Data ownership is a serious issue on the internet, especially given the revelations that spy agencies like the NSA have been sneaking into back doors in companies like Google and collecting massive amounts of our personal metadata. While the courts and other US public institutions wrestle with the difficult constitutional […]
Computing
73 posts
I won’t be posting on Google+ anymore. There are a few reasons why. The first is that I feel about Google+ the same way – if not more – than I felt about Twitter and Facebook: a company should not be the sole vault and arbiter of my data. I […]
Social media is frustrating, but not for the reasons you are probably thinking. It’s frustrating because it’s disconnected. What happens on Facebook doesn’t seamlessly make it to Twitter; conversations on Twitter don’t seamlessly appear as conversations on Facebook. Twitter friends cannot talk to Facebook friends when discussing the same topic. […]
A visit by family members usually coincides with embarrassing failures of computing in our household. This is embarrassing because I try to be fairly tech savvy. However, any cred is immediately wiped away by events such as those which occurred during this most recent Thanksgiving: While my sister and I […]
The term “social network” is ironic, because it largely applies to systems on the internet that are themselves anti-social. For instance, Facebook and Twitter don’t really talk directly to each other. If I have one group of friends on Twitter and another on Facebook, I have to use a third-party […]
A few weeks ago, I was lying on the couch browsing RSS news feed headlines on my open-source “TiVO” (called STiVO – I’ve mentioned it before…), when I saw on the linux.org news feed that a letter-writing campaign was in gear. The Free Software Foundation, whose work I deeply appreciate […]
I’ve commented on how much I love my MythTV box, “Stevo.” I’ve found another reason to love it more: streaming recordings from my home in Texas to my laptop in France. Fundamentally, all MythTV does is take output from a TV tuner card and convert it to MPEG, writing it […]
The music player Songbird has been a project I’ve been excited about for a long time [1]. When Songbird first appeared, it wasn’t great on Linux but it brought a promising feature into the music player mix: a built-in web browser, allowing you to surf to music blogs and grab […]
After years of colorful verbal expressions regarding the quality of Microsoft Windows Vista, dad is upgrading his desktop from Vista to W7. Here is a live blog of the process. 7:15 pm: Dad has already tried upgrading once. The upgrade tool sat for about 10-15 minutes, then told him he […]
It’s the end of 2009, and time to have a little blog fun. Here are my tech recommendations for things I’ve discovered (or re-discovered) in the last year. Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (Karmic Koala!): it seems that each time Ubuntu releases a new version of their Linux/GNU/open-source remix, they out-do themselves. […]
Skype has become an invaluable tool for communicating with family and friends. PC-to-PC calls are free and PC-to-phone calls are cheap. Lately, I have been trying Skype on Linux, Windows, and Mac. As an avid follower of the (not frequently updated) “Skype for Linux” blog [1], I was pleased when […]