Technophile Monkey

Today’s XKCD cartoon is built around an Emliy Dickinson poem. I read this at, oh, 7:45 or so. I didn’t know Emily Dickinson or that particular poem (“Because I could not stop for death…”) before.

Now around 7:55, in my little video player window, someone starts reciting a poem. It begins with “Because I could not stop for death…”, and a few seconds later the camera shows someone holding an Emily Dickinson poem collection. It was in season 1, episode 8 of Torchwood.

Creepy. Very creepy.

I’m deleting my Facebook profile because Facebook, Inc. creates a very scary situation. And that’s even if you don’t use the privacy-abusing games on their platform.

What will happen when I’m no longer on Facebook? Will I disappear? Will my status messages be deleted when Facebook, Inc. deletes my profile, removing me from the memory (read: walls) of all my friends? Will there be people who refuse to communicate with me because I do not use Facebook?

What happens when those of you who stay there for now find your next social platform, after Facebook goes out of fashion? Will you invite me to it or will I be so far removed from your world by then you don’t consider me worthy?

My Facebook private messages. They are saved inside Facebook. I’m glad I never put anything inside that platform that I really need to save, but I might want a copy of my messages anyhow. There seems to be no easy way to do this other than giving some random stranger’s application read rights to your entire profile in order to pull a backup. And if I had anything private in my inbox, I’d be completely daft to do that.

As an aside: There’s a sort of workaround that uses a Firefox extension called Archive Facebook to pull a “dumb” HTML copy of your profile. It’s better than nothing, but getting this back into machine-readable form to import into e.g. an e-mail client is less than fun. And did I mention it’s taking several hours to do and takes thousands of requests to Facebook?

The alternative could be to register as Facebook developer and write your own application against the Facebook API to retrieve your data, but I’m not sure if most people would like to invest that much work.

But back to the sinister business. Why does Facebook, Inc. cling onto your personal data like that? Some people have analyzed why it’s so hard to get your own Facebook data back from the company. I’ll let you read their opinions directly instead of regurgitating them.

Anyhow, I’ll shoot my profile in the face now. Goodbye. It was sort of fun, but also sort of unnecessarily risky. I’ll jump back on the bandwagon when decentralized, encrypted, self-hosted, privacy-aware and standardized social network nodes come into fashion. Maybe next year sometime. I’ll surely get Diaspora’s source on September 15th and see if there’s anything I can help out with.

Until then you’ll have to read my idiotic mutterings on this blog and on IRCnet’s #linux, and you’ll have to get my photos at Flickr. Yeah, I know making people look in three different locations for one person is social suicide nowadays

If you feel all cheerful about killing yourself now (well, on Facebook), here’s the link to Facebook, Inc.’s account deletion request form.

It’s quite scary if a single company is not only in control of all delivery but also all storage of communications between people. Facebook, Inc. is turning into such a company. Yet they don’t have to abide by the same privacy laws that bind e.g. telecommunications companies like ISPs.

The Diaspora project is working on an alternative, decentralized social platform that gives control over your personal data back to you. I think that’s the right way to go. Even though you could argue social platforms like Facebook bring nothing new to the table (chat, instant messaging, photo sharing and blogging have existed long before Facebook came along), combining everything in one platform does have some advantages.

Diaspora sites can be hosted by yourself but then syndicated securely with other diaspora sites (seeds), so that each person not only controls where and how their data is stored, but also who can and who cannot see or receive it. If humanity needs such a social platform, this seems to be the right approach in my opinion.

So I’m pondering Facebook suicide, and erecting a Diaspora site as soon as it becomes usable, to see if it has the potential it seems to have.

If you think music sounds good from your PC audio outputs, you are wrong*.

Most PCs come with onboard audio circuits that, at best, sound weak. As if you’re listening to your music through balls of cotton in your ears while the neighbor’s kid is marching up and down your living room shaking a bowl full of glass shards in rhythm with the music.

But there’s a cheap way out of that. The Music Streamer by High Resolution Technologies. It’s an external USB sound interface with a very good D/A converter. This is a semi-audiophile device, several levels above consumer-grade stuff from e.g. Creative. Yet it costs only about the same as your average USB audio interface these days.

This isn’t made for 5.1 surround sound gaming, it only has two analog RCA (Cinch) outputs to hook up to your amp. Of course you can also play games in stereo on it and watch films. Both sounds crystal clear.

I’ve hooked mine up to my Synology NAS (it’s plug and play) and I’m running mpd on it, so now I can listen to my collection of FLAC audio without even switching on the PC, and I can remote control it from any Android phone, a web interface or dedicated clients like Ario or ncmpcpp.

Best purchase of the year! I’m yet again discovering new aspects of albums I’ve bought 15 years ago and have heard over a thousand times. This thing reveals more detail in my music than my CD player. It’s nearly the same sensation as I had going from shitty speakers to semi-audiophile shit.

I bought the small version for CHF 120.00 (around USD 120.00), but if your ears are good enough to hear it and your equipment is good enough to reproduce it, you can go up to USD 900.00 on one of the higher-end models.

(*Okay: If you’ve hooked up some external D/A converter via S/P-DIF or TOSLINK you can get as good or better quality. But then you wouldn’t be reading this, would you?)

Die Veränderungen in der Schweizerdeutschen Sprache aufzeichnen, ist doch auch ein schönes Hobby.

Ein meines Wissens neuer Import aus dem Hochdeutschen sind die Relativpronomen der/die/das. Im Alemannischen, oder wenigstens im Schweizerdeutschen, kannte man bis anhin nur das Relativpronomen “wo”. Ein Beispiel, das in meinen Augen richtig ist:

• Hochdeutsch: Der Mann, der mir die Brille verkauft hat.
• Schweizerdeutsch: Dr ma, wo miar d brilla verkauft hät.

Ich höre aber öfters von jungen Leuten solche Konstrukte: “I hola schnell min kolleg, der das besser kann”. Die übliche Formulierung wäre aber “I hola schnell min kolleg, wo das besser kann”. Ganz interessant war auch die Aussprache von “der”, es war effektiv “der”, wie im Hochdeutschen, nicht “dä”.

Dabei wird im Schweizerdeutschen das Geschlecht des Subjekts beim Relativpronomen überhaupt nicht unterschieden. Die Kollegin wäre auch eine gewesen, wo das besser kann. Die dem Hochdeutschen angeglichene Variante wäre aber sicher geschlechtsspezifisch herausgekommen: mini kollegin, dia das besser kann.

Schweizerdeutsch-Sprecher in der Leserschaft: Welche Relativpronomen benutzt ihr? Der/die/das oder wo?

Roman Haefeli recently released two very handy shell scripts that let you watch and record TV through Wilmaa. All you need is mplayer and rtmpdump and, voilà, TV with hardware-acceleration, without any of the annoying and slow Flash player crap that Wilmaa throws at you.

This allows even slow computers such as netbooks to smoothly play these TV streams full-screen.

Check it out at http://github.com/reduzent/watchwilmaa

The script is released under GNU GPLv2, if you fork the project on GitHub and send pull requests for your improvements, I’m sure Roman will merge them.

Caveat: It might only work from Switzerland for now, I don’t know which countries can get Wilmaa.

Eine interessante Häufung von Deutschismen, lustigerweise habe ich alle davon in den letzten fünf Tagen gehört:

• “Welles wotsch? Das mit hüenlifleisch?”
• “Und denn bini mittem fahrrad gange go…”
• “Jo, mittem rad voll in gehsteig…”
• “Fahruswiiskontrolle.”

Schweizerdeutsch hat für mich einen Teil seines Charmes deshalb, weil man so viele schöne frankophone Einflüsse findet. Diese scheinen aber jetzt Germanismen zu weichen, die es bis anhin in unserer Sprache nicht gab. Wer die vier “Fehler” in den Sätzen nicht erkennt, ist entweder jung oder muss sich schämen

Nice! They’re finally visiting Switzerland

Mongolian folk rock experts Altan Urag will be at the ISM, Rue de Lausanne 45-47, 1201, Geneva, playing a concert on Saturday, June 5. 2010, 20:00. If you don’t remember Altan Urag, they’re behind part of the Mongol soundtrack, for example, with songs like Xöx Tolboton. In Mongolia, I think they’ve already released six albums, but none of them seem to have made it to the European market. So Geneva will be a chance to buy the CD(s) and get autographs.

More info: http://www.wmasm.ch/1altanurag.php

And hot on the heels of that Osmos release for Linux, theck out the Humble Indie Bundle. The guys at Wolfire have created crazy package deals before, but this one is special: You get acclaimed indie titles Gish, World of Goo, Aquaria, Lugaru HD and Penumbra Overture, which all work on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. You pay whatever you want, from $1 to any price at all. And a part of the income goes to the renowned charities Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I already own Gish and World of Goo for GNU/Linux, but I’ll invest a few bucks to get the rest of those games. And it can’t hurt to have World of Goo twice, it makes a fantastic gift even for non-gamers

Update: It looks like Linux users donate twice as much for these games as Windows users. Go team!

Ambient atmospheric chillout game Osmos just received a Linux version.

And it’s a pretty good game, too. 2DBoy with World of Goo, Hemisphere with Osmos, let’s hope more indie developers join in on the OpenGL push (thanks to iPhone and iPad) and from there to Mac OS X and GNU/Linux.