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Jul 12 2011
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Education, Hardware, Internet, News, Productivity, Software

The Age of the Maker is here

Last week a friend sent me a link to the world’s first sub-$1000 PCR machine. PCR stands for Polymerase Chain Reaction, it’s a method of replicating a section of DNA it billions of times. This means you can now study the building blocks of life to your hearts content, in your basement, for less than the price of a top-of-the-line computer. As the announcement says: DNA is now DIY.

OpenPCR joins a list of recent technological milestones including 3D printing, cheap embedded microcontrollers, ubiquitous computing and broadband Internet connections. The technological scene is supported by social phenomena like the open source movement, coworking and hacker spaces and organizations like Kiva and Kickstarter. The rise of increasingly powerful DIY technology and the surrounding social systems is pushing us toward what can best be described as the Age of the Maker.

Going from idea or innovation to self-sustaining product doesn’t require large factories or upfront investments anymore. As projects like OpenPCR and Coffee Joulies show it’s feasible to create a truly novel, popular product combining nothing more than talented, hard-working creators and willing customers. I’d like to believe that this is the beginning of a new industrial age, one that produces a similar improvement in the quality of human life without many of the bad side-effects of the last one. This revolution focuses on the individual and the small team rather on the factory. Sure, there are businesses and there is manufacturing, but the point of it all is not just profit. Profit is important, but a lot of people and groups I just mentioned are doing it largely because it’s fun and exciting.

Technology and the means of production are becoming increasingly democratic. What can be accomplished by small groups of focussed individuals leveraging modern technology is truly amazing. The software industry has already shown that small groups of people can create products and services that change the world. Today’s generation of makers and hackers are taking that a step further – showing that such world changing innovation doesn’t have to be limited to software.

I’m not an economist, but I’d argue that in many ways we’re seeing a reinvention of capitalism. Financial capital doesn’t have to be concentrated in the hands of a few – it can be widely distributed among the masses – millions of customers around the world. What is needed are people with ideas and skills that can bring that capital together just-in-time to create a product – the makers. And we now have the services required to bring the capital in (the Internet, Kickstarter, Kiva) and the cheap infrastructure needed to get the product out (UPS, FedEx, etc.). With OpenPCR, Arduinos, 3D printers and the we’re democratizing and distributing the means of production.

If you’re someone who likes building cool, interesting things there has never been a better time to be alive. The Industrial Revolution brought about mass production and cheap commoditized goods. But it also decimated independent artisans and craftsmen. Today we’re just getting ready to put all the manufacturing power of modern industrializaton back in the hands of individuals with ideas and skills. With today’s technology Leonardo da Vinci may have been able to build his flying machines.

What have you made today?

Jul 08 2011
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Internet, Software

The cloud is not secure

We’re getting closer and closer to an age where our data is separate from the machines that we use to manipulate and interact with it. A stepping stone to that future is the “cloud” – a remote, server-based repository of your information that can be accessed by a variety of applications and interfaces. In some ways the cloud has been around since the beginning of computing (dumb terminals plugging into mainframes) but the new, shiny, consumer cloud is both similar and indifferent. And there are many incarnations.

Apple’s iCloud is a complex, powerful solution for remotely storing your data and making it accessible to your apps whether on any of your devices. A simpler solution is Dropbox which syncs your files between devices (and offers a decent web interface). In recent weeks Dropbox has become quite controversial. Dropbox had a serious security breach that allowed people to log into any account using any password. It was a very serious flaw and a serious oversight on Dropbox’s part. They’re currently being sued over the matter. More recently they made an important addition to their terms of service which gives them broad-reaching rights over your data. However they have made efforts to make it clear that they have no interests in rights greater than what they need to run the service.

While services like Dropbox are great and convenient (and probably have the user’s best interest at heart) one thing needs to be made very clear: The cloud is not secure. Having a strong password is no guarantee of security. Putting copyright licenses on your work is no guarantee of security if the TOS give the hosting company rights to it. It is safest to assume that at some point in the near future any data you keep on a cloud storage service can and will be compromised. Under “compromise” I include perfectly legal government seizures as well.

The only data that I put in Dropbox is stuff that I will be making public anyways – copies of school projects, essays or reports that I intend for people to see and distribute. I would never put anything I consider even remotely private in the hands of a service like Dropbox. You should only put private, personal data in the cloud if you first encrypt it locally with a proven encryption algorithm and the encryption algorithm is implemented by an open source, trusted piece of software. The open source is important otherwise there is no way to know that there isn’t a backdoor of some sort. To access the data you should download the encrypted version and then decrypt locally. Anything unencrypted that goes over the wire (or the air) is probably wide open to the world to see. For most people this already includes their email and Facebook data.

I keep my online backups in an encrypted Amazon S3 bucket. I also keep some code on a remote server and make sure to connect over SSH. However, I also don’t keep things like passwords, PINs and account numbers in any written form. The only really secure data is data that doesn’t exist. That being said, modern encryption techniques are still a pretty good defense in most cases. In this age of the cloud you should keep in mind that any data you put unencrypted on someone else’s servers (whether they be files in Dropbox or photos on Facebook) is essentially public.

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Jun 30 2011
5 Comments
Internet, Productivity, Software

Starting with Inbox Zero

As part of joining Cornell I have had a shiny new Cornell email address for a few weeks now. Cornell uses Gmail for its email service (along with Calendar, Docs, Sites, Groups and a few more). I’m not sure if I entirely approve with Universities and large organizations using Gmail for their mail, I do love Gmail as a mail client and interface.

Previously, Lafayette used Zimbra and I would forward all my Lafayette email to my personal Gmail accont so that I could use the Gmail interface. While it meant that all my email was in one place, it also meant that it was a bit of a mess. I’d regularly end up sending relatives email from my school account and professors email from my personal account even though I wanted to keep them separate.

Since my Cornell account gets sa Gmail interface, I’m going to keep it separate from my personal email completely. And since it’s a brand new, empty inbox I’m going to try to keep it to Inbox Zero. The basic of idea of Inbox Zero is that you use a combination of automated filtering and quick, decisive action to stay on top of email. By having all email get sorted automatically and manually processing only the things that need human intervention you can end each day with a clean inbox (a state of Inbox Zero).

I don’t really have a problem with email because I barely get a dozen emails a day (even on the busiest of days). However I do have problems replying to emails. Sometimes I’ll let things sit for days on end, lose them in the pile of things sitting (even though everything else has been read) and eventually follow up days later much to the annoyance of the sender.

The tenets of my Inbox Zero mission for my new inbox are simple. For starters, my email address is precious. It only goes out for reasons that are directly related to me being a graduate student at Cornell. As much as I can, I’m going to avoid using it to sign up for services. I’m not going to provide it as an alternate for any of my existing email accounts. How much will this work? I don’t know, but I’m hoping it’ll keep out at least some of the useless not-quite-but-almost spam that I get for my personal account.

Next step is automated processing. Whatever can be automatically filed away using Gmail’s filters and labels gets filed away, within limits. I already have labels for 2 project mailing lists and one for automated mail from the University. What I keep in mind while I set up these filters is that I don’t want to splinter my inbox into a dozen different places. Whatever doesn’t get into my inbox I can deal with later. Later here is defined as: I’ll look at it at some point in the next 24 hours and respond to it if necessary. The email that does make it to my inbox is stuff that requires my attention quickly or needs to spawn a filter so that similar stuff doesn’t come back to my inbox. Once I have read and responded to (or filtered) all incoming email, everything gets archived. Since everything is labeled I can use the labels to come back to something later (or just use the powerful search tools).

The final piece of the puzzle uses Gmail’s support for multiple inboxes. Besides the normal inbox I have two more. One is for high priority mail that hasn’t been filed away (using Gmail’s automated Important tag which seems to work pretty well for me). The other is for email that I have to respond to, marked with a blue star. This leaves the normal inbox to contain only unread email that is not high-priority. This way I can see important things that I should look at right now, things that I need to respond to as well as unread, probably unimportant things that might need to be filtered.

This is the same organizational system I’ve been using with my personal inbox which I wrote about a few months ago. However, the fatal flaw was that I didn’t actually clear out my inbox, I just made sure I read and marked everthing with some label. Unfortunately a “clean” inbox doesn’t have the same psychological effect as Inbox Zero. It’s easy to lose stuff in a sea of “read”. So this time around no compromises: Zero or bust.

The real test of my resolve (and system) won’t come until things start gearing up again in late August. The one tweak that I will need to make is when I check my mail. Right now I leave the tab open all day, but I think that’ll be far too distracting if I’m going to get email every few minutes. Ill probably adopt some kind of “check every few hours” policy, but what hours remain to be seen.

As I’ve been writing this I’ve been thinking that I should go back and revisit the system I use for my personal mail. I need to clear the inbox all the way down to zero for it to work, but that pile of 11000+ mostly answered email doesn’t look too appealing. Maybe someday in the not too distant future. But I’ve learned some lessons (I think) and it’s good to be able to make a clean start.

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Jun 30 2011
3 Comments
Books, Business, Internet, News

An ebook dilemma

As much as I love the idea of a digital book and the implementation of the Kindle, I can’t quite convince myself to go all ebook for future purchases. There is the DRM question, but that’s not the main issue. I suppose in the future Amazon could go the way of the dinosaur leaving all my precious Kindle books to bitrot. But I’m pretty confident that someone will find a way to break the DRM before that happens.

No, my current dilemma is far less technical. There are two books I really want to buy right now: Seth Godin’s Poke the Box and the just-released Anything You
Want by Derek Sivers. Both of them are available on Amazon in Kindle and hardcover, dead-tree form. The problem is that for both of them the ebook version is just about a dollar less than the hardcover version. For the Poke the Box, it’s just 30c.

From an author’s or publisher’s perspective I can understand why you’d want that kind of pricing. Perhaps you don’t want readers to feel like either version is a
second-class citizen. Perhaps you don’t want readers without a Kindle to be put off buying. Perhaps you want to tell your readers that either choice is fine and you, as publisher, are ambivalent on the subject of print versus digital. I think all of them are perfectly valid decisions. But as someone who isn’t pre-decided one way or the other, it makes the decision harder, not easier.

Here’s a (probably incomplete list) of all the things that I’ve been thinking about over the past few days regarding my choices, not in strict order: Oooh.. look Kindle versions! Now I can take them with wherever I go. But wait, the hardcover is less than a dollar more. If I get the hardcover I’ll have something nice and physical and DRM-free to keep on my bookshelf. And I don’t randomly start reading on my Kindle so I could probably just plan ahead and carry the book when I think I’ll read it. But the hardcover is probably going to be heavy and I have to move on a fairly regular basis. I don’t want to move too much heavy stuff, but then again I move once a year at most. The rest of the time it’ll sit on my bookshelf and I do like the look of a well-filled bookshelf. And if it’s in plain view instead of tucked inside the Kindle I’ll
probably reread it again at some point. But paper books are so last century and the Kindle is just gorgeous.

So on and so forth. You get the point.

In general I agree with Craig Mod: the future of books is digital and paper books will move closer and closer towards Collectors Item status. Instead of being cheap, mass produced blocks of paper, they’ll become careful, hand-crafted works of art. And I for one am quite happy with that. The problem is that there is this awkward growing-up phase as digital book technology matures. That phase is now. One of the results of that awkwardness is the indecision I’m currently facing. If these were mass market paperbacks that I’m going to read on a plane flight and never again I would get the Kindle versions in a heartback. But they’re not. They’re both books I think I’ll like, would want to keep and can see myself rereading. If the reading experience on the Kindle wasn’t as top-notch as it is, I would get the hardcovers. But the argument in favor of ebooks and ereaders has gotten good enough that the choice between the two is not an easy one by any measure.

For me the idea of books is intimately connected with the idea of libraries. I don’t just want to read the books and absorb them, I want to have a growing library of my reading as well. And though I could make some kind of digital ”have read” list, there is something about a physical library that tugs at my heartstrings. It’s the idea of having a set of books that in some way is a reflection of myself. They contain words and ideas that are now a part of me. Not all books I read would go into this library (most textbooks would not make the cut), but hopefully anything that I willimingly buy would. In an ideal world I’d be able to “rent” the ebook version for an absurdly low price (say 50c a day). Then I could read it and if I decided it was a “keeper” I would buy the dead-tree version for my library.

At this point I officially hand this question to the wisdom of the Internets. For a $1 difference, which version would you buy and why?

(And no, I am not going to scrounge around for a “free” PDF copy. That defeats the point of everything I just said. I want to give the authors my money, but I want to make a good investment myself as well. The two purposes can be aligned, I’m just not sure how.)

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Jun 27 2011
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Internet, News, Productivity, Software, Writing

What does your software do?

In the last few weeks a Mac and iPad app called iA Writer has been doing the rounds on the Internet and garnering rave reviews. Since my Mac Mini is currently disconnected and Apple doesn’t seem to be in the mood to refresh the Air, I haven’t had the chance to try it out. But based on what I can see on their website, it looks like an exquisitely designed app. However there seems to be one problem: it doesn’t do very much.

Given my personal preference for minimalism, it is a bit odd that I’d critique an app for doing too little. But I’m coming to realize that pure minimalism is the wrong approach to take towards modern software. We live in an era of incredibly powerful, well-connected machines. And yet most of our day-to-day software does little more than the equivalent software of years past. It’s one thing to say that our software should do a small number of things well instead of bombarding the user with lots of unused features. But it’s another thing to say that we shouldn’t be trying to press the boundaries of what our software is genuinely and usefully capable of.

iAWriter strikes me as a particular example of this trend. It may be a very well designed (and perhaps even beautiful) text editor, but at the end of the day it’s still just a text editor. Sure it has some plus points: it supports live Markdown rendering, but the implementation is personally unsatisfying — if you’re going to render Markdown, why keep the plaintext Markdown characters? It also ignores the fact that most of the text we seem to be writing nowadays is for sharing. All the bloggers going crazy over it seem to miss the fact that it doesn’t connect to their blogs in any way, leaving them to manually copy-paste or come up with some elaborate (if clever) hack job to go from editor to web page. Let me reiterate: iA Writer is a beautiful text editor, but that’s all that it is. And that’s a shame because I’d like to see great engineering and designing talent go into helping me do my job better rather than just making me drool. The one part of that I feel genuinely makes it a better editor is focus mode: that’s something I’d like to see get into other text-based applications.

In contrast to iAWriter is Instapaper. It’s admired by a lot of the people who seem to have taken a liking to iAWriter. But the big difference is that Instapaper actually moves consumer computing forward. I can click a little bookmarklet on any text-heavy page on the web and instantly the text gets extracted and sent to a variety of reading devices. It fundamentally changes the way I do reading on the web, it’s not an incremental upgrade or an aesthetic redesign. It actually does more and better than any software tool before it. That’s the direction I would like to see our software going.

As I think about more about the state of consumer software it becomes abundantly clear that I am very much a power user. Ben Brooks loves iAWriter because it helps him focus on writing instead of being distracted by things like tweaking the user interface. He says that the end product of that focus — better articles — is what matters even if he has to do a whole lot of copy/pasting and manual editing to get there. All he cares about is the end product, not how he got there. For me, that’s not enough. I want a good, polished end product, but as a creator I want a great workflow, tuned to my specific needs. That’s why I use Emacs, Jekyll and LaTeX for a lot of my longform writing. (I’m considering sitting down and integrating WordPress into the flow too.)

In a more general sense, we don’t want to be making separate programs for power users and non-power users. We shouldn’t have Emacs for me and iAWriter for Ben Brooks. What we need is for everyone to be a power user. Not in the sense that they all use Emacs and Linux, that’s superficial. But users need to be able to tune their workflow and tools to their specific needs. Ben should have an editor that has beautiful fonts and focus mode and let’s him one-click publish to the web using whatever platform he likes. But to do that users need both the tools that facilitate such power use and the skills and mentality to make their customizations. Unfortunately I’m not very optimistic about either, not at the moment anyway. Feel free to make me feel more hopeful in the comments.

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