Microsoft seems to be feeling some competition from Google, but Gmail Man certainly strikes a chord in light of Google’s new privacy policy (doesn’t make me want to go Office 365, though–sorry Microsoft).
“My business, your business, it’s all business.”
I came across Jaymie’s assignment yesterday, looking forlorn and neglected, and I knew I had to do something about it. I broke out the camera last night while I was cooking dinner, and here’s the result. I had originally intended to do a voiceover narration, but I came across a cool little tune on the Free Music Archive’s Tracks to Sync blog, and decided to see if I could get it down to about a minute and a half. I’ll add a tutorial in the next few days, also.
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Tagged carrots, cooking, ds106, parsnips, video, VideoAssignments, VideoAssignments274
cc licensed flickr photo shared by Ross LaRocco
I’ve used Google Voice as a voicemail service for awhile because they provide the option to email a transcript of each voicemail (they’re often bad, but usually you can get the gist of the message). I’ve been pulling back from Google, so I went back to regular voicemail from my phone carrier, which went smoothly, except that Google wouldn’t let go of the voicemail button on my phone–no matter what I did, the voicemail icon dialed my Google voice number and not my phone carrier. I could dial “1″ or “123″ to get voicemail, but the icon was stuck on Google voice. (I know, I know, first world problem.)
To fix it, I had to call tech support for my phone provider, and then had to escalate to level 2 support. There’s an over the air update that’s supposed to reset the voicemail number, but it didn’t work. Eventually, I had to take my SIM card out of my Android phone and put it in a dumbphone to recieve the update. Leaving Google: it”s not always easy.
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Tagged Android, data, dumbphone, google, privacy, Project Reclaim, voice, voicemail
As part of my transition away from gmail, I’ve been updating email addresses on the various user accounts I have spread across the web (wow! didn’t realize how many of those there are). Some sites make it easier than others, but so far the Chronicle of Higher Education has been the worst. Years ago I created an account on one of their blogs to leave a single comment. When I logged back in, the only way to change the existing information they had was to fill out a complete profile with even more information. As I’m a little skittish about data promiscuity these days, I thought, “no thanks,” and looked for a delete button. There wasn’t one, so I emailed asking to delete the account. Here’s their response:
They won’t delete an account for “security reasons”?!? Seriously? They expect me to accept that bullshit security theater excuse for hoarding my data? I left one comment on a blog–what security could be at stake? There’s a whole lot more data on me in Google’s databases, but they at least claim to be willing to delete my data.
This may be the straw that broke the camel’s back of my hope for the future. If we as a society are willing to accept “security” as an unquestionable reason for every stupid decision, what hope is there that we have the ability to ever make anything better?
On top of their new privacy policy, Google seems to have stepped up their efforts to push Chrome. Yesterday they warned that I might soon lose the ability to use Google Docs unless I “upgrade to a modern browser”:
The problem? I’m using Firefox 10.0, which was released just a couple of days ago. On top of that, now Google’s home page is trying to get me to install Chrome, too:
Google Chrome: All the better to track you with, my dear.
I started mulling this assignment over on the way home last night when I heard President Obama on the radio citing “Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.’” A troll-quote immediately sprung to mind, but mome did such a good job with the Superman/Spiderman/Iron Man mashup that I struggled for a good image. I considered using Obi-Wan Kenobi and citing Luke Skywalker (since the original verse in is in the Book of Luke), but using two characters from the same source didn’t sing to me.
In mulling things over, a line from Dune came to me, and reminded me of something Arya Stark says throughout the Song of Ice & Fire. I found an image of Arya that I liked, but I couldn’t think of a third character for attribution. I thought about Dune, and from thence to the House of Atreus–and there I got it–Electra. Citing a character from Greek mythology didn’t quite work, but using a comic-book image of Elektra with the quotation attributed to Arya Stark (which has a nice comic-book/superhero ring to it) suddenly clicked. I found an image I liked, and here we are.
Sources:
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Tagged ds106, VisualAssignments, visualassignments138, VisualAssignments24
Another potential source for tracking by Google: your DNS. If, like me, you discovered that Google’s DNS is significantly fast than your ISPs, you may be giving Google data about every website you visit. (H/T to Michael Leddy for a pointer to namebench which finds the fastest DNS for your location.)
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m trying to host my own streaming video. while it still isn’t perfect, I was making it harder than it has to be. WordPress does handle videos using the HTML5 <video> tag. So with the WordPress Android app, I either shoot a video, open WordPress and insert the video into a post, or I just open the WordPress app and press ‘Quick Video.’
For that to work, I did have to create a php.ini file (Bluehost is kind enough to provide instructions and a button in cPanel) to increase memory size and upload limits with the following settings:
For most users, that's a deal breaker, but if the administrator of a WordPress multi-site installation handles, it won't be a problem for individual bloggers.
With those settings in place, I can shoot a short video on my phone and upload to WordPress as easily as to youtube, and the video's on my own server. With the Advanced Category Excluder plugin, I can keep short videos off the front page and out of the RSS feed (H/T D'Arcy Norman), and with the WP to Twitter plugin, WordPress automatically tweets my daily update.
And it works, except for a few (minor?) problems. First, the the video window is too wide for my theme, and it looks ugly (fixable, I know). Second, the 720p video my phone shoots is too big to stream smoothly on all but the fastest of connections. The third and biggest problem, though, is that my phone records using h264, which Firefox doesn't support. Daily Updates play fine in Chrome (which does support h264), but that's a Pyrrhic victory if I'm trying to avoid Google.
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Tagged chrome, firefox, google, h264, HTML5, Project Reclaim, video
Among other things, I’m trying to find a streaming video substitute for youtube. Ideally, in the spirit of Project Reclaim, it would be self-hosted. Since I’ve got unlimited storage and bandwidth, why not?
Videopress looks interesting, and has nice features, but despite being open-source, it doesn’t look like there’s an easy way to install it on my hosting account and save video locally. Instead, it requires a $60 annual fee and a wordpress.com account to host the actual video files, with a 3 GB storage limit (expandable for a fee). Today’s daily update was 12 MB for 30 seconds; even if I only do daily updates, I’d burn up my 3 GB in less than a year. So much for videopress.
Next, I tried JW player for WordPress. It’s free, and it stores video locally. I ran into several problems with this one: first, my hosting account has a default upload limit of 10 MB, which is less than 30 seconds of video. I had several “500 Internal Server” errors trying to upload a post before I figured out it was a php error, and then had to figure out how to change the php configuration. Not for the faint of heart. After all that, the video wouldn’t stream. I’ve spent too much time futzing around already; so much for JW player.
Finally, I’ve installed All-in-one video pack from Kaltura. It’s open source, and it’s free, both plusses. On the other hand, my video isn’t hosted on my site (it’s not entirely clear where it goes–somewhere on one of Kaltura’s servers) and the video resolution isn’t great. But the biggest feature: it works without configuration or futzing around on my part. It doesn’t seem to work with the WordPress android app, though, so I don’t know that it will be a solution for posting ephemeral videos.
The search continues.
