On Google Maps

New, high-resolution Landsat 8 images have been swapped into Google Maps, yielding really amazing pictures of terrain and buildings.  The whole earth is now cloud-free and the detail is good enough to make out patio furniture, stone paths, and garden boxes in my backyards.

A nice 3-D effect has been added, with taller structures like houses and trees shifting perspective against the ground as I pan over a neighborhood.  .

Street View has also been updated, as I found out when I called up 5 Woodside to show my parents my UK abode.  The picture of the house was perfect, but when I shifted perspective to show my street, I was surprised to find…well…me.

 

The photos must have been taken by the Google-Cam-Car last summer.  It’s my old car, midday. and it looks like I’m  packing for a trip north.  ‘Cute that they blurred the milk bottle in my right hand. 

I must have been lost in thought: I don’t recall seeing the vehicle glide past.  But it’s nice to be immortalized, literally ‘On the Map’.

Simple PC repairs (not)

Four engineers are riding in a car when it suddenly sputters and stops.  The electrical engineer suggests that the problem is the battery, the mechanical engineer pokes the valves, the chemical engineer sniffs the gasoline.  The computer engineer insists that everything will be fine if everyone simply gets out of the car and then gets back into it.

Friday I logged into my PC to find that my Start Menu was corrupted.  This would prevent short-cut access to any programs, so I checked on the internet and found lots of people reporting the same error and lots of guidance for fixing it. 

Rebooting, disabling the antivirus, going to Safe Mode didn’t resolve things.

I tried to add a new user, the solution that most advisors advocated, but Windows prevented that.

I hacked into PowerShell and rebuilt the startup tables.  Nothing changed.

Deepak, the Indian IT fellow living up the hall, suggested getting a Mac.

Worse, the problem was spreading.  Search stopped working.  The Associations, which link a program to a data file type so that clicking on a document, for example, starts Word, became corrupted.  Repairing / reinstalling Office failed to fix anything.

Worried, I updated my backups.

The next suggestion was Reset my PC / Reinstall Windows 10 (Your applications will be lost, your data files will remain).

It took a few hours for the process to complete, and my data files and account settings came through intact.  Microsoft kindly posted a list of everything that was uninstalled to my Desktop.  All of the problems were, indeed, resolved.

So I’m now in the midst of a two-day recovery to re-install and re-set several dozen applications.  It’s time-consuming, but likely will make the computer run better.

I also took advantage of the transition to migrate from Windows Live Mail to Outlook.  Microsoft hasn’t updated Mail since 2012 and it has been getting increasingly unreliable.

Outlook 2016 is not a happy alternative.  Bloated and slow, it’s been a hassle to set up and connect to my email accounts, and slow to download my existing mail files.  I can’t drag and drop mail between different accounts, and Search will take weeks to finish indexing.

We treat our computers, like our cars, as an appliance: focused on using them to get from here to there and  not worrying about how they work.  When they fail, the cause can be difficult to diagnose, and any fix often seems like trial and error.

And when it involves IT, the fix is often counterintuitive and leads to a lot more work.

‘Taking it slowly

I dropped into my Leisure Centre at six, e-book and MP3 player in hand as customary.  I’m trying to wrap up a light, misogynistic  thriller so that I can get into Hatching Twitter, the personal startup story of  the one social medium I’ve never understood.

A row of signs diverted towards the gym: Blood Donations Evening.    I knew that NHSBT hosts donor events across England, much as the Red Cross does in the US.  I’ve always  given blood, initially because it earned me a free dinner at Burger King in college, but later because I knew so many friends and colleagues who benefited during their hospitalizations.  At this point, it would also be interesting to see how the process compared here in the UK.

Country to country, societies reveal their truest selves in grocery check-out lines.  The Dutch fling new goods down the belt before the previous customer has cleared the area.  The US is more polite, but asocial.  In the UK, people take it slowly, chatting with the clerk, counting out change, digging for coupons.

Giving blood is much the same: a stepwise process through intermediate queues, earnest polite conversations at each station.  The level of concern for my travels and possible exposure to West Nile Virus was new, and the laboratory screening tests seemed more superficial.  I  liked the space-capsule style recliners and the techs were much better at hitting a vein on the first try than their American counterparts.

But the experience is much liken  the Tesco check-out: calibrated to the slowest participant, fully satisfied before moving on to the next. It took an hour and a half to complete the donation.

A similarly slow and deliberate process accompanied my transition to Windows 10 this week.  I have hated Windows 8, the touch-tablet universal interface getting in the way of work constantly.  The new upgrade promised to be more desktop-friendly, with tiles moved to the background and the return of the start menu.

I approach these brain transplants with care.  There are always missing (video!) drivers and dropped settings during the upgrade.  I backed up everything locally and to the cloud before starting, scheduled the install to occur at 1 am, and crossed my fingers.

Happily, this was the smoothest upgrade that I’ve done.  There were no lockups and I think that everything came through unscathed.  I like the new focus on the desktop a lot, and the Start Menu is learning my habits and preferences.  Each day, more of  what I need is offered ever-more conveniently in its menus

There are some configuration adjustments (CNET and BGR have recommendations) and I’m not sold on Edge or Bing, so I set default browser / search away from them the first day.  But otherwise it seems to be a worthwhile and painless upgrade that solves a lot of usability problems.

Tools I use

Windows 10 releases this week, I have high hopes  that it will make the whole PC experience easier and faster again.  I’ve really struggled with Windows 8.1.  The touch interface gets in the way, inconsistent and oversensitive: I prefer to command the computer when I have work to do, rather than stroke and poke at it. 

I pine, still, for my BSD Unix command window.

OffSite Storage: Someone asked me about my cloud storage preferences the other day.  I am, frankly, ambivalent about the cloud, where the only copies of my data and applications are kept at the other end of a network connection.  With travel and paranoia, I keep a copy close by on a USB drive. 

Worse, and too often, a remote photo archive or data server has closed down without warning when the vendor’s business model failed, costing me China pictures and web sites.  I’ll acknowledge that PC disasters, a dropped computer or a spilled drink, have also cost me dearly, so this isn’t unique to the cloud.

In any case, I run a three-pronged cloud strategy:

• My computer continuously backs up to Carbonite, highly recommended, it just works.
• My photos back up to Google Photos.  The storage seems bottomless and the indexing gets better and better.  I do wish the creepy Story Generator would stop aggregating unrelated photos into fables, though.
• My shared files go to to Dropbox.  It’s quick, clean, multi-platform, with excellent sharing and privacy tools for collaborative work.

Utilities: While looking for solutions to a few specialized tasks, I found some good apps worth a try:

• Memrise:  For years, I’ve been looking for a good Dutch flashcards program to practice my vocabulary.  Memrise is great: itofferss lots of courses (I am doing the MRT Dutch 2, with over 3300 intermediate-level words) and syncs progress across multiple platforms.  A $10/mo subscription unlocks additional practice games, but the basic learn and review is free and effective.  They continue to make improvements, introducing voice output last week.
• Malwarebytes:  I use Windows Defender, but caught a nasty virus anyway that sent spam emails, disrupted Skype, and slowed my PC.  I got it out in a day’s work, but then bought Malwarebytes as an added layer of protection.  It’s worked well: my only complaint is that it freezes the touch interface briefly when it does a scan.  For extra care, I run Spybot S&D monthly.
• Supertintin:  I occasionally need to record business conference calls, and this background utility does a very nice job: it’s efficient and unobtrusive.  Purchasing the app removes the time limit, and it’s worked very smoothly.  My only issue has been one crash during an incoming call, losing 5 minutes of cached data.
• Koredoko:  I am posting daily photos to the Dorset Landscapes group and to Instagram.  I don’t want to run down my camera battery with GPS, though, so need to geotag my photos after the fact.  Koredoko has a good map-based interface that lets me update my tags quickly. Some of the interface is counterintuitive, but works well once I found the right buttons.

Desk Tools: Finally, I am still looking for a good solution to Contacts and Calendars.  These are the most basic of office tools, but the existing tools from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Android are still awful.

Letting Google index appointments and travel from my email has not brought any predictive order or useful notifications from G+Now.  So I stay with my paper diary and ignore the jeers (sending Lucy Kellaway’s article when people press the point: Users of electronic calendars can take six times longer to scribble something down.).

I had hoped that LinkedIn would be the basis for a self-updating business contacts system, and spent hours linking and pruning my Contacts in Android.  Unfortunately, people don’t keep their profiles complete or current, and Android doesn’t back up or maintain records properly.  Paper alternatives are not good either, so I just struggle along.

Disclaimer:  I was neither asked nor compensated to write any of these reviews.  As always, I select and purchase all of my own tools, and the opinions are mine alone based on daily use.

A wee bit 'o techy trouble

The problems first appeared last night, Windows Live Writer (WLW)  returning an error when I tried to push a new essay up onto Blogger. It looked like an authentication issue: I checked passwords, then had a beer and waited for Google to sort itself out.  An hour went by with no change.

A quick search turned up a number of frustrated WLW users complaining in Blogger's Help Forum.  Unhelpfully, we were informed that Google had changed it's user validation process and that Microsoft had chosen not to update it's software.  Microsoft, in turn, saw no reason to update a legacy product that had not been updated in years.

As the evening wore on, it became apparent that none of the Windows blogging clients had updated when told to, from BlogJet to BlogDesk, so nobody was able to post to Blogger.  Microsoft's Word and Outlook interfaces were also broken.

Suggested work-arounds included migrating the blog to WordPress, but the importer likewise had not been updated, so all formatting was lost if I migrated using the Export Content To File / Import Content From File suggested by other users.


I took up the challenge and found that if I mailed a copy of the WLW post to Blogger, then copied Google's HTML back to WLW, tweaked the format, and pasted the HTML back into Blogger, I could get a post published with pictures and formats.  It takes a bit of hacking at the code to smooth it out – if you are noticing small formatting glitches, that is why.

Google is now promising to work with Microsoft on a fix, we apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Some days the Internet is sooo brittle…

Good news, bad news and the novel

How many ways can you tell a fictional story?  British newspaper columnist Christopher Booker suggested in 2004 that the answer was “7”: 1. Overcoming the Monster, 2. Rags to Riches, 3. The Quest, 4. Voyage and Return, 5. Rebirth, 6. Comedy and 7. Tragedy.  All  but the seventh have happy endings, either the restoration of order or the promise of renewal.

‘nothing magical about 7, of course, and other authors argue for anywhere from three to thirty-six basic plots.

Complementary to that was Kurt Vonnegut, who argued for Universal Shapes of Stories in his rejected Masters thesis.  In it, he traces the sentimental arc of stories, the shifting balance of happiness and sadness as the plot unfolded.  He identified eight basic types of story arcs, well illustrated here and charmingly presented in video by Vonnegut here.

Enter Matthew Jockers, a University of Nebraska English Professor.  He assigned a sentiment weighting to any word that carried some emotional affect: for example, Pout, Powerless, Prejudice are all unhappy; while Gallant, Generous, Gentle are all happy.  As computers scan text, they can assign emotive values to each word, calculate cumulative sums and averages, and thus follow the ups and downs of sentiment across a work.  So, for example, Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist:

A few things to note: the average sentiment is positive (μ > 0.0), the novel has many ups and downs (black annotated line) but the smoothed trajectory is sort of happy-sad-happy (blue line).  It roughly follows Vonnegut’s Man in Hole model (top of page). 

Analyzing 41,383 novels with Syzuhet, he concluded that there are six, maybe seven, basic sentiment plots.  The two Primary arcs were Man in Hole and Man on Hill, with variations on each.

It’s not a perfect path to analysis.  Jockers notes that happiness can be false-notated in sections where the bad guys are having a very good time.  It completely misses British subtleties of irony or dark humour (as do I). 

Still, I find the whole analysis sort of delightful, I’m looking forward to an atlas being published so that I can see how some of my favorite works are diagrammed (the software is available if you want to do your own analysis as well).

Tech failure Thursday

I noticed that my blog posts have not been auto-magically updating on my Facebook page recently, so I dove into the maze of settings for RSS-Graffiti to fix the problem. 

Or, rather, I tried to.  Instead, I found this:

We currently power over 300,000 Facebook pages; only about 500, or less than 0.25% of clients, see enough value to pay for the service…lost a considerable sum of money…the product is not sustainable…we will be discontinuing….

As a small-business owner, I feel their pain, although I probably would have recommended taking a higher road in their sign-off.  Similar ‘sending a shutdown shout-out’ messages have become frequent on Medium (1, 2, 3), leading me to a few further thoughts:

• Announcing the end: Telling users and investors that the service is going away by posting an essay on a company website or social aggregator is not a useful or graceful way to exit.  It is likely to be discovered too late and then irritates everyone who reads it.  ‘far better to provide a sincere apology, a self-accountable explanation, and a migration / recovery path for those impacted.
• 300,000 users abandoned: This again underlines the transient nature of internet startups.  I have been burned by arbitrary service shutdowns many times, losing feeds, websites, contacts, mail, files, pictures, and connections that could not be replaced.  The large-scale demise of Windows Live Essentials, Microsoft Small Business services, and Google Reader shows that size is no protection.  Now, I practice redundancy and local backups for any data of value: I don’t rely on any single-site solutions.  Take a moment to think about who you trust and how you would recover if they suddenly stopped.
• Rethinking the business model:  RSS Graffiti never gave me a compelling reason to pay. The added services that came with premium membership were faster posting, more social networks, and better support, but I didn’t need any of them for my modest use.  I would have paid a proportionate subscription, $5-$30 per year, and their large user base could have raised millions by that change alone.  When the business model fails, it’s important to admit it early and make a change.

There are a number of alternatives to RSS Graffiti available, and I have switched over to Buffer, which offers the features and small-scale flexibility that I need.  I am using the free DIY posting while I get the sense of it, but will likely switch to the pay model once I’m ready to connect my feed.

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And one work-around for feature-failure while I am on tech themes today.

I use Instagram more and more for my social connections.  People’s photos and comments make me feel happier, and I’m avoiding trips to the swamp of petty cruelties and advertisements that Facebook has become.  

Two tips for getting the most out of Instagram:

• I am gradually expanding my connections by finding friends, relevant hashtags, strong curators, and occasionally taking the site’s recommendations.  I go through much the same process with Medium: accept that it takes time to gradually build up a feed on unstructured aggregators.
• Instagram lacks the ability to export pictures and to upload from a browser, so I needed to find extensions for both.  InstaSave does the job of saving photos from my feed, while InstaPic gave me more ease and flexibility than the top-rated Grambler for posting from the PC desktop.

As always, my recommendations are entirely my own: I have neither been solicited nor paid for these comments.

First light

A couple of new arrivals in Dorset today – a cardiologist from Turin, Italy (the local cooking moves up another notch), and a replacement camera for the venerable HX9V.  I’d wanted to reward myself using a bit of my Cambridge teaching fee, and had been studying the alternatives for a month with a friend, well versed in photography (and also Italian).  John Lewis had a fabulous sale on the unit I wanted over Easter, so the Click and Collect was done.

The a5100 is an interchangeable-lens camera, shy of being a full mirrorless DSLR. It has a lot of opportunities for manual control that my old point-and-shoot lacked, and much better lenses and processing. 

The improvement is obvious: old on the left, new on the right.

     

So far, I like the way it picks up the effects of mist and light in the distance, the sharp detail, and the warm vivid colours.  It will take a lot of time studying the manual and completing my course to really use it well, but I’m looking forward to upgrading my game.

Tech Monday

A Chinese student and his mother have checked into 5 Woodside for the next few weeks while he prepares for his exams in math, physics, and chemistry.  He finds my everyday technology, especially my MP3 player and TomTom, charmingly retro: he seeks ever tighter integration of all functions into a single platform.

Chagrined, I’ll try to regain some credibility with a few tech links to start the week…

Dutch Newspapers:  A new reading platform, Blendle,  has opened in beta to aggregate content from leading Dutch newspapers.  Whole newspapers and curated articles are available, some with a micropayment. 

I have long used Kranten en Tijdschriften on the Nexus to read Dutch news, but this is becoming a good alternative.

Cloud Backups: After losing a couple of months of pictures in the January disk crash, I decided that I needed to migrate from removable hard drive backups to a cloud solution.  I turned the job over to Carbonite, and have been happy with the features. 

It runs in the background and updates nightly, establishing a full mirror with 30 days of version histories.  I can grant read-access to others for file sharing and access files remotely, somewhat duplicating Dropbox. 

I haven’t been able to get it to recognize my removable USB drive and the System Mirror feature is not working, but otherwise it’s good peace of mind.

Full-Translation Skype:  This is an exciting idea: imagine an online call with simultaneous voice translation / transcription of foreign languages, both ways, during a conversation?   Google/Microsoft Translate apps, based on statistical rather than linguistic approaches to converting between languages, has become fast and accurate.  Now, with faster servers, Microsoft will be hooking its translator into the voice stream as Skype Translate.

This has the potential to change a lot of expat life, from conversations and language learning to business and social interchanges.  I can’t wait to try it.

Earpiece mike:  I like having hands-free capability on my phones, and use the Bluetooth comm/media features of my Ford Fiesta to the maximum.  Outside the car, though, I’m often forced to type with one hand while clutching the phone with my other. 

The earbud/mike solution, Bourne’s solution in the Waterloo Station sequence, turns out to be both affordable (about £10) and effective. I am using it more and more  even at my desk: the noise cancelling and the capability to free both hands for typing and note-taking is really liberating. 

I have to be sure to keep the volume cranked down and a mute button would be nice, but it’s otherwise part of my standard kit now.

Find picture; Add text:  I have a large Word document with the each individual line tagged by one of several different pictures.  I wanted to do a Global Search and Replace, replacing the index pictures for text tags.  It took a while to find, but Word does have a nifty solution.

Select one of the images and Copy it to the clipboard.  Open Find and Replace, and the Special menu at the bottom.  Select Graphic from the list of items and a ^g appears in the Find field: this tells the search to look for the graphic on the clipboard.  Type the replacement text in the Replace field, and proceed as normal.

This likely works with all sorts of embedded objects or formatting, but is completely counterintuitive to set up until you’ve learned the trick.

Lists and Diaries:  I organize my day around appointment calendars, receipt logs, and task lists.  My philosophy is that a ‘note to self’ should not requiring more than one step: open one of my three diaries and jot a note.  

Lifehacker and the Home Work podcast have made a case for using productivity apps, though, so I’ve given a few a (re)try.  I may be retro, but, for me, these ‘aids’ still turn simple tasks into multi-step Projects.  

Evernote, which I love for transcribing voice memos in the car,  still requires too much formatting and hunt-peck typing to create bulleted lists at my desk. 

Calendar requires opening, clicking, typing, tabbing, checking, and saving each time I want to schedule an entry.

Auto-updating contact books, itinerary aggregators, and receipt transcribers make too many errors and omissions. 

Collaborative sites require a lot of work to organize and maintain files and messages.  

I may be wedded to a particular style of work that leaves me at odds with electronic alternatives generally.  But I have to get my work organized and done, and electronic alternatives just aren’t simple and accurate enough yet.

Online Courses:  I’ve been auditing an online course in Analysis and Design of Algorithms through Coursera on occasional evenings this month.   Taught by a Stanford CompSci professor, the content is clear and moves ahead briskly: it’s much different from the fuzzy filmed class lectures available through MIT Courseware.

I’m learning  a lot in small bites, and it’s nice to keep a hand in (recreationally) on the technical side.  I hope that there will be comparable courses in history and languages coming available soon to broaden the focus from business and technology.

Disclaimer:  As always, I have neither been solicited nor compensated for any of these product references.  The experiences and opinions are entirely my own.