I’m toying with the idea of setting up my own Diaspora “pod”. They’re one of the first things since email and Jabber that gets the model somewhat right — not in the control of a single entity[*], based on a loose federation of independent agents. Part of what bothers me about the proprietary services is that I start to feel that I’ve left pieces of myself cluttered all over — kind of the disconcerting feeling you might have when you’ve left physical possessions behind in the real world.

[*] Okay, you can argue that the DNS is subject to some autocratic control, and you’re even largely right, though there are some workable proposals for decentralizing that (Namecoin, etc.)

I think that if you’re going to spend more than $10 on headphones, they might as well make music sound really good. Those headphones with the band that goes behind the head are just for folks that are afraid to mess up their hair.

1. Services I use to make my own personal computing easier (Evernote, Dropbox, Newsblur, Google calendar).
2. Services I use to share things publicly or with a set of contacts (Flickr)
3. Services I use generally for communication (Google+, Facebook, Twitter, various IM services.)
4. A possible fourth category: virtualized linux hosts that I pay for.

If you know me, it wouldn’t surprise you that this bothers me. It bothers me a bit to not own my own tools — it bothers me a little to use the ones where I have a clearly defined business relationship with the service provider where I pay for what I’m getting; but it bothers even more when I’m getting something for “free”, because they’re typically getting something of even greater value out of me than a few bucks a month: marketing data, patterns of who I associate with, etc. In some sense, the users of these social networking services are merely a means of crowdsourcing content to be used by the provider.

I prefer the old vision of personal computing: once you’ve bought the hardware and software, you can do things indefinitely with it, no one has the power to take it away from you, you are independent of outside interests. With that perspective in mind, I’m attempting to untangle myself from some of these services. For the moment, short of devoting a lot of time to trying to get distributed social networking off the ground, I’m not even going to try to seriously touch #3. Also, #4 is mostly unoffensive to me, though it’s not clear that even today that virtual hosts offer the same legal rights (fourth Amendment) as hardware which you own.

So some plans: Flickr is slowly dying, I’d like to go back to some kind of self-hosted photo gallery software. I don’t really like a lot of the options out there, I may roll my own. Dynamically-generated content is dumb for everything but commenting, everything else should be static HTML, thumbnails.

I only use Google calendar because it’s an easy way to sync my iPhone to a calendar server, and it is an easy way to share my calendar with Tien. On the first part, I think I could solve my problems by running a CalDAV server. Not sure about whether it would accomplish the sharing too.

Dropbox, while I just use the free 2GB account, is darned convenient — I use it for 1password syncing, and I use it as a place to put low-security documents so I can easily share them between computers. It is amazing how long it took to give people what they want in a network filesystem — even though it would have cost more years ago, none of it was impossible (though the market was probably much smaller.) Most of the self-hosted open source alternatives to this are pretty fiddly.

Evernote is the one I’m least likely to want to give up. It’s been so useful, and this is why I’m more dependent on it than almost anything else I listed. I frequently shoot photos of small pieces of text with my iPhone and add them to my Evernote account. I use it to remind me of food or drink I enjoyed. I use the desktop version to replace my former use of things like Eaglefiler (and before that, a directory full of text files.)

For the photo gallery (and an eventual move away from WordPress), I want to cook up my own open-source, self-hosted equivalent of Disqus. I just need to find a little more free time…

As an aside, I think it’s marginally better with a weak worn-out gate to make the diagonal cross-piece from the high corner of the hinge side to the low corner of the free side, but it really depends on the condition of the gate.

Also, I’m somewhat frustrated that bandwidth limits in Transmission 2.22 (on Mac) don’t seem to work anymore. Given that the alternatives are either don’t do enough or do too much (Vuze), I’m tempted to finally learn enough about Mac programming to debug the issue myself. Another item for the always-growing queue of personal programming projects. Or perhaps I’ll just switch back to rtorrent, it always did what I wanted.

• Vents on the bottom. And getting hot on the bottom in general. Perhaps this is why they market them as “notebooks,” so they don’t need to answer for this stupidity, even though most people use them a part of the time on their lap. As far as having to dissipate lots of heat, I don’t buy a laptop for gaming or anything particularly resource-intensive. (Possibly this is why I don’t mind integrated GPUs.)
• Trackpads that don’t work like Apple ones do — having to move your finger over to the side of it for the “mouse wheel” action.
• 16:9 displays. 4:3 is better for anything but watching movies.
• Numeric keypads seem pretty dumb, mostly because you have to place it off-center with respect to your body as a result. I’d probably find a good USB numeric keypad if I were a traveling spreadsheet wizard.

What I currently use as a personal laptop is a Lenovo S12 — it fails most of this critera, but at least it’s about as small as they go with a full-sized keyboard. For work I have the 13″ Macbook Pro. When I buy a laptop again, I’ll probably buy the 11″ Macbook Air with the maximum CPU/RAM/Disk config. It’s the sort of laptop I always wanted from Apple, but which they didn’t make until recently (I’ve had a 2006 Macbook and 2002 iBook in the past, I am quite an Apple fan.)

Shaking Down Science: Why do IEEE and ACM act against the interests of scholars?
Redis Manifesto
The Dekopon arrives in California
A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database
The Value Of Being Aloof: Or, How Not To Get Absorbed In Someone Else’s Abdomen
Hate Man: How a New York Times reporter dropped out and became a hate evangelist in Berkeley

There is a lending feature, but with the vast majority of books I’ve purchased, the flag is set so you cannot lend them to another Kindle user. Second, there’s an app you can run on Mac or Windows, but it doesn’t even let you copy and paste text out of a book. Not even limited amounts of text. What a waste of perfectly good technology.

Back to buying paper books more. (I realize I could crack the DRM and read the files in some other reader, but I’m lazy, and I’d rather just give less business to a stupid business model.)

At least I can look at all my Kindle highlights at https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights and I can copy/paste from there, but seriously, I don’t use newer technology to get a more restrictive experience than I got with old technology.

Facebook and related social networking media have brought us closer to a Borg hive-mind utopia than ever before in human history. I was just marveling at how I’ve been in fairly regular contact (of some sort) with people I generally assumed I’d completely lost contact with. Also, this sort of media places its users in contact with a lot of people all the time. Most people find this experience much more compelling than I do.

But I can certainly understand how it may feel as if we are building a more perfect human society with these tools. In a way, it seems like the same utopian vision that has inspired fictional societies such as the Borg.

At first, I, like nearly everyone else took the obvious interpretation of this idea and thought of them as the existential threat to the protagonists, as they were presented. But on closer inspection, it’s easy to see the appeal of it: effortless communication between individuals (now parts of a whole), reduced costs of communication, reduced social tensions, the elimination of deception. One of the largest flaws of central economic planning is that it invites great effort to be directed towards gaming the system or corrupting the central planning authority completely — but imagine if an individual or clique could not lie to the society at all.

In a way, this greater sharing of ourselves in near-realtime with social networking media seems almost like a first step towards such a utopia. But, typically, the failure of utopias is that they, almost by definition, fail to admit that they may be wrong. The closer you get towards the ideal utopia, the less substantial differences are permitted. Even under the Enlightenment ideals of John Locke et. al., you still can’t satisfy the person who insists that the worldly community must be governed by a strict interpretation of their particular flavor of religious law.

This is uncontroversial, you can’t find a lot of advocacy for a true utopia today, in fact, it’s much easier to find quite the opposite. But, what I want to know is, what is this social networking utopia we are building towards, and what are its consequences? Compared to the Internet of times past, it’s frequently less anonymous and more likely to push the user toward a shared, mainstream experience, both in the content itself and how it is presented. There was a time when a large percentage of internet users (a smaller absolute number) discussed things on Usenet groups, for example, using their own choice of client software, identity being only mildly fixed and traceable.

(Sidenote: it’s kind of a perverse fantasy, but it’s amusing to think of Facebook or Google as a sort of central planning committee, deciding how your time and attention will be allocated.)