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I’ve had an iPod Touch for almost a week now, and aside from driving people on Twitter nuts by exclaiming how unbelievably awesome it is, I have some thoughts on how it could be better. Nothing groundbreaking, I’m sure, as anyone who spends time with it will likely come up with a similar list. The short version is that I LOVE it. In an unhealthy way. I haven’t been this impressed by a piece of technology since my first Newton MessagePad 120. And before that, my Amiga 1000. It’s that much of a game changer. [ed: both of those technologies are now defunct?] My iPod Touch has quickly become a very powerful mobile email/Google Reader/Twitter/Flickr/Blog platform. I’m not sure I could give it up now.

Software Improvements

1. Notes sync – if I enter a page of notes into the iPod Touch Notes application, they stay there. Unless I email a copy out. And the only way for text to get INTO Notes is by typing it on the Touch. No way to add, say, a schedule, or travel itinerary, etc… without typing it all manually. wtf? It would be ideal if Notes either synced with a folder in ~/Documents/Notes or were managed by iTunes directly – for this to be a truly useful feature, I need to be able to DO stuff with the notes, not just write stuff down. Getting Notes both onto and off of the Touch are pretty important.
2. Wifi toggle. I try to save the battery as much as possible, which means spinning down wifi when I won’t be using it (while on the bus, while it’s idle, etc…) but currently each toggle requires about 5 taps. Home > Settings > Wifi > On/Off > Home. It would be handy if there was an icon on the Home screen to just toggle wifi.
3. Temp on Weather icon. The Calendar icon shows the correct date. Why doesn’t the Weather icon show the current temperature when it’s available?
4. Copy/paste. Of URLs, text in emails, text in Safari. Not essential, but would make things easier when sharing stuff.
5. GReader offline app – Gears? SDK? I’d love to be able to load up my RSS feeds in the morning, read them on the bus, and sync stuff when I get to the office. Like Gears does, but without the laptop.
6. Photos sort by date not filename. Seriously. Why would I sort by filename? Want to show a series of photos? Hope you didn’t rename any of them in Aperture, because the order will be all messed up. Bizarre.
7. Sketch app? Perfect cocktail napkin!
8. Flash. Not 100% essential, but it would be great to be able to interact with Flash apps and view Flash Video.
9. Display name + contact info on unlock screen. If I lose it, and it’s locked with a PIN, how will the honest person who finds it know who to give it to? I’m not going to put a sticker on it. (and if a dishonest person finds it, it’s gone either way)
10. Ability to have files (pdf, etc…) copied onto the iPod for access without a network connection
11. Ability to cache multiple locations and sets of directions in Map for use without a network connection. Having Maps is really cool, but a bit useless if I need an active wifi connection to get any details out of it. It caches some stuff, but not enough to make it really useful when offline.
12. Safari should remember usernames and passwords – doesn’t have to be full Keychain integration (or at all) but this would be handy for browser-based authentication that doesn’t use cookies (wifi hotspots…)

Hardware Improvements

1. Volume control without touch screen. The double-home-button-tap trick is really nice and elegant, but still requires that I dig the Touch of of my pocket and look at the screen. Every iPod I’ve had before would be just as easily controlled by blindly tapping a button and/or spinning a wheel.
2. Camera.
3. Microphone – ability to record audio.
4. STUCK PIXEL!!! AAAAAAHHHH!!! 5 days after getting my iPod Touch, it developed a dead pixel. A really obvious one, too. The flashing-colours website fix works for about half an hour or so, then it creeps back. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a stuck pixel on any of my displays. (jinx 1234!)

Nothing too earth shattering, and certainly nothing to cry about (well, except maybe that stuck pixel. sniff.). You’ll have to pry my iPod Touch from my cold, dead hands. And even then I’d probably give up a pretty good fight.

Turns out the feed for my blog decided to bork about 4 days ago. David sent me a kind note (as he always seems to do about 5 minutes after fecal matter impacts spinning metal) but I couldn’t find wtf was wrong. A few days later, and it’s bugging me, and FeedBurner is choking on the fumes. I try FeedValidator.org, and it’s all “hey! dude! your feed is all like 404, ‘n stuff!” And I was all like “no fracking way. it’s all good, man. haven’t even touched that stuff in a long, long time, brah.” and then FeedValidator says “whatever, dude. I’m telling you, it’s gone. 404. MIA. Fix it.”

I send a message to the FeedValidator listserv (because I can see the feed just fine in my browser and via curl/wget/etc but FeedValidator insists it’s 404), and get 2 responses back within 10 minutes, suggesting my .htaccess was inflicting all kinds of negative foo. I decide to give up on trying to make sense of it, and just replace it with a fresh copy. And it seems to work now.

Anyway, all of this to say “sorry for any RSS noise you might see as a result of my feed’s borkage and subsequent hopeful deborkage.”  Of course, this post jynxes it. It’s probably going to bork just to spite me. Fracking blog.

MacOSX 10.5 added some bling, possibly to "catch up" with Vista. The transparent menu bar sucks. Completely. Please, someone at Apple, fix this.

I've got my desktop picture set to cycle through some of my photographs. Most of the time, it’s not a big deal, but occasionally, one comes up that causes my menu bar to look like this:

Seriously.

Yes, transparency is cool. It's great to show off the power of the UI renderer, etc… But not at the sake of readability.

Walking across campus this morning, I passed a couple dozen students with laptops open, sucking the wifi network. I wasn’t trying to snoop, but I noticed that well over half of them had browsers open to Facebook. It struck me that they are spending much of their time pumping content and data into a proprietary commercial venture. And they’re fine with it. I’m pretty sure they’re capable of understanding what it means to provide so much information about themselves – what they like, who they know, what they’re doing, the music they listen to, the books they read, their vocabulary, things they’re selling/buying, etc…

But, I fear they don’t actively think about what it means to give this personal data so freely to a commercial venture that has one singular purpose: to profit from their information, in any way possible.

And Facebook isn’t alone – we’re using Google Docs and the rest of the Google Apps suite, essentially teaching Google’s advertising engine with the most intimate and powerful data about ourselves. The Google Toolbar tracks what we search for, and what we see.

Universities are also guilty in this – we compel students to publish their content within the confines of the sanctioned LMS, where it can evaporate at the end of each semester. We provide them with email addresses, web space, etc… all of which evaporate when they graduate, and are not truly “theirs”.

It strikes me that an entire generation of our upcoming best-and-brightest minds are developing in an environment where they are comfortable not owning their own information, and even worse – they are comfortable with corporate entities mining every bit of minutiae about themselves in order to make a buck. In a “best case” scenario, these students simply aren’t aware of what this means, and this becomes an education issue. In a “worst case” scenario, they are aware, consenting, and active participants in this.

This scares the hell out of me. These students will be forming our governments in a few years, and running our companies.

How do we steer this ship onto a more wholesome, individual-centric course, where individuals not only want to own their own information, but also to effectively control who has access to it, and what they can do with it?

This post is in response to Chris’ Twitter Condom post.

I’ve been on the fence regarding public or protected tweets on Twitter.com. I’ve actually toggled that switch at on at least 3 different occasions, and then reverted back to Public maybe a day later.

Public tweets are visible to the world, indexed by Google, and make it easy to nanoblog (something that can be encapsulated in 140 characters or less, which might not otherwise be blogworthy). Protected tweets are private, and are visible only to those people whom you follow on Twitter. They aren’t indexed by Google, and they’re essentially part of a private conversation.

The problem is that the public/protected flag is a global setting for an account. Either all of your tweets are public or they’re all protected. There is no middle ground, or ability to change this on a per-tweet basis.

So, why set an account to be “protected”? One of the things that strikes me about Twitter is how much it feels like a conversation in a pub. It’s informal, loose, and sometimes a bit more unfiltered than would be otherwise advisable. A common type of tweet (of which I am probably more guilty than others) is the rant/vent. Bitching about meetings. Letting off some steam in little 140 character puffs. Probably not something that should be indexed by The Goog. To be really honest, probably the kind of thing that shouldn’t be online in the first place, but that’s probably another post.

If a twitter account is set to be “protected” then it becomes a bit more safe to open up a bit more (too much?). The pub conversation becomes more intimate and real.

Why set an account to be “public”? It makes it easy for people to follow you.  Your social network/graph can grow without obstruction, and you will likely find new people who are doing things that interest you.

But, it’s not as simple as it sounds. I currently follow 70 people. That’s about the maximum I think I can follow. There are 318 people following me. It’s just physically impossible for me to reciprocate. Am I missing out? Possibly. But anything important will trickle through various conversations and I’ll see enough to make sense of it. And anything really important will likely exist outside of Twitter.

And I doubt anyone would really miss anything by being unable to follow my tweets. Sure, they’d miss out on some extremely witty banter, but anything important would show up in other conversations, and eventually outside of Twitter.

To me, twitter isn’t a publishing platform. It’s an informal hangout. If I want to publish anything, I’ll put it on my blog, or as a comment on someone else’s.

I want to preface this post by saying that I realize that it will sound like pretentious self-important aren’t-I-great writing. That’s not what I intended, but it’s difficult to write about this without throwing caution to the wind. Although I shoot a fair number of photographs, and at least partially identify myself as a photographer, I have had absolutely no formal training. I have no “expertise” on the subject, aside from that which has been self-taught, and experience gathered from shooting something like 50,000 photographs over the years. People have been asking me to provide some pointers on how to improve their photography, resulting in this blog post. OK. That’s out of the way…

Photography can be both a noun and a verb. It is both the act of, and the product of, capturing images through photographic processes. When someone asks “what do you recommend to help me get better at photography” – I think they are meaning photography-as-noun. They want their photographs to look better. They want to take better pictures.

But, what they really mean, whether they realize it or not, is how to improve photography-as-verb. How to “get better” at taking pictures. How to be a better photographer.

And there’s no easy answer. There isn’t a simple recipe, where if followed dutifully, a person will be transformed into a better photographer. There are two separate but related aspects to photography – the technical, and the aesthetic. I believe that the technical side can be relatively easily addressed – read some books, maybe take a course or two, rtfm, and practice.

It’s the aesthetic side of photography that is harder to develop. There isn’t an easy process to do that. Some sense of aesthetics will develop as you shoot more photographs – whether through trial and error, mimicking other photographs that you like, or through deliberate composition. The most effective, long term strategy that I’ve found to improve my sense of aesthetics has been through what I call “mindful seeing.” I don’t mean in a spiritual sense, although there might be a spiritual aspect to it – mindfulness is a strong component of eastern philosophies such as Buddhism. I mean the act and process of being deliberately thoughtful about what you are seeing. To see what you are looking at. It’s something that doesn’t happen automatically – we go through life filtering what we see, reducing input and stimulus to the point that we aren’t as distracted by visual stimuli. Mindful seeing is the process of turning off the filters, of seeing your surroundings unfettered and unobstructed.

When viewing the world without filtering, even the most boring and banal subjects can become wondrous and interesting. We are constantly surrounded by interesting things that we normally don’t see – textures, lighting, patterns, shapes, objects, groupings, even messages.

Photographers are often described as distancing themselves from their surroundings by “hiding behind a camera” or “viewing the world only through a viewfinder.” I see photography from the exact opposite side of the coin. By mindfully seeing the world around me, I feel as though I am seeing much more than I would otherwise. I see patterns, convergence, divergence, shadows, lighting, juxtaposition, and composition that are likely missed by others. That’s not to say that I am “better” than any other – just that by being mindful of what I am seeing, I am aware of what is around me. And when I am aware, I am better able to take an interesting photograph.

One benefit of practicing mindful seeing is that it doesn’t require a camera. You are seeing things every second you are awake (assuming no visual disabilities). Being mindful can be as simple as stopping what you are doing, and examining what is directly in front of you. How is the light reflecting off the wall? Notice the gradients in the various shadows? How they interact with each other? The caustic refraction of light through curved glass? The texture of the floor and ceiling? From which angles would these shadows line up or be exaggerated?

Once you start to see these details (both micro and macro) you begin to take photographs of them. You begin to use them in composing photographs. And eventually it becomes second nature. I constantly catch myself being startled by seeing something interesting in unexpected places. Most of the time, I don’t have a camera handy, so I just make a mental note and say something profound like “cool.” On the occasions where I do have a camera literally in hand, I take a shot. And some of these have resulted in surprisingly interesting photographs.

The biggest example of this is when I took a series of photographs examining the texture of the back of a bus seat.  I was commuting to and from work on the bus, and kept noticing the patterns on the back of the seat, right in front of me. I put my point-and-shoot camera into super-macro mode, and took a few shots with the lens almost touching the seat back. And the results were quite amazing – textures, patterns, shadows, reflections – all of which were right in front of me every day for more than a year, but which I hadn’t seen before.

Once you start being more mindful of what you see, and taking more photographs, it becomes important to be honestly critical of your (and others’) photographs. Not critical in the negative sense – but able to give an honest evaluation of what is good, what is not so good, and what would be done differently if given the chance. This honest criticism is essential to becoming more mindful of the aesthetics of photography. Eventually, you will be able to separate yourself from your photographs (it isn’t easy) and as a result you’ll be aware of what makes your photographs good or bad aesthetically.

If I say that I took a good photograph – and it’s important that I be aware if I have – I am not saying “hey! I am an awesome photographer! Look at this awesome shot that I took! Aren’t I awesome?” No. Instead, if I am honest about the evaluation, I am saying something like “this is a good photograph. notice how the composition leads the eye, the lighting blah blah blah” – it’s not about me, it’s about the photograph. Similarly, a critique of a “bad” photograph isn’t a comment on me, or my skills, or anything other than the aesthetics of a series of binary bits representing an image.

With that said, how would I recommend someone “get better at photography”?

• start with mindful seeing. it’s easy, because we see all day. it’s hard, because we filter what we see.
• shoot a lot of photographs. Try shooting every day. every. day. If nothing else, it will force you to see interesting things around you. And you will learn the technical aspects of photography because you are doing it often.
• be honestly critical of your photographs. Something that helps with this is to do it in the open – if you don’t have a Flickr account, create one and start posting photographs there. Join a few groups and participate in the community. They’ll help keep you honest.
• be honestly critical of other people’s photographs. This doesn’t have to be in the open, but by critiquing other photographs you’ll learn what you like and don’t like, and you’ll learn what you want to (and don’t want to) photograph.
• expose yourself to a LOT of photography. I follow 26 groups and tags on Flickr – subscribing to the RSS feeds – so I see hundreds of photographs every day.
• expose yourself to a LOT of information about photography – I follow about 50 photoblogs where photographers talk about their craft and post their best work. It’s important to expose yourself to various opinions and techniques – things you can try out when you’re shooting every day.

So, some rambling thoughts from an amateur photographer with no training. There aren’t any guarantees, but this is the rough philosophy and process that I personally subscribe to.

I just tried to navigate around in my Time Machine backup, only to find that it was woefully out of date. I’d set it to automatically back everything up, and had assumed that it would, you know, automatically back things up.

It hadn’t been doing it.

Since December 5, 2007.

Over a month ago.

And I’d assumed that I had a reliable hourly/daily/weekly/monthly backup.

Except the last month got dropped.

Frack. If you have a backup solution, check it. If you don’t have one, get one. And check it regularly. I’ve turned Time Machine back on, and will let it chew overnight to make sure I get a decent backup. And now I’ve got to figure out how in hell the Time Machine switch got thrown to “OFF” in the first place. I sure as frack didn’t do that. Time Machine has been the biggest feature of Leopard for me (or so I thought…)

Update: Just to be clear – I’m not saying there’s something wrong with Time Machine, or that there’s some nasty bug that borked things. All I’m saying is “periodically verify that your backup system is functioning as you expect it” – nothing more, nothing less…

I just got my signed travel request approval to cover my pilgrimage to Lotusland for NothernVoice 2008. I mean, I was already planning on going, even if I had to stick the trip on my Visa card, but it’s nice to know I can go with blessings The moose is loose!

As I’ve said a few times, this is my one must-attend event. If this is all I get to do in 2008, the year would still be a success. The biggest draw for me is being able to hang out with a bunch of people whom I both respect and admire, and let myself get pulled out of my normal comfort zone to kick out the jams for what isn’t a purely educational, nor a purely technology conference. I’ve blogged before about why I’m looking forward to NV08, and why previous NorthernVoice conferences have been so meaningful for me.

Now, if we can only avoid another outbreak of the dreaded Moose Fever...