I’ve taken to going for a 30 minute walk each morning, and I’ve made walking a bigger part of my life in general: I don’t drive or bike to the grocery store when I can take the time to walk and  on the days I go out for lunch I prefer to walk. I like having something to listen to while I’m doing that. It really doesn’t need to be — and I’d prefer it not be — music. I can listen to as much music as I want, as loudly as I want, all day long. I’d prefer it be spoken word. I don’t have nearly as much time as I’d like to listen to other people talking about stuff. I don’t have a job that allows me to absorb an idea while I’m otherwise occupied, and I don’t have a commute. At home, when I’m not working, I don’t want to sequester myself away from Al & Ben during the time we have together as a family.

Currently, I just time-shift NPR programs: On the Media, This American Life, Fresh Air, Philosophy Talk. I wouldn’t mind adding a few more to my list. Maybe you can help me. Here’s what I’d like:

Engaging subject matter:  For me, that’s probably philosophy, politics, media, film and mixed martial arts. Not professional tech (e.g. web development, programming) and definitely not consumer tech (e.g. gadgets, Apple products). 

Tight format: I’ve tried to listen to “dudes hanging around” podcasts, and they don’t work for me. One of the reasons most of my listening is still very much “repackaged professionally prepared content from NPR” is that i can count on the format: Intro, quick plea for money, on to the first guest. I’ve only got 30 minutes here. I want to spend it well, not listening to digital water cooler talk. Unless it’s digital water cooler talk from really fascinating people.

Production values: Doesn’t have to be perfect, but if the show is an ongoing series of decent-sounding host and echoey, unreliable Skype call-ins, that’s just more wasted time. 

So … that’s it. That’s what I’m after. Can you help?

So, the Great Room Migration of ’12 is pretty much over today: I paid Ben $5 to finish the tedious task of moving his stuff out of his old room and into The Room Formerly Known as the TV Room, and that’s that: He’s got a bigger room, we’ve got a new guest room, and the t.v. is down on the ground floor, where the person who built the house (and stuck a cable jack over the fireplace/tv plinth) intended.

We’re ahead of plan by about 5 years. When we first moved here we decided to put our t.v. in one of the larger four upstairs bedrooms. We liked the idea of keeping the t.v. out of the house’s socializing area, and the upstairs t.v. room was sort of cozy. Ben got one of the smaller rooms (with a loft, to give back some floor space). But in the process of shifting things around over the past few months, we decided it might be a little more comfortable to just move the t.v. back downstairs. It’s not like we plan to let the t.v. interrupt guests, and Ben was getting tired of his loft. So instead of waiting until he was in middle school to move his room around, we went ahead and got him a regular bed and moved him around.

The biggest complication turned out to be our network. With the t.v. upstairs, our four connected devices (a Roku, AppleTV, Blu-Ray and Wii) were all within 20 feet of the Airport Extreme in my office. Everything moved along pretty quickly, most importantly the Plex channel running on the Roku, which connects us to any digital entertainment stored on my iMac that I don’t feel like running through Handbrake to stream over the Apple TV.

Once we moved everything downstairs, things went south pretty quickly.

My office, where the Airport Extreme lives, is upstairs and on the opposite end of the house from the t.v. and all the attached devices. The first few things we tried to watch on the Roku (Netflix, Hulu or Plex) had a lot of problems: It took forever for content to load, there were periodic minute-long hangs because of rebuffering, and sometimes the Roku just reported that it couldn’t load whatever I was trying to watch. An AppleTV movie rental stopped about three minutes in and took another several minutes to rebuffer. That took me by surprise because Wi-Fi performance downstairs has always been good enough for laptops, iPads and iPhones. YouTube was sometimes a little balky, but the iPhone YouTube app has always seemed sort of flakey, even in good network conditions.

I think some of the problem is the sheer proliferation of neighboring 2.4GHz networks: Depending on when I look, I never see fewer than three nearby networks, and sometimes see as many as ten. When we had everything upstairs, the devices that could support the 5GHz connections an Airport Extreme can provide profited from the lower interference of the 5GHz band, and the devices that couldn’t were just close enough. Once we moved everything to the opposite end of the house, it probably made some neighboring networks loom a little larger.

I went into fix-it mode. I took an 802.11n Airport Express and put it between the Airport Extreme and the living room. There’s an outlet right at the top of the stairs that represents a spot about a third of the way between the office and living room (and on the living room side of a dogleg in upstairs layout). That worked out a little better, but there were still problems: The house is a little too large and twisty for a single WAP to cover the entire premises well enough to stream HD video, but not too large to keep devices from ignoring a relay in favor of the primary base station, so periodically one of the devices would pick up the Airport Extreme, ignore the Airport Express (as reported by Apple’s Airport Utility), and we’d be back to rebuffering and long load times. I might have been able to address some of that by turning the power on the Airport Extreme down to 50 percent, but I had a suspicion that the latency of connecting through a relay would still cause problems. And like I said, we have a lot of neighboring networks no matter what.

My next thought was to run some Ethernet cable along the side of the house, from my office and down to the living room. Doing it right, though — drilling the holes, using conduit, getting cable that wouldn’t degrade during the occasional freeze, grounding it all — seemed like more work than I felt like dealing with. Internal cabling was a possibility (our garage shares a floor or wall with all the rooms involved in this situation, so it would have been pretty easy to drill a few holes and run cables between rooms), but that also seemed like a lot of work, and I didn’t want to end up running internal conduit to hide the CAT5 cable.

So I printed out a few coupons from Best Buy I’ve been holding on to and went out and bought a Powerline Ethernet kit by Netgear. I made the purchase as an experiment, being careful to keep the packaging and tape the receipt to the inside flap of the box, because I’ve read a few reviews over the years (I’m positive we covered it when I was running Practically Networked) but I’ve never had a situation where Wi-Fi wasn’t good enough.

I brought the kit home, plugged one of the two little wall warts into the wall by the t.v and one into the wall by the Airport Extreme (which has a gigabit switch) in the office. The devices are supposed to be able to provide gigabit speeds over house electrical wiring, but the LED speed gauges they provide suggest they’re not operating up to their full potential in our house. That makes sense to me: They’re not on the same fuse and they’re at distant ends of the house from each other. I plugged the Airport Express into the downstairs box, set it up to share the home network over its own SSID, and ran speed tests with SpeedTest.net from both my laptop and iPhone. As near as I could tell, I was getting 15Mbps download speeds over Wi-Fi via a 20Mbps cable connection. Since the Roku needs a 3Mbps connection to stream HD video and the Plex server’s max 720p connection speed is 4Mbps (8 for 1080i), I’m sort of over-provisioned from a digital media standpoint. Since there’s nothing downstairs that’s storing or moving large files in chunks (as opposed to streaming them from Plex on the iMac), we’re in pretty good shape.

The final step was to take the Airport Express down and drop a four-port gigabit switch I’ve had in the closet behind the t.v., cabling it to the Powerline Ethernet adapter, Apple TV and Roku. Now video content from Plex is loading almost instantly, and video via Hulu or Netflix has very little buffering time. The Roku has always displayed an initial softness when streaming HD video, but that’s become shorter (and buffering time is down, too). The iPhones, iPad and laptops all work as well as they ever did for everything else.

So, mark me down as a pretty happy Powerline Ethernet customer. It solved our problem without the need to drill holes or run more cable. It isn’t performing at the ideal advertised speeds, but it is providing four or five times the bandwidth necessary to stream HD video, and it provides a stable connection that’s not prone to interference from neighboring phones and networks.

I was not aware that you have to log into Google+ to read “public” posts. This is bullshit, Google. Good bye. http://pic.twitter.com/F3dncOvE

— Oliver Reichenstein

I once spoke with someone who maintained Google isn’t “just an advertising company” because its assorted services were just too good and too smart to exist if there were no other reason for them besides ad sales. I thought that was naive rubbish at the time I heard it, but it was naive rubbish that made me a little sad because it would be nice to believe that Google was a real Wonka factory of good things driven by nothing more than love and a certain dwarvish passion for artisanal software excellence that put the end user first*.

In my heart of hearts, I would like it if Google had invented some sort of commercial anti-gravity device that would let it float there, just above the dirt. That’s sort of what it felt like in Google’s first few years: Good search results with ads that weren’t intrusive, good webmail with ads that didn’t distract you from the task of managing your mail. A good RSS reader that didn’t distract you from the content. Nobody else had seemed to figure that stuff out. It was immensely satisfying to watch incumbents flail around and fall down in the face of quality and care.

And now there’s Google+, which I admire a lot compared to every other social networking service, and I’ve cringed a little each time Google’s done something sort of tone-deaf or hamfisted with it, but also bristled a little when each ham-fisted or tone-deaf thing becomes the nugget of more ridiculous “Google’s being evil after all!” commentary from people who don’t exist to do anything besides have opinions about whatever.

Making you log into Google+ to read public posts? That’s not evil (and I’m not saying Oliver Reichenstein thinks it’s evil, either). It’s just crappy and sort of lame, and it’s happening because Google can’t bring itself to lie about the numbers Google+ is generating. But it also needs them to be higher, so it pulls stuff like that, knowing a largely negligent tech press will relate the numbers without making an effort at context. That contextless numbers game will inflate Google+ into a genuine force in social networking instead of what might well just be a ghost town propped up less by real people who are using it to share than institutional and quasi-institutional presences who are pumping content into it because they show up at every new thing determined to be a first mover.

So, there wasn’t an anti-gravity device. Or if there was, it wasn’t ever built to sustain the weight of Google in 2012. So Google’s hem has touched the dirt and the company looks a little smaller every day.

It’s just gravity.

* I know … I know … “I’m the product.”

Some notes on adopting a standing desk for my home office. Maybe an odd entry because I started writing it several weeks ago, just after installing it and now I’m circling back because I didn’t want to do the whole “I got this standing desk and it’s been awesome for, like, 30 minutes now!” thing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jim’s released a new trailer for his movie about Polack jokes:

I got to see it while he was still editing and really enjoyed it. Since it premiered at Dallas Video Fest, it’s played at a few other locations, including a screening for Pixar. I’m looking forward to seeing it again if it comes through Portland.

Regarding my July tech purge, about which I wrote:

“So today I’m going to experiment with eliminating all of it from my RSS reader and Google News page except the professionally mandated stuff (which is a pretty narrow field) and maybe a few security update sites. Consumer tech, though? Gone. If it’s not something I use, I don’t want to read about it. If it is something I use, I don’t need a columnist telling me what to think about it. If I need to know something, I’ll just go looking. Passively setting up trawls and then sifting through whatever gets caught up in a few keyword searches or catches the fancy of tech bloggers is for the birds.”

I kept to that for a while — right up until around the end of November — then started discovering some consumer tech stuff was creeping back in. Less gadget/hardware (though there was a little of that) and more Web/online.

The default place to put that kind of thing is in my RSS reader, so that’s where that stuff went as it found its way back in. But the list of things I want to be distracted by during the day is still pretty narrow, so having those things in my RSS reader wasn’t a good place for them.

So I ended up taking a lot of those things right back out, then hunting them down in a form I could consume via Flipboard, which is a really lovely app for the iPad that takes Twitter (and more recently RSS) feeds and wraps them in a magazine-like format you can flip through. (Follow the link and look at the video for an idea of how it works.)

For the professional/don’t mind seeing come by during the day stuff, I’ve got a desktop RSS reader with companion apps for the iPhone and iPad. For the stuff I don’t want to catch my eye as easily during the work day, I’ve got Flipboard. When I call it a day in my office, the work stuff pretty much stays in the office, but the things that are more personal are there on the iPad, which is the only computing device I touch after 6 p.m.

One of the nice things about Flipboard is that it will use Twitter lists as well as vanilla Twitter feeds, and that’s caused me to start using Twitter more and more the way everyone else has been using it for a while now: Rather than following hundreds and hundreds of people and institutions, I keep my follow list sort of slim, but have added bunches and bunches of sources to assorted Twitter lists that I subscribe to with Flipboard. I treat Flipboard as a mostly optional reading experience. Something more to be browsed than closely read. It doesn’t nag about how many unread items I have, which is fine because nothing in there (with one set of exceptions) is anything I really need to read. Since it’s easy to flip past stuff that’s not interesting, I feel a little better disposed to outlets that were annoying the hell out of me when they were mixed in with the stuff I really need to think about during the day.

I could use the many canned lists that are (ugh) curated by assorted Web luminaries, but I’ve found those lists are much better as starting points to be raided for good sources and stripped of assorted a-lister cronies and other annoyances. Cruising Twitter profiles for “more like this” lists is pretty fruitful, too.

I also use Twitter lists for the tweetsonae of friends who’ve got commercial or promotional feeds that run parallel to their personal Twitter feeds. It’s a good way to keep out the double (and triple) posts, continue to be open to retweeting or absorbing the promotional stuff (as a good friend should be), and cut down on the workday distractions.

The new Ballpark Digest went live today.

This job was pretty similar to the Arena Digest relaunch, and involved a lot of the same tasks.

There were over 2,500 legacy articles that needed to be imported this time around, and preserving their search engine placement was a little more important because the site was pretty well indexed. I had to pick up one new trick, too:

Not having any legacy i.d. numbers to work with during the import, I ended up having to figure out the legacy URLs on my own. I knew the article were, at least, in the proper order, so at the beginning of the import data, the second article in the list had an i.d. of “2″, the tenth in the list had an i.d. of “10″, etc. Unfortunately, that 1-1 mapping broke down the first time an article was published then taken down, because my import data didn’t note missing articles. By the time I got to the 2,000th article, the relationship between import row and legacy i.d. was off by a pretty substantial amount.

I grabbed the RBing gem and automated the process of searching by article title and using the URL I got back to figure out the article’s old i.d. and URL. That didn’t work perfectly, because there were some gaps in Bing’s indexation of the site. So I had to write a second script that ran down the list of articles and looked at each i.d., applying the following algorithm:

• If the article i.d. was one greater than the i.d. of the article before it, and one less than the i.d. of the article after it, I assumed it was o.k.

• If the article i.d. didn’t match the above criteria, but the i.d. of the article after it was two greater than the i.d. of the article before it, I assumed the real page for that article had failed to be indexed, and I assigned it an i.d between those of the articles on either side of the sequence.

• If the article i.d. didn’t meet either of those criteria, I flagged it for review.

Most of the time, the ones that were flagged for review were part of a streak of articles that hadn’t been indexed properly to begin with, so the best result Bing could produce was an easily recognizable archive page URL. It was easy to consult the list and see sequences like this:

• 453

• 454

• archive URL

• archive URL

• archive URL

• archive URL

• 459

Clearly the third through sixth articles in the list had to be 455, 456, 457 and 458. I felt a little guilty for not taking the time to work out a way to do that programatically, but there were only three or four sequences like that so I sucked it up. There were also a few sequences where there was no discerning the proper sequence, but that list totaled fewer than 15.

Once all the i.d.’s were straightened out, I wrote a script to generate the redirects, and plopped it into the site .htaccess.

I like reading MetaFilter. I also like playing the “Guess the Deletion” game on MetaFilter.

Materials Required

• An RSS reader that updates frequently enough to remember items that appear on MetaFilter but are eventually deleted.

• MetaFilter members who post lame stuff.

Game Play

1. Read the MetaFilter RSS feed now and then. Do not click through to read comments until you complete step 2:

2. When you think you’ve spotted a post that will surely be deleted, signify that by saying to yourself “oh boy,” or “that’s not gonna fly” or “dead.” (Feel free to amend the list of signifying phrases.)

3. Click through. Look for the little gray box with text that begins: “This post was deleted for the following reason:”

   • Is the little gray box there? Score a point.

   • Is it not?

     • Signify that you’ve doubled down by saying “This isn’t gonna last” or something similar. Two points if it’s eventually deleted. Lose two points if it stays put.

     • Signify that you choose to lose only one point and move on to the next round by saying “Huh.”

Victory Conditions

• We can’t tell you how to live your life.

Game Variations*

• Gain 5 points for getting in before actual deletion and taking a big crap all over the thread provided it’s eventually deleted.

• Lose 5 points for thinking you made it in before actual deletion and taking a big crap all over the thread, only to realize a day later that it hasn’t been deleted.

• Gain a point for any “favorites” earned in either type of comment.

* Here is where my flat game manual affect goes out the window: It’s pretty rare for me to comment on MetaFilter, let alone engage in daredevilry like I describe here.

O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.

– Robert Burns

Re: the Great Tech Purge:

Maybe it’s not so much “tech writing” as it is “things writing.”

I like tech-related things, so a lot of the things I read about will be written about by tech writers. But in the end, whether they’re battery powered, Wi-Fi connected, assessed in terms of their storage capacity or resolution, they’re things.

One thing a lot of those things have in common is that they’re made by really big companies that invest millions and millions of dollars to build affinity with their brands.

One thing brands do is exploit a back door left open by the gap between our images of ourselves, ourselves as we imagine others perceive them, and ourselves as we aspire to be. It’s hard to balance all three sets of perceptions, let alone actually reconcile them. Brands offer an opportunity for relief from that emotional and cognitive stress by suggesting that they can speak for us now and then, relieving us of the burden of being what we wish we were — or what we wish other people would think we are.

Apropos yesterday’s “Four Things You Think When You Read Headlines Like This“:

My feelings about tech columnists gain some clarity whenever I’m away from tech commentary for a spell, like I was while I was on vacation last week. There’s a certain amount of tech writing I have to read because it’s my job, and a certain amount I do because I like to keep up with what’s happening with stuff I like to use. It’s kind of hard to disentangle the straight news/reporting from the commentary, though.

When I’m on vacation and away from the tech stuff I’d probably be fiddling with, I tend to “mark all as read” most of the tech writing then never go back to see what I missed. Once I get back and begin to read new stuff coming in, I get frustrated because so much of it isn’t very good and I have to readapt the mental filters I apply to ignore the likely chaff.

So today I’m going to experiment with eliminating all of it from my RSS reader and Google News page except the professionally mandated stuff (which is a pretty narrow field) and maybe a few security update sites. Consumer tech, though? Gone. If it’s not something I use, I don’t want to read about it. If it is something I use, I don’t need a columnist telling me what to think about it. If I need to know something, I’ll just go looking. Passively setting up trawls and then sifting through whatever gets caught up in a few keyword searches or catches the fancy of tech bloggers is for the birds.

Update:

“Isn’t very good” is pretty subjective, so here are a few of the things that set me off:

• the aforementioned “{thing}-killer” mode of writing

• meta-commentary (“I am using this here thing I just got to tell you about how awesome this here thing I just got is so awesome”)

• “I have decided to …” (“return this device” is a big one, but also assorted switcher narratives)

• almost any writing about social networking. Social networking itself is cool. Writing about social networking is boring. Crabbing about social networking is sad and boring.

• advocate-baiting (“I wrote 600 words about why Ubuntu sucks and now all the Ubuntu fanatics are being mean to me because they suck just like Ubuntu, which sucks.”)

• “I was wrong about {thing},” mostly because I seldom have read the person being wrong in the first place (how many tech columnists do you make it a point to follow specifically and regularly?), which tells me I didn’t know to care whether they were right or wrong to begin with.