Technology Makes You Fit, Not Smart

By | November 22, 2011
1 Comment

image

I’m trying to use technology as much as possible in my new environment (Singapore), and it’s not working well out that well for me. I have no useful Internet connection, my Nokia N95’s GPS locks in just in time for the journey to finish, and I’m eating off the tops of plastic containers.

Otherwise everything is going well. I’ve just been trying Streetdirectory.com’s useful tool, for example, for arranging trips by public transport. I know I’m not in tiptop condition, but I was slightly unnerved by this step in the nine-step process of going from one part of the island to the other:

You need to walk to Simei Avenue – blk 3012, (Stop Number: 96101) which is 54250m away.
View: Map

By my calculations, that’s a more than 33 mile walk. And I thought Singapore was only 30 miles wide. No wonder everyone here looks fit. And slightly wet.

I think I might take a cab.

Streetdirectory.com Travel: All about Singapore – Travel, Hotels, Vacations

del.icio.us Tags: ,

Backing up hard to do, but worth it

By | November 22, 2011
3 Comments

This is an edited version of my weekly column for Loose Wire Service, a service providing print publications with technology writing designed for the general reader. Email me if you’re interested in learning more.

Sometimes it takes something like an earthquake to realize that you’re vulnerable.

Once the ground stops shaking and you’ve begun to sense that your life — and those of your loved one(s) — are not in imminent danger, your thoughts turn to the next most important thing in your world: Your data.

Well, of course, that may not be your exact train of thought, but it’s the general direction. So much of our lives are digital these days — e-mails, music, photos, social lives — the first thing we tend to clutch when we’re in trouble is our cell phone/laptop/external disk drive.

Or at least it should be. So what should you prepare for when things go wrong and you need to evacuate, pronto?

Here, in brief, is how to do it:

Whatever can be online, should be. E-mails, for example, should be on something like Google’s Gmail (or Yahoo!, who have launched a new e-mail service that’s at least as generous in terms of storage as Google’s.)

This doesn’t mean you can’t also keep your e-mails on your own computer, but make sure they are also online. Get in the habit of e-mailing important documents to yourself, as well, so you’ve got an extra copy online.

This means you can evacuate in a relaxed state of mind. Well, as relaxed as you can be fleeing a building that is burning/falling/swaying/no longer strictly speaking a building.

Same goes with photos: Get in the habit of uploading your favorite photos to an online photo album service like Flickr (www.flickr.com), because if there’s one thing you don’t want to lose it’s family snaps.

Sign up for the Pro edition if you’ve got the cash and a fast(ish) Internet connection, since at US$25 a year for unlimited storage it’s a reasonably cheap way of backing up.

Add photos incrementally: Just get into the habit of uploading photos to your Flickr account when you upload them from your camera/cellphone to the computer (I’m assuming you do this; you do do this, right?)

Of course, online options are only good if you’re online. And, tellingly, I’m not right now because there’s a problem with the Internet — and quite a big problem, since even my trusty backup connection is down — so you shouldn’t rely exclusively on connectivity.

(The other problem is that as more of us go digital, we can’t hope to store everything online, because there’s so much of it. Our iPods store 60 GB or more these days, which is still impractical to back up online.)

In which case you need to have a hard drive backup. There are several ways of doing this, but here’s the best one: Back up everything on all the PCs and laptops in your house to one big external drive the size of hardback book, which you can then grab as you exit the building in an orderly manner.

Here’s how to do that:

Maxtor offer a pretty reasonable range of backup hard drives — the cheapest are really just hard drives in a plastic casing (good to prevent damage: hard drives are not as tough as they pretend to be.)

Expect a whopping 500 gigabyte drive to cost you less than $200. Attach the drive to a USB port and you’ve now got a seriously large drive attached to your computer.

Then buy a program called Acronis True Image ($50 from here) and make a backup image of all the computers in your house.

(An image is a sort of snapshot of your computer. It’s faster than backing up individual files, but will still allow you to restore individual files or folders if you need to.)

It’s a little tricky to set up but you’ll get the hang of it, since you’re going to be backing up once a week. (Yes, you are.)

If you think this is too much for you and that the only data you really need to save are a few documents, then get a USB flash drive (those little sticks you can put on a key ring.)

Prices have fallen to the point where they’re a cheap option now for up to four gigabytes. I would recommend the SanDisk Cruzer micro, not only because they don’t have removable caps (which always get lost) but because they include software that make backing up important files easy. (Stick the drive in a USB slot and follow the instructions.)

A word of warning: Think hard about what data you’ve got and what you want to save. It’s easy to forget stuff hidden in an obscure folder.

Get into the habit of saving important files — whether they’re attachments, photos, spreadsheets or whatever — into the same folder. It’ll make finding them to back them up much easier and quicker.

Oh, and try not to wait until the building is swaying/filled with smoke/has moved down the street before actually doing the backing up.

Trust me: You can’t count on thinking as clearly as you might expect.

The Jakarta Post – The Journal of Indonesia Today

del.icio.us Tags: , , , ,

Beginning of the End of TV as We Know It?

By | November 22, 2011
3 Comments

image
Noddy does a noddy shot (photo from five.tv)

The Guardian reports that Alan Yentob, the BBC’s creative director, has performed “noddy shots” on TV interviews that he did not personally conduct for his arts series Imagine.

Noddy shots, in case you don’t know, are those silly cutaways to the interviewer reacting, or not reacting, to the interviewee. In most cases they’re faked — recorded after the interview is over — although this is the first time I’ve heard someone allegedly reacting to someone he hasn’t even interviewed. This probably doesn’t represent a TV first, but it certainly marks the beginning of the end for a lot of hackneyed, silly and anachronistic TV stunts.

The Guardian quotes a BBC source as saying Yentob “often does not conduct all the interviews on Imagine – even though he appears nodding or reacting to them… [S]cenes featuring Mr Yentob reacting to some of the more peripheral figures and experts featured in his programmes were edited in even though he was not actually present. Editing work on the programme later gave the impression that he was present.”

Interestingly, the BBC source “robustly” defends the technique as standard:

“Everybody does it – it is a universal technique,” he said. “The important point is to ask – does this change the meaning of what you are doing and the answer is no it does not.

“If you had everybody who did interviews featured in them you would have have 11 or 12 people nodding at different times which is getting into the realms of the ludicrous. This is standard practice across the industry.”

Er, surely that’s not the point? Surely the point is that the interviewer is pretending to be somewhere he’s not? Surely the viewer is entitled to assume, from the shots of someone nodding/shaking head/looking skeptical/sympathetic/bored/aghast, that they’re actually in the room, presumably facing and listening the person they’re reacting to?

Another channel, Channel Five, the Guardian says. has already banned some of what it calls “rather hackneyed tricks” in its bulletins. Among these are the staged questions (sometimes called reverse questions), where the interviewer is filmed asking questions of the interviewee, usually to an empty chair long after the interviewee has left the building. The BBC Newsnight program has already banned introductory ‘walking shots’ in which a reporter and interviewee are shown walking before a cut to the interview.

I hate these shots too; they look so lame and you can’t help but ponder what they’re really saying when they’re walking along:

“So how much am I getting for this interview?”

“Fancy coming back to my place after this?”

“Please walk a bit more quickly. I’ve got to go record some noddies for 16 interviews I wasn’t there for.”

Frankly I also hate the shots of cameramen or photographers, called cutaways if I recall correctly, which are done to break between the subject — Putin, say — doing different things but not actually moving between them. Putin speaks at press conference and then cuts ribbon on new nuclear bomb shelter, say, would look weird, supposedly, if the viewer didn’t see something in between. So the hapless editor splices in some tape of a cameraman squinting into his camera. Pointless.

The serious point here is this: Sadly this is related to a serious decline in UK TV’s credibility. As such it represents a somewhat weak response; TV news needs to look deeper into its soul to find a way back. It might start with the wider changes wrought on the media by the Web and consider how it’s going to find a new role for itself.

Dropping noddies, fake or real, is a small step. But the biggest one is going to be going back to what was great (and is great, in shows like Newsnight) about TV journalism: well-researched, well-funded, well-shot, well-produced, fearless and ground-breaking stories about stuff we care about.

BBC’s Alan Yentob in ‘noddy’ controversy | Media | MediaGuardian.co.uk

del.icio.us Tags: , , ,

Doctor’s Decorating Taste

By | November 22, 2011
3 Comments

Maybe other countries are different, but where I live doctors don’t just put any old picture on the wall. They seem to prefer to scare the bejesus out of you with graphic cross sections of your innards, usually in a state of advanced decay. This one had a nice picture clock on the wall, featuring a charming young lady. Only upon closer inspection the blurb read “I beat Hep C” or something. Great. Good pickup line, lady.

—

Update: Popular request, here’s the clock:

image

apparently it comes from a Schering-Plough campaign of the same name.

Foleo, Foleo, Where Art Thou?

By | November 22, 2011
3 Comments

image

Caption competition:

“Is this a dagger I see before me?”

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio”

Now you see it, now you don’t

Photo from BusinessWire

It has the grim predictability of a company that doesn’t seem sure of what it’s doing, and what people want. Ever since Ed Colligan unveiled the Foleo — a Linux-based sub-sub-notebook — a few months back, folks have been saying it was a mistake. Now it’s dead.

I liked the idea, but felt it was the wrong solution: the iPhone and the Nokia N800 seem to prove people now want something that isn’t just a workhorse, but another onramp to the social web, whereas the Foleo seemed to be aimed simply at business customers. Such folk have long been used to lugging heavy stuff around, so it made no sense.

Anyway, Ed has done the right thing and knocked the project on the head, taking a $10 million hit (while sparing a moment for the poor third party developers who committed time and resources to software to run on the dang thing). What is most telling, though, are the comments left on his blog post announcing the gadget’s demise. They reveal the frustration and supportive passion of Palm users around the world, and to me illustrate what people really want from the once-great company:

  • a better interface that isn’t so buggy and unreliable.
  • better battery life (the Foleo boasted six hours. But remember the IIIx: days and days on a couple of AAAs. How far backwards have we gone?)
  • more durable. The IIIx also survived a lot of bashing about.
  • a phone that isn’t a sop to the phone companies — in other words, so it can do VoIP, work on WiFi networks as well as cellular ones.
  • find a way of getting a bigger screen onto a Treo. How about projection?  
  • GPS. Things have moved on, Ed, and nowadays we expect our devices to fit a lot more in.
  • Like good cameras. Not just for snapping, but for scanning.
  • And 3.5G.
  • And probably WiMAX.
  • And big storage.
  • And decent software that can handle PDFs, flash, browsing and interactive stuff.
  • And decent keyboards (get back in bed with the ThinkOutside guys, or whoever bought them.) I still love my Bluetooth keyboard and can’t understand why they’re considered such an afterthought.
  • Voice commands and voice recognition.
  • USB connectivity

The bottom line, is that we’ve been thinking the PDA is dead, whereas we should be thinking the other way around: The smartphone is just a PDA with connectivity. A good PDA does all these things we’ve been talking about, and while we take calls on it, that’s a small part of what it is about. We just want the things we did on our PDA to be connected, that’s all.

That’s not just about being able to take calls, it’s about SMS, email, browsing, and of being able to meld into our environment — GPS to know where we are, cameras and HSDPA and GPS to take photos that go straight to Flickr, tools like Jaiku to wrap us into our social network. It’s still a digital assistant, it’s just a connected digital assistant.

As one commenter put it, it’s still a Getting Things Done Device.It’s just we do lots of different things these days, so a to do list shouldn’t be where you stop.

del.icio.us Tags: , , , , , ,