook (Field notes or Moleskine Cahier) and using that. I don’t know how this will work for fiction but for non-fiction I tend to come across lots of interesting facts that I would like to remember. For example yesterday while reading Martyn Amos’ “Genesis Machines” I found out that Turing was prompted by a friend’s death to start thinking about the possibility about moving human thought to non-biological substrates. These are the types of things I’d like to remember and maybe come back to later.

I’m leaving for India in a few weeks time which means lots of time on planes and away from reliable Internet connections. That in turn means lots of time and opportunity for reading. My Kindle is already well-stocked and I hope this time at home turns into a good start for a year of reading. Ideally I want to read at least a book a week. That might be a bit ambitious, but I won’t find out without giving it a try. For the time being though, it’s back to finishing “Genesis Machines”.

The Internet as Echo Chamber

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… and social media even more so. This isn’t a new idea, but it’s one I’ve been realizing first hand over the last few weeks. While the Internet makes it possible to contact and communicate on an unprecendented scale, it’s easy to simply walk in the same circles. It’s easy to hear and say the same things over and over again. It’s easy to follow the same sorts of people on Twitter, to be involved in a single, mostly homogenous community. And while this can certainly be interesting and enjoyable for a while, in the long run it is at least boring and (I suspect) even actively harmful.

Perhaps the truth is that I’m just bored. I’m bored of shiny Apple stuff, I’m tired of the newest Nexus hardware. I’m tired of startups whose products and services mostly just make me go ‘meh’. I’m tired of Twitter and Facebook dumping endless streams of I don’t even know what into my brain 24/7. I’m tired of endless discussions of best vs worst. I’m tired of vapid claims proclaimed as gospel truth without any proof or logical chain of reasoning. I’m tired of blandly homogenous groups of mostly mediocre individuals claiming to be “the best of the web” without a shred of evidence or a hint of irony. I’m tired of people expecting for-profit corporations to behave like public utilities and then being outraged and surprised when they act in favor of profit rather than social good. I’m tired of the Internet as an echo chamber.

No, I’m not quitting the Internet. Or going on an “information diet” as seems to be all the rage nowadays. No, I still love the Internet. Without it I would have known far less about computers than I do today. Without it I wouldn’t be where I am today. Without it I wouldn’t be talking to my parents and my friends on a daily basis basically free of charge.

I love the Internet, but not all of it. I love Wikipedia (please donate today), I love Google Search, I mostly like Lambda the Ultimate. I love the wealth of technical information and good books online, mostly for free. The Onion is killer. Reddit has its moments. But I could do without Hacker News. The Internet may be an information superhighway, but I really don’t want to go to all the places it leads. In fact, it’s best used when I have a clear(ish) idea of where I do want to go.

In some ways, the Internet is two things: it’s an information resource and it’s a communication tool. The two can be quite separate. Lately I’ve been finding myself using the former aspect more and more. As I throw myself into research and hacking and building, the Internet seems more like a library than it does a meeting place for all and sundry. This Internet is quieter, less chatty, slower, calmer. There are still voices, but they’re time-shifted, they’re softer, there’s a certain distance between me and them. In this Internet, the ideas come first, the voices later. This is the Internet in which people are building hobby operating systems for new hardware platforms. This is the Internet where people write programming languages and complex systems for fun. This is the Internet where I discovered Lisp and Linux and functional programming. This is the Internet as I first remember it.

Things change. To hold on to the old (or expect a return to it) is a fool’s errand. Nowhere is this more true than in the world of computer technology and the Internet. But perhaps part of the magic of the Internet is that the old can coexist with the new and you can choose one, or the other, or both. I’ve been choosing the new for a while and it’s been good. But I think it’s time to look back at the old again. For a while, at least, I need to leave the echo chamber and find a nice quiet corner of the library.

An Unexpected Error has Occurred

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There are a number of web services I use on casual basis. These are services that I find interesting and somewhat useful, even fun. Every now and then I learn interesting things from them and they don’t require me to devote large amounts of time or energy to them. At the same time, they’re not services I depend on and I wouldn’t be disappointed if I lost them.

I was using one such service the other day, in the form of a Chrome plugin, when I got an error: “An unexpected error has occurred. Please try again”. For a number of reasons, I think that is a particularly bad way to handle an error. I was not told what the error was or why it occurred. I wasn’t told if it was an error on my part, or if something was wrong with the service. I didn’t know if I could do anything to fix it (other than to try again, which didn’t work). There didn’t seem to be any way for me to report this error and I didn’t know if the developers were aware of the error.

Now, I don’t pay for this service and like I said, I probably wouldn’t miss it if the service ended. This is definitely a first-world netizen problem. That being said, I’m assuming that the people running the service want it to grow and prosper (and maybe someday make them money). But I can’t help but wander: how are they dealing with user-end errors? Looking at their website it looks like they’re a pretty small team. Maybe they don’t have the manpower to track down and solve each and every error. As a user (and early adopter) I understand they’ll have growing pains and rough edges, that things won’t work perfectly every time. I’m not very disappointed by the fact that there was an error, but I am annoyed that there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

I like this service, I think they’re doing a good job. If I could, I would help them by reporting errors. I’ve filed bug reports in the past and I would do it again for a service I like. But I simply have no way of doing it. Almost anything would be a better error message than “An unexpected error has occurred”. Perhaps they don’t want to scare away users by dumping error codes or long error messages, but in that case let me know that the error has been logged. The way things stood, I didn’t know what the error was or that the developers were aware it had occurred.

So here’s the message I would like to give to this startup (and others like it): your users are smart and some of them want to help you. Especially if you’re a new webservice, many of your early adopters may be technically adept people who can file good bug reports and diagnose errors. But they can only help you if you let them. If you don’t want your users seeing long error messages, at least let them know that you’re aware of the error (you are logging errors, right?).

I ended up not using the service for several days because I didn’t care enough to track down the error. I later realized that the error could have been because I wasn’t in logged in to the service in Chrome. This is really something they should have just told me (or even not let me use the plugin till I was logged in). As a final word of advice: don’t be afraid to tell the user when they’re doing something wrong (but do be polite about it).

Postscript I tried to email the startup telling them about this issue, but I couldn’t find an email address either on their website on their blog. Their About page only has Twitter handles for the people that work there. Another note for startups: make it easy for your users to get in touch with you. I’m starting to reconsider the original goodwill I had towards this company.

A Whole Lot About Books

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Today’s post is just a collection of things about books. These are things that I’ve been wanting to talk about for a while, but none of them individually deserved a full post on its own. So I’m going to put them all together here and put them into a coherent narrative.

First off, you may have heard about the Kindle fiasco where Amazon removed a customer’s account without warning (or explanation) and then deleted all her books. Said customer’s account has been restored but it raises question about Amazon and the Kindle. I personally love the Kindle hardware and service, but I also want to actually own my books. I still buy paper copies of books that I want to keep and will read more than once. All my textbooks are paper too.

Luckily, many non-Amazon ebook vendors will provide DRM-free ePubs. If you have ePubs then the best reading experience for them is using the Readmill app on the iPad. They also recently added support for Adobe DRM, PDFs as well as books from the Kobo and Google Play store. Readmill will also sync your books to an online library and provides highlighting and social features to share what you’re reading. Highly recommended, I just wish they connected to Goodreads and Findings.

Unfortunately the Humble Bundle for eBooks has already ended. This bundle offered a selection of DRM-free ebooks (including some graphic novels) at your own price. The amount you paid got split between the authors, a number of charities and the Humble Bundle team. I hear that if eBooks counted all of these authors would have made the New York Times bestseller list. We can count this one as a success for DRM-free, post-scarcity publishing. You can sign up to receive notifications of later Humble Bundles and I hope to see similar bundles in the future.

A few weeks ago I reviewed Cal Newport’s excellent book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”. It offers examples and advice on forging a career that’s based not on nebulous definitions of passion but rather on cultivating rare and valuable skills. If you’ve been wanting to read this book but haven’t gotten around to it yet, here’s your chance. Social Books is a new online book. Members read one book a month, sharing and discussing it as they go along. Their first book is So Good and they’re starting November 1. I’ve already read the book but I think it would be a learning experience to do it again.

Last but not least, one of my friends from college has been writing a blog called Courtney Reads a Lot. If you guessed that it’s all about books, you guessed right. If you’re looking for new books to read or a constant stream of book-related posts subscribe to her blog.

That’s all for today. Enjoy your weekend and see you all next week.

Sunday Selection 2012-10-21

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Good afternoon everyone. It’s fall in my part of the world, the leaves are changing color, the weather is getting colder and the days are getting shorter. Things are moving and shaking in the tech world (as usual) and today’s Selection takes a look at Microsoft, Linux, Firefox and the intersection of technology and life.

Around the Web

The Story of the New Microsoft.com

Microsoft has a new website. No matter what you might think of the company and its products, I think you’d be hard pressed to say that the website wasn’t a job well done. It’s clean, effective and very modern.

UX Principles Behind Firefox for Windows 8

I’ve always had a soft spot for Firefox. Even though I mostly use Chrome nowadays, I keep coming back to Firefox. It was the first non-IE browser I used and I think the Mozilla team has done a lot to make the web a better place. It’s good see Firefox evolving and developing to stay in tune with the rest of modern technology.

Linus Torvalds Answers Your Questions

Linus isn’t the most public of technology superstars, but he doesn’t pull any punches either. In this recent Slashdot interview he talks about kernel development, what he might have done differently, patents and more.

Video

Creative Mornings with Jonathan Harris

CreativeMornings is a monthly breakfast lecture series for creative types. Each event is free of charge, and includes a 20 minute talk. This one is by Jonathan Harris creator of We Feel Fine and Cowbird (among others). It talks about his journey exploring technology, life and storytelling. If you’re looking for examples of a remarkable life well lived, this one’s a keeper.