Sonos vs Squeezebox

Asides

I few of my friends (including Om) are crazy about the Sonos, but I’ve been a Squeezebox user for 6+ years now and have stuck with them through a few upgrades and the acquisition by Logitech. Some of their new products like the Squeezebox Radio are super-handy, I like that the whole thing works over my Wifi network, and it runs Open Source server software. (I used to run it on a Linux box, now on a Mac.) That said, the software has always felt clunky to me, the lack of a good iPhone client is annoying, and the multi-room sync is temperamental. They also seem to have stagnated under Logitech, for example the Radio is cool but the battery for it (which is half the sell) doesn’t come out until April, and costs another $50 — lame. Has anyone used both Squeeze devices and Sonos and have a preference?

Bangkok Unrest

Asides,

In celebration of my arrival in Bangkok the opposition party is apparently planning a million person “red shirt” rally. Exciting! On the bright side, “The UDD [United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship] can only afford to keep its protest going for three to five days. If the government has not fallen by that time, it will have to withdraw and draw up a new strategy.” I always pick the best times to travel. 🙂 (Mom, don’t worry. I’ll stay safe!)

Back to Firefox

Asides, ,

After a good while (I can’t search my Twitter stream) on Chrome I’m switching back to Firefox as my primary browser, and actually uninstalled Chrome. Why? I was getting the “Oh snap” failure page all the time, even on Google’s own Youtube! The only support I was pointed to was this page, and when I followed the instructions there when I restarted Chrome everything was gone. The sentence “copy the relevant files from the “Backup User Data” folder to your new “User Data” folder.” is useless when you consider the folder has 50+ files to sort through and I wasn’t sure which one was causing my previous problems. So back to Firefox, and thanks to Xmarks all of my stuff is there. I’m also using this persona which is pretty sweet. The feature I missed most on Chrome was lame: the ability to click and hold a folder then release on a bookmark I wanted to open. On Chrome you have to click twice. It bugged me. Now back on Firefox I feel like the browser has a large head.

IntenseDebate auto-login

Asides

WordPress.com User Accounts now auto-login to IntenseDebate blogs no matter where they’re hosted, any website in the world. Connect services like Facebook’s and Twitter’s always require at the very least a click or two, and in worst case can be a full login and several bounces to the origin site, which increases the friction of commenting and can actually decrease the number of comments you get. (Oh noes!) This is much smoother, and faster. Previously this was only available if you actually hosted on WP.com, now it’s for any website, anywhere.

I Miss School

Essays, Personal

Just like they say youth is wasted on the young, I think I squandered school when I was in it. The idea of having no responsibilities except general edification seems like such a luxury now. When I had it all I wanted to do was hack around on the web. Now that the vast majority of my hours are hacking around on the web, it’s a huge luxury to just sit and read for a bit.

Part of that, for me, has been learning how much I don’t know. My search for learning in the past few years is why I’ve attended so many conferences. Events are usually a terrible medium for communicating information, at least how most of them are run, and most of their value is human connections. In the past years I’ve been to a few TED-style ones that were entertaining in their fast-paced format (15-20 minutes per presentation, musical or theatrical fluff to break dense ones up) and the curiosity they sparked by nature of being short and incomplete: TEDMED and EG. The format does become tiresome and exhausting after a while though, too short, and like pizza I appreciate the talks more once they’re on TED.com. (TED has one of the best post-conference experiences, and a big inspiration for WordPress.tv. Also check out FORA.tv which also has amazing content.)

So while events are a brief hit, most of my pleasure from learning comes these days from books and highly interlinked websites. Wikipedia is the canonical example, it can be so blissful to be lost in a web of great content, like a choose-your-own-adventure of information, stumbling from link to link and always ending up someplace you didn’t expect.

I wonder if there could be some sort of metric for writing that told you the ratio of time-to-create versus time-to-consume. On Twitter it’s basically 1:1, you can craft and consume a tweet in a time measured in seconds. For this blog post, it may take me an hour to write it and 5 minutes to read (not skim) it. You can work your way all the way up through 8-10,000 word essays, and books that may take years and years (or a lifetime) to create. The higher the ratio, the more potential for learning and self-improvement. (I wonder how you would measure the Wikipedia which has taken lots of people a little time.) I could easily spend four hours a day surfing hundreds of posts in Google Reader, most of them that took a few minutes to create. It’s a sugar-rush of content that crashes after an hour or two and leaves me empty and hungry. A great novel or book feeds my soul. That’s why I love the Kindle — it has helped me read again.