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.”
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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Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Android, data, dumbphone, google, privacy, Project Reclaim, voice, voicemail
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.
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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Posted in Uncategorized
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.
cc licensed flickr photo shared by dmixo6
As I’ve said elsewhere, Google’s new privacy policy gives me the creeps. I’m also surprised how much I’ve let my digital identity be subsumed by Google. As a result, I’m considering whether I can get by without Google. Even making an exception for the search engine, it looks like closing out my Google account will be challenging. (To be fair, Google does provide a way to get data out and they do have an option to delete your account.)
Email was relatively easy–I’ve got a hosting account already, so I just added an email account. A few emails to contacts with my new address, and a few hours changing email addresses for online accounts, and I should be free of Gmail well before March 1.
The real challenge is going to be my Android phone. I wiped the user data this weekend and re-flashed the ROM, so that my phone is no longer connected to my Google account. Although Android asks you to login to your Google account at setup, the phone will operate without doing so–at the cost of reduced functionality. The first challenge is apps: you can’t get into the Android Market without logging in to Google. My first mistake was backing up only my paid apps (with Titanium Backup) before reflashing–if I’d flashed them all, I wouldn’t have needed the Market so soon.
I did find several options. First, repositories of open-source Android apps: F-droid had several useful apps, and there’s also A-opensource. Next, alternate app stores: Slide me is one option, but what I’ve used most so far is Amazon’s app store. Sure, now Amazon’s tracking my Android purchases (and their labor policies are pretty atrocious), but they don’t track nearly as much of my data as Google. The Amazon store doesn’t have as many apps as Google’s, but it has a good selection (including K9 mail, which is far superior to the native Android mail app for using IMAP mail, and gStrings).
The next real challenge is a calendar, which I haven’t quite worked out yet.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Amazon, Android, data liberation, f-Droid, google, privacy
I’ve been using Google voice to get email transcripts of voicemail messages, and maybe it’s the southern accent of most of the people who leave me messages, but the transcripts leave something to be desired. Here’s the latest transcript, apparently a ransom message from kidnappers:
“Hi Ted, this is Rachel, I unfortunately I was calling show that we have your parents if you have any questions just give us, call us in touch soon bye bye freak out. Thank you.”
Oops, maybe that was just the jewelers telling me my watch was fixed.
