Google pulling plug on FTP blogger. goodbye blog

Google sent me a notice that FTP publishing support for blogger is discontinued. I understand their reasoning, and it may mean I have to abandon this blog.

That may work out, though, as I've been considering two shifts in digital society:

1. Facebook is the new blogger

It's confusing to decide if an idea or link should be "blogged" publicly or shared with local community via facebook. Community seems to trump the public for most posts lately.

2. Most hits come from new video game posts

Why not focus on games, then, and invest in new titles, subsidized by google ads? We'll see. It'd mean a switch to wordpress or some other tool.

Sikuli: automating GUI interaces

Wow! This demo video is impressive. You can write code to interface to anything you can see.

I wonder if I could use this to write a facebook-bejeweled-cheat-app in a matter of minutes...

Ars misses vital point: flash on the iPad

Everyone is talking about Macromedia Adobe Flash missing from the iPad. It's been missing from the iPhone for years. Today Ars Technica takes a poll, asking people if they care.

Ars says "Flash is necessary for a larger percentage of the Web to work properly". Those Flash-based sites, however, were built at a time when web users primarily used devices that either had Flash or could quickly install Flash for free. Apple is creating a new segment - a portion of web users that neither have Flash, nor can install Flash if they want to.

If that market existed over the last 10 years, we may not have a web where Flash is necessary for a large percentage of the web to work properly - and I would be OK with that.

If Apple holds steady on avoiding Flash on their gadgets, and Apple sells a lot of iPhones and iPads, the Flash-based web is going to change. That's a good thing.

Charlie Brooker - How To Report The News

Nexus Envy

Jon Hannibal Stokes twitters today about his Nexus One:

I accidentally pressed the voice input on my Nexus One right before a huge sneeze, and it Googled "sneeze." I am not making this up.

http://twitter.com/hannibalrex/statuses/7923029604

I want one.

Dear Internet: stop posting about not posting

Have you noticed that bloggers are always making excuses for not posting enough? I'd like to fill in all you bloggers on a secret: Nobody Cares.

I tried to read an article about Nexus One today, and the writer stops the story to talk about not posting enough, and then promises to post more. Promising to "get better" is even worse; it just leads to more apologies when the writer fails.

Here's why you all need to stop masturbating about post frequency:

1. Your reader has never heard of you. He has no idea how often you post and doesn't care. It's a world-wide-web of linked hypertext, and traffic comes from all over the place.

2. Your reader came here for a reason (in this case, for your thoughts about Nexus One). When you start talking about your blogging practices instead, you've failed to deliver on topic and they will leave.

Nexus One versus iphone: technical specs chart

I know, everybody is doing it: but here's a side-by-side comparison of new Nexus One tech specs versus the iphone. Green bold text highlights a superior feature. The summary is that Nexus if cheaper, smaller, lighter (if only marginally on all three), with better camera, bigger display, faster CPU, bigger battery, and more RAM.

We have to hand it to Apple for re-defining the worlds expectations for cell phones. Good job Apple, you blazed the trail again, just like you did with mp3 players, USB support, and the GUI. Apple is a leading innovator.

Google's advantage is that the iPhone's specs are public so Google knows exactly what they need to beat, and they do so in every category but base storage.

Also the wishlists for iphone are well-published, so Google can one-up Apple in categories that users actively complain about: removable storage, camera flash, battery life. Smart.

Chiseling my shoes free

The mud/clay near my home is so bad that I almost lost two pairs of shoes to it when doing some landscaping recently. The first pair I just threw away, the second pair I couldn't imagine a way to salvage until I grabbed a hammer and a chisel and started chiseling away these immense chunks of dried clay. The result was visually interesting - clayforms of my shoe treads below.

What I'm Reading Now: The Picture of Dorian Gray

I think I'm going to be reading very old books for awhile, as most titles published before 1914 are in the public domain so I can legally download them for free.

Wikipedia says that the Picture of Dorian Gray was very different in it's 1890 publication and 1891 forms; I wonder which copy I have.

Peanuts is cooler than cool: Hey Ya

This peanuts rendition of Hey Ya is great. I like Linus & Charlie Brown covering "ice cold!" at 02:20, and the attention to detail with the clapping/snapping along at all the right moments.

What I'm Playing Now: The Majesty of Colors

There are just a lot of great flash games out there right now. Some of them are rather artsy, like Passage, and the game I found tonight, I fell in Love with the Majesty of Colors. You can play it in a couple of minutes, or spend more finding all the different story lines.

What I'm Reading Now: Mother Night

More Kurt Vonnegut. Hooray! I already enjoyed A Man Without a Country, Breakfast of Champions, and The Sirens of Titan. I might try to get his entire collection eventually.

What I'm Reading Now: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

I didn't realize how much of a Cory Doctorow fan I was until my friends & I were discussing a Larry King interview question "Who are your heroes?". My friends had a hard time thinking of heroes for themselves, but they all quickly told me that, for me, it's Cory Doctorow. I didn't realize :)

I won't argue, though - a former EFF staffer, tireless defender of our digital rights, and just a nice guy (he signed my book at this SF reading), Cory is certainly a better hero than the average professional athlete.

Why I like real, physical books, and resist Kindle, Nook

I like technology, and would probably be a regular early-adopter if my budget wasn't already focused on my family. ...but I resist e-book readers, including Kindle, Nook, and smartphones, even while my wife reads books on her iphone weekly.

Tycho explains why in his post today. In most cases, new technology is presented to the public as beneficial to us, but the peddlers of said tech are focused on using it to restrict our liberties in an attempt* to increase their profits.

Here's the whole (long) quote:

I mentioned to Gabe that the LendMe feature didn't extend to all books, and he was surprised to learn this, as "lending" a book digitally removes it from your device. It is, in many ways, like lending a person a real book. I suggested to him that this was precisely what they didn't like - you have to warp your mind to perceive it, to understand why a publisher of books would hate the book as a concept, but there you have it. They don't like that books are immutable, transferable objects whose payload never degrades. A digital "book" - caged on a device, licensed, not purchased - is the sort of thing that greases their mandibles with digestive enzymes.

There are other reasons too: I like how real books look on the shelf - I'll re-read my favorites just because I saw them on the shelf and was reminded of a great story. I like how how favorite volumes wear their stains, creases, and worn bindings like medals for the hours of wonder they provided to readers. The Nook allows limited lending, and only to people with similar hardware, but I can lend a real book to any one at all.

Long-term, I hope ebook readers only supplement printed literature, not replace it.

*while correlations between DRM & profit aren't necessarily supported by research, anyway.

What I'm Reading Now: The Hacker Crackdown

Non fiction about AT&T, the secret service, Steve Jackson, the BBS community, and the creation of the EFF. Audiobook ready by Cory Doctorow, downloadable for free, no less!