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A year or so ago, I came across a book by Cory Doctorow called “Eastern Standard Tribe“; how I came across it is a story for another day. The underlying story involved groups of competing “tribes” that run on the same time compete to ensure success for their tribe – so people in EST would compete against the Greenwich Mean Tribe and so on. While that was an interesting plotline in itself, the notion that most attracted my attention was the idea of working wherever there was a broadband connection.

Thus, I was fascinated to learn that people are already doing that, today.

If I was Jan Chipchase, I’d probably ask “What are the legal implications of not having a mailing address for your business? How is productivity measured? How is sensitive information kept quiet – or not?”

If I was a cynic, I’d say “Hey Washington Post – that’s what freelancers and consultants have been doing for years decades!”

Since I’m me – I say interesting, but what happens when your laptop’s battery dies?

A quick idea that hit me as I was getting ready to go to bed. I’ve written in the past (can’t look them up or hyperlink them, this is being written from my iPhone) about how I didn’t understand what Nokia’s long-term fit for Maemo is.

I still don’t.

But today, as I was browsing through Microcenter’s website, I saw that 32GB bulk memory cards were being offered for about $60; 16GB cards were less then half that price. It got me thinking again how, if my N800 had any battery life left, decent a music player the Maemo platform would make. In fact, the N800, had Nokia chosen to go down that path definitively, could easily have been a powerful competitor to the iPod Touch, albeit one more oriented to the technically inclined.

The room is still there for Nokia to make such a determination, because frankly I don’t know how Maemo is expected to fit into the various platforms that Nokia has. I suppose it’s another case of a company with too much money, responding to too many new competitors and trying to solve all its problems by throwing money at said problems ala Microsoft of the early 2000s.

We’ll see. I, for one, bemoan the missed 64GB music player opportunity though.

I’ve been meaning to write a whole bunch of smaller entries over the last few weeks, but judging by the size of the draft queue, I guess I’ve not got them all ready to the point where I want to publish them. So rather than have ten or fifteen longer entries, I’m just going to a spare parts entry, mainly based off other stuff I’ve been reading lately.

1. Unplggd had an interesting entry about the downside of digital. I can’t find the other blog post I came across talking about that, but I found myself agreeing that an all-digital world can be … problematic. For example, NASA can’t find the tapes it made a mere 40 years ago of what I consider to be one of the five most important milestones in human history. But we can read ancient Egyptian poetry. My two pence addition to this is that one complication that no ancient Egyptian ever had to deal with was DRM – looking at the past 15-20 years, when data has literally exploded, it’s been accompanied by various forms of draconian digital restrictions – lock ins to proprietary file formats, actual encryption and obfuscation, and a general lack of consideration for the future. I wonder if in a hundred years, historians will look at this time and call our present time “The Hole” – the time between the end of print and the rise of open, interoperable and forward-looking technologies.
2. Speaking of forward-looking technologies, I started wondering about the state of my CDs burned in the early part of this decade; a few days later, Slashdot discussed the asked the same question. In my experience, a surprising number of them actually work okay even today. Unfortunately, the ones most prone to failure were the rewriteable ones – which means that if there were earlier versions of my HS thesis paper or my first-year college documents, they’re all gone. Not too much of a loss, but I’ve started wondering about the limits of storage – and I don’t mean megabytes, but the ability to back up that data. Just this year’s photos alone are 4.03GB – a not insubstantial amount of data to backup.
3. And my perennial backup question rises once again – even on Slashdot! Unfortunately, I didn’t get any good suggestions out of this year’s edition of “how do you backup your data” question. I think I may have to one day go get my parents a toaster and setup a peer-to-peer backup system – their data gets backed up here, my data gets backed up there. In the meantime, Jungle Disk to the rescue, though the question about reliability of the providers, the security of the providers and so on remain valid…
4. Google announced Chrome OS. And none of the details, leaving me slightly suspicious about the timing of the announcement and convinced that there’s a lot of work that needs to yet be done before the OS is ready to ship. The other question is why Google cares about the OS – after all, as long as their web browser (the bit that interacts most directly with their web services) runs on your choice of OS (be it Linux, BSD, Mac OS or Windows), then why should Google care to develop the rest of the software stack? I wonder if this is another ploy by Google, ala their 700MHz auction to foster innovative work in the field of OSes, rather than actually compete. (This guy, though, thinks that it’s the start of an all-out war.)
5. I’ve been using my Canon SX10 IS a lot (1777 photos since I’ve got the camera, though, admittedly, a number of them need to be deleted; see point one above). I’ve also had a chance to compare it to two other cameras that were close runner ups for my money – the Nikon Coolpix P90 and the Sony DSC-H20/B. I have to say, it would be a tough call – all of the cameras succeed and fail in their own ways. For example, the Nikon has the best optics – and the worst JPEG compression algorithm (and no support for RAW), giving weird ghosting artifacts. The Sony has an absurd lens – 38mm to 380mm – but an absolutely breathtaking digital zoom (by far and away the best I’ve ever seen on any device) and unbelievable low-light performance. My Canon is a good compromise between the two, but given the number of random failures I’ve seen of Canon cameras, the sudden whining noise the lens is making is beginning to scare me. A one month old camera should not be making this sort of high-pitched whining noise. Putting my ear to it also reveals some weird, Iomega click-of-death-like sounds, so I’m pretty scared. I also played with a couple of the newer DSLRs and came back very impressed, but realized that this means that those four year old cameras I drooled over are cheap and I should be able afford those now!
6. I also bought a wonderful telescope, cheaply since it came from Craigslist. Unfortunately, I’ve not been at home much, nor have the clouds parted to let me actually use the telescope. Sigh. However, I’ve discovered that a webcam I have fits perfectly into the telescope’s eyepiece, and the camera itself doesn’t heat up too much during use, giving me an inexpensive, and excellent astrophotography setup. Thus, with any luck and some time playing with the scope, I should have a decent chance at taking some pictures of planets. Maybe I’ll catch the next hit on Jupiter?
7. Related to the above: the Patriot Act strikes again! Some years ago, I had read a fascinating novella by one of The Big Three about an earth that was struck by a meteor shortly after genetic material for several humans was stored on the moon; after a cycle of several rebirths and failing to recolonize the planet, the last few humans were resurrected several million years after the calamity. For whatever reason, I didn’t write down the name of the book (nor the author), so I can’t find it. Since I had borrowed it from the Montgomery Public Library, I went to check if they could tell me what it was… only to find that in response to Title II of the Patriot Act, they purge the borrowing information for the libraries immediately and irretrievably so they can’t respond to a subpoena on what I’ve been reading. Sigh.
8. Speaking of reading, I made the jolly attempt to read Dune. After forcing myself through part I, I concluded that I had been erroneous in calling Virginia Woolf the most unreadable writer ever; Frank Herbert is by far and away more deserving of that “honour”. If this book is seriously considered one of the best science fiction novels of all time, I shudder to imagine what the worst might look like. I’ve returned to reading my beloved Alastair Reynolds (but not before making a short detour into old territory by Kim Stanley Robinson).

I think that’s it for this installment. I’ll see about doing one of these sorts of posts every couple of weeks if I don’t post more regularly. Or you could join the conversation at Twitter.

I discovered I’d left a file I needed on my home Mac. Per usual, I went to VNC in and … what’s this? Oops, I left the Caps Lock key on – most likely, while moving the keyboard, I pressed down on it. I tried a few permutations to see if I could get it work regardless… no dice.

I really needed that file.

After a few seconds of thought, I logged into my router, activated port forwarding to allow me to log in to my Mac using SSH, and downloaded Putty.I successfully SSH’ed in. Once in, I FTP’ed the file to my NAS, and opened a copy of WinSCP to pull the file down. Total time spent? About 90 seconds.

Lots of ifs that worked my way: if I hadn’t left SSH running on my Mac, if I hadn’t setup my router to accept inbound connections, if I hadn’t had a NAS to transfer to, if I didn’t have WinSCP handy, then none of this worked. As it happened, all the ifs worked out in my favour. Lucky me. Otherwise, I’d have had to go back home and get that file. Or redo it. That would’ve taken ages.