Farsong Blog-o-Matic

More amusing things about twitter.

Frankly, I'm obsessed with it. It helps me not deal with real life problems.

Because I find these things like this interesting.

WELL party video, 1989: proto-online social network meetup

Howard Rheingold's vlog today features a rare gem of cyberculture history...

Nearly twenty years ago, people who had met online began to meet in person at the WELL office in Sausalito. These interviews from a WELL party, circa 1989, include me, Stewart Brand, Flash Gordon, M.D., Hank Roberts, Janey Fritsche, the late Tina Loney (the woman with the bird) and the late Bob Bickford. Party material courtesy of and copyright by InCA productions.

Link. The video is lacking only one thing: IDs for the people on the screen, as they talk. Anyone want to take a stab at that in the comments here?

[Boing Boing]

Seriously, I'd transcribe the whole thing, but from about 4:50 on, it's gold. You couldn't get this sociological stuff if you wanted to, but it's really at the core of what Geeks and The Internet are all about (and the places that conventions sprung out of). Yes, myself included. So genuine.

Specifically:
@5:50 “I use it as a blowoff if TV's really boring.” (a sentiment echoed again @5:56, and which is only nowdays becoming a mainstream sentiment — watch here for how static media like TV is broken nowdays — which echoes Lawrence Lessig's talks about user-generated media and Sousa's views on these things too)

@6:42 “You end up being in some ways more personal because you can't see who you're talking to. […] It's a strange dynamic: people can get really intimate online, and when there's a real face-to-face party like this people are kind of amazed at who they've been communicating with.”

It's subversive. It's a way of interacting that's easier for geeks. I think that Rands* had written something about this a while ago, summarised: “Geeks like to compartmentalise things. Interacting on the computer

Oddly enough, with things like Make, it still feels like the community in central California is radiating the same vibe now, nearly 20 years later. It makes me want to be there then with what I know now. It makes me just want to be down there in California now. I think I might move there after I'm done with school here. Grad studies in design? Architecture maybe? I like all these things.

I've just given you about 10 minutes of media to watch, read, and interact with on the low end, and closer to an hour if you keep following links and watching related subjects. You really do owe it to yourself to watch and read these things if Cyberculture, Newmedia, or Open Source are things you think are interesting. I think this stuff is interesting, which is why I not only repost links but also my thoughts and reactions to it. It's why I hope you read it, too.


--
* Seriously, if you haven't read the things he writes, do yourself a favour and go read them now. Witty and intelligent, he breaks down the way most geeks' minds work. He's also got some great ideas on design and breaking down applications, programs, layout, and graphic design.

I'm excited. Pleased. Thrilled. Want to know why?

I'm getting a new laptop. I have it all picked out and I'm already picturing myself using it and hauling it all over the place. I've even decided on a bus-powered optical drive for it, for the little I'll actually need it. I have already mentally moved from the MacBook and am biding my time.

It's an Asus eeePC, and it's perfect.

There's only one problem: I'm not getting it yet. In fact, I'll probably have my MacBook for the rest of the term. I'm going to get rid of it, though — I already have a capable desktop, and I don't need more computers (despite the fact that I seem to collect them).

In the past week, I've pretty much convinced myself that the eee is the machine I need. I've talked about it. I've spent hours reading reviews of it and talking excitedly about it at people. I've written and rewritten this entry at least three times from scratch (including once on a cell phone) and have sat on it for the better part of a week.

I might be one of few people in this world who would trade a large, fast laptop (one that is actually more powerful than my desktop) for a tiny, slow one.

This is because it's not about the power of the machine, though — it's about the functionality. Most of the time, the MacBook is more computer than I need. I do most of my big projects on my desktop, keeping the laptop around for portability — as a console I can grab and go. I have it for writing and taking with me.

In fact, that's why I got the laptop: so I'd have a machine to take with me whenever I wanted to go. It was smallish and lightish and portable. However, about a month and a half after getting it, I realised that it was too large. It's wide and heavy, and unlike my old PowerBook G3, I can't remove the optical drive (I also can't put in two batteries at a time for extra battery life). I'm stuck with the configuration, and it's a huge, heavy laptop, weighing in at about 6 pounds. It's great, and has always worked well, easily doing all the tasks I throw at it, but I would have been happier with a 12" PowerBook. The MacBook is just too wide.

I was disappointed when the 12" line was cancelled, as the computer was the right, portable size — but the MacBook was far more powerful than a used 12" PowerBook. I was doubly disappointed when the MacBook Air was released. It was thin, yes, but it was still the same length and depth as my MacBook, and the Solid State Disk (flash memory) version was an outrageous price.

Enter the eeePC. Barely 2 pounds and the size of a hardback book, replete with a SSD, 3 USB ports, a VGA-out, a 10/100 ethernet port, and a webcam. More ports than the Air. Even better, it's a fraction of the price of even the MacBook. It's tiny. It's light. It's cheap. With the flash-based SSD, it's almost instantly on. And the processor is more than powerful enough for web-based things (even in the age of YouTube, no one needs more than a 533mhz machine, especially when using linux. More RAM only makes these things faster) What's not to love?

When if first came out last November, the eeePC was cool, but didn't really have enough space or screen size for me (2gb and 4gb built-in SSD and a 7" 800x400 screen). It still seemed like a toy to me. But this past week, Asus released a new model, now with a larger screen (8.9" 1024x600) and more storage (12gb or 20gb, for the same price).

In fact, it's exactly what I wanted when I got the MacBook: no more computer than I really need on the go. I have a desktop for the heavy-duty work; all I need is a small, light computer for text-input, web-browsing, e-mail, and chat. Plus, being so small, I wouldn't think twice about sliding it in my bag before heading off to class.

APIs for that twitter thing I'm fairly addicted to.

Quotably — Threaded twitter conversations.

Twitter feed as an image:


Who's following whom — Your Twitter Karma

TweetStats

This quarter is already busy! That's why there's been this radio silence.

Flickr has a new video upload feature, limiting videos to 90 seconds and 150mb. I like it a lot more than YouTube for short clips of things — the kind you take with the camera? Yep. Quality's really good, too. Embedding's slick, too.

So, to break the radio silence even briefly, I regale you with video clips from the summer at camp (this is actually what it is like all the time)!


Friend Herick, from Tanzania, dancing. Please excuse the fact that it is sideways. I know I do, because it's just that awesome. (Besides, rotating it in Final Cut is too much processor work for the output).



Friend Dan elucidating swordfighting for our Viking Movie (of which, only one person has a copy, and it is neither me nor Dan).



Some boys found a lizard and picked it up. Really cool (this was the same day I was running around covered in beetles). Lizards are so friggin' cool!

( three more videos! )

Anyway, I'm exhausted from this week. Run-down, harried, haggard, and quite possibly getting ill from not having good sleeping hours, so I take this time to sleep so I can actually take tests in the morning. Naps are also good.

I have a lot of things in my head that I've been thinking about and writing about.

This is none of them. It's basically a knee-jerk reaction to a technology.

( Twitter Micro-blogging )

I have found a new, poorly-designed annoyance on the web to hate. It bothered me enough to make an entire post cataloging the reasons why I hate it so. It is as bad as myspace pages, and just about as useful (read: useless) is the new “Snap” preview.

To me, it's a popup. More and more of the websites that I read have this thing enabled, and it's terribly annoying. As I'm scrolling down a webpage my cursor tends to drift. When it drifts, it also happens to rollover links — a thing of little conciquence. With Snap previews all that changes: rolling over links now means that a fiddly little popup springs up from under the cursor displaying a preview of the linked page.


This is where things go horribly wrong.


The time it takes for the little popups to open is a split-second, even while scrolling down. Once it springs up, it covers a goodly portion of the webpage, so that one must place the cursor in a different location. This wouldn't be so bad if the popups had cached thumbnails of the websites in questions — but they do not. The little popup loads a live preview of the link in the small window that it creates, and it does so at the same speed that it takes to load the full-sized page in the browser (heaven forbid one might still be on dialup!).

Oddly enough, that's not the worst part of it: the small, live preview is too small to make out any of the important content on a page (such as the words). Apparently, the entire purpose of the preview is to see whether-or-not the linked page is “pretty” enough to warrant a click. Now, I'm all for a well-designed web-page, but the design is purely functional, and serves only to further the content of a page (i.e., the words), though I will be the first to admit that a webpage must be sensibly-designed, or I will not waste my time on it. With a 200 px by 150 px preview I can make out little more than the basic layout of a web-page. It tells me nothing about the content.


So, that's three problems with this snap preview. Let's review them:

1) Inhibits by obscuring content underneath it.
2) Does not help decide whether a webpage's content is relevant.
3) Takes as long to load as loading the webpage in a new tab.

I have also encountered a few problems that I would consider to be specific to my PowerPC G5/ MacIntel builds of BonEcho (“Unlicensed” builds of Firefox optimised for PowerPC and Intel Macs, complete with Aqua-form widgets. I get my builds from BeatnikPad). When the little links pop up, there is an option to “Disable” in the upper right corner. I find that this link does not work properly — instead of instantly disabling the popup, it opens the options. From there, it is possible to disable the annoying, tediously-fiddly little things for good, but it is too much effort.

I see no point to it as it is slow, tedious, annoying, useless, and uncool.


Ironically, when searching through Snap about its own service, the majority of hits are either about what a nuisance it is, how to disable the thing.