A thought just occurred to me….. That is a surprisingly pleasant experience… When a thought occurs I consider if I should tweet it…. sometimes I do. Sometimes though the thought is hard to express in 140 characters… maybe I should blog about it…. maybe I should flesh it out some more…. and then ir normally dies – blog post never written… So today I am starting on a concerted mission to blog more regularly – but in a shorter, less well formed format…. At least then it might get done!

Just a quick note in case anyone else finds themselves in the same position.

I have just recently set up the excellent Sublime Text 2. One of the appeals of using this editor was sharing the one set-up across my Windows desktop, my Macbook Pro and the various Ubuntu virtual machines that I run in Virtualbox.

All was going swimmingly until I tried to set a convenient font size. The font size that looked right on the Linux guest (on the Macbook Pro) looked too small on the Macbook. To cut a long story short – I found no great answer. 

In this configuration the difference was caused by a different dpi setting for the two systems. The native Mac was working with a 72dpi, and the Ubuntu virtualbox was working with 96dpi. There didn’t seem to be any way to dpi setting for Ubuntu. The closest I got was change the text scaling factor as so:

 gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor X

I tried setting X to 0.75 (75dpi / 96dpi). This made all of the system fonts smaller. So then I was able to set larger system fonts on the Ubuntu guest that looked about the same size as they did on the Macbook Pro host – for most applications. (e.g. Terminal and gEdit.) However for some unknown reason, Sublime Text 2 did not seem to recognise this change in any way. (I am guessing this is because I did not acutally change the dpi in the Ubuntu vm – just changed the text scaling… and Sublime Text must be referencing the dpi in some way.)

So where I am at now is setting the text-scaling-factor back to 1 (so that within Ubuntu, font sizes with Sublime and other apps are aligned) – and having to manually change (increase) font size whenever I switch to editing within OS X.

So if anyone reads this after spending an hour or two looking for a solution…. feel consoled that you are not alone.

And if you happen to know a better answer – I would really like to know it.

Lots of people seem to worry about being profiled by their use of the ‘net. ‘Big data’ is coming to analyse your every click, tweet and post for someone else’s benefit. This is captured in the ‘if you are not paying, you are the product’ soundbite that reverberates around the internet.

Some people obviously go to great extremes to maintain their anonymity online – but it seems pretty hard to do this without losing some value. (I am not going to get a huge amount of value from Facebook if I don’t have an account – and log in occasionally.) 

So if we must leave a trail of data behind us on the internet I wonder if it is possible to leave a trail that is so full of noise that it is essentially useless for profiling? In engineer-speak – can enough artificial ‘noise’ be added to my online activities so as to make the signal difficult for these algorithms to extract. In the case of Google Search for example, would a computer issuing fake queries on a massive range of topics be able to limit Google’s ability to identify the ‘real’ queries. 

Probably just hair-brained idea with no practicality – but it is sort of interesting to imagine what would happen. This thinking has been inspired by the recent Twitter vs app.net dichotomy that has already had too much said about it… The choice that is being portrayed is between an organisation that will make decisions in the best interests of advertisers, vs an organised that has promised to do it differently. But if I always retained control of my data – then I would not have to rely on promises…

In all the hoopla about Twitter’s continual clamp down on the use of its API (including by such people as Dalton Caldwell, Fred Wilson and I am sure many others) there has been much debate about ad supported vs paid services. There has also been some debate about developing competitive alternatives to Twitter, including Dalton Caldwell’s app.net and proposals to build upon existing open protocols (such as by Dave Winer).

My less than 2c contribution to this discussion is to wonder aloud about the market dynamics of ‘social media’/’user generated’ content sites. What is it about these ‘new media’ that seems to promote a ‘winner takes all’ dynamic. How many ‘twitter copycats’ are there? Yet ‘conventional media’ has many competitors… say mainstream daily print newspapers supported many competitors vying for ad dollars and customer dollars simultaneously. In this analogy I don’t see Facebook and Twitter as competitors… Twitter is like the daily news compared the the ‘weekly glossy’ of Facebook.

The relatively high switching cost (setting up accounts, finding people to follow and so on) compared to traditional media (buying a different newspaper, or flicking channels on a remote) seem to be pretty key to me. All of which brings an example that will be familiar to anyone with the slightest notion of Eric Ries and the Lean Startup ‘thing’ – and that example is IM. Eric often talks about his experience building on top of existing IM networks only to discover that his customers actually preferred to have multiple networks managed by an ‘all-in-one’ client.

Will we get such all-in-one clients? It is quite likely that these will be on Twitter’s hit-list in terms of any API crackdown. But without this, it would seem we will be limited to ‘one provider per media’. And replacing the incumbents is a lot bigger ask than simply providing a competitive alternative.

I found something very useful for me today that I only just discovered: Google Search settings.

On the Google search results page (not the home page) there is a little gear icon in the top right that lets you change some search settings. There are a few handy ones in there – but there was one real eye-opener for me: “Where Results Open”. When this is selected – if you click on a google search result it opens in a new window/tab – instead of the current one. This might sound trivial – but it will save me countless Right-click…. Open as New Tab operations!!

I have been on a bit of an ‘extended rant’ lately about the internet…. how it is not useful to me, how SEO sites suck, and so on. And then I came across this post about manufacturing desire on the internet. 

As I read it – it dawned on me that large amounts of the internet were now focussed on establishing this ‘desire engine’ to generate clicks and pageviews and ‘minutes spent on-line’. The ‘dopamine rush’ helps explain the hours and hours of my life wasted on the internet.

I started to think of other ‘engine of desire’ based industries. You may argue that at some level all consumer industries do this. Apple creates huge amounts of desire for its products, exclusive fashion brands can (so I am told) create great desire for their products. However the consumer pricing makes these industries somewhat supply limited. Apple products and exclusive fashion items cost hundreds of dollars, and their ‘exclusivity’ helps add to the desire.

However there are other industries, that are built on tapping into this ‘engine of desire’ for which supply is not limited. Poker machines at $1 a go are a ‘classic’ example. The desire engine as described in essentially creating addictive behaviours and these examples can be extended to other industries based on addiction where supply exceeds demand…. smoking, alcohol, fast foods to name a few

And then it struck me that all of the examples have extensive public policies designed to support consumers in managing and limiting their behaviours. From labelling the fat and sugar content of foods, to public education programs, to ‘supply limits’ on cigarettes and alcohol (taxes and point of sale restrictions).

Yet the internet has an almost infinite supply of sites either deliberately or inadvertently designed to trigger dopamine-rushes and addictive behaviours? Can we really expect people to place effective limits on these tactics through sheer will-power alone?

Dear Sarah Lacy

I, like many readers, have watched from the sidelines as the tech blogging world tries to eat itself. I don’t mind a bit of ‘personal character’ in my tech news – and so whilst these shenanigans are a sideline to my tech news – I don’t mind too much. What I really like though – is when this turmoil leads to innovation – and that, Sarah, brings me to the point of this post.

I want to congratulate you on trying to do something a little bit different with PandoDaily. I really would like to see this succeed. I like the idea that I can get a one paragraph take on current news, and then link to the full thing if I am still interested. But for the love of all that is good and right – can you please speed up your site? I mostly visit PandoDaily on my mobile device. It is part of my daily tech news reading. But it is so SLOW. It takes forever to load. It may possibly be the slowest loading thing in my daily feed (although it may just seem this way because I go to it many times). And unless it gets a lot faster I am sadly going to have to remove Pando from my daily feed.

You will probably never see this post, I really just wrote it to assuage my own ‘guilt’ at the thought of removing Pando. I love seeing innovation. I love seeing new things tried… and I like it even more when they seem as though they could be very useful to me. So I really want to support PandoDaily, I really want it to change the way I get my tech news… but it needs to load super fast on my mobile browser. It.Just.Has.To. 

Regards

The other day I deliberately changed my morning routine. I drank my morning coffee away from my computer – where I could sit and think. Sure enough a thought descended upon me…. “the internet is no longer useful to me”. This was both obvious, and a little bit disturbing at the same time. The more I have thought about it since the tru-er it has seemed.

Sure there are plenty of sites that are useful to me – but the internet itself – that random collection of things all hyperlinked together in an organic web used to be valuable. For almost any topic you could spend half an hour on ‘the internet’ and it would be hugely productive. Without trying too hard you would have a mix of current ideas linking to reference information, resources linking to resources that you could actually use – and even bookmark! At the end of the half an hour it would feel like ‘time well spent’. Greater use of the internet seemed to correlate with greater productivity (at least subjectively). Today, that is no longer the case. Every extra minute spent ‘just browsing’ the internet feels like another minute wasted.

So yes – I still use and need many sites on the internet for many things. But ‘the internet itself’ is no longer useful to me…