Tag: technology

Cellphone Cancer

I was reading a Gizmodo post recently about the a study on correlation between cellphones and cancer. The study isn’t done, but apparently there is considerable evidence pointing to cellphones causing tumors.

This raises a lot of very interesting questions. Cellphones have had such and incredible impact on the way we live our lives – would we give them up? Would it be possible to find a less harmful alternative? Giz thinks it could go the way of tobacco – common knowledge of its dangers that are ignored by many.

In case you’re wondering, this isn’t a real threat – the comments on that article explain. But it is interesting to step back and think of what our world would be like if suddenly cellphones became feared.

More Super Awesome Ideas

I made a post a long while ago with things I’d like to see made. While I’m still waiting for cellphone away messages, I learned about Freenet, which is essentially the second idea I described. I’ve been meaning to play around with it, but I haven’t really had the time. Still, good to know it exists.

New ideas!

These are very mobile-computing based. Netbooks have gained popularity as of late, and I’m a little confused as to why. They’re alright, but for all they do you’re better off carrying a decent smart phone around (I’ve been eyeing Nokia’s N85). I think there are considerable advantages to this approach, and with a few addons, a smart phone could outperform netbooks.

The first is a very simple idea, which would make smart phones more usable for mobile computing. Imagine a small keyboard, with an empty slot where the calc pad usually is. Plug your phone into that slot, and you now have a large keyboard to use to type things (like actual documents, not SMSs). Since keyboards require very little actual space, underneath the keys can be a small bank of batteries that will charge the phone while it is plugged in. Since this battery bank is larger than the phone, I would imagine this setup would have an incredibly long battery life (days of activity, weeks of standby) before you had to recharge it all. It would also be easy to throw a couple ports on this, just to make the package complete. Most smart phones support video out in some capacity, so building that into this device would make hooking up to a monitor or TV easier. And a USB port of two for that misc gadget that needs charging or whatnot. There you go – everything a netbook does and more. Slip your phone back in your pocket when you don’t need all that crap.

Next is a sort of toned down version of that last idea, just to achieve full keyboard functionality. Anywhere with a computer, you can usually find a USB keyboard (I never see PS2 anymore). A small bluetooth dongle that would attach to the USB cord of a keyboard, and allow it to interface with your phone would be pretty slick. Just pop it on, sync it with your phone, and you’ve got a full-size input device. And all you have to carry around is something smaller than a thumbdrive.

I would buy either of these things if they were made. Someone please make them.

The Open and Social Web

There is a certain kind of technology gaining popularity on the web. Most of it has been around for a little while now (a year or so), and is just gaining popularity and traction now. The idea behind this technology is that you’ll define something in one place, and it will follow you around the web, ideally making your life simpler.

First, and probably most prevalent, are Gravatars. The idea is that you set an avatar on the gravatar website, and any website you post to that is gravatar-enabled will automatically display your avatar based on your email address. So this way, on any website you post, your avatar will be there with you, and you won’t need to upload it to each site you post on.

Next are social commenting systems. I’ve just started looking into these recently, and I’m not really sure about them yet. The idea is similar to Gravatars, but takes it a step further and lets you post on any social commenting [Disqus or IntenseDebate] enabled comment system with a single user id. So you don’t need to sign up on new sites, and your comment history is associated with you. There are some other little features, but that is the main idea, and what is important to this post.

Lastly there is OpenID, which looks to do what the social comment systems are doing, but with everything (sort of). The idea behind OpenID is that you can sign into any OpenID enabled site with a single user, and access whatever it is that site is offering (this extends beyond comments). Oddly enough, both of the main social commenting systems support OpenID.

The way OpenID works is fairly simple – when you go to log in to a website that supports OpenID, you enter a URL specific to you. You’re then bounced over to whoever is authenticating you (likely whoever owns that URL) and log in. Then, you bounce back to the original site you were on, all logged in (and optionally some other information filled in for you).

I like OpenID more than either of the above systems, but not just because it has the potential to encompass both of them. OpenID is actually open. The other two systems are on centralized servers that are out of your control. Anyone can make an OpenID authentication server. Tonight I set up my own OpenID server just to test it, and it works. There are tools out there that make setting up a server trivial (I’m serious, you can and should do this). All of my information is completely under my control, and I am able to log into thousands of websites across the internet.

I don’t really have a conclusion, but the idea behind these services is interesting and worth paying attention to, and OpenID is pretty awesome.

102 Minutes that Changed America

102 Minutes that Changed America is the name of a documentary the History channel made about September 11th using lots of amateur and unaired footage. The clips are all edited in chronological order, and it follows what happened that morning, and people’s reactions to it. If you can, see it in its entirety. It is an incredibly moving piece, that I think does more justice to the event than anything else so far.
(Also worth noting, the September 11th Television Archive on archive.org)

But more than that, this got me thinking. In 2001, no one had a cameraphone. All of the video in this comes from people who had actual camcorders. If something like this had happened today, the amount of footage about such an event would be staggering. I imagine that it will get to a point where documentaries like this will be commonplace, and won’t take 7 years to compile. With user-generated content at the level it is right now, something like this could be edited in days, complimenting the thousands of hours of raw footage that would have already flooded YouTube et al.

Which got me thinking more. Earlier this year I read on Gizmodo an account of what happened in a gas station when a tornado touched down nearby. People whipped out their cellphones, and started recording. They recorded as the tornado headed straight for them, and kept recording to the point where it was definitely unsafe. I can imagine something similar happening in other large scale disasters, where instead of doing something, people observe. This isn’t a legitimate fear, because I think when it comes down to it, people will put their phones away and actually help other people. But it is a little scary that their first reaction is to capture the moment. I have a post about people’s desires to be the source of information – the person who broke the story. But I’ll let that be in its own post. It ties in nicely to this.

But it is absolutely incredible to imagine, if the attacks had happened today, 7 years later, how dramatically different the entire event would be. People inside the buildings would have posted blog posts or videos to YouTube from their phones; there would be hundreds of thousands of pictures and videos posted to the net by this time tonight. I think the technology gap between NYC and Indonesia is a big part of the lack of emotional response to the Boxing Day Tsunami three years later.

It is difficult to imagine, but odds are we’ll see it soon enough, and we’ll all be out in front, trying to get an exclusive.

Spore and Computer Things

Spore came out today, which is pretty cool. Also cool, GameStop actually honored my pre-order from nearly two years ago. I haven’t picked it up yet, because I’m still in Storrs, but I will get it sometime this week.

I’m not in a big rush to get it because I don’t have a functional computer that can play it. At the end of last semester, my desktop shit the bed, and I didn’t really bother trying to fix it. I used Cassidy all summer, which was great. This fall, when I tried to get the desktop running again, it got worse, and started re-ordering drives. I’ve been using Cassidy as my fulltime computer here at school so far. I even got a new battery, so I don’t have to stay near an outlet (the battery Apple shipped to me to replace the one that was supposed to explode died a few months after I got it).

But Spore won’t run on a PPC Mac, so Cassidy can’t help me there. And the desktop had formerly run Linux, which seems to only slightly support Spore (at the moment). So I might actually install Windows, just to run Spore. Weird.

Video on Flickr?

Consonance by …me, embarrassingly enough
[audio:http://john.paganetti.com/wp-content/uploads/Consonance.mp3]

http://blog.flickr.net/en/2008/04/08/video-on-flickr/

I would be really pumped for this. YouTube / Google Video / whatever other flash video site mostly annoy me. The only one I could ever really see myself using is Blip.tv, but even they are missing some basic things I would want from such a service. I’m almost certain that if Flickr can handle the backend for hosting videos, then they will be the best such service on the web. Their frontend for photos and even general site usage is unparalleled. Looking forward to it.
Update: Video on Flickr! But only 90 seconds? :-/ Guess I’ll stick with Blip

Bittorrent Advancements

Puttin’ People On The Moon by Drive-By Truckers
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/dbt2008-01-12.km184.flac16/dbt2008-01-12d1t01_64kb.mp3]

I started using AllPeers again recently, and since I had last used it, they added Bittorrent functionality. But even more interesting, is that they let you download individual files from a torrent. Because of UConn’s bittorrent cockblock, I haven’t even opened a torrent client on this computer yet, so I don’t know if this is a wide-spread feature or not.

Whatever the case, a website called BitLet (which I guess has some connection to Mininova) has launched, and it allows you to stream music from within a torrent. Yes, its cool, but apparently, there is video on the way. That is far cooler. So I started snooping around to see if I could find out any more about this technology, and apparently there is something called Bittorrent DNA put out by Bittorrent Inc. which does something similar. As I understand it, its a backend that you could integrate into a site like YouTube, and have users supply some of the bandwidth via bittorrent protocol.

So all of this new functionality got me thinking about my idea for a browser based off bittorrent protocol, where webpages and other things would be served up from the people viewing the site, instead of a central server. I don’t have anywhere near the technical knowledge that I would need to pursue this project, but I’m going to keep designing it to see if it could be feasible. Right now I’m thinking it would be best to have it as a Firefox extension, so it would be easily adopted by users. I’ll post more about this when I figure it out.

Ugh

The Arrival by Codename
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/codename2008-01-03.at4040.sbd.flac16/codename2008-01-03.at4040.sbd.d1t01_64kb.mp3]

I feel really crappy. This is a mostly worthless post, and I strongly advise skipping over it. I need to complain somewhere so I can realize how petty my problems are and cut it out. I just reread the whole thing now that I’m done writing it, and you shouldn’t bother. Its a total waste of time. This post is what gives blogs a bad name.

Lets start with Friday. Friday night was good, but after friends left my place, it got less good. I didn’t go to sleep Friday night in an attempt to get myself tired enough to go to sleep a little earlier on Saturday night, so I could wake up for something on Sunday. This is never a good plan, and after trying this many times in the past and knowing full well that it doesn’t work, I did it again. So I got to wonder around Saturday in a weird daze. I’m normally pretty good with not sleeping, but whenever I’m not sleeping, I’m usually doing something. This wasn’t the case on Saturday, and trying to stay awake with no reason to isn’t a very easy thing to do. Hence the daze.

Around noon on Saturday my dad and I went to the RV show in Hartford. The idea was to check out some floor plans of the RVs there, and find some vendors who could hook me up with parts I’ll be needing. The RV show was a really disgusting place. Really. Its in a (the?) convention center in Hartford, which is a massively long, wide, and tall building, which was heated much more than it needed to be. The RVs there were mostly disgusting, including things you should never need. I was thinking about skipping over this RV rant, but I’ve got nothing better to do, so I’ll go with it.

I think – no, I must have a different idea of RVing than the people who make/buy/use them. My idea of an RV is very functional. It has beds, a toilet and shower, a place to make food and eat, and a place to just sit. On wheels. The RV being a base camp for whatever else you would be doing. The RVs at this show could replace a house, which isn’t very surprising because they cost about the same. I know they brought out their biggest and best for the show, but there were RVs with two floors, RVs with TVs larger than any in my house, and all of it was leather. It seems to me if I had one of these RVs, I wouldn’t want to leave it. Which kind of defeats the purpose of it being mobile. I don’t get it.

Back to the RV show. So the place and vehicles are disgusting. There were some sane RVs / campers there that didn’t require a mortgage, but I’m going to forget those and villanize the whole place. So while I’m at it, the people there were…interesting. There were the people who were shopping for their new house, and taking it all very seriously. There were people who were looking for a RV for weekends and such, and of course there were NASCAR people. I don’t quite know how this works, but I guess if you have an RV at a NASCAR event you’re some kind of VIP. And then there were the people who seemed to have absolutely no reason to buy an RV. I’m tired of writing about that, so I’m going to wrap it up by saying that the floorplans were not practical for my purpose (or in my opinion any other…they were just really inefficient with their space.) and there was no one selling parts. Plus they charged us $10 a head to get into the place.

Anyway, we got home from that, and I sat around for a while, and didn’t find anything to do. So eventually I gave up on staying awake for no real reason and went to sleep around 1800. I woke up around 0030, and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I went downstairs to get something to eat and zone out in front of the TV. I got back to sleep around 0500, and woke up for good three hours later. I did more of nothing this morning, and then in a desperate attempt to busy myself, I tried to set up my parent’s mythtv box. After an hour or so of dealing with problems I had already solved a week or so ago when I last touched it, I realized that the hardware just wasn’t going to cooperate, and stopped before I smashed it to bits.

I’m not sure how, but my parents have this amazing ability to cripple computers. I can’t really blame the mythbox on them (it has larger issues), but they’ve rendered any computer the family used completely useless within a year of use. I had always chalked this up to Windows or Dell, since all their previous computers had one or both of those inherent defects. But the iMac I hooked them up with about a year ago is starting to slow down. I’m just puzzled by this, since I’ve had my PowerBook for three years now, and it works as well as the day I got it. I dunno, as long as I don’t have to use it, I don’t think I’ll try and figure it out.

So in conclusion, I feel crappy after spending a weekend doing all sorts of things I didn’t really want to do (and in case you didn’t notice, I didn’t end up going to that thing today I stayed up all night Friday for). Ugh.

Upgrades

Rocksteady by Houdini Roadshow
[audio:http://www.rockerblog.de/houdini-website/02_Rocksteady.mp3]

Last Thursday Fedora 8 was released, and of course, I wanted to upgrade. I was still using FC6, and I figured an upgrade over the existing OS would be ugly (in part because there is one release gap between the two, and I never really had a stable install of FC6), so I prepared for a fresh install. Thanks to Google, I didn’t have to worry about documents or the like. I’m still working on moving more of my media online (videos to Google video/YouTube, pictures to Flickr/Picasa). In the end, I only had about 12 gigs of files from my old system that I wanted to keep (not counting my external hard drive).

So I go to move those 12 gigs to the external, and something is wrong. My external is now read-only. After playing with it for a while, and figuring out that there wasn’t much I could do, I decided I’d just move the contents of the external back to my desktop, format the external, then move everything (plus the 12 gigs) back to the external. Great. While copying the 200-some-odd GBs to my desktop, the filesystem on the external corrupts. I have no idea why this happens, and after a couple attempts I find it cannot be saved. So I’m formatting the external, and that goes smoothly. I can now back up those 12 gigs, and install Fedora 8.

And I did, without any other issues. But I’m now down one very large music collection. I don’t care too much though: its happened before, I know I can rebuild. Just frustrating. So today, I wake up, and find out I went over my bandwidth. Crap.
Anyway, Fedora 8 is slick, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in Linux.

MythTV

Its about damn time. Finally, my MythTV box is working. I credit KnoppMyth. I’ve tried many other distros (some of which didn’t even bundle MythTV) and none worked with my machine. Knoppix was able to do it, and the KnoppMyth distro made it so I didn’t even need to set it up.