Tag Archives: technology

PhotoFriday

Enormous

Floppy disk

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Enormous,” which is kind of a difficult word to get across. A lot of people have just gone for big things or small things at high magnifications. I thought I’d go for a 3.5″ floppy disk, as I remember 1.44Mb being enormous, way more than anyone could reasonably use — and far more than the 100K per side that my BBC Micro managed on its 5.25″ disks. Of course, a single raw image from my 50D would need fourteen of them…

There’s no need to rush to vote for my entry in last weeks challenge as I didn’t post an entry.

Opinion

A new CEO for Yahoo?

Rumour has it that Yahoo! are looking for a new CEO. Some people have been putting their name forward for the role, or at least offering suggestions for Carol Bartz’s successor. This post is in response to Joe Stumps list of ideas.

To be clear, I know that list is not completely serious. I know that he’s not really angling for the CEO role and I understand that many of the options would not be achievable even if they were the best thing for Yahoo! That’s not the point I’m trying to make.

The point, in summary, is that buying a bunch of companies to get smart people is not going to fix Yahoo!s problems.

Let’s look at some of the suggestions and, more importantly, how they inter-relate.

I’d buy Instagram and put them in charge of both Instagram and Flickr. They would have 100% autonomy over the entire “Yahoo! Photo” division.

Fine. Instagram has done really well. But what makes it successful? (Assuming that it is successful. So far it has managed to attract a lot of users but there’s no revenue stream as far as I can see.)

Is it the photo part? Well, partially. It has filters that people like playing around with. Another key to its success is the sharing, social side. But…

I’d buy Path and With for the sole reason of bringing Dave and his team on to lead the new “Yahoo! Social” division.

What’s the direction of the company if “Yahoo! Photo” and “Yahoo! Social” are both doing social stuff? Who decides how to share photos or videos?

And how is social distinct from mobile?

I would buy Twitter and Square in order to bring Jack Dorsey on full-time to run a new division called “Yahoo! Mobile.” He would have 100% autonomy over the entire mobile strategy.

Part of the success of both Instagram and Path are the fact that they’re “mobile.”

Mobile and social are not divisions any more than a technology company should have an “internet” division; they are fundamentals that need to influence all modern web “properties.”

Buying companies is not a solution. They’ve bought plenty over the years, but that didn’t help. What happened to Flickr? How “Yahoo!” is it? What about Delicious?

What Yahoo! lacks is not smart people or good technology, it’s a coherent way of tying everything together. Unfortunately that can’t be fixed by maintaining existing fiefdoms or importing new ones.

Opinion

The Trouble with eBooks

I want to like ebooks, I really do.

I like that the Kindle is smaller than a real paperback but can store dozens, hundreds even, of novels. I like that you can lose the hardware device and just download the books again. I like that I can read the same book on my iPhone as well as my iPad. It doesn’t even bother me that there’s no physical product. I’m not going to re-read most of my books yet they continue to take up the limited space in my London flat.

So why have I only ever bought a single ebook?

Here is the pricing for a book that I recently wanted to buy.

Paperback: £6.73.
Kindle: £6.99.

Here’s another.

Paperback: £5.59.
Kindle: £5.03.

I’m quoting prices on Amazon as it’s one of the bigger ebook suppliers. I’ve also used Apple’s iBooks, but downloads there are similarly (often higher) priced. But the gist is that ebooks are often more expensive than the equivalent paperback, and when they’re cheaper it’s not by much.

The publishers or Amazon might argue that the ebook is subject to VAT (sales tax) whereas paperbacks do not.

I would counter that with: I don’t care.

What I care about is “value for money.” All else being equal, I might consider an ebook to be worth more than a real book as it takes up less space and I can download it again if I lose my reader.

Unfortunately, all else is not equal. I can’t lend an ebook ((Lending Kindle books only works in the US. I like the idea of Lendle. iBooks doesn’t allow lending at all.)). I can’t resell an ebook. I can’t donate a book I’ve read to the local library or to a charity shop. The fact that it’s worth pretty much nothing when I’ve finished it means that an ebook is worth considerably less to me than a real book.

Nevertheless, I think ebooks are almost certainly the future. Unlike audiobooks or TV versus radio, ebooks have exactly the same use-case as traditional books. The objections are almost entirely technical. The cost. The resolution or brightness of the screen. The battery life. These are all solvable. It’s the business model that needs work.

Steve Jobs famously said that people want to own their music and, to this date, Apple have only sold music; they’ve never rented it. On the other hand, you can rent movies and, if you live in the US, TV shows too. I think, broadly speaking, Jobs is correct ((Spotify and Last.fm have the opposite problem to ebooks: they’re too cheap. Or at least too cheap to sustain the current system. Changing the system is a different, and entirely valid, conversation.)). You might listen to your favourite music dozens, even hundreds, of times. You’ll watch a movie or read a book, even a favourite one, only a few times by comparison.

So following that logic, I wonder why no-one has tried ebook rentals? In libraries we can already see that there’s a market for rented reading material. The same kind of DRM used with movies could be used for books, though we might need a little more than 24 hours to read a complete novel. I’d suggest around a couple of weeks or something more along the lines of a Netflix/LoveFilm model where you borrow n books at a time for as long as you subscribe.

Is there any reason why this won’t work?

Opinion

Travels with my iPad

Using the iPad Camera Kit

When I travel I don’t normally take a laptop with me ((Well, I do take my Windows brick when I go with work. I think my boss would not be happy if I left it behind then!)). Too big; too heavy; too fragile; too expensive; too inconvenient.

But the iPad is different. It’s smaller and lighter. The fact that it’s limited compared with my MacBook wasn’t going to a problem as I only had two main use cases for it: reading and downloading my photos.

I won’t say much about reading stuff on it. That’s already been well documented elsewhere and the abilities of both Instapaper and Kindle are known by many. I always have a substantial back-log of reading material squirrelled away in Instapaper and two weeks with a few long train rides would likely be helpful in getting this back under control. As for the Kindle, I’m still not entirely sold on e-books ((More around DRM and longevity than any particularly attachment to the physical book.)) but I bought one just before I went to see how it would work out.

As a reading device the iPad worked really well. I was able to carry around far more reading material than I would have managed otherwise. Previously I’d have brought a paperback and, maybe, a magazine. With Instapaper I had far more variety and with the Kindle I had a bigger book than I would have brought.

A hardware Kindle would have been smaller, cheaper and lighter but if I’d bought one of those I’d have missed out on being able to download my photos ((And being able to use Yummy on it. Sorry for the shameless plug.)).

The primary focus of copying my photos was as a backup. Taking pictures for two weeks without any kind of duplicate copies has always worried me. I’m so chicken that I avoid the mega high-capacity memory cards ((My current feeling is that around 4Gb is the sweet-spot. Since I have a digital SLR that pumps out huge RAW files, the speed of the card is also significant. The last cards I got were San Disk 30Mbps CompactFlash.)) so should the worst happen I theoretically wouldn’t lose everything.

Secondary was to show other people the pictures. The screen of the iPad is much nicer for viewing them for a start, people can figure out how to move between images (the wheel on the back of my 50D confuses many) and, most importantly, this would hopefully save some precious battery power from my SLR. Perhaps even more precious than memory capacity when travelling is battery power.

Like the reading side, the iPad worked well though with a few reservations and glitches.

In order to download images from a camera you need to purchase the iPad Camera Connector. In this you get two dongles, one accepts SD cards directly, the other had a USB socket. I needed the latter as my 50D uses CF cards. I would have preferred a direct connection which didn’t require the SLR to be powered on while the download was happening.

I nearly forgot a USB cable when I was packing and then thought I’d misplaced the dongle a couple of times while on holiday. Small is good in some respects but not others…

When you plug in the dongle and the camera, the iPad automatically opens the Photos app. It then downloads previews of each picture and you’ll find a blue “Import” button on the toolbar. You can also download selected images easily too. All nice and easy; typically Apple “Just Works.”

But there are those caveats.

Firstly, Photos kept crashing. I’m not sure if there was anything weird about some images or whether it was running out of memory or something else, but it got very irritating after a while.

Typically when you restarted it would recognise the pictures that had already been downloaded and offer to skip them. However on one occasion it seemed to forget about the previous import and ended up downloading a bunch of duplicates.

I don’t want to spend a chunk of my time when on holiday diagnosing computer problems so I just gave up at this point. Later in the holiday (when the above picture was taken in fact), I went through and deleted every picture on the iPad. By hand. There’s no “delete all” button. And then downloaded every image again. The same crashes happened again but this time each time it skipped the duplicates and I had all the pictures for show.

Back home I used the iPad to transfer into Aperture. I normally use a USB memory card reader, but it’s old by IT standards and it only USB 1.0 compliant. I assumed the iPad would be faster.

And it was. All the images were quickly imported. I was pleased to see that they were all the full sized versions and with all the meta-data intact. The only down-side was that Aperture had decided to download each day as a separate project. I assume that this can be changed, but it didn’t take long to merge them.

So, what’s the verdict? Would I take the iPad with my the next time I go on holiday? Yes. Even with the glitches ((I’d like to think they’d be fixed in iOS 4.2 but I don’t know for sure.)) it still worked out very well.

Opinion

Crash

Broken Hard Disk

It’s nearly four years old now, so I do expect the odd beach ball occasionally. When my MacBook is doing something hard or complex or just opening iTunes, it often shows its “I’m too busy to respond to you right now” indicator. But this time it was different. The beachball appeared and didn’t really go away again. Sure, it occasionally hid but as soon as I instructed the machine to do anything it would return.

And I do mean anything. From accessing a menu item, to quitting, to switching application, everything resulted in the beachball returning.

I powered off for the night, optimistically hoping that it was transitory, maybe a software failure that a simple reboot would fix.

The picture above and the title of this post probably tells you that it wasn’t.

Fortunately I was pretty well prepared and I lost little more than a few days use of my MacBook and less than £50. My backup regime has changed a little since I last wrote about it so it’s probably worth discussing what I’m doing these days.

Previously I used SuperDuper to clone my main disk. The nice thing about this is that there is a full, bootable copy of my complete Mac. The disadvantage is the small print surrounding the word “complete.”

It’s absolutely complete, but only to the point that the last backup was actually made. Using SuperDuper is fairly quick and easy, but it’s still a manual process that needs to be initiated manually.

Fortunately I realised this before I lost any data. A couple of years ago, shortly after I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5, I also picked up a Time Capsule. Long story short, a Time Capsule is a wireless router with a built-in disk. And 10.5 has a feature called “Time Machine” that automatically performs hourly, incremental backups.

Hard Disk Circuitry

Since the disk in my MacBook went so suddenly this was brilliant. I would lose a maximum of one hours work with only one proviso: that the backup actually worked.

But skipping straight to actually restoring the backup would be missing a few steps. First I had to replace the broken disk.

CPUs and disks are things that I understand more in theory than in practice. I know that CPUs come in different clock speeds and with varying numbers of cores but if you start to discuss Intel part number I’m going to reply with a blank look of incomprehension. Similarly, I know that disks come in a number of physical and capacity sizes. So when I was looking at the specifications question such as “What’s the difference between SATA and SATA-II?” were asked. I quickly became confused.

Answers were not entirely forthcoming. In the end I took a bit of a punt and bought twice the capacity (320Gb) with a faster rotational speed (7200rpm). Most disks were SATA-II so I crossed my fingers on that. And nowhere did I see a physical size mentioned so there was no way that I could check to see whether it would actually fit in the aperture left by the old, failed disk.

As luck would have it, it all worked out just fine. Replacing the old disk was suspiciously easy, so much so that having switched over I was wondering which steps I had missed or which vital component had dropped on the floor and whose absence would short out the motherboard.

I booted up from the Snow Leopard install disk and told it to restore from the Time Capsule. On first attempt it couldn’t find a disk to install on to. I missed a step. I went back and formatted the new, 320Gb disk.

I let out a big sigh of relief when I realised it could find and format the disk. I guess that meant by confusion over SATA and SATA-II wasn’t going to be a problem.

This time the restore started. It would, the installer said, take about eight hours to complete.

I don’t know exactly how long it took but it was ready the next morning.

I rebooted.

It looked good.

My familiar desktop was there. The backdrop was there, the few documents and folders that I had there before the crash were still there now. The dock showed all my old applications. I poked around my Documents folder.

All good.

Phew.

I clicked on Mail. Slight panic when the setup dialog appeared, and then I realised that Time Machine would not have backed up in the mail index. The messages were all there. It churned away for a while, processing all the messages. It finished. And then it crashed.

I restarted.

It re-crashed.

Okay, let’s Google the error message.

Ah, Safari crashes when launching too.

Everything with an embedded web view crashed either on launch or when the web component was used. Even the Software Update app. Worrying, but not cause for concern yet. Using Firefox, which did still work, I downloaded the 10.6.4 updater from the Apple website and proceeded to install.

In doing so, I learned something new. Did you know that the installer application has an embedded web view?

Luckily the command-line does not scare me — I have a history of voluntarily using Emacs — and I found the appropriate incantation to install the patch the hard way.

It didn’t work. Applications crashed in exactly the same place as before.

In hindsight I probably should have tried installing Safari again but instead I went straight to reinstalling the whole OS from scratch. From past experience I knew that my data was safe. It may have been a brute-force approach, but I was confident that it would work.

And it did.

It took about an hour to do the initial install, then I had to download and install a bunch of updates. Excluding the time it took to copy my data from the Time Capsule to the local disk, it took perhaps three hours to swap out my old disk and get my laptop to pretty much exactly the state it was in when the old disk stopped working.

It’s disappointing that the restore from Time Machine backup option didn’t work in its entirety but, to its credit, I didn’t lose any documents, emails or data. And in that sense it was a complete success.