Category: Computing

Instagone

Stops Here

You’ve all heard the news about Instagram, that they’re about to set loose some particularly nasty licence conditions. Many of the users are up in arms, and so they should be.

I’m not surprised. Facebook bought them. Mark Zuckerberg and I don’t share the same view on data privacy. He has what one might call “progressive views”. I stopped using Instagram, sadly, when Facebook bought them. I’ve since started using Facebook again. Hypocrite? No. I just made a simple adjustment. I now behave as if Facebook was a public arena. I post nothing, and say nothing, that I wouldn’t want my worst enemies to repeat.

With the news on the licence terms changing for Instagram, and with the recent improvement of the iPhone Flickr app (it’s not great, but it’s usable), I decided to take some conclusive steps.

  • I used instaport.me to download all my Instagram pics as a .zip file. This didn’t take long.
  • I uploaded the files to my Amazon S3 repository for long-term safekeeping.
  • I backed up my files locally.
  • I backed the files up to the cloud via CrashPlan.
  • I uploaded all my photos to Flickr and started to rename them.
  • I deleted my Instagram account, permanently.

You can find my photos here:

And my Flickr profile here:

Goodbye to an Old Friend

 

Screen Shot 2012 12 08 at 11 54

I’ve finally had it with Simplenote sync. 

I’ve been using Simplenote for several years, and have gladly paid the subscription fee for the Pro version two years running. At $19.99 a year, that’s a lot to pay for an app that doesn’t provide much that the likes of IA Writer doesn’t. The latter doesn’t feature tags, or the brilliant search mechanism that Notational Velocity on the Mac made so popular, but that’s fine. I can still use Notational Velocity with Dropbox sync.

The great thing about Simplenote sync was that it was instant. If you think Dropbox is fast, you haven’t experienced the wonder of making a change on a Mac and knowing that the changes are already on your handheld before you’ve had a chance to pick it up to check.

Right now I’m sitting through a Simlpenote Dropbox duplication sync and watching duplicates of files appear over and over. NVAlt, a popular fork of Notational Velocity, also seems to be having problems with Simplenote sync of late and I think Brett Terpstra has pretty much given up on it. When Michael Schechter of A Better Mess wrote this, I decided to clip it and come back to it later to finally kick the Simplenote habit, which I did today.

Of course, given my “one-more-go” nature, I decided I’d have another look at the Simplenote Dropbox sync to see if I could get it to work. I copied my notes into a new Dropbox folder, pointed Simplenote at it and watched as it duplicated everything religiously and I got notification after notification of files being added to Dropbox. Enough is enough.

So, given the issues with the sync, and given that this was the only real benefit of Simplenote, and despite the fact that my subscription is paid until august 2013, I’m going to have to say a sad goodbye to the longest lived piece of 3rd party software on my iPhone.

A Bicycle for the Mind

Whenever I sit in front of my Mac, I am almost overwhelmed by possibility.

I feel like a caveman sat in the pilot’s seat of a Cessna. In the air. I practically shriek with delight at every magical, cool, amazing, distracting thing that is happening, scarcely able to grasp why what is happening, is happening.

I feel like the whole history of the world has happened in the last 30 years, since the day I put my first game up for sale, and I have been unable to grasp it all, to understand it all, to absorb it all. A century ago, nobody would have read more than the content of a Sunday newspaper in their entire lives. Now I feel like I’m drinking the Niagara Falls.

Jobs said that the computer is like a bicycle for the mind. Yes, it is, but I have a bicycle and it sits on a turbo trainer unused. I spin it from time to time, but have never got anything like what I should have out of it. It’s the same for computing. I feel so limited in the face of the three-orders-of-magnitude jump in power in my working life.

I have several computers, and every time I sit in front of one of them, I feel overwhelmed by all that I could have accomplished using one. A computer is the means of production. I can produce anything. Can.

My desire to produce, to create, to inspire, to reach out, to engage, overwhelms me, but I am still somehow riding in this barrel across the rapids and haven’t hit a rock yet.

I’ve worked on over a hundred games directly, have written untold articles, have composed so much music that is now forgotten, have made websites, have even exposed a cult, but I feel that my consciousness, the consciousness of untold others is straining to expand to the next level to accommodate the unbounded possibility that still abounds.