Sidingsound

Readers of Eee 701 Planetoid (my blog devoted to the Asus Eee 701 ‘netbook’) may be aware that I’m a big fan of Dropbox, the online storage/file synchronisation service which also happens to work perfectly with the 701. I just wanted to share a quick tip for Dropbox I learned from an article at Lifehacker, which may be of use to other users, especially if they’re running Linux or Mac OS X:

As you may know, installing the Dropbox client on your Mac, Linux or Windows computer, gives you a special folder into which you place other folders or files; these are then copied not only to the online Dropbox storage space, but to any other computers linked to your account. This is very handy, especially if you have a laptop or other portable machine; it’s perfect for my Eee netbook, as I can back up files to Dropbox and my Mac with very little effort.

But what if you wanted to link folders/files on one machine to Dropbox, which aren’t located within the Dropbox folder? For instance, my Eee (running the Eeebuntu Linux OS) has a “Documents” folder in my home directory, and I’d like this to be backed up to Dropbox (nothing sensitive or confidential there, BTW), even though the folder should really stay where it is.

The answer—certainly if you’re on Linux/Mac—is simple: you just create a symbolic link (or ’symlink’—like a Mac alias or Windows shortcut) within the Dropbox folder, which points to the folder (or file) you’d like to link to. In the Linux and Mac terminal, you would change to the Dropbox folder, and from there, enter:

ln -s /path/to/your/item

This would create a symlink in the Dropbox folder with the same name—if you wanted a different name, you enter the new name for your symlink after the path:

ln -s /path/to/your/item alternative_name

(I would recommend symlinking a folder rather than a file for this purpose, just to be ‘tidy’.)

I use this method to ‘place’ my Eee’s Documents folder within Dropbox, so it appears to exist in two places (within my home directory, and within the Dropbox folder). The contents of ‘Documents’ are backed up to Dropbox, and also to the Dropbox folder on our Mac, meaning that in effect I have three copies of each item in the folder.

Check out the original Lifehacker article (“Sync files and folders outside your Dropbox folder“) for more details, including how to achieve the symlinking effect on Windows (basically, if you’re on Vista or Win7, use MKLINK at the command prompt).

Web developer and musician Jeremy Keith has posted a heartfelt, even passionate eulogy for GeoCities, the pioneering Web site hosting outfit which was quietly put to sleep by its owner Yahoo!, earlier today.

A decade ago, I had my own plot of cyberspace on GeoCities (even that turn of phrase reads to me as quaintly 1990s as GeoCities itself). It was located at /SunsetStrip/Amphitheatre/5117/—the city/geographical metaphor extended to the thematic ‘areas’ of the site, where “SunsetStrip” was devoted to music, “WallStreet” to business, and so on.

“The Hall Of The Endless Knot” was a small site devoted to my big musical interest of the time: loop-based instrumental music of the type popularised by Terry Riley, Fripp and Eno, and the like. It served mostly as a host for a “virtual album” of my own recordings with electric guitar and loop sampler (a quite exciting idea in 1998), but I also found space to link to other resources along similar lines, including Looper’s Delight (which as you can see, long outlived my own effort, and interest in the subject, for that matter).

Suffice it to say, after a few years the “Hall” was gradually abandoned, and long before Geocities departed this world, I think my own site there did too. Actually, I have no idea whether my pages survived to the end, or were swept away in one of Yahoo!’s periodic remodellings of their new acquisition, and unless the Internet Archive fortuitiously kept a copy, I may never know.

There’s much more that could be said on the subject, but I’ll content myself with observing that the Web as a service known to most of the general public, has been in existence now for over fifteen years, and as time passes, we’re running up against issues of preservation more and more.

Over time, I myself have lost most of the personal Web sites I have built since discovering the Web in 1994. The loss of some of the material, doesn’t bother me greatly—some was downright embarrassing, and most not W3C-standards-compatible—but I do regret not making more effort to save my early blogging efforts from 2001-2, and later from 2004-5. I’m fairly sure some fragments survive somewhere, either on one of my large collection of CD-Rs (which at their age, for all I know, could be disintegrating into unreadable dust as I sit here), or perhaps in the aforementioned Internet Archive (Wayback Machine).

I’m thinking seriously about starting to compile my blogging, Twittering (well, the highlights, anyway), Twitpic-ing and similar online ephemera of mine, in “yearbooks”. I would want to create them in an electronic format which could be easily read/recovered in a couple of decades’ time (or more), which to my mind means LATEX or ODT (OpenDocument), and would also think of having a copy or two printed, in the hope that the contents might be of interest to future generations. (Yes, it sounds pretentious, but who knows?)

Anyway, I have tangent-ed long enough. Farewell, GeoCities, and may a flight of sprites sing you to your rest.

(Update (11pm): Oh wow… the Wayback Machine has a 1999 cache of the “Hall”… now, how can I easily save myself a copy before that vanishes?)

A couple of months back, I looked back on some of my “computing milestones” from the past fifteen years or so, and in passing, mentioned that for a couple of years I was the proud owner of a Psion Series 5mx.

Whilst I had time to write about how I was getting on the Internet with it in 2001 (via my then mobile phone—a Nokia 6310i, as I recall—via GPRS over an infrared link!), I didn’t mention another use for the Psion at the time: it was also my calendar, which I synchronised with Lotus Organizer (sic) on my desktop PC via PsiWin.

Of course, there’s little new in syncing a PDA with a PC/Mac—owners of handhelds have been doing this since the 1990s. However, after parting with my Psion I didn’t get back into calendar-syncing activity until acquiring my current mobile phone (a Nokia N95), in the summer of 2007. This syncs very nicely with our iMac (either over USB, or more often, wirelessly via Bluetooth), but it can also exchange data with calendar hosts on the Internet.

Since last year, I’ve been syncing Google Calendar with the N95 over the Internet (3G or WiFi, whichever is available). A sync setup has evolved over time between the iMac, the N95 and Google Calendar where:

• Google acts as the de facto ‘master’ calendar, mainly because until relatively recently, Apple iCal couldn’t update Google Calendar directly. Therefore, I set up iCal to “read” the GC data, and updated GC via either the N95 or the Web interface. (I just learned that iCal now supports “write access” to GC via CalDAV, of which more shortly.)
• Until now, the N95 has synced with Google Calendar over HTTP, via the GooSync online service. (You will note the past tense, the reason for which follows in a moment.) I also sync via HTTP to Nokia’s Ovi service, as it seems to me one can never have too many data backups…

The problem with GooSync, is that they have just discontinued their Free service, in favour of offering “Lite” and “Premium” packages. The “Lite” package isn’t ruinously expensive (about £6 a year), but being a bit of a cheap sort (!), I thought I’d look around for free alternative solutions for syncing between Google Calendar and my N95, or even completely different approaches.

Well, at time of writing, I’m still looking. Basically, I haven’t found another free service offering sync between S60 phones and Google Calendar over SyncML (the preferred method for S60); they’re all paid services. Google’s own SyncML-based service is limited on S60 to contact information (so no calendar sync); however, they offer contacts and calendar sync if you’re prepared to download Nokia Mail for Exchange, which Google warns may result in data loss (“make sure to back up any important data before you set up Google Sync”, but then that’s good advice anyway).

One positive development: I’ve managed to set up iCal on the Mac to access Google Calendar via CalDAV, so I can now not only read GC items within iCal, but add them as well. Whilst I could get around the GC-N95 sync problem by syncing the N95 and Mac (i.e. the Mac becomes the ‘master’), this wouldn’t work if I’m away from home, and I’d also be stuck if the home Internet connection goes down.

Loads of fun, anyway. In the end, it may turn out that I have to bite the bullet and pay for a Google Calendar syncing service after all (in which case, I’d probably stick with GooSync). It all makes me feel as if I took the ability to sync my calendar online from my phone, for free, somewhat for granted.

Whatever the case, it looks like I have some weighing-up of options to do.

The BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, has written a post for the BBC’s dot.life blog, titled “Who will ride Google’s Wave?“. Along with ZDNet UK’s “first look” at Google’s new baby, Rory’s article may well be the first one I’ve encountered which (IMHO) actually explains in simple yet non-patronising terms, what Google Wave is/does, and why it should be of any interest to the likes of yours truly.

And better still, now I’ve read it (and watched some of Google’s own demo video—embedded below), I can say that yes, I am interested.

ZDNet’s article describes Google Wave as “a cross between IM and a wiki”, and that’s as good a place as any to start. Google themselves put it a bit more prosaically:

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

I’m only judging from what I’ve read (and Google’s demo video), but assuming this is all what’s being worked on: imagine a wiki (say, Wikipedia), but a wiki which evolves, sprouts extra text, images, videos, embedded maps, and so on and so forth… all in real time as you are looking at the page. Text can be seen being entered, conversation threads appearing and developing as you watch… yes, basically like “a cross between IM and a wiki”, as ZDNet said. And all this is not a program you install on your computer—it takes place inside your Web browser (well, unless you’re using Internet Explorer, which as the ZDNet preview points out, isn’t quite up to the task).

At time of writing, Wave is a “limited beta”, meaning that you can only use it if you are one of a very select band who found the Golden Tickets inside the Wonka bars… or if you live in the real world, if you have been lucky enough to receive an invitation. This is apparently with good reason—Wave is reputed to be still rather buggy and unpredictable—but I have “signed up” for notification when the service is opened up to the wider Web in due course.

I hope Google Wave fulfils the promise it seems to be showing here, as I can think of all sorts of uses which it could be put to (real-time collaboration between workers, researchers, etc.; the “next level” of Web forums; another tool for customer service; and so on). I can’t help thinking that this is a first stab at what the Web could evolve towards over the next decade or so… or it could turn out to be a fascinating experiment which leads nowhere.

Only time will tell, but I’ll be keeping an eye on this one to see where it goes.

I don’t know if you’ve tried Wolfram|Alpha yet, but one example they recommend for a test is to input a date and see what the system sends out the other end.

Well, I tried Wolfram with my birthdate , and amongst the outputs was a nice list of famous personages with whom I share a birthday.

It’s a mixed bag: I was pleased to have been born on the same day as three notable musicians (composer Paul Hindemith and pianists Anton Rubinstein and Diana Krall ) and actor Burgess Meredith , and somewhat less contented to share an anniversary with Oswald Mosley. Most surreally, I learned that I share my exact birthdate (day and year) with the American actress Missi Pyle (Stormbreaker, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)—would’ve been nice if the lucky individual had been a musician or something, but I can live with that

I suspect that Wolfram|Alpha is capable of rather more than telling you who shares your birthday, but it’s fun nonetheless…

Posted by Wordmobi

For a few years now, I’ve had an idea in my head that I’m sure someone has already worked out long before me, and that I would really like to see in the real world.

In short, it’s a modern variant on a frequent feature of those “home of the future” predictions we saw so often in the 1950s and 1960s: where the man of the house (and it invariably seemed to be a man) would head for the door to leave for work, and pick up his newspaper—which would be personalised specifically for him.

Leaving aside the absence of the six-foot-tall lumbering Robbie the Robot lookalike which (more often than not) would be the one handing over the newspaper in this scenario, in 2009 the grounding technology has existed for a personalised newspaper for some years. We use RSS feeds and aggregators all the time (well, OK, I do), and it’s rare to find a major media outlet which doesn’t provide information this way.

Moreover, Web “portal” sites have long provided an “at-a-glance”, personalised summaries of various information sources (iGoogle, My Yahoo! and Facebook are three which spring instantly to mind), and they have their place. However, these are all (unsurprisingly) formatted for the screen, and if you were to try and print out the portal page (whether on paper, or to an “eBook” format for a Kindle, Sony eReader, etc.), it would be very unlikely to fit on one side, and certainly wouldn’t look optimised for print.

Here’s my idea (and again, I stress that I believe someone has already done this, or something similar):

A Web service (or standalone PC/Mac application), which for sake of argument, let’s call “The Daily Me”. It would perform a similar task to a Web portal, by pulling in current information from RSS feeds and other sources, and then formatting it and laying it out as a print document in the style of a newspaper front page (or maybe a magazine), before exporting this document as a PDF for you to print, load onto your iPhone/ebook reader/whatever, etc.

To give you an idea of the kind of information I would have on my “Daily Me”:

• a couple of headlines from a couple of news sources (if there’s enough room on the page);
• Weather for my home town;
• Travel updates (if relevant);
• A selection of Twitter updates (perhaps the ones which came in while I was asleep);
• any Facebook updates/reminders from the last twelve hours;
• calendar events for the day, and reminders of others a few days in advance (e.g. birthdays/anniversaries);
• perhaps a picture of the day (e.g. from Flickr), and/or a daily cartoon (I like Dilbert myself);
• a Bible verse and a quote or two.

Perhaps the application could include various “themes”, so that you could have your “Daily Me” look like a businesslike broadsheet, an arty magazine, a tech blog, or whatever took your fancy. (I should mention that an enterprising group of hardware tinkerers has been working on a similar concept for some time, but via a very different route: using old receipt microprinters to print off small daily “digests” of information sourced from the Internet. The idea above partly came from this, but I’m thinking of something a little more… shall we say, ‘ornate’?)

I don’t know quite how I would find a service like this, assuming my suspicion is correct and someone else thought of the idea first, but I’ll let you know if I find one.

(Update: Before I’d even published the above, my instincts appeared to have been confirmed, when I Googled for “rss daily newspaper”, and came across FeedJournal. On the face of it, the service looks like it offers most of what I wrote about, including choice of paper size. Upon closer inspection, though, the site is basically generating a mini custom newspaper (i.e. multiple pages, except populated by the news and blog content you specify), rather than the single-page day-at-a-glance document I’m thinking of.

I may look further into FeedJournal anyway, as it looks promising, even if it may not quite be the concept I had in mind.)

It’s coming up for two weeks since I migrated my blog site across to a new host, and to a new blog ‘platform’ (WordPress). So far, I’d say I’ve managed to realise most of my early aims, which to a great extent revolved around creating a blog with tie-ins to the various multimedia services I send stuff to, and which as far as possible I could maintain from my Nokia N95 without needing a desktop or laptop.

Whilst I’ve got a fair amount of the ‘auto-update’ functionality working (insofar as I can send something to YouTube, Qik, Flickr, etc. and it’ll appear somewhere on this site automatically), there are still a couple of ‘holes’ which I hope I can work out how to fix:

• I haven’t yet found whether it’s possible for YouTube to post automatically to WordPress, when I upload a new video. YT can update Twitter and Facebook automatically, and you can set up a WordPress blog on your YouTube account, which gives you a “blog this” feature on a video’s page. However, I have yet to try YT’s mobile site to see if the “blog this” feature is present there; if not, it’s not easy to access the “full-fat” YT pages from a Nokia N95, so some kind of totally automatic feature for posting new YT videos to a WP blog upon upload, would be useful. I’m guessing it already exists, but just haven’t tracked it down yet.
• In a previous post, I referred to my search for an audio equivalent of YouTube—i.e. a Web service where I could upload short, impromptu voice recordings which would then be cross-posted to this blog. After I posted this here and on Twitter, someone from ipadio dropped me a line—this is the service which allows you to make a voice phone call, and have the audio from that call uploaded straight to the Web (they call this “phlogging”). Apparently, ipadio is working on allowing users to upload pre-recorded MP3 audio clips, which may address my primary concern with ipadio (the limited audio quality of a phone call), so I may well be giving their service a try shortly.

Otherwise, I feel I have more or less got the whole infrastructure to where I wanted it at this stage. Other future developments I have in mind are:

• a “music” section, where you’ll be able to listen to some of my recordings (probably via an embedded Flash music player at first);
• an expansion of the “lifestream” feature, so that each day on the main blog page will carry a summary of the day’s content from the lifestream;
• the “contact” page, which I know I haven’t implemented yet, but I have to make as sure as possible that I won’t expose myself to any more spam than I already get (no offence meant, incidentally )

Anyway, I think that’s enough to be going on with for the moment, wouldn’t you agree…?

Posted by Wordmobi

Just in case anyone’s interested: the switchover of the sidingsound.co.uk domain name seems to have percolated through the DNS system, as I’ve just been able to update the FeedBurner RSS feed to point to the new one. (It didn’t work before now, as FeedBurner reported it couldn’t find the WordPress RSS feed, even though the feed was accessible from where I was.)

I haven’t set up our e-mail addresses yet, as I’m awaiting access to my site’s control panel; therefore, any e-mails to our ’sidingsound.co.uk’ addresses will probably be bouncing at present. Apologies for any inconvenience caused, and I’ll get this sorted as soon as I can.

Since my last post talking about my moving Web/e-mail host, things have started moving quite quickly. I’ve found another hosting outfit, and my notice period with the old one expires in around one week from now, so I will need to start moving things in the next couple of days.

The exact ’switchover’ day and time is still rather up in the air, but I will be sure to let you know when things are likely to happen, and more to the point, whether there will be any disruption. The main item I can think of at this time, is that because I will be changing the blog platform I use (from Blogger to Wordpress), the RSS and Atom feed URLs for this site will also change. I aim to migrate all the existing blog posts over to the new Wordpress system, but anyone subscribing to this site via RSS/Atom may have to change settings in their feed reader—watch this space for more details.

The new Sidingsound site is going to be run entirely on the Wordpress system—that is to say, not just the ‘blog’ section, but any other pages which will be added to the site. This should not only make it easier to administer the site, but should also result in a more integrated look-and-feel throughout. It is also my intention that the new site will pull in content which I submit to various other sites, such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Delicious, so that visitors can sample items from these sites before going offsite for more.

Without getting too technical, switching over to Wordpress for this site should open up quite a few new possibilities, and I’m really looking forward to getting to grips with what the system has to offer. In the meantime, please keep an eye on this site and on my Twitter feed for further news over the next week to ten days, and I hope the new site will be worth the wait for you.

You may be aware (or probably not) that I have a few other outlets online for my various jotterings, pics, vids (occasionally) and so on. It’s been a while since I referred to many of them in any depth, and I don’t actually remember mentioning them all together, so here is my attempt to corral my online “presences” (or at least the ones I use much) into one post, in no particular order…

• I’ve been saving photos to our Flickr account since at least 2005, though I didn’t start using the service in earnest until 2006. The majority of our photos are there, although lately I’ve been considering a move to Picasa Web Albums, owing to a few advantages it currently has over Flickr (e.g. no limit on the number of items in a photoset RSS feed—Flickr can only output the first fifty—and apparently, better integration with Blogger (a fellow Google-owned service). However, with over 550 photos in Flickr, and no easy way I know of to migrate, I think I’ll be sticking with Flickr for the time being.
• For about the past year, I’ve posted regularly to my Twitter feed—i.e. long before the media found out that Stephen Fry rather likes Twitter and thus made it the Next Big Web Thing Usually, I “tweet” at least a couple of times a day, most days, though my usage fluctuates depending on where I am, what I’m doing, etc. It’s probably the Web service I use most often, and is therefore most likely the best way to keep up with what I’m generally up to.
• About two months ago, I discovered Delicious, where you can save Web bookmarks and comment on them (a sort of “bookmark blog”. To cut a long story short: here’s my Delicious page.
• I dabble with video, but have only posted very occasionally to the video pages I have set up so far: my blip.tv and Qik accounts. My videos go out under the name “Digital Ramyun”, which will be the name of my video blog if I ever get the time to make it regularly! As I write, I am also setting up a YouTube channel for Digital Ramyun, so that the many more who use that service will be able to tune in, but more to the point, because YouTube integrates a bit better with another service I’ve just signed up for…

As of today, ladies and gentlemen, I have joined Tumblr. Basically, Tumblr is one way of integrating many different kinds of content into one big “super-blog”, so if by some immense stretch of the imagination you were hoping to find all my different writings, tweets, videos, photo uploads and so on, all in one handy location… well, here is Digital Ramyun @ Tumblr, to provide you with your regular fix of all things Tim Walker-esque.

My Tumblr page is currently very much “out of the box”, but I’ll be customising it with new feeds, visual tweaks and so on, just as soon as I figure out how to do most of them It currently pulls together my Twitter updates, Flickr photos, Delicious bookmarks and YouTube video uploads, and you’ll also see posts from the Sidingsound blog, once I find out why Tumblr doesn’t seem to like the details I’m putting in.

And before I go: no, I haven’t joined Facebook yet, but I suspect it’s only a matter of time now…