OK.. this one got lost in the slush pile...
I know the thread went stale, but it intrigued me (obviously)!
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Digital Ecology
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2013 18:03:08 -0700
From: Steve Smith <[email protected]>
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]>
Owen -
My digital ecology is more of a digital *swamp*... A seething mass of
digital and analog creatures feeding off of one another, planting roots
in eachother's bodies, twining about eachother in search of the light
filtering down from the tangled canopy.
Radios/Miasma:
I inventoried the *digital radios* in my swamp recently and was appalled
by how much chatter is going on around me in the 802.11, Bluetooth and
GSM space. I wish I had an RF power meter/spectrum analyzer to make it
more real to me. At any time, a full 7 802.11 radios are buzzing in
phones, laptops, all-in-one computer and routers and about 5 Bluetooth
devices, and a couple of GSM radios in 900 and 1800 are talking through
and around a bidirectional RF amp (cell booster). There are also a
handful of landline handsets and a pair of wireless weather devices
chattering as well. On a bad day, I may have as many as 2-3 extra
802.11 *devices* and 8 MyFi SD cards shooting data over my WiLAN. So
like 20-30 radios all talking over and through each other.
Fanboi:
I live in a swamp dominated by Apple products... yes, I *am* a
Fanboi... I've been a full-up fan since OSX. Born and bred to Unix
(BSD Style), I was a fan of SunOS, AIX, Mach, IRIX, before Linux came
up. The only Unix derived OS I was never too impressed with was
WindowsNT... go figure.
(semi)Mobile:
I carry my phone nearly everywhere (spectacles, testicles, wallet,
keys, phone, pocket knife, change, belt, corkscrew, etc.) and my laptop
nearly as many places... my wife has a matching laptop (3 year old
MacBook Pro) and phone (iPhone4s), making it easier for me to be her
tech support. She also has a tablet and we have a "media" all-in-one (8
year old iMac still going strong) computer sitting within view of the
kitchen, dining, living areas (with a little rotation). All of these
are Apple products. I am a fanboi when it comes to keeping my wife
happy and having consumer-grade electronics that work without much ado.
The Apple "ecology" works pretty well for us.
Center does not hold:
The hub (if a swamp can be said to have a center) for all this is a 2 TB
Apple Time Capsule with a couple of extra TB disks hanging off of it, a
Linksys router, and two HP all-in-one printer-scanners, one with it's
own WiFi. I also carry about with me several .5-2TB USB drives and a
small handful of USB memory sticks as well as a similar handful of SD
cards (including 8 with built-in WiFi).
Cloud:
I maintain several websites on a single ISP in ABQ (Southwest Cyberport)
and use Blogger and Flickr for other content in "the cloud". My
router(s) are connected to the big world via a Motorola 900Mhz "Canopy"
directional network run by San Ildefonso Pueblo's "Tewacom".
Heavy Lifting:
My work (home office) computers include the aforementioned laptop, and
two hot dual-boot PCs (Debian/XP and Scientific Linux/Win7) with onboard
RAID. I access (from time to time) one or more very dense clusters of
CPUs and GPUs housed with a collaborator in ABQ. These change
configuration almost weekly, but often include up to a dozen backplanes
and over 100 cpus and several dozen GPUs. They run Scientific Linux.
It sux enough to try to keep the two home-office systems stable and I'm
thankful to have a system someone else manages.
Digital Imaging:
My personal photography is mostly done by iPhone4, backed up by my
professional Canon DSLR. My professional work in imaging ranges across
many devices starting with The DSLR but also including an array of
hacked Canon point-n-shoots (thanks to Tony Giancola) and an array of 32
(now antique, 1.5" block) Sony video cameras.
I have 5 digital projectors which I use from time to time (not including
the myriad ones in my alternate work locations)... a pico, two minis, a
short throw 3D, an antique Sharp the size of a .50 cal (wait, it isn't
digital on the outside, just on the inside).
In the scrapyard abutted to the swamp I have a gutted Macbook Pro (donor
for the 2 my wife and I use daily), 3 gutted/broken iPhone2 and 3,
several old school dumb cellphones, a 12 Macbook , several deprecated
Linux PC towers, an Apple Cube, and a whole line of Macs of my wife's
Macs going back to a 512 and an SE she got in 1985 and 1987, not to
mention her first computer, an IBM XT with a Targa graphics board and
Wacom Tablet. I think that first one cost more than any other computer
she has had to date.
Adjoining Lagoons:
This doesn't even include the fact that sometimes I interface the
various computers in my Nissan Truck, and my wife's Honda Insight to
read out the diagnostics. I also have a several Arduinos to drive
stepper motors and control cameras. My oscilliscope and multimeters
are not digital but I sometimes use the Arduinos to snag their output or
drive them in unusual ways, extending my digital swamp upriver into the
analog swamp I lived in before I floated downstream (in the last 5-10
years, depending) to a very very digital swamp. I haven't cracked the
case on my wireless thermometers yet... but I have imagined that the
(analog) control systems in my home solar systems deserve an upgrade to
zigbee or ???... my swamp will be buzzing with fireflies and cicadas!
Ambient:
If Stephen and I have our way, every light fixture in the house will
have an IP or BT address and every .5 sq mm on all walls will be
pixel-addessable with light. Will I saturate the swampy aether miasma
with yet-more WiFi or BT or push it all by ethernet over AC or replace
my AC star network with a bus DC (power over hdmi?) network... gah!
Makes me want to wear a tinfoil hat with a long ground strap to a copper
stake in the ground! OK... Glen wins, I *am* my technology! Geeze,
what a sad awareness.
- Swamp Thing
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 <http://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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