I often think about how our world reflects us, and vice versa. For instance, consider the reciprocity inherent in mass media, and how we might effectively look through the TV screen and at a blurry image of ourselves: society at-large. It’s “media as our looking glass.”
TV: “The View” and Adult Diapers
Advertisements during Oprah or The View are very different from those during football, Glee, Wipeout … prime time. Marketing companies have intently studied the viewership, and so the ads are targeted to have greatest return. I can reasonably suspect that an above average number of incontinent adults, or adult diaper-wearers (hmm, or maybe adult diaper purchasers), etc. are sitting in front of TVs watching “The View” at that moment when the commercial airs.
Google: Facebook and Babies
Today I typed “how do” into Google, and its relatively new “instant” feature displays the top few search queries, I suppose the few that are most prevalent (maybe even my suspected locale, “Peachtree City” on the left sidebar). It appears that Googlers most commonly want to know two things: how facebook works, and how to get pregnant. I guess you still can’t actually get pregnant by facebook, but maybe that’s a market-ready next step.
Google searches beginning with "how do"
Google searches beginning with "why do b"
I’m not sure what else Google is going to tell me, and I’m not really sure exactly what it means, but I’m really curious about people self-educating through the web.
NOTE: the following is a correct procedure to access the disk image, but I was unable to recover any media from before the factory reset. I’m not sure whether this is due to a deletion/erasure technicality with Apple’s implementation of flash storage media, the fuse filesystem, etc.
The AT&T store factory reset our iPhone 3Gs, and all the photos, etc. were deleted. Unfortunately, iTunes had not been syncing any of the photos since Dec. 2009! So, we had to run a recovery operation.
You can readily find tutorials for jailbreaking & downloading the disk image of an iPhone. Once you have the disk image, you can use photorec, part of the testdisk suite, to recover photos, etc. from the disk image… assuming they resided in areas of the filesystem which were never overwritten… just deleted.
A key command, which is often cited for other phones, and not the 3Gs, is:
dd if=/dev/rdisk0 bs=4096KB | ssh -C YourRemoteUserName@Your.Remote.IP.Address 'dd of=iphone-dump.img' bs=4096KB
If you have an Amazon Kindle, or if you just like to capture and store your readings on Wikipedia, take note. You can now easily collect your reading material on Wikipedia and save it to PDF format. Next, send it to your Kindle, and you can read it anywhere, without having to pull out your laptop or netbook.
Wikipedia Book Creator
To be determined:
How well does the PDF render and scale on the Kindle?
Does this work well for Google Patents or Google Books?
If you try these things I’d love to know how it goes. These would boost my interest in the Kindle.
I use EverNote to sink much of the digital disorder in my life (in a retrievable way).
Aside from emailing mobile phone snapshots to EverNote, I use an AceCAD DigiMemo L2 notepad to digitize my notes and sketches. The notepad is slim and basically just a clipboard, and it’s thankfully lighter than a tablet PC. I can write in real ink with a comfortable pen with decent ballpoint tips and on any paper I like. The vector graphic output of the thing is just amazing, when you convert to PDF… you can enlarge sketches to poster-size, without loss of quality. Evernote has outstanding text and handwriting recognition – it does surprisingly well with my technical notes.
There’s a problem, however. EverNote only digitizes handwriting in images. EverNote 3.x no longer supports import of .DHW files (digital handwriting), so some people from Germany wrote a great PERL script (link to the files: dhw2ps). I needed to convert to an image format, and PNG is quite efficient. So, I fixed the script accordingly and verified it runs on Linux Mint / Ubuntu with appropriate packages (like perl and ghostscript) installed. You can download the script below:
dhw2png PERL script
NB: You can quite easily modify the script to call pstoedit if you want to convert DHW to .svg, .ai (Illustrator), or another vector format.
Check out this snippet from Google’s home page… yes, that’s right, they’re using Yahoo’s BSD Licensed code for YUI, whatever that is. Looks like iGoogle uses this technology, maybe that’s where the whole gadget thing came from. You can see “grids-igoogle-dummy.css” as a file under Google’s third_party javascript code.
/* third_party/javascript/yui/grids-igoogle-dummy.css */
/* ===============BEGIN BSD LICENSED PORTION============= */
/*
Copyright (c) 2007, Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Code licensed under the BSD License:
http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt
version: 2.2.0
*/
#modules .yui-b {
position:static;
display:block;
margin:0 0 1em 0;
float:none;
width:auto;
overflow:hidden;
}
.yui-gb .yui-u {
float:left;
margin-left:2%;
*margin-left:1.895%;
width:32%;
}
.yui-gb div.first {
margin-left:0;
}
#modules,.yui-gb {
zoom:1;
}
/* ===============END BSD LICENSED PORTION============= */
The Take
Open Source seems to change the game for competition. When one can instantly leverage the the competition’s tools, it really keeps the R&D striving. This is certainly more efficient and good for consumers/users: the best solutions of one company are very quickly adopted by all the others.
Not a New Thing
This sort of thing has been going on longer than most people would think. Look back at Microsoft Windows… where did they get the source code for their TCP/IP stack? BSD! Perhaps this was one of the original uses of the BSD license… I think I recall early Microsoft EULAs actually referenced the BSD license.
In more recent history, Apple jumped on board and built OS X on top of a BSD core, but guess what… they did it right! Instead of a hack-job of BSD code and non-BSD code, they seemed to use a large portion together – as it was meant to be used. And what’s more, they kept so many useful things all the way up to user-land programs- like a standard BASH shell, rather than something newfangled, or perhaps worse: an old legacy (nowadays non-standard) DOS shell which I still can’t get to do any useful batch processing of files, etc.
I think this convergence toward a unix/linux-based OS makes Microsoft exceptional in more of a bad way than a good way. The convergence is also good for competition and for open source initiatives which can achieve cross-platform capability much more easily.
