Technology
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When I first read that the Internet was “overloaded,” I thought it was a hoax.
CUNY/CIS/Networking has informed Queens College that hardware used to connect the university to the Internet is overloaded. Queens College’s connection to CUNYNet and the Internet is attached to the overloaded equipment. CIS expects to restore normal network speed by the end of April.
We ask for your assistance by cutting back on any network use that is not needed to do your work or studies.
I suppose they mean that some network hardware is overwhelmed, probably because a parallel router, switch or hub went down, and things are slow. However, it’s odd that someone chose to say that the “Internet was busy.” Don’t worry folks, no one can overload the Internet.
Earlier today, news broke that This American Life had retracted the episode “Mike Daisey and the Apple Factory,” because Daisey had fabricated crucial parts of his report on working conditions in the Chinese factories that manufacture Apple products. The immediate reaction on the Mac Rumors message board, for example, has been almost unanimous outrage against Daisey for making false claims. I too am upset but for an entirely different reason: he didn’t break character.
Having studied documentary film at various points in my academic life, you learn that you can communicate truth with fiction. For most of film history, filmmakers such as Robert Flaherty, Chris Marker, and Errol Morris, have played fast and loose with facts to communicate a larger truth to an audience. I think Daisey, who is an essayist and not a journalist, is working in a similar vein. His monologue and performance, which I saw in November at the Public Theater, is absolutely compelling. After hearing The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, you leave with a very simple message about how our electronic stuff comes at a human cost.
Daisey’s performance is an excellent example of what art can do. After nearly two years of performing in theaters throughout the United States, January’s This American Life broadcast seemed to have an effect in the world outside of the theater. There was the New York Times series on the iEconomy. There were petitions delivered to Apple Stores protesting the working conditions in Foxconn factories in China. And there was the Nightline investigation into one of the Foxconn factories, which I found as too short and too soft. Whether Daisey was making up the facts in his performance seems almost a non-issue because he had pressed the public into action, which is what great political art should do.
However, I’m upset with Daisey because he used his exaggerated, composite, or even fabricated facts, which made for a great story, and took them to journalistic venues. He wrote an impassioned op-Ed in New York Times. He went on CBS Sunday Morning, on MSNBC on The Leonard Lopate Show, and of course This American Life. Once he leaves the theatrical environment, he’s engaging in a different form of performance. Perhaps he thought that by disclosing that many crucial facts were in fact fabricated, he would undermine the argument at the heart of his performance. Once he went to these non-theatrical venues, he must have faced a tough choice: either disclose that his report was based in part on fabrications or to avoid spreading his message beyond the stage.
Instead, he chose not to break character. He continued performing in public. Now that This American Life has retracted his story, it will sadly set back the cause of justice for the workers who make our stuff. But I don’t know how to get people to actually think about all of our electronic stuff, Apple-branded or not, and the means of their production.
On Tuesday night, ABC News aired its exclusive report on the working conditions at one of the Foxconn factories where almost all of Apple’s products are produced. I was looking forward to the seeing the report because of my enthusiasm for Apple and because I had become more interested in Foxconn’s production methods since seeing Mike Daisey’s monologue The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs last November. To be fair, I was skeptical from the beginning that a commercial television network would broadcast a scathing report against Foxconn and Apple, and I was overall disappointed by the report portraying the Foxconn factories as little worse than mind-numbing labor.
I appreciated that Bill Weir, the story’s reporter, acknowledged the relationship between ABC/Disney and Apple at the onset. Not only are both companies heavily financially invested in each other, Disney often is the software to Apple’s new hardware. For example, when Steve Jobs demonstrated the original iPhone’s movie playback capability in his famous 2007 keynote, it was Pirates of the Caribbean on the new screen. Most disclosures seem innocent enough, but this one stuck with me. Out of all the news organizations in the United States, why did the one that is most owned by the Steve Jobs Trust get this scoop?
The abbreviated length of the report hindered the ability to investigate the factory throughly. Nightline only runs for twenty-five minutes, and once you subtract the advertisements, we were left with less than twenty minutes of actual news. Moreover, since the report aired on a major broadcast network, it needed to brief the audience at the expense of covering the details about the factory and its human toll. For example, instead of hearing about how popular these devices are, I would have liked to seen more than one shift of workers on the factory floor and perhaps even the shift change. It would have also been nice to have see how they hire from the nearly 3,000 new applicants each week. Also, could we have seen at least one former employee or did they all move into management and out of poverty?
Weir and his crew must have been challenged by what seemed to be Foxconn showing for the cameras. While it was unprecedented that cameras were given almost full access to the factory floor and its employees, Foxconn knew about the reporters and FLA inspector and the news crew was escorted for their entire visit. The presence of management during an inspection or investigation can be chilling for those being interviewed. What would happen to an employee if she or he spoke candidly to Weir, once the cameras and reporters were gone, other than complain about the wages and the loneliness. What if they spoke about happen what happens to misbehaving or under-performing employees?
I never expected this report to shock anyone or make any real impact, as such is broadcast journalism in the conglomerate era. After all, this was a report aired by a commercial broadcast network, owned by a media conglomerate, that depends on advertising and the approval of its shareholders. However, this might be the perfect opportunity for a competing news operation, such as CBS, NBC or CNN, who have vast resources and no substantial relationship with Apple, to follow up. If only Bob Costas covered technology and labor.
One of my great regrets is that I didn’t take a screenwriting class during my many years of studying, especially at film schools such as UCSB and NYU. While I don’t know how to construct a screenplay, I can read one, and I do know that most screenwriters use specialized software, such as Final Draft, that makes the formatting process much easier. But as an art form, it’s lost to me.
Last night, I learned about Fountain. To put it in "pitch" terms, it’s "Markdown for screenwriters."
The great thing about Fountain, and Markdown for that matter, is that it requires no special software. You can write a screenplay or a web document with a basic text editor. This solves a huge problem for fledgling screenwriters, who won’t have to buy any special software. Every computer operating system has a text editor. You can use the dreaded Notepad on Windows, the serviceable TextEdit on a Mac, and even the cryptic but powerful vi if you’re more of a Unix geek. If you want something more featured, text editors are relatively inexpensive. I like using iA Writer for Mac and iPad, or Writing Kit for iPad and iPhone. My all-time favorite text editor for the Mac, BBEdit, will set you back $50, and I hope they build Fountain support one of these days.
Another great feature is these languages are as future proof as you can expect. We who traffic in "media", specifically electronic and digital media, lose countless hours of sleep wondering how much longer will we be able to retrieve music, movies, and text stored on such media. I hadn’t worried about this danger until I visited a audio/video restoration outfit here in New York. One of the techs showed me a ball of tightly tangled, thin wire. I didn’t know what that was until he revealed that it was recording wire, which was a consumer recording medium available in the 1930s. This shop was one of a very few that had access to the playback machine for this wire. However, he said that the wire was so tangled that "there wasn’t enough money on this earth for him to physically untangle the wire." Preservation or restoration is basically impossible.
Whenever I write a document, I wonder when all my college essays, syllabi for classes I’ve taught, and reading will end up like that wire. When in the future will some tech look at my MacBook Pro or iPad, and say, "Oh man, there’s no amount of money in the biosphere for me to figure out these machines!"?
The only real way to preserve all these documents might be to just print them out and and keep them dry. It worked for our grandparents with paper, just like it worked for medieval Europeans with parchment, and just like it worked for Egyptians with papyrus. As I tell my students, "paper is permanence."
In the short term, one of the best ways to ensure access to your documents is to save them in a human-readable form. Plain text files ensure that, for as long as humans can read and can open a file on a computer, someone can read them. They won’t have to have the latest version of some proprietary software whose vendor went bust a decade ago. If you can retrieve the file from a disk, which is a big "if" in the long term, you can read someone’s screenplay.
The other thing that I really like about Fountain and Markdown is that it lowers the barrier of entry for fledgling screenwriters and web writers by using something easy, robust, and very inexpensive to use. When you open the gates like this, you get more work. Granted, the average quality if the work will decrease because there will be some very poor writing out there, but the true value lies at the margins. The quality of the greatest work will increase.
I hope this catches on with screenwriters as Markdown has with some savvy web writers.
(Photo via Wikicommons)
Most of the Apple-branded Mac OS X applications, such as Mail, GarageBand, iMovie, Pages, and Keynote, have a Media Browser that you can use to place photos into your messages, projects, or documents. It can sometimes be a handy way to include an image or audio file without opening another application, exporting the file and importing into your new document. The Media Library will show images from iPhoto and Aperture. I would recommend that Apple add the Photo Stream to this list of photo sources.
This morning, I took a photo with my iPhone and wanted to include one of those photos in a lengthy message I had composed on my Mac. I opened the Photo Browser, pictured above, hoping that Apple had perhaps made the Photo Stream as one of the sources. Sadly, that was not there. I had two options. The first is to open Aperture to synchronize the new Photo Stream additions. The Photo Browser will then show a Photo Stream from my Aperture library and I can add the photo from there. The second is to save the message on my Mac as a draft. On my iPhone, I would go to the Camera Roll and copy the photo. Then I would open Mail and retrieve the draft. I would then paste the image in the message composer and send it. The first is a much easier process than the second, but I think including the Photo Stream in the Media Browser would make this process a lot easier.
To implement this, Apple would have to move the access point of the Photo Stream from the desktop apps, specifically iPhoto and Aperture, to the OS, presumably through the iCloud System Preference pane. This way any application can use the Photo Stream, perhaps even non-Apple applications. Personally, I would really like it if MarsEdit could tap into the Photo Stream so I could add Photo Stream images to a blog post.
Earlier this week, iTunes on my Mac encountered an issue that wouldn’t allow it to sync normally. The error message read “This computer has been previously synched with an iPhone or another iOS device” and asked whether I wanted to either “Setup as a new iPhone” or to “Restore from a backup.” I didn’t want to select the second option because I backup my iPhone to iCloud, and the backup on my Mac was several weeks old and useless.
This is the same problem that Michael Williams encountered and blogged about in August with iOS 5 beta. He suggested a tricky workaround: initiating a restoration and then yanking the USB cable from Mac when that process starts. That causes the sync to fail and, after iTunes chides you for disrupting the restoration, it reestablishes the normal synchronization process.
When I tried to follow this process, I got a different but equally effective result. First, I backed up to iCloud to ensure that if iTunes wiped my phone in order to restore it, I would have a very recent backup. Second, when I initiated the restoration, iTunes did not actually try to restore the phone. Instead, it performed a normal sync, and all seemed well. The only issue was that it restored all of the apps I had once downloaded but since removed from my iPhone. (I had done so because I was trying to stop the infamous iPhone’s battery drain that many users encountered after upgrading to iOS 5.)
Based on the commentary on other blog posts, it looks like this might be a side effect of WiFi sync. However, I have also been doing that with my iPad since the release of iOS 5, and nothing like this has happened with that device.
Recently, I bought a Dymo LabelWriter 400 Turbo to print postage at home. With the holiday gift season upon us, it seemed like a worthwhile investment that will save me the trouble from having to visit the post office for mailing small packages and buying postage.
Dymo partners with Endicia to power the postage printing functions of the printer, and both appear to subscribe the Gillette model for doing business. While the price of printing the postage is the same as retail prices, the generator of revenue appears to come from the labels necessary to print the stamps. If you go to an office supply store, you’ll find that 200 stamp/labels cost about $20. That’s a terrible deal.
If you search on eBay, you can find stamps/labels for as little as 2 cents each, if you buy multiple packs of them. I don’t know how long it will take me to use, say, 800 labels, but I imagine that it should last a few holiday seasons. With so many stamps, I might even start mailing in checks again to pay my bills.
Earlier this week, I ordered a four-pack of these cut-rate labels from an enterprising seller on eBay, for about two cents per label, and the labels arrived today. At first sight, it’s obvious that these labels are not the genuine article.
There are two differences that are apparent right away. First, there’s the color. The pink border is slightly different in color than the genuine labels. It’s not major, but it is apparent upon first opening the package. The second difference is the size of the labels. The bargain labels are somewhat bigger than the original ones, but it seems to allow for the print area to register the postage properly.
The other difference is that the genuine labels contain a branding on the side. This might cause problems when shipping, since it is not technically an Endicia label, but I suspect that the postal service won’t care too much.
Printing on the bargain labels appears to be fine. It registers with good quality on both the genuine and the bargain labels. The only problem is that when you print a single label, the printer feeds two stamps: one printed and one blank. I imagine that it has something to do with the little hole in the label that guides the label into the printer.
I dispatched a letter to Sarah at her work to see if the postage printed on the bargain labels would clear the postal service. I’ll report those results to see if I did get a bargain after all.
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
Update: The letter to Sarah arrived with no apparent delays.
As I was flying to Los Angeles today and watching the episode of 30 Rock that comes on between the inflight safety video and the feature film, I saw the episode, “¿Que Sopresa?” where Jack Donaghy pitches the idea of a voice controlled television set to his new Kabletown bosses. The demonstration doesn’t go well.
When I saw that scene, it made me think of how Steve Jobs reportedly said that he had finally “Cracked It” when it came to an Apple TV. If the rumors are true, the new integrated television set will take advantage of Siri, Apple’s new voice-activated personal assistant.
So did Jack Donaghy “crack” television before Jobs and Apple?
I lost a book that I needed for research, and it’s checked out of my library. They do however offer access through as an electronic book, but it’s through the web based Ebrary service. It’s almost unreadable.
First, the interface requires you to be connected online so you can read it offline. Second, the text is way too small to read at 100%. You basically have to read it at 200% to be able to sustain reading for any particular amount of time. Third, if you try reading it on any screen that’s not at least 1200 pixels high, then you can’t fit the whole page. And if you’re reading a book on an iPad, something that ebrary touts, then you are out of luck because you can’t scroll. It’s just an example of poor HTML coding and failure to adhere to web standards.
I am going to continue the search for my lost paperback or recall it from someone.
Update: You can actually scroll on an iPad. You have to swipe on the contents section on the right of the text. It’s not the most intuitive gesture since you’re use to swiping on the actual content not the side of it.
Although I wasn’t one of the 800,000 subscribers who cancelled their Netflix subscriptions, I did cancel their DVD-by-mail part of my subscription and kept the video streaming since I use that more anyway. Two days ago Netflix charged me for the new billing period, which includes only the streaming service, and today I received what should be my last DVD-by-mail from Netflix, at least for now.
This marks the end of an era for me. I joined Netflix in 1998 when my first DVD player, a Toshiba branded deck, came with a card that offered a free trial for an unlimited DVD by mail service. At the time, the service cost $15 a month and you could have 4 disks at a time. I remember wondering, when I first signed up, how are they going to send me a DVD by mail, considering that I was used to getting DVDs encased in those jewel boxes. Little did I know that they had designed those now ubiquitous red-and-white sleeves.
I held on to the service for a few years until I moved to New York, mostly because I thought that the DVDs had to come from California, where the company was based. Little did I know that the service had gone national.
I re-upped in 2004, partly in an effort to get the airline-mile bonus that Netflix offered to new customers. At the time, the subscription offered only three disks for almost $20 per month, and over the years, I scaled back to two disks, then to one disk, and, after this week, to none.
The streaming service proved to be the “disk killer” for me. The convenience of watching a movie or television series, even if it’s not my first choice, is much better than waiting two-to-three days to watch a movie on DVD. I was a bit late the streaming service when it was first offered. I had a Powerbook G4 as my only computer from 2004 until 2009, and the PowerPC chip wasn’t good enough to run the streaming service. I didn’t do Netflix streaming until I bought a Roku in 2009 to watch Netflix Instant through a TV. Since then I have linked my Blu-Ray player, iPad, and iPhone to my Netflix accounts. It’s now possible to see Netflix just about anywhere I can get a 2 megabit Internet connection.
Will I miss the disks? Not really. DVD was always a problematic medium, given its rather short life.
I know that Neflix gets blamed for killing the local video store, and that studios are withholding streaming content from Netflix because they fear that Netflix is going to kill the DVD format and then the multichannel video distributor. I have theories behind the decline of each of these institutions, and I don’t think Netflix has had a substantial role. I’ll save that discussion for another day, but for now, I know that my mailbox will be a little emptier for the time being.
