I have a habit of getting a scene or conversation from a story stuck in my head, grabbing the book to re-read, and then getting lost in it again. I love re-reading good books, and this is one of my favorites…Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Stephenson has really mastered the art of storytelling; his books are tales about people that I care about, but still are great science fiction, because they require the scifi hook to work (be it nanotech in this instance, or virtual reality, quantum worlds, or whatever).

But as I’ve schlepped my careworn paperback copy around the house for the past day or so, it suddenly clicked. The novel’s subtitle, after all, is …or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. How can I NOT re-read a book about a digital book on a digital book??? Kindle copy ordered, and arrived 60 seconds later.

We’re livin’ in the future, folks!

My buddy Mischa recently posted a list of apps he’s using on his T-Mobile G1. I enjoyed reading the list, and decided to write up my own, especially since we don’t seem to have a great deal of overlap.

BuzzOff: I don’t use a lot of settings-tweak sort of apps, but I do like this one. Lets me put the phone in vibrate-only mode (no ring) for a specified amount of time, and then have it pop back to ringing automatically. I used Locales to do a similar thing when I first got my phone, but the GPS-heavy nature of Locales is pretty battery draining. This solves the same problem without that downside.

Cinema / VideoPlayer: Two different video players. VideoPlayer itself was one of the first players available on the G1, and it’s quite solid. Cinema has a touch-based UI, which is fun to play with. I don’t normally install multiple apps that do the same thing, but video players are mostly wraps around installed functionality, so they’re not using a lot of space.

ConnectBot: One of the few apps in common with Misha. As he said, it’s a very capable ssh client. SSH on the G1 is enhanced by the fact that it has a physical keyboard; makes using it quite easy. If you need this, you NEED it. *grin*

FBReader: A etext reader…this is a port of the main FBReader project to Java and the Android platform. As of this writing, this app still isn’t in the Android Market; you have to d/l and install separately (from http://fbreader.org/fbreaderj – you also have to flip the bit to to allow non-Market sw installs. Just a settings checkbox, though.) I love ebook readers, so I was glad to see this project team start their port; I used this reader on my Nokia 770 and loved it. They’re still adding formats (right now oeb, epub, fb2), but even so, it’s already head and shoulders above any other etext reader I’ve found on the G1. (If you know of other good ones, though, I’d love to check them out.)

Forecast: I have a bit of a “small app” / “conserve memory” thing, especially for program types that aren’t in my top interests. So for weather forecasts, I looked for the smallest app I could find that would give me the basic info. This one seems to do the trick; certainly not a lot of (ok, no) bells and whistles, but it works as intended.

imeem Mobile: I do like the streaming audio apps! There are a lot of sites and services that bring the “digital jukebox in the sky” to your G1 (or iPhone, etc….any smartphone is pretty well supported), and pretty much (IMO) make the satellite radio guys weep. (They spent too much money and time on big-names and merging). I probably use Last.fm (see below) more, but imeem’s app was on the G1 from the beginning, so I spent some time with it. It’s nicely done, continues to be updated (always a plus), handles even fairly low connection speeds well, and looks good.

Last.fm: One of the big apps I was hoping for on the G1, and it showed up in January. This is great for me; not only do I love the service, but I “scrobble” (send my listening data) to their site from as many music tools as I can. Doing this both improves the recommendations that the site can give me, and allows me to share info (like songs I “love”, etc.) to friends on other networks like Friendfeed and Facebook. The Android app is full-featured; it lets you play streams based on a song, an artist, or a tag (I often listen to music tagged “80s”, for example), and gives you artist info, etc. (as does imeem). The client updates my listening list as well, which only leaves music played on the standard “Music” app out of the loop. That’s solved now as well (see ScrobbleDroid below).

My Maps Editor: A recently released app from Google; this lets you read and edit maps that you’ve created in the custom “My Maps” part of Google Maps. Useful for pre-created maps for a day trip or something like that.

Quote Pro: I’m not a big stock watcher, but it’s a nice-to-have. Small and well-behaved.

Rings Extended: Very nice tool. Lets you use any sound on your phone (built-ins, MP3s, even allows you to record sounds on the fly) for pretty much any audible notification. So if you want SMS notifications to play 10 seconds of “Message In A Bottle”, or something, this is for you.

Scrobble Droid: The last piece of my scrobbling puzzle. This cool little utility runs in the background, and pushes songs you play through the built-in Music app out as “scrobbles” to Last.fm. Nice!

StreamFurious: Another audio streaming app. I primarily use this one for news; I listen to a lot of BBC World Service, but there are plenty of varying “channels”, from FOX News to Democracy Now, and everything in between. StreamFurious supports pretty much any mp3 stream of the PLS or M3U-style…anything in Shoutcast, Icecast, etc. Comes with a bunch of pre-installed streams, but you can add them straight from the browser by going to a page offering a stream and just clicking on the link. Very handy!

I don’t have any games installed right now…I’ve had a few, but nothing’s really struck my fancy yet.  I need to look for a good chess program (and it doesn’t have to be very good *grin*); I enjoy having a chess game with me. I do need to install DroidDice, though…thanks for that mention, Mischa.

I think it’s great that the Android Market already has a pretty healthy assortment of apps (judging anecdotally just from the fact that Misha and I have fairly similar interests, but very few apps in common, and neither of us really get into the gaming section). Sure, the Apple App Store has it beat to death…whatever. I’m not as interested in G1 vs. iPhone vs. Pre as I am watching the uptake of all of the various smartphone types. It’s a huge potential audience…I think there’s plenty of room for various platforms to co-exist.

I was checking out Bandcamp a couple of days back, after learning of it from a recent boingboing post. Looks like a pretty nice website for bands to use to promote their music…nice layout, easy sharing, CC-friendly, flexible payment options, ample metrics, etc. So I checked for one of my favorite new-media friendly artists, Paul Fidalgo…he didn’t have a site yet! Ack…had to fix that. I shot Paul an email (we’ve become online buds over the past year or so), and he checked it out.  He seems to have liked it enough to have put one of his songs up there…it’s a free download, and easy to stream to see if you think it’s worthwhile. I’d say check it out!

There’s plenty more good music where that came from (Paul’s got that Jonathan Coulton geek vibe going on with at least some tunes), and you can pick up a lot more of his stuff at his Amie Street site, as well as iTunes, etc. (Paul definitely groks the new music ‘paradigm’).

I just spent my afternoon in some weird state. I heard about a takedown notice by Amazon on kindle DRM tools , tracked down a link to an excellent overview article, and then momentarily lost my mind. I didn’t download MobiDeDRM.zip. I backed away from the site, and started thinking about how to anonymize my access to it (I know plenty of ways, never fear). All over tools that I simply want in order to backup my Kindle purchases against the possibility of something happening to Amazon! I don’t want to rip the DRM and upload books to Usenet…I don’t want to even give them away to friends. I WANT the authors to get paid; I love authors. I even like publishers, some. *grin*

But on the off chance something happens to Amazon or the DRM service for AZW, I want accessible backups. I really like this Kindle2, and I’m investing in books on it. We’re finally at the edge of something big wrt electronic books, and I’m on the bleeding edge…I don’t want my bookshelves to end up on the bloody side. So after I realized how goofy I was being, I downloaded the damn zipfile (just like I did with the Hymn project’s iTunes cracker years ago). I’m going to crack all my books, stick those files in a couple of my backup repositories, and sleep well at night. Both because my books are safe, and because I’m not doing anything wrong. There’s nothing for me to be afraid of, and I’m ashamed of myself for worrying about it for a couple of hours this afternoon.  My penance will be to re-read the Microsoft Research DRM talk from my (non-DRM’d) copy of Cory Doctorow’s ‘Content‘!

Woohoo…changing site hosting and CMS all at once (why bother breaking things twice), so I expect breakage all around! 404s are inevitable, but I’m watching for them; they will be fixed if at all possible. I tend to drag along old urls (Cool URIs don’t change), so I’ll be setting up a separate ruleset to catch and redirect them. (Yes, I actually dig doing stuff like that.). So just bear with me for a few days…things should straighten out soon enough

Yikes…I’ve got a grand total of two posts in February on here! Ouch. Not that I’ve been quiet online…plenty of stuff on FriendFeed, identi.ca and other sites. FF is a great place for a quick thought or comment on a news story, etc., but I like bringing long-form stuff back here. As social networking sites proliferate, the decisions about when and where to post become quite a challenge. But the good news is, a post about that is in my to-do pile for posting, so perhaps I can get another one out in February after all!

The embarrassment of riches that we now have online for making ourselves heard makes me, on some days, hanker for the old days of hanging a page off of my original webhost, with the good old tilde: http://www.io.com/~kenzoid (ok, not really, but it was an amusing line. *grin*). With a personal website, social networking out the wazoo, microblogs, location-awareness, and forums/discussion groups around every corner, it’s nirvana. Or, it’s a nightmare. Your Mileage May Vary.

With social networking sites in particular, the balkanization of one’s identity is both a frustrating challenge and a hidden virtue. Having to recreate your account, your ID, and your relationships every time you sign up to a new site can definitely be a royal pain in the ass. And yet…solving this problem will unleash a lot of unintended second order effects, I’m thinking. There’s both promise and peril (it was ever thus).

There’s a lot of very good and important work going on right now to allow identity information to pass between networks, with proper authorization, privacy, and constraints. (See OpenID, OAuth, and Portable Contacts, for starters). That’s good stuff. It’s important, and needs to happen. And in many cases, it will be INCREDIBLY useful. But some of the blue sky scenarios outlined by proponents give the (IMO, dangerous) impression that ALL social networking should be managed this way. I don’t agree.

Human identity is complicated. Complicated enough that despite every urge to have a grand, Unified Internet Identity, I think this is something to discourage. People are social facets, and while those representations sometimes (often, even) mix, sometimes they don’t. And much like Facebook’s experiments with Beacon in 2007 leaked information unintentionally into people’s FB news streams, the same thing could, and would, happen with overly integrated identity management.

I see our ability to create multiple virtual identities as an actual advantage that the virtual world has over the real one, in the same way that digital copying (creating non-rivalrous resources) and low-to-zero digital distribution costs are an actual advantage over knowledge dissemination and creative expression via physical objects. And just as digital copying and distribution changes that game (see Wealth of Networks and “The Public Domain” to get your feet wet), virtual identity has advantages that we shouldn’t ignore just for the sake of mapping back to the real world as closely as possible.

And please, don’t get the idea that just I’ve got some secret cheese and peanut butter fetish account somewhere that I’m trying to keep hidden. *grin* If only I were that interesting…LOL. It’s much simpler. Even now, with just the simple buckets of “current real-life everyday friends”, “friendly work acquaintances”, “online buddies”, and “folks I like and have known forever, and wave at online”, I’ve got identity issues. The easiest way to separate these buckets, IMO, is to use separate services…I mainly use FF for online friends, FB for work and casual friends, and email, mailing lists, and controlled access online groups for real-life friends.

It’s not that I have much to hide. Many of these accounts and publishing endpoints (including this one) are public. But they’re not all wired together, especially in a two-way sense. And I like that. It’s not secret that I go to a lot of sci-fi conventions, and I’m happy to have folks check out the public photos (Dragon*Con 2008, for example), but jamming a big hunk of those through my Facebook news stream just doesn’t make sense to me. Likewise, I do actually subscribe to a couple of location-aware services (Latitude and BrightKite), but the privacy issues obviously make that data something that I carefully manage access to.

So while I see the promise of improved identity management going forward, I worry about the “oopsies”. I worry about people linking accounts and merging social groups without thinking through the consequences. I’m worried about the mistakes that a person can’t undo. And once again, let me reiterate…this isn’t (necessarily) about merging your AA buddylist with your work “Happy Hour” group. There are plenty of lesser embarrassments waiting. Just be careful, and let’s think about consequences (and multi-order effects) as we go.

Addendum: Damn…I tread the ground of danah boyd (“just because we can, doesn’t mean that we should”, and “Putting Privacy Settings in the Context of Use (in Facebook and elsewhere)”). Oh well…it’s not like she isn’t worth citing…she pretty much defines thought leader in this space.

So here’s my “x things/yes and no/tell me about yourself” meme-ish post. (I stuck this on FB too, but I figured the real Web deserved it as well!)

I’m not _completely_ antisocial, but I find these things way to reminiscent of chain letters, for the most part. I finally found one I could deal with…thanks, Janene! Easy to comply fully yet retain a fairly low information transfer (if you have a question, feel free to ask, but I tend not to just infodump to the world). And though I considered it, I didn’t even check the Songbird (my media player) source code to see how well they’ve implemented their shuffle. (PNRGs FTW!)

Oh, and I don’t tag, b/c that IS a chain letter, reborn with a shiny new skin. *grin* Hope you enjoy it!

INSTRUCTIONS:

  1. Put your iPod or other music player on shuffle.
  2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
  3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS!
  4. Tag friends who might enjoy doing this as well as the person you got this from.
IF SOMEONE SAYS “IS THIS OKAY” YOU SAY?
Fat Albert Theme (Dig)
WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Don’t Give Up (Peter Gabriel)
WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
We Are Santa’s Elves (Burl Ives)
WHAT IS YOUR LIFE’S PURPOSE?
3 Ghosts I (Nine Inch Nails)
WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
Lights in the Sky (Nine Inch Nails)
WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
Lay Down Your Weapons (Scissors For Lefty)
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
Hungry Heart (Bruce Springsteen)
WHAT IS 2+2?
Bad Horse Chorus (Jed Whedon, Joss Whedon & Zack Whedon)
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
A Sermon (The Police)
WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
Light Brigade (The Crimea)
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
last wish (Human Response)
WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Allegro (Richard Savino)
WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
The Nutcracker, Op.71 – Act 2 – No. 12c Character Dances: Tea [Chinese Dance] (Kirov Orchestra, St Petersburg)
WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO (hear) AT YOUR WEDDING?
San Jacinto (Peter Gabriel)
WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Man (The Crimea)
WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
Villancico: perdid tenyo la color (Jacob Heringman and Catherine King)
WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
Lunch Hour (Gentle Readers)
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
Don’t Put Me On Front Street (Cash Audio)
WHAT’S THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN?
How You’ve Grown (10,000 Maniacs)
HOW WILL YOU DIE?
More Human Than Human (White Zombie)
WHAT IS THE ONE THING YOU REGRET?
O My God (The Police)
WHAT MAKES YOU LAUGH?
Concerto no. 5 in F major [HWV 293]. Allegro (Sonnerie)
WHAT MAKES YOU CRY?
Concerto terzo – Allegro [G.A.] (Nova Casa)
WILL YOU EVER GET MARRIED?
The Carol of the Olde Ones (H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society)
WHAT SCARES YOU THE MOST?
JS Bach: Prelude And Fugue No 9 In E Major BWV 878: Praeludium (Magnatune Compilation)
DOES ANYONE LIKE YOU?
The Shadow Government Live on XM (They Might Be Giants)
IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME, WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE?
Music (Madonna)
WHAT HURTS RIGHT NOW?
The Greater Good (Nine Inch Nails)
WHAT WILL YOU POST THIS AS?
Unravel (Drawing Down the Sun)

My online buddy Paul Reynolds pointed out a freaky new take on pledge drives today on Friendfeed: NPR is encouraging people to turn in their friends that listen and don’t pledge, and then calling them for a shakedown. Seriously. I’m sure NPR thinks it’s edgy…but it’s not. It’s creepy and totally out of bounds, IMO. Here’s a MP3 of Ira Glass leaning on a listener: Megan gets the call.

Have fun, NPR…but don’t expect any money from ME anytime soon. I’ve actually started listening to some radio again as streams on my G1 (in particular, Vermont Public Radio’s excellent BBC World Service stream), and I’d not only be happy to donate to VPR, I in fact plan to do so later, in the spring (I plan and spread out donations over the year).

But if Ira Glass calls…well, I don’t think they’ll be able to play my response on the radio. *grin*

One of my resolutions for this year is to get better at reviewing books that I read. Even if it’s not much, it helps me (both work through in my head why I like or don’t like certain books, and also, it’s words on a damn page), and others (while my reviews may not be much, they’re grist for the mill of should I read this?). Good idea overall, IMO.

I’m easing into it for last year, though…writing them as I go should be much easier than one (or a few) marathon sessions to review all the books I have in my Goodreads library. I’m honestly planning on getting to them all, but for starters, I’m just going to go with my favorites from last year. So, in alphabetical order, here are the books I rated 5 stars at Goodreads in 2008. I’m working through the reviews now; mostly done, but I do want to get this out before February. *grin*