Shopping centre wireless internet

We're getting to the point where WiFi should be a service provided by shopping centres to their tenants. Too many have their own set up, and I'm sure it's causing problems in some areas. The added bonus is that customers can also use the wireless internet, either for free or through some kind of charge system.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then again, that might almost put those internet booths out of business.
PPS - The funny thing is, you never know what side-effects a move like this might have.

Christmas light attachments

Every year, when we put up Christmas lights, we struggle to find a good way to attach them to bricks. Usually we use tac - sticky blobs of goop designed for temporary attachments - and every year they fall down. Tape doesn't stick long enough either. What I'd like to be able to do is 3D-print some custom brackets that snap onto my brickwork somehow and allow me to thread the light cables through. That way they should stay put, the lights work properly, there's no gunk on my bricks afterwards and I can reuse them next year. If I had the modelling software, I could probably order them straight from Shapeways or something.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - But then again, for the sake of easy attachment, it might be too expensive.
PPS - I haven't really looked into it.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Road Ahead

The motorcycle purred to a stop outside the rickety-looking diner and motel, wheels crunching on the car park gravel. Something about the road beyond made Hank, the rider, stop, unwilling to go on, at least for a while. He couldn't put his finger on it, though. It even looked like a good road - smooth and well-maintained, varied scenery and enough dips, hills and turns to be interesting. But somehow it felt like a one-way trip.

He headed into the old diner instead, carrying his helmet with him. The waitress looked him over, then said with a smile, "You're taking the road, aren't you?"

"I don't think I've decided yet," replied Hank.

"You will," returned the waitress, and presented him with a plate of steak and a cup of coffee. Hank didn't even wonder about how he hadn't ordered. He just tucked in, hungry from his journey.

"How long you been travelling?" asked the waitress.

Hank opened his mouth to speak, then drew a complete blank. How long had it been? He couldn't remember when he started, couldn't remember how far he'd travelled. It's not just that it was a long way, a long time, but that there was literally no beginning to the journey in his mind.

"Take your time, hon, it'll come to you," she said, topping up his coffee.

Pushing back from the old dining counter, Hank considered a while. Was it days? Weeks? Months or years? Maybe he'd been on the road for a century or more. Who could say?

Then suddenly an image flashed in his mind. A whole life he had nearly forgotten. His wife, children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, endless hours of riding familiar roads and days filled with watching sports on that old recliner.

And with that, he knew now where he was, and why the road ahead felt like a one-way trip. He'd crossed a border between lives, and that was the one he had lived, but now had to leave behind. They would remember him, and he them, but he couldn't go back. He was headed on, along that clear road, toward the white mountain on the horizon.

The waitress smiled and nodded at the door, and Hank knew it was time for him to go. He turned and left with a "thankyou", swung his leg over his bike and took off down the road. The waitress, still smiling, picked up the helmet he had left on the stool behind him, and placed it reverently on a shelf next to other remembrances of other travellers who had passed through. Hank wouldn't need it again. Not on that road to the mountain.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I lost my uncle this week.
PPS - This story is dedicated to him.

Ebook format war

With Google, Apple, Amazon and others all selling ebooks, you need different software for each one. This is because each seller has their own DRM to lock you in, and you either need a different device for each store or a general-purpose device with apps for each store. And you'll notice that each vendor does provide free apps for desktops and phone operating systems, too. That tells you the devices and software are not the major revenue stream; it's the books themselves. So each camp wants to get you hooked on their format and locked in so you only buy books from them, and book sales is where Amazon rules the roost.

Cross-compatibility would help any one camp win the format war. It is in Amazon's best interests to break or even support ePub DRM, making the Kindle compatible with Google Books and the Apple iBookstore, but the Digital Millenium Copyright Act means they're not even allowed to try. However, if someone were to publicly demonstrate that the ePub format is cracked, publishers might be less willing to support ebook sellers other than Amazon.

Now, for publishers, before any one format emerges as the winner, it is worth their while to support them all, and that's pretty easy, so they'll keep doing so. That means there's no differentiation between the ebook stores. Since there's no incentive for publishers to support one store over another, you can bet each store will be negotiating for exclusivity deals with publishers. That's when the wheels start to fall off for consumers. If some books are only available from certain locked-up ebook stores, but you want them all, you'll end up having to work with both, in much the same way as dedicated gamers own an XBox, a PlayStation and a Wii.

I really hope we can sort out this format war sooner rather than later, and I hope in the meantime I don't spend too much money on the losers. I don't want to get locked to a format that will die in a year or two, with a ton of ebooks I can no longer read. In the end, I support Amazon, because even if they fail, they can just switch to the winning open format, ePub. Any books I bought before their victory should be converted and still available afterwards on the same platform.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I really don't like that situation.
PPS - But what can you do besides not buying any ebooks?

Self-education

Self-paced education should never stop, throughout your entire life. What we need are skills for which people will pay, and that means education, but the baseline for the meaning of "skilled" is always rising. So in your spare time, you can teach yourself things through practice, or through websites like Khan Academy. For your personal gain and your personal skill set, it's pretty important to stay on the ball.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I feel like I don't get enough practice in a lot of things.
PPS - I could, though, and I should.

Thunderbird folder compacting bug

I've been having a bit of a bug with Thunderbird at work, and since nobody else seems to have even posted about it, I might as well mention it here. I keep my email archives in Dropbox, and this has saved my life twice now, but Dropbox is also part of the problem. Two times over the past weeks I have received errors from Thunderbird either claiming that my archive folders are "full" or else they have just disappeared entirely. Upon examination, those files have been deleted - an entire year's worth of email vanished silently. Fortunately for me, Dropbox has an undelete feature, so I was able to recover the files without much trouble, once I noticed they were missing.

My best guess at the cause involves a kind of conflict of timing between Dropbox and Thunderbird and the folder compacting process. At various times, Thunderbird decides that a folder needs to be compacted, which probably means resuming empty space left behind by deleted messages. It is possible that during these times when the folders are being automatically compacted, the file is deleted on disk. When this fact is noticed by Dropbox, it dutifully syncs the file deletion action to their servers and that becomes the official state of the folder. When Thunderbird goes to check again, the file is gone and there are problems.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My solution was to make Thunderbird ask before compacting, and pause Dropbox while it does so.
PPS - It's not great, but it works.

Dropbox on my phone

I think the reason, or one of the reasons, I like Dropbox so much is that it makes my various computers and my phone feel more like one platform focused on me, rather than several different machines with different files and different software, disconnected across various sites and separated by firewalls. One thing I particularly like to do with Dropbox is manage my podcast playlist. I download podcasts on my desktop - any one - into Dropbox, then use the Dropbox app on my phone to copy them there. When I delete them from Dropbox on my phone, they're gone from my desktops as well. Very handy. I use it in a similar way to manage my free ebooks that I read on my phone too. Killing time is the killer app on my phone, but using Dropbox makes the process much easier, and even fun.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't know how I'd do without Dropbox now.
PPS - Possibly with some arrangement of a flash drive and sync software.

Kindle and Amazon wish lists

How come I can't access my Amazon wish list through the Kindle store on my phone or even my Kindle, for that matter? It only shows recommendations, but I already have some recommendations for myself. Apparently those aren't good enough. Also, if I don't mind whether I get a book from my list as a Kindle ebook or a print version, why can't I specify that on my wish list? As it is, I have to add the print and ebook editions to the list, then remove one version if I get the other one.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The second feature is not affecting my life much.
PPS - But it might be handy.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Magic Book

On a little-used street away from the centre of town, in between a Chinese massage parlour and an all-night pancake restaurant, there is a solid wooden door with flaking green paint and a shiny brass letter slot. Behind the door, some people know, is a bookstore with shelves stacked from floor to ceiling haphazardly, sometimes two or three rows deep, in apparently random order. Customers range from school librarians to aging bibliophiles to young hipsters looking for something to show off at the cafe. They navigate around the piles of books on the floor and browse the shelves over two floors, passing each other up and down the rickety old staircase that is also jammed with books under the steps and, occasionally, a reader engrossed in a story she couldn't wait to get home.

Many of them, for whatever reason, do not know that there are further mysteries inside the shop, such as the one shelf off in the back, hidden behind piles of dusty encyclopedias - the magic bookshelf. It doesn't hold books about magic. That would be too obvious. What it holds is books that contain magic, like a gardening guide that will make your vegetables grow, or a photography book that will make you capture a golden moment on film by chance.

Even though the bookshelf was magic, it didn't look like it, so Emily didn't realise she'd picked up a book that would change her life. The shopkeeper behind the counter gave it a quizzical look, like he couldn't remember stocking that title, and Emily stood with a sheepish, slightly embarrassed grin. The shopkeeper found the hand-written price in the back cover, took Emily's money and put her book in a paper bag.

Outside, Emily pulled out the book and opened to the first page, walking as she read, and immediately bumped into a tall, dark, handsome stranger.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I had a magic book similar to that once.
PPS - Sort of.

Kinds of fun

There are some people who play games because they're fun. There are other people who play games because winning against real people is very satisfying. Then there are those people who define "winning" in this context as "inciting red-hot rage". I work with one of those people, and I do not play games anywhere near him.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's called "griefing".
PPS - I don't understand it, though.