Our recent conversation on buying a computer made me repeat a mantra I use
whenever asked what to buy for a camera, phone, TV, computer and so on: Its
The Digital Ecology that matters: what do you do, how does your work/life
flow work, what do you care about in terms of these devices. How do they
interact.
I'm often met with skepticism: you cant mean that, your a mac fan-boy,
right? Well, yeah we have a lot of Unix around .. er Mac OS X. But I
mean a lot more than that.
But when asked a year or so ago about getting a computer, my advice was:
Mine would be to consider your entire ecology of computational devices:
Phones, Cameras, Desktops, Servers/Hosting, Web Services (Google Mail, Cal,
Docs), and see them as a whole. Then see if a change or two makes sense in
this larger whole.
I'd like all of us to appreciate just how rich our digital lives are, how
full our DE's are.
So I just sat down for <15 minutes typing as fast as I could think about
just what our DE includes. And I bet I'm only fairly standard user. Most
folks that I know use 10x the apps that I do.
So here's what it looks like with LOTS left out, I'm sure. Let me know
what I've forgotten and what you use.
-- Owen
Digital Ecology:
In terms of "computers", our house has 3 laptops (2 MB, 1 MBA), and a
server (Mac mini) which also acts as a desktop.
Our network is 5Gb/s wifi dual radio (guest and home networks) making
in-house backups, media sharing, file sharing, screen sharing fairly
simple. For example, my server's screen is available to all the laptops,
letting me "administer" its tasks easily (VNC).
We also use ethernet-over-powerline for our TV which has no easy way to put
it on the wifi network. The mini has recently started using an ethernet
rather than wifi connection to our wifi base station.
That is because I've recently lost a backup disk, our Time Machine (Mac
versioned backups .. "wayback" access to every version of a file during its
life). This prompted me to buy a NAS RAID (Network Attached Storage;
Redundant Array of Independent Disks) box for $200 with two 2TB SATA server
grade disks. Total $400 for very reliable in-house storage.
The NAZ as we like to call it is busy 24/7. I certainly hope the disks are
as good as advertised! 2 TB (4TB RAID'ed) is really not as huge as it
might seem. It, being a Linux box, can run a seriously wonderful
Transmission torrent web UI, making all the computers in the house able to
mange media, see below.
We watch TV. Never "live". This has gotten me involved with Torrents
which give us access to great video archives: Downton Abbey, Boston Legal,
Get Smart, Legend, Mission Impossible, Numb3rs, Secret/Danger Man are our
current dramas. We also use a TiVo for timeshifting current TV shows,
mainly ESPN daily sports and talking heads (PTI, Arround the Horn, NFL32),
The Chew, Sherlock, this year's Downton Abbey, Eureka, etc.
The TV is feed from cable and the Mac mini. The latter via a Python
pyTiVoX server which transcodes and uploads the torrents to the TiVo. We
also have an Apple TV hooked up to the TV for photos, music, and media.
Both the TV and mini have UPS power protection (Uninterrupted Power
Supply), basically enough battery to coast through power surges and be a
gentle let-down in case of longer power outage.
Dropbox is used on all but one of the computers, making internet backup
natural. It provides a folder that is constantly sync'ed between computers
.. and phones and tablets. Arq is now used to backup onto AWS S3 for
"archival" media such as our picture collection.
Mobile devices include GSM capable iPads and iPhones (GSM for travel and
SIMs). The iPad (Dede's) having cellular networking has been quite useful
in Italy. Most mobile devices have kindle apps .. and we have a 1st gen
kindle which still gets used due to its hugely long batter lifetime and
internal cellular network.
Dede lately bought a wireless phone system (VTech) which allows bluetooth
access to our cell phones. Thus when we get a cell phone call, our house
phones can answer the call. It has the ability to download our contact
lists, both Google and Mac and "speaks" the caller's name receiving a call.
Our cloud usage is primarily for music (iTunes match) and photos (AWS), as
well as Google docs (Google Drive). But now it is also being an archival
backup (for photos now) and likely more in the future. And Dropbox is just
amazing for having all your daily files everywhere.
Chrome is part of this as well. It's sync features have made it possible
to have my three systems be identical.
Recent android/ios apps have started invading my old Taurus car. Stitcher,
a mobile app, makes any podcast available trivially w/o docking with
computers .. its all internet based. So while driving, I listen to the
usual news programs, as well as 4 italian news shows .. all piped via the
phone into the car's radio.
Books are really getting into the act lately. Tech books, which grow out
of date quickly, are entirely digital, via OReilly and a host of other
digital publishers who provide not only the book (.mobi, .epub, .apk,
.pdf), but periodic updates with each new "printing". This has made reader
apps important on the iPads.
Skype is important as well, we take weekly Italian classes with our
teachers in Italy. Naturally its used for "business" as well.
GitHub has started to be an important collaboration with us .. working with
SimTable, Redfsih and Northwestern University on AgentScript, a JavaScript
Everywhere approach to Agent Based Modeling.
https://github.com/backspaces/agentscript
Git has been quite a surprise, being very effective as a local versioned
file system and a remote repository for collaboration.
A TextDrive/Joyent web host provides blog and file sharing, and a good
developer site for trying new Javascript technologies. It's login is
completely public key cryptology thus avoiding password exposure. Ditto
for the local mini so that it can be accessed from the internet w/o
passwords, only keys.
Our name services and registrars (NameCheap/RegisterGo/Joyent) let us use "
backspaces.net" even though we're using cybermesa and gmail for mail and a
variety of services for other backspaces branded access. Having our own
name makes changes in ISPs etc transparent.
OSX has been a nice surprise. It comes with ruby, python, c/c++, /usr/bin,
bash, /usr/local all built in along with Apache for local web use. It is
trivial to have a node.js server, a command-line JavaScript/CoffeeScript
shell. I may be extreme, but my bashrc/profile has over 100 custom
commands:
Home|~/ebooks[713]: typeset -f | grep '()' | wc
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