Skunkworks

Legs On: Honda’s Walking Assist Devices from Vimeo.

I consider myself a very knowledgeable person in relation to computers, software, Internet and basically everything that has a remote connection with those concepts. I am using a lot of web based services. I am using instant messengers, email, RSS readers, I am sharing photos using Picasa and Live Photos, I am using online storage and Google Docs but I am not able to get any value whatsoever from the social networks that I am part of. I am on LinkedIn, Facebook and a few others. I don’t have too many connections on any of the networks, but this is because I choose to be very selective.

I don’t see any value in being up-to-date with what everybody in my network is doing. I don’t see myself updating my status every few hours with what I am doing. It’s not in my nature to be that open. At the same time I am reading a lot about how cool is to be on LinkedIn, about how trendy is to use Twitter or how productive you can become by using an app that is available only on Facebook and I don’t see myself doing what all the “cool” people are doing it.

Because of all of the above, I am getting very annoyed some time and this is one of those moments. I do have a reasonable explanation  for the fact that I don’t get it, but for the moment I refuse to accept it .

It took me a while, but now I have a very good and I hope future proof solution for keeping all my information that I gathered in the last few years. Below you’ll get a succinct account of what I had to do.

continue reading…

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

This morning I got the news that Google will close many services. The one that affected me was Google Notebook. I had a lot of information in it and even if Google says that I can still use it and add information to the notebooks, I do not feel at ease with that. So, I decided to  export all the information out of Google Notebook and import it in Scrapbook . I don’t think is the best option, but I know the information is on my hard drive. The export was relatively easy to do, and once the export was finished I realized that the amount of information that I have on Google servers was minuscule (less than 70 MB archived).

For the moment this service closing is just a minor annoyance, but should be an alarm signal. Trust is something that is very difficult to build and very easy to loose. Probably in the higher levels of Google hierarchy they decided that the amount of information that the users are storing in the notebooks does not improve the relevance of the adverts served to those users in Gmail or in the Google search pages. So they decided that Notebook is not needed for their plans. Once Google chooses to close some services, it’s obvious that if the situation is going to be even worst they could choose to close other services. I know the service was free, but I would have like to have a better export option at least.

On the other hand something else to take in the account. Because Microsoft is making a lot of money with their offline software (Server, Windows, Office and so on) they can afford to loose some money with the online division, so they are able to still offer a lot of things for free. The most interesting to me is the 25GB Skydrive storage space. I start uploading some non vital files for testing purposes and it seems to work pretty well. Once Microsoft announced this some months ago, I expected that Google will match this, but nothing happened. This was my first alarm signal that maybe not everything is nice and dandy in the Googleplex.

Now I am looking for an offline RSS reader that would match Google Reader capabilities and if I will find one, then Gmail is the last thing that still has me linked to Google Services.

I know I can replace Analytics and Feedburner anytime with other options for skunkworks.ro

It appears that all good things are coming to an end. And I am sure now that in the next months a lot of free services from other Web 2.0 companies will dissapear. Probably is best to start thinking offline software again and somehow find the means to maintain the collaboration level and community feeling that the Web 2.0 services are offering

Some time late last year I’ve realized I do not have enough time to browse through all the information available to me in my Google Reader setup. I was getting anything from 500 to 1000 posts each day. I had a hierarchy of folders based on my interests, folders like gadgets, blogs, Romania, politics, news and so on. I was planning to use the AideRSS Firefox extension but until December 2008 they had performance problems. The long story short, I was getting overwhelmed with the amount of information available and I wasn’t able to actually process the information and derive knowledge out of it.
So I’ve took a step back and over a few days of browsing I’ve changed the folders to Daily, Weekly, Monthly, SomeTime, Podcasts . I put in each folders the feeds based on my reading habits and the importance of getting the information in a time. For the Weekly, Monthly, Sometime the AideRSS is displaying only the great posts. Now I am going to Google Reader only once per day in the evening during the working days for at most 30 minutes and read only the Daily folder. At weekend I spend maybe 1 hour reading the Weekly and Daily folder, and once a month I will spend another extra 2 hours for reading the Monthly and SomeTime folders.
For the moment the only issue I have is the fact that for the the Digg and Reddit feed, the AideRSS extension is not working properly. And these 2 feeds are having the worst signal to noise ratio from all the feeds I read.

Today I installed the out of beta Google Chrome to see if they improved since I’ve looked at the software. It seems to me that Google Chrome is in a worse state than before. continue reading…

Last week, I used GMail from a computer that allowed all the adverts from Google. So I’ve read around 50 emails which exposed me to maybe 250 adverts. To my surprise I ended up clicking on probably 15 links that were interesting to me. The interesting bit is that the links were not related to the content of the email, but somehow the datamining that Google does, payed off because the links were interesting to me. After around 3 years of using Gmail, Google Reader and all the other services it seems that I am a very open book to them. I was trying to anonymize my broswer habits using different Firefox extensions but I am not sure it’s worth the effort anymore. As long as I am using Google Reader and Notebook, I have a cookie from Google for as long as the session is open. For the time being the cookie is sweet and I will enable the adverts in Gmail. I am not sure if in the long run I am at ease with this “lack of privacy”. I know it was my choice and in my case an educated one.