philwilson.org

It amazes me that people who profess to be interested in conversation, in thoughts and in communities of ideas still use Disqus to host the comments on their sites. Did no-one learn the lessons of a decade ago, when we did this before?

At first blush I didn’t know what to make of Google’s new iOS and Android app, Currents, other than it is an almost infinitely better way to consume The Guardian than their own Android app.

After a few hours I’ve got a much better idea, and broadly, I’m not impressed. No URLs, No view-source and half the content I’ve read seems to be partial with a link through to the source website, but within the app so still no URLs or view-source. Very unsatisfactory.

When the iPad came out it got slated for being a consumption device and nothing more. That’s been shown to be false, but Currents takes that thought and runs with it. It’s the antithesis of what reading on the web should be about.

I think I would pay good money for a downloadable version of Huey Morgan’s 6Music Sunday show without the news/audience participation etc.

The Kindle Touch 3G is the only new Kindle with 3G available and you won’t be able to access anything except the Kindle Store and Wikipedia with it.

My Kindle Keyboard has 3G and I’ve used it, in the case of flat-phone-battery-syndrome, when out and about, to send emails to my family to let them know where I am, that I’m goin to be late, and more. I’ve used it to go on Facebook, and to read Hacker News (via http://ihackernews.com/). I think that yes, OK, it’s a shame that the absence of wikitravel means that this xkcd is no longer accurate, but the loss is greater than that – having such a cheap device with unfettered access to the internet is A Good Thing – I guess Amazon decided the bills just weren’t worth it.

So, I’m in on that whole Google+ thing, and my experiences of 2007 are coming back to haunt me. It’s like some kind of existential self-doubt: if my social network accounts are shut down, was I ever there? Did I ever have those memories? Did people reply to me in the way I remember? Are my social connections in the state I think they are?

On a more practical note, at least now all of my photos (which go to both Facebook and Flickr and now Plus depending on topic) are all backed up at an off-site location. The same can’t be said for the Facebook wall posts, although I do use the "Download your information" feature to take infrequent data dumps. Twitter is pretty much dead to me, so although I have historical backups, I’m don’t plan on taking any more.

Related to all this, I feel sad that my son will likely grow up in a world where licensing content will be more normal than owning it, which reminds me of this story.

September 2008:

I look forward to the first Linux build which runs Chrome as its window manager.

Whilst I’m thinking about all these different topics that I’m interested in, can anyone help? I’m in the market for a new desktop note-taking tool. It must start up in <3 seconds and save each note as a standalone text file, using some form of text-based notation (like wiki, textile or markdown).

If that didn’t eliminate enough options straight away, it would ideally auto-save every few seconds and allow tree-based note hierarchy. A couple of tools have come close over the years, such as WikidPad, Zim and KeepNote, but none have quite hit that sweet spot.

So, any suggestions? I am willing to pay!

Pete has some good advice for writing a blog that lasts: Keep Posting.

I should post more, but I’m frequently paralysed by choice. I’m a software dev manager, so I’m interested in down-in-the-mud-coding, software quality, personal and team productivity, agile techniques, web analytics, business value and return on investment.

That’s not to mention the fact that my two-year-old is finally sleeping at night and I’m starting to pick up videogaming again (did I mention I have a 3DS so that I can finally complete Ocarina of Time? The console is physically delightful and OoT:3DS is the best version Nintendo have made of possibly the best videogame ever).

Also: Kindles, tablets, portable computing, mobile apps vs. web. Someone at work described me as ‘decisive, but easily distracted’. I like to know about everything; frequently, this doesn’t leave time for writing about anything.

I work in Higher Education in the UK.

Every day I see enterprisey systems which are awful, terrible, unfriendly, unusable, behemoths.

The market for each niche system is more or less a monopoly.

The market is prime for smaller, more agile, more user-friendly systems to come in and destroy them.

Please, somebody just kill off these dinosaurs.

Seth Godin wrote an interesting piece about libraries recently, and it rang true with me. I’m reading more than ever, but I wouldn’t even bother asking a librarian what I should read next.

Public librarians today seem to act more like sentinels of dead-tree collections. They own the data, they tidy the shelves and care for the books but when they want a recommendation, they use goodreads.com or amazon like the rest of us. Knowledge is a handwave at the encyclopedias in the corner or the ancient pcs lined against the wall. As much as bookshops are suffering from their failed attempts to get into multimedia and from publishers not understanding how people buy books, their staff are still typically enthusiastic, informed book-lovers, able to make a recommendation professionally rather than only knowing the authors they’ve read.

This is a generalisation of course, but it is at least anecdotally true. My region’s library website is librarieswest.org.uk and despite knowing which books I get out, my wife gets and what we get for our son, it makes no recommendations. Just like its meatspace equivalent.