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#cttu CT Tweet Crawl - Brief Initial Reations.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/15/2009 - 10:10Years ago, I read the book The Soul Of A New Machine
Unlike other social media gatherings I’ve attended where people stare down at their shoes and start conversations with lines like What app do you use to access twitter? Are you writing a Twitter app? Or my favorite, “Nice cell phone. Got any good mods on it?” This was a social media gathering that had moved from the hands of the geeks to the hands of the marketers. People asked, “What do you do? What do you Tweet about?” I felt vaguely uncomfortable and glanced longingly around to see if anyone else had a plastic pocket protector. No such luck.
As I waded into the conversations I explained that I had not been able to make it to any previous CT Tweet Crawls; they always conflicted with other events for me. However, I’ve been to plenty of other social media gatherings. Mostly, we talked about podcamps. However, it got me thinking about the first social media gathering I attended.
It was in 1982 in New York City. I was working at Bell Labs and participating in various discussions on Usenet. I posted an invite to a Halloween party we were having on a couple Usenet groups and several folks from various research labs showed up. Those were the days; geeks in costumes standing in a corner drinking beer and talking about routing algorithms. There was also the hardcore AI geek staring out the window talking to himself, I assume, but he could have been doing that anywhere.
On the other side of the country, friends were having parties that you could only attend if you had an at-sign in your address. This wasn’t the at sign of Twitters. These were the at signs of SMTP addresses according to RFC-821. Sure, sometimes they would allow someone with the double colons of a Decnet address or the exclamation point of a UUCP address into their parties, but really you needed to be able to take that address and create a route that would connect it to the SMTP world, usually through ucbvax. But I digress.
In the end, I had some fascinating discussions with people at the CT Tweet Crawl and I didn’t even have to stare out the window and talk to myself, although in these days of cell phones, that seems much more acceptable. I’m digging though my emails as well as the cards I collected and random other tasks to accomplish today. When I get a chance, I hope to write more about some of the interesting discussions about the CT Tweet Crawl.
So, have you been to any social media gatherings? What were they like for you?
The WikiReader
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 10/13/2009 - 16:28In the past, I’ve written about the Kindle
Today, I received an email announcing a new device that has the potential to add an interesting disruption to the ereader market, the WikiReader Pocket Wikipedia
It has a reflective monochrome 240x208 capacitive touchscreen and a 8 GB MicroSDHC card. The card is formatted in FAT32 format and contains a snapshot of Wikipedia. You can subscribe to receive updated MicroSD cards, or you can download data yourself. It does not contain any sort of WiFi or 3G networking. It does not have a complicated digital rights management system. It is just a very simple device to read MicroSD cards and display them on a reflective monochrome screen. Very simple.
What caught my attention is that it was produced by OpenMoko. The other device that they produce is the Neo Freerunner. “The Neo FreeRunner is a Linux-based touch screen smart phone ultimately aimed at general consumer use as well as Linux desktop users and software developers.” It is about as open a cellphone as you can get, and I’ve long been considering getting one. I’m just hoping they’ll come out with a nice 3G version including a decent camera.
I followed up with William Lai at Openmoko to find out exactly how open the WIkiReader will be. For example, would it be possible for me to load books from Project Gutenberg on a WikiReader. Will responded that everything is and will remain very open, that they are working on a developers’ site, and that Project Gutenberg would make a great card. I could easily see a geeks market in MicroSD cards with interesting texts emerging.
It is hard to tell what else developers playing with a very simple open eReader might do, but it is precisely the sort of tool that can be a great disrupter and the WikiReader is well worth watching.
It is worth noting that all of this is based on what I have read online and in emails from OpenMoko and PR people. In light of the latest FTC guidelines, I should note that I have not received a free WikiReader or Freerunner, but if anyone provides me one, I will gladly disclose that and write a much more detailed description of experimenting with the devices.
(originally published at DigiDayDaily.)
A BlogCatalog EntreCard Inbox for Adgitize or CMF Users
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 10/13/2009 - 10:34When the latest issues with EntreCard developed, I started looking at ways to more completely replicate the EntreCard experience. Sites like Adgitize and CMF Ads provided a good way to advertise and be an advertiser, and BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog provided nice lists of recent readers. Yet none of this effectively replicated the ‘Inbox’ on EntreCard.
When a person drops a card on EntreCard, the blog owner sees the card, and can return the visit, feeling fairly confident that the visitor is still using EntreCard. The functionality to easily return a visit for BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog is there, but not as easy as with EntreCard.
It was with this in mind that I wrote the Enhanced BlogCatalog Surfer. Initially, I wrote it as a test script on one of my internal Linux boxes. When it started working a little more nicely, I added it as a post on my blog.
The page takes two optional parameters, userid and count. So, if you want to see the ten most recent visitors of kml, you would go to http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3774?userid=kml&count=10. It defaults to my five most recent visitors.
However, having a quick and easy link to people that have visited me via BlogCatalog was not enough. What I really want to do is visit those sites that have Adgitize or CMF Ads. So, I added a little lookup. If it is a page that I’ve visited before, I add a note to a file that I keep about the blog, and whether they have EntreCard, Adgitize, CMF Ads, BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog and in some cases other widgets on their site.
So when I ran this as I wrote this post, the only site showing up that I had details on was Cornyman. He has EntreCard, CMF, Adgitize and BlogCatalog on his site, and so I know that visiting him will provide me with good opportunities to surf ads from other sites and that it will leave my smiling little face up in his BlogCatalog widget.
It is worth noting that not everyone using BlogCatalog has a BlogCatalog widget on their screen, so if you are looking to show up in a recent readers list, just because they are on BlogCatalog doesn’t mean your visit will be obvious to anyone, unless they have the widget.
So, this is the first pass of my Enhanced BlogCatalog Surfer. I use it now as part of my efforts to find interesting blogs to read for the day, along with checking my EntreCard inbox and surfing various ads.
I’ve currently entered 90 sites into my list of recognized BlogCatalog users, and I’m slowly adding to that list. Over time, I expect it to change. Ideally, down the road, I would love to have a program that looks at all the various blogging and social networks and lets me know which most influential blogs according to my personal ranking have been updated most recently. Eventually I’ll get there.
Any geeks that are out there that want to get a copy of my code, as it is, are welcome to it, just let me know. It is still pretty messy code as it continues to evolve. Everyone else, feel free to use my surfer. Let me know what recommendations you have.
Californinger's Sage: Total Recall of Things Past
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 09/27/2009 - 06:05“There was a king named Fornjot, he ruled over those lands which are called Finland and Kvenland; that is to the east of that bight of the sea which goes northward to meet Gandvik; that we call the Helsingbight.”
“I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn”.
It wasn’t particularly The Orkneyingers’ Saga that was on my mind as I fell asleep, nor was it Remembrance of Things Past. Yet both of them related back to a single theme. Instead, I was thinking about the book Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything
I had heard a discussion of the book on an NPR radio segment a couple weeks ago, and have been trying to get a chance to write about it ever since. It is a fascinating project to record ever increasing details of our personal lives. All kinds of concerns were raised about this. If we keep all our memories online, will we lose our ability to memorize things? There were discussions about how memorizing things actually makes one’s ability to memorize additional things easier. If everything is recorded for us, does our mind atrophy? What about the privacy issues, if every detail of our lives is recorded will we change the way we behave? Will people tap that information for marketing purposes or as part of criminal investigations? Will it move us closer to a world of thought crime?
How does blogging fit into this, and do we run the risk of becoming simply diarists spending too much time looking at what was as opposed to what could be?
It seems to me that the real issue isn’t how much of your life you’ve recorded, but what you can do with it. The simplest part is, can you easily find and retrieve the information that you’ve recorded?
In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust starts out, “For a long time I used to go to bed early”. There isn’t a specific date on this. He doesn’t start, “On July 17, 1876 I went to bed at 6:47 PM”. He continues with “I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn”. He does not state that they took a particular turn at 7:13 PM, although scholars might be very interested in when he really did go to bed and exactly how long it took for these thoughts to take a peculiar turn. Instead, it is all generalized, a collection of rather
imprecise memories.
The Orkneyingers’ Saga is even less precise. ““There was a king named Fornjot”. While we know that Proust was born on July 10, 1871, the day or year of Fornjot’s birth is not easy to find anywhere. Yet The Orkneyingers’ Saga was an important part of early collective memory.
All of this comes back to a few different themes for me. First, is how do we organize, search, retrieve, and make sense of information? I’ve not read Total Recall, but it seems as if this is the interesting part that is overlooked. How do we make random associations? I suspect that not many of my readers have associated The Orkneyingers’ Saga with Proust and Gordon Bell before.
Beyond that, when we make our random associations in our efforts to make sense of information, how do we tell the story? This is one of my gripes about all these “future of news” discussions. Whatever the media, video, print or online and whatever the label, be it journalist, blogger or some combination of the two, we need to make sense of information and tell it in a compelling story. The Orkneyingers’ Saga did that. Proust did that. Yet so much of the minutiae of modern news is just that, minutiae that has not been fit into a bigger picture, a more compelling story.
There are many more places I could go with this, but while Proust went to bed early, I’ve woken up early. It is still dark outside. The rain is falling and sleep beckons me back to another opportunity for my thoughts to take peculiar turns.
Exploring Digital Tuners and Cablevision IO Digital in CT
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 09/19/2009 - 20:24On Monday, I will attend two different meetings dealing with the Public, Educational and Government Access channels in an area served by Cablevision in Connecticut. One of the issues that is likely to be discussed is the movement of PEG channels from an analog cable signal to a digital cable signal.
When I first heard about this, I was surprised. It had not occurred to me that when all of the broadcast channels moved to digital in the United States this year, that so much of the cable broadcasting remains analog and that moving channels from analog to digital would be an issue. However, the concerns about moving analog cable channels to digital channel signals remains as much, if not a bigger issue than we saw with the move from analog to digital broadcast signals.
I don't watch a lot of television, and currently when we watch television, it is on an old analog TV tuned to channel 3 which gets its signal from a cable box. I never paid a lot of attention to what is coming in on the cable prior to the cable box.
However, this is a concern for others. Some people have multiple televisions in there homes. They may have a cable box in the living room, but other rooms are simply getting whatever they can for remaining analog signals off of the cable for televisions in other rooms. As channels move to digital on the cable, they are no longer available to these other televisions, unless upgrades or new equipment is purchased.
It turns out that I have a digital receiver that I can use to receive either broadcast or cable television signals and make them available on PCs. I have a Pinnacle PCTV HD Ultimate stick. This is a tuner on a USB stick that receives analog, ATSC and Clear QAM channels and allow them to be viewed, or recorded on a PC.
Initially, I had used it to record programs during the Presidential elections. Yet in discussions preparing for meetings on Monday, I figured I should dust off the old TV Tuner stick and try to get a better sense of what is going on with the signal coming in on my cable.
Initially, I had connected the TV Tuner stick to my laptop running Windows Vista. Unfortunately, I've had various problems with Vista since then, and it will no longer recognize the TV Tuner stick, or any memory stick for that matter.
My next thought was to try it on my Linux laptop. Searching on the web, I found a few references to the stick and Linux. As best as I could tell several people had modified the Linux kernel to add a device driver for the stick and it seemed like maybe a third of them were successful. It really looked like too much work for the weekend.
So, on to plan B. I hooked up the TV Tuner stick to Kim's desktop computer. It is running Windows XP and managed to get the software to eventually run on the desktop.
The next problem was finding the PEG channels. I did a scan and found hundreds of digital channels. However, many don't seem to work. They are probably encrypted, and most of the channels that did work ended up with names like 821.916 instead of anything useful. However, it turns out that 821.916 is what the tuner calls the channel. This channel is at a frequency of 171 Mhz. It is a Digital Mpeg2 channel with service ID 916, Original Network ID 0 , Transport Stream Id 48431, PMT PID 38 and PCR PID of 36. It turns out that this is the Government Access channel.
Given that the tuner handles both ATSC and QAM, I don't know if this is ATSC or QAM encoding. The educational channel is 821.915, same Frequency and video standard. The service id is 915, the original network id is 0, the transport stream id is 48431, the PMT PID is 41 and the PCR PDI is 39. The Public Access Channel is 821.912. You can probably guess everything except the PMT PID and the PCR PID which are 87 and 72 respectively.
I also mapped out other channels. CSPAN is 891.2 at 627 MHZ. Transport Stream ID 48154, PMT PID 231 and PCR PID of 121. CT-N is 105.3 Frequency 681 Mhz, Transport Stream ID 48404, PMT PID 167, PCR PID 107. As one other reference, WCBS-HD is 2.1 at 759 Mhz, service Id 702, Transport Stream 600, PMT PID 1065 PCR PID 1056.
If anyone else is using ATSC or QAM tuners in Cablevision Connecticut area and want to compare notes, I can gather more of this information and share it and would be very interested in hearing your experiences.
As a final note, it appears as if you can now buy Pinnacle PCTV HD Ultimate Sticks for about $50 at various places online. It looks like a good way to get add HD television reception, at least for some channels on some PCs.
What does this all mean for Monday? I don't know. I'll explore it and see what comes up at various meetings.
