From the desk of » Technology

eBooks

konrad — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 19:37:16 +0000

So there’s a new Kindle that looks quite attractive. Many things on the Kindle plattform appear quite nice: You can read the Kindle books on multiple devices (the Kindle app for iPhone and iPad just as well as your desktop and laptop computer) and have your library available on all devices equally. The way I understand it, you even see your own notes and progress on your books on all platforms; this is how storage should be done (local copies for offline, but basically be accessible from anywhere).
And yet, as with many other of the new media consumption gadgets, you get a big bag of concerns that at least still give me second thoughts on all of this.
For one, I don’t want to leave such a well-documented trail of what I read, when and for how long. I know that by shopping at Amazon, I already leave quite the trail about my reading habits, and buying stuff on the Kindle does not change that all too drastically. And still, I feel that the more data Kindle transfers to Amazon, the less comfortable I am with reading stuff on such an electronic gadget.
Also, we’ve seen that Amazon is able to change the library on the Kindle without your approval or interaction. This gives an entirely new meaning to the concept of “purchasing a book.” It’s actually much more like a public library: You pay for the privilege of being allowed to read a book, but only little of the experience is under your control.
And that brings us around to the next point: I want to be able to pass on books. Once I’ve read them, I want to have somebody else have them. Or I want to be able to loan them; either just for an afternoon of leisure or for others to completely read those books. That’s just not possible on the Kindle. But then, I also think that it’s not possible on iBooks, so that levels the playing field.
For the time being, I just might be stuck with paper books.

Home media integration and other televisory matters

konrad — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:50:30 +0000

Following up on my last posting, there are a few more things that come to mind when thinking about the future of TV sets. With all those video streaming services that I want, I also would like integration with my lapop (or iPhone or iPad, or whatever other media consumption devices there are in the household). If I see a video on one of my devices, I’d like to be able to easily transfer that running stream onto my TV set. So, for instance, I am browsing TED and find a presentation that I’d like to continue watching while I do something else on an iPad (which I currently don’t own, but that is another topic). So then, I’d like to bounce the stream off to the TV set in the room I’m currently in and continue to use the iPad for other things.
And on the subject of transfers: I more often than not carry my iPhone on me. I can easily have my earphones plugged in there, and the cable not tangle with anything. So then, my laptop should link up with the audio output of the iPhone and transfer it’s sound out via the iPhone. That way, I could walk around and continue to listen to what I have on the computer — or just not be tied to the computer by means of headphone cable.
I’d like to be able to watch HD content, record and playback it at my leisure. And get HD content in such a way so that I can watch different HD channels on different TV sets concurrently, and without paying a monthly sum for every single device. We can do that now, with the plain analog cable service that we have. By means of cabling, we can distribute the signal to multiple TV sets. Anything but that would be a step backward, to my mind. It would be a great plus if the HD content could also be watched on laptops (and we have both Windows and Macintosh devices in the household, of which one Windows laptop regularly gets used for watching TV with a USB TV tuner), but that is even a secondary goal. I’d be happy if we could just get two TV sets. Of course, if we just had one media storage solution so that recordings of TV shows could be shown on any screen around, that would be a plus — but that seems to currently not be easily available.
It seems there’s still a great many challenges out there to get media stuff working conveniently and easily …

TV sets and online experience

konrad — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:39:10 +0000

It seems that TV sets that offer some form of web connectivity are the latest craze, right next with the 3D stuff that is not yet ready for consumption, at least to my mind. I say web connectivity because it’s about the web more than it is about internet connectivity — the TV sets are even a far cry from fully giving you a decent browser experience, let alone thinking about other protocols or applications. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing—but one still should be honest about what kind of experience a device is delivering.
What this is about, though, is that youtube is not enough. Of course it’s fun to look at various video clips and that one site is very rich in all the content it offers. Maybe, if the manufacturer is kind, they’ll also include other online video systems (vimeo, ustream.tv, or sevenload and myvideo.de in Germany) But as we all know, the web is filled with so many more opportunities. Being in the german TV market, I also want to be able to look at the online video offerings of the local TV stations; incidentally that also requires a Flash player on the device. I presume that other markets will have other offerings that the consumer might be interested in—a constant, steady battle for the manufacturer if the want to follow this all. And then, there’s video podcasts, there’s streaming stuff coming up that we don’t yet even dream about. A nightmare to keep current, even more of a nightmare if you have to keep pushing updates to the sets at the consumers constantly.
So we have established that the requirements for the TV online experience are high: Flash player, a decent full browser to support all the various offerings, a good update path to get new versions released (just imagine if IE6 had been distributed with every TV set that a certain manufacturer shipped five years ago, with no clear way for the customer to update). I think we’re getting dangerously close to having a full operating system on the TV set. And then we haven’t even touched integrating the normal TV services, video on demand, time-lapse watching, new ideas about pay per view.
Watching a home entertainment system for the living room certainly won’t be getting easier!

More basement finds …

konrad — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:40:38 +0000

So if you thought that the last post dates me, see here. This is from the mid eighties, magnetic stripes to save stuff on. One stripe held all of 1.2 kb. What fun to remember!

URL shortening, a new approach

konrad — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:27:32 +0000

There is an approach in URL shorteners that I have not yet seen, but think that has some merit: Store all the information for the URLs in a DNS zone. Store the URLs you point to as TXT records. The zone can then be pulled and perused at will. That way, data is never stored in just one companies database, you can just go in an pull those links that interest you. If the shortening engine then allows for user specific zones, you can just get to all the data you are interested in.

The prototype should not be so hard to get in shape.

Look what I found!

konrad — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:01:01 +0000

Cleaning up the basement (because we had some water leaking in, but that is a different matter entirely), I found stuff that practically makes me feel ancient …

An iPhone API I’d like to see

konrad — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:03:41 +0000

Just talking about the iPhone, there is an API that I’d like to see and I’m sure many applications would benefit from: A download manager. I imagine that an app could register to pull the content of a specific URL or the answer from a Web Service at a specified time or at specified intervals, and then the answers or most recent answer is ready for consumption when the app is started by the user.

Ideally, this would integrate with iTunes so that when syncing the phone, all the data-hungry apps get their mouths fed and are provided with the last version of the data they’re interested in. What I have in mind are news-plucking applications like All Things Digital or Bloomberg, or the TV schedule apps — or many of the other apps that you start, then wait to have their content pulled, and only then continue to use. The basic thing they do is simple: They all get their data in first. And I presume many, many of them in one or the other kind of XML application.

Man, would that improve my user experience of the iPhone.

NeXT.

konrad — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 16:23:51 +0000

Steve Jobs demos NeXTstep.

[tags]Steve Jobs, NeXTstep, video[/tags]

Thunderbird Extensions

konrad — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 14:36:15 +0000

Wo ich schon dabei bin, schreibe ich auch gleich noch auf, was ich derzeit an Extensions so in meinem Thunderbird sitzen habe:

[Tags] Thunderbird extensions software [/tags]

Firefox-Extensions

konrad — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 14:21:38 +0000

Auch, ums für mich selbst zu dokumentieren, hier die Liste an Firefox-Extensions, die ich derzeit verwende:

[Tags]Firefox extensions[/tags]

Google Browser Sync — noch eine Firefox-Erweiterung

konrad — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 07:53:11 +0000

Mit Google Browser Sync kann man über verschiedene Firefox-Installationen diverse Dinge gleich beibehalten. History, Bookmarks, Cookies, gespeicherte Passwörter und die offenen Tabs werden bei Google (auf Wunsch verschlüsselt) gespeichert und können dann von anderen Rechnern direkt verwendet werden. Auf den ersten Blick sehr praktisch. Ich berichte in ein paar Tagen davon, wie erfolgreich das klappt.

Apple and TV

konrad — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 12:43:07 +0000

Listening to Engadged Podcast 47.5 and the discussion about the strategy Apple is following with video on both the iPod and the iMac, I am slightly surprised about some of the theories not articulated.

If you are a company that is highly identified with digital media, that – even with a certain understatement – is constantly on the technical edge, would you really want to integrate a dying technology like analog TV into where you develop your media hub? I see Apple as a company that rather takes its time and invests effort into doing things both right and in style. Analog TV wouldn’t make the new iMacs display look good.

To me, Front Row has HDTV written all over it. With Video in the iTunes Store, Apple even already is laying the groundwork to have HDTV transport in their hands and put some pressure on cable operators and broadcasters. They have a display more suited to 16:9 material than 4:3 TV. And of course, they can do all the wonderful things with the digital media that the iTools and Front Row allow.

I’m not at all surprised that there’s no TV in the mix … yet.

Podcasting …

konrad — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 09:30:49 +0000

Replacing writers block with total silence.

Yahoo MyWeb 2.0

konrad — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:06:23 +0000

Coming via an article on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog to reading Getting MyWeb, I find it hard to bring it in line with what I do not like about my personal experience with the product. I admit that I was hooked by the idea and have been thinking long and hard how I would like to organize my bookmarks – or rather, what tools would make it easier for me to organize my web surfing and helping my informational needs.

What made me give up on using it was, in fact, the speed of the thing. I’m mostly well-connected, but if I want to externally remember something in my browsing, I do not want to wait for a window to enter my data in for thirty seconds to a minute. I want tight integration, I want to see quickly how things go. To me, it seemed to be more of a proof-of-concept than an actually usable application.

So when will we be getting the real thing?

Spellcheck!

konrad — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 13:31:42 +0000

Why is it that most every application on this planet on the operating systems I’ve used so far is either not doing any decent spellchecking (we’re not even talking grammar checking yet), or brings along dozens of megabytes of dictionaries and then can’t handle multiple languages gracefully? Looking at my blog you’ll see that I write in two languages, and that’s true with almost any writing I do, from email to internal notes. My editor (emacs) can handle multiple languages. My email application on Windows can (The Bat!). And often enough I have to use Word for Windows, that can also do it. But they have separate dictionaries, so all the words I teach them, I have to teach all of them. And at the same time, I do more and more of my writing in web browsers, and those don’t spell-check at all.

Come on! There’s so many smart things user interfaces can do. Why can’t they do something that basic? It would certainly improve many peoples lives.

(By the way, my offline blog editor can handle english, but not german. Sigh.)

Schon wieder kaputt!

konrad — Sun, 08 May 2005 20:47:39 +0000

So richtig robust ist das Motorola Razr 3 nicht. Meines kam Anfang November, als es endlich bei T-Mobile im Programm war. Mittlerweile musste ich es schon einmal tauschen, weil eine Taste nicht mehr funktionierte — just jene, die in fast allen Dialogen die Funktion “Ja” oder “Bestätigen” hat. Und gestern ist es mir das Austauschgerät auf einem Parkplatz aus der Hand gefallen und physisch gebrochen. Jetzt fehlt ein Teil. Die Siemens-Geräte, die ich vorher hatte, haben solch rüde Behandlung durchaus ausgehalten; ich bin leider so ungeschickt, dass elektronische Assistenten, die ich öfter mal bei mir habe, sowas aushalten müssen. Nun bin ich etwas verunsichert, ob ich mir das dritte Razr nehmen soll, oder vielleicht doch auf ein anderes Handy umsteigen soll. Aber so richtig wichtig ist das nicht.

NetBSD, apache and php-gettext

konrad — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 12:17:27 +0000

After spending entirely too many hours debugging the thing, I just found out that just setting the language domain with setlocale is not enough. At least with apache-1.3, you also have to set the environment variable “LANG” with putenv. Now, the localized applications show their beauty in all languages.

Netzwerk II

konrad — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 19:23:13 +0000

Die vorhin abgebildete Frickel-Konstruktion konnte wieder abgebaut werden. Es fand sich dann in den Vorräten doch noch ein Switch, der genug Kabelenden aufnehmen konnte. Damit sind wieder alle Kabel gebändigt und der Schrank wieder geschlossen.

Jetzt auch mit lokalem Editor!

konrad — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 16:11:22 +0000

Ich habe mein Blog-Schreiben etwas umgestellt: Anstatt wie bisher immer direkt in die Maske meines WordPress zu tippern, habe ich jetzt einen lokalen Clienten auf meinem Notebook und kann so schon jederzeit Texte vorbereiten. Ausserdem ist das Editieren so eine Spur einfacher geworden. Die ersten Eindrücke sind auf jeden Fall angenehm. Heissen tut das ganze w.bloggar und ist gratis zu haben. Auch hier: definitiv fürs Erste empfohlen.

Picasa (Google macht Bilder)

konrad — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 16:08:29 +0000

Gibts vermutlich schon länger, ich habe es aber gerade erst für mich entdeckt: Von Google gibt es jetzt Software, um die Bilder am lokalen Rechner zu katalogisieren und auch schon die ersten einfachen Änderungen daran vorzunehmen; vermutlich ist es sowas ähnliches wie iPhoto für den PC. Heisst sich Picasa und ist gratis. Definitiv eine Empfehlung wert.