Letter Never Sent

Since the Kindle is a new type of product whose purpose is to transform how we read, I try to observe how I use it myself.

A couple things.

First of all, I am reading a little more than normal. I’m also reading more new releases since the Kindle store recommends new books and bestsellers more than less well-known works. In the Kindle store, they prominently list both new releases and major bestsellers on the home screen. With the average new release priced at $9.99, I can take more of a risk on a new book; often the kind of books that have captured public attention, but which I would normally avoid until I finally forget all about them (The Tipping Point). I’m also reading less difficult material as many books from smaller publishers and academic presses are still largely unavailable.

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One technology I am excited about is telepresence; the new-fangled name for what we used to call video-conferencing. With large HD flatscreens and fast connections that allow the transmission of high-quality video over the Internet, this technology is maturing and will likely change the way we do things. High-quality telepresence has the potential to reliably simulate “being there”. In other words, telepresence enables light-speed travel.

If you have rich, directional sound and high quality video of a particular environment, you possess most of the inputs you would have if actually in that location. Of course, the other senses like touch, taste, and smell would be missing via telepresence. But, how often do you actively touch, taste, or smell the world around you? This could actually be an advantage! Send your senses and perceptions to visit far off places rather than your meat vehicle.

We experience the world mostly through sight and sound. This will be enough to enable many new realities and behaviors to emerge. Assuming it continues to improve, how will people use telepresence? Virtual travelling? Teleprostitution? Telemedicine? Centralized remote security guarding? Remote elder observation? Remotely operated taxi cabs?

Combine telepresence with the ability to move through and manipulate the environment and you have effective human-mediated telerobotics. Combine telepresence with head-tracking and you would have an even more convincing simulation of presence. It is important to remember that each time we create a mature technology it quickly connects to many other technologies to create new uses and chimeric results. There is a network effect in how products enable one another to do bigger things.

The next step is to create more immersive inputs including haptics and olfactory inputs as well as telerobotic avatars we can borrow to “travel”. How will this change things? I don’t know and maybe it won’t change a thing, but it is fun to think about.

Stole the above image from the Army article: Telepresence: Harnessing the Human-Computer-Machine Interface.

Thanks to RememberTheMilk, I’ve been maintaining a pretty steady blogging schedule. Now when if tee up 2-3 posts, I’ll just schedule them for later in case I get behind again and miss a day.

One thing I noticed is that if you edit the timestamp to schedule a post publishing at a later date, Wordpress still appears to send out a ping when you actually hit “Publish” rather than when the post is scheduled for publishing. I noticed this because Google was trying to hit posts that had not yet been published, but that had been scheduled, which was generating 404 errors. 404 errors are not search engine friendly, so I would consider this a fairly egregious bug. Since you are sending out pings, which include URL’s containing the words included in your post stub this could be something of a security hole in the sense that you might divulge time-sensitive information before it’s intended for release.

I tried reporting the bug to Wordpress, but could not log in with my Wordpress.org credentials. Curses.

If you use Firefox and have open more than about 12 tabs they will scroll off the tab bar where you cannot see them unless you use the pull down menu on the end. However, if you hover over the tab bar and scoll your mouse wheel up and down the tabs will scroll left and right, allowing you to select one that is not currently visible.

With all the various web services and email accounts we use on a daily basis, it’s easy to lose track of all your passwords, unless you use the same few for everything, which is not safe. Password management is a common problem with several different options:

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I love my Kindle. I use it nearly every day. Even though there are many books I can’t get on it, I prefer to read this way now, so I usually just move on to something I can read on the Kindle. Take note book publishers!

I’d like to use it more for other things, but the web browser is limited. One cool feature is that since every Kindle has an Internet connection and an email address you can email yourself documents that will be converted and sent to the Kindle for 10 cents (unsure on why the cost unless it’s to throttle network-crippling usage). Also, your Kindle will only receive messages sent from a sender whitelist, so you should not receive spam. Unfortunately, this means you have to add various friends and colleagues to your Kindle whitelist if you want to receive documents from them on your Kindle. If you have a lot of friends or colleagues this is a pain in the butt and will require ongoing management. There’s an easy way to liberalize access, which should still prevent spam:

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In the previous entry, I explained how you could read full articles at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) by tricking wsj.com into thinking you originated from Google News. Basically, any WSJ traffic from Google News is allowed to view the full article.

My previous solution was awkward kludge, but it got the job done. Of course, I should have known there was an easier way to do it. The problem is two-fold: the Journal site checks the referer and the URL parameter. So, if you can change the referer and rewrite the URL’s to include the URL parameter, the entire site will be in subscription mode.

Step 1: Change the referer to appear as if traffic is originating from Google News. This is easy with the RefControl extension for Firefox. Just install the extension and set the referer for any traffic to “http://online.wsj.com” as coming from “http://www.google.com/news”. See screenshot below.

Step 2: Rewrite all URL’s on the WSJ site so that they include the Google News parameter. In other words, take all links on the site and add “?mod=googlenews_wsj” to the end. With the referer set manually and the modification in place, you should be able to view the full articles. So, how do you rewrite the URL’s on the WSJ site? I recommend creating a Greasemonkey script to do this, which should be pretty simple. When I get some more time I might do it and upload to my defunct userscripts library.

The Wall Street Journal is a pretty good resource for business news. I say “pretty good” because it has an annoying pay wall and it’s now owned by Rupert Murdoch, who I find tacky (Fox News, regardless of its politics, is lowest common denominator viewing). I do have to wonder about the profit margins on newspaper advertising if a business like the WSJ can’t reliably make enough money selling advertising on its own site that is relies on a subscription model. Maybe this is just a testament to the success of its subscription model?

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A while back I broke down and bought the Amazon Kindle, which I love. I have been waiting for a perfect ebook reader since I would like to get rid of any material possessions that are not necessary. Let’s face it, books are pretty useless unless you’re actively reading them. Books are an inefficient medium in that they are heavy and take up a lot of space.

One of my goals is to reduce my material possessions to the absolute minimum. Like many people I no longer own CD’s for music (having sold them several years ago), but I have also been scanning in all paper records and photos and have sold a lot of furniture and junk on Craigslist. I would eventually like to get to the point where my possessions consist of: a car, some clothing, computing tools, and a few personal effects.

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A while back I ditched Microsoft Exchange to save some money, which made it more difficult to sync my PIM between my desktop and handheld. Even though I liked having everything synced through Exchange, the cost was annoying for something so simple. With basic Blackberry service you get your email quickly, so it seemed like overkill to pay $20 extra a month just to sync tasks, calendars, contacts, etc. Shortly thereafter, Google released a nice Blackberry app to sync Google Calendar to the Blackberry Calendar, which replaced the Exchange calendar syncing for free. After that, the only thing missing from Exchange was synced contacts and synced tasks.

A few weeks ago, the folks at Remember the Milk were nice enough to build a new Blackberry app to sync your RtM tasks with your Blackberry. MilkSync effectively costs $25 a year since you have to have a pro membership to use the app. It’s worth it.

Now the only thing missing is Exchange-less over-the-air syncing of your Blackberry contacts. You can get contact data if your contacts are in Gmail using the Gmail mobile app, but it doesn’t sync with the Blackberry Address Book. Hopefully, Google will release a tool to do this.

Google will sell a lot of phones if they release similar tools for the Android platform.