New Adventures in Technology

This weekend I decided to try and use different tools to perform my usual computer-based tasks.

Yesterday, I tried to do everything in Mac OS X (Leopard), and also tested out Thunderbird 3. I reckon I could live with a Mac as my only computer, and the only thing that bugged me was the speed (my Mac is somewhat ancient now). I especially liked iCal, and how it integrates perfectly with the Google calendars that map out my whole life, and I love the way OS X renders fonts and colours. Thunderbird 3 was a nice surprise, and I love the way it integrates with Gmail. Maybe I’ll consider switching back to Thunderbird the next time Evolution does something to annoy me.

Today I’ve been using the daily build of Chromium on my netbook. It’s seriously faster than Firefox, and I’m finding that I can do pretty much everything I need to do without a plethora of extensions. This might be one to keep I think.

I’m also having monitor envy. Or possibly screen resolution envy. I think I may be nearly ready to consider spending my day looking at something larger than a laptop screen.

This morning I’ve been thinking about mortality, and about all the people I see and talk to (and all the people I don’t see and don’t talk to but still care about). If I knew that I only had one remaining conversation with each person, what would that conversation involve? What things have remained unsaid that should have been said years ago? What unfinished business needs to be resolved before it is too late?

The truth is, none of us know how long we’ve got. Maybe it’s time to start treating every conversation as the last one we might have with that person, because, eventually, one of them will be.

This week I have been on leave. I’ve not really been anywhere, but have largely spent the week either at home, or out with family.

My plans for the week were to reinstall my laptop, get my hair cut off, and do something about de-cluttering the house. It’s now Thursday, and I’m well on track to get all of the above done (with only some of the clutter still outstanding). I’ve also eaten well, slept properly, and generally managed to avoid stress, impossible people, and other such things.

On a technical level. I’ve not done anything too productive, but have been playing around with Google Sites to see what sort of things it is capable of. So far I like the RSS features, but am not really seeing anything that would make me move away from Wordpress in the near future.

I’m back to work on Monday, and am sort of looking forward to it. I think this probably makes me sad.

This weekend I decided to reinstall my laptop. Largely because it’s been through two Ubuntu upgrades (8.10 –> 9.04 –> 9.10), and also because it was still on an ex3 file system and my netbook on ex4 is a lot snappier with less memory. I also wanted to reclaim the disk space previously used for Vista, which was largely going to waste.

My method for re-installation is as follows:

1. Back up the whole of my home directory (including hidden files). In my case this was about 83Gb.
2. Do a clean install of Ubuntu 9.10 from USB. This took under 10 minutes, which was a record for me.
3. Do software updates and installation of anything outside the base install that I need (very little in my case). This required a reboot for a new kernel.
4. Copy back the home directory, trying not to do anything else at the same time to avoid config files getting overwritten.
5. Download and install dropbox.
6. Log out, and log back in.

After an hour or so (of copying data) I found myself with an identical looking interface, but with a lot more extra space, a snappier feel, and no loss of data.

It probably took about 2 hours in total (of which 90% was copying data), and I didn’t have to do anything I’d regard as too scary for a non-technical user.

For a good few years I’ve been using Livejournal as a feed reader, with the idea being that if I was reading what my friends were up to anyway, I might as well intersperse it with news and other things that interested me.

Fast forward a few years, and I realise that over 95% of what I get through LJ comprises of feeds from other websites. So this weekend I’ve been setting up my Google Reader account to pull in every single unauthenticated feed I currently view through LJ, as well as feeds of every website I visit at least once a day (including a few from Facebook which deserve a post of their own at some point due to the pain of getting them working). The theory is that I will be able to access most of what I want to read in one place, and that when I’m doing my daily trawl of interesting things I won’t get distracted by memes, games and other less educational content.

Of course, I have no intention of leaving LJ and Facebook behind (just yet). I’ll just be using them for their intended purpose rather than trying to shoehorn them into directions they were not meant to go.

I was going to write a post about the iPad, but I think most of what I wanted to say has been expressed in quite a few other places. Largely, I think it looks pretty, but the lack of customisation and multitasking mean that if I was to get one, I don’t think I’d get the use out of it that the price tag would require, although I do concede that this product is going to appeal greatly to non-technical users.

I should also mention Firefox 3.6, which actually does seem faster than 3.5, and which I’ve been using for a few days now without noticing anything different other than the speed (I like new things, but I also dislike unnecessary interface changes because they cause my brain to have to think for an extra second or two).

Ubuntu users wanting to get hold of the latest releases of Mozilla software might want to try the ubuntuzilla repository which seems to work a treat.

What else?

Well, I’ve not really stumbled upon any other new and interesting technology this week, largely because I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work and have had very little recreational internet time. I have however noticed that Facebook seems to be prompting me to “reconnect” with people I see every day (it’s not suggested Steph yet, but it’s only a matter of time), which makes me wish there was a setting to define people with whom I largely interact with offline. That way Facebook might actually prompt me to talk to people I really do actually need to reconnect with.

I did a fair bit of work on this about a year ago, and then never got round to writing it up. What I was trying to achieve was to have a minimal virtual server running in VirtualBox, which could been seen from the outside world and would appear to all extent and purposes to be a real physical machine.

Start off by creating a new VM. I went with a totally stripped down installation of Ubuntu (from the alternative CD), adding just openssh-server and apache2 to the default install. I called it Ubuntu Minimal (the name will become important later).

Boot up the new VM, and then on the host machine enter the following commands (replacing the name of the VM with what you decided to call yours):

VBoxManage setextradata "Ubuntu Minimal" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/HostPort" 2222
VBoxManage setextradata "Ubuntu Minimal" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/GuestPort" 22
VBoxManage setextradata "Ubuntu Minimal" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/Protocol" TCP
VBoxManage setextradata "Ubuntu Minimal" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/HostPort" 8008
VBoxManage setextradata "Ubuntu Minimal" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/GuestPort" 80
VBoxManage setextradata "Ubuntu Minimal" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/Protocol" TCP

Power down the VM, start it up again, and then you should be able to ssh into it on port 2222 and pull up apache’s “it works!” page by browsing to http://localhost:8008. At that point you can install web apps and do whatever else you want with the server.

It doesn’t take up a great deal of memory, so you could probably have a couple of these running on most computers without any obvious performance degradation.

This evening I’m dabbling with RGB MusicLab. It claims to turn images into sound, and from my first couple of experiments it seems very interesting. I think whoever created this likes free jazz and post rock, but that is fine because so do I.

I don’t really know where to start when trying to draw up a list of songs or albums that sum up the last 10 years. 2000 was a long time ago (10 years, in fact), and I’m not sure I can be truly objective when comparing things I’m listening to now and records that I remember being at least as important at various other points in the last 10 years. I love the new Flaming Lips album, but is it really better than Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots? Is In Rainbows better than Kid A, or was it just released more recently? And is it really possible to sum up a decade in a list of records?

My gut instinct is that no record released this year should make the list. Just because I’ve not had time to assess their importance. But at the same time I don’t think that’s fair to an album like The Hazards of Love, which I reckon I’ll still be listening to in 2019.

So without further ado, a first stab at a list of records from the last 10 years that I think people should own, and that in some way sum up the decade for me.

Radiohead – Kid A (2000) – To me this record redefined what a big selling record could sound like, and did a great job of sounding like everything I was currently listening to at the time (Tortoise, Jim O’Rourke, Miles Davies and a few even more esoteric things). Everything they released this decade would get into my top 100, but this is where they laid down the blueprint for what was to come. I bought this album the day I had my first interview to work at the University, and to me it perfectly sums up 2000.

Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002) – The album that introduced me to Wilco, and that marked them out as something more than just an alternative country band. It was also the first album (I think) that was streamed to listeners before it was released, and marked the first of four consecutive great albums they released between 2002-09. It was hard choosing between this, A Ghost is Born and Wilco (the album), but I think YHF just shades it, and is the one I’d recommend people start with.

The Arcade Fire – Funeral (2004) – They seemed to come out of nowhere, and to be critically acclaimed without ever being fashionable. This album was the one that really introduced me to them, and made me realise that there was something coming out of Canada that wasn’t 24 minutes instrumental masterpieces or trite pop songs. I played this album to death in 2004, and still dip into it every now and again, and it is something I would recommend to anyone who likes music.

The Hold Steady – Separation Sunday (2005) – I didn’t discover this band until their 4th album (Stay Positive), but soon fell in love with their second effort from 2005. They are described as a bar band, but I see them as the 21st century version of Jack Kerouac and the best storytelling band ever. The music is loud and simple, the lyrics are narrative and hilarious, and the fact that something made in 2005 topped my listening charts for this year just goes to show it is something special.

Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid (2008) – Last year’s album of the year by a mile, and something I keep going back to when I want to be reminded of 2008 (which was generally a good year). I’ve been a fan of theirs for a while, but this is the first album where I would recommend every single song.

Calculated using the same algorithm as the last two years, and only including albums actually released this year.

1. The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love
2. Wilco – Wilco (The Album)
3. The Horrors – Primary Colours
4. Portugal. The Man – The Satanic Satanist
5. Florence and The Machine – Lungs
6. Jarvis Cocker – Further Complications
7. The Big Pink – A Brief History of Love
8. Califone – All My Friends Are Funeral Singers
9. Doves – Kingdom Of Rust
10. Maxïmo Park – Quicken The Heart
11. And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – The Century of Self
12. Robyn Hitchcock – Goodnight Oslo
13. Editors – In This Light And On This Evening
14. Manic Street Preachers – Journal For Plague Lovers
15. Bear in Heaven – Beast Rest Forth Mouth
16. Julian Casablancas – Phrazes For The Young
17. Fresh Body Shop – The Ugly Army
18. Atlas Sound – Logos
19. David Byrne & Brian Eno – Everything that Happens will Happen Today
20. Monsters of Folk – Monsters of Folk

Oddly enough, three of my most played (and favourite) albums of 2009 were released prior to 2009. They slot into the top 5 as follows:

1. The Hold Steady – Separation Sunday
2. The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love
3. Wilco – Wilco (The Album)
4. British Sea Power – Do You Like Rock Music?
5. The Hold Steady – Stay Positive

Nothing else from before 2009 got anywhere near the top 20 (American Demo by The Indelicates being the closest by some distance).