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It ain’t easy takin’ your blog with you

Steve Rubel tweeted yesterday that he was ditching his existing blogs, and starting again on Tumblr. I assumed that his reasons for moving would probably not convince me, since he does what he does as a profession, but before he posted his reasons why later in the day, I got thinking about moving from Posterous to Tumblr, and decided to give it a go, since he did get me onto Posterous in the first place.

The results were disasterous, and I learned that blogging platforms do NOT play nicely with each other.

I was shocked at how unbelievably painful it is to even attempt to export your data from one blog to another. There’s no concept of a standard format a blog gets exported into, and right now, WordPress seems to be the only middle man, however cumbersome and handicapped He may be, that can actually pull data from most of these blogs, through plugins they’ve developed that access the APIs, and then spit out an XML file of sorts, parts of which can be read, in various ways, by blogging platforms.

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Alien vs. Aliens

Alien_aliens

You know, for more than half of James Cameron’s Aliens, I was left wondering what all the hype was about.

I’d never seen Aliens, or Alien for that matter, before this year. Yes can we skip the whole “But oh my God you’re such a movie buff, how could you not have seen these classics?”. Trust me, you’d be alarmed at how much of anything before the year 2000 I’ve actually not seen. Moving along…

Everything I’d read about the two films made Aliens seem far superior, yet I finally got around to seeing Alien a month or so ago, and was completely floored [heh, Peter Travers would be proud] by Ridley Scott’s visionary, sci-fi horror masterpiece.

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Did you know Grooveshark had a Video Mode?!

Note: This is for Grooveshark paying members only, as far as I know.

I’d randomly posted on /r/groovesharkplaylists a week or two ago about collaborative playlists, and someone replied today, and in browsing the subreddit again, I came across this post on Grooveshark having a Video Mode

When you have songs in your “Now playing” bar, you will see a song count on the bottom right. If you click on that you get a menu with both these options on it. The video mode displays various YouTube videos that match the current song – very cool

So yeh, I went ahead and tried it, and it does indeed work!

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I was thinking lately of how I hardly see music videos anymore since I do most of my listening on Grooveshark, but this is quite the convenient indeed!

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Fringe season 3. Rediscovering that LOST feeling [spoilers, duh]

Nine days from now will be the one year anniversary of LOST ending. I wrote about how that void will never be filled, and how there will never be another show as great as LOST, for OH SO MANY reasons, but today, just temporarily, a little bit of Amber in the form of the Fringe season 3 finale filled that void.

I tweeted about it the instant it finished, I rewatched that ending, had about ten tabs open, started looking at the Fringe subreddit, read an out-there, theorising post by Doc Jensen, and well, it felt like LOST all over again!

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What I’m looking forward to at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival

The Sydney Film Festival schedule came out today, and I’m pretty excited! It was last year’s Sydney Film Festival that really got me into the film festival circuit, starting with a memorable screening of Banky’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, and since that time, I was lucky enough to be in Melbourne for MIFF, and then had the time of my life at SXSW Film this year.

So, scheduling conflicts aside, and me actually being in Sydney, and able to attend, these are the films [in no particular order] that caught my eye initially…

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My mind has been opened to the Holocaust by Maus…

And it’s overwhelming me.

Maus

I finished reading Maus a few hours ago, and I can’t stop thinking about it; I don’t think a literary work has ever affected me as much.

Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, by Art Spiegelman, is a memoir of Art Spiegelman listening to his father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, retelling his story. It alternates between descriptions of Vladek’s life in Poland before and during the Second World War and Vladek’s later life in the Rego Park neighborhood of New York City

I’m just going to come out and say it. I’m an ignorant person. I knew about the Holocaust. I knew about Hitler. I knew about Auschwitz. I knew about the gas chambers. And… well, I’ve already crudely simplified it, but, these were events of the past, and had no impact on me. I accepted that they happened, I was disgusted by it, but again, it was just another “fact” or piece of history that I acknowledged.

Then I read Maus, and now the weight of what occured during those years, and the lasting impact it has had on survivors, and the generations after, is starting to hit me. Don’t get me wrong, I am in NO WAY claiming to understand I know how it feels, as I am so far removed from this, but, I will forever look at it from a completely different perspective, and it’s a perspective I am grateful I have gained, and I feel a little less ignorant as a result.

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Data is the pollution problem of the information society

Data is the pollution problem of the information society… all processes produce it, it stays around, it has to be dealt with, and its secondary uses are what concern us.. so, just as, we collectively look back at the beginning of the previous century, and sort of marvel at how the titans of industry in their rush to build the industrial age would ignore pollution, I think we here will be judged by our grandchildren and great grandchildren by how well we dealt with data, with individuals and their relationship to their data in the information society

I stumbled across this fascinating 8 min clip of Bruce Schneier speaking at EWI Cybersecurity Summit 2010, and decided it needs to be shared, on a “sticky” platform, like this blog.

Bruce speaks primarily about data and socialising in this increasingly data-producing Information Age we are in, and with the recent #locationgate uproar over data, privacy, etc, I found it most relevant.

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Rationalising my digital media purchases, or lack thereof

@juleshughan tweeted an interesting Guardian post titled In the digital era free is easy, so how do you persuade people to pay?, and it got me thinking about why I pay for some forms of digital media, and why I refuse to for others.

The article is a good read, and speaks of motivations, which is something I’ve been very interested in lately, but this list, or whatever the post will turn into, is a lot more, colloquial, I guess.

<time jump> I’ve ranted too much [yes, I’m jumping in time], so I’m going to just list my rationale / motivations—generalised—below, and if you’re still interested, you can read about why it was basically World of Warcraft that got me paying for digital media. </time jump>

Note: The following rationale may likely be highly irrational to some.

The short of it

Games

  • Features [the social, multiplayer aspect in 99% of cases] not accessible through pirated copies
  • Ease of purchasing and the convenience of digital delivery
  • Supporting Indie developers

Music

  • Supporting something I’m passionate about
  • It’s cheap
  • Convenience

Television

Good luck trying to get me to pay for television.

Movies

Can’t justify it, and I’m more than doing my bit to support the movie industry by paying $20+ each week at the cinemas.

<time jump 2> Ok, I’m jumping in time again, but I realised I’d forgotten about mobile, and it feels a little different in my mind.

I would more than happily pay for an app I use regularly, but at this point in time, all my favourite, and most used apps, are free. In saying that, I do feel like, for whatever reason, I would hesitate / consider buying an app a lot more than I should, for the relatively small amount they cost. This Oatmeal comic sums it up  </time jump 2>

And now, a wordier version…

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Where I went yesterday, via my Android phone

You know what? I’m glad this whole phones keeping track of everywhere you go thing happened, because, pushing all those pesky, minor concerns about privacy away, it’s really kind of cool!

Hot on the heels of the iPhone tool that showed us the smorgasbord of data that’s being stored, someone decided to see what Google / Android does. It turns out they store location information as well, just, no way near as much as Apple

After a period of time, 12 hours for cellular data and 48 hours for WiFi data, has passed, the location data is renewed by a new request from Google. It is also limited to a maximum number of entries so that the database doesn’t grow too large. 

Swindon says that the location file pulled from his phone contained roughly 13,000 entries related to cellular network tracking. By contrast the Android file is limited to only 50 entries in the cellular location database.

via The Next Web

Maybe it is just a bug, or lazy programming or whatever on Apple’s part, but it makes sense, especially in Google’s case, where they delete / refresh the data, and you can see it being useful for location-based services.

This same someone that decided to see what Google do, created a Python script that you can feed the Wi-Fi and Cell cache files into, and then output into a .gpx format, to eventually visualise on Google Maps, so I just went ahead and tried it out, purely with my Cell cache file.

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Today I learned about motion interpolation

Our tv at home is around 10 years old, maybe older. In general, I don’t watch tv on my tv, and if I ever do, there’s a 99% chance it’ll be sport, hence my visible disgust as I turned on the tv in my hotel room today, excited to watch Kill Bill: Volume 2. 

I still remember the first time I came across motion interpolation. I was drunk, at a mate’s place, and Spiderman was on tv. Ten seconds in, I was wondering what the hell was going on, and why the movie was looking so… real or non-cinematic. I put it down to my lack of sobriety. Nope, that wasn’t it at all.

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