Stalled

In parts one and two of this small series I tried to repair my childhood Commodore 64.

I've tried a lot since my last post and completely botched it, so all-in-all I'm feeling pretty confident in myself and happy with my progress.

Testing, testing

Step one was to try the test cartridge when it arrived. Plugging it in I got a completely different unique garbage pattern, and a green border instead of the usual blue. This said to me that parts of the test cartridge were working, but that something NOT tested by the cart was to blame for the garbled pattern. A bit of research suggested the logic chip can sometimes output this sort of nonsense, although I was unable to find any pictures showing either of the issues I've experienced. I ordered a new 74LS373 logic chip and a backup 8500 CPU just in case, and sat quietly in the corner of the room for them to arrive.

I'm not equipped for this

The new chips arrived - and as the CPU I have is socketed - it was a quick job to see if the new 8500 would help. It did not. The logic chip was not socketed, and so I made a trip to Jaycar for one so I could start the process of making the whole board more easy to use for testing chips.

I did not spend the money on a desoldering gun, and soon regretted it. I was not enjoying it, but I was at least making progress until the final pin of the old logic chip didn't de-solder the whole way and pulled up the trace on the board all the way back to the previous thru-hole.

I tracked back to Jaycar and purchased some silver trace paint and some wire. The trace paint was a waste of time (although I could have been doing it wrong), so I'm glad I picked up some wire while I was there. Then I installed the socket and tried to hard-wire the pin on the broken trace back to where it needed to be.

One, Two, Three

My attempts had made things worse. With the new logic chip in place in the socket and my gross wiring, the display now cuts in and out. Mostly out. The crazy patterns are still there too, making it clear the logic chip was not the culprit so I also shoddily removed a potentially working logic chip. Finally, I thought it might have simply been a dodgy soldering job, so I rechecked my work, and in the process learned my soldering iron might be too hot for this sort of work, and I've melted parts of the socket and I'm worried I've damaged the PCB even further.

Time to give up

At this point I was ready to pack it in. Deep down I'm not ready to stop, but I reached the limits of my knowledge about three steps ago, and have little to show for it. I reached out to friends who gave me some further advice, but I thought I'd sit on if for a while and try to decide the next best steps.

Fortunately I may have some better news for the next post in this series.

40-Year-Old Computers Are A Nightmare

Restoring my childhood computer is apparently going to take longer than I hoped. Restoration of a Childhood Icon Part One ended on a bit of a bummer, and (spoiler warning) this part is also not the conclusion I'm looking for.

On Mike, First of His Name's advice, I ended up purchasing a set of new capacitors and a modern PLA replacement chip from Retroleum.co.uk, then waited patiently for them to arrive.

Like Riding A Bike

In preparation, I'd asked for a soldering iron for my birthday, and also grabbed myself some supplies so I could dredge my rusty soldering skills out of their 30 year hiatus.

With solder in hand, and solder sucker in... also... hand, I started by recapping the board. Fortunately, once you learn to solder it's not difficult enough to forget, so I soon had new capacitors in place.

However on testing, the old boy still wouldn't give me anything better than a black screen.

Light At The End

But fear not! I had the replacement PLA chip! And with this baby in place, I was...

Only slightly better off.

On testing, I'm getting somewhere with this new PLA, but it's clear that the PLA was one of the issues with the old boy, but not the only one. Now instead of a black screen, I get the familiar blue border indicating not everything is borked, but I get a jumble of colours instead of the expected BASIC intro text.

At this point Mike offered to take the board and run some tests and repair it himself, but I've come so far and want to see the repairs through myself if at all possible. So on his recommendation, I've ordered myself this diagnostic and dead test cartridge to see if I can suss which chips are still not quite right.

The Pictorial C64 Fault Guide doesn't show any issues quite like mine, so I need to do some digging of my own.

So stay tuned for part three, when I wire up my test harness and try and pry some chips.

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1. Longan
2. Lychee
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4. Marionberry
5. Melon
   • Cantaloupe
   • Honeydew
   • Watermelon
6. Miracle fruit
7. Mulberry

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• Olive
• Orange
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  • Clementine
• Papaya
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• Passionfruit

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package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "net/http"
)

func handler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    fmt.Fprintf(w, "Hi there, I love %s!", r.URL.Path[1:])
}

func main() {
    http.HandleFunc("/", handler)
    http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

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Incididunt in culpa cupidatat mollit cillum qui proident sit. In cillum aliquip incididunt voluptate magna amet cupidatat cillum pariatur sint aliqua est enim anim voluptate. Magna aliquip proident incididunt id duis pariatur eiusmod incididunt commodo culpa dolore sit. Culpa do nostrud elit ad exercitation anim pariatur non minim nisi adipisicing sunt officia. Do deserunt magna mollit Lorem commodo ipsum do cupidatat mollit enim ut elit veniam ea voluptate.

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The Pull of Nostalgia

Ever since sending my old Commodore 128 to a better place, I've been thinking of it's older breadbin C64 brother I've got sitting in storage. I knew we mostly used the 128 because the 64 stopped working, but I couldn't remember exactly what was wrong with it. Thinking it was completely dead, I felt like even just putting the shell to good use would be a win. There's some great tutorials and components you can buy that can help you convert a non-functional Commodore 64 into a modern PC or USB keyboard.

However, after almost 2 years of thinking about it, I decided I didn't want to gut the thing until I was really sure it was dead. My mum has one of those C64 Minis and what I discovered getting that running was that emulating the Commodore wasn't the experience I wanted to capture (or recapture). The C64 full size upgrade appears to be a better experience, but is completely sold out everywhere.

I have this small piece of my own history sitting in a cupboard, and I've decided I wanted to try and do what I can to breath new life into it.

Problem One: Power Supply

Step number one was the power supply. Conventional wisdom is that you don't ever, for any reason, do anything to anyone for any reason ever, no matter what, no matter where, or who, or who you are with, or where you are going, or where you've been... ever, for any reason whatsoever... plug an original Commodore 64 power supply into a Commodore 64.

The problem as I understand it, is that the 5V DC line on the power supply will eventually inevitably break and pump more voltage into the machine than its chips can handle. There's also a 9V AC line that's far more stable and doesn't cause issues, but that DC line has killed more Commodores than time alone would be responsible for. So before I could see if the machine even worked, I would have to get myself an alternative modern power supply. There's a couple out there, but I'm told the most reliable modern PSU is the C64PSU made in Poland. Getting a PSU shipped from Poland seemed like an expensive way to start however, as there could be many more things wrong with the board, and having a working PSU sitting around with the broken computer seemed like a waste.

Then, the astonishingly generous Mike, First of His Name¹ from https://chinwag.org offered to send me his C64PSU as a loner from his lockdown in Melbourne, kicking off my attempts to finally get this thing repaired.

Problem Step Two: Spring Cleaning

While I waited for that to arrive, I gave the whole thing a spruce up. The case got a clean in the dishwasher along with the keycaps, while the board got a brush down with a soft brush. The internals don't look too bad, and I can't see any capacitor bulges with the naked eye.

I'm happy with how it turned out, and I'm even oddly proud of the couple of melt-marks on its upper grill. In my research I learned that the marks are quite common on these machines, and weren't caused by some sort of over-heated wire or soldering iron (as I'd originally presumed) but due to a chemical reaction between the plastic of the case and something in the cables a lot of people wrapped around their C=64s while they were in storage!

Step Three: Tuning Up

Finally the other night I was able to pull out my old CRT TV and plug in Mike's power supply and see if the thing would even boot any more. The LED came on - which was a good sign, as I vaguely recall previously attempting to get it working and not even getting a light (leaving me fearing I'd pre-fried my chips!).

The CRT is the only TV in the house I still know how to tune via RF, as I've also since remembered that we never once had a proper AV cable for the Commodore, and always relied on tuning the TV to channel 3 and plugging direct to the RF port (prompting memories of swapping cables at the back of the TV any time we wanted to play games).

Problem Four: Nothing

Tuning the RF was successful after I worked out how to tune the TV with the sparse controls, but alas - I only have an empty black screen. As setbacks go, this is quite a big one - more research shows the completely black screen can be commonly caused by upwards of a dozen different issues, and tracing it to the real issue is going to take time... and money.

{{< video5 webm="//turbo.geekorium.au/video/C%3D64/C%3D64-power-but-black-screen.webm" mp4="//turbo.geekorium.au/video/C%3D64/C%3D64-power-but-black-screen.mp4" vtt_en="https://turbo.geekorium.au/video/C%3D64/C%3D64-power-but-black-screen.vtt" >}}

Speaking to Mike we think the next step will be to replace all the capacitors on the board and see if it makes a difference, followed by replacing the PLA². After that your guess is as good as mine. Some very clever people have dozens of tricks to determine the myriad ways a C=64 can be busted, and I'm hoping to learn a lot as I figure this out, but it may be slow going and I might not have anything to show for it for a long time, if ever.

And that's where I'm leaving it for now. I'm looking forward to doing this, and trying to keep the cost to a minimum as I go. Getting the old thing cleaned up really confirmed my desire to get it working again. Wish me (and the memory of the 5-year-old I used to be) luck!

I want to share the album I was listening to while I figured out how to dockerise Hugo. It's such an upbeat listen that I didn't notice when it looped through and played again. I was listening on soundcloud through docker-tizonia but I'll leave you the Spotify link for Thaehan - Mekatsune and the FULL LP on Youtube

{{< youtube WuAgqT-gsc4 >}}

My two fave tracks are Chapô Chapô and Goblins, but you make up your own mind.

NOTE: I added the above as sign off on another post a few weeks ago, but re-listened to some of their music again today and decided they deserved a separate post. I'm totally blown away by their music. And as an additional bonus for re-reading this post if you saw it at the bottom of the last one, here's a newer trilogy track called Mechanical Heart.

Back in '87 the Gilstone company released the X488, a breakthrough in mesopliner technology that was soon forgotten to the mists of time. Today I'm building my own X488 and I'm going to do it with flamming!

Keeping inline with my desire to produce catchy titles I've named this post something nonsensical. The Gilstone X488 wasn't a thing (was it?), but lately I've been getting all nostalgic for retro tech, and reading a bunch of excellent posts about technology and frankly I was feeling left out.

So I apologise if you came here hoping to learn more about flamming, or if you yourself have fond memories of the Gilstone X488, but that's not what we're doing today. Today I thought I'd share some excellent websites I've been enjoying lately, and hopefully you can find some good posts there instead!

Recently there was some discussion on EVERY SITE¹²³⁴⁵⁶ about RSS feeds - how hidden they are now, and how we need to promote and boost those sites that write about the things we enjoy reading about. Not every site has to pump out quality SEO driven articles about technical subjects to drive ad revenue, and the re-emerging indieweb of randos writing about topics that interest them is so nice to see.

Earlier today I put the finishing touches on a simple Docker/PHP combo script to grab my Miniflux feeds and convert them into a "follow" page here on The Geekorium. Eventually I'll follow some of the excellent work put into the exact same problem by Jan-Lukas Else on his site to build his Miniflux blogroll, as solving the problem in Go seems more inline with my use of Hugo than a php script.

My Follow page has a super simple list of sites I'd recommend, along with their RSS feeds to make subscribing simpler if you're into it. But right now I'll break down some excellent posts I've enjoyed by a few of the people on that list.

Kev Quirk runs the fosstodon.org mastodon instance and posted recently about his experiences with Synology and Nextcloud. I was particularly interested because I've tried Nextcloud in the past, and while I love the idea of keeping full control over my data, I found Nextcloud to be slow and unweildy when I tried to encrypt the data and store it in the cloud. Turns out Nextcloud is just slow. Synology looks interesting, but I've found that Tresorit while expensive, meets my backup needs. Kev is a 'metablogger' who writes sometimes about his own experiences as a writer, and is also the brains behind #100DaysToOffload, a challenge to "Just. Write." and power the old-school personal website revolution again. Also, Quirk is a kickass last name.

I originally read Guillermo Garron (ggarron)'s post Blogging is not dead on Hacker News. It was part of a longer ongoing discussion across a number of sites on whether old-school personal web logs were dead or dying. The irony of this discussion happening across multiple personal "blogs" was not actually irony at all, but rather a concerted effort to bring back something a lot of people miss, now that corporations lock us into their specific "social" platforms. GGarron has been consistently putting out new fresh posts on his own site, doing his part to power this resurgence, to take back control and give people a reason to find and follow new people. Hs posting has led directly to making me write my more recent entries, and directly inspired me to set up a feedreader and subscribe to more people. He was the first of my new subscriptions when I finally got set up.

Horst Gutmann (zerok) wrote about Domain Of Ones Own, a program of certain universities to offer personalised domains and hosting for their students instead of a generic institutional address. This gets the student set up for life "owning" their own identity early in their career and ensures they can continue using the same tools after academia that they've been using all along. This idea gels with my belief that people deserve, in fact need, to claim a domain and use it for at least their own email. Zerok also built webmeniond, a way to hook the indieweb webmention technology up to your site, that I must actually enable here some time.

Launching Keyoxide is a post by Yarmo Mackenbach on the really excellent Keyoxide service he's built as an independent tool to "prove you're you" across multiple important websites. For example, I have a Github profile, a Mastodon profile and a personal domain that you have no way of knowing are truly "mine". By using my Keyoxide proofs page, you're able to see that I've explicitly identified profiles on these services as being under my control. Yarmo writes a lot about, and is clearly passionate for, our independence from large corporations holding and monetising our data.

Mike Stone is another fosstodon admin, and writes the sort of geeky stuff I love reading. He's covered the software he uses, the purchase of Keybase by Zoom and his adventures into Open Source AI. He's always got something interesting to share, and I've found and tried multiple new programs I'd never heard of based on his recommendations. Just don't try eDEX-UI - it'll crash your desktop like it did to mine!

My most recent follow I found only after putting the finishing touches on this post! Katie McLaughlin (glasnt) wrote a post called Generating a pseudorandom string: the what and the how, and while I like linux geek posts, normally the "here's a simple command that does x" sort of posts are skippable if I can't immediately figure out how I'll use them. Glasnt however uses the post as an opportunity to break down the command into its parts, teaching me about tr (and LC_ALL=C), fold, and finally why short and long commandline option/argument combos make no friggin' sense to me in a way that makes friggin' sense. I had to immediately subscribe and add her to this list for making a linux command-line post so much more informative than they usually are.

The last person on my list is someone I've followed since at least 2010 when "blogs" were a thing, the salmon protocol was about to take off, and Twitter was cool. Ruben Schade (Rubenerd) has been podcasting and writing since before both were things everyone did, and is still going years later (he's up to 411 episodes of his show which is just insane). I'm not even going to try and link to a good example of his posts, as they're so eclectic. His technical posts are the reason I titled this post the way I did, and I'm using Linux and Hugo directly because of him (although he uses BSD like a gentleman), and I have implemented or de-implemented tech on this very site due to his recommendations. If you search for mentions of his name here, you'll start to wonder if I have a crush on the guy, but he's just one of the few consistent writers I've follow - and he also doesn't allow comments on his site and only uses Twitter, so I can't give him feedback any other way!

So that's just a small list and taste of the people I'm following. There are many others, but I can't write paragraphs about all of them so I'll throw up some good posts by randos here:

• Simbly Me - toot - a cli mastodon client I want to try
• rolisz - Pixel 3a - how I feel about the Pixel 3a in someone else's words
• Jlelse - How I curate links for my blog - a similar breakdown to mine, for more excellent suggestions of who to follow.
• Hey Georgie - How to manage and avoid stress
• tttthis - If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
• Stan's blog - NextDNS is my new favourite DNS service
• Max Böck - Whimsical Website Club
• Freddy's Ramblings - 6 Beginner Privacy Tips for Lockdown
• James Routley - Bespoke software, and a really simple RSS aggregator
• Lazybear - Moving to main - Also his Vim weekly tips are great

I hope you can find someone new to follow, or are inspired to fire up a feed reader and start. And to all the people I've linked to here, and those who are on my list who maybe didn't get a mention, thank you for writing, please keep going! Let's write for pleasure and enrichment and keep the web personal and alive.

This is the third in a series of posts where I just plonk stuff I've been thinking about that doesn't go anywhere else. It's got a stupid title because my first thought is...

1. I have a real bad time trying to come up with good titles. I don't try too hard, so I guess it's to be expected, but I note that my titles have a similar quality to other posts I've read that strike me as amateur. If I could tell you what that meant it would put me closer to rectifying it.

2. I have subscribed to a number of new "blogs" recently - as an aside, I think the word blog is awful so I will from now on refer to them as as net-logs, or personal chronicles, or whatever fits.

   After a week of posts on Hackernews about the death and resurrection¹ of said personal chronicles, I thought I'd fire up the ol' RSS reader and brush off the dust.

   The first thing that struck me was how unpleasant the PHP-based software I had been using was. So instead of dicking around with it, I put my new Docker/Nginx skills to work and fired up a version of Miniflux which is just so elegant and simple to work with. I've been slowly accumulating a bunch of low-key personal chronicles by people who write about FOSS and speculate about the same kind of issues that interest me. I'll put up a list of them somewhere soon.

3. I'm looking for some diversity in my growing list - a lot of these people are other men about my age, which is a fine thing to be - I myself am a man about my age - but other view-points and ideas are also nice. I'm interested in FOSS, internet decentralisation/federation, programming, technology so I'm looking for personal chronicles with a similar bent. I'm not looking to subscribe to stuff that's completely outside my interests (eg. sport, cars, gardening etc.) but someone who occasionally shares their passions for those things amongst the stuff I'm interested in is welcome². Share your linkrolls!

4. Today I did a big Mastodon harvest - finding and following a lot of new people. This was just to widen the number of voices I'm seeing there. I have to walk the line I failed to walk on Twitter though - while it's important to be politically engaged, Twitter doesn't do political nuance well, and Masto probably doesn't either. I don't want a lot of politics in my feed anymore. I also need to remember that hiding people's boosts is a thing I can do.

5. I was going to say something about the protests and riots and police/military action going on in the US, but almost everything I wrote seemed flippant. I hope that whatever happens it leads to real lasting change (or the start of it).

That's another round up of stuff that's been on my mind that doesn't deserve it's own post. I guess it's also the third in the #100DaysToOffload³ series I haven't officially committed to.

Following on from last night's post, I needed a way to run Hugo to build the new entry and deploy it. Since I had to rebuild my environment from scratch I wanted to see if I could run Hugo and Go without installing them locally.

I know Go is unlikely to cause any stability issues, as it installs all its dependencies in the user's home dir, rather than touching system files but I'm determined in my experiment to keep my new install as clean as possible.

Using some insight I'd gathered from using docker-tizonia a Docker version of Tizonia and using asolera's Golang minimal Dockerfile image as a base, I was able to put together a minimal Dockerfile that does the following:

1. Creates a golang based build image to pull down the latest version of Hugo.
2. Build and install the Hugo binary
3. Copy the binary to a clean image
4. Set the image work directory to /site
5. Expose the Hugo server port 1313
6. Make Hugo the entry point and default to the help text if I forget to add a command.

The Dockerfile looks something like the following:

FROM golang:1.14.3-alpine3.11 AS build

RUN apk add --no-cache git

ARG HUGO_BUILD_TAGS

RUN go get -v github.com/gohugoio/hugo/source
WORKDIR /go/src/github.com/gohugoio/hugo

RUN go install

RUN apk del git

FROM alpine:3.11

COPY --from=build /go/bin/hugo /usr/bin/hugo

RUN mkdir /site
WORKDIR /site

# Expose port for live server
EXPOSE 1313

ENTRYPOINT ["hugo"]
CMD ["--help"]

Also thanks to jojomi of bits cribbed from their Hugo Dockerfile.

Many of the Hugo Dockerfiles I found would copy the website source to the container in preparation of serving the files from Docker. In my case I'm happy with my plain HTML to continue being served where it is, but didn't want to lose out on the features you get when you're using Hugo to develop locally - such as running a test server with live reloading.

With the help of a handy "hugo" wrapper shell script, I was able to fire up Hugo in the container, and serve my local files through a mapped volume with no appreciable difference to how Hugo was running for me before.

The wrapper is as follows:

#!/bin/bash

docker run -it --rm \
    --network host \
    --volume=$(pwd):/site \
    --name hugo \
    $(docker build -q .) "$@";

This wrapper

1. Runs the necessary Docker command to hook the image into the host network so I can check my changes on http://localhost:1313
2. Shares the working directory into the expected /site working directory on the image.
3. Passes in whatever argue I pass in.

I set this Hugo file to executable with chmod u+x hugo and I can now run the automatically updating Hugo server with

./hugo server

Now because the command hugo by itself is used the build the site, I now just pass in a harmless switch like -v (verbose) to build the site without triggering the default --help text.

Finally I use my previous ./deploy script to rsync the files to my host.

The two new files are in my personal-chronicle github repo for any good they can be to anyone, and I'm curious to know if there's any way I can improve the Docker build to simplify it.

Some questions or areas I think I can improve are:

1. I'm not sure if the line ARG HUGO_BUILD_TAGS is necessary. It just happened to be there when I finally got it working, after removing other lines that were causing it to fail.
2. I'm getting the hugo source from github.com/gohugoio/hugo/source when the Hugo documentation says the main repo root is what you'd use to install it. I'm not sure if there was a better way to go get the Hugo project.
3. I think I'd prefer to freeze the version of Hugo at the current version until I choose to upgrade after testing. I'm not sure how to 'go get' a specific version of the git repo.
4. Is the RUN apk del git line necessary if I'm using a throwaway build image?

The thing that blows me away about Docker and Golang and a lot of modern developer technology is just how much "standing on the shoulders of giants" I'm able to do. Docker is not just a clever idea, but such a well built stack that even with a rudimentary understanding of what I wanted to achieve, I was able to do it with a few lines of code. And the Go ecosystem meant that go get etc.. pulled an entire projects worth of dependencies and built the entire Hugo app inside a black box. This is such a far cry from past experiences I've had trying to build software from source that I can only express gratitude for all the hard work donated by so many.

Over on the Aus Mastodon instance (where I choose to Toot, rather than Tweet) I posted that I'm frustrated over and over again that my Linux experience goes like this:

1. Install a new Linux distro. Be amazed and surprised just how smooth the experience is, and how little effort there was to get it working.

2. Get excited for more "Linux" and think "Great, time to try compiling something from scratch for the experience" or "Now I can install that technology stack I was reading about"

3. Install said stack, or attempt to compile said something.

4. Fail - due to having picked the wrong distro with the wrong version of Python, or having picked a desktop that runs on Wayland instead of X.

5. Find workarounds, tutorials on how to compile around the issue, or just instructions on how to install another version of Python. Be successful or not.

6. Get a notification that the Next Version of my distro is available - and look at all the neat new features and stability it has!

7. Install the new version and discover some new hellish torment that means that the rock solid stability I've b¹een enjoying up until this version is gone and no amount of scouring the internet, or trawling the logs will help me figure out how to restore my OS and with it, my sanity.

I'm not sure if step seven happens because of my tinkering in step five. The frequency with which it happens is makes me think it has to be me.

So I find another distro, or I download the installer for the new version, and I backup all my files and I rebuild my machine and repeat from step one. It's getting tiresome.

So having pinned the problem on myself, I've decided this time around I'm going to containerise everything. For those only slightly behind me on the discovery of new technology concepts, containers (or sandboxes (or jails Rubenerd has been using for years)) are a way to put applications in their own little bubbles without access to anything else on your computer². They help keep everything from rubbing up against each other and getting computer juices everywhere - sort of like social distancing for computer software. Fedora Silverblue is container-based and looks amazing. I have loved using Fedora and learning how to sandbox everything is probably a good skill to learn moving forward. Also, @shlee generously gave me his time to teach me Docker and now I want to keep using it for everything.

BUT... Fedora (and Silverblue) have some downsides for me. Remeber step five? Almost every Linux tutorial or piece of software I've ever found anywhere assumes two things: you're using apt as your package manager, and you're using Xorg not Wayland as your display server. I was constantly hunting for the 'dnf' package, or checking to ensure that the new clipboard manager I was about to use could handle Wayland³. Critically, Docker is a second class citizen in Fedora in favour of Podman, and while Podman might be better in some ways - like Wayland: it's not what everyone is using. In the end the perpetual dream I have to use the "superior" technology over the "winning" technology had to be put aside, and I've settled on Cinnamon flavoured Debian.

Debian is not containered. But it doesn't insist on making me use Podman instead of Docker like Fedora does, and it's the closest thing Linux has to a "default" distribution, so I'm making do. The first thing I did was install Flatpak to start my container journey and... immediately failed.

• Flatpak Firefox looks like shit. I spend almost all my computer time in Firefox and I want it to match my theme and the container version didn't. That's a really shallow reason not to use it though, so I'm going to try that again⁴.

• Docker is complex enough for a Docker n00b to learn. Trying to run a Sandboxed containerised Docker instance of some sort is right out, so it got a full install.

• The Flatpak version of VS Code is so isolated it can't see Docker. I want to use the Docker plugin. I switched to the fully integrated version immediately.

So my ideals took a small beating when the rubber hit the road, but I swear to Woz that I will only use Docker and Flatpak for everything else. And one day when I'm more comfortable translating distro specific nonsense into my preferred flavour, I will give Silverblue or a fully containered distro a much better go.

And maybe one day my desktop will go more than a single major version without being replaced.

It's time for round-two of a bunch of random stuff that's slightly-interesting-but-not-interesting-enough-for-a-full-post.

• I'm sitting on a new office chair that's called a Swopper that I got second-hand as a Christmas gift from my dear wife, and it's bouncy and fun to sit on.

  I read an article somewhere that said active chairs encourage you to move more and put weight on your legs and fill that niche between standing desks and vanilla sitting. What I was finding with my fancy-schmancy office chair was that I was cutting circulation in my legs, my butt was always sore, and I just felt bad after sitting for a day of work. While the Swopper has some problems of it's own, I'm definitely feeling more active while using it, and (surprisingly) I have sore core muscles after using it, like I've done a couple of situps.

  I'll get back to you if my opinion changes, the main downside is that it seems wildly over priced if you buy it new.

• We took a family holiday to Buninyong to visit my sister, and went with my brother's family and my mum. It's the first big family holiday I've been on with my mum and brother and sister since well before I got married, and it was a lot of fun to just hang out with them all.

• We took the opportunity to go to Sovereign Hill, which I visited once when I was a boy, and I remembered why I thought it was so dull when I was a kid. It's fascinating, but not very hands-on for children, but we spent a good hour panning for gold, so the kids will have some good memories I hope.

• We stepped up our new car plan before we went so we'd have a bigger car to squash the kids into before we drove over the border. I've said goodbye to the beautifully cheap-to-run Prius that has done me well for the last five years, and purchased a second hand Holden Commodore wagon. The running costs are higher, but my daughter can now fit in the back seat again. Plus other men are no longer threatened by the care-free way I drove my smaller, lower-emission car.

• Australia is on fire. Well, parts of it are. Important parts that have people in them. It's forced a lot of them to uproot, and has a lot of people very cross that successive governments have done so little to address climate change. I donned a cap of political apathy after the country decided that just because Tony Abbott was no longer the public face of the Liberal party it meant that they were probably the best party we had. I pulled the cap lower and raised my collar after the country decided a second time that a party who is very clearly uninterested in tackling the biggest issues we're leaving to our kids was their best hope for a bigger tax rebate. These fires would be just as bad if anyone else was in charge, but maybe if we'd given enough of a shit 10 years ago we might have actually been in the middle of trying to do something now.

• I'm still trying to find somewhere online that can scratch that itch that Reddit used to fill. I'm still resolute that I'm not returning, but I don't have anywhere to find new things to read, and nowhere to participate in discussion. I've been using Hacker News, but as much as I like to think of myself as a "hacker", only about 20% of posts there interest me, and I've almost never felt the desire to contribute to the discussion. In the last two days I've discovered Lobste.rs, Hubski, and Tildes. Lobste.rs and Tildes are invite-only, while Hubski is open for registrations.

  Lobste.rs is even more niche than Hacker News, but I love the technical design decisions they've made. If I wanted to make a similar site, the Lobste.rs source would be an excellent starting point.

  Hubski is less niche, but despite the open registration seems to have far less activity. As an example: as at time of writing, the fourth article down is about the impeachment of Donald Trump, posted 23 days earlier. It's big news, and it's off the back of the Christmas break, but I'd expect more recent news than that on the front page of a news aggregator. The discussion on it is thoughtful though a little sparse, so the community is definitely not the sort of people who left Reddit for Voat, but with so little happening, there's not a lot of reason to stick around and see if it's worth it.

  I've settled on giving Tildes a try for a week. Their community is big enough that I keep seeing new stuff on the front page, even across the space of a single day. The diversity of discussion is also much better than HN or Lobste.rs, and I've found myself with actual things to say while reading some threads (although I can't do so yet). And although I don't like using it for webpages - it's much better for a text editor or terminal - the fact that they offer Solarized Dark as one of the out-of-the-box color schemes means that someone there understands sophistication.

• In the process of trying out Lobste.rs I have also installed WeeChat for IRC. I love the idea of IRC, but I've never found myself in a room where I've wanted to say anything. Can anyone suggest a good room for IRC newbies to just hang out in and chat with nice people? Leave a comment below, or chat in Keybase, Discord, or directly with me on the aus.social Mastodon instance. I'd set up a Geekorium IRC channel but from what I can gather, I'd need a server that's amenable to randos making channels.

So that's me for another four months - still trying half-hearted-ly to push air through the blue lips of this website.

I've scoured Soundcloud to find the best Christmas music I could find. It's chock full of Christmas favourites that are guaranteed to:

1. Bring Christmas cheer
2. Not suck

This years playlist includes:

Many originals and covers of well known Christmas songs such as 'Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)', 'O Come All Ye Faithful', 'Joy To The World', 'We Wish You A Merry Christmas', 'Up On The Housetop', 'Auld Lang Syne', 'Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas', and many more reimagined in ways that don't suck.

{{< soundcloud 937949992 >}}

The whole Christmas Playlist That Doesn't Suck (2019) is up on Soundcloud right now, go have a listen!

Thank you to all the artists who have shared their Christmas songs on SoundCloud for the rest of us!

The very next day after our successful chick sky-drop, one of the eggs our broody hen had been diligently sitting on hatched too, bringing on chickpocalypse.

chick·poc·a·lypse

/ ˈtʃɪk pɒk ə lɪps /

noun

A great and scary change brought about by the birth
(or purchase) of too many young domestic fowl at one time

In the space of two days we've jumped from five to eight chickens, and while we have some time to plan for it, this means one of two things:

1. We prepare to sell two or three chickens when they're older
2. We prepare to keep two or three chickens when they're older and I build another coop that can house 8 or more chickens at once.

As I have three children, option 1 was discussed, but never once taken seriously by anyone involved in the discussions, and now I need to learn how to build things with wood.

Hard hard can it be?

Here are some chickens:

My greatest hurdle to writing here is myself. I have plenty of opinions, but nothing I feel is worth inflicting on anyone else (unless you sit within a few feet of me at work). I have lots of ideas, but very few fully formed, or that survive a withering stare. I have drafts galore, but rarely hit publish because on the path to writing things, I so very often disappoint myself with what I actually write.

Then today Kat posted and published her first blerg post and reminded me that the reason I love this can-and-bits-of-string style of old-school post is because they're not polished thought pieces on the nature of mortality, but simply a glimpse into what other people are thinking and doing in their lives¹. Rubenerd has being doing exactly this for many many years and I still love reading what he's doing and thinking, even though it's not hosted on Medium or written like he's got VC funding he needs to justify. They're just slice-of-life observations and thoughts, and they're the good stuff.

Even the above is more waffle than I meant to do in this post, but this time I mean to cut through the attempt to formulate a thesis and simply put down stuff that was on my mind tonight while I did the dishes. So, some things I've observed today in no particular order:

• I tried a new coffee place. My boss incredulously asked if we really walked to get coffee two blocks away. So I thought I'd see what the coffee was like at the new(-ish?) place at the end of our street. The coffee was good, but a large was miniscule, and I can't imagine the thimble size I would have got if I'd asked for a regular. I had to get another coffee later in the day to make up for it.
• My partner and kids are excitedly buzzing about two new chicks we got to give to one of our broody hens. We couldn't make her take them yesterday, but we just successfully executed a Mission: Impossible style coordinated operation to drop the chicks in in the dead of night, and it seems to have worked. Apparently you know it worked when the new mother purrs like a cat. I'm only disappointed I didn't get to use the mask I'd made to infiltrate the coop by impersonating our rooster.
• I'm still struggling with my self-imposed Reddit ban (which is my most recent shunning of social media after Twitter and Facebook). I've replaced it in some small part with a combination of the ABC news app, Hacker News (top stories), an Aussie Mastodon instance with a bunch of people I met through Twitter, and Dev.to, but none of them are a drop-in replacement (minus the crap I was getting tired of). I really miss the not-thinking-ness of being able to just witlessly scroll through Reddit when I'm not doing anything better.
• Speaking of Dev.to - I can't find a simple way to just see top posts in any field. As far as I can tell, my feed (and the week/month/year/all-time) feeds are only the tags I've subscribed to, and 'latest' is the only un-filtered list I can see. Maybe I'm missing something, but one thing I really appreciate about HN and Reddit is that I get posts on topics I've never even heard of before, and I really need it. 100 posts on "#javascript" is not my idea of a good time.
• I chiselled a hole in my desk this week in my never-ending crusade against cables. This hid a further 30cm of cable beneath the desk, bringing me ever closer to the glorious day when everything I own will hover fractionally above the desk and nothing will be connected to anything except by invisible forces.

  

I'm going to stop here. Observing-ness maybe shouldn't be a brain dump of everything I've thought this week.

Maybe I'll be back again soon with more observation... nesses?

I've been listening to a podcast called Team Human ever since the host Douglas Rushkoff was a guest on another favourite podcast, You Are Not So Smart. The basic premise of the podcast, book of the same name, and indeed the guest episode he appeared on, was about taking back society for humans.

It took me a while to warm up to the argument. Rushkoff was writing about the cyberpunk movement when I was still in high school, and wears his counter-culture credentials with pride. Me with my quiet Australian suburban Christian upbringing know nothing about what was happening in technology circles in that time, or what anyone was really even railing against back then.

So the idea that technology today isn't really serving humans any more made me stop and think. And it's stupidly obvious when you give it more than a moment's thought, but it hadn't really occurred to me that it's the exact reason I'm lost on the internet nowadays.

Today we're served by technology more than ever, and the internet is responsible for the feeling that we're getting more done, and we're more connected than ever before, but despite the vision of early internet visionaries, we're also stuck in tiny silos, and fighting bigger and bigger monopolies for control of our data.

Instead of really serving us, technology is being used to sell us, divide us, and make us happy to hand over everything that makes us human. Which isn't to say that we should head back to caves and poop in the open, but we need to be able to make informed choices about how our data is used.

Full disclosure: I've tried to write this article before, and encourage you all to switch to fastmail.com, and duckduckgo.com, but every time I start it, I see the little Google Home on my wall blasting out electro swing and telling me when my pomodoro timer is complete, and I wail and gnash my teeth for being a godless hypocrite.

The upshot is, I'm extremely interested in how we can maintain our privacy and autonomy while still enjoying the benefits of connected technology. I don't want to miss out on the benefits that these big companies can provide, but I also want to know that it's serving me, not the other way around. I believe we forfeit too much data to large companies, but I also believe the benefits and fun of technology can make the trade off worthwhile if we do not enter into it with our eyes closed.

I'm looking for is a community of people who are also treading that fine line between tin-foil-hattery and open embrace of our corporate overlords to work within the system to make it safer for humans.

Rushkoff would argue that this isn't possible online. He wants people to get out there and make real face-to-face connections with people. I get where he's coming from - by communicating online, we're letting algorithms and companies decide who we talk to - pushing us into silos of like-minded people. That happens in real life too, but the process is manual - we have to decide to stop talking to someone whose ideas aren't our ideas. Online, the algorithms are getting better and better at showing us similarly minded people, sheltering us from "the other" before we have to ask.

Take YouTube for instance - I recently discovered a Star Trek youtuber who also happens to also do videos about rationalism and atheism. He's exactly my cup of tea, and I spent a good few evenings listening through his back catalogue. Then another guy popped up who makes videos poking fun at far-right youtubers and then another who makes videos about the differences between right and left. I've thoroughly enjoyed them all, and they give me just that little tickle of satisfaction that I've discovered someone else who "shares my thoughts" on these topics. In some sense they play a role to help cement or crystallise thoughts I hadn't yet properly synthesised into my own words, so it's not bad that I get these recommendations, but over time if YouTube's AI does it's job, it does mean I'm going to see fewer and fewer alternative ideas, hear fewer voices, and fall deeper and deeper into that filter bubble that people talk about a lot lately¹.

I don't know how to socialise in the real world any more. It's a lost art for many people, and even close to impossible for others. The internet brought on a golden age of social interaction for some people who in years gone by might have lived lives of utter loneliness. I'm not one of them, but I've let myself lose a lot of the skills I once had to leave the house and be "real". Finding the time and strength to put myself in places the algorithm can't get me is going to be hard work. I would even like to think there might be a technological solution, but it would have to be radically different from anything else that currently exists, or it risks being susceptible to the same problems as today's social technology.

The upshot is that I'm starting to see the cracks, and I don't have the tools to even understand them, let alone fix them by myself. I fix problems better when I have other people to work with, and I don't know if other people around me are also seeing the cracks and wondering if they should say something or just keep quiet. If you're reading this, and you're concerned about what we can do to balance safety and progress, then get in touch with me. Leave a comment here², or say hello on Telegram, Discord or now Mastodon or Keybase. Maybe you don't think the way I do - and I look forward to it.

Something really weird and special happened a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't and still don't really know what I want to say about it. It was a big enough event though that I want to talk about it because it involves one of my favourite people in the world.

My sister went and did something foolish, and got herself made a full blown minister of the Australian Uniting church. As in, she's actually an honest-to-god reverend. And like, she can put that on forms she fills out (see below).

Title:      Reverend
First name: Cazbutt
Last name:  Nunn

Growing up, I admired my father for becoming a minister, and although I didn't think I could ever actually do it, I often thought it might be the path I might take one day - carrying on some sort of family tradition¹. When I left my faith, that was a small dream I left behind as well, and although I didn't want it any more, I still missed it.

To see Carlynne take up the mantle now makes me happy to see that dream become a reality somehow in a silly sort of way.

Which isn't to say that my sister's faith and chosen path are anything like my father's. Carlynne isn't so much following tradition as she is taking tradition firmly by the shoulders, walking it firmly to the door, and asking it politely to leave.

The ordination ceremony itself was a rich and beautiful celebration of Carlynne's journey so far. It was an honor to have been invited and to have been able to attend. Afterwards, my sister's band Terry Towelling and the Tank Tops played a full set while the church family at Brunswick catered a lovely party to both celebrate and say farewell.

What I loved most about the day was this: religion might not be my thing, and the (nebulous, worldwide) church might have a lot of explaining to do, but when I think of my sister as a minister it just makes so much sense to me. What I recognise when she dons the Alb is that my own silly childhood fantasy of becoming a minister was always about my own status - about the title - being able to put reverend on the form.

When I look at my sister's road to ordination, I instead see a truly humble servant who only wants to meet people where they are. She has already spent much of her adult life learning to accept people how they are just because they're human. It's a trait I admire so much in her, and I'm overjoyed when I see her keep embracing it, using it.

The world has always been pretty fucked up, and too often we hear about the people who take their positions and leverage their power to look after themselves, leaving it just a little more fucked than it was before. What I love about my sister and the path she's chosen is that she really will leave it a little less fucked than how she found it. This step is just another on that road.

Congratulations The Reverend Carlynne @mygirlbetty. You're a Starasaurus and I love you and I'm proud of you. Keep making the world more awesome.

Just to help out anyone else who's brain is turning to mush trying to figure this out:

I went to write a new post tonight and discovered that Hugo flat out refused to render the new post. Nothing I did would make Hugo display or serve up the new page. Digging further, Hugo wouldn't convert the post using the conversion functions, and running --verbose or --debug showed that as far as Hugo was concerned, the new pages flat out didn't exist.

I was wracking my brain for hours over this - checking and double-checking paths, ensuring file permissions were correct, removing old posts, attempting to disable caches - until I did some frontmatter splitting and discovered that if I left the date field off, the posts showed up.

It turned out that something in my config has changed since I created my last posts, and Hugo is now rendering posts relying on the post's timezone to determine when it should be published. I recently updated my version of Hugo to v0.54.0, and I also specifically altered the way my dates are generated in archetypes\default.md to match how I'd like them to be stored, and one or both of those changes meant that Hugo went from generating new posts in a consistent timezone, to generating them in my local timezone but acting as though they were in UTC. This meant that posts were being ignored but would have published without a problem +1030 hours from the time I wrote them.

Now I've simply altered my archetype to include -0700 to tell Hugo to append my local TZ to new dates, and now a hugo new posts/whatever.md generates a file that shows up immediately when I serve the file.

In my archetypes\default.md file I've set date to:

date: "{{ dateFormat "2006-01-02 15:04:05 -0700" .Date }}"

After having followed in his footsteps and converted my site to Hugo, Rubenerd also prompted me to check out my HTTPS score on Mozilla's Observatory with his post on the topic.

Using Wordpress my grade was an F, but the change wasn't enough in-and-of-itself to change the grade at all. It turns out Mozilla is super persnickety about HTTPS security and focuses on your site's Content Security Policy as one of it's primary measures.

The CPS is not something I'd ever heard of before. Other sites gave my site a clean bill of health when I'd checked to see if my SSL certificate was doing it's job, so I figured my site was safe. It turns out that browsers now support a Content Security Policy header that can tell the browser to ignore any potentially dangerous content that isn't explicitly allowed by the creator.

What this means is that the webmaster identifies where all their Javascript, CSS, iframe embedded content, images and other content might come from, then set up a ruleset that tells the browser to block anything else.

My ruleset (via Headers in .htaccess) looks something like the following:

default-src 'none';
object-src 'none';
frame-ancestors 'none';
base-uri 'none';
frame-src https://www.youtube.com;
form-action 'self'
    https://*.staticman.net
    https://duckduckgo.com;
font-src https://fonts.gstatic.com/;
img-src 'self'
    https://turbo.geekorium.au
    https://visitors.geekorium.au
    https://*.flickr.com
    https://*.staticflickr.com
    https://www.gravatar.com;
script-src 'self'
    https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com
    https://visitors.geekorium.au;
style-src 'self' https://fonts.googleapis.com
    https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com;

• default-src is the base level rule, and by setting it to 'none', we tell the browser to ignore anything that isn't explicitly spelled out below.
• frame-src is set to allow only youtube.com iframes (eg. this post)
• form-action only allows submitting forms to staticman.net for comments and duckduckgo.com for the search form on the front page
• font-src is set to allow google fonts
• img-src allows images from my amazon s3 bucket, Flickr, Gravatars, and an image for visitor statistics (using Matomo so your data isn't going anywhere).
• script-src allows cloudflare hosted JS because the theme I'm using uses some libraries there.
• style-src allows CSS from googleapis.com and cloudflare, again for the theme.

By specifying 'self' for JS and CSS, and explicitly not using 'unsafe-inline' I've forced myself to move everything to self-hosted CSS and JS files, instead of using inline style on html elements or onClick JS. From the Mozilla docs on the matter:

Inline JavaScript – either reflected or stored – means that improperly escaped user-inputs can generate code that is interpreted by the web browser as JavaScript. By using CSP to disable inline JavaScript, you can effectively eliminate almost all XSS attacks against your site.

And with comments enabled, I want as much protection from XSS as possible.

Now The Geekorium scores a delightful A+ on the Mozilla Observatory, and a score of 125/100, which is the sort of 'extra-credit' number I'm looking for in my security.

One thing that moving away from WordPress means is that I can no longer publish on the go.

I mean, I never really did, but at least I had the option. Now to post I must be in front of my PC with the Hugo software installed and a copy of my repo. I could get the repo on any computer and even install Hugo if I needed to be elsewhere, but my home computer has the key to log into my server, so I'm not making it easy on myself.

I can however, use a portable git client (I'm trying out FastHub for GitHub and write my posts on the go, then tidy and publish them later.

I'm banking on the idea that reducing the barriers to writing will increase the number of posts that get published. We'll see.

I've re-enabled comments here at The Geekorium, and imported all my old comments, so go nuts!

To import all your old comments, I used a script written by someone else, then parsed them through a dodgy PHP script I made myself to rename everything into the format my site is relying on, so there might be shenanigans with the imported comments. Please let me know if anything seems off.

That leaves me with the next question: how do I ensure I don't get flooded with spam? I've had comments back on for all of 2 days, and I get a steady trickle of Pull Requests from the Staticman bot triggered by spam comments. On the Wordpress site I had Akismet turned on, which all but eliminated bad-faith for me, the way modern email clients almost never let the chaff through.

The simplest answer is the Google reCAPTCHKA¹ - the latest version doesn't even ask you to tick the "I'm not a robot" box let alone click on thirteen boxes of street crossings. It's a tempting solution, but it's owned and operated by Google, and everything your users do on your website is captured for analysis. As spelled out in their documentation:

reCAPTCHA works best when it has the most context about interactions with your site, which comes from seeing both legitimate and abusive behavior.

Additionally,

reCAPTCHA learns by seeing real traffic on your site.

In a perfect world, Google would only use this data to improve the service. Maybe that's all they're doing, but I take my reader's privacy seriously - more than my own - and I'm genuinely concerned what Google is doing with this enormous corpus of user data capcha'd by these little blue boxes all over the web. They're more pervasive than Facebook logins and social buttons, and unlike the earlier version, it's no longer training robots to recognise trains or traffic lights, it's training computers how to recognise human behaviour.

There's also the question of how these work if people choose to disable javascript. The theme I'm using relies on more JS than I'd like already, but at least it degrades elegantly. I'm not so sure about recapcha and I can't find an answer on their website.

It's looking likely I'm going to have to palm user data off to someone to determine if they're a robot or not. I'm not happy about it, but it appears to be the price unless I'm willing to sift through dozens of spam comments a day. It wouldn't be so bad, except Git's policy of keeping history means that the spam I receive is attached to my site's repo forever, even if the comment never makes it here.

My final recourse is to try something that I'm guessing won't work for long. Staticman has a feature that checks for valid form data. The check is basic enough that the field can be present in the data as long as it's blank. If it has a value set it immediately fails validation. I've set a dummy field in the form that needs to be left blank. If a 'bot fills it in, it should get picked up and fail to submit. I'm not sure how long it will slow them down, but I'm going to give it a shot.

I've also disabled the form on posts older than a month, so if you want to comment, do it now!

Update: 24 hours without a spam comment. Success!

They say "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", and I do hope they're right. I've been reading Rubenerd for the longest time, and his lovely minimal(ist) website built on Hugo has had me dying to try out the technology for the longest time.

While there's nothing wrong with Wordpress, I've always found it just a little too clunky for my tastes - and slow. That might be because I've always used it on shared hosting with less than optimised databases. The idea of a super fast and efficient text-only site is appealing.

So if you can't tell the difference, today's post (and all past posts) are now brought to you by Hugo, powered by Go.

I also used this as the excuse I needed to finally put the effort into dual booting Linux on my machine. I'm trying out Linux Mint, and I'm proud I actually got it working with Secure Boot¹. Starting out, my "flow" is to create a post in Markdown, then build the site and rsync it to to the same location my old site was.

Please let me know if you notice anything funky. As usual I can be reached on Telegram, Discord, and just recently, Twitter². However, I'm aware that there's lots of posts that will not have survived the switch over without some... problems. I will get to them eventually.

The process of moving was interesting. All my posts in Wordpress were written in Textile which for years was my preferred markup language, but Textile turned out to be Betamax to Markdown's VHS, or what Mercurial is to Git, or what Bitbucket is to Github, or what this sentence is to any other sentence.

The first step was to learn just enough Go to build the Go Wordpress Importer. This pulls all the posts out of a Wordpress Export XML file, then uses Pandoc to convert the HTML to whatever format you like. I built in the ability to toss in some extra Pandoc magic to convert from Textile to HTML then from HTML to Markdown.

From there, Hugo does most of the heavy lifting as long as you can find a theme you like that includes all the nice stuff you want included. I quite like Er but I've forked it as ooh-er for my own purposes.

The next step is to build comments back in. It's something that Ruben has forgone - not for technical reasons I believe - but I really enjoy the one or two I get occasionally. It's not an easy problem to solve with a static site though, but I think I'll be leaning on Staticman to add comments into the github repo. I found a slightly different script that also uses Github, but adds comments as "issues". While appealing, I also want to ensure I'm not tied completely to Github for all time.

Let me know what you think of the changes. I'll post more when I have comments up and running.

So I came in here to do a post about something completely different, but discovered that Wordpress has enabled their Gutenberg editor by default with the latest version of the software, and it's both enticing and scary to try something new, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

On the surface it's got some advantages I think for people who want to write pretty posts.

What's immediately appealing is that everything is a block of "something" and you have to be very deliberate in what something you want that something to be. For example, if you want to insert a quote, you start a new paragraph and you select the "quote" block type and blammo, there's your quote:

Gutenberg is more than an editor. Gutenberg contributors

Which is something that for years I've thought was missing from all the nice GUI editors bundled with netlog software. I've had to deal with the source-code HTML fallout of websites written with WYSIWYG editors, and for the most part what you see on the front end might be what you get, but how you get it is usually some form of Lovecraft-ian horror on the back end, with tags embedded in tags like they've been involved in a transporter accident.

The ideal goal of a "block" powered editor in my mind would be to teach your users how to think in blocks, so that their HTML is structured and formatted from the get-go with the particular idiosyncrasies of that format in mind. I'm not sure if that's what the authors of Gutenberg set out to accomplish, but it's the ideal outcome I can think of from such a project.

Personally I gave up on WYSIWYG years ago because I wanted precise control over what I wrote and not have the editor insert it's ideas of how to output my thoughts. I began using Textile (markup) and have since dabbled a little in Markdown, and if I'm truly not getting the output I want, I switch to plain HTML. So, my initial reaction to having Gutenberg thrust upon me was to immediately reach for the off switch.

As an aside - I wanted to write a quick footnote here, but by default Gutenberg does not appear to support them. I'm guessing there are plugins for this, or maybe a setting I've missed, but it doesn't appear to be possible out of the box - something I cannot abide.

What I wanted to write as a footnote was that I did enable Gutenberg early as a plugin just to see what it was all about, but freaked out and turned it off immediately because change is awful and should never be tolerated. It's possible that I left it turned on, and only thought I disabled it, but I'm pretty sure it's turned on by default, and research is for chumps.

While I'm writing, I'm noticing what I'm going to presume is a bug that's causing the cursor to reset to the top of the paragraph I'm writing every time the page auto-saves. This is annoying. It could be a setting or another plugin I have causing the issue though, so it may not happen to everyone.

In summary, what I'm hoping to find when I press publish is a concise and minimal HTML output on my final page. The block paradigm, and the beautifully crafted interface for building those blocks appeals to me on a technological level, and I truly hope that the Gutenberg idea sticks and is embraced by the Wordpress user base. While there appear to be some minor issues (that might be unique to my setup), the idea is sound and may go some way to improving the guts of the sites that use it, which is a win.

Addendum: Gutenberg is wigging out with my Textile plugin and adding an extra <br/> tag after every paragraph. Other than that, the output HTML is every bit as simple and elegant as I could have hoped for. I will need to find a resolution to the Textile/Gutenberg conflict some time, and it might simply be switching off Textile once and for all, but if you come here and the page still has giant empty space between paragraphs, you'll know it's not because of Gutenberg.

I've scoured Soundcloud to find the best Christmas music I could find. It's chock full of Christmas favourites that are guaranteed to:

1. Bring Christmas cheer
2. Not suck

This years playlist includes:

Jingle Bells, a version of All I Want for Christmas Is You that doesn't make me want to murder someone, an original track by Sia, and many more classics reimagined in ways that don't suck.

{{< soundcloud 653561124 >}}

The whole Christmas Playlist That Doesn't Suck (2018) is up on Soundcloud right now, go have a listen!

Thank you to all the artists who have shared their Christmas songs on SoundCloud for the rest of us!

I took the kids and Mil to Cleland Wildlife Park today. It's one of my favourite places in Adelaide, and I've made some fun memories with the kids and various grandparents over the last ten years.

Today I thought we'd do something different. We've got a year-long membership we've barely used in this last 12 month period, so entry is free, and it was such a lovely sunny autumn day, I thought it might be nice to just chill out and try a new role-playing game I've been wanting to play with the kids. So we spent the morning and early afternoon printing, coloring¹, cutting, and sticking and had a go at the first campaign in Hero Kids, a really simple role playing game (like dungeons and dragons).

This is the whole family's first RPG - I've watched a couple of games in my time, but never participated - and my first attempt at being GM(Game Master). We didn't get very far - turns out stopping to explain rules and pat potoroos can eat into game time - but I think the kids had fun. Ammy played a healer, Evie played a rogue and Merry played a warrior. Mil was a Warlock with water powers. The basic gist of the game is that the characters themselves are kids so that the players can relate to them and get involved in the adventures.

I'm looking forward to putting more time into it. The kids all have great imaginations, so I think they'll really take to it. And I had to promise to take them all back to Cleland soon because we barely got to see any animals this time.

My buddy Mike's birthday is today and he's turning 3 months older than me!

Happy Birthday Mike, I hope you have lots of fun playing with your balls.

About 12 months ago I listened to The C= episode of the Rubenerd podcast wherein he tried to convince himself (poorly!) not to buy a Commodore 128.

I got in touch on twitter and asked if he wanted my old C=128 because although for nostalgia reasons I had held onto both my families old 64 and 128s, having both sitting in a closet doing nothing seemed stupid.

Rubenerd was glad to take it off my hands, and I'm glad it's going to someone who clearly loves retro computers in a way I will never emulate¹.

My memories of this thing are playing Wizball to the wee hours with my mum, her elation when she finally clocked it, playing Subsunk and Cosmonaut and River Raid and Curse of Sherwood and so many other games my young hands couldn't master.

I was never much of a gamer, and I never did put in the hours to finish all those games I loved, but it did make me love computers and the potential behind them. I also wish I could say I'd programmed much on either machine, but copying out code from a book didn't teach me much at the time, but it did help me see what someone could do with the right mindset and training, and planted a seed for programming that took another 25 years to finally grow.

The 64 and 128 have reached a level of nostalgia in my mind that they possibly don't deserve, but they're the only couple of things from my childhood that I really remember clearly. That and the Chubbles that were clearly more gimmick than substance. Oh, and the Rubick's Magic I got one Christmas and couldn't put down.

Today I finally got off my ass and posted it to Rubenerd. Shipping was surprisingly cheap because he didn't need the vintage printer or the after-market disk drive I have for it.

I won't mention the contents, and save that for a surprise for him, beyond the following:

• A slighlty rattly Commodore 128
• A power supply that no longer works, but that Rubenerd assures me he can fix or replace

I would love if Rubenerd could post an unboxing when he gets it. I left a couple of things in there that I hope he doesn't mind receiving and having to store somewhere. And I'd love it if he could post it to The Fleet when he gets it working, with a suitably cute name. Enjoy it, learn new things on it, and share!

I'm still stuck on this idea of how to enable comments and feedback on personal netlogs¹ in this world of Facebook and Twitter.

Almost everything I can come up with falls into a couple of broad categories.

1. Hosted by me. For example, enabling comments here or in a self-hosted forum. Comments here are obviously the easiest and I've had comments enabled ever since I started (although now limited to new posts only). A self-hosted forum is adding a barrier to entry that offers no incentive for people to bother, and isn't really appropriate for my readership of three².

2. Outsourced. This includes all discussion on Twitter, Facebook, Discord, Telegram, Discourse, or Disqus. These all require readers/commenters and me to both use the platform, and give up our privacy/rights to those comments to varying degrees based on how much we trust those platforms.

I have a couple of guiding principals I believe in when it comes to the internet. One is that it's super important it remains as open as possible - as free from government interference as possible (within reason), but also as free from corporate interference as possible too. Governments will always overreach and overreact, so it's handy that for years the internet has sort of routed around the problem when governments go rogue. More could be done on this front of course, but to my mind the biggest threat isn't government interference as it is citizen indifference.

By putting so much of our online lives in the hands of large social media companies, we're dulling the gears that make the internet such a powerful force for social change. Think about it - imagine a group that uses Facebook to mobilise their protests and activism in a country similar to our own. I'm going to use Facebook through this example, but it could just as easily be any other large social site.

So imagine this group of activists - their message is irrelevant, suffice to say it's something important to them, and potentially dangerous to powerful people in their country. For those powerful people, all it takes to decommission the group is cut off their access to Facebook. If that group hasn't met in person, shared contact details outside of that channel, or prepared alternate means of communication then they're effectively deaf and blind when they try to continue communicating. Not only that, but they are mute as well.

On top of that - to people in other countries not affected by the same struggles - they might as well be invisible if their only presence has been on Facebook. On the flip side, for people outside those problems we're allowing a company - or even a foreign power - limit what we see. We're also limiting ourselves to those formats that get traction on those sites - for Facebook it's the Single Grainy Image With Text. How much can we learn about the world from a single picture?

I'm stumbling into /r/iamverysmart territory here, which is not my intention - I have a limited grasp of the socio-political realities of my own neighbourhood, let alone what other people are struggling with elsewhere in the world, but relying on Facebook (or Reddit, or Twitter) as our means of engaging with the world leaves us vulnerable and open to manipulation.

Which is why I miss the days of netlogs. It seemed like for a period of about two years, the internet was exploding with this vibrant eclectic mix of freely shared, highly personal content. Going through my site and cleaning it out I remembered I used to be subscribed to a guy who just talked about toy Transformers. That guy stopped writing in 2011 without any fanfare and I completely missed it. There was someone else who I discovered when I realised I needed a way to be a good parent to my child when my wife is a Christian, and I an atheist. That guy stopped writing his netlog in 2013 and again I didn't notice the loss. So many more sites refuse to load at all - buried in a sort of DNS graveyard, or worse returned zombified as placeholder pages full of ads. The least worst fate is for a site to at least still load - quiet and untouched by human hands as a monument or shrine to the moments they capture.

How much of that is captured on Twitter or Facebook now? The content might be there - but it's trapped behind accounts and subscriptions, real-time feeds and algorithms that show people what they're told they want to see. And it's making it easier for corporations, foreign powers, and your own leaders to hide what they don't want you to see.

That's enough of a trek into conspiracy theory and nostalgia for one night. I understand how much I'm teetering between crackpot and melodrama with the above. I really just want more people to think about this stuff. It's much easier to talk about possible solutions when we're on the same page. Because I don't know what the solution is. Spinning this site up is step one. Figuring out how to discuss this stuff with people who want to talk is step two. ... Profit?

I've been thinking more about yesterday's post on comment systems.

I started posting to my Reddit profile, then realised why stop there - I've been mucking around so much with chat apps that I've got profiles everywhere, and I thought I could try and make them useful. My two communication preferences right now are Discord (because it's like Slack but more relaxed), and Telegram (because it's exactly like Facebook Messenger but better. Both offer simple ways to set up and harness the power of bots and make using them simple, and with a couple of WordPress plugins the process is even simpler than it should be.

The two plugins I'm giving a crack are WP Discord and WP Telegram.

Both made setting up their respective bots a breeze (although the instructions for WP Discord skip one vital step), so theoretically when I hit publish on this post I should see a message pop up in both my new Geekorium Discord Server and my Geekorium Telegram Channel. Feel free to join in either channel and say hello, and if you wish, get notified of new posts when they happen - it's like RSS, but with future technology. I won't ever spam you - if you don't want to see posts, leave the channel or turn off notifications for those channels in their respective apps.

You might also notice a Discord widget down below above the comment box. Join in there if you want and chat directly.

I've often tested out new stuff round here in the past, and my post history is littered with the detritus of tried and failed experiments. I can't say for certain how long these will last, or if I might find something better. My goal in trying this out was to see if they were viable alternatives to vanilla comments, and if they might make it more appealing for people to give feedback or connect with me. If they're still around in a week it will be because I'm finding them valuable, or people are actually using them.

See you in chat! 🚀

Update: the widget below above the comments lasted about 5 minutes before I realised it only shows who's on the server, not the chat that's going on. I'll need to find a place to prominently display the Discord and Telegram icons to encourage people to click through, but a massive widget is not going to do it.

Having fired up the old blogging engine¹, I now find myself wanting to comment on Rubenerd's latest post about enabling a commenting system, but find that due to lack of a comment system I cannot! And also having trashed both my Twitter and Facebook accounts in a single week, I now have NO CONCEIVABLE WAY to get in touch with the man. I mean, despite email and other antiquated ways of communication - should I perhaps be sending smoke signals?

No, email isn't public enough. A person cannot comment on another blogger's content from the detached privacy of an email - we are after all "civilised gentlemen"².

So consider this another comment in a long series of posts directly directed at Rubenerd. Tune out from here if you're not him, and have no interest in how he chooses to enable comments.

I shall tackle his so called "two options", and then suggest my own third option. I'll ignore that he presented his own third option, because that's thrown all my maths out and I can only count to many.

1. Disqus: No. No. Don't do this. No. Do not use Disqus. Not because there's anything wrong with it necessarily, but don't change how you do things to make a couple of people slightly happier - you'll always feel dirty.

2. A CMS: You could. But again, why change something that's working for you³?

Your only real option is to take your comments outside your space.

1. One option that comes to mind is something like /r/rubenerd on reddit. They have those new profiles now don't they? x-post everything onto your profile, and link to it at the end of your post.

   Pros: no changes to the way you write (much), potential for actual link karma, surely everyone has a reddit account right?

   Cons: you still don't own/control the platform and Reddit is most certainly mining their user's data in all the same ways Facebook has been. Might be an effort to moderate, or you might miss stuff if you're not a heavy Reddit user yourself.

2. Pick some forum software or a microblogging platform like GNU Social or Mastodon and self host that, x-post to the site as suggested above. Enable Twitter/Facebook/Reddit logins so people don't have to register to your site to throw down a witty one-liner.

   Pros: Self hosted means it's your data and your readers can have a say in what happens to it. You get to decide how it's shown - write a back end script that pulls comments in on a cron and adds them to the static site, use some Javascript⁴, or just link to it and let people free-for-all

   Cons: It's a hassle and no one will use it.

3. Keep going as you are now. Use Twitter. I'll keep responding from here and other people can find ways they feel comfortable to respond.

   Pros: Really easy.

   Cons: I don't get to comment⁵.

4. If you're mirroring your repo online, give people the link and let them clone and send you pull requests with their comments.

   Pros: Only dedicated idiots will comment.

   Cons: Only dedicated idiots will comment. You'd have to set up a template/rules for comments. It's a fucking ridiculous idea.

5. Build some sort of federated commenting system that would allow someone like me to make a comment on their own site and have it salmon'ed to yours. Frankly, I don't think this would work with your current system and would probably be difficult to integrate without a CMS. I've been playing with Keybase which has a flat-file system integrated - you could join a trusted blogging network and use that to allow comments somehow.

I'm partial to the reddit idea, and might start doing it myself. I've also thought about setting up Mastodon and using that instead of Twitter. I also have a GNU Social instance running, but it's kind of a bummer without many people to follow.

All these options are making me want to turn my own comments off, just to force some creativity. I'm looking forward to seeing what Rubenerd does.

Discuss on Reddit... IF YOU DARE

Quickedit: This page on Hugo suggests Staticman which looks pretty neat. Integrated with Jekyll, which I know you're not using any more, but could be integrated into Hugo.

This was going to be a post for my 500th published... post. 500 is a big milestone. So I've been cleaning up my site, migrating and consolidating AWS S3 buckets and setting up https hosting on one for some of the images and videos I've posted here in the past.

But as I've been cleaning, I've discovered lots of old photos and short text posts that were imported through various automatic processes, like Flickr photos that were imported for a while when I tweeted them, or things I reblogged from other sites with dubious attribution.

So I've been judiciously killing them, and very rarely re-instating posts I never published (or only ever published on Facebook).

Which has all brought me to the much less auspicious count of a 445 post milestone for my return to blogging¹.

Hooray! Here's to 445 more! And then 110 more after that so that I reach a more rounded number².

I find myself in the fun position of following up on a follow-up post to my follow-up on Rubenerds original post.

I mean, if we both used Facebook, this would just be a series of comments, but where's the fun in that? As Rubenerd says, "it reminded me of the blogosphere of old", and I'm enjoying the feeling of a proper back and forth. And unlike a Facebook comment, his post can be read completely independently, with his thoughts and musings taking their own tangents without the feeling that it all needs to tie back into my post like we're arguing about something. It's like a layer cake, or a meat trifle or something.

But as he said, the blogs¹ of old are fading out. Most people just don't bother, unless they're part of some large conglomeration. Maybe this is just the evolution of the web, as the weaker writers give up from lack of traffic, and the stronger ones either get grabbed by companies who can pay them, or just keep on solidly pushing through publishing post after post of eclectic material, not for the world but for themselves. Rubenerd is definitely of the latter, while I am one of those weaker ones who got tired of feeling like I was talking to myself. Or I was bad at it.

So while I'm giving it another shot, I can't imagine how long I'll last this time. Which brings me back round to RSS. I settled on FreshRSS because it was PHP based and my host had an install script. Not much of a reason to base my decision on, except that I've tried TT-RSS before and while I was happy enough with the software, the support left me feeling a bit eh about the whole thing². So Rubenerd, if you're listening, I'd be happy to set up an account on my instance of FreshRSS if you want to try it out.

Of course, this is all academic if I never use the thing, and I'm not sure I'm going to. As I said in my previous post, reddit scratches that itch I have to find new content. But even that is a bit filter-bubbly despite an amazing breadth of sources on /r/all. What I need is an ever changing list of semi-random content to peruse on my mobile. I wonder if there are any federated RSS aggregators?

And don't get me started on federated replacements for Facebook Messenger. I have one colleague at work who I keep roping in to try new messaging platforms, and I think he hates me now. In fact I know Mike hates me because he just cycles through each app to message me how much he hates me. I can't blame him - my phone creaks under the weight of the following in no particular order:

• Pulse (SMS)
• Yammer (for work team chat until Microsoft Teams is available to us)
• Discord (what I tried when I was trying to find something like Slack)
• Telegram (my preferred replacement for FM (Facebook Messenger) with my family)
• Wickr Me (I know exactly one person that uses it)
• Wire (I can't make anyone use it, not even Mike)
• Google Hangouts (I can't bring myself to use it)
• Duo (pre-installed on Huey, my phone)
• And three different email apps

Most recently I've also installed Keybase, which is so loaded with the buzzword promise of blockchain I couldn't not try it out. Rubenerd wasn't there - which as the only person I know who's actually published a PGP key - surprised me a little. Keybase is chock full of people who have published PGP keys. If you want to hit me up there, my Keybase profile is here. Maybe someone smarter than me can tell me why it isn't a sound technology, but although it's based on technology by one company, you can't get much more federated than blockchain, even if it's not exactly what we mean when use the term.

One last thing Rubenerd before I go. If not comments, at least enable pingbacks and ping other people when you link them. Otherwise I might not notice you've published until I go to my feed reader.

I once did a post about the old-old Batman and Robin Serial and took some screen-caps from the episodes. One of them has proven quite popular around the internet and has been used by sites like [Cracked] THE JOHNNY DUNCAN IMDB PAGE for any post that needs a picture of Batman and Robin running:

{{< figure src="//turbo.geekorium.au/wp-content/uploads/526941344_4c307467e1_o.jpg" alt="A grainy black and white still frame of Batman and Robin running towards the camera from the 1949 Batman and Robin serial">}}

I wondered why it was so popular, till I realised just how iconic that image is, even if I can't think of a particular example. So after some research, here's a compilation of images of Batman and Robin running from different media.

First up is Adam West and Burt Ward running to the UN to save some diplomats from being powdered by their greatest foes. I think they'd gotten stuck in traffic?

I can't find any images from the original comics, but I'll keep my eye out for them and put them up as they come. The closest I could find was this vintage 1966 Japanese comic cover. This is the Adam West era as you can tell by the eyebrows on the cowl¹.

Despite the lack of direct comic book proof, I submit this retro t-shirt design, and you tell me if it doesn't trigger a memory of something in your brain. You know this is a classic image. If you've come to realise the iconic-ness of the image of the Dynamic Duo running, you can buy this t-shirt and wear it proudly.

Or if that doesn't convince you that Batman and Robin hoofing it is one of pop-culture's most classic images, try this piece from the 2007 Singapore Design Festival. Once glance and you immediately get it don't you? Because it's classic.

Here they are running in Batman: The Animated Series.

Followed by an awesome wallpaper by BobbyRubio on Deviantart.

The next is Batman and Nightwing, but as Nightwing started out as Robin², I figured it was an homage to the idea and therefore valid.

Which leads nicely into this one, which is the New Batman and Robin, who are Dick Grayson (the original Robin nee Nightwing) and Damian Wayne, Bruce Wayne's son³. So the image comes full circle to the next generation.

And for gamers, Batman and Robin in the best Batman video game adaptation of all time.

Finally, I leave you with Batman and Robin from the end of Batman Forever movie from 1995.

Over on Rubenerd¹, Ruben is upset about the death of his favourite feed reader, the Digg Reader.

First of all, who knew Digg still had products that people wanted to use. Second, I'm sort of in the same boat myself. Having just killed my Facebook account, while simultaneously soul searching about what I really want from social media, I've thought that maybe I can go back to consuming RSS feeds like I used to.

Only, I've logged into my self-hosted instance of Fever and fired up the beautifully made Press (RSS Reader) only to discover that Fever was shuttered and Press hasn't been updated since 2014. Which isn't a huge deal for now, as both still work (although Press can't be found without a direct link), and they both work as well as they did two or three years ago when I stopped using them. The problem is - if I start using them again, relying on them like I used to rely on Google Reader (or as Rubenerd relied on Digg Reader) what will happen when they finally actually die like they inevitably will?

Ruben added a pretty exhaustive list of self hosted software including feed readers, which I will certainly go through and take a look at, but teasing out the right replacement is going to be a pain considering I need to ensure:

• The software works well and is pretty (I can't pretend I can use functional ugly software).
• There's an equally well made Android client so I can read on the bus.
• I can install it on my rudimentary cPanel hosting that may or may not allow Ruby/Python etc, but will handle PHP like a champ.

And finally, breaking out of my dot-points into a fully fledged paragraph - I'm not certain a plain feed reader is going to cut it for me any more. When I said I'd been thinking about what I want from social media, I realised that Facebook was not doing it for me because it was full of the opinions of my friends and family, and not a lot more. People might have been posting stuff, but the Facebook algorithm was letting me down, and only showing me page after page of stuff I just wasn't interested in².

On the flip side, I use Reddit a lot, and the thing that has me wasting hours of my life there is that it surfaces the quality stuff that thousands, or tens of thousands of people have upvoted from thousands of different communities all in one place. So I can flip from reading a joke, to watching a Russian dashcam, to poring over an article about some new scientific discovery all from a single app. It means I'm not reading the same type of stuff over and over³, but a massive and diverse range of opinion and types of content from all over the world. And I just don't think there are any other sites quite like it.

Again, there's nothing that means I need to replace Reddit today either, just like I don't need to ditch the feed reader that's still working, but I also didn't have to ditch Facebook when I did. But I truly believe as responsible modern citizens we need to make better choices about where our software takes us, and the technology we use to get there. Part of that is to stop using stuff that frustrates us, when the only reason we keep doing it is because everyone else is.

So I'm looking for the next Reddit, the next Facebook and the next feed reader all in one. Something that can keep me in touch with people I know and love, but also give me more of what other people I don't know find funny or sad or inspiring. If something like this already exists, please let me know. If not, I'll be waiting over here using technology that just hasn't figured out its days are numbered.

I haven't properly "blogged" here in so very long. With so many other social sites around like the Facebloops and the whatnots, it's seemed a little pointless putting anything up here where no one would read it. I could post a pic of my kids on that site that everyone has an account for and get a bunch of interactions there instead, so putting the effort into this site seemed pointless.

The sheer lazyness of it is exactly what Mark Zuckerberg is counting on. Posting on Facebook takes no effort, it's simple, and your pictures and rants and low effort posting gets seen and liked and commented on, and no one ever wants to leave, unless they held out for years and never joined in the first place. And if you want to chat to your mum, or your wife through anything other than SMS, are you really going to make them install something else like Telegram instead of just using Messenger?

But I can't be lazy any more. I quit Twitter years ago (and finally deleted it a week ago), and this week I'm quitting Facebook. All the cool kids are doing it, but none of the cool kids I know do, so I'm the dumbass who has to look like a hipster wannabe rebel and close down my account. So I'm not "closing" it - I've simply deleted most of what information there was about me, unfriended everyone, and left a public message that people should email me or visit my site here from now on. I hope people don't get too offended. I've already been told off my my wife for removing the fact that we're married from her profile... I probably didn't think through some of the side effects here.

I'm holding out for something new and federated. Something where I can own my data, but still share it in a way that's easy and lets old friends and family I never get to see know I'm alive. There are promising beginnings out there, but they all suffer from not being easy to set up, or not having enough people, or just plain not being what I'm really looking for. And no, Slack isn't it - it's just as closed and proprietary as Facebook.

If you've come here from Facebook to see what I'm doing or get in touch, you can email me. My personal email is Josh (my name) at demands.coffee - I know it doesn't look like an email address, but trust me it is. And if you want to instant message me, download and [add me on Telegram] - it's the closest thing to Facebook Messenger I've found that actually cares about privacy, security of your messages, and is just plain useful. And if you're really paranoid, I've got a Wickr account too.

Big 840x420 version of the pixelised Wiz and Nifta from Wizball, my favourite game as a kid.

I've scoured Soundcloud to find the best Christmas music I could find. It's chock full of Christmas favourites that are guaranteed to:

1. Bring Christmas cheer
2. Not suck

This years playlist includes:

Jingle Bells, Ding Dong Merrily on High, The First Noel, the only version of Jingle Bell Rock that doesn't make me want to cancel Christmas, Silent Night, and sixteen more classics reimagined in ways that don't suck.

{{< soundcloud 394314926 >}}

The whole Christmas Playlist That Doesn't Suck (2017) is up on Soundcloud right now, go have a listen!

Thank you to all the artists who have shared their Christmas songs on SoundCloud for the rest of us!

I've scoured Soundcloud to find the best Christmas music I could find. It's chock full of Christmas favourites (and a few new ones) that are guaranteed to:

1. Bring Christmas cheer
2. Not suck

This years playlist includes:

We Wish You A Merry Christmas, While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks, Joy To The World, Santa Clause Is Coming To Town, Mele Kalikimaka, Wonderful Christmastime, Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, We Three Kings, Drummer Boy, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Home Alone Theme, Marshmallow World, White Christmas, Away In A Manger, Always In The Season, I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, The Grinch, Let It Snow, Sleigh Ride, O Come All Ye Faithful, The First Noel, Jingle Bells, as well as four originals.

The whole Christmas Playlist That Doesn't Suck (2016) is up on Soundcloud right now, go have a listen!

Thank you to all the artists who have shared their Christmas songs on SoundCloud for the rest of us!

Six years ago I wrote a post sitting in a park watching my daughter play. I called it "The Life" and the feelings in it spring from what seem to be an eternal longing inside me to live other people's more "glamorous" lives. For instance, I listen to a lot of different podcasts and I find myself wishing I could "do that". Whatever that might be.

For instance, if I'm listening to an adventure drama, I'll wish I could write something as engaging as The Red Panda and capture people's imaginations.

Or if I'm listening to two guys chatting I start imagining what interesting conversations I could have with my favourite people to share with the world.

If I'm listening to a something educational, I'll try and figure out what subject I know enough about (or could learn enough about) to be as engaging as Hardcore History.

Ultimately though, what they all share in common is the underlying model of making cool stuff and being your own boss. I don't know why this appeals to me so much, but it does, and always has. I don't really know where I acquired this romantic notion that self-employment in some creative endevour is what would make me happiest, because frankly the idea of putting myself in charge of anything sounds like a terrifyingly stupid idea.

There are a couple of things I spelled out in that post six years ago that I thought would make me happier:

to pad¹ out my digital lifestyle with all the trimmings

I'm pretty content with my trimmings right now. I have enough disposable income to get "stuff" that makes my inner geek/child happy, and to get some fun stuff for my own kids that my own parents could never afford for me.

sit in a park and read and write

I still sit at a desk.

never fix another jammed printer or reset another password

I hear talk of mythical beings who enjoy their day jobs

This I've achieved! This is where I have to point out how fortunate I've been to get to a point in my career where I absolutely thoroughly love what I do. I used to weigh up taking a day off almost daily in previous roles and jobs, but where I am right now it never occurs to me. That isn't something I take lightly, and I am grateful to everyone who has helped push me into this position.

just make giant run-on sentences that would make Zombie_Plan and Rubenerd proud.

Not run on sentences, but I'm pretty proud of the size of some of my SQL queries.

I've scoured Soundcloud to find the best Christmas music I could find. It's chock full of Christmas favourites (and a few new ones) that are guaranteed to:

1. Bring Christmas cheer
2. Not suck

Thank you to all the artists who have shared their Christmas songs on SoundCloud for the rest of us!

{{< soundcloud 167228826 >}}

The Christmas Playlist That Doesn't Suck (2015)

I'm not sure how many of my friends are in the market for good podcasts, but one of my favourites has just returned from a lengthy hiatus.

This is a superb treat for your ears. No other podcast I listen to sounds quite so epic and intimate at the same time. The voice acting is sublime and draws you in to the intricately created world of the Edicts.

Now is a great time to listen from the beginning and catch up for the second half of season 3. Immerse yourself in the world of Agent Nick Garrett of the F.I.S investigating reports of strange phenomena that threaten to undermine his understanding of the very nature of the world.

It's atmospheric and creepy with incredible sound design. I really can't recommend it enough.

Edict Zero - FIS

I'm livid lately at the state of this country's politics, and the reason is this government's absolutely disgraceful reaction to the Human Rights Commission report into the children in detention.

Tony Abbott is a fool and an incompetent, but the vast majority of the front bench are much much worse. Not because they are idiots, but because they have proven themselves to be heartless pieces of filth.

If you haven't already, take the time to read just the findings of the report. It's a small list, but it cuts to the heart of the problems with keeping kids in detention.

"The overarching finding of the Inquiry is that the prolonged, mandatory detention of asylum seeker children causes them significant mental and physical illness and developmental delays, in breach of Australia’s international obligations.

The following is a snapshot of the findings:

• Children in immigration detention have significantly higher rates of mental health disorders than children in the Australian community.
• Both the former and current Ministers for Immigration agreed that holding children for prolonged periods in remote detention centres, does not deter people smugglers or asylum seekers. There appears to be no rational explanation for the prolonged detention of children.
• The right of all children to education was denied for over a year to those held on Christmas Island.
• The Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, as the guardian of unaccompanied children, has failed in his responsibility to act in their best interests.
• The Commonwealth’s decision to use force to transfer children on Christmas Island to a different centre breached their human rights.
• The numerous reported incidents of assaults, sexual assaults and self-harm involving children indicate the danger of the detention environment.
• At least 12 children born in immigration detention are stateless, and may be denied their right to nationality and protection.
• Dozens of children with physical and mental disabilities are detained for prolonged periods.
• Some children of parents assessed as security risks have been detained for over two years without hope of release.
• Children detained indefinitely on Nauru are suffering from extreme levels of physical, emotional, psychological and developmental distress.

The findings damn both this government AND the previous one, and make some serious recommendations for improving the situation. That this government has chosen to attack rather than listen has removed the last rational hope that we aren't being led by heartless disgusting monsters. Abbott shooting his mouth off is the least of the problems.

Scott Morrison has failed these children, and we're told he should be thanked! They accuse a respected Human Rights lawyer of partisan bias intending to occlude any introspection, while admitting that they haven't bothered to read it! They offer her a new job just weeks before the release of the report, and they smirk about it while testifying that she wanted it. I'm angry that all I can do is write on Facebook. I'm angry that people who voted for Abbott think that he's the main problem. Or Peta Credlin, Or partisan politics.

The problem is that discourse in this country is games and intrigue instead of vision and accountability. No one is doing it right, and Australia's soul is turning black while kids suffer and their parents face bleak hopeless futures. And none of my friends are to blame. None of you wanted this either. What do you do about it that I should be doing? Where do we go from here instead of impotently raging online? I needed to get this off my chest, and I do so knowing that I'm not helping, and I'm not improving the level of discourse by blaming Liberal voters. I'm sorry if I've offended.

I want to know that other people are thinking about this too, and I want people to know the facts, not the nonsense that our politicians want people to believe.

I've scoured Soundcloud to find the best Christmas music I could find. It's chock full of Christmas favourites (and a few new ones) that are guaranteed to:

1. Bring Christmas cheer
2. Not suck

Thank you to all the artists who have shared their Christmas songs on SoundCloud for the rest of us!

{{< soundcloud 62612028 >}}

The Christmas Playlist That Doesn't Suck (2014)

NOTE: I posted this in 2015, backdated to 2013 when I created it because I wanted an archive of each year.

I've scoured Soundcloud to find the best Christmas music I could find. It's chock full of Christmas favourites (and a few new ones) that are guaranteed to:

1. Bring Christmas cheer
2. Not suck

25+ tracks from great musicians with a unique sound to bring to your Christmas celebrations. Including favourites like "Away in a Manger", "Carol of the Bells", and even a special rendition of an old favourite from a much beloved Star Wars character!

Thank you to all the artists who have shared their Christmas songs on SoundCloud for the rest of us!

{{< soundcloud 15217087 >}}

The Christmas Playlist That Doesn't Suck (2013)

NOTE: I posted this in 2015, backdated to 2013 when I created it because I wanted an archive of each year.

When you first install the WHMCS Bridge plugin from Zingiri, the plugin warns you not to 'edit or delete this page', meaning don't touch the page that's automatically created by the plugin. Unfortunately, if you disable the plugin then re-enable it, the page that was initially created gets trashed and a new one created. This would be fine, if unlike me, you just permanently deleted the original page that had been created, then altered the page slug and page name however you want on the new page. What do you do if you need to edit the WHMCS Bride page?

However, if you were like me, you instead permanently deleted the new page, and reinstated the old page, only to find that it doesn't work any more.

That's because the settings grabs hold of the database ID of the page it creates and permanently stores it in the settings, untouchable in anyway via the front end.

First up you need to grab the ID of the page you want to use. You can get this from the database, under the wp-posts table, but it's easier to just edit the page you want to use and grab the page ID from the URL. For instance, you might have http://example.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=123456789&action= and you would grab the ID 123456789 from the middle of the URL.

Next you want to edit the database. Using something like phpmyadmin (beyond the scope of this post) head to the wp_options table and look for the option cc_whmcs_bridge_pages. change the value to the ID you grabbed before, and blammo - pages are working again.

You might also need to add THE Custom Field Name cc_whmcs_bridge_page with the value WHMCS, but I found they were already there when I reinstated the page.

He sensed the other watching him.

"This is you, isn't it?" he asked, holding the Ortrix up.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"In a manner of speaking,"{{% /voiceinthedark %}} replied the other in a way that sounded melancholy, even though it lacked tone.

"All the Torim below created this? Became this before they died?" asked Rex.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"Instead of dying,"{{% /voiceinthedark %}} the other corrected, {{% voiceinthedark %}}"and not just the Torim below."{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"Although the other Torim lived, what little power they possessed was a power they all shared"{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"And now it's all in the Ortrix?"

The Ortrix.

For an object that contained the essence of an entire race, it was underwhelmingly nondescript. It even lacked the ostentatious metalwork it would eventually pick up on its travels.

Rex felt the weight of it in his hand. Not just its mass - again it felt not-enough - but the weight of it's future.

He could sense its journey from here, had seen it in reverse, and knew where it ended up.

If he concentrated, he could hear every soul that had created it.

But the Torim below survived.

Not as physical beings. Not when their bodies were forcibly taken. Reduced to so much ash and dust.

Not as minds. The Torim below had found a power that linked them deeper than that simple structure.

Not as a single being, but as an entity of thought and presence and power.

And in the caverns of Torim, an Ortrix.

The tension broke.

The Torim above took action. They felt the power from below like electric prickles on their skin and they could no longer bear it.

They sent armies below, and with fire and plasma and the rending of guns they silenced the voices in their ears and released the pressure on their chests.

For a little while at least they even felt relief.

Eventually they gave up.

The experiments failed while the fear in those above grew.

All the while Rex could feel the power of the Ortrix increase although he could not locate it. It was not quite the same power as those below possessed.

And tension grew. And hatred grew. And Rex's heart felt heavy with more grief than he thought he could handle.

One by one they were taken.

In the darkness, they came with powerful lights that blinded. Although they were met without resistance they brought weapons.

They rounded up a few at a time and they took them above. They opened them up to see where the power lived and tried to pull it out.

Of course it failed. The power was not caused by any part of their physical body, unless you count their consciousness or their ever-loving minds.

Not all Torim were fearful.

When they tried to talk their peers around or tried to provide aid to the Torim below it usually went one of two ways. Either their own power increased until they themselves were shunned, or they were forced to see they were wrong and became even more callous.

And not all the Torim above lacked power. Some held it as a prize to be used and feared. They believed the gentleness that emerged in their kin was weakness, and sought to punish those who failed to use the power.

The horrors began.

...

Rex watched time unfold in silence, the other by his side. He didn't look at his companion as they watched, but he sensed the tension permeating the non-space they shared.

He watched the Torim drive their fellow Torim underground. In deep cavernous bunkers they waited, uncertain, afraid, but too generous to resist.

He watched the Torim above make plans. They sensed the amassed energy of their captives below and it drove them, ever fearful, to unspeakable acts.

Rex shuddered.

"So what happens next?"

"The Torim below created the Ortrix. If they didn't make it as a weapon, then for what?"

The Other had materialised, and Rex searched his face for a clue. Instead, he was shocked to see his companion crying.

For a moment, Rex was speechless.

"I... I thought you were a god. But gods don't cry."

{{% voiceinthedark %}}All Torim were born with great power{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

{{% voiceinthedark %}}But those below hummed with it, exuded it like a bright light from their being.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

{{% voiceinthedark %}}It may have been an evolutionary trait, or simply that these were the Torim that embraced the power, revelled in it.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

{{% voiceinthedark %}}The power was similar to that which you posses. It understood all things it touched, and embraced all it understood.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

{{% voiceinthedark %}}Those who possessed it strongly would not fight when the others cast them down.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"And here they wait".{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"I sense disharmony."

{{% voiceinthedark %}}This is not a world at peace.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

Rex let his awareness expand, encompassing the planet.

He sensed a rift between two peoples. He couldn't really see much of a difference, at least not at the deepest levels he could feel them. Pulling back, trying to focus on the conflict, he could see one group were more fearful of the other.

Geographically, the group the others most feared were separated and underground. He sensed a familiar power concentrated there.

"These people call themselves the Torim," Rex said, realisation dawning, "and those underground... They are the Torim below."

"How many times have I died?"

"And why is it, that with time and space bending to my will, I still keep forgetting stuff like this?"

{{% voiceinthedark %}}The power of the Torimbalo is not meant to be used by consciousnesses such as yours. The effects can be unpredictable.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"So who is the Torimbalo for then?" Rex asked as he wandered around the base of the enormous stone hut.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}It is not a tool for anyone's use. The power was corrupted and shaped into the Ortrix.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"Maybe I can stop that happening," Rex replied.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}If only.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"I'm sure I've been here before."

Rex tried to get a feel for the world around him. Beyond local features and the brief glimpse he'd had from passing through earlier, he felt like this planet was significant to him for some reason.

"There were more buildings," he hesitated.

"I was running, chasing, something."

"Did I...?"

He paused, puzzled.

"This is where I died!"

"I recognise this world."

"We came past here a little while ago, I think - but we were moving so fast I wasn't paying attention."

Rex was solid again and standing next to an enormous featureless skyscraper.

"The Ortrix will be here again some time in the future."

He put his hand on the stonework of the building.

"These stones are enormous!"

Stepping back, he wandered away from the buildings to get a better look at it's entirety.

"That's no skyscraper," he gasped, "that's a stone hut!"

The Other travelled with him.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}What will you do with it when you have followed the Ortrix to it's source?{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

Rex pondered.

"I suppose I'll see if it can be destroyed, or use it in some way to take Jones' power away from him again. If I can't do that, maybe I can stop it being made in the first place."

{{% voiceinthedark %}}A sound plan,{{% /voiceinthedark %}} his companion replied, {{% voiceinthedark %}}although perhaps more difficult than you expect.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"No doubt. But if there's one thing I've learned since I died, it's that nothing worthwhile is easy."

The pair sped on into the past.

The time-belt was the Ortrix again.

And now the time-belt.

It wouldn't stay each way for long. While tracing it backward and forward through time, he'd seen it forged into time-belts and reverted back to something like the Ortrix so many times he wasn't sure which was the original any more.

Occasionally it had been sent back in time to collect itself with varying levels of success. He held his out-of-body breath as he followed it through the short time Jones had it.

He also wondered about the sneaky joy-ride The Professor had taken it on once.

Not so long ago, there was a much wider gap between the various methods for acknowledging online content. At one end, you had the option of reading something and then doing absolutely nothing. On the other, you had things like leaving a comment, emailing the post to a friend, or writing a blog post in response to another you read elsewhere. - Len Kendall - Don't 'like' this post

The habit of "liking" things on the internet would be difficult to break. But it inspires me a little because it gels with an upcoming experiment I have planned for The Geekorium.

To "like" (or +1) something is the lowest form of interaction you can have with someone's post, and it saves you from having to put actual thought into your response. I think I'd rather have "likes" on my posts than nothing at all, but I'd certainly appreciate some thoughtful comments more.

Len points out that the "like" button is one-size-fits-all. There's no way to say "I appreciate you posting this, even if I disagree with the content". There's no difference between liking your favourite noodle bar and liking news of your friends newborn son. And with the rise of sponsored posts on Facebook, your "like" on the noodle bar page now puts ads for that noodle bar front and centre above more important things like births, deaths, and marriages of the people I actually care about.

I expect this behaviour is here to stay, but I will try and think a bit harder before liking things in future, and I'd appreciate it if you'd do the same too.

It took a while.

The Ortrix had led an interesting existence. As the time-belt it had observed the beginning and end of governments, watched the deaths of lovers and seen evil men frustrated over and over again. Empires rose and fell on its unyielding law. When used as a weapon, it more often than not backfired. When used for personal gain, it invariably led to heartbreak.

Those who used it well learned to ride it, saw some sights and left things mostly the way they were.

The time-belt did not allow time to change, but it did cause some mind-bending time loops.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}They are one and the same.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

{{% voiceinthedark %}}The power of the Torimbalo was used in the device you observe.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

The thread Rex had followed hadn't tapered out, so much as disappeared into itself through the time belt. Squeezing his consciousness through it, like yarn through a needle, he could see the thread emerge from the other end.

He followed it through to another time, pausing to get his bearing while the other slipped through after. As he tried to establish when he was, he noticed the thread looped back on itself and through the time belt again.

"This is going to take a while isn't it?"

{{% voiceinthedark %}}You are searching for the Torimbalo.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"Well I still don't know what that is," corrected Rex, "I'm looking for the Ortrix right now."

Rex continued his clumsy dance through time and space, following the temporally luminous thread of the Ortrix. The Other followed alongside.

On a nondescript planetoid, in a system that no longer existed, the thread unravelled.

Finding where it ended, Rex turned to his companion bewildered.

"This isn't the Ortrix. This is the time belt!"

I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. Roger Ebert

If only I could really learn this leeson.

Rex crashed through the past.

Following the thread of time, he ricocheted around divergent moments trying to find one that would not alert Jones to his changes.

He found the threads increasingly intertwined about the presence of the Ortrix.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}Where are you headed Rex? {{% /voiceinthedark %}}

The voice of the other startled Rex enough that he misjudged a quantum event and plunged through the fusion-heat of a star seventy thousand years in the past.

"Shoot, man! Don't do that," he complained.

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}It's OK, you don't have to live with this.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}It's OK, I'm certain I can change this.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}Jones rested a heavy hand on Rex's shoulder. Producing a small vial of an indigo liquid from within his cloaks, he leaned in closer.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}His heart heavy with grief, Rex watched the scene unfold again. He had forgotten all of this, but he remembered his heart breaking.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}"I picked this up on a recent mission and I've only just confirmed its properties."{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}"I would only have to change one thing. One tiny little thing."{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}He unstoppered the vial and took a small whiff.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}He went back to a moment before and hovered over the alarm panel{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}"What were we talking about?"{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}"Come back to me," he thought.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}Jones looked around uncertainly, noticed Rex - brooding, distressed - and the vial in his own hand. He struggled to keep a smirk off his face.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}A dull pain bubbled its way into his consciousness. He watched his own memories unfold from this moment as the pain slowly increased.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}"Ah yes. This is a memory toxin. A measured dosage could erase all those ghastly images from your head. You wouldn't have to remember how you found her, or that she was even with you that day." Jones gripped Rex's shoulder harder.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}Anrianna heard the alarm and raced to her station early. Rex and The Professor were surprised to see her, but forgot their surprise as the Hundred-Tonne-Husky lurched out of control and began it's devastating decent toward Nolix.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}Overwhelmed with grief, Rex snatched the fluid from Jones hand and downed the whole bottle. Then he passed out.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}The trio emerged groggy from their synthetic cocoons and Rex's panic dissolved into joy to see Anrianna safe.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}Taking the vial from Rex's fingers Jones muttered to himself, "Well that was quite a bit more than I wanted to give you, but no matter, maybe now we can get back to more important matters."{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}The pain intensified as the next few days played out. As they returned to base and Jones hailed them home, Rex watched the ripples of change flow forward to the future where the new Jones would notice.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}He crushed the empty vial beneath a boot and helped Rex to his feet.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}He left the alarm panel alone and the past remained unchanged.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}Jones chuckled.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}Rex cried.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

I can travel through time?!

This is true power.

The Ortrix was the greatest prize in the universe!

I was right to pursue it, and now all of time and space shall revere me as their god or be extinguished from existence.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

after my most recent rex havoc story arc and 50th chapter garnered exactly 2 readers, i've decided that the "return" of rex havoc shall become the "retirement" of the illustrious hero. i've put a lot of work into the story, and to receive such a lacklustre response is more than disheartening.

i was writing space flight 704 not because i wanted to, but because it was the sort of story i thought other people might like to read. that's clearly not the case. from this moment, i refuse to write what is popular and choose to concentrate on what will make me happy.

{.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-229477973 width="622" height="400"}

Leylanilu and Mr Ruffles

i'm going to write a story about a were-bear and a faerie princess. specifically, an erotic fiction about the love between a were-bear and his faerie princess dom. i've been plotting this out in my head for months, and i've really gotten into their relationship and i think it will make me much happier than rex havoc ever could. the only thing holding me back from putting pen to paper was the fear of what others might think.

but i'm not afraid any more! i'm no longer ashamed to admit that i want to read and write stories about bear-men and faeries having relations.

those of you who follow the rex havoc facebook and google+ pages might want to unsubscribe before i change the names. you probably don't want to be seen 'liking' bear/faerie erotica.

thank you all for your understanding.

Leave here. Don't stay.

The foam dissipates. How long it takes is hard to say.

Rex is conscious now.

He rises slowly, groggily, then frantically as he remembers.

Anrianna is not at her station behind him, and a tiny mewling sound escapes unbidden from Rex's throat.

He pushes violently at the door release. Punches it. Screams in frustration and pulls the door open with brute strength.

Stumbling down corridors. Door after door.

He finds her.

"...Anrianna..."

Stop this. Look away.

Rex feels the impact like a body slam, even through the impact foam.

Jarring, shuddering pain curses through his body, threatening to liquefy everything inside him. He feels himself losing consciousness.

"Anrianna!" he yells before the darkness covers him.

Please not this.

The Professor is coming around. He realises the predicament and punches a button at his console.

"Why don't I have that button?" wonders Rex as The Professor's impact foam surrounds him.

The gelatinous goo encases him and the roaring sound of the ship decomposing in the atmosphere becomes a wash of quiet white noise.

Rex hopes Anrianna was at her station.

Not this. Not this.

The Hundred-Tonne-Husky slammed into the atmosphere, igniting a trail across the sky.

On the ground below, the Nolix heard the thunder and saw the fire and prayed to their deity to spare them.

Aboard the ship, Rex grit his teeth and tried not to black out. Through blurring eyes he could see The Professor passed out at the navigation console.

He could not see Anrianna.

He'd been a bit of a dick.

Rex reran his life in reverse and found himself wanting.

He watched his past heroics from a new perspective and decided he didn't like the man he'd been.

All the mooks he'd killed and the villains he'd slain had been part of a whole he had no right to alter. The lives he'd destroyed were not, for the most part, evil. And those that were, not irredeemably so.

He saw that now.

Rex went back, way back.

Having watched the Xentash calamity play out in reverse, Rex realised time was as malleable to him as his own form.

He knew interfering with the Xentash would alert Jones to his own ability to bend time, and at that point Jones would never be stopped.

But maybe if he went back to a time before Jones had the Ortrix, he could find a way to unravel it all.

I was tempted to do a “clip show” thing to refresh readers of the important plot points that have happened so far. Fortunately for you, I can’t imagine how to make something like that work in text, and still be fun to read. So what follows is a basic recap of the story so far, as simply as possible.

WARNING: this post contains spoilers for the Rex Havoc: Space Flight 704 story. If you ever plan to read it, I suggest you head there now and get reading. Or bookmark it… You know, whatever.

I’m posting this for the fans who haven’t had a Rex Havoc story for almost a year. The last update to the major story-arc was on May 20 2012, which is a long time to remember things. I’ll try to include links the pertinent chapters if you’d like to remember the specifics. This also means I have more Rex on the way for you, and we’re in the home stretch!

Our Hero.

Rex Havoc is a space adventurer. He does the difficult things no one else can.

On a mission to secure the Ortrix, Rex is betrayed by his partner, Jones. Rex barely escapes with his life after killing Jones and abandoning the mission.

Returning to base, Rex finds it totally destroyed and his good friend and gadget maker, The Professor, dead. In a surprising turn of events - this early in the story - Rex is killed too.

But not for long.

Becoming conscious in an empty mindscape, Rex meets the other, a mysterious, strangely familiar yet wholly otherworldly entity who teaches him about his new existence.

The Ortrix was more powerful than Jones let on, and has made Rex a powerful god-like being who can shape the universe to his will.

Rex learns the downside of so much power is a conscience that cannot stand to harm anything in the universe. He also learns that Jones didn’t die and also shares his power, without his conscience.

Confrontation is out of the question. Jones can inflict a multitude of tortures on Rex

Since Google announced they were closing Google Reader down in June, people have been scrambling to find something to use in it's place. I'm not sure what the rush is, but I was caught up in it too. My replacement of choice is Tiny Tiny RSS because it's self hosted, meaning I don't have to rely on any third party for such an important task any more.

This article is not about how to set up TTRSS (Tiny Tiny RSS). That's been covered by the official Wiki and Forums. This article is about how to make TTRSS behave somewhat more like Google Reader, so you can jump right back in to reading feeds and not have to learn something new.

First up are the settings you can change straight out of the box. Open Preferences - the link is the first item in the 'Action' menu at the top right of the main interface.

Set up the above options as shown. To access 'Automatically expand articles in combined mode' you need 'Show additional preferences' ticked. 'Combined feed display' switches the view from 3-pane view to two-pane.

While you're in Preferences, click 'Customize' under 'Customize stylesheet' and paste in the code found in this Gist by Gregory Rickaby to get TTRSS looking a bit more like Google Reader (if that's your bag).

Mark Waters created a Google Reader Shortcut plugin. Developer fox has already merged it into the software, but if like me you downloaded the version before the plugin was incorporated, you can create a directory called 'googlereaderkeys' in the plugin directory, and in that create a file called init.php. Paste the code from Mark's plugin in that file and save it to your installation. This will enable the familiar j/k keystrokes to navigate feeds and 'v' to open them. Alternatively you could get used to the native keystrokes n/p for next/previous. Don't forget to visit the plugin page and enable this new plugin.

Next up is collapsing expanded articles by clicking on the headings again. Based on fox's patch, open up the file 'js/viewfeed.js' in a text editor.

Beginning at line 1320, replace:

[snippet id="862"]

with

[snippet id="863"]

And save it back to your installation.

Things should now look like this:

There are a few more tips around including how to import starred and shared items into TTRSS. Tiny Tiny RSS is a fantastic product that fills the void left by Google Reader. I highly recommend donating too - Andrew Dolgov has been working tirelessly, since the Google Reader announcement, to keep on top of endless support requests.

Got any other tips you're using?

June 2013: I am no longer using this software myself. This post was written in support of an independent developer who I believe has built a terrific product and released it for free for anyone to use. You're still free of course to use Tiny Tiny RSS, but I can no longer recommend it. While the developer works hard and is constantly updating and fixing his software, I find his customer service manner to be beyond rude. He's never been rude to me personally so this isn't sour grapes, but his forum and other interractions are littered with examples of unnecessary rudeness. If you want good software, and will never need assistance please go ahead and use TTRSS. Personally, I switched from Google Reader to a self-hosted solution so that I wouldn't need to switch again. However, I'm not convinced that I will able to get help with the product in future without following the developers unwritten rules for support. I'm certain the developer will not miss me. TL;DR Developer is unnecessarily rude and I don't want to support rude people.

Not your usual Christmas Candy

I've scoured Soundcloud (for literally hours) to find the best Christmas music I could find and my playlist is finally complete. It's chock full of Christmas favourites (and a few new ones) that are guaranteed to:

1. Bring Christmas cheer
2. Not suck¹

30 tracks from the likes of Ivy Levan, Swing Republic, Pomplamoose, and Owen Pye. Who are these people you ask? Well, they're all great musicians and they each have a unique sound to bring to your Christmas celebrations. Including favourites like Away in a Manger, Carol of the Bells, and even the Theme from Home Alone.

Over an hour of music, all completely free (although Soundcloud lets you buy tracks if you so desire)!

{{< soundcloud 2946037 >}}

2010 Playlist

Jones and Havoc skidded to a stop behind the jeep. Backing up against the vehicle, Jones peered around the edge and squeezed the detonator.

The aircraft hanger exploded, showering the pair with fuselage and debris. Uncovering his head, Rex peered over the top of the jeep and had to duck down again as another explosion rocked the airfield. Rex giggled and looked at his chum.

"Let's go."

Drawing their weapons the duo emerged from cover either side of the jeep and strode purposefully toward the ruined hangar.

Guards were pouring from the buildings nearby to survey the carnage and were caught unaware as Rex and Jones opened fire. The few remaining guards had found cover and were trying to determine where to fire through the smoke. Rex reached the hatch of the small planetary defence craft on the other side and was urging Jones to move faster.

As Rex took aim at a guard who had spotted them, Jones stooped quickly and scooped something from the ground without missing a step. Watching Rex carefully, he slipped the object into his pocket.

With a sigh, Rex's consciousness delved into Jones' pocket, already knowing what he would find. It was a small crystal, imprinted with a holographic map. Watching himself stepping up into the cockpit of the defence craft he wondered how he had been so oblivious.

As Jones joined Rex's past self in the ship he took one last shot at a guard. Like he'd done with the other guards earlier, Rex slowed the bolt before impact and eased the unconscious guard to the ground as the bolt passed harmlessly overhead.

The mission had been engineered for Jones to get the crystal map and the airport belonged to a rich but benign old man, not Dr Phelchoff as he'd been told at the time.

"Jones, your depravity astounds me," he thought to himself.

What a crazy 8 weeks.

In case you hadn't picked up the news on the grapevine, I'm a daddy again! Twice more!

So, funny story... 8 weeks ago, one of the twins ruptured their membrane (Mil's waters broke essentially), and Mil was told she would be staying at hospital until they were born. When the membrane is broken, the most dangerous thing that can happen is for the mother or the baby to get an infection, so they keep the mother hospitalised so that they can assess it regularly and jump on it the minute there's any sign.

At that time, we were 22 weeks along, and the doctors were very careful to warn us that unless the babies stayed in Mil until 24 weeks, we might lose both of them. We tried to stay positive and Mil moved in.

After a scare at 23 weeks that the babies were coming, we were pretty wrecked, and didn't really feel like sharing too much with the wider world. We all dropped out of life for a little while, so if we missed any other amazing news, we're very sorry.

At 27 weeks our little boy couldn't help himself and literally started pushing his way out. Mil was rushed into surgery and both babies were born pretty quickly on the 1st August, only 1 day after Amelynne and my birthday! I kind of wish they'd come the day before - stupid leap-year.

Well today they're finally 30 weeks old and tomorrow is their three week birthday!

Merrick Hector Nunn is my strong boy. His lungs have had some problems since birth because he was the one who lost his fluid, but he's doing pretty well considering the complications that caused. The doctors say he's on track though, and he's absolutely lovely.

Evany Louisa Nunn is my sweet girl. She was a bit smaller than Merrick at birth, but has done so well since she was born that she's almost as big as he is now! She's holding her own so well, that we've finally been able to give her some cuddles this last week.

Sorry it's taken us so long to pass on this important news. We've been so wrapped up in it all, and scared for their safety and overwhelmed by the speed of it that it's been difficult to put it all down. They'll both be staying in hospital until at least their due date in late October/early November so we're in a sort of limbo-world at the moment - born, but not officially ours to keep!

I'm so glad I finally get to tell you all. We've been so scared to say anything, but now they're here, I'm really proud to announce them officially.

So welcome Merrick and Evany! Thank you all for your support and understanding. We look forward to introducing them to you all in real life soon¹.

Hi there everyone! If you haven't already noticed, The Geekorium has moved domains. It used to be the.geekorium.com, but we've moved to the.geekorium.au - it's a small change but important, and I'll be posting more about why I think so in future.

So if you see anything funky, let me know so I can fix it.

In other news, I have more Rex coming, I'm just a bit too busy to get it written.

Rex wept for days.

He was responsible for this. A whole planet tortured mercilessly for years, it's people enslaved, and their world destroyed.

He could barely comprehend it. But he knew it was his fault.

Jones had not known the extent of his powers before. When Rex confronted him and unleashed the fury of the universe, Jones had realised what he himself was capable of.

Then he had used that power to destroy the entire Xentash civilisation.

Google Wave is dead. I don't care. For a while I did care, and I had a site about Google Wave called First Waves.

I've shut it down and incorporated the posts back into The Geekorium. This post is just in case one person still had me in their feed reader and wondered why they started getting posts about a Space Hero.

So there you go.

{{% timereverse 3 %}} The Jones-spectre disappeared and the planet erupted in flame.

Rex watched horrified as people burned. But the burning did not consume them. People who were alive moments before were on fire - how had they survived this?

The fire ceased after an eternity. Months had passed and the agony was over, the people unaffected by it. The star's energy receded back into its gravity well and the horror and pain became fear and trepidation.

And Jones appeared again and whispered what he would do if the people continued to defy him.

He would destroy their star with a thought and keep them alive to watch. {{% /timereverse %}}

I just got my first actual real life death threat in a comment on my oh-so-stupid-I-wish-I-hadn't-written-it Fred Basset post. It was a dumb post I wrote back when I was desperate for stuff to write about, and I regret writing it so poorly. While I stand by the basic sentiment - so I won't delete it - it reads like it was written by a Youtube commenter and makes me cringe knowing that it's cluttering up my site.

The worst part about it is the post accounts for about 3% of my search traffic and 3% of the comments I get. That doesn't sound like much, but most of the other stuff I write doesn't get nearly the same amount of interaction. And I still get comments on it now, about a 50/50 split of agreement and disagreement - it was highly controversial obviously.

And today I got another comment ending with the following death threat:

DO NOT mess with bassets again, or i will have to kill you. ruby

Of course, this chills me to my core, but I believe so strongly how bad Fred Basset is, that I will not be frightened into submission.

Sorry Ruby, I won't be publishing your comments, nor that of the other person who left a comment. I just don't care enough. I have other things I've written that are more important to me. Things about my life and family, or my ongoing sci-fi serial about Rex Havoc that's at least as funny as Fred Basset.

What I'm trying to say is, I want to put Fred Basset to bed please. If you love him, that's great. Have a great time! Why my opinion matters to you I cannot fathom. Just enjoy yourself.

And don't threaten me.

{{% timereverse 2 %}} The ships were now raw materials.

Huge factories staffed by millions of de-aging people ripped the ships apart and surrounded the useful metal with worthless minerals. Fleets of trucks hauled the ore to gaping holes in the ground where they filled them methodically. More people came out of the mines than went in.

When the holes were full the people stopped. Their broken spirits gave way to fear and anguish and terror.

Rex did not have to wait long to know why.

Jones appeared.

He was a god-like figure in the heavens. The enormous spectre spoke to the people and warned them that what they had just experienced was a taste of what he could do to them if they did not do his will. {{% /timereverse %}}

"What did I do?"

Rex and The Other walked the deserted city and Rex repeated the question again and again.

The Other remained silent and surveyed the desolation with a face Rex wouldn't have been able to read even if he had been paying attention.

The city showed no signs of life. The streets and buildings were stripped of all technology, so not even the electrical hum of civilisation was left.

When he had arrived on this planet, he had reached into the planet to learn what had happened to its inhabitants. The picture was fuzzy, distorted and incomplete. The Other nudged him.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"Try looking backwards."{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

Rex shifted his focus. His previous time-travel helped. He reached backwards through time to follow the fate of this world.

{{% timereverse 1 %}} He watched huge ships land across the planet and disgorge millions of unhappy broken people. He saw them strip their ships of technology and begin to rebuild their cold city. The ships grew smaller. Generations grew young again and he watched as more and more of their dead returned to life.

The newly re-animated told dark stories about the sky-stranger that left instructions for them. {{% /timereverse %}}

Vworp

The Professor popped out of the time vortex with an ignominious crash. Dusting himself off, he lamented his lack of finesse compared to his colleague and vowed - not for the first time - to start working out when he got back.

As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he tried to get his bearings. He could make out the faint outlines of the retorts and stands of his chemistry bench, and the flashing green glow in the corner that told him his terminal was ready to log on.

Making his way there, he checked the date on the terminal screen and chuckled to himself. He was only four minutes out from the time he'd been aiming for. Not bad with only the data he'd gathered from the anomaly to work with.

Now to get to work.

He was fearsome.

Rex Havoc called to the stars. He summoned the energy of heavenly bodies.

The power of life, of darkness, of cold and heat filled him, strengthened him and threatened to overwhelm him.

He was floating, flying, becoming everything.

The Jones-thing screamed and held tighter. Anger and fear channeled Rex's strength and he lashed out, forcing the creature to retreat.

The Uber-Rex advanced, sure in himself and powered by the universe's endless abundant will to be. Jones faltered, hesitated and shrunk back further and Rex pushed his mind deep into Jones' being and unleashed all the fury of a universe threatened.

The Jones-thing laughed. And then it renewed its onslaught, stronger than before. Flashing claws ripped at Rex and tore away the threads that bound him to the universe like they were mere cobwebs.

Rex's mind almost gave way. He'd thrown the combined power of the universe at Jones and his nemisis had shrugged it off.

Rex fled.

Pain!

Ripping and tearing, it unfocussed his mind and he cowered under the onslaught.

He tried to withdraw, but the Jones-thing held him and was slashing and rending and he could not escape, was not able to run and the talons went through him and he tried to cover his body with his hands but he had no body only mind-stuff and it hurt and spears pierced his present and began to seep into his past - a river of blood and fire winding its way back into what he had been, and the claws kept slashing at his breast and the fangs ripped his innards and white hot pain filled his senses and he whimpered at the hatred that crushed him and tried to extinguish him...

A voice spoke to him and calmed him. It wasn't a voice he recognised, if only because his rational brain was being eaten, but it touched him and he knew it, and for a single moment he could focus and realised he could fight back.

Rex Havoc was afraid

In his past life he had thought he knew fear. He had laughed at it, even believed himself above it. He had mocked fear, and those who let fear dictate their actions. But what he thought was fear was just adrenaline, the rush of the unknown - and deep down he had embraced it. To a man who believed himself immortal, what was fear? Surely nothing could harm a man who was better than any other man alive?

Now he understood that what he thought was fearlessness was just arrogance, and it was only his connection to the Ortrix now that had given him true immortality.

But now he was deathly afraid.

The word scarcely conveyed the full range of the emotion. Fear, terror, merciless abject horror - these were inadequate expressions for this feeling.

He wondered if the absence of fear before he became immortal made this new fear more distinct, but knew to his core that this gnawing, clinging dread that immobilised him was warranted.

Intellectually, Rex knew himself to be one of the most powerful forces in existence, but he felt helpless and small. Jones was out there - a being just as powerful and full of hate. Bonded to existence by the Ortrix, able to do anything Rex could do, but not bound by understanding or hindered by compassion. Jones was his final task, his only real obligation now.

And Rex was petrified.

He calmed his mind and reached out.

Rex smiled devilishly.

The crackling orange energy surrounded him. He let it wash over him, drank it in and understood it. He reached back down to its source and found a machine made more by accident than by design. He located the small component coil devistatingly misaligned and righted it. Around him the swirling energy became harmless static.

He laughed.

Van De Nippal wailed. He stumbled back to the control panel and stabbed at the doomsday button again and again. He trembled as the giant he had trapped and contained reached toward the unbreakable glass that sealed him in. The glass dissolved at his touch like sugar under water.

The Doctor screamed with frustration and drew his blaster, but the un-man was on top of him and suddenly... he couldn't think why he cared. It all seemed so beneath him now. He lamented the years he had spent building this island base, when he could have been advancing his fellow man.

The energy from his ray could power the whole planet for months at a time. Why, the solution to the over-population and wastefulness of civilisation was within his own hands the whole time. He had created the answer to the very problem that had led him down this destructive path in the first place!

What a fool he'd been! What irony! And what good luck this Havoc chap had come along when he had, or he could have made a jolly silly mistake.

Rex watched as the Doctor started reconfiguring his weapon and walked away with a grin.

Rex pounded on the walls of his glass prison.

Doctor Van de Nippal paced around his command center, chuckling to himself and explaining his plan to his helpless captive.

"So you see Havoc, you are about to be atomised with the very-same death-ray that will turn this planet to dust, and leave my island base a floating asteroid-space-ship with which I can begin my plan to dominate this galaxy!"

Rex stopped banging for a moment and looked the doctor in the eye.

"You won't get away with this. I won't let you."

"But what can you do my dear Havoc? You are trapped in a glass dome made of the same material that will protect my island-cum-asteroid from the cold kiss of space. It is strong enough to keep the death-ray out and keep it sealed in there... with you!"

Rex tried to downplay the small smile that twitched at the corners of his lips.

Doctor Van de Nippal ceased his pacing and came to a stop in front of a giant silver panel covered in dials and switches. His hand hovered over a giant green button in the center.

"With this, I bid you Adieu!" shouted the madman as his finger stabbed down.

Egron went down to his left, screaming. Olat fumbled with his clip.

Zenmar crumpled soundlessly, looking like something had exploded in his gut. Olat cursed and picked up his weapon.

As he raised his head, Bonwhanney yelled obscenities and fired at the swiftly moving figure, but the shape shimmered in and out of view like a ghost, bullets passing harmlessly where the man had been. Del ran to Bonwhanney's side and the two unleashed everything they had at the monstrous creature. It was no good. The figure towered above them and crushed their heads together between it's immense hands with a sickening crunch.

By now Olat had retrieved his weapon and reloaded, but it was too late. The fearsome beast was upon him and his nerves were shattered. The un-man snarled and unleashed a devastating blow to his solar plexus.

As Olat doubled over, gasping for air, he thought he heard a calm, almost loving voice explaining the mysteries of the universe. His mind, tightly packed full of hate and discontent, began to unwind and he blacked out.

Olat awoke on the floor of the An-lab. His comrades were gone and he was glad. He felt light, but the sight of the laboratory sickened him and the thought of the things he had done filled him with regret. He wanted to hold on to this new feeling for as long as possible. All he wanted to do now was get home to his beautiful Paula and little Svette.

Guardsman Olat was finishing up his bawdy tale when the alarm sounded.

"So I pushed her off and told her I was done!" he laughed as he and his comrades picked up their plasma rifles.

A loud speaker boomed across the quadrangle as they left the guardhouse, "The intruder has been spotted in the animal pens, and is now likely to be in the animal laboratory. He is armed and extremely dangerous."

Olat knew that someone who could survive the An-lab would indeed be formidable, so he knew to be cautious. But he was tired of catching bears for Doctor Nippal and was looking forward to taking out his frustrations on a human. Particularly someone idiotic enough enough to attack an island base full of bored and frustrated armed guards.

Commander Del signaled his men to a halt and Olat obeyed. Del motioned for Feldor and Bennis to breach the An-lab and the two men rushed inside shouting to each other in the dim light inside.

Gunfire, followed by the sounds of breaking and rending flesh, unnerved him a little and Olat determined he wouldn't be taken by surprise by the intruder.

Commander Del motioned for Olat to join the three remaining men as he tossed in a phosphor stick to see by. The lab lit up as bright as day as they made their way inside. Feldor and Bennis were out cold.

Olat saw him first. The strong jaw, the towering figure, the cold eyes. Without waiting for an order Olat fired, emptying a clip at the place the figure had been moments before. He blinked and began to reload.

The ever-lovely Mil has been feeling pretty crap of late, more so than usual. It's really weird. Sort of a sickness. In the morning ¹.

I don't know what it is. The thought of food makes her nauseous, and even odder, she's getting bigger. I wouldn't call her fat, but there's definitely some tummy on her.

We went to the doctor to get an opinion, and they sent us for some scans. Scan A clearly shows some sort of growth:

{{

About a year ago I began writing a story for my daughter Amelynne, using her toys as characters.

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by Brittany Lowe

It took me about 3 months to write and 9 months to type it up, and I’ve finally got something to show for it. Right now it’s still a work in progress, as I need to read it through a few times with Amelynne and make sure she’s happy with it. I also need to add some illustrations.

HTML version
MOBI version for Kindle

I’d be interested to know what you think. Let me know if you notice
anything wrong too.

This tutorial is for people with a grounding in InDesign already. You should know the basics of creating a new document, adding Paragraph Styles and manipulating text. I'll be covering the "gotchas" I found creating an eBook from InDesign. Creating an eBook in InDesign will give you the option to export as EPUB, PDF and HTML all from the same source, with minimal changes. What follows is my preferred flow.

Regular readers might want to tune out now. Go read an old Rex Havoc or something.

Before you start you'll need Calibre. Calibre is a "swiss army knife" for eBooks. It converts to and from all sorts of formats. To keep the code as pure as possible though, I only use it for the final conversion from EPUB (eBook format) to MOBI (Kindle format), which is not currently possible straight from InDesign.

# Create all the different visual styles as Paragraph Styles.

# As you create them, fill in the Export Tagging options at the bottom of the Paragraph Style Options window.

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Be sparing with the H tags

**** Chose an appropriate Tag for both the EPUB and HTML section and the PDF section. You can choose P (paragraph) or H1 through H6 (heading sizes 1-6), but keep it simple. If you're used to working with HTML, this will be straight forward, but you want to keep most text as Paragraph text and leave the Headings for your actual title and book headings. For instance, I've used H1 for the title of my book, H2 for chapter titles, H3 for the Author style, and H4 for the book subtitle.

**** Add a Class under EPUB and HTML. This will add all the relevant CSS to the exported document to give it a semblance of what you actually intend it to look like.

# Also make sure you turn off Hyphenation on each paragraph style. Kindle reflows the book to match the reader's text options, and hyphens won't make sense the minute they leave your carefully formatted book.

# Create a Table of Contents, but do not insert into a page. Leave it as overset text outside the flow of the document. When you export it, you have the choice to include it and you should do it then.

**** When you export the document, choose the Contents as shown.

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Remember this, there's a Quiz later

# Fill out at least the first tab of the File Information ( File > File Info in the menu.) This will pre-fill a lot of the metadata your eBook needs.

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Metadata is always important

1. Export your file. At this step you can export as PDF, HTML and of course, EPUB.

   • In the EPUB Export Options tick Include Document Metadata and fill in your details of you care to.
   • Select Use Existing Image File and select a cover image. It's better that you don't include this image in the actual InDesign document.
   • Under Formatting Options you can choose to leave the defaults, or set Bullets to "Map to Unordered Lists" and Numbers to "Map to Static Ordered Lists" (I'm actually not sure what the difference here is.
   • You can leave the Image options as default, or tweak to your liking. The books I've done so far have been light on images, but if I do anything more in-depth I'll update this page with what I find.
   • Fill in the Contents section as previously shown.

2. Open your EPUB file in Calibre. Check the conversion. I only got this process right after much trial and error, and some of my settings have become default for me. If things aren't working right for you leave me a comment and if I had the same issue I'll update the tutorial with how I overcame the problem.

3. Click Convert Book in Calibre.

   • In the Metadata section, fill in any further metadata necessary.
   • You can leave most of the rest as default, but under Structure Detection you may wish to use an XPath expression to force page breaks in your kindle document if you haven't already done so in InDesign. To do it in InDesign, choose the Paragraph Style that will force a new page and under "Keep Options" in Paragraph Style Options set "Start Paragraph" as Next Page. EPUB and MOBI will honor this setup.
   • Under Table of Contents ensure "Force use of auto-generated Table of Contents" is unticked.
   • In MOBI Output, untick everything.
   • Click OK. If I've remembered all the steps I used, you should have well formatted EPUB and MOBI files.
   • From Calibre, select the new title and click "Save to disk in a single directory" and put your new files somewhere. Share and enjoy!

The MOBI file that this process produces is perfect for uploading into Amazon. The files I've uploaded don't change at all and look exactly the same once they've been processed by Amazon's software.

The EPUB file can be loaded over the net into iBooks on your iPad or iPhone by opening the file in Safari. The software will ask you if you'd like to add the file to your iBook shelf.

You can check out the results of this process by downloading "my first Rex Havoc ebook://the.geekorium.au/get-space-flight-704/ for free, or the third Time Diversion directly from Amazon.

Rex Havoc punched the bear in the face.

After what seemed like an eternity in "training", it felt good to be out and in the thick of the action again. Just like old times.

As he rounded the bend, a cyber-wolf bared its teeth and Rex calmed his mind, reached down and summoned his power. Directing it downwards as he sprinted forward, he unleashed an almighty kick that sent the wolf spinning side-over-side into the bushes beside the mountain.

Of course, being living creatures Rex couldn't actually bring himself to harm the bear or wolf. As he lashed out at them he was actually holding back, easing their troubled captured minds and reversing the bio-engineering the island-dictator had subjected them to. Then in the guise of violence, he was gently moving them out of the way.

Watching through his monitors, Doctor Van de Nippal would see Rex wading through his animal forces and never suspect his true powers. Plus Rex was having fun.

Rex backhanded the hawk that swooped at his head.

Only last week I published the Time Diversion story arc from Rex Havoc's adventures over on Amazon. Today I'm uploading the first ten chapters of the main story up on Amazon too!

Amazon wouldn't let me offer it for free, so I'm offering it here too for anyone to download as Mobi for kindle, ePub for other eReaders and iDevices and PDF for everyone else.

Did someone say free?

Space Flight 704: Final Flight of Xarnash is available in

• ePub for iPad and eReaders
• mobi version for Kindle; and
• PDF

Of course, if you have a Kindle, and need a quick way to get your Rex fix, you can visit Amazon and purchase it there.

Thank your for reading. Please take it and tell your friends.

Space Flight 704: Time Diversion is also free for a limited time on Amazon

Published!

Hey Rex Fans, have you always wanted to read Rex Havoc adventures conveniently collected for you in book form? Are you TIRED of visiting The Geekorium for your Space Flight 704 needs? Do you think,'I wish there was a version I could read on my Kindle every day'?

No?

Just me then?

Well despite your interest or lack thereof, Rex Havoc is now an eBook! For the next 90 days, Space Flight 704: Time Diversion is available on Amazon for one dollar! If you own a Kindle, you could be reading it right now - isn't that exciting?

Space Flight 704: Time Diversion collects the stories in the recent Time Diversion arc, before Rex became an enigma, when Jones was still an ally, and before The Professor was cruelly bombarded from space by a death ray. Included is a table of contents that makes it easier to follow the story in chronological order. Of course the story is free here on The Geekorium, but buying it from Amazon will give you a warm glow, and something to read on the bus.

If you're still not convinced read these 5 Star Reviews.

A ripping space yarn of the Old School variety, this action-packed short story harks back to the golden days of Flash Gordon serials with tongue firmly in cheek. Both wonderfully amusing and butt-clenchingly thrilling, not a sentence is wasted that doesn't thrust the story forward like a rocket ship.

HugePedlar

and

I look forward to what happens when I actually read it.

Zombie_Plan

After 90 days I'll be offering the eBook in other formats too, but how many formats I offer will depend on how much interest I get with the version on Amazon. So if you'd like to see an iBook version, or one for Android, or just a DRM-free version you can buy directly from The Geekorium, tell your friends and followers about Rex Havoc's eBook adventure!

Now go out! Be fruitful and multiply! Wrong command set! Go and tell people! Buy it! Stop using exclamation marks!

The fool!

The Ortrix was gone, slipped further out of his grasp. That idiot Mondex had botched the operation from the outset.

Jones sneered. He should have known not to trust someone who had failed so many times before. But desperate times take desperate means. It had taken six months, and half his fortune to track down the device he'd given Mondex and the imbecile had lost it, killed some time in the past.

When Rex had returned from the casino planet without the Ortrix it took every ounce of composure Jones could muster not to scream at him, or push him out a window. Then to insult him further the oaf couldn't remember what he'd done with it!

He would have suspected treachery except he knew Havoc was an idiot without a treacherous bone in his body.

So he'd sent Mondex back to collect his prize before Rex could lose it and the moron had failed him. Likely gotten himself killed by a hover-bus. Now he was down a time travel belt, and one all-powerful superweapon.

To make matters worse, he had known of another time-travel belt - secreted away in The bumbling Professor's lab. To assure his success, he'd blown up the lab and duplicate belt with it, just to ensure no one could stop him. He'd also spent another small fortune on that blasted memory device he'd used on The Professor. Six months wasted. He'd gladly give his fortune over again for the Ortrix, but to come full circle and be no closer to his goal irked him to no small measure.

Some days it just wasn't worth plotting doom.

"Do we dare?"

The Princess Anrianna looked at Rex with shock at his suggestion.

Rex had an impertinent smile on his lips and his eyes sparkled.

"Of course we dare! I know how it ends."

The pair had escaped the Sultan's planet in the fastest ship they could steal from his extensive collection. They rocket back to base with all the power they could draw from the engines. Rex had been uneasy. They were fast approaching the time of his most recent memory and they didn't know what might happen to Rex when his time came full circle.

On approaching the base, Rex had sent his security code ahead to initiate landing protocols and was baffled when they were rejected. He wondered for a second if this was what it felt like to not exist.

Before he could worry further, his comm-board lit up and he heard his own voice through the ship.

"Unidentified ship, this is a private communications channel. Please identify yourself."

Rex was gob-smacked, and a glance at the Princess told him she was gob-smacked too.

"I thought you were dead," she said, shock overcoming tact.

"I mustn't be," he replied, shock overcoming eloquence.

They conferred, ignoring the insistent summons of the comm. It was decided that The Professor must have discovered the secret behind the anomaly and reversed the paradox. It helped that as the comm chimed and bleeped and past Rex left increasingly desperate pleas for a response, Rex remembered being on the other end.

"I thought it might be you," he said to Anrianna, "When I returned from... wherever I was... The Professor and I couldn't piece together where you were. Our hail to me today became the seed of my worry for you."

"But it turns out I'm safe with you after all."

The memories of the next three months started to make sense and he realised they had some time to kill between now and the next anomaly. He remembered he had missed the Princess terribly, but also remembered how much more he'd loved her when he'd found her safe in the past.

He loved her.

"Let's blow this joint and see the universe. Just you and me. Neither of us are due back for three months."

Anrianna looked at Rex. Her look said she thought he was mad.

It also said she loved him back.

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}Rex awoke to a stunning headache.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}Rex awoke to brilliant darkness.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}It was as if he had woken up after a night at a tavern with The Professor. The world still spun an lurched around him, although the cold steel floor underneath him was perfectly still.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}It was as if he were floating in the depths of space yet in the centre of a sun. Coldness, warmth, life and death covered him, wrapped him like a cloak and he gasped for breath and found he had no use for it.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}He remembered nothing, felt as though he might recall something and tried to understand it.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}He remembered death, felt as though it might be familiar and tried to understand it.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}He remembered meeting himself, excitement welling up within as they prepared to go after Mondex. His future self had said Mondex was after him, but that was all he could remember.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}He remembered running with himself, fighting for his life with Mondex. He and his future self had split up, but when he found Mondex he had been alone.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}What had happened?{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}He'd been shot!{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}Why couldn't he remember?{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}That son of a bitch!{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}And where in space was he?{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}Now where was he?{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}A voice spoke to him, comfortingly familiar.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}A voice spoke to him, oddly familiar.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}"Rex!" exclaimed The Professor, "where in blazes have you been? And why in space are you naked?"{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}{{% voiceinthedark %}}You have cheated death. This is where your soul resides when you are not visiting the mortal plain.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}"Stop shouting man!" pleaded Rex, holding his head in his hands as he sat up. "I haven't the faintest idea."{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}"I have to go back I need me! I mean, future me needs me! And the Princess!"{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}"I see you've been hit too," said his old friend, "I've just come from what's left of my lab, and I can't remember much beyond the night you left for the Shebat game three months ago."{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}{{% voiceinthedark %}}You are quite correct, although not for the reasons you think. This is not the last time we will meet, but you are not to know of this. It is not your time.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}"Three months!" Rex felt himself go cold and warm and felt his mind on the edge of madness.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}Before he could respond, Rex felt himself dragged from within the cold/warm cloak and felt his mind give way to madness and terror.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}"Who did this to us?"{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}Rex awoke to a stunning headache.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

The Professor awoke to a hole where his lab should have been.

And no eyebrows.

For a few moments he sat dazed against the corridor wall where, if the pain in his head was anything to go by, he'd been tossed when his lab had been destroyed.

While he waited for the ringing in his ears to subside, he tried to figure out what had happened. Could it be sabotage? What else might explode?

He wondered if it had been something he'd been working on, but try as he might, he could not recall the last thing he'd been doing. In fact, he found he was having trouble recalling anything at all.

The last thing he could remember was... witnessing a spacetime anomaly with Rex, just before Rex's big Sheebat game.

That was it. That was the last thing he could remember. Looking up his records of the anomaly he was shocked to discover three months had passed since then.

Had the anomaly done this then?

What in space was going on?

"We've been locked in here for three weeks, how in space do you wake up cheerful every day? "

Rex had been whistling as usual, and despite herself, Anrianna felt buoyed by it, despite their incarceration.

"Well," came Rex's reassuring voice through the thick brick wall between their cells, "it has a little something to do with what I was about to share with you before we were captured."

"How you knew about the trap, you mean?"

"Sort of. I've been reluctant to bring it up because we might have avoided all this if I'd told you sooner.

"I'm not the Rex you think I am. I came from the future to save myself, but instead I got myself killed."

He explained what had happened and how past Rex had died.

"Oh Rex, that's dreadful! I couldn't bear it if you... were gone."

The Princess hated, more than ever, the solid brick between them. She wanted to give him a hug.

"So how have you been so cheerful?" she finally asked.

"Because every day I'm here with you is another day I know you're alive. In my future you've gone, disappeared without a trace, and we don't know where to find you. Back in time I might be dead and locked in a tower, but at least I know where to find you."

"The future sounds ghastly. Can we not go back in time and put it right?"

Anrianna was sure she felt a draft from the long sigh from the next cell.

"The Professor is working on it, but I can't risk losing you again. If it comes to it, I'd rather have you safe."

The Princess smiled. "I wouldn't exactly call this safe," she said.

There was silence for a few moments. Anrianna wondered what Rex was doing, as she'd expected a snappy reply. In the stillness and quiet she heard a scratching sound. It was familiar and she wondered if it was the same sound she'd heard each night in her fitful sleep.

The sound gave way to the louder sound of stone on stone. The wall bulged. No - not the whole wall, but a single large stone. She jumped back.

"Rex?" she started, "I said I wouldn't exactly call this safe..."

The rock slid out of its place in the wall between their cells. In the gap stood Rex, shirtless, trickles of sweat cutting through the dirt on his arms and face. Rex, stronger than ever. He held out his hand to her.

"Well we'd better get you out of here," he said.

She grabbed his hand and he turned and led her back into his cell. Leaning into a rock on the adjoining wall, he pushed with all his might and Anrianna leaned in to help. The rock juddered and jumped forward. Pushing harder, they forced the rock further out. Stepping back from it, Rex motioned for the Princess to back away, and gave the rock an almighty kick.

The rock broke free and tumbled down the castle wall and into the moat below. Wind rushed through the cell from the opening, bringing a chill freshness Anrianna had missed.

"If only I had my rocket boots or even my grappling line," lamented Rex.

"Would the hang-glider The Professor built into my corset do?" asked the Princess with a smile?

Rex grinned and Anrianna grabbed him around the waist, and they leaped from the tower into the blue sky outside.

Rex gripped the Eldoan Death Fish, only a hands-breadth from his face.

The smell of doom was in the air.

As the monster slipped towards his throat, a bolt from one of his Corral Specials ended it's life and saved his.

Limp in his hands now, he dropped it to the floor and grinned at the Princess, poised with his gun still raised and smoking, nearby.

"Not the only thing smoking," he thought to himself.

Tossing him his weapon, she rummaged in the pile of dead fish at her feet and retrieved her own gun. They'd both dropped theirs in the first chaotic moments after falling through the trapdoor into the elaborate fish-trap. They had disabled most of the deadly creatures with a vial of The Professor's anti-fish gas.

They should have never accepted the invite to the Sultan's Ball. Rex had feared a trap, and was certain this would be where the Princess would disappear, if he couldn't prevent it somehow. He couldn't convince her though, not without revealing that he was dead, and only alive due to some accident of time-travel. So he'd gone with her to the ball and despite the death-fish he was enjoying himself quite a bit.

Until the walls started to close in.

"I'm sorry I got us into this mess Rex," said Anrianna. "You were right about the trap, but I can't possibly see how you knew!"

As she talked she produced a bright lipstick from somewhere on her person, and peered at it.

"I actually have a confession to make about that," began Rex.

Anrianna found the secret button she'd been searching for and the lipstick sprang open into a long metal pole.

"What's that?" asked the Princess continuing the conversation casually.

"Where in space did you get a spring-loaded nesball cue?" asked Rex, momentarily forgetting what he was saying.

The Princess wedged the cue between the walls as they began to press in. The cue bowed slightly but held, and the walls groaned to a halt. Rex was sure he could hear gears slipping and grinding behind the walls.

"I love nesball, so The Professor made me my own cue, that also happens to be made of solidium. And now we should be able to shimmy up the walls to the trap door we came through."

"I have jetboots if that's easier," suggested Rex.

Anrianna smiled conspiratorially and grabbed Rex in a full hug, stepping onto his feet. "Get us out of here!" she cried over the explosive punch of takeoff.

At the sound of the rockets, the two goons who had been set to watch guard over the trapdoor peered in.

Rex's fist caught the first in a jet-powered uppercut as they exited the hole. The other had enough time to look up at the duo before Anrianna lashed out with a kick to the head that sent him spinning and stumbling into the death-trap. A "sproing" sound told the two the goon had dislodged the cue, seconds before his scream echoed around the hall followed by a sickening crunch.

The Princess grimmaced at Rex, "I was hoping I might get that cue back."

"You're from the future!"

The Professor was amused and amazed.

"So where is our Rex?" he asked.

"Well, you can't tell the Princess or Jones, but he's dead. Blasted away by Mondex."

The news struck The Professor like a bullet to the chest. He stumbled and grasped for the stool behind him. Sitting down he tried a few times to speak, and finally said, "but that's impossible! You would cease to be! The paradox here could destabilize the universe."

Rex rested a hand on his old friend's shoulder.

"That's why I'm here. I've already started forgetting what happened the first time 'round, and I'm afraid if I return to the future, my death might catch up to me. If I stay here, maybe I can make myself useful, and at least save the Princess."

"What happens to Anrianna?" The Professor could see the future unraveling before his eyes.

"I don't know. Maybe my memory of that has been erased too, but now I can prevent it. Before I left for my Sheebat game you spotted an anomaly. That was Mondex, travelling back from the future to kill me in the past. In the future we were waiting for it because I left a message for myself about what Mondex was planning. I came through the vortex after him, but I don't know what happened differently this time and he succeeded."

"Rex I... don't know what to say. I'm glad you're alive for now. Maybe it will give me time to find a way to change what happened. At least I might figure out how to keep you alive. I'll begin studying the anomaly at once."

Rex dropped Mondex's time-belt on The Professor's work bench.

"Maybe this will help."

Rex waited for the universe to collapse.

When it didn't, he wondered why.

They had cornered Mondex on an industrial planet three billion years in the past. The natives were towering giants that barely noticed the struggle for survival far below them. The Rexes had split up, thinking they could get the drop on their old foe, but Rex had mistaken a crack in the immense architecture to be an alley. By the time he had backtracked, the younger Rex had confronted Mondex alone.

Mondex was desperate and cornered and unleashed his deadly energy beam on Rex's earlier self. Rounding a corner, older Rex saw the situation and ended the threat permanently, but it was too late. Young Rex took a shot to the chest that burned and corroded and eventually consumes his former self before his eyes.

Staggering, the remaining Rex tried to keep upright, but fell to his knees. The impact of seeing himself killed hit him like a punch to the stomach, and for a moment he wondered if it might be the beginning of the end that must inevitably come. His mind was numb at the loss, but a small part of him was not silent. It was pointing out that he wasn't yet erased from time. Isn't that what was supposed to happen?

He certainly hadn't remembered being shot the first time around. Then again, his memory of the time was getting hazy. He thought he remembered meeting his future self, confronting Mondex, but then he couldn't remember how it ended. Was this how it started, forgetting the original timeline? He figured he had six months, maybe less before past Rex would become future Rex. Would his memories of the first timeline be erased as he failed to have them, until he too was gone? Would returning to the future accelerate things?

Rex thought about his friends. The Professor, Jones - brilliant but aloof, and the Princess.

The sweet Anrianna. He wished he'd spent more time with her before she'd gone.

Maybe this was his chance! Perhaps he could spend some time with her now, perhaps even prevent whatever happened to her. Obviously the past could be changed. He could spend his last six months making sure she was safe, and meet his end knowing that at least she was back where she was meant to be.

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}The Professor was concerned.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}The Professor was concerned.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}When he'd first spied the spacetime anomaly, he knew it was the same one he'd seen six months ago from the other side. Reluctantly, he'd let Rex go, knowing he'd been waiting for this day and itching to get going.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}When he first noticed the spacetime anomaly, he had no way of knowing what danger it could bring from the other side. Happily, he let Rex go, knowing Rex had been waiting for this day and itching to get going.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}He was also curious himself. His memories got hazy after their first encounter with the anomaly, probably something to do with the effect of the tachions or some-such, and there were a lot of questions he couldn't answer when Rex had come back.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}He was curious about the anomaly, but any threat it posed was yet to be seen. But when Rex failed to check in after the Sheebat game, it raised a lot of questions.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}Questions like, where had the Princess gone? Who had brought Rex back? Why had his lab exploded?{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}Questions like, where had Rex gone? How would he find him again? What was causing the spacetime anomaly to move?{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}So he'd let Rex go, knowing that if he didn't, Rex's past would be at the mercy of Mondex.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}He wished he hadn't let Rex go, but knew he would have gone anyway. The Ortrix was too grand a prize to pass up.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}Sitting in his back-up lab, he was analysing data taken from the anomaly when Rex strode in with Anrianna by his side. He didn't look like he'd been battling one of his greatest foes. In fact he looked... rested.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}Maybe the anomaly would provide the answers. He'd just begun to analyse the latest data when Rex strode in with Anrianna by his side. He looked worn out, like he often did after battling a challenging foe.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}And the Princess! How wonderful it was to see she was safe!{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}And the Princess, she looked puzzled, like something was bothering her, but she want sure what.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}"Where have you been my girl?!" he cried as he embraced her.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}"Where have you been my boy!?" he exclaimed as he took Rex's hand.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}She giggled and squeezed him back, "I've... been around."{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}Rex smiled lazily, "I've been around."{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}The glance she and Rex exchanged, and the unsubtle cheeky smiles they both failed to hide told The Professor it would be better not to ask too many questions.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}The Princess turned her puzzled gaze on Rex, then back The Professor, who gave her a wry smile. They both knew it would be better not to ask too many questions.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}But here they both were, happy and healthy and all was right with the world.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}But Rex was back, tired but alive, and all was right with the world.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}Obviously Mondex had posed no problem.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}Obviously Grubner had posed no problem.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

Rex plunged through the vortex, falling like a paraglider into an unknown destination. Rex was right behind him.

When Rex and his younger self had confronted Mondex outside the casino, they had expected a fight. Instead, Mondex had tapped his belt and plunged into the time vortex that opened up behind him.

Past and future Rex had jumped in after him and were headed who-knows-where without a plan.

They grinned at each other.

"Nothing like a night of improvisation," they both said together, and barked a laugh in unison.

"Get ready," said future Rex, who'd taken point on their fall through time.

The shiny, inky walls of the vortex sworled away into nothing in front of them and both Rexes barrel rolled into ready crouches, guns drawn, sweeping the area for threats.

It was dark.

A glowing blue pane of glass barely illuminated two dark figures against the opposite wall. The heroes swung their guns on their surprise assailants.

A dolphin swam through the aquarium water behind them and their eyes adjusted to the dim light. A frightened elderly couple clutched each other and waited for the identical madmen to move.

"Evening folks," they both said as they holstered their guns.

"You see another chap come through a blinding flash of light?" asked future Rex.

The couple pointed down a corridor.

"Thank you both," said past Rex as they headed for the exit.

He was infuriating and insufferable.

She hated to admit, he had his charms and a certain dangerous allure, but most of the time he also held an air of entitlement that made her feel like an accessory. And the way he called her nothing but "Princess" all the time, like he hadn't bothered to learn her name? Ugh.

She had not been remotely interested in him, but overnight he seemed to have developed some... manners.

He'd left for his Sheebat game three days earlier and neither she nor The Professor had heard from him until he turned up back at base (a lot further than three days travel from where he'd been) like nothing had happened.

She'd been about to make a flippant remark about calling them when he was going to stay out late, when he'd surprised her with a bear-hug.

"What's this for?" she'd asked mid-hug, trying to decide how to return it.

"Just missed you is all," he'd replied - she was shocked to realise - sincerely.

"Anrianna."

She was dumbfounded. She suggested to The Professor in private that he run some scans on this man who was clearly an impostor. He laughed and informed her the base already did that to everyone on entry, and this was definately Rex Havoc.

She wasn't convinced though, so that night over dinner she told him about growing up on Khenna, and instead of loudly changing the subject, he listened.

She knew then something was up, and she was damn sure going to get to the bottom of it.

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}I'm tracking a spacetime anomaly.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}I'm tracking a spacetime anomaly.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}"I've never seen anything like it!"{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}"I've seen something like this before..."{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}The Professor was excited, lit up like he usually was when exploring something unknown.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}The Professor was agitated, like he usually got when he knew something was about to end badly.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}Rex laughed at his old friend's enthusiasm, "sounds like both of us have plans for the evening!"{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}Rex scowled at the view on his old friend's screen, "Sounds like I need to cancel my plans for the evening."{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}He turned and winked at the Princess, who rolled her eyes and turned her head. Rex could still make out the hint of a smile crinkle the corners of her eyes though and he smiled back, even though she wasn't looking.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}He turned to say something to the Princess and remembered again that she was gone. He still had no idea what had become of her, and The Professor hadn't seen her either since that fateful night six months ago.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}Rex switched off the holo-emersion field and gathered his Corral Specials and his credit chip. Heading out of the hotel, he hailed a hovercab. He handed the driver an address on a card and swiped his credit chip.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}Rex gathered his Corral Specials and the special device The Professor had pushed into his palm. He listened while the Professor explained how it worked and what he would need to do.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

{{% timeswap %}} {{% timeline 1 %}}"I need to go here," he said.{{% /timeline %}} {{% timeline 2 %}}"Where do I need to go?" he asked.{{% /timeline %}} {{% /timeswap %}}

Rex took the hint.

He'd stopped worrying about time and let the other teach him about his powers.

Rex was getting the hang of intergalactic travel. Now with just a description of the place from his companion, he was able to reach out with his mind and find it. Then it was a simple matter to pull himself through into the real world at just the right place.

Of course he was very careful not to let his mind wander anywhere near that constant drip-drip of power that came from Jones.

He also refused to unmake anything and he couldn't tell if this made his mentor pleased or disappointed. Whenever he reached out to an object to understand it, he learned it to it's core and knew he could unmake it, but in that instant knew he never could.

It all felt like stretches and warm-ups though. The things he used his power for didn't seem to have much purpose beyond practice and he wondered what the end game was meant to be. He did notice a common thread though. Everything he did increased his awareness of the universe, how things fit together.

He was feeling pretty smart.

It was six years ago on a Sleepless Night that I wrote my first blog post on what was then (maybe) not even my own domain. I didn't set up nunnone.com with Google Mail for about a year after that night so I might have used some hosted blogging environment, but I can remember the night, if not the software. I thought it might be therapeutic, and it did let me get a lot off my chest in those early days.

I spun off a "godblog" for religious posts that documented my dawning atheism, then later absorbed them back in. Since then I've done the same for a number of ventures: posts on education and more recently Google Wave. But I keep coming back here, where I can hone my CSS skills and learn about new products and technology as they come out.

The site has undergone some name changes. Once "Josh Nunn's Wee Blog" (weeblog, weblog geddit? What in space was I thinking?) then simply nunnone.com, now The Geekorium with its own domain, but the site has been the same site with all the same content it originally had (I'm very proud of that fact). Occasionally I clean up: there was a phase of importing crap from all over that I've since deleted, and Disqus butchered my comments database at least 3 times leaving some posts with up to six duplicates of each comment. But the essence of the site lives on, eclectic, haphazard and unfocussed¹ .

Recently I've found a direction I enjoy - writing the adventures of Rex Havoc the space adventurer. Some stalwart friends have followed my meandering to this point and I hope are enjoying the more structured posts. I'll still occasionally post non-sequitur posts like this though, just to keep you on your toes. Hi guys

So here's to The Geekorium! Six up and down years, but six years I've been happy to call this my own slice of the web. Welcome! Stay a while! Have a drink²!

"Rug weaving?"

Despite mastering the art of travel back to the white place, he had trouble doing it in reverse back to the normal world. The other had to help him, even more so because he didn't know where they were going.

The other had taken him to a lovely little planet covered entirely with sand, except for one oasis just big enough for the village of four-hundred-odd beings who populated it.

About half the population Rex could see were doing the work of running a town: farming, milling, mending, cooking, cleaning. It looked like a pleasant place to live. The villagers were friendly and not surprised to see Rex, waving cheerfully and offering their simple hospitality to refresh him and his companion.

The half of the population who were not doing day-to-day work were sitting in a large village square, weaving. Weaving a giant rug. The bulk of the rug was rolled into a enormous cylinder that was twice the length of one of their modest dwellings, and about as high. He wondered who it was for, and how they intended to move such an immense object once they finished. He figured it must have taken them years.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"Seven hundred years,"{{% /voiceinthedark %}} said his companion.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"They have been weaving for eight generations and it will not be done for at least three more."{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

Rex was flabbergasted.

"Why in space would they need such a large rug? What is the need for it here? Will they sell it?"

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"The Heeyaas were once a space-faring race, enamoured with the universe, and happy simply exploring galaxies in their life-ship."{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"One thousand years ago they met the Xentash, another race who took their ship and stranded them on this planet. The Heeyaas were heart-broken but never without hope. They rebuilt their society, and when it was strong they began weaving again."{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"But weaving for what?"

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"The rug is the neural network that will command their new ship. It was the technology the Xentash coveted: an immense AI hand-crafted into the fabric itself. They have rebuilt their ship, better and stronger than before. They patiently weave and tell stories of the universe they will one day explore again."{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"Such patience," exclaimed Rex, "to spend one thousand years, and so many lifetimes hoping to one day visit the stars again."

Rex marvelled at the lesson the other had brought him here to teach him. And entire race dedicated to patience, wisdom and the pursuit of knowledge.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"They will explore again,"{{% /voiceinthedark %}} continued the other, {{% voiceinthedark %}}"but first they will hunt down and exterminate every Xentash they can find."{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

He hated to admit it, but dying a second time had been informative.

When the other had pushed him off the cliff, he'd only been moments away from mastering what the other now called "withdrawing".

Rex conjured up the sense of awareness he'd felt in those moments, and this time used it to make his hands dissolve away in front of his eyes. It turned out to be just as tricky making them disappear as it was to make them solid in that other place.

He figured he didn't need to actually think about how he would get to the white place, as he certainly hadn't made any conscious effort last time. That time simply dying had been enough, so he tried to concentrate on just not being.

It was harder than he expected.

His conscious mind didn't like being not-concious, and rebelled against being shut down. Thoughts of Jones clawed at his mind and he fought to squash them. The Professor, not properly mourned, achingly missed, he squashed those thoughts too. He wondered if the ship he'd sold to that trader on Kleeb still flew as fast, and how many days it had been before that persistent rattle that he could never locate came back to torment its new owner. That guy must hate him for that. Not that it mattered.

Why was this so hard?

He suddenly had a craving for cupcakes.¹ What he wouldn't do for one right now...

Rex's mind finally shut up. His consciousness folded in on itself.

And he found himself in the endless white plane.

I did it! he thought proudly.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}What is a cupcake?{{% /voiceinthedark %}} asked the other.

Rex stared hard at his opponent. They both knew how this would end.

His face was a mask, had to be. Grubner was partially telepathic and used facial signals to confirm what he called his "hunches".

Why anyone played Sheebat with a telepath was a good question, but Grubner was not even aware he was telepathic, he just thought he was good at reading people. The stakes were high so Rex pushed on, trying not to give anything away by thinking distracting thoughts about Grubner's mother.

Rex nodded to the Croupier who dealt 3 more cards and acknowledged Rex's new bet with a nod in return.

Trying to keep his mind occupied, he sized up the dealer. He was exceptionally good at his job. Checking he name badge he reminded himself to tip this "Zom Bieplan" when this game was over.

If he survived.

Grubner by now had taken two more cards, raised the bet to 75blenths (Zom even raised an eye-stalk at such an enormous figure) and had begun rubbing his tummy, the traditional signal that Grubner was calling Sheebat on Rex's hand.

Rex could either match the bet and reciprocate the gesture, hoping his hand could beat Grubner's, or decline and forfeit what he'd already put down.

Grubner looked confident and Rex couldn't afford to lose. He didn't think he'd get another chance at the Ortrix if he missed his shot. He gathered his chips together but hesitated.

The opponents started at each other from across the table. Both faces were masks.

Then Rex felt it. A tiny prick of pain in the back of his skull. He tried hard to keep a smile off his face. The pain spread further forward.

Most people who knew Grubner was telepathic wouldn't play Sheebat with him, but Rex had one more piece of intel. When Grubner was bluffing, he would unconsciously try to influence the other players by sending out telepathic suggestions that could, on occasion, cause minor brain aneurisms in his opponents.

It was one hell of a tell.

Rex pushed everything he had out onto the table. The pain intensified and Rex hoped he wouldn't black out. Even poor Zom was obviously feeling some psionic splashback - his dorsal tentacles quivered and he steadied himself against the table. Rex smiled and rubbed his tummy, as he laid a Full Sheebat on the table.

Grubner growled and rose to his feet. With one hand he pushed the table over, knocking Rex sprawling onto the floor. With the other hand he revealed his hidden pistola, which had been concealed in his fake leg.

"I will not give you the Ortrix!" he screamed at Rex.

Grubner raised his hand and Rex registered gunfire. He looked down to see where he was hit. As he looked back up, Grubner crumpled to the floor.

Rex Havoc stood behind him, Corral Specials smoking in his hand.

"I'm here from the future," he said to his stunned younger self.

"We're in trouble, and I need your help!"

He didn't like the answer.

He was hoping for a solution like "Laser-Vision" or "Cosmic Hug" to the problem of Jones' increasing power.

Instead he was advised to wait and master his own power.

"But what power do I have," he asked, "other than a difficulty staying dead, full control of my hands in a place where I can't use them, power to destroy things followed by crippling guilt, and now a painful link to someone who wants me dead and has already murdered me?"

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"You must trust me,"{{% /voiceinthedark %}} replied his companion earnestly, "{{% voiceinthedark %}}you have time, and you will understand soon.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"Without my assistance, I want you to withdraw yourself to the other realm. There is someone I would like you to meet."{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

If they ever got out of this, he'd owe this guy one.

He'd sat there in his holding cell, wishing he hadn't already used The Professor's hidden grenade launcher, wondering how he was going to make his escape.

There had been a quiet knock on the door, so out of place in this dark dungeon of terror, he'd been completely taken by surprise.

"Come in," he'd said lightly as though he wasn't tied - naked - to a cold metal chair stained with his own blood.

The man before him wasn't tall or well built, but he exuded power that made it difficult for Rex not to just think of him as "massive". He moved swiftly to release Rex and handed him his clothes and weapons.

"Come with me," he'd said before Rex could speak, and moved out into the corridor.

Rex winced as he pulled on his shirt and struggled into his pants. He was grateful for both, but even more so for his Corral Specials.

Rex bounded out the door and found he had to run to catch up with his new ally, despite the stranger looking like he was out for a casual stroll.

"Who are you?" Rex asked, but as he did so, six Plenitech guards rounded the far corner and immediately began shouting and drawing their weapons.

Rex reached for his guns, but the stranger put a hand over his own and gave a slight smirk.

An explosion shook the compound and flame, concrete and dust engulfed the hapless goons.

"What's your name friend?" asked Rex, impressed.

"Jones," said Jones with a smile, as he led the way through the hole in the wall.

This guy is good, thought Rex.¹

It stood to reason that Jones would be unhappy with him. He had shot him, a lot.

Then again, Jones had vapourised him from space, so they should be square. Not to mention Jones had betrayed him in the first place back on Manasar, and killed The Professor as well. By his count he owed Jones one.

What worried him now more than Jones finding him and releasing all that terrible power on him, was what he had been doing with his power before they'd touched. Jones clearly had a plan when they had gone to recover the Ortrix, and he wondered if dying had slowed him down at all. Maybe with all this power he'd have a new plan. Jones always did love a plan.

"What can I do?" he asked the ever-present Presence.

It hadn't been particularly smart, in hindsight.

He wasn't sure what he was going to do once he found him, but as soon as he'd realised Jones was the source of the ripples he felt, he began searching him out.

Reaching out with his mind, silencing his thoughts, he'd focussed on the energy. Groping around like a blind man in an unfamiliar room, he touched something.

He did not like what he found.

Violence, anger and misery hit him like a storm. Amongst the mielstrom he could make out something else familiar, a power and strength of will he recognised.

He recoiled at once, but the damage was done. Jones had felt the touch. Before he could withdraw, his being exploded with pain and light, then darkness as a thousand savage terrors were loosed on him. With effort he clawed his way out back into his Rex shell, back to the safety and comfort of solid body and flesh brain.

"That was a mistake," he said as he tried to catch his breath.

Some times its a discomfort within the ass to read what weblog owners wrote but this internet web site is rattling user friendly ! .

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It reminds me of this translation

If the sensation of unmaking the rock was like a kiss, then this felt like someone was nibbling his ear.

In the moment before the pain set in, destroying the rock was exhilarating. The influx of power from unmaking something was intoxicating.

Since that moment, he could feel something similar happening over and over but further away, like ripples reaching him at the edge of a pond. Again and again something was washing him with power, but small, subtle and incremental. Unlike the power from the rock, this came with no guilt.

He wondered what it was.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"Jones,"{{% /voiceinthedark %}} replied his companion to his unspoken question.

His heart froze at the mention of the name.

"'Jones' what?" asked Rex, dreading the answer.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"Jones has learned to unmake,"{{% /voiceinthedark %}} responded his companion, and Rex wanted to throw up.

The sensation he was feeling had been there since he was vapourised, but he'd only noticed it since his experience with the rock.

"And he's been doing it all this time?!"

Rex clutched the Princess to his chest and leapt from the tower.

The Professor's new grappling line snapped taut and swung Rex and his charge in a wide arc around the outside of the tower and back in towards the lower floor window.

The guards inside had no time to prepare as a million razor sharp shards of TITANOGlass exploded inwards followed by a powerful figure holding a beautiful woman. Those who weren't already bleeding on the floor were incapacitated swiftly. Rex lasered a guard as he reached for his pistol then sent another spinning with a round-house kick. The remaining guard fell as the Princess sent him flying into next week with a surprise uppercut.

"That was pretty impressive Your Highness," drawled Rex.

"I didn't want you thinking I needed you to rescue me," replied the Princess.¹

He immediately felt bad about it.

With the understanding he found after hugging his chosen rock, he discovered he knew exactly what to do when The Other suggested he "unmake it".

Without thinking he reached deep into the structure of the rock and made it no-longer-a-rock. At the same time he felt a rush of energy and strength and sparkling thought. It was exhilarating, liberating, and devastating.

Rex had destroyed something. It hadn't been alive, but it was home to an entire species of organism that had grown there for generations. It couldn't feel, but its absence left a void that Rex couldn't fill. Rex had killed before, in his last life - a blaster had often been his only choice for survival, but this was different. He had used his power to connect with an object. It had helped him understand the universe better and he had obliterated it.

The knowledge of it crushed him like the acceleration from escaping Vellegas 6, but without the release of weightlessness at the other end.

Rex shivered.

Hi there!

If you're seeing this, it's because you're a subscriber to my site. I wanted to make it possible for you to see some special content just for you, such as exclusive Rex Havoc chapters and whatnot. Let me know what you might like to see! From the bottom of my heart, thank you!

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Typing practice with Amelynne.

He didn't expect unimaginable power to mean he'd have to hug rocks.

"Why am I doing this again?" he asked the other, his arms encircling the rock he'd picked at random.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"You must understand the universe before you can shape it,"{{% /voiceinthedark %}} replied his baffling companion.

"And I'll understand the universe by hugging this rock?"

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"No,"{{% /voiceinthedark %}} dismissed the other, {{% voiceinthedark %}}"you will begin to understand the rock. Do not think. Do not act. Only feel the object."{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

Rex tried, he really did. This stupid exercise felt less like unlocking the mysteries of the universe and more like a lesson in humiliation. Maybe that's all this was, a sort of "letting go of yourself" through doing something stupid.

He was starting to to get a little uncomfortable. The rock was jabbing into his palm, and it was roughing up his arms. The cool mass against his chest felt...

Rex felt it. Not just the surface, but the whole rock. He understood its composition, and could sense its density. He felt the moss growing at its base, the cool sand sucking from below.

Rex started to solidify.

Rex was itching to blast a hole in something.

You could put a gun in his hand and he was unstoppable.

But since the... accident... he could barely hold his form together. He felt powerless against an old friend-turned-enemy, and now he knew what it felt like, he couldn't face the thought of another painful death.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}Perhaps you could unmake something,{{% /voiceinthedark %}} suggested the other, casually.

This time they appeared on a beach. As before, Rex was solid. As before, his companion was familiar, easily forgettable.

They were alone, but nearby the beach became rock and the other turned and walked toward the stones. Rex followed.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"Choose one."{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

{{% voiceinthedark %}}You understand now, don't you?{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

Rex did understand. This life after death offered the chance to see the universe as he'd never seen it before. He was beginning to see beyond the surface of things to their very structure. He was astonished to find he was starting to understand it.

If only he could focus.

Rex concentrated and began forming himself again. He struggled for a moment to remember how to start, but it was easier this time once he remembered.

"It's tough getting your mind to switch back and forth from the real world to here, huh?" suggested Rex.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}Indeed.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

He was not getting the hang of this.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}I had hoped to help you master your mortal form.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

They were back in the endless nothingness. The other was a presence once more. Rex's consciousness recoiled from the memory of death, and the lingering sting of the impact.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}I apologise for causing you distress,{{% /voiceinthedark %}} said the voice, {{% voiceinthedark %}}I sensed you on the cusp of taking control of your form.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"Well you misjudged the height of the cliff," responded Rex, bitterly.

Rex Plummeted to his death.

He had been pushed, he knew he had. Yet as he fell, he didn't feel anger, only surprise it had happened so soon.

As before, with certain doom rushing to meet his face, he experienced clarity. This time though it was different, the clarity stretched out into infinity at either end. His descent seemed slow, like plunging through custard, and he had time to think. He could feel each instant present in his mind.

He was astounded by the possibilities: the one moment of clarity brought on by adrenaline and imminent death - stretched to a lifetime with his untapped powers.

He felt god-like.

Each of his bones splintered within his ruptured skin as he hit the rocks. He felt indescribable pain for an infinity before his mortal body finally passed out.

I became an "Apple fanboy" while doing a film making course. The course used Macs for editing, and at the time (about 8 years ago now) they were really the most reliable editing platform. Unless you had a high end PC, your home computer would not run video smoothly enough to edit without choppyness and dropped frames. Every Mac had firewire too, making the capture smoother on that platform. When I got my own editing rig, it was a Mac.

I kinda lost sight of how I came to be an Apple user, and started believing it was the better OS, or the innovation that set them apart from their competition. I still believe OSX is miles ahead of anything Microsoft is currently selling, but recently come to realise what it was that REALLY made me proud to be a Mac user. For the last ten years they've kept moving.

I'm not having a go at Microsoft here, although to some degree they deserve it. I could never understand why some people perpetually bashed Apple, and stuck by Microsoft despite no new desktop products (worth mentioning) for at least 7 years. They had as many rabid fans as Apple, but for no good reason I could tell. More importantly, I couldn't put my finger on why it irked me. Certainly I had come to realise that you could do the same work on both machines, and with a lot of new "internet based software" could almost run completely on Firefox (or Opera) on any platform and not notice the difference. Why did it bug me that people were so fanatically devoted to Microsoft when they had such boring desktop products.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced and proudly showed off their successor to Vista: Windows 7. Despite the lacklustre name, the product looks solid, and even has some new features that most people would not have seen in a Desktop Operating System before. I might even go so far as to say that I'm truly excited for it. Far more so than I was for the release of Vista.

It was at that point that I struck upon why it baffled me that people were so dedicated to XP. Why it bamboozled me that people felt the need to make excuses for Vista. I can't understand why people are so stuck on old technology. Why they can't see the inherent awesomeness of new technology. These people aren't real technologists.

There. I said it.

With technology changing so fast, you can't afford to be wedded to old technology if you want to keep up. I'm sure I'll be accused of chasing shiny things, but I think it's more than that. I'm not one to switch to the latest and greatest just because it's new, unless it actually is the greatest. The balance here becomes evaluating the new technology and making a rational decision based on actual experience. A person who claims to love technology, but can't see beyond the interface to see the inherent value in a new technology shouldn't be saying anything.

Of course I'm not saying that you should give every new technology a free pass. This isn't about loving something new becuase it's new, but rather evaluating it based on it's potential.

At least his discomfort was gone

The figure before him was a stranger, but someone vaguely familiar. He had thought at first he knew him, or was it a her?

Looking away for a second, he could not recall a single distinguishing feature.

"Who are you?" he asked, looking back.

The other hadn't changed, still looked the same, but Rex still had trouble recalling him even while staring straight at her.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}"I am no one I remember,"{{% /voiceinthedark %}} came the familiar voice from the unfamiliar source, more resonant and somehow younger - though still ageless.

"You are a very confusing person," Rex said, turning back to look out over the sea.

Rex turned quickly on his heel

"Aha"

Rex strained to see the other, now he was back in the real world but it was proving tricky. Back in the other realm, the presence was there, like a change in pressure - feel-able if not physical - and somehow natural. Here on the cliff, the cold wind in his hair and sunshine on his face, the constant nearness of his non-physical companion felt unnerving. Rex wondered if this was what it felt like to be haunted.

"Can you stay still so I can finally get a look at you?" he demanded of the other.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}I assure you I am quite still,{{% /voiceinthedark %}} the voice replied, {{% voiceinthedark %}}but I understand your discomfort. Allow me to make myself physical.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

Rex waited.

A figure solidified before him.

"You're not who I expected," said Rex.

Two figures stood at the cliff top.

"How did I get here?" asked Rex, turning to his companion who eerily slid just out of view.

Looking down Rex could see himself again, and checked to see if he could feel himself while asking, "How come I'm solid again?"

{{% voiceinthedark %}}Your presence in the real world grounds your mind and naturally distils your essence into its original physical form.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"Then why didn't you just bring me back here first?"

Almost as the question left his mouth, a bird flying above relieved itself mid-flight on Rex's all-too-real head.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}Because just as you must will yourself to be in the non-physical plane, so you must learn that you are not bound to the physical any more in this plane.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"Did you make that bird do that somehow?" asked Rex, wiping the bird-goop from his hair.

While the voice explained, Rex began forming his arms.

"So this Torimbalo is some sort of artefact?" he asked as the voice finished. "Something that imbues power through what? Touch?"

{{% voiceinthedark %}}It is not a physical object, any more than you are now. The power is normally given by another that wields it, but now the power has been taken forcefully.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"Jones found a way to steal something that has no physical form?" Rex was impressed despite himself.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}In a manner of speaking. Because of the nature of the power some of it was given to you at the moment you left the physical realm.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"When I was vaporised you mean? So Jones is not dead either? What does that mean? You said I have powers, does Jones have powers too? How do I stop him using them?"

Rex's arms and hands had dissipated with the avalanche of worry that filled his mind.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}Do not be concerned,{{% /voiceinthedark %}} the voice comforted, {{% voiceinthedark %}}we have much time.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

{{% voiceinthedark %}}Do not be dismayed.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

The voice was commanding, reassuring.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}Control over the physical takes time, concentration, patience, willpower.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

Rex willed his hands to appear. Concentrating heavily, he spoke slowly and carefully.

"Tell me more about the Torimbalo," he asked, still focussed on his hands.

As the voice spoke, he watched his hands, forcing them to remain whole even as he tried to follow the words of the other.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}The Torimbalo was forged a million lifetimes ago, under the surface of an unimportant planet far from here.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

Rex focused on his hands.

He was startled to see that he could... see... them.

"I have hands!" he exclaimed at the other, but as he thought he watched them blur and slide back into the æther.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}Before you can return to the mortal realm,{{% /voiceinthedark %}} the voice explained, {{% voiceinthedark %}}you must master your physical form.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"How?" asked Rex.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}Impose your will on the universe.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

In the silence, Rex concentrated. He imagined he saw his fingertips, saw sworls of prints. He watched fingernails form, knuckles, and scars from a thousand battles. His hands grew in front of him and he flexed them slightly and felt their strength, their permanence.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}You are learning quickly,{{% /voiceinthedark %}} came the voice after a hundred years of silence.

Rex started.

"Huh?" he grunted as he watched his hands explode into nothingness once more.

Can you forgive me?

Hi Rex fans¹! The last week has been all over the place for me, with a scheduled holiday from work then the passing of my Grandma. The week of chapters I had banked up ran out and I didn't end up publishing anything for Thursday or Friday. I've got new stuff for Monday though, so prepare yourselves! Spoiler: Rex has hands!

Space Flight 704 - New chapters every weekday at 7pm!

A few weeks ago I posted on G+ that I'd enabled IPv6 on my home network through Internode's experimental support. The couple of responses I got were variations of "why?" which is understandable, as it's kinda like turning on a second version of the internet where there's Google and a tumble-weed.

But now, thanks to the power of CloudFlare, The Geekorium is here now too!

Ping me bitch!

Eventually I hope to set up IPv6 "correctly" through my host, but they're waiting for CPanel to support it. I'm sure that will happen soon. In the meantime, through the magic of pixies and fairies, I'm doing it now!

So if you're on IPv6, come by! We're open 24/7.

Rex felt a sensation he soon identified as "solidifying".

As the voice spoke and the other became more visible in front of him, he felt something. A warmth, a wholeness starting in the place he would have called his chest.

"Will I be human?" the thought came unbidden.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}Of course you will{{% /voiceinthedark %}}, answered the voice.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}But you will be more. You will have power beyond what you can imagine. Power that many seek.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"Jones," said Rex.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}Yes.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

The voice was taking shape inside his mind.

Each time it spoke, Rex imagined he saw a dark form slowly growing clearer in front of him.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}The Torimbalo keeps your soul rooted and whole when you die. Over time you will learn to master your new form and will be able to return to the mortal realm.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"You mean like a ghost?" Rex asked incredulously.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}I mean more than mortal.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"I don't know what that means," said Rex, bewildered.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}I am another such as you.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

The voice spoke in a grave yet comforting manner.

"Is this the afterlife?" asked Rex, not believing it to be possible.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}Not as you are thinking,{{% /voiceinthedark %}} the voice explained.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}You have cheated death, and this is where your soul resides when you are not visiting the mortal plain.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

"But how..." began Rex, "but how is this possible?"

{{% voiceinthedark %}}The power of the Torimbalo.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

Rex's essence whirled and partially dissipated with the shock. He willed himself back together.

"That again?" he wondered.

{{% voiceinthedark %}}Do not be alarmed.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}

The voice came out of nowhere. This made sense, as Rex was nowhere and had no senses as such to pinpoint the origin of the... sound? Was it a sound? No, this was one consciousness talking to another, pure thought.

"Where am I?" asked Rex, concentrating hard to keep himself together.

Literally.

That wasn't supposed to happen.

Rex had believed, the way everyone believes, that he would live forever. He knew technically that this was not possible, and had a suspicion he'd die in the midst of a fiery battle or chained in a dungeon, but never-the-less the human brain likes to think it will continue forever despite all evidence to the contrary.

The fact that Rex's consciousness was now slowly gathering itself together in an endless white plain was both reassuring (to that part of him that couldn't accept death) and at the same time utterly terrifying.

"Where am I?" whimpered the swirling chaos of Rex's essence.

It took death to bring him around.

Knowing full well he would return to base, his enemy had waited until he was helpless and come back, weapons raining fire down on the already scorched planet.

Hearing them coming, Rex took a breath, exhaled and saw clearly what he had to do. In that moment, he was vaporised.

"..." thought Rex as his component atoms dissipated.

His mind was blank.

Normally Rex could conjure a plan from thin air. When circumstances were direst, when he had no weapons, no contact to base, no chance of surviving, he would see with startling clarity what what to do next.

This time when he paused, took a breath and exhaled - he had nothing. He didn't care about the last mission, or the Torimbalo or whatever, and Jones was already dead so revenge was unnecessary.

Rex was empty.

The Professor was dead.

He'd overturned the smoking ruins of his base to find his friend, the quickly cooling body faint on his bio-scans. Obviously he had not been complicit in Jones' treachery.

The base and his friendship with The Professor were his final bastion of normalcy after his disastrous last mission, but even that was denied him, another certainty cruelly ripped away by Jones. He wished he could return to put another clip of bullets into his corpse.

Lying in the dirt and rubble, he held The Professor's body to him.

"When did the world go mad, old friend?" he whispered as the sun set behind them.

He wasn't sure he could do it this time.

Normally at this point in the mission he'd succeeded in liberating the artifact or downloading the master plans. He would rocket out of the enemy base, engines blazing blue below.

This time he was going it alone, barely escaping with his life, the mission in tatters and no real grasp on what had happened. Normally the exhultation and adrenaline kicked his reflexes into overdrive for the final escape. This time the rush was quickly giving way to exhaustion, and he wasn't sure he would survive.

Trying to pull himself together he gritted his teeth, "Come on Rex. Survive this and you can find the answers."

With that he rolled his ship sharply starboard and boosted, the pursuing missiles exploded far behind him as he burst free of the atmosphere.

The explosion was deafening.

Or would have been if he hadn't been ready for it with his hands over his ears. He'd found some explosives and a detonator in the weapons locker where he'd retrieved his guns, and it made a nice big hole he could use to get out of this catacomb.

Racing to the spot he and Jones had parked their invisible jet he stabbed at the remote.

Nothing happened.

"Blast!" thought Rex. But there was no time for casual swearing, Jones had sabotaged him again.

Calling up a schematic, Rex leapt back through the hole he'd just created as the concussed guards were coming to.

"Stay down!" he commanded as he blasted his way back through the hoard.

He'd have to thank The Professor.

Every mission, it was usually The Professor's neat inventions that got him out of his predicaments. At least the minor predicaments anyway - he usually still had to disarm the bomb or kill the leader or steal the jewels.

Not this time though. They had come on a mission set up by Jones. When Jones had turned on him, the mission no longer mattered. Now he needed to return to base and fill The Professor in.

A thought struck him, "What if The Professor has turned as well?"

He brushed the thought aside. The Professor had helped him, just then to escape. Besides, he had more immediate things to worry about, such as the fresh hoard of guards bearing down on him.

"Yearrgh!" he yelled as he lept towards them, guns blazing.

Rex really didn't know this time.

Usually when Rex Havoc was tortured for information he'd scoff at their attempts to draw out the location of the secret base or superweapon or princess.

He'd laugh and say, "Each time you hit me it makes your death a little more certain."

Rex didn't know what to say this time. They kept asking him about "the power of the Torimbalo" and he'd never heard of it. It certainly wasn't what he came here for. If he wanted to survive this time though he would have to fall back on his regular routine.

Ignoring his questions Rex growled, "Keep hitting me boy. It makes my decision of who to kill first much easier."

It starts here.

I read an article the other day that actually made me want to cry a little bit.

It's an old Washington Post article from 2007 about violinist Joshua Bell, who as an experiment/stunt played for 43 minutes in a rush-hour train station for about 1000 people that passed through that morning. He was playing a $3.5 million dollar violin, and the best seats in his performance tonight will set you back $213.61, but on this day he played for free to anyone who stopped to listen. He played Chaconne by Bach, "considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master".

{{< youtube myXOrVv-fNk >}}

The sad part is that about five people in 1000 actually bothered to stop and listen. Roughly five people made time in their schedule to stop and pay attention to the fact that this was a master, playing a Stradivarius for free on the street. And I totally get it. One gent had to be at work in five minutes, so he let himself stay and listened for three. Another was a violinist himself and could tell that there was something special about this particular busker. Another was a woman who worked as a shoe-shiner - he was the only performer she didn't complain about to management.

Actually, sadder still was the fact that every child who passed through wanted to stop and listen. And every parent they were with hustled them on without a glance at the violinist.

Saddest yet is that I know that if I had been there, I probably would have done the same. I like to think that I would have been the guy to at least spare a minute. Or maybe the one parent who didn't drag his kid away from the amazing music that neither of us will hear the like of again. I'm afraid that I would miss it completely and be the guy who "had no memory that there had been a musician anywhere in sight".

I knew after reading this that I wanted to be different. I want to notice things that others miss. My sister has a little side-blog where she captures something every day that she loves. I don't want to copy that, and I want to capture more than just pictures, but it certainly inspiring. Then while I thought about it, my 31st birthday came and went, and my sister¹ got me the book above. It's called How to be an Explorer of the World by Keri Smith. While it wouldn't have been my first choice of book, as it doesn't involve space battle or time travel, it fits the bill perfectly for maybe getting me out of my own little head. What I need is something to force me to see things I take for granted, and perhaps over time, I won't need to be forced to do so.

So while the book is about taking notes and writing things down in the moment, I'm going to experiment and learn and explore and as I go, transcribe the things I do and learn and what-have-you onto the net, to share what I'm learning and doing and make myself do it. I will do it over on Explore with screenbeard on tumblr, and when I'm finished fold it back in here.

My first explore is up there now. Go to it.

He'd almost done it too.

The first guards went down quickly before they'd realized there was someone firing a gun nearby. The next few were easy pickings in the confusion that followed. Rex might have done it, but as the last few guards rounded the corner his guns let him down.

Normally he'd have had just enough shots left but dealing with Jones had cost him extra.

"Maybe the last 19 shots weren't strictly necessary," Rex thought as he was dragged to a holding cell, "but it sure made me feel better."

Playing a guessing game with Amelynne:

Me:

It's big and grey.

Am:

A kangaroo?

Me:

No, but good guess. It's got big ears.

Am:

A kangaroo?

Me:

Nope. It's got big feet.

Am:

It's got to be a kangaroo.

Me:

Well, no. It's got a big nose.

Am:

A hairdresser?

Rex holstered his gun.

It was unfortunate that he'd been forced to fire on his old friend, but to learn he'd been lured by Jones into a trap... Let's just say their friendship was over.

He'd need to think fast though - even one shot from his Corral Specials was usually enough to draw the attention of the dopiest of guards. Twenty rounds was sure to bring the entire security force straight to him.

"Good," said Rex Havoc to his old dead buddy, "I like a challenge."

With that, he sprinted off down a corridor.

I can't find a social network that doesn't give me the shits.

Maybe I'll try Buddycloud.

Could this be the answer?

David Hawkins at What Culture! asks Can Marvel Digital Comics Conquer The Comic Readers of the World?

The Marvel Comics apps for Chrome, iOS and PSP let you read a large swath of the Marvel back-catalogue online or on your Apple/Sony devices. You can subscribe for $60US a year, and read a lot of classic Marvel comics, as well as a selection of the new stuff.

{.alignnone width="500" height="188"}

"You wouldn't like me on a tiny screen"

David has been collecting printed comics for 20 years, and says he was spending hundreds of dollars on comics in a month before trying out the Marvel Digital route.

I too have been going digital, but I've been coming at it from a different direction. As an Android user, I discovered the Comixoligy comic store before I discovered the Marvel store. For the uninitiated, the Comixology store offers comics from a range of publishers (except Marvel) on iOS devices and Android, as well as through your browser. For the first time in my life, I've been enjoying comics the way I imagine most of my comic-loving peers used to when they were younger.

I'm going to go through my experience with Comixology as it compares to the Marvel experience using the couple of dot-points David used:

Price

I'm a comics late-starter. I've always loved the idea of comics, but never had the disposable income to spend on them. As I've gotten older and gradually come into a bit of spare cash, I've found comics have gotten more expensive to match, and the value I perceive from them has decreased. When I was a kid and could get my hands on a comic here or there, I was always somewhat disappointed that they were so chock full of ads, and never finished an arc in the one I happened to have then and there. For most comic-book nerds, the huge sweeping arcs are the draw card to buy the next one, but for a poor Aussie kid, the chances of seeing the next story in the saga was exceedingly slim. Comixology offers a number of free comics including a back-log of FCBD comics, and first issues from popular series. The remaining comics start from 99c up to $5 for some of the more esoteric comics available, but are very fairly priced compared to their off-the-shelf couterparts.

Range

Range is the first point where Comixology beats the Marvel store hands-down. Take a look at this list of publishers. There are 46 publishers of varying popularity and quality, and most tellingly - DC gets pride of place on the web store. I don't know which came first, but it makes sense that DC would use Comixology's infrastructure rather than build their own to compete with Marvel. The remaining contributors are a diverse bunch, including Dark Horse, Image (publishers of my current favourite comic Chew), and even Comixology's own brand.

*Marvel on iOS only...

Age

This can vary a bit on the Comixology store. Like David, I was worried all I would find would be old comics, but I'm finding a nice mix of old and new. Every week seems to bring a release of old classics such as Batman #1 through #25. I recenly got to read the (sadly ridiculous) Green Lantern: Emerald Twilight Saga during a movie inspired Green Lantern 1/2 price sale. On the flip side, I've decided I'll use my new-found comic-powers to actually read some history-making comics as they're released, and I'm following DC's latest universe editing Flashpoint story as it unfolds. I think it's a few issues behind (at writing I've read #2 in the main story), but this is only to be expected - as David points out, "You are never going to get the newest comics that are currently sitting on the shelves. If you did you would find many small comic stores going out of business"

Ease of Search

Search is search. I'm 99% certain that the reason I haven't found certain comics using the built-in search is that they just aren't in the store. One neat feature of the Marvel store that the Comixology store is missing is a "search by character" feature to bring up all appearances of certain characters. With just the Marvel universe to cover, this might be more straight-forward than keeping all the various "Ultraman" characters from every comic publisher in order, so it's no real surprise. On the other hand, the mobile app lets you browse by genre, creator, publisher and story arc and the web interface integrates these into the search feature, so you can find all of Alan Moore's work (well, everything they have) in an instant.

Ease of Use

The mobile interface has a few quirks navigating the store, and the web-app is Flash-based and feels clunky at times. These are minor quibles though, as the comic reading experience is first class. Using Guided View^TM^ Technology (that name is pulled straight from the app's marketing), single panels and pages are carefully cropped and shown as big as your display will allow and carefully edited for clarity and dramatic impact. Compared to the Marvel reader, this is far-and-away the biggest and most important difference between the two experiences.

{.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-134645820 width="600" height="292"}

Atomic Robo

After using Comixology's reader, I found the Marvel version clunky and inelegant. Both guide your reading across the page, but only Comixology seems to know what it's doing. Admittedly, this is only a software upgrade away on the Marvel store, but at the moment it's a big difference. Tellingly, I also find myself wishing to read paper comics a panel at a time now - I find I enjoy it just a little more not to be able to see the secrets revealed further down the page until I get there.

Experience

I haven't been a comic collector long. My earliest experiences with comics were devouring my Uncle's Duck Tales and Mickey Mouse comics whenever I visited him, but I never had comics to call my own until I started making select purchases at comic sales when I could. I enjoy pulling them out now and then including a fun Deadpool special that's essentially "Back To The Future" with Spiderman, and a collection of goofy Amalgam comics that I'm stupidly happy with. However, my collection leaves a lot to be desired, and I'm annoyed I haven't had the chance to read some of the important stories that make up my favourite comic universes. So I can't really compare reading comics on a tiny screen to the joy of poring over a freshly minted book, as I've really only done the latter recently on a very low-key scale. Additionally, my first chance to read some classic tales like The Dark Knight Returns and the Spiderman Clone Saga were thanks to my oddly well-informed local library, but they've been bound in hard cover or omnibus versions, so it's not the same thing true comic collectors experience anyway. As someone just coming into comics though, the experience of the Comixology store and reader has been revolutionary. The prices are what I used to wish comics would be at the local store and, most compelling of all, the titles are all ad free.

DC available on iOS too!

I'm not sure if Marvel or Comixology will conquer the readers of the world, but they offer a new way to consume comics if you aren't hung up on having them on paper. Digital comics are here, and Comixology offers a classy hassle-free way to get your fix.

So I'm hanging out on Google+. I mean literally of course - the second¹ new social network that Google has launched in the last couple of years has a "hangout" feature where you can chat with lots of friends simultaneously via video. I've never tried it, so I'm sitting here in the hopes that someone will join in with me. No one has come past yet, but I think that says more about Australian/American time difference and my own social ineptness than the popularity of the feature. I hear very good things about it.

This article isn't about that feature specifically. This is about Google+ in general. The new social network that totally isn't trying to out-social Facebook². It seems quite a hit! But then so was Buzz initially. You remember Buzz? The social network built knee-deep into GMail that a lot of people tried, but no one really liked³. There was also Wave - but that never made sense to most people⁴. I mock, but only out of love. Google, despite their failures are not a company to give up on something once they have it in their sights, and understandably they want to get in on this "social" act.

What "social" means exactly is anyone's guess, but in vague terms it means somehow putting all that information you generate when you browse the web and share the cool stuff you find with your friends to use. Sites like Facebook are all about giving you a central place to post videos and photos you like so other people can see how witty and clever you are for liking Transformers before they were ruined⁵ by Michael Bay. This sort of sharing has come a long way since the web was made. It used to be that you had to own your own website and manually copy/paste links and videos into your pages and hope to hell that people might find, and occasionally re-visit, your site. Then sites like Blogger and Wordpress came along and made that somewhat easier, then Tumblr and Facebook - making those sorts of short and snappy link sharing posts easier and easier to do. Now you wave your mouse in the direction of the Facebook tab and it pulls out that it's a Youtube video and picks out the title and description and even embeds the video, and you barely have to do anything. Well now Google is heading one step further. They aren't there right now - Google+ is still a lot like Facebook on the surface - but deeper down the steps are there to become something massive.

Google+ is a service where you share your links, photos and videos with people in your "Circles". You group the people you know into named Circles to make sharing easier and less prone to accidents of the "sharing photos of myself drunk with Aunt Sally" variety. For example, you create a "Work" circle, a "Family" circle and potentially a "Drunk shenanigans" circle. Then each time you post a picture or a report, you can easily assign it to be seen by the appropriate group. For the record: Facebook offers a similar option, but I've rarely used it, and I can't imagine my mum has ever bothered.

Then there's the Hangout feature I've mentioned above. When you're online, you can set up your webcam for chats with whichever friends happen to be browsing Google+ at the time.

The third major feature at launch is "Sparks" - a kind of automatic interesting article finder. Type in a few keywords about what you're interested in, and you get your stream filled with articles that match those keywords. I find this feature somewhat limited at the moment. A few of the articles it's uncovered have been interesting, but mostly it's just more of the same sort of thing I can get at one or more of a dozen similar services. Once it's fully integrated into everyone's Google account though - like my mum's - I can imagine it being useful for some people to find new and interesting articles they might otherwise not go searching for.

Thus we get to the crux of the matter: integration. Google practically runs the web right now, despite the valiant efforts of Microsoft and up-and-comers like Duck Duck Go, and despite the sneak-in-from-behind services like Twitter and Facebook. If you want an answer to something you most likely start at Google and work your way from there. But Google recognise it's only a matter of time before someone takes that "social" power that other sites like Twitter and Facebook have and turn it into a more useful information finding service. The power of social is to hopefully take it one step further and start recommending things to you before you even recognise you were looking for it. To help you dig out more reliable information - reliable because a friend or relative has already used it and shared about it⁶. Google is the biggest search engine on the planet and has been for years. On top of that, Google has sites like Blogger (for web pages) and Picasa (for photos) and - because you might not have actually heard of those - Youtube for video.

Google's plan with Google+ has already started. You can "Plus One" any search result to indicate to other people in your networks that a particular website is a good result - similar to Facebook's "Like" button, but on your search page. Now website owners can embed these buttons onto their sites, and you can "Plus One" after you've visited - the results are shown to your friends in their Google searches.

The next step will be to turn this functionality on on Youtube and their other properties. When you "Like" a video - soon to become "+1" no doubt - this will be added to your list of +1s on your profile and I'm imagining eventually integrated into your stream. As more and more Google properties are built onto the Google Plus platform, stuff you have found useful or beautiful or interesting will be offered to your friends and family as reliable content that they might also find useful or beautiful or interesting. It's all part of Google's plan to find ways to understand what you do on the web and make themselves more useful so you use them more⁷. It's a grand vision. It's easy to imagine this as the start of something big, which is why I'm so excited about it.

Of course at the moment, it's all seems much like the other services we know and love. This is not a bad thing. The fact that you can take your knowledge of Facebook (or Buzz etc) and move into Google+ is a huge bonus at starting time. If Google can layer more functionality over the top of this simple base, I imagine Google+ being a powerhouse of sharing and a massive database of knowledge.

This is just my initial reaction/summation of Google+. The best way to find out what it's about is to give it a go. I've got some invites if you'd like to try it! Check out my +Josh posts and put me in one of your circles.

Since my last post more than a year ago, a lot has happened to Google Wave. Within months of opening Wave up to everyone at the Google I/O conference, Google pulled the plug, and Wave gurgled down the drain.

That left me feeling somewhat foolish, as I'd dedicated a good portion of my time to Wave: joining a group of Wave Watchers¹ and maintaining this website. I never expected Wave to gather much support at first, but I honestly thought it would last longer than it did. It certainly seemed to me to have more momentum than it turned out to have.

So when I heard they were killing it off, I was left figuring out what to do with this website. I had a couple of ideas:

1. I thought I could change focus onto some other Google product, but honestly, none of them inspired me all that much: Buzz was a fairly bland FriendFeed clone that I couldn't use from my normal account and messed up my Google Reader experience.
2. I could shift focus to a non-google product, but similarly, there was nothing all that awesome that I thought had much weight behind it. For instance, Novell's Pulse was meant to be a Wave-like collaboration tool that was intended to federate with Google Wave itself - but Novell the company just doesn't have the clout they used to have, and I knew Pulse wasn't really going to take off. There are so many products out there that do much the same sort of thing, but they're all these little walled-off social network wannabes.
3. I could continue with the open-source Wave project picked up by Apache. A few people are running with this, and it might be a fun project to monitor but it's not moving as swiftly now that Google isn't funding it.
4. I could generalise the focus to any product that might replace email as the fundamental communication of the internet. This would leave Facebook and Twitter and other Buzz-like products. This honestly appealed to me the most, but again the problem with most of these sorts of products is that they all live in their own little worlds and if I choose to use on Twitter for example, then I'm cut off from my wife who might choose to use Facebook.

So I thought about it and then just ignored the problem and hoped it would go away. Plus I started a new job that required a lot of time and energy and in the end, maintaining a website about a product or products that didn't inspire me just... didn't inspire me.

But a few days ago, Google announced Google+ (pronounced Google Plus if you couldn't figure that out). It's a "social networking layer" built over the top of some of their other products. It has some of the limitations of the products I decided not to focus on from the list above, but it's got some promise and for the first time in a year, I'm excited about one of Google's new products again.

So this site will now focus on Google+ for a while - until it takes off, or fails. My next post will explain why I'm excited by this, and why I'm writing about it when at first glance it seems no different to the products on the list. I'm also planning a newbie's guide to bring non-techies up to date.

If you're new here subscribe to the site! And if you're a reader from long ago and my site's just popped up again in your Reader, then Hi! Welcome Back! Thanks for sticking with me so long! Things are gonna ramp up around here!

It's good to be back.

"I just can't understand it," said Tom McWilliams, as he sipped his overly frothy cappucino. He would have to speak to Nermal, his house servant about how much froth he liked. It needed to be balanced. Somewhere between those awful foofy drinks they served at trendy coffee bars and a flat white. This was not it.

"Can't understand what?" asked Lindsay Lenninghan. She was wearing a pale green t-shirt, one of Tom's, that she'd helped herself to after their tempestuous night together. In bed, having sex. Tom couldn't tell if she'd put on any pants.

"Why would Myamoto be gunning for me? First he tries to buy me out, and now I'm pretty sure his hired goons are trying to kill me!"

Tom was looking less calm than normal, even in his favourite purple turtleneck and midnight-black slacks that rode up a little at the crotch the way he liked it. It reminded him he was alive.

"What could he possibly want?"

"Let's think about this logically," said Lindsay in that voice of hers that made Tom want to do sorts of illogical things to her. Before he could make a move she continued, "Why would the world's largest teddy bear manufacturer want to buy out a biologist? What have you been working on?"

Tom thought for a moment. While Lindsay was talking he had changed into a cappuccino coloured business shirt, chocolate tie and tailored brown suit. His black Church's shoes didn't match though, which bothered him, but his Tiger of Sweden brown suede fall brogues were at the dry-cleaners and it couldn't be helped.

"My lab does tissue regeneration. We're making some great progress. We may even cure cancer soon!"

At this, Lindsay looked up in surprise. She had showered and changed while Tom was thinking and had on a white blouse and orange sweater that brought out the brilliant colour of her eyes and sable slacks.

Lindsay looked pained at the revelation, and Tom realised he'd hit a nerve. Of course, you dolt, both her parents died of cancer and you go and act like curing it is no big thing. Trying to hurry past it, Tom kept talking.

"But I'm not doing anything like that. I'm working on scalp regeneration for burn victims."

Lindsay didn't know what to say. She knew Tom was haunted by his past, but only now was realising how much. Last night between bouts of lovemaking she had shared with Tom the loss of her parents. It was a big step, as she'd never told anyone else that she was a cancer orphan. In return Tom had told her about the horrific accident that had befallen both his parents.

One morning while preparing to go out his parents had started another one of their heated arguments. His father had waved his hands a little too vigorously and the Chancellor cigarette he'd been holding had flicked out of his grasp and into the stream of his wife's hairspray, squirting a jet of flaming fire at her beautiful golden-red hair. Within seconds her hair was ablaze and his father, a proud Scot, dove to help her - the argument forgotten. In the confusion the fire caught hold of his dad's heavily waxed hair and within moments both had sustained third-degree burns to their scalps. A long period of painful rehabilitation brought his parents closer than ever before, but Tom never lived down the school-yard shame of being dropped at school by two bright red bald prune-heads. Lindsay wondered if this was his motivation for his dedication to his work.

"What were you working on just before the buyout attempt?" she asked as she bit daintily at the marmalade on toast Tom had made her while she'd been thinking.

"Good question," Tom muttered as he pulled out his papers and started scouring back through the carefully dated sheets.

"It was about three weeks ago..." he began, then started, "Oh!"

Looking up at Lindsay's curious face he remembered again why he had fallen for this blonde goddess. There was something special about her.

"What is it Tom?" she asked. Lindsay watched his face soften at her as he had looked up and wondered what it meant. She could only hope it meant that he loved her back. This man had broken into her cold and carefully locked citadel and stolen her heart out from under her nose. When she had lost her parents she had vowed never to love anyone again, but all that had changed when she had met this wonderful man, last night.

"About a week before the attempt, I had finally stabilised the molecular structure of a compound to create skin tissue with full hair growth in a Petri dish."

"Why that's wonderful!" said Lindsay, dabbing at her lips with one of Tom's delicate monogrammed Bella Lino table napkins.

"Not really," replied Tom, "The skin was from rat DNA..." at this Lindsay's face took on a puzzled expression and her cheek crinkled cutely.

"Sorry, DNA is deoxyribonucleic acid - a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms (with the exception of RNA viruses). It's like the LEGO instruction book for life!"

Understanding, Lindsay brightened and prompted for Tom to continue, "So the stuff in the Pedro dish is like rat LEGO?"

"Yes," confirmed Tom, "but now I need to do the same with human DNA to make human skin replacements. So far, I've been completely unsuccessful."

"So maybe Myamoto knows you're close and wants to buy you before you crack it so he can share in the profits?" theorised Lindsay.

"That could take years, and then the FDA, EPA and YMCA will all need to study my findings before we can start human trials and we'll be tied up in red tape for years. No, Myamoto is not that patient. Besides, his company makes toys for God's sake!"

Suddenly it hit him. The whole sordid plan.

"I've got it"

Catching on, Lindsay gasped.

"He wants to use real rat fur on his teddy bears!"

Tom shook his head. It just didn't seem like Myamoto's style to be so obvious. On a hunch, Tom pulled up his favourite means of finding out information and looked up the name of the largest and most successful pest extermination business in the country: Rats 'R' Doomed. A few short minutes later he had confirmed his hunch.\ Lindsay tucked hungrily into her Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce, served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and a fried egg on top and Spam while she waited.

"I have it," Tom exclaimed at last.

Lindsay stood up and peered over Tom's shoulder.

"Rats 'R' Doomed is a subsidiary of and international textiles factory which is in turn a subsidiary of..."

Lindsay gasped as she read over Tom's shoulder.

"Myamoto Industries!" they exclaimed together.

"So Myamoto doesn't want to kill you to get your rat-fur formula..." started Lindsay.

"He wants to squash it so it doesn't compete with his own company's rat-fur harvesting business. It must be a multi-billion dollar industry, and we're about to pull the rug out from under it!"

"But that means he's using real rat hair in his toys!" reasoned Lindsay as she reclined on the couch in her Gestuz plait detail knit dress and Oxford black slacks, Amontillado in hand.

"This is bigger than we can handle," agreed Tom.

.

This work is a parody, and any similarity to Ben Bova's work is intentional but exaggerated. I mean no disrespect to Mr Bova though - I've enjoyed his work for about 15 years. My only complaint is that it's gotten less science-fictional and more industrial espionage-y since his Orion days, and he puts so many products in it starts to feel like a Will Smith¹ movie. This post is meant in jest. It's only because I've read and enjoyed so many of his books that I can pick out and skew some of his more outrageous patterns. Please don't hurt me.

Amelynne in a conversation with Mil.

Amelynne: (muttering something uninteligable) Does it Mama?
Camilla: Does what?
Amelynne: Mama.
Camilla: What does what?
Amelynne: Does it?
Camilla: Does what?
Amelynne: Mama.
Camilla: What does what do?
Amelynne: Does it mama?
Camilla: What does what do?
Amelynne: Yes!
Camilla: What?
Amelynne: Does it?
Camilla: Does what?
Amelynne: MAMA.

I think my daughter is a troll. Or a comedy prodigy.

I was eleven when I was implanted. I was fortunate to go to a family who treated me well. Others got sent to families with mean-spirited children or fathers who... My friend Tracy, she was lifeless within a week of starting.

.

Anyway, I started out at a nice place with a family who took the rules seriously. And it wasn't entirely without its joys - I tasted ice-cream for the first time there. And I read Narnia there. Really, it's where I started enjoying the small things when I could.

So that was half the Sum, and I left there at sixteen and went to live with a bachelor. He was also very good to me - I've been lucky I guess. Kind of makes me feel stupid wanting it removed now, when there's so many others who it means so much worse to. But I just don't want it defining me any more you know?

So anyway, he was nice, and he travelled a lot. He just needed a housekeeper. And I kept his house spotless. He never had a complaint. And, I danced for him. For him and his friends. Nothing gross. One of his friends suggested it once, and that killed the party. Everyone else followed the rules. They're at least good that way - in crowds. Everyone knows they get broken in private, but at least a group is more likely to not. I suppose that's not strictly true all the time though is it? Maybe a group is just more likely to have one person who doesn't want to break the rules. Simon didn't want the rules broken in his house and I never saw that other guy again.

But dancing is my specialty. I'm awkward and self conscious when I try to dance for myself, but when I'm Commanded I'm told I dance beautifully. So that was my next five years. Simon seemed bored by the end and I never danced for him alone any more. I guess five years is a long time to live with someone you don't know very well. And that was about the time that people started talking about changing the laws, so maybe he was scared of that or something - but for about a year before I finished he never got me to do anything other than cook and clean which I could do without being Told. And when the Sum was paid and I left I didn't know what to do with myself...

But I knew how to keep house so I did that for a year or so. And then the law was changed so no one could be implanted again - not that it made a huge difference to me practically. No one had Commanded me for two years. It was good for people like Tracy though. And no one has tried to command me since. I know no one ever will again too, and my husband has never once brought it up in 20 years.

I mean, technically and legally I know I'm free. Before it became illegal, I'd cleared the Sum so even under the old law I... But you know - it's just in the back of my mind. HA! Literally! But no. Seriously, it's always niggling there and I have never ever felt fully myself with it there.

And then I heard about you and that you're looking for volunteers to remove them now, and I know it's really dangerous - my husband is so scared... I... I shouldn't be doing this to... But I can't stand this thing! Most of the time I forget about it, but something happens and I remember Simon, or those kids who used to play with me, or my husband brushes my neck... I go back. And I'm not fully myself and more.

So I know it's experimental and dangerous and that they were never made to be removed... But I shouldn't have to live like this forever. I need it taken out so I can be free.

Do you think I qualify?

Ashamed to say that I only recently learned about Victor Borge who from only a few YouTube clips I can tell was a genius - a brilliant musician and comedian. I found him watching old Muppet Show clips, and it's clear to me now that his style of comedy inspired a lot of the most well loved Muppet Show routines.

What a guy

I'm sad that I'd never heard of him until I turned 30 (although I suspect my Dad may have told me some of his jokes). A man who was an entertainer for about 70 years and still doing shows until he died at 91.

It just goes to show that fame is fleeting. No matter how well known or popular you may be, your fame will be lost in the noise of the next generation. To think that one day our generation will forget that girl who yelled "Leave Britney alone!"¹ . We'll forget even MJ, Gaga and Hannah Montanna.

I think the only way to truly be remembered is to be so famous that great works of art or literature are created about you. Take Julius Ceasar. His name is still well known thanks alone to the work of that fine English writer, Rene Goscinny². Of course the only problem with this plan is you have to know which painters/writers/playwright are going to be good enough that their works are going to be held as an example of magnificent art for the next century or so.

://tools.google.com/dlpage/webmmf

Why can't we all just get along?"

Google has decided to throw its weight behind WebM, the new more "open" video format that competes with Apple's H.264.

In a post a month or so ago, Google announced that future versions of Chrome will drop support of H.264 in favour of WebM.

Of course, Microsoft wont play ball and build WebM into IE9 (their upcoming latest browser), prompting Google to create an Internet Explorer 9 compatible plugin to enable WebM playback in that browser.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has seemingly put their muscle behind H.264, announcing their Extension for Chrome that enables H.264 playback in that browser.

So Microsoft is making extensions for Chrome to enable a feature Google left out, and Google is making plugins for IE that Microsoft left out... Why aren't they both just working on their own damn browsers?

Thanks to Google Operating System for the story.

You know your daughter watches too much recorded Play School when, instead of singing ABCD-FOG¹, she sings ABC-for-kids-on-2. And I can hear it in my head as she does it.

The ABC might not have advertising, but its sure got some catchy jingles.

If they don't dance...

I got sick of futzing with tumblr's idea of what size a gif should be. I was thinking "Oh, aren't all these animated gifs cute,¹ that'd be easy to do..." But then I actually tried to post one, and realised that it really only wants you to post about 3 frames about the size of a postage stamp and where's the fun in that?

So here's my sister dancing with my bub - because I was practicing, and I love my sister and my bub and decided it needed posting somewhere.

I've been searching for a new theme, and nothing out there really said "me". My other themes have been fairly modest and simple and this time I wanted something with big bold bright colours and some pop out graphics. Hopefully the comic book inspiration is evident and makes you feel a bit like you're reading something equally as entertaining.

Isn't it beautiful?

2011-11-15: I've noticed a lot of searches for "comic book theme wordpress" coming in. I haven't made this theme available for download, as I like that it's unique to The Geekorium, but I'll happily make it available in the theme directory if there's any demand for it. So if you've come here looking for a theme like this, let me know by commenting or +1'ing and I'll look into getting it out there for people to use. You'd have to be patient though, it's not ready to go as it is.

About this theme

This theme is a two column, fluid wordpress theme. It supports threaded comments, the WP-Footnotes Plugin and the Author Exposed Plugin out of the box. It supports the Wordpress image/caption combo, but I prefer using my own style:

This is a clever caption

So it supports this too.

Credits and Thanks

Colour Scheme

The colour scheme is based on one of the "Pop Art" palates from the Adobe Suite.

Layout

Firstly I'd like to thank Andy Taylor for his astonishing and excellent CSS Grid. The grid resizes fluidly from a 1140px width down to iPhone size and took almost no effort to implement. Go ahead and try it!

Fonts

Kilogram is the chunky title graphic you see up there. Hetilica Bold gave the pop-out graphics a bit of a comic hand-lettered feel. Quicksand is the stylish little rounded font that peppers the site. Code Bold by Fontfabric is the font in the post headings and main menu. Beyond that, I'm using the default typography of the CSS Grid I mentioned earlier! All embedded fonts are free for use and distribution as far as I've been able to determine. If you disagree, please let me know so I can investigate further.

Graphics

All pop-out graphics used are from a Vectorstock set by Kraska. Thank you Kraska - they're beautiful.

Comments

Thank you to Chris Coyier for his "Custom Comments HTML Output" that helped me get the comments looking just the way I wanted them (now hidden by Disqus...)

Everyone else

There are a million tutorials out there that I use every time I make a new theme that I don't even remember the next day. Thank you all.

Disclaimer

I've done my best to cover all my bases, but I can't guarantee I've missed something. If you find something wonky, let me know and I'll sort it out.

Updates

2011-03-19 Fixed some issues in IE 7-8:

1. Picked some fonts from the basic windows kit to display instead of the custom fonts. IE8 can use @font-face, but needs separate .eot files to make them display, when most come naturally in ttf/otf format. Typical Microsoft. As punishment, you get a smattering of Comic Sans MS instead of Hetilica.

2. Fixed the display of pictures. Apparently IE needs a width on the figure element or it disappears the whole thing. I've given images a default width of 100% to fix this.

Removed a closing tag that shouldn't have been there.

{{< youtube kUZLVrBmuE4 >}}

You hum and whistle what you think is a classical tune for months. Only to finally place it, and realise it's the Joker's waltz from the 80's Batman flick.¹

Christmas by Joshua Nunn on Grooveshark

Embedded here are a bunch of Christmas favourites done by some of the best modern artists I could find¹. No Boney M for my family this Christmas²! Let me know if there's anyone I've missed out! And no mum, Celine Dion doesn't count.

Oh, and here's a special playlist just for Paul.

Merry Christmas everyone!

This post was going to start out negative, calling for nominations for "Unaustralian of the Year". And whilst typically Australian, its not a particularly celebratory way to see the year out.

So instead I want to spend December gathering stories about people who have been exceptional this year. I want to know about the hard working mums who are cooking dinner, washing clothes and potty training a 2 year old all at the same time, every day.

Tell us about the guy at the end of your street who climbed up a tree to save a cat and saw an old lady having a heart attack while crossing the street, so he rushes down and sprints to her side to carry her to safety, call 000 and start resuscitation, all before that lout in the Ute comes this close to driving over her face.

Introduce the people near by you who make your life excellent, or who help people they don't know, or who generally deserve a medal, but medals are expensive and not given out by a General for "Valor in the Face of Interrupted Sleep".

Share with us how people you know have been beautiful, hard working, loyal, brave, inspiring or delicious.

I want you to write a comment to nominate someone you think deserves a mention for being Bloody Good Bloke or a Top Sheila. Tell us why they deserve it. Then, if you read a story from someone that you like, give the comment a thumbs up so I can come back and post about the people you vote for.

Lets end this year on a positive note, giving thanks for the people in our lives who inspire us, make us happy, or put others before themselves.

{{< youtube pkr18kkmBls >}}

This video is in sepia - mostly to hide the awful colour and lighting. It's also echoey. It was a lot more rushed this time.

Slacks!

Tonight is my five year anniversary of this Blog. It started out as Josh Nunn's Wee Blog on nunnone.com, and tonight - in honour of my achievement and due to my name-change earlier this year, I've migrated to this new domain¹.

The Geekorium is now officially at https://the.geekorium.au

The last five years have seen a lot of changes here. I no longer write much about religion any more, I've started doing some videos posts and I've made numerous cosmetic changes over the time².

I've had a kid, I've started a new job, and bought a house.

I wonder where I'll be in another five. Hope you stick around!

{{< youtube SnFVw2JkYFw >}}

Apologies for this one. When I did the first two, I didn't much care how they turned out - I decided if I couldn't get them in one take, that it wasn't worth my time. Now with this one, I have a better camera, greater volume and a nicer setting, and the stupid demo of Pinnacle I downloaded can't seem to handle the titles I added without chopping the video up so much it HURTS ME. So I've exported it multiple times with no success, and I'm not re-doing it in a different program, so you have to suck it. Stupid Pinnacle.

Today I discuss the remainder of the Orphans trilogy I mentioned last week. I also mention my sister's site Tiny Little Glows that you have to go visit, because it's so much more entertaining than this one.

Thanks for watching my vids so far!

{{< youtube Z5FyuHIvu4w >}}

In which I ramble about books I've read and the training I've been doing at work.

Books mentioned:

• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• Cenotaxis by Sean Williams
• Evergence by Sean Williams and Shane Dix
• Orphans by Sean Williams and Shane Dix
• Dr. Futurity by Philip K Dick

Music used:

• Jolie Coquine by Caravan Palace
• I've Got That Tune by Chinese Man
• Libella Swing by Parov Stelar
• Back and Forth by Dr. Steel

I think I've mentioned before how much I like Caravan Palace - one of my favourite Electro-swing artists. Here's one of their video clips to admire.

{{< youtube 1RaKSRU60bw >}}

{{< youtube 5mLjtmsJsz4 >}}

What have you guys been doing?

It's been so long since I did anything round here, I feel like I'm treading on an ancient burial ground just coming by, let alone defiling the place by writing.

So...

What's up?

Had a strange problem using the new Microsoft Windows Live Sync Beta. It's working fine on one of my computers, but on the other one, it drops a letter when I set up a folder to sync.

See what I mean?

For example, if I want to sync a folder like D:\My Videos, the program accepts the folder I want as D:\y Videos and then creates this new folder for syncing. Or it might sync D:\Archives as D:\rchives. On my other computer - no issues.

Investigating a bit, I discovered it doesn't happen on my other drives (C:, F:). My D drive is different, in that I've moved the location of my My Documents folder to D. In a quick test, I discovered that moving it again to a subfolder of D removes the issue. It's not a permanent solution however, as a) I like having my documents folder in the root of my secondary drive, and b) I would have to move 220Gb of data to an external drive and back again as you can't move the location to a subfolder of the current location.

So I've sent feedback to Microsoft using the inbuilt "report a problem" menu in the beta. I did it in two parts though, so this post is my way of putting it all in one place, and on the off chance that someone is having a similar issue, they might get some comfort knowing that it's not their fault (well it is, but only ever so slightly).

As much as I miss the genius of Jim Henson, I realised the other day that I will miss something else just as much as Jim's Muppet characters. I will miss the insane and brilliant pieces of comedy gold he used to create with Frank Oz.

Frank Oz is nowadays probably best known for being the voice of Yoda, but he's also a respected and talented film director. He's still entertaining, long after Jim Henson's death and I hope he continues to do so for a long time to come.

But what the world has lost since Jim's death is not only a talented puppeteer and performer, but some classic comedic pairings of his characters with those of Frank Oz. I cry a little inside when I realise that there will be nothing new created by these two fabulous men working together.

Let me give you some examples. First up the most obvious pair:

{{< youtube g0P5FzSe3qw >}}

This is the only video in this collection that I'll forgive you for not watching in full. It's a scene from my least favourite of the Muppet movies (Muppets take Manhattan¹) showing the "wedding" between Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog, probably the most memorable Muppet pairing of all time (even if it's not one of my favourites). Though an unlikely pair, Jim and Frank made the pig's flamboyant declarations of love and the frog's seeming indifference oddly engaging and has created a love affair that is still going strong.

The next classic pair were Kermit and Fozzie Bear:

{{< youtube eH2coWVi9Vg >}}

As well as some terrific running gags throughout the Muppet Show, this odd couple were the backbone of the first two major Muppet movies - as travelling companions in the first and as brothers² in the Great Muppet Caper³. I think their relationship is part of what made Muppet Treasure Island feel like old-school Muppets.

Rowlf and Fozzie:

{{< youtube fYiWWdzDYMs >}}

These guys had some great musical moments together (check out I got rhythm on YouTube for another classic bit). Frank rarely got to show off his musical talent, playing the fool in a lot of songs or singing shrilly in his Miss Piggy voice. It made for some great comedy moments though.

Sam the American Eagle and Rowlf:

{{< youtube ueuA-9pqRok >}}

Sam is one of the most hilarious characters to come from the Muppets, and can instantly make any other character funnier, just by being the worlds most over the top straight man. Once again, it's almost like Frank is playing up a lack of musical talent, and it's brilliant.

Moving briefly to some Sesame Street pairings, and the most obvious (and maybe even more famous than any of the above) is the classic duo of Bert and Ernie. With Jim playing the prankster and Frank the straight man, there was no situation too simple to be made into a hilarious farce - and even kids could get it.

{{< youtube 51ZhEjB_KvU >}}

I'm just not emotionally secure enough to do this Ernie.

And some rarer but no less fantastic pairings came when Kermit⁴ ran into the Cookie Monster:

{{< youtube shbgRyColvE >}}

or Grover:

{{< youtube vQj2_Zmq1-o >}}

These two men made comedic character pairings to rival some of the greatest in history: think Laurel & Hardy, Abbot and Costello, Aykroyd and Belushi, French and Saunders, Fry and Laurie, The Mighty Boosh, or Lano and Woodley.⁵ All things must come to an end I guess. The loss of Jim Henson alone was a dreadful blow, but the loss of the joyful playful scenes that these two men could create together make the loss that much harder to accept.

Of course I don't mean to detract from the other brilliant pairings that the Muppet show produced. Statler and Waldorf come to mind as another well known pair (voiced by Jim and both Jerry Nelson and Richard Hunt). Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker are the other two that spring to mind. Their sketches are just as fun, but I believe that Jim and Frank had a spark of something greater in their performances.

I'll leave you with one other pair that might be less obvious, but is one of the defining partnerships of the Muppet Show - and is firmly entrenched in public consciousness. The pairing of Jim Henson's head and characteristic voice, and Frank Oz's out-of-control hands for the Swedish Chef:

{{< youtube UerBCXHKJ5s >}}

I've been working on a new design for The Geekorium. I'm constantly revising and trying to get it looking right, and I've previously made my own themes, but I've never been particularly happy with them. The problem with creating a design for yourself is it's far easier to distil the essence of someone else into a few key elements based on what you perceive as their strong and sellable points, but far more difficult to do it to yourself. So the themes I've created have not really been "me".

Well I'm trying again.

I'm happy about where this one is going. I'm still in the design stage, so it's probably going to change a lot, but I'm proud of the work so far and I thought I'd share the direction I'm going with it and ask for some feedback. Normally my feedback process on my personal site design is to ask my wife, but I want to widen my base and get an idea from some of the people who read it. I realise I'm not giving you much to go on, but I'd love some off-the-top-of-your-head thoughts.

A sneaky peak

So what do you think?

Creative Commons Configurator
Adds a Creative Commons license to your blog pages and feeds. Also, provides some Template Tags for use in your theme templates.George Notaras

I've used this plugin here and elsewhere to add a Creative Commons licence to the items I publish. Publishing something as Creative Commons means you still retain full copyright to the material, but gives others permission to use portions (or all) of your work on their own sites as long as they meet your guidelines. The choices can be a combination of the following:

• Attribution - the person who uses your content must link back to you.
• Non-commercial - the work they do must not be used for commercial gain.
• Share Alike - the work they make must also be put under a Creative Commons licence with the same terms.

The nature of the web is to share and republish things you find interesting and useful and to add your own take on it. By making my writing CC licensed, people can share what I write without fear of copyright claims (as long as they agree to my terms). I in turn other people's CC licensed photos in a lot of my posts. CC helps to make the web richer and more useful by opening up things that might otherwise be locked away on their own sites.

If you don't plan to sell your work or make money off it, or feel like contributing to your community in some way consider putting your work under a Creative Commons licence.

I DIDN'T KNOW MY SISTER WAS A BLOGGER THEN I FOUND OUT THAT SHE IS AND SHE DID A POST ON CREATIVE COMMONS AND PUBLISHED IT BEFORE I DID AND MY MIND IS BLOWN SO I'M LINKING TO HER POST ON CREATIVE COMMONS SO YOU CAN GET MORE INFORMATION IF YOU'D LIKE TO READ IT SHE STUDIES COMMUNICATIONS AND SHIT SO SHE KNOWS WHAT SHE'S TALKING ABOUT AND SHE HAS A TWEETER ACCOUNT TOO. HOLY CRAP.

"This is probably the single greatest breach in the history of privacy."

Steven Conroy on Google's (accidental) collection of unsecured (and essentially public) wifi data from people who don't know how to set a simple password on their wireless Internet connections.

{.alignnone width="500" height="309"}{.tt-flickr .tt-flickr-Medium}

I once caught a clue THIS BIG! Then I let it go.
By kjd.

Really, he needs to stop talking if he ever wants anyone to take him seriously in a technological capacity ever again. Can't he just have a 13 year old check his speeches before he gives them so they sound at least vaguely knowledgable?

Here's my favourite pancake recipe. It's excellent with some good quality yoghurt and fruit instead of maple syrup.

I've worked out the Calorie count for these pancakes.

• If you use 1/5th the mixture per pancake, you're eating roughly 890kJ or 215Cal.
• If like me you add 2 tbsp it's only an extra 10Cal per pancake.
• A 1/4 cup of choc-chips adds an extra 100Cal to each pancake.

Due to me not using Twitter any more, I can't just retweet this, so I'm blogging it instead. Overkill: yes; necessary: yes.

Today at the Google I/O Conference{.vt-p} (the same one that Google Wave was announced at last year{.vt-p}) Lars Rasmussen{.vt-p} gave a brief update on Google Wave. The biggest news is that Google Wave is now available for any one to sign up without an invitation. This makes it much more likely that large groups will just get started collaborating on Wave without having to coordinate Wave invitations for everyone. While the service was invite-only it had the appearance of being a "tech elite" product. As more people found uses for it in group situations (classrooms, meetings) the need to make it easy for the people that actually wanted to use the product to do so became obvious.

In a guest post on the Huffington Post{.vt-p}, Lars explains:

For this reason, today we opened up Google Wave to everyone. You no longer need an invitation to use the service. Simply go to wave.google.com{.vt-p} and sign right in. Likewise, if you administer a Google Apps domain, you can now easily enable{.vt-p} Google Wave for all your users at no extra cost. Google Wave is now officially part of Google Labs, the same place my team launched Google Maps close to 5 years ago.If you tried Google Wave earlier and found it not quite ready for real use, we think you'll find that a lot has changed, and now is a good time to give it another look.

Lars Rasmussen in the Huffington Post{.vt-p}

Did you catch that second part? That was the other half of the announcement: Google Wave is now live for all Apps for Your Domain accounts! If you are using Gmail or Google Calendar on your own domain name, you can now use Google Wave too, and it integrates fully with the normal Google Wave experience. Those of you who have been waiting for this since launch, or since Linkoping University announced it{.vt-p} for their students, well wait no more!

It took about 3 hours from the announcement to being able to add Wave to my own domain account. Setup is a breeze. Click the "Add more services" link on your App Dashboard to install the Wave Preview. Then get Waving!

Don't forget to Wave @ me.

A few weeks ago, I noticed a new feature{.vt-p} of Google Wave that allowed a user to easily send websites and content to a new wave to easily share with others. The feature (called "Wave This") was not officially announced at the time, and I was asked politely not to say anything more at the time until the team could officially announce it.

{.s3-img}{.vt-p}

In addition to this, the Wave This{.vt-p} function has an official Chrome Extension{.vt-p}. Install the extension, and you can send any page to Wave with a click!

Finally, you can also use an undocumented Wave This feature to add a Wave contact button to your sites. At the top of my page I've added a "Wave @ me!" button that starts a new wave with me as a participant so you can easily contact me in Google Wave. To add the button to your own site it's as easy as filling your details in the code below:

<a href="https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=Contact+via+[Your-Site-Name]&r=[fill-in-your-@-wave-address-here]" title="Contact me in Google Wave" class="vt-p">

The &r parameter for adding a recipient isn't listed on the API page and support might be pulled or altered so use at your own risk. Additionally, be aware that the Wave This function currently defaults to the Google Wave Preview account only, so if you use a different client (a Google Wave for Domain Apps account for instance, or Novell Pulse) you're out of luck for now.

So there you have it! A new API, an awesome function, and my modest widget. Have at it! Make some buttons Start spreading Wave!

Announcing the Wave This Widget for Wordpress. Install this widget, add it to your sidebar and let your visitors share your posts easily on Google Wave!

The Google Wave "Wave This" function takes the title of a post and a short description and starts a new wave for you to add users to. It uses the "Wave This" API.

This sidebar widget adds a button to individual post pages that sends the post title and exerpt to Wave. If you haven't set an exerpt the widget uses the default one generated by Wordpress for each post. The default button is 300px wide to allow for larger sidebars. Please resize the button using the widget options.

2010-06-16: Added the official button options from Google.

Latest Version

Version 0.3

Known Issues

• Settings are not persistent across updates. I'll try to build this in soon.
• Does not use the official "Wave This" buttons from the API page. The official buttons can be linked though using the custom image feature. Fixed: see update 16-06-10
• Does not support Wave for domains other than the Google Wave Preview.

Support

If you need help with the Wave This Widget, leave a message here, or on the Wordpress Support Forum. At the risk of fragmenting the support, you can also get in touch with me on Google Wave¹, or leave a message on the official plugin wave

Warranty

No warranty is given for this plugin.

Quick plugin plug1

Favicons are those little icons that websites display in the address bar (or in the open tab in Chrome). They're usually about 16 pixels square (which is tiny) but it adds a bit of professionalism to your site, and lets people figure out which site is yours if they have dozens of tabs open. You can get plugins for photoshop that will let you save files as ".ico" files so you can create a favicon.ico file. Then you can upload your file to your website and link to it and... well it's easy, but kind of annoying to get right.

Enter Shockingly Simple Favicon:

Shockingly Simple > Favicon A simple way to put a favicon on your site. -- matias s

Install and activate and follow the instructions on the configuration page. The page includes better information than I've provided here, and a whole bunch of ideas for creating your own favicon.

Go to it!

Previously I wrote about some plugins I love for making writing posts easier. This is a list of the little plugins I love that just do cool things around the place. They're all useful, and most are ones I use on both sites I maintain. I would highly recommend them to anyone.

• Akismet

  Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.Matt Mullenweg

  Akismet keeps me spam free. I'm using it conjunction with Disqus for a double layer of protection. It's pretty accurate - think Gmail spam filters for your site. Anyone who isn't using this is asking for trouble.

• [Author

  Exposed](http://colorlightstudio.com/2008/03/14/wordpress-plugin-author-exposed/ "Visit plugin homepage")
  Simple and elegant way to get more information about author.Igor Penjivrag

  I used to have a plugin here that showed more details about myself using a third party service. When I started First Waves I felt like I wanted a similar tool to promote my guest authors a bit but didn't want to have to ask them to create an account on the service. So this plugin does something similar based on the information they fill into their profile on this site. When you click the Author's name a little hovercard shows you their gravatar and a link to their other websites.

• AddQuicktag

  Allows you to easily add custom Quicktags to the editor. You can also export and import your Quicktags.Roel Meurders, Frank Bultge

  I can't stand WYSIWYG editors, so I choose to use the HTML editor to write my posts. It doesn't mean however that I don't want to use shortcuts occasionally. The AddQuicktag plugin lets you define custom tags to wrap around your HTML while editing. For example, I have a <code><cite></cite></code> tag in addition to the normal <code><blockquote></blockquote></code> tag and a "Caption" button that wraps my image caption text in <code><figcaption></figcaption></code> (to save me writing them out every time).

• [Broken Link

  Checker](http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/08/05/broken-link-checker-for-wordpress/ "Visit plugin homepage")
  Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.Janis Elsts

  This plugin creates an area on your dashboard that reports any broken links it finds - any sites that you've linked to that are no longer there, or resources that get 404 errors. Then you can go through and relink or ignore them as you like. Keeps your site tidy. You can also give it permission to cross out links that don't work so your visitors know not to bother to click through.

• [Clicky for

  WordPress](http://getclicky.com/goodies/#wordpress "Visit plugin homepage")
  Integrates Clicky on your blog!Joost de Valk

  Ultimate Google Analytics
  Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site. Check http://www.oratransplant.nl/uga/#versions for version updates*Wilfred van der Deijl*

  These two add the Clicky and Google Analytics tracking codes on my pages so I can be silly about the number of visitors my sites get. Clicky is particularly cool, as I can see people come and go in real-time and can feel a bit like Jack Bauer.

• [Organize

  Series](http://www.unfoldingneurons.com/neurotic-plugins/organize-series-wordpress-plugin/ "Visit plugin homepage")
  This plugin adds a number of features to wordpress that enable you to easily write and organize a series of posts and display the series dynamically in your blog. You can associate “icons” or “logos” with the various series. This version of Organize Series Plugin requires at least WordPress 2.8 to work.Darren Ethier</em><

  Wordpress doesn't come configured out-of-the-box to incorporate posts into series. This plugin makes it feel like it does. This plugin post is an example.

• [Page Links

  To](http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/page-links-to/ "Visit plugin homepage")
  Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources.Mark Jaquith

  A good plugin if you want pages in your menu that go to pages off-site (like First Waves and nunnone email in the menu above). Create a new "Page", and in the new option at the bottom of the post tell WordPress where you want the item to link to.

• [YOURLS: WordPress to

  Twitter](http://planetozh.com/blog/my-projects/yourls-wordpress-to-twitter-a-short-url-plugin/ "Visit plugin homepage")
  Create short URLs for posts with YOURLS (or other services such as tr.im) and tweet them.Ozh

  This is the best plugin I've found that lets me use my Bit.ly pro account (using my own domain for shortened links) to display a short link on my site for each post. I was originally using YOURLS to shrink my links, but when bit.ly offered theirs I switched over. Comes with a widget too, to display the link in the sidebar if you'd prefer.

• [Smart

  404](http://michael.tyson.id.au/smart-404 "Visit plugin homepage")
  Rescue your viewers from site errors! When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if matching content can’t be immediately discovered.Michael Tyson

  This is such a simple plugin, but it can make such a difference to your site. When visitors try to visit pages that don't exist, normally your site will give them a 404 Error (telling the browser that the page doesn't exist). What this plugin does instead is tries to match up some content with the URL they entered, so for example when you try "//the.geekorium.au/batman" (a page that does not exist) you will be automatically redirected to the page for my Batman tag (of which there are quite a number). Or if you tried //the.geekorium.au/disqus, you'd be taken to a post with "Disqus" in the title. There are a lot of queries that it won't work with, but it's neat when it works.

There are a few more extra-special plugins that I want to share, but they're the sort of plugins that you dedicate whole posts to, so I'll share them soon. In the meantime, if you like the sound of any of these features give them a whirl. The great thing about Wordpress is just how easy it is to install and try out new plugins.

Something that's been bugging me about the Google Wave interface are the icons that show you three participants from each wave in your inbox (and other searches). The origins of the feature make sense - in email we're used to seeing who an email is from right from our inbox. In one and two person waves it does kind of make sense, but when you have multiple participants the icons stop being useful and just become clutter. To me it adds nothing to my ability to identify a wave and just makes my inbox "noisy". The icons in the wave make sense, but I'd like a more thought out approach to identifying waves. Something like:

• Make waves I've started a slightly different colour (like sites where the author's comments are shaded slightly blue).
• Don't show icons at all in the inbox/searches (or make it easy to show and hide).
• Let me tag or bookmark specific blips within waves and make it obvious from the inbox which waves have "starred blips".

Now this post wasn't started just as a gripe against something I'd like to see changed - I'd like to hear what things you'd change about wave if you could. I'm not necessarily talking features we know might come (like the recently switched on "Remove" button). I mean interface and behaviour changes that don't make sense to you, or made sense at first, but don't now you've used it a bit. What are your specific gripes and revolutionary ideas that would make using Wave more of a delight for you?

Wave is constantly in a state of flux, so there's every chance the feature you hate might be altered in future. So get your pet peeves out here in the comments or on this post's sister wave (embedded)

[wave id="googlewave.com!w%252BPia29cqgA"]

The most long-awaited feature (besides the seemingly dead "Draft" button) has finally been imlemented by the Google Wave team. That's right, Remove Participant is here! What this means if you're not an addicted Wave user, is that wave authors now have total control over who comes and goes from their waves.

{.s3-img}

This is a big deal for Google Wave. The button has been there since the beginning, but grayed out and unusable. It's taken some of the shine off Wave that until today you were unable to recall waves or remove people added accidentally.

It works in a pretty straight forward way. You decide someone should not be a participant any more and you click remove. The person who is removed sees a big red X on the wave in their inbox and opening the wave shows the last thing they were able to see before you removed them. If you remove them before they even open the wave, they won't even know it existed!

{.s3-img}

Part of me balks at the idea of removing waves right out from under their noses if they haven't opened them. It feels somewhat dishonest - but it's actually just fixing a email shortcoming! I think we've gotten so used to the idea that once something is sent, it can't be unsent that it feels a bit weird to actually be able to do it again. Keep in mind though that this probably isn't foolproof. If for example someone's waves become "unsynchronised" while you are removing them from the wave, they might still see it - leaving you thinking that you got to it in time.

Another big issue in the months since launch has been Wave abuse. Waves have been destroyed by malicious (and accidental) addition of bots, or overwhelming the wave with large amounts of spammy text. At the moment, the best way to deal with this has been to reduce the abuser's participation to "Read-Only" and report them to the abuse team. This remains the best way to halt an ongoing attack, but now it's also possible to clean up after an abuser by removing the sign they were ever there in the first place.

A teacher is after a new laptop, and asked if they should "just buy a Mac".

A few years ago the answer would have been "absolutely". Not because I was a Mac fan-boy (I was) but because compared to XP or even Vista, the Apple operating system and overall computer experience was just much better. Nowadays my answer is not so clear cut. I told him that of course "it depends". What's changed?

Microsoft released Windows 7, and slowly pushed itself back to it's feet to fight another round with Apple.

1. Win 7 is faster, easier to use and lighter on resources than XP/Vista and is just a joy to use.
2. A standard Dell Vostro¹ with an i5 processor, 4Gb memory, 500 Gb space and a 15" screen will cost you $1500 (plus $250 for a three year warranty if you want). An equivalent Mac will cost $2570 (add $580 for a three year warranty). That's an enormous difference.

Once upon a time, a Mac was harder to compare - they used completely different technology and the operating systems were chalk and cheese. Microsoft had effectively stalled for 10 years on the desktop, and Apple was releasing new features and innovations every couple of years. Now it's different. I'm just as happy (happier?) on my PC than I was on my Mac - largely owing to the fact that I could get more power under my keyboard for the same money.

There are of course still a lot of arguments for the Mac operating system. Used in conjunction with an iPhone/iPod/AppleTV/Airport it can seem like magic. The idea that "Macs just work" is still very pervasive². At the end of the day it's about what works for you.

1. Do you already have a Mac? Maybe get another - the things they can do together are sometimes pretty neat.
2. Do you like top notch industrial design? Macs cannot be flawed for how well they're designed and built.
3. There is speciality software on the Mac that just have no competitors on the PC in the same price bracket - software like Delicious Library, Transmit, Coda, Rapidweaver. They're all wonderfully crafted tools for doing their jobs in simple and intuitive ways. I'm yet to find anything that can match any of them in style on the PC. Of course, I've found functional alternatives (often free) that do the job just as well, but it's personal preference.

For me the choice was a lot more simple with the introduction of Win 7 - I get all the pretty glossy stuff that appeals to the part of me that likes shiny new things, and the day-to-day management of my computer is now just as easy as it was on my Mac.

This "newbie friendly" post is the first in a new category of Tech for Newbies. Got anything to add? Leave a comment below!

I'm gonna try to get a new series going here on the Geekorium where I answer some of the questions I get asked in my job. I get asked for advice every day, and it's often more interesting than the sorts of things I actually do to get paid. Ages ago I toyed with the idea of making a site where I would break down technical concepts for the less technically minded, but wasn't sure it would have an audience. The advice I get asked for though already has an audience - the people that asked in the first place. So when I get asked a question I think warrants some fleshing out I'll put it under the new category Tech for Newbies.

://www.flickr.com/photos/kimtimnashville/4417256456/

omg n00b!
//www.flickr.com/photos/kimtimnashville/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Keep in mind if you're technically minded, that the people I give this advice to aren't. My answers are simplified and often lacking some of the stuff us geeks find very important. Feel free to point this stuff out in the comments, but try not to be too harsh on my for leaving it out! Also sometimes I don't actually have an answer - it doesn't mean I won't try to put them on the right track.

And if you're not a geek maybe I can help you out. Leave a suggestion (there's a suggestion tab just over there to the right) if you have a question you think I could answer. Make sure to read what the geeks have to add though!

The first topic I'm tackling is the age old dilemma - Should I Buy a Mac?

The decisions Google makes don't normally annoy me, except in small geeky ways that most people would pfft at, and you may well pfft at me now but they are seriously annoying me now.

://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/21469363/ The Google Master Plan http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/ / CC BY 2.0

On one hand we have the recent integration of Buzz into Gmail and Google Reader. The upshot being:

1. You cannot disable Buzz without disabling your carefully tended Google Profile.
2. Because you cannot disable Buzz, you end up slowly accruing followers - you could ignore them, but you start to look like an ass.
3. So you follow back and this breaks Google Reader.
4. So the choice is between using Google Reader OR Google Buzz to read content from others. Google Buzz is so tightly integrated with Google Reader that I can only choose one or the other. There is no way I can see to effectively and simply use both at the same time.

But then on the other hand:

1. Nothing looks the same as anything else - the interfaces of some products have similar elements, but there's no universally consistent theme to the products.
2. Google Translate (which is so nicely integrated into Google Reader) is not integrated into Buzz, so all the non-english-speaking people I follow are just so much noise to me.
3. Google Bookmarks (which I used to use a great deal) now houses the annotations you make to Google results (starring results and so on) but
4. Google Chrome doesn't use Google Bookmarks to store your bookmarks (!?) it uses Google Docs.
5. On top of that, I am yet to be able to actually produce a two-way sync across Chrome at home and at work.

So riddle me this Google: why are some products tightly integrated - inextricably so - while others barely work in ways that would make absolute sense to the user? Normally I can see where you're going with things - heck, I write a site just about Google Wave - but in these couple of cases, it seems you're making decisions not based on what's best for the user, but forging ahead with integration only when it will push a product that you deem worth your time. No one was clamoring for Buzz. They thought it would be nice if Google entered the Social Networking space, but not at the expense of your other products. But users have been asking for years for tighter integration of products that matter to them - translate, bookmarks, the defunct notebook, docs and calendar.

I realise these are all different teams of people. I realise they're all working as hard as they can on what they're doing. But Google the Company needs to stop occasionally and say "Maybe we need to focus on fixing and integrating what we already offer before we introduce this new shiny toy".

Google, you have a lot of excellent products - please pay them some attention occasionally and get them talking to each other.

But it's not going to happen overnight. It will be five years before we can say "this actually works."

Lars Rasmussen on Google Wave via CNET UK.

Told you so

To James,

I've not actually met you in "real life" yet, and much of what I know of you I have only learned through your blorgs, twoots and videos of you getting slapped... which seems to be more often than regular folk.

Regardless: Happy Birthday.

I'm glad you're having a good year. I hope you don't grow up as soon as you think you should. We should meet sometime soon.

When I started First Waves I wanted to keep my readers up to date with Google Wave news and keep on top of changes and updates as they happen. However, looking around the net I soon found many sites that already do a great job of keeping up with Wave news, and I hate the idea of rehashing the same stuff my readers could get at any number of excellent sites. So instead I have started to concentrate on larger news and "future direction" stuff here at First Waves, and I hope my readers are OK with the focus.

But I realise that many people do want up-to-the minute Wave information, so I'm going to lay out the sites and people I follow, and if you're a hardcore Wave nut, you might like to follow them too. These people all have my utmost respect and admiration for their writing and dedication to Wave. I've included these sites in a Google Reader bundle called Best Google Wave Sites. If you trust my judgement, you can use the bundle to subscribe to all twenty-two feeds in just a couple of clicks! If you'd like to know more about the sites though, read on!

Wave Users - Hints and Tips

First and foremost, you cannot go past the Official Google Wave Blog - written by Googlers with news information and tips. If you only subscribe to one other site (ahem), this should be it. It's kind of a no-brainer though so lets move on to some less obvious sites.

The Shiny Wave by David Cook takes a look at useful waves, gadgets and bots as well as the latest important technological developments that could impact Google Wave. Once a month he profiles the work of a talented Wave developer, and generally keeps a close eye on the Wave development community.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave Alright, this isn't a site to follow so much as a book, but it's written by the enormously talented Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. The site includes the entire book for you to read for free, or you can get it in PDF or full colour print versions for a very small fee. If you're just getting started in Google Wave, there really is no other site you need to get your head around it.

Google Wave Information by Pooja Srinivas (a Googler) is a compilation of Wave guides Pooja has written. The focus is on brand new users who might find something like the Complete Guide (above) too complicated. It also covers some unusual and fun use cases for Wave.

Waving At You by Russell Tripp is where Russell puts all his tips and information on Google Wave to "ease the learning curve" as he puts it. Waving At You and Russell's Twitter account are where I found a lot of my favourite Wave resources. His tips are simple, but always excellent.

Waverz uses waves themselves to create the articles. Using the wavearchive@appspot.com bot, an archived html copy of a wave is made (at http://archive.waverz.com). You can then embed this archive in a page using some simple javascript (or php or python on the back end). Beyond this technical marvel though is an insightful site written by a number of Wavers including one of my fave wavers Jon Blossom and Dragon Silicon, who's work I've only just discovered while writing this article.

Google Wave Possibilities by Tim Brown is another excellent source of Wave news. Tim is a "Wave Watcher"

• a group of Wave helpers - and for good reason. His site is full of helpful information (like how to get started with particular bots), and Google Wave news.

Wave on Business is focussed on how businesses might use Google Wave. The site incorporates presentations, use case scenarios and information on collaboration.

Google Wave Book by Andrés Ferraté is a companion site to the books Getting Started with Google Wave and Google Wave: Up and Running. It is more than just a catalogue for the books though, and contains insightful posts with tips and ideas.

Riding the Wave by Prasun Nair has Wave news, but mixes in some news about other communications technology such as telephones. The posts cover Wave news and information on its future direction.

Google Wave Info. The latest news and information about Google Wave by an anonymous author. Some useful information.

Wave Developers

These sites are run by Wave developers for Wave developers and contain a mix of the technical and informative. If you would like to dive in to the nuts and bolts of Google Wave, these are a few of the best!

The Google Wave Developer Blog is the official blog for Google Wave developers. It's full of tips and guides and helpful information for developers who are just starting out with Wave and for Wave gurus too.

Google Wave Samples Gallery is the go-to place for new robots and gadgets as they come out. Primarily a teaching resource, the extensions here are tagged with how well they will teach you the concepts behind developing for Google Wave. An excellent source of useful bots too!

On Top of the Wave by Kiwibcn is a site run by a team of developers to showcase their experiences developing for Google Wave. One of their most popular posts is how to Develop your first wave robot in Java and clearly demonstrates their knowledge and their ability to teach.

Wave.to by @waveDOTto is the home of the developers of the excellent Mr-Ray extension, plus many more. These guys clearly know their stuff, and they are passionate about sharing it with the developer community and the public.

With Waves are a team of four developers who have created a number of popular extensions including Amazon and eBay bots that insert product listings into waves when you mention them. They have also released their Extension Generator that they use internally to build their own robots. That's generous!

Mastering Wave by Daniel Graversen follows the process of developing for Google Wave, as well as highlighting important Wave news and tips. This site is one of the first Wave sites I subscribed to.

Process Wave is written by seven software engineering students, and follows their process of developing from Invity, a group management bot, to a collaborative modelling tool integrating the open source ORYX software into Wave.

Go Wave hasn't been updated for little while now, but has some good information about Robots, Gadgets and Embedding.

Google Wave Sites by Region

The following Wave sites are written for specific communities and are often in another language. This should not be a problem. I speak nothing but English, but thanks to modern internet translation software have no trouble reading and participating in these sites. If you subscribe to these sites in Google Reader you can use the built in translation function and you should have no troubles whatsoever.

Spanish

WAVEsfera by David Alviz. David was an enthusiastic commenter here on First Waves, so I followed him back to WAVEsfera and discovered his site was in Spanish. Realising I was missing out on some excellent tutorials and news I subscribed as soon as I remembered that Google Reader does instant translation! I'm glad I did

• David updates almost twice daily (!) and is an endless font of knowledge and excitement over Wave. Without David, I'd probably be missing out on all the other excellent non-English wave resources below.

German

Google Wave Surfer by Thomas Friebel has news and information with particular focus on the Wave experience and how it is changing over time. The site also includes a forum for users to share their wave experiences.

Wave Inside by Sascha Ahlers has shorter updates than Google Wave Surfer, but they are no less informative. A good resource for quick news.

French

Google Wave France is maintained by three authors who explore Wave use cases and report updates and changes as they happen.

Russian

Google Wave Russia by Vadim Barsukov has some in-depth articles from Q&A sessions with Lars "Google Wave" Rassmussen. Some of the content appears to be English articles translated to Russian, but there is some original content too.

Everything else

Of course, this list is not meant to be complete. There are authors I've not met, site's I've not found and tweets I've not seen. There are sites like Smarterware or Read Write Web that often cover Wave news, but aren't dedicated to covering Wave. As I come across articles like this, I'll add them to my "Further Wave Reading" list over on the left. I also re-tweet interesting Wave articles from @firstwaves on Twitter. If you really want to be in the loop, follow my Twitter list of Wave Geniuses too!

I've also left off a lot of good resources and people that can be found on Google Wave itself, as that will take another post entirely. <a href="https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=Contact+from+First+Waves&r=nunn.joshua@googlewave.com" title="Contact Josh via Google Wave">Ping me if you'd like to chat, and I'm sure I can help you find some great people, and useful resources.

If you know of some great Google Wave resources I haven't covered, please let me know in the comments below!

I was visiting Pamela Fox's personal website, and noticed she had a _Wave This I can't find mention of the feature anywhere, and I'm not sure if it's permanent, but a specially formatted URL takes a title argument, a content argument and passes it to a special new wavethis function as shown:

[snippet id="843"]

Using a bit of PHP in Wordpress and a plugin called Samsarin PHP Widget (that allows php in a special widget) I created the _Wave This

The PHP I used was as follows:

[snippet id="842"]

Simply install and activate the plug-in. Add the Samsarin widget to your sidebar and past the code in as you see it. It will only appear on post pages (not the front page).

I created a couple of button images you can feel free to use:

So that's the new Wave This! button. Go ahead and give it a try. If you're a developer I'd be interested in seeing other ways to implement this.

Introduction

Google Wave is a product that's trying to do something massive to the way we communicate online. Its stated goal is to be what email might look like if it were invented today. A number of other services are labeled as competitors to Google Wave, including the recently updated Google Docs (which is too new for me to comment on in this article), but I wanted to take a look at which of these services are real competition. Below are the services who show the most promise at becoming the next generation of online communication.

Microsoft Sharepoint

Microsoft Sharepoint is a suite of content management tools to maintain and collaborate on documents. While it was never sold as a replacement to email, it was held up as one of the products Google Wave was meant to compete against. But as Steve Gaitten of Bamboo Nation points out, Wave competes with Outlook, not Sharepoint.

It might be possible for Microsoft to transform Outlook in some significant way that expands it beyond email into some sort of super email client. It might even integrate it into Sharepoint a lot further. The truth is, email is Google Wave's biggest competition. It might be outdated and rough, but it's the most popular form of communication on the internet. If anything stands a chance at beating Wave, it's the service that Wave is trying to beat. If email innovation can keep up with user demand, it might just remain the top dog for another 40 years. If Outlook can maintain the large slice of the pie it has, while innovating on top of email it could still be competing into the future.

Novell Pulse

This is exactly the kind of "competition" Google was hoping for when they built Wave. As I've said before, Wave's only hope of replacing email is federation. Only by giving users the choice of Wave provider will users find one that works for them. Novell Pulse might even become a more loved Wave client, and I think that would actually make Google happy. Personally, I'm eagerly awaiting a Pulse preview account.

SAP Streamwork

This tool was touted as a Google Wave competitor while in Beta (with the code name 12Sprints or Constellation).

The tool turns out to be a collaboration space for making decisions. It's not a complete replacement for email, but I'm not sure that was ever their intention. Streamwork allows a team to collaborate and add gadgets to enhance the process.

"It was clear we needed to work together," Meyer said. "We're excited about what they're doing, they're excited about what we're doing." Users will be able to share content between the two platforms, he said. - David Meyer, reported by Computer World

It will be interesting to see what sort of integration they build into it.

Shareflow and Toqbox

Much like Streamwork, these tools are not marketed as email replacements, but were both touted as Google Wave competitors. What they do is allow users to collaborate on documents in real-time. If these sorts of services were better integrated into email (perhaps using GMail's new oAuth tools) they might be more likely candidates. Otherwise they are really only competing with Google Docs and others of that kind.

ccBetty, Syphir, Etacts, Xobni, Rapportive et al.

Products such as ccBetty and the others mentioned enhance email. They exist to remove the holes in email by providing additional information, embedded media, faster searching, or simplified discussion. Some work on GMail, others on Outlook, others work outside any email service by CC-ing a special address onto each email you wish to turn into a discussion. The problem with all of these tools as competition for Wave is that the email protocol just doesn't take these sorts of tools into consideration, so they're limited by how many services the developers can write for. That is, each service might support Outlook or GMail, but not all the other smaller players in the marketplace. Where Google Wave has this model beat is by including extension support from day one, allowing developers to enhance Wave in whatever ways they can imagine. Any service that federates with Google Wave will also support these extensions, making it a truly open, extensible experience.

EtherPad

This collaboration tool gets its own special crossed out spot because it was one of the strongest, simplest competitors in the collaboration space, but was bought by Google! The developers have obviously since been put to work on Google Docs, as evidenced by the announcement of the recent update.

Facebook.

This one scares me a little. In some ways, Google Wave is the anti-Facebook. Where Wave is built on open technology, uses an open protocol and federates with other services, Facebook is a "walled garden" and keeps users inside their service. Both systems let developers make extensions and apps that use the platform, and Facebook seems to be slowly inching towards including some of the collaboration features that have been missing so far. Facebook has a huge user base, and could easily become some sort of defacto go-to communication platform for the masses. Currently though there are no obvious moves to open up the platform further, making it unlikely to catch on in business, where email still rules.

Twitter (+ Buzz and other Social Public Messaging)

Currently, none of the services in their current form pose a threat to email - they're too limited with their 140 character limits and lack of in-line collaboration. But Twitter (or a more open version of it at least) is the product I think has the most real chance of beating Google Wave at becoming the communication platform of the future.

A distributed network (integrated with Twitter of course) that updates in real-time, with an API could have many people needing their email less and less. Once you can get updates from your favourite companies and all your friends are on the service, why would you need it? Throw in an extension or two, enhanced private messaging, and you have a very compelling product that could steal users away from email. The platform is so new, no one really knows where it could go in the future, and I suspect it will give Google Wave and traditional email a run for their money. It could be Twitter, or Buzz, Status.Net or a new player we've never heard of, but the idea has the strongest traction of any I've seen.

Something completely new

So those are my thoughts about Google Wave's true competition. Of course, a company could come out of the blue with a product so completely new and exciting it amasses a huge audience that completely abandons email. This is the least likely of all I think, as I've stated before I think Wave is our best chance at replacing email wholesale. Alternatively, email will be killed by slow changes to the next generation of social communication. The chances of it happening are dependant on the whims of companies who are trying to make a buck, not replace email so I'm not holding my breath. Email will be replaced by something federated, open, extensible and easy to use. I've taken my best shot at predicting what it could be.

What are your thoughts? Is Google Wave our best hope, or is there something even more obvious that could take email's place?

Tehe

This tickled my fancy. Over on First Waves I've got a post ready to go about Google Wave competitors, and one of the ones I mentioned was Sharepoint. Amusingly, the spelling suggestion for it was chokepoint...

Which apparently is a geography term, but sounds kind of ridiculous.

Well I though it was amusing anyway.

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Another minor update (perhaps a test) - the new Extensions link has been moved down to the drop-down folder area, and been separated into Featured and All. These were previously available as searches, while the original link simply showed all extensions. This is all part of the plan to get people using and developing extensions to showcase the strengths of Google Wave.

Tonight I disabled Disqus and tried to implement some of the same features manually. Rubenerd has been pushing his anti-disqus agenda for some time, and it ramped up when Taryn proclaimed it's virtues and Zombie_Plan bleated and caved too¹.

So as an experiment (and due to my underlying desire to stop handing stuff over to third parties), I turned it off. Here's what I installed in its place:

• CommentLuv - puts a link to the commenter's most recent post under their comment.
• Gravatar Signup - if a user doesn't have a Gravatar associated with their email, offers to sign them up for one.
• Simple Facebook Connect - lets a commenter register using their Facebook account.
• Simple Twitter Connect - lets a commenter register using their Twitter account.
• OpenID - lets a commenter register using their OpenID account.
• Subscribe to Comments - Adds a check-box so a commenter can have follow-up comments emailed to them.
• Live Comment Preview - Shows a mockup of the comment being left as it's written. Kinda neat.

So that's seven plugins, plus an hour or two mucking around with site templates and CSS to get them looking vaguely acceptable (so many themes have very ugly comments). I had to style my comments separately, fix the threading, and alter the layout of the comment form. And I still have less functional comments than I did with Disqus. The only benefit I have is... I... don't know. I can say I don't use Disqus?

That's not including the plugins I decided not to turn on - Backtype to pull mentions from Twitter etc., and Ozh' Absolute Comments to enable reply by email (for me at least). I'll miss reply by email the most.

Maybe those of you who can't see the point of Disqus don't care if your commenters can't log in with Facebook. And I'm yet to see anyone but Techcrunch with an attractive and functional comment area using a vanilla Wordpress setup. Disqus isn't gorgeous, but it's a lot better than what Wordpress out of the box can do.

So now I've done it I'm not sure it was the right thing to do. As an added bonus, none of the comments that were in Disqus are threaded any more, and if I go back to Disqus it might screw up the comments people have left since disabling it. And none of my comments before today are associated with me as administrator any more. All in all, I probably should have left it alone. But at least I can maybe help some one make up their mind about their comments - use Disqus and get a whole bunch of features, or install some of the plug-ins listed above.

Just so you know, although I'm a fan of the software, I'm not such a fan of Disqus the company. Trying to get assistance for a problem is like pulling teeth, and there's at least one feature they promise when you set it up that just doesn't work. When I tried to ask them why my comments weren't "real-time" they told me they were and that they were disabled for maintenance - which seems odd, since it's been at least a few months now... So take from that what you will - if you don't think you'll need support, Disqus might be perfect.

I used Twitter for a while there and got quite into it. Then I got annoyed with it and stopped using it a bit, then came back, then left, then... you get the idea. Eventually I officially left. I've also been trying out pretty much every other social site out there and other than Facebook (which I use primarily because most of my family do), I haven't found one I like.

Here are the things that would get me back into it¹. Pretty much only one of these things need to happen for it to get me moving back.

• Twitter becomes more open. Twitter has become this huge behemoth of information and vital updates. People rely on it now, which is a mistake as it's prone to dying horribly. I want to know that the whole thing isn't reliant on one company for keeping it up. Imagine if email was totally run by one company? You'd be completely at their mercy if they died or they changed the product. Email is decentralised and open, and it's more robust. Twitter might not seem as important a platform as email, but it has the potential to be a major part of communication on the web.

• Buzz gives me more control. Google Buzz was the latest and greatest for about three days there, until everyone realised that it pretty much spews everything at you indiscriminately, and you have almost no control over it. If Buzz adds better filtering controls so I can filter out everyone's twitter feeds, or just Louis Grey's Google Reader shares, I'd be all over that. I think my friends might be too.

• Status.Net gets more developers. One of the things that pushed Twitter's growth were the extra services that developers made to fill in the holes. iPhone apps, image services, link shorteners - none of them work with Status.Net, the open source, open protocol competitor. I want to own my own updates thank you very much, but I don't want to miss out on the cool stuff that everyone else gets to play with either. But Status.Net doesn't have a lot of those cool things, like a decent iPhone client. Although they are trying to fix it.

• Any of the others get users. There are a whole bunch of other services that are as good, if not better than the above three services, but no one uses them - well no one I know anyway. If any one of these services got some more of my favourite people on them, I'd be there in a shot.

Currently all of these services annoy me too much for me to use them. Blogging is the only outlet I have that gives me satisfaction and full control over my experience. It also has all the cool people I know².

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Not a big thing, but a simple update that shows the shortcut for closing a blip on the Done button. Also missing is the Draft check box which has been present from day one but never worked. This could mean that the ability to create drafts might be low on the priority list, or the team decided that it was confusing to have non-functioning interface elements available. Either way, it's a sign that the Wave team are serious about cleaning up Wave and making it less confusing for new users.

This might be my next phone...

In about June or July my iPhone contract expires. Looking at the new 4.0 software that won't run on my 3G phone, and knowing that the next model will be out about then with (hopefully) the newer faster processor and better battery life, I'll probably be looking to upgrade. The problem is despite loving my iPhone, and what is to come, I abhor that what my iPhone can run is subject to the whims of Apple, and I hate that I'm tied to iTunes in any way.

So this is my wish for all the makers of Android handsets and iPhone/iPad competitors:

Get your shit together by July. Get a decent range of Android competitors out here to Australia by then. Bring your Dell Pads and Smartphones, provide me with some choice! Everyone will get a fair viewing - I'm prepared to sacrifice the money I've invested in my iPhone apps if you'll provide something compelling! The Dell Tablet sounds great - I'd like a bigger screen, but I want only one device to make calls from - so make a bluetooth headset standard kit and I might get one. Or I'll get a Nexus One, or one of the HTC range. I'm not fussy so much on brands, but I am fussy that the experience be as fun and intuitive as the iPhone. I'm fussy that it not lock me in to software that makes me fume. I'm fussy that it not be a step backwards - that I can surf the net, that I can get some great apps, and that it remains the hub of my communication.

Please think of Australia. You have 4 months max to make this decision difficult for me. If the next iPhone gets here before you get it together, you'll have blown it for at least another two years. The next iPhone promises to be a cracker. Make yours a cracker too!

There are a number of Wordpress plugins I use to do various bits and bobs around the Geekorium. The Skribit tab and the Blogroll at the side are both produced with plugins for example. But there are some plugins that you never really "see" as such - they do their work silently behind the scenes, and most of them are primarily there to make my life easier. If you run a Wordpress site, you might be interested too. These are the plugins I have both here and on First Waves because they're just so damn useful. Below is an introduction to each, and my explaination for why I use them:

• After The Deadline Adds a contextual spell, style, and grammar checker to WordPress. Write better and spend less time editing. Raphael Mudge

  This plugin adds options to your profile page to check for grammar and spelling errors. Chrome usually picks up most spelling errors anyway, but this is great for picking up my awful grammatical errors. I use a lot of Passive Voice for example, and this highlights it.

• SyntaxHighlighter Evolved Easily post syntax-highlighted code to your site without having to modify the code at all. Uses Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter v2.0.320 and some code by Andrew Ozz of Automattic.Viper007Bond

  I can't pretend I write a lot of code, but this one is so pretty and useful I can't leave it out. It highlights code blocs in whatever language you specify. Check out this post to see it in action.

• Smart Link Lets you write links as link text (explicit link), or as link text (implicit link). Denis de Bernardy

  This one was useful for the couple of times I remembered to use it. Kinda superceded now by the Textile plugin (see below) but for a while it was useful. Adding a link was as simple as:

  [this is the link text ->http://example.com]

• Textile 2 (Improved) This is a wrapper for Jim Riggs’ PHP implementation of Brad Choate’s Textile 2. It is feature compatible with the MovableType plugin. Does not play well with the Markdown, Textile, or Textile 2 plugins that ship with WordPress. Packaged by Adam Gessaman.Adam Gessaman

  I've only just installed this plugin, so I'm yet to get used to using it. One of the annoying things about blogging is that I often include a lot of strong and emphasis tags, but hate typing them out. In fact, using the correct markup often puts me off doing what could otherwise be quite enjoyable. So after a bit of experimentation I settled on textile. Now I just use asterisks and underscores, and links are done like so:

  "This is the link text":http://example.com/

  There are a whole slew of other formatting options that will make marking up a post a heck of a lot faster and easier now, and much simpler to do on my iPhone.

• wp-Typography Improve your web typography with:

  • hyphenation - over 40 languages supported,
  • Space control, includes: widow protection, gluing values to units, and forced internal wrapping of long URLs & email addresses,
  • Intelligent character replacement, including smart handling of: quote marks, dashes, ellipses, trademarks, math symbols, fractions, and ordinal suffixes, and
  • CSS hooks for styling: ampersands, uppercase words, numbers, initial quotes & guillemets. Jeffrey D. King

  Using the correct typography is as important to me as correct grammar. I love a good em-dash and my ellipsis must be the correct three-dot character, not just three full-stops! Doing it all by hand can be a PITA (Pain in the Arse) though (particularly with HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) entities) so why not just get a plugin that does it for you? It even transforms acronyms into proper small-caps and swaps out maths symbols with nicer ones!

• WP-Footnotes Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post.Simon Elvery

  This is seriously my favourite plugin of all time. It's so simple it's stupid, but I use it at least once in every post and often more. All it does is generate footnotes, but it's so simple to use I can't help but do it all the time.

  Simply type your text¹

  It's as easy as that. Instant footnote section at the bottom of your post! It gives me so much scope to just throw in asides and afterthoughts without ruining the flow of the text. I've resisted installing it on First Waves, because I strive to be somewhat more professional over there, but for my rambling stream-of-consciousness posts here it's the bomb.

So those are my favourite post-writing plugins. Hopefully there are one or two that might appeal to you too². If any one is interested, I'd be glad to share a couple of other useful plugins I use. What plugins do you use for your site? Which could you not live without?

If one of my heroes - and a highly successful tech journalist and writer

• feels like this sometimes, maybe it's ok that I do too.

Unfortunately I have two movies that spring to mind when I was given this suggestion:

Review the worst movie you've seen this year.

The first is The Ugly Truth with Whatserface and That Bloke who always seem to be in these awful movies. Normally I would have steered clear of something like this¹, but occasionally I have to watch a romantic comedy so that my wife will keep watching SciFi with me.

Bleh

What a dreadful movie. I'm not sure there's much to be said beyond that.

The second was Surrogates with Bruce Willis. I had heard it wasn't fantastic, but the idea behind it intrigued me: what if everyone lived their lives virtually through robot simulacrum²?

Bruce Willis: Bored.

The movie's conceit is ridiculous in execution though, with almost the entire world having chosen to live in little pods that feed sensory input from their virtual bodies back to them. I cannot imagine anyone but the elite and a select few ever going for it. The movie world is one where doctors no longer espouse the benefits of sunlight or fresh air, where muscles don't atrophy from under-use, and the technology is so good that no one misses reality.

Except Bruce Willis of course.

He has that same sort of bemused look he has in every film. Except in this one it doesn't suit. I also recently re-watched 12 Monkeys and the man can act, but when the script is bad, he just spends the entire film with a little half-smirk like he knows something the director doesn't. Well his character hates his virtual life for some reason. He's a cop put on the trail of a man with technology to kill someone through the surrogate. There's all sorts of interesting questions that this raises³, but none of them are really explored or adequately covered.

Which is the essence of this film really. The premise is interesting, but the execution is flawed. About half way in the movie starts showing all its cards until there are no surprises by the end. None of the characters are "real", so you don't care about them in any way. The technology is so magical you just cannot believe any of it.

The final indication that this was not a good film came about 2 minutes after Bruce Willis saved the entire planet⁴ and my wife woke up. Oh how I envied her.

Cheers Zombie_Plan. Hope it was good for you too...

I'm sitting under a lovely big tree in a park, watching my girl play on a slide with her Grandma nearby. I'm reading feeds on Reeder on my iPhone, and writing this in the Wordpress app. I'm wishing this could be my profession. All this iPad chatter has me wishing I had money to squander, to iPad¹ out my digital lifestyle with all the trimmings and sit in a park and read and write, and never fix another jammed printer or reset another password, and just make giant run-on sentences that would make Zombie_Plan and Rubenerd proud.

I hear talk of mythical beings who enjoy their day jobs. But I'm an atheist, so I don't believe in fairy stories like that.

I do enjoy my life though. My baby girl is spinning on the play equipment now, and a breeze is touching my face and I am content.

I had my first taste of international communication today thanks to Google Wave. David Alviz runs an excellent Spanish Google Wave site called WAVEsfera. He keeps up with the latest bots and gadgets, and writes very well. A while ago it might have been a small problem that his site is entirely in Spanish. Translation has been around for a while on the web now, but it involved taking note of the site and plugging it into Babelfish or something similar. Now I have translation built right into Chrome. when I visit WAVEsfera, it asks if I want it automatically translated. Similarly, I've subscribed to the site in Google Reader, and it translates the site for me too! So far so good, no reason not to subscribe to international sites any more!

Then I got to thinking. I'm getting in touch with some of the people who have read First Waves, and realised that it's the perfect chance to try Aunt-Rosie, one of the original bots released with Wave. So I fired up a wave and added WAVEsfera and the translation bot. I selected the destination language and started typing.

It was true magic.

My amazement at watching my words translated as I type is like that of a caveman witnessing fire. the experience is so novel and potentially life changing. Imagine a world where language is no longer a barrier for communicating with anyone. Think of the potential for learning!

I'm full of excitement for the world of tomorrow enabled by real-time communication and translation. We're so close to realising the universal translator of Star Trek that I can almost taste it.

In a site note: Inspired by my discoveries, I've enabled instant translation to each of my posts. I know I've had visitors from Germany, Ireland, the USA, France, Spain, the Czech Republic and Turkey just today! If you want to read First Waves in your language, check out the "[Translate]" button beneath each post. If you're an international reader, I'd love to hear from you! Please leave a comment, or wave me at nunn.joshua@googlewave.com and don't forget to add aunt-rosie@appspot.com!

Edited image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/ / CC BY 2.0

I have that "Suggestions" button up there on the right because I'm hoping that people might make my never ending search for interesting stuff to write about easier. Before today my only suggestion has been (literally) "....", which I'm not sure what to do with. I thought it a stretch to drag a post out of an ellipsis and a period.

Then today I got GOLD.

"mate your a wanker"

Not a suggestion as such. It's entirely possible that the chap¹ misread the tab to read "Statements", and just decided to put his 2 cents in.

I do have a comment area under each post so if it's a particular thing I've said, you could leave a specific comment. Failing that, you could contact me directly and say hello. Perhaps after a chat you might come to realise that I'm not such a bad guy.

I can infer a couple of things about my eloquent visitor:

He spent 10 seconds on my site. Just long enough to write "mate your a wanker", and pretty much nothing else as far as I can tell. I can't see exactly how he found my site, which suggests he either bookmarked it to come back later to insult me specifically, or he came from a secure site such as Facebook or his email. What he's doing seeing my site in his email I have no idea.

He's from Manly, NSW but I've never been so don't know what that says about him. I'll steer clear of geographical stereotypes in this post :P. He gets a small pass from me for using Google Chrome (the browser of the gods), but he's using Vista so he is a little backward. And if he ever comes back I'd like to know if his Vodafone plan is any good...

So that's the post you get for your "suggestion". I hope it satisfies. Anyone else who has an ACTUAL suggestion is very welcome to write something up there, and I'll treat you with a lot more respect than I've treated this one.

Isn't spam fun?

In yesterday's open thread, I used Mr-Ray by wave.to to allow non-wavers to access a wave. Mr-Ray's real purpose is to be an intermediary between Wavers and emailers. It does this by creating a simple wave interface when you add someone to a wave by their email address.

Well Mr-Ray wasn't the first attempt to get Wave and Email to interoperate. A couple of Googlers used their "20% time" to create Emaily, a bot that behaves very similarly to Mr-Ray on the Wave side, but tackles the email side of things a little differently. When you add Emaily, it first creates an email address for you on its servers. Then when you add the address of a non-waver, it sends an email to that person with the details of your update and they can reply right from their email. I have to say, it creates a pretty seamless bridge between the two worlds from the email side. In Wave though, you get to see their entire email shoehorned into a wave, with ">" reply markers and signatures left in. For anything more than simple communication back and forth this could get messy.

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The developers of Emaily have said they are planning to integrate Emaily even more into Wave by "rearchitecting Emaily into an application, which uses more of the internal Google services". Hopefully this could be the beginning of actual built-in email capability in Wave that could speed the transition of more users from old technology to new.

Try it today. Add "emaily-wave@appspot.com" to a wave and send an email to a non-wave friend! Will extensions like Emaily and Mr-Ray help you transition to Wave any faster?

In honour of a couple of Wave extensions that allow wave-to-email collaboration, I thought I'd try something light-hearted instead of my usual wordy post. Mr-Ray is a bot/gadget combo from wave.to, that lets you add people to a wave by their email address, and they get sent a stripped back version of the wave that they can use to collaborate with you, without having to figure out and navigate the full-blown Wave interface. Embedded below is an example of the interface the email user sees. Please note, this isn't the way the developers recommend using Mr-Ray - the address should be kept secret to avoid people posing as you. In this case, I KNOW it's not me!

I've got a short holiday thanks to Easter, so I'll leave this up until Wednesday to get to know my readers and give the non-wavers a chance to see a little bit how it works. I'll check back regularly to reply so you come back too! If you're already on wave and want to reply as you, contact me at nunn.joshua@googlewave.com and I'll add you directly.

[ This used to be an embedded view of a Wave. Technology comes and goes and we lose even the archives of what we had. ]
Fullscreen Version

Updated: Added static view of the wave for reference.

I love the potential of Google Wave, but that doesn't mean I'm not sometimes frustrated with it. Here's my list of stuff I'd like to see sooner rather than later.

1. A way to "subscribe" to people/searches: Lisa Miller writes Our Patch (the First Wavezine) on Google Wave [<a href="https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=wave&passive=true&nui=1&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F%3Fpli%3D1&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F%3Fpli%3D1&ltmpl=standard">"our patch" wave search]. John Blossom write useful waves about Wave [<a href="https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=wave&passive=true&nui=1&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F%3Fpli%3D1&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F%3Fpli%3D1&ltmpl=standard">wave search for John Blossom]. I'd like to "subscribe" to these searches and have them tell me when new items are published by these people. The presence of "archive" and "mark as read" options when you make a search suggests it should eventually tell you when the search has updated, but it's not implemented yet. Instead, users are making their own indexes (for example -<a href="https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=wave&passive=true&nui=1&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F&ltmpl=standard"> Our Patch)
   And while we're on searches - a "quick add" option to turn a search into a shortcut.

2. Spam and abuse management: Spam and destruction seem out of control sometimes on wave. We know the team are building spam and user management, but it's a bit slow going at the moment.

3. Federation: At time of writing, federation (connecting one Wave server to another) is only supported in the developer sandbox and not in the public wave preview. It'd be nice to know that when Novell Pulse is released, they'll both talk from day one.

4. Moderation tools: Creators should have the choice to lock their initial blip from editing if that is what they desire. Some blips are purely informative and don't need to be edited by all and sundry. This is perhaps antithetical to the way the creators intended Wave to be used, but users will do as they want with a tool, and it's up to developers to support them.

5. Google Apps support for all users: I don't like using nunn.joshua@googlewave.com. I'd much rather use my domain email as I have with email for the last 5 years.

6. Better contact management: Currently contacts appear in Google Contacts under their Google email addresses. Why not add their names automatically, put them in a "Wave" group, and add a link to their home page pulled from their Google Profile (and don't try to tell me Google doesn't know that much about them...)

So that's my list of "missing features" that are necessary ASAP. What do you think Wave is missing right now?

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/ilovememphis/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Some updates:

Spurred on by the outpouring of comments and (!) blog posts after asking for feedback, I got stuck into a few posts here and on my other site. Thank you everyone who responded and wrote replies - it gave me some much needed confidence and meant the world to me. I was buoyed for days afterwards (and loved the commentfest that followed here and elsewhere).

I officially quit Twitter (with my joshnunn account at least). I was leaving it open ended so I could come back without looking like a fool, but now I'll have to hang my head in shame if I DO return.

First Waves is going great-guns. tjb654 tweeted "Wave on Slow Cook" and was retweeted by Pamela Fox (one of the Wave API evangelists). So I got a bunch of new readers and some more Facebook Fans!

I began re-working my portfolio site. I couldn't be bothered installing a test environment on my laptop, so I put it up and started editing it live. It took me a little longer than I expected to make it usable though, as the documentation for MODx¹ went down just as I started, so I couldn't figure out how to build menus. Eventually I got something I'm happy with up just before...

Lifehacker (!!) linked to my site What the F is that about?! I suspect I've stepped into a mirror world where the Joshua Nunn of this world produces things that interest people and that they want to read. I kinda feel sorry for the poor schmuck who got sucked into my universe, but then I remember he probably goes around with a goatee, so it serves him right.

Tonight I published a massive post on First Waves. I suspect that because I'm massively proud of it, it won't be read by anyone and I'll realise that my mirror-self managed to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow and switch us back... bastard. Or I could be pleasantly surprised that I get some people reading it. I've paid for a Clicky account, so now I'll know when YOU are reading this... unless you're using a feed reader... or I'm not on my computer when you do... What was i saying? This point has descended into a Rubenerd-esq sort of ramble. My apologies.

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It's Old

Why it's bad:

Email was invented 40 years ago to deal with a very different set of communication problems. The web didn't exist, and email was a simple way to get text from one place to another. Think black screens with green writing and geeks talking to geeks across America. Now we have Twitter, Facebook, and whole new ways to communicate, but our basic building block is email. Everything useful eventually finds an implementation in email, but it's ill-suited for the task. Sure it's universal, but just sending images was an afterthought!

How Google Wave can help:

It's built on the latest proven internet technologies. It's built from the ground up to handle rich media of all different types but still retains some of the things that worked for email in the beginning, like addresses using the @ symbol to send messages to the right place.

It's Slow

Why it's bad:

When you send a message to someone, you hope they'll get it before you need a response, so savvy users know to pick up the phone if they need an answer quickly. In some cases you might have IM available, but what if you need to send a document? You'd check that they're on in IM then switch to email when they respond. How convoluted is that? Or worse, you call them and ask if you can send them a document. Not very efficient is it?

How Wave can help:

Wave tells you when a user in your contacts is online. You can "ping" them to ask if they can chat, then send them the document all from the one interface. Then you can get feedback in real-time

It's Wasteful

Why it's bad:

Email creates a message and sends a copy to the recipient. Then they reply, and the sender replies back and so on and so forth until there are multiple copies of the message, often with earlier messages still attached taking up space and using resources. When Aunt Helga sends her holiday snaps to everyone in her address book, every photo gets stored on every mail server that receives it, accumulating gigabytes of data all around the world in mail servers.

How Wave can help:

The Federation protocol requires the originator to "host" the message for the rest of the recipients. So when Aunt Helga sends a Wave full of pictures, the message is accessed right from her own provider, so it's only stored once. This multiplies a bit when other Wave providers are involved, but not as much as the potential email has for wasting space.

It's Difficult to Follow

Why it's bad:

Imagine our mythical Aunt Helga again if you will. She's planning a trip to France with her daughter Julia, so they email their ideas back and forth about the sites they might see when they get there and who they might sponge off. After about 10 emails, Helga wants to make a list of all these places, but has to wade back through them all to find each mention of a place-name. How inefficient! Tragically she misses a couple because she doesn't recognise the names. Then Julia asks if she can bring her friend Tracy and they have to start all over again to make sure they cover the places Tracy wants to visit too! Not to mention the new conversations they must start with their French relatives to ask for a place to stay and to find the best sights to see while they are there.

How Wave can help:

Helga starts a wave and adds Julia. When Julia asks where they'll go, they begin a blip right there to brainstorm ideas, while they discuss other aspects of the trip further down the wave. When Julia realises she wants Tracy to come she adds her directly, and Tracy can see exactly what they've come up with so far, and can even play back the wave to follow the discussion. She can also edit the "places to see" blip to add her own ideas. Finally, once Helga has contacted the French relatives separately to ask them nicely if the three can stay with them, she adds them to the ongoing wave to give suggestions and ideas right there in that same blip!

It's Full of Spam

Why it's bad:

Do I need to answer this? The problem with email is that anyone with your address can send you something. Of course, this has allowed email to grow into the juggernaut it is, because it's just so damn easy to send information to people. However it means that anyone with your address can send you any old rubbish, and (at least before today's exceptional spam filtering) it will pop up right in your inbox with all your legitimate mail.

How Wave can help:

Google Wave also has a spam and abuse problem at the moment. However I believe there are a number of ways Wave could begin to tackle spam, which warranted another post.

It's Insecure

Why it's bad:

As touched on in the Spam section above, email is trivial to spoof. Anyone can send email as anyone else. Some email providers offer some protection against this, but like almost every modern feature of email this was an added afterthought, and can not be presumed of every email client and system. Additionally, you might log in securely (using an https:// address) to your email, but unless you go out of your way to enable it your mail is generally not sent and stored securely. Email providers do what they can to secure it, but insecurity is built in!

How Wave can help:

We've already seen that waves are tied to the originating Wave providers, preventing spoofing. As an intrinsic part of this security, all wave communication is encrypted from end to end, meaning someone watching the data being sent between wave clients will not see anything useful.

It's Limiting

Why it's bad:

With the technology of the internet getting faster, smarter and more secure, people are finding new and unique ways to use it. It's common to have two, three or more places where we must go to check for news and messages. Numerous attempts have been made to unify these streams of data into one super-inbox, but none have really caught on.
Email is still the dominant form of messaging, and most new services end up providing some sort of email gateway to their service. For instance, Facebook users can now reply to messages and posts via their email, and third parties let you follow and reply to Twitter users through your email. These solutions are usually tacked on as an afterthought. Email was not intended for many of the roles we shoehorn it into.

How Wave can help:

Wave is being built from the ground up to be customisable and extensible. The Wave API allows for the creation of Robots and Gadgets that each have a defined role in customising a user's wave experience. Robots can be used to change the behaviour of waves (by importing Twitter notifications for instance). Gadgets can enhance the interface to add tools and options not available before (a voting gadget or similar). I can imagine eventually plugging in the sites and notifications I want using my choice of Bots and Gadgets. Such options are only limited by the imagination of developers.

These and more are the reason I'm excited about the future of Google Wave and the Wave Protocol. I can't wait for the day I'm using Google Wave or something like it instead of my clunky antiquated email system.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/lovati/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

The Wave team have said very little about how they will address the spam problem, but from some clues and hints in the interface and what they have said, I can take a couple of guesses about how they could start to tackle it.

1. First up, Wave will ensure messages are signed and verified from the source. Currently email can be forged and made to look like a legitimate email coming from a trusted source. The Wave Protocol specifically addresses this, making it impossible for anyone to "spoof" another address without access to that user's account.

2. Email currently makes it very easy to send millions of messages with little to no cost involved for the sender - they send and delete and don't need to save copies of them, and the recipient is forced to deal with the accumulated data. The Wave Protocol however, requires the sender to host the wave and keep a copy for future reference. Spammers will no doubt find ways to send and then remove their waves, but if a host no longer hosts the wave, that could be a reliable indication that the sender was a spammer.

3. Finally, the few times the developers have been asked about spam they've mentioned a possible white-list system. White-listing involves choosing who can send you messages and blocking everyone else. People worry that this will stop legitimate communication, say from long lost friends, getting through. But already built into the interface is a "Requests" link that Wave says are "Waves for users not in your contacts list". This could allow anyone to contact you, but you'd know at a glance that they weren't from people you knew and trusted, and could more easily add them to your contacts, or mark them as spam.

I believe a combination of these three factors will go some way to addressing the spam problem. By tying everyone to a Wave server it's not as economical to spam using waves. By not allowing completely anonymous communication, reported spammers can be more easily shut down, and by white-listing users we can identify potential spam at a snap. The Wave team will hopefully come up with even more solutions to implement and I'll be interested to see how it develops.

The Google Wave Federation Protocol excited us, because for the first time since email, it provided a way for collaboration systems to cooperate in a non silo'd way . The promise is that each organization can choose what product to use and the communication will flow unimpeded between the different systems, in the same way that people on different email systems can send and receive messages to each other today. This is a collaboration revolution we wanted to be a part of. - "Novell Pulse and Google Wave" - Google Wave Developer Blog.

This is exciting. More detail up soon.

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I think a little wee just came out

Who else is excited about the new season of Doctor Who?

April 18th.

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Doctor Who - Now with more... This Guy!

When I started the Geekorium (back then, just "nunnone"), I decided to do it without ads. It was a protest against the appalling punch-the-monkey type ads that were most common at the time, and something I felt proud of. My website was not made to "generate revenue", it was a place to be me and as such I was happy to pay for it out of my own pocket. It's sort of my only expensive hobby that Mil looks away for.

Then a year ago I briefly dabbled with putting ads on my site, then in my feeds. I never generated any money from them, and they cluttered up my site so I killed them, and I'm still happily ad free here.

But I kinda feel the pressure to have ads on my First Waves site, so I've done it. I feel kind of dirty, but as someone who wants to make money off of this thing called the internet, I feel it's my duty to understand how the advertising world works. If only so one day if someone asks me to help them set it up I can do so without looking like a goob.

But I still can't help feeling a bit dirty about it. Ads have improved a lot since the days of AOL and Yahoo "start pages" where the ads almost drowned out the useful information, but now when I visit a site that I enjoy, I still have to wade through layers and layers of ads that push the content to the side and intrude on the reading. I never want that to be the case on my sites. Advertising should always be secondary in my opinion, but is that an unrealistic ideal? My biggest concern is that the ads I have are distracting and ruin the look of the site. I realise that's kind of the point - to draw attention to them, but I can't help but feel like the ads have killed what little aesthetic appeal I was able to impart to the site.

I know most of my friends with websites have ads, so maybe I can guess what they'll say. I also don't want to accuse them of being sell-outs - it's purely my own misgivings about advertising that make me feel a bit like I'm selling out my "principles" such as they are.

But I am curious to know what you all think? I happily pay enough of my own money to keep my Geekorium running ad free, and First Waves currently adds no extra expense, so it's not vital to have ads. I also don't really make anything off the ads I have at the moment, so it's not like I'll miss them if they go. It's just the "cha-ching" I hear when I think about it that's got me a bit worried I've gone to the dark side. I also love the idea that one day¹ I might have a few people writing articles for FW, and would love to be able to pay them to do so.

So should I keep FW ad free and uphold my vision for ad free content that people like to read? Or should I forget my concerns and happily take the cash? Should I put even MORE ads on? Ads on my Geekorium? Monetise my Twitter Feed? Actionise my synergy? What do you reckon?

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In a short and succinct tweet by Joakim Nejdeby, we finally have news of Google Wave in an Apps environment. With almost little to no fanfare.

Google Wave activated for our students, http://wave.student.liu.se #googlewave #Google #GoogleApps #liu

Joakim Nejdeby on Twitter.

Joakim Nejdeby is the CIO of Linköping University, a large University in Sweden with some twenty-five thousand students. In an email exchange with Mr Nejdeby, I clarified some of the details of the roll-out. I asked if this was an official partnership with Google and if we could expect an announcement from them. He replied:

From what I understand this is a preview activated for a few customers using Google Apps. I expect the twitter and Facebook announcement [from Nejdeby himself] was the official announcement. We will likely add information on our student pages as well.

Email exchange with Joakim Nejdeby

Asked whether the student accounts were compatible with the current public Wave infrastructure, or if they were limited to sending waves withing their own domain Nejdeby replied:

I have not seen any observable difference between the regular Wave system and our preview. From what I can see there are no limitations in interactions between our users and the public system.

Email exchange with Joakim Nejdeby

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I've asked to connect with Mr Nejdeby (a fan of Google Wave from day one) on Wave to see how well the two systems interoperate. If it does indeed work as well as Nejdeby says, then this (to my knowledge) will be the first large scale public roll-out of Google Wave outside of the Google Public Preview opened last September. Linköping University has activated Google Wave on their domain for 31858 users and reports that they currently have close to seventeen thousand active Apps users. How many active Wave users this will translate to remains to be seen.

It may be by releasing Wave in contained environments such as universities, Google hopes to continue testing and expanding in an environment that is more receptive to the collaborative nature of Wave. One of the complaints leveled at Wave has been that people fail to see the need for another communication medium in their daily workflow. As a new technology without widespread use, it's difficult to use on a daily basis as a user's main means of communication. Perhaps with large businesses and education institutions on board Wave might see increased uptake as people learn how simple it can make internal collaboration. We may even see these large organisations driving a push to activate Wave for other companies and institutions as they get used to using them amongst themselves.

It should be noted that this opening up is not quite the announcement of full-scale federation that some Wave developers and users are hoping for. The Apps infrastructure is run by Google and managed by the individual organisations, so can more easily integrate with the public Google Wave service. Hopefully though, as Google Wave grows in popularity with education and business it will spur development of competing products on top of the Wave Protocol.

Update: I apparently missed that Google said they were making Wave available to select institutions "this fall", 2009 soon after Wave was opened to the public.

Image by Joakim Nejdeby

When I was in grade 8 I learnt French. I say learn, but it was a handful of disconnected words and maybe a sentence or two that I couldn't possibly remember now. The problem for me was that I knew I was going about learning it the wrong way, but relied on the teacher to teach me the "best way". See, when I wanted to say a word in French, I first had to think of the word in English, then check my mental filing system for the equivalent word in French. It's a slow and cumbersome way of recall that never really worked for me, no matter how many times we repeated the words by rote.

I'm not bringing it up now to point out the flaws in my year 8 education, but to highlight something about the way people learn. When Wave was first announced and launched it was described by various people as "sort of like email" or "part instant messenger, part Google Docs". This is because we often find it easier to understand something new when we "pin" it on a concept we already know and understand. Likening one thing to something else is sort of like my metal filing cabinet I had in 8th grade, useful up to a point, but no way to go about using something on an advanced day-to-day basis.

Which is why I think Google or a third party need to seriously consider how the non-tech-minded are going to learn how to use Wave.

The problem as I see it is how the tech-illiterate are going to learn how to use Wave. I work in an industry where technology is secondary to the primary business, and am constantly amazed to find that there are still people who can't use email and often even refuse to turn on a computer. It's sometimes my job to explain even the most rudimentary of modern communication tasks. I might normally do this by comparing email to snail-mail, email addresses to post office boxes and so on. The user then keeps these analogies in mind the next time they use their email without me around.

With Wave, the analogies are all different. There aren't yet clear real-world examples we can use to explain Wave concepts and so far all the analogies I've heard compare it to other technology concepts. For example, a wave is compared to a message board and individual blips are like single emails. While somewhat helpful for technology types, these analogies will fail with non-techies who are already struggling to map these concepts to the "real-world". I suspect the thought-process to interpret these concepts might take two or three steps to "translate" these new ideas into ones the user is familiar with. So we have Mr Jones who has been told that a wave is like an email, which he remembers from his grandson is like a letter. But He's also been told it can be used instantly like a telephone. Technically (and very loosely) these analogies are correct, but are they useful?

Perhaps this is exactly the reason the Wave team abandoned terms like "message" and "update" for brand new ones like "wave" and "blip" - to give everyone a level playing field when learning the new technology. I just can't help wondering however if new names and ideas might be more confusing.

What I'd like to see is a third party developer build a wave solution (server and client) that addresses the new concepts in an involving and intuitive way. It's widely known that Google builds software the engineering way - by doing it the simplest way they know how, then testing multiple variations over and over and continually refining. This incremental approach can only work when it's almost there to begin with. The huge shift in thinking that Wave requires might never make sense to the non-technical when built by engineers. Another party however may be able to research the best way to school new users in Wave right in the interface.

A radically different wave-compatible alternative could open Wave up to a whole new set of users that might otherwise pass it over as "too technical". If Google want to encourage the world to embrace Wave and abandon email, they will need all the help they can get building a translation-free wave experience for new users.

• Do you find Wave confusing?
• What do you think your less tech-savvy friends and family might think of Wave the first time they see it?
• How would you make Wave more new-user-friendly?

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/hectorl/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

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As a follow on from my last post, I felt the need to clarify that this site, First Waves, is not meant to be cutting edge day-to-day technology news. As Google Wave slow cooks over time, so will the posts here. I will cover important developments as they happen, focusing on the shaping of the Wave interface and the maturing of the Wave Protocol.

I want to make it easy for my readers to keep up-to-date as Wave grows, so I've added some social media gadgets over in the sidebar. If you join up in some form, I can let you know when First Waves has new content. I'll refine and make some decisions about which ones I keep in future, so if you have a preferred method, sign up with it now to help me decide which ones to keep! I also have a feed to subscribe to (which also provides an email option) and I update the First Waves Twitter account with posts from here. As you can see on the side there, FirstWaves follows a few hand-picked Wave Geniuses which you can follow with one click if you want to.

I'd love for input and extra perspectives on Wave from the wave community too if you'd like to contribute. You can suggest posts using the Skribit tab in the top left, or email me at josh@firstwaves if you'd like to see something of yours in print.

I know it's a bit backwards to use a blog for this instead of a Wave, but as the tools that are built for Wave improve, I'll hopefully do some sort of crossover/merging to cater to dedicated wavers in their native environment!

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

I get the feeling talking to regular web-folk that Google Wave was a huge disappointment for them. With the introduction of Buzz, comments and posts flew asking "will this be better than that Google Wave failure?"

It's taken me this long to figure out that people are not viewing Google Wave the way I do. The current technology life cycle goes something like this:

1. Readers are on the lookout for new products to try, and better yet - beta invites to get early exclusive access to the next big thing.

2. They try the site, decide if it fits in with their day-to-day activities and if it gives them any benefit over the last shiny new thing they tried.

3. They talk it up to their friends to get them to join, as these sites are almost always no fun without a large number of people you know and respect.

Then the cycle repeats for all manner of sites and services.

I do this. Every day I pop open Techcrunch, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, Web Worker Daily and others to keep informed of the latest hot places I can claim my name on. I've joined Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Plurk, and others too numerous to mention all vying to be the place I share my daily activities. It's almost addictive to keep on top of the latest sites.

I'm guessing a lot of the people who were itching for Wave invites were, like I normally would be, expecting Google Wave to deliver something to replace Facebook or Twitter or Google Docs, or whatever they got in their heads it would be amazing for. It's unsurprising that people want to use the best tools they can for their work (and leisure). The problem was that Google Wave was never meant to be a replacement for any of these things. It wasn't even meant to be a replacement for email - not just yet anyway.

The best post about this topic came from Daniel Tenner. What problems does Google Wave solve? came out soon after Wave debuted and attempted to explain this disconnect between what people were expecting and what was actually delivered. It's an excellent read, and vital to the understanding of what Google Wave is meant to be. The short version is: Google is building something that might be our preferred platform for communication some time in the future. They're not expecting it to be an overnight sensation, they just want people to be aware of it, and start thinking how they can use it to phase out busted email technology.

At the recent SXSW conference, Louis Gray reported on talks by the GMail team:

Google Wave, which debuted in early beta last year, is a "leapfrog project", which goes beyond today's environment, but is set to impact a future Web.

Gmail Failures, Crazy Ideas and Wave's Leapfrog.

The important thing to keep in your mind here is that Google Wave will only succeed (over time) if they have a large collection of useful add ons and competing alternative services that interoperate. They're attempting to oust a 30-year-old technology that has morphed and grown and matured and become one of the vital technologies of the web today. Everyone uses it, and it's been shoehorned into all sorts of roles it's unsuited for. Google knows that replacing it will not be easy, and they don't expect it will happen quickly. They do know it will take a lot of work from 3rd party developers to give it even a fraction of the rich ecosystem that email has. So they want to get it right.

So next time you log in to Wave keep that in mind. And if you're a developer, give it another shot. You're our best hope of retiring email from our lives and giving us real, exciting and useful new technology as the most ubiquitous communication tool we have.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/geishabot/ / CC BY 2.0

I always thought the advice to "live life like there's no tomorrow" to be a bit odd. I guess people say it to convince others to take risks and try for things they might be scared to do, but I don't get that from it.

If I was living like today was my last day, this is what I'd do:

1. Tell work I wasn't coming in today. Or ever. Maybe tell someone my passwords so they can get to all the old InDesign documents and Word templates I've made so they don't have to start from scratch.

2. Make sure my life insurance policy is sorted for Mil and Amm. Write down my email password so Mil can get into all my accounts.

3. Blog my final thoughts, for the interests of imparting my final wisdom to the world¹.

4. Play with Amelynne. Do everything she loves. Give her lots of tickles and cuddles, which I love.

5. Play with Mil. Ahem.

6. Invite everyone I know over for a party. Play the "I'm gonna die tomorrow" card to make sure they come. Cross those that don't off my Christmas list.

7. Die. Or perish, or cease to be or whatever it is that makes it possible that I know I'm gonna die, and not be taken completely by surprise the way it should be.

None of those things, except maybe the ones with my girls are things that anyone should be doing every day. Giving out my work password would be asking for trouble, as would telling all my friends I was dying just to get them to come to a party². Maybe some of them would be good housekeeping, but I don't think that anyone with a mortgage who's leaving behind a family should live life like there's no tomorrow.

Perhaps the only thing I'd regret might be that I haven't got my name on anything "big". You know, the kind of major contribution to society that gets you a wikipedia article.

Maybe that's a better adage for today's age... "Live life like you haven't got a wikipedia article about you yet". That sounds much more inspirational.

This photo is not relevant to the rest of this post. Cute though huh?

One of the biggest problems I face when I contribute anywhere on the internet is feedback. Often there just isn't any.

Whether it's Twitter, this website, First Waves, Reader, Buzz, Fizz, Flickr, Facebook, Shittr, whatever, I just don't get much feedback at all.

It's partly because I'm a self obsessed narcissist¹ that this bothers me so, but mostly because I just want to know what I can do better. What I'd like to know is if people find the things I share or write about are interesting, well written, useful, or pertinent so I can adjust my focus accordingly.

I started out blogging saying I was writing for myself, and I didn't care if people found it interesting, but really I do. I want to be helpful. I want to share parts of the web that people might not otherwise find, and expose the things I've learned in my job or in my leisure. Now as sites like Twitter and Facebook become more mainstream, I find myself trying to be helpful and useful there as well and find myself in a (stupid) dilemma about where to put all this stuff I want to share. For a while I was using Twitter, but I didn't feel like I was really saying anything of worth there. The most followed and re-tweeted² users were the ones who were constantly finding and posting new stuff. When I got around to doing it, it was usually old-hat or (I assume) fairly uninteresting. I say "I assume" because I only occasionally got re-shared or responded to, so I took it to mean that what I said was uninteresting or dull and didn't warrant much attention. So I quit. Hopefully it didn't come off in a "I'm taking my ball and going home" sorta way³ , but rather in a "I'm not sure what I'm doing here" sorta way. I've had more success with Facebook, because I've tried to share stuff I know my friends might appreciate, and I get a few more "likes" and an occasional comment there than I got the equivalent on Twitter. But my Buzz and Friendfeed streams are the equivalent of me standing on the roof of my house with a megaphone. A friend might hear me when they come over, but I could just talk to them. And everyone else who can hear it might just be getting annoyed with me.

I'm trying not to be sulky about this. What I'm hoping from this post is not pity, but an answer. From the people who DO actually follow me (via my feed, or on Facebook, or who just come and visit when they think of me), what sorts of things do I do well, so I can keep doing more of that? The most lovely suggestion I've had so far is that I continue to do more posts about my family and bubby girl. And if those are the ones people like the most then maybe I will. But I named my site "the Geekorium" for a reason - I am a geeky fellow, with geeky tastes and by far the things outside my family that interest me the most are geeky things. I like sharing such things, but am fairly certain that the majority of people who read my site regularly are family and friends who have no interest in what the latest gadget can do slightly better than that last gadget I said was awesome. Writing about my family is hard though, not because they aren't worth writing about, but because I don't want to be one of those people who are always exposing their love one's lives on line for their own gratification. If I could find a way to do it without it coming off that way, I might.

I also do large run-on sentences and start a lot of paragraphs with "I", so I know I'm not the greatest of authors, so if it's my actual writing style that bugs you, then maybe I should know that too⁴.

Should I keep my posts small? Talk about one topic only? Use words no bigger than two syla? Try and be funnier? Keep my sentences smaller? If you read my stuff and find it's not quite what you'd like to read, tell me in my comments (or on Facebook, or via Buzz, or in the "suggestions" tab over there, or in an email) and maybe I can get better at it. They say you should write for your audience, and I'm not sure I'm doing such a bang up job at the moment, so please let me know.

I'd like to think that I'm getting better at this writing thing. I'd like to know what I can do better though. Stats and analytics software can only tell me so much - they can't give me feedback about why one throw away post about Fred Basset gets more feedback than any of the other things I write about. So please help me out. Talk to me. Write to me. I'm listening.

As part of my Group Policy Rewrite I'm attempting to make use of Folder Redirection which lets you specify where common important Windows folders reside on the network.

Normally when you first log on, Windows makes a few folders under your user document folder for things such as Music, Favourites¹ , Downloads etc. On a standalone machine these are usually stored under your user profile folder (C:\Users\{username}\Downloads in Win 7 for example) but they can be moved when you're on a network².

In Group Policy, expand User Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Folder Redirection. Right click on one of the folders listed and select "Properties". Documents is a good place to start, as I'll show you how all the others can hang off that.

If you've worked with group policy before I won't insult your intelligence more by explaining everything in here, suffice to say that in our environment, I've chosen to use the settings as shown below:

Settings for redirecting My Documents to a shared network location.

For all the other folders I redirect, I use the same settings on the right there, and only change the Target folder location property on the left.

What this does is specify that you want all the users folders redirected to what you've specified in the Home folder property for the user in Active Directory (usually H: somewhere on your network). This is I suspect how most admins configure their document folders. The issue comes with the other folders later on. Lets work with the Desktop folder for example.

To redirect the Desktop, you again access the properties of that folder. This time, you'll notice you lose the option to "Redirect to the user's home folder". This is fair enough, as we don't want every folder type pointing to the same location. Unfortunately though, Microsoft don't offer a simple way to redirect to a subfolder of the new Documents location, although they do suggest this:

The USERNAME variable may be used as part of the redirection path, > thus allowing the system to dynamically create a newly redirected > folder for each user to whom the policy object applies.

Folder Redirection feature in Windows KB Article.

What they are suggesting is using \\server\share\USERNAME\Desktop to specify the location, but what if your AD structure is more complicated than that? For instance, we have our year levels separated into folders to make it easy for teachers to locate a certain kid's work. There just isn't a variable to insert a specific folder into this path based on the user's location or position in AD - ie. you can't use \\server\share\groupfolder\username\Desktop as it just doesn't exist.

The next logical step was to try inserting the mapped drive into this field: "H:\Desktop". The problem here was that at the point that the logon process connects to the desktop, the H: has not yet been mapped, leaving a blank desktop and an error in the Application log. It was at this point a few years ago I gave up. Until this week.

Lucky for us!

When you view the GP report for Folder Redirection you'll notice that MS includes the VARIABLES that it uses to fill in the user's home folder path (as shown):

AH! Variables!

In my initial tests, I set the Target folder location to "Redirect to the following location", and the Root Path: to "HOMESHAREHOMEPATH\Desktop". This did NOT work. I can't remember the error exactly, and I think it may not have even mapped at all.

My next test was to try with "HOMESHARE\Desktop" and lo-and-behold, it worked! Now when a user logs in they get a H Drive, and a desktop that routes to a folder in that drive, regardless of the path the user data is in. If they inadvertently save something to their desktop³ it will be securely tucked in their home drive where they can find it again later, or on their desktop the next time they log in.

Going through the rest of the folders in Folder Redirection I did the same (except for the Start Menu, although I suspect this will work exactly the same way). Now all my data is secure in my home drive, without using true roaming profiles (which can end up pulling a lot of data around the network in a school environment).

Some caveats

Even after multiple iterations and rewrites, Adobe software still cannot handle expanded network paths for saving application data. If you redirect AppData to "HOMESHARE\AppData" even something as new as Adobe Photoshop CS4 refuses to load. The only solution I have found for this is to use "H:\AppData" or nothing at all for that folder. This seems to work acceptably for the AppData folder, even though it doesn't for the Desktop.

Wrong! H:\AppData has the same problem outlined above, that is, H is only mapped after folder redirection. Instead I followed the advice on this Adobe Getsatisfaction page by Ge3oR who suggested giving users permission to c:\users\USERXX\appdata\Locallow, which for some reason Adobe products need, but cannot create themselves. So in GP I added a Folder rule in GP Preferences to create a folder in C:\users\username\appdata\Locallow, and everything is working, and I have redirected AppData once more!

Also! I haven't actually tested this extensively in a production environment (although it works day-to-day on a couple of test desktops), so test this with your apps and bits before making these changes wholesale to your network.

I've also found while writing this post⁴ that this information is included in part in Microsoft's Managing Roaming User Data Deployment Guide.doc found here. As I wasn't using roaming profiles I didn't read it. Plus it's unclear as to the best way to redirect and I still would have written this post to clear it up for you.

I hope this tip can help you get Folder Redirection working for you if your environment is a bit unusual. Let me know what you find!

This is a test of th emergency broadcast system.

And by emergency, I mean Google Wave

About 6 months ago I read a Lifehacker article that advocated standing at your office desk to stay healthier. I thought it was a neat idea at the time but didn't try very hard to make it happen. Then Lifehacker again linked to an article in the NY Times about standing at work, and this time I decided to do something about it.

Introducing my standing desk

It's two different size filing cabinets which turn out to be exactly the right heights for my keyboard and monitors. It's surprisingly comfortable from about my shins up, but my feet are already killing.¹

I find it difficult to fit much exercise into my day. Hopefully this might get me using even a little energy.

PS. Read that article. It's an eye opener, and a very quick read.

PPS. Hey Lifehackers! Welcome to the Geekorium! Browse around and have a look if you like. I also run a small site about Google Wave called First Waves. If you're into your geekery, there's nothing more geeky than Google Wave...

One of the problems with Google Wave for the non-geek crowd has been how you know you have a new wave?

For dedicated geeks, there are browser extensions, OS specific software, iPhone Push notifications, and more.

But most of these don't figure in the non-geek arsenal for managing the wash of information from the internet. And for regular folk convincing them to use Wave without these sorts of notifications will be hard simply because they don't want to bother checking for new waves as well as new emails.

Convincing them may have just gotten easier however with the release of integrated email notifications for your Wave inbox. In a post on the official Google Wave Blog, Ged Ellis explains how to turn on email notifications for new waves. Using the drop down list next to the inbox link (it's hidden until you hover over it) you can choose an email address to have notifications sent to. The tool even picked my Google Apps email even though it's not my official Wave address because I've set it as primary in my Google profile.

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In the Google Wave Blog Ged goes on to say:

If you want to use Google Wave with your friends, family or colleagues who aren't logging in frequently, help them to turn on notifications. Then, they can get updates on their Google Wave account, even if they mainly stick to checking their email inbox.

Ged Ellis, Software engineer, Google Wave Team

Perhaps this feature was always on the cards, or maybe it was a reaction to the <a href="http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=google+wave+fail">waning interest in Wave from the geek community. By making it easier to get notifications people might start inviting friends who might otherwise be uninterested in another tool to check. I know I'll be inviting my wife and a couple of buddies that I've previously thought might be uninterested thanks to this addition.

However it's still a long way from the ultimate integration I see is necessary for Wave to finally catch on - using Wave as a full email client. As long as email and waves are two separate entities in two separate products there will still be two places someone must visit to get both the old (email) and new (wave) forms of communication. Notifications via email just makes this more obvious. Ideally Wave should be usable as a hub for all sorts of communication. Currently the closest we have to this ideal is email, but it's dependent on services sending out notifications. With Wave, the potential for any third-party to integrate services via bots and gadgets gives Wave a clear advantage.

All said though, the notifications are a welcome addition, and will make convincing friends and family to join that much easier. Time will tell if it helps Wave get the consistent user numbers it needs to take off.

{{< youtube qybUFnY7Y8w >}}

I can't think of a way they can possibly top this clip. Brilliantly shot in High Def, beautifully choreographed, and perfectly synchronised. If you liked their treadmill clip (symbolically shattered half way through) you'll love how clever this is. It also knowingly nods to the Internet and Youtube crowd (did I see the mars rover? Something like the water bird that Homer uses to press the "any" key when he works from home? An OK Go concert rendered in Lego?).

What a joyful and exciting clip from a band that knows how to engage their audience. Bravo!

In my post yesterday I noted the increased push by the Wave developers to make it easier for the wave community to build and deploy extensions. It turns out this flurry of activity coincided with the imminent release of Version 2 of the Wave API, announced today.

The first new feature is the:

Active API: In v2, robots can now push information into waves (without having to wait to respond to a user action). This replaces the need for our deprecated cron API, as now you can update a wave when the weather changes or the stock price falls below some threshold. You can learn more in the Active API docs.

Google Wave Developer Blog Announcement.

If I understand this correctly (and I'm not a developer so correct me if I'm wrong) this means that before today, a robot in a wave might have had to wait until a user opened a wave before it could refresh the information in the wave (updating stocks etc), now the robot can initiate a wave update itself, making it possible to have robots create new blips in response to events. This is a much smarter way for a robot to behave, and should make for far more interesting and functional bots.

For a more enlightened perspective from a wave developer, check out Mastering Wave's take on the announcement.

So what I initially thought was just a push to get developers involved was actually leading to an announcement of a massive upgrade to the API. In the end though, the aim is the same - to get developers engaged and creating interesting software to make Wave an indispensable tool.

Google Wave Developer Blog: Introducing Robots API v2: The Rise of Active Robots.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/avoiretc/ / CC BY 2.0

As I hit publish on my last silly post, I realised I could use the same template for a number of things. Namely:

My wife is . She . When I and it dawned on me **, I wanted to marry her all over again.

Thus:

My wife is amazing. She carried and gave birth to my daughter Amelynne. When I first saw my little girl and it dawned on me that I now have my own clone, I wanted to marry her all over again.

See how that works?

My wife is magical. She made me home-toasted muesli yesterday. When I ate breakfast this morning and it dawned on me that I have maple syrup in my breakfast cereal, I wanted to marry her all over again.

Twitter sucks.

It feels good to finally get that off my chest.

Not the users, mind you. I've met some great people through Twitter. Bloggers, programmers, web designers, a lot of fellow Adelaidians. All of them excel at what they do, go out of their way to try new things, and generally win at life.

But Twitter sucks.

Not the technology either. Mostly. FSM knows I've griped and bitched about how Friendfeed put it to shame technologically, and in the end it didn't matter. Twitter does what it does well. No, that's not why it sucks.

Twitter sucks for the same reason they ALL suck. The same reason Friendfeed sucks, Facebook sucks, Cliqset, Status.net, Google Reader and now Buzz all suck.

Because I don't get them.

I mean, I know why they exist. I enjoyed throwing out tweets here and there. I like connecting with friends and new people. I understand that they're about sharing what you know and find, and uncovering new stuff.

But they just don't gel with me.

They take time. Energy. Dedication. They require you to put in thought about what your friends might like to read. You need to watch what you say about your workmates and avoid sounding stupid. I self censor so much all my input comes out trite and uninteresting, and when my internal censor fails I come off self absorbed.

And I can't keep up.

In the period of time I was tweeting the most, I was also working the least. Work sucked, and that didn't help, but I just wasn't as focussed as I should have been.¹

Recently, the Wave Team have made a big push to publicise more bots and extensions. In a post to the Google Wave Help forum, Kylie announced that some users might start seeing a new Extensions link in their navigation panel. Then enterprising Wavers noted that anyone could get access to this Extension information with a search for [<a title="Search on Google Wave for Extensions" href="https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=wave&passive=true&nui=1&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F&ltmpl=standard">group:google-wave-extension-gallery@googlegroups.com].

Now Google have made it easier than ever to submit an extension to the Wave Extension review team using a simple bot.

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Create a new wave and add the Submitty bot (submitty-bot@appspot.com), and Submitty will create a submission form for you to fill out. At the bottom are a couple of checkboxes. If you check either of these boxes, you'll be prompted to fill in more information about your bot and/or gadget. Finally, you add the Extension Review Group (google-wave-extensions-review@googlegroups.com) to your wave to submit your extension.

By making this process easier, the Wave team hopes to encourage development of extensions to rapidly build up an ecosystem around Wave. Without a varied and useful set of apps, Wave will remain no more than a fun experiment.

Which also explains their dedication to an extensive and open API which they continue to enhance with supporting bots. In addition to the Submitty bot, they have released Gadgitty, a bot for editing your gadgets inline and seeing the results straight away.

Between these two bots and the others submitted by the Google Wave APIs Team, it's obvious how important developers are to the creators of Wave, and I hope it spurs further experimentation from the wave community.

{{< youtube Mw91RJ_m_7g >}}

One of the staff asked me for a copy of this (somehow) for his home theatre setup. I'm not sure what I've got for him will be good enough, but it looks good on Youtube.

I've been sorting through our group policies and rewriting them ready for a switch over to Windows 7. During my thorough investigation it turns out our current policies overlap a fair bit, and it's no wonder we have trouble tracking down why something we're sure we've set in GP turns up unset on logon¹ .

So my big project has been going through our settings one by one, and deciding which of these categories they fall into:

1. Common Computer settings - all the computers should get these as they are vital to the function of the network, or are likely to break something if they aren't explicitly set for our staff and students.
2. Common User settings - everything else that just can't be set in the Computer policy.
3. Staff Settings
4. Student Settings
5. Printers

The interesting trick I've learned about the printer GPs though is how to apply printers based on the computer's OU without using local loopback!

The Problem

The problem with managing printers in a school environment is that unlike corporations (which GP is clearly geared towards) people move around all the time but want to be connected to both their printers in their offices on the other side of the school, but also the local printer in the classroom they're in². Microsoft decided that without any extra tricks they would let you set a default printer for a user, but not for a room because Betty from HR will only ever use the one computer in her office.

The Old Trick

Then they told people you could get around this by enabling local loopback, which applies both computer and user policies to a user, so you could set the printer as default in a computer policy using the "user" section, then make the computer read the computer section at logon and apply the printer. The problem with this³ is that it could slow down your logins, as it increases the number of policies it has to read and evaluate to prepare the desktop.

The New Way

In my quest to eliminate unnecessary policies, I wanted to kill local-loopback too. A bit of research turned up this page on using GP Preferences to assign default printers, which I already knew and was using, but it advocated using local-loopback.

But

Further down that page was a comment by Michael Moore who had this bit of advice:

Actually, if you Item Level target a group which has a computer in it, it will still install the printer even though these preferences are under the User Configuration Section of the GPO. Try it, saved on loopback. -- Michael Moore

So I followed the directions on that site (it has helpful screenshots) to create a printer policy and target specific computer OUs, but then instead of turning on local-loopback, I simply ticked Run in logged-on user's security context (user policy option).

Now my printers deploy and are set as default based on the current computer's OU without using local-loopback at all.

The Google Wave Templates - http://bit.ly/c7sv2K (via @shinywave{.aktt_username}) <3 the Doc from Template idea

Eager to dig up dirt on Julia Gillard (an alumna of Unley High School) the SMH visited the Unley High website¹ and clicked on through to the Old Scholars page. HAHA! they yell, chuckling to themselves:

... it appears the website of the federal Education Minister's former school, Unley High, has fallen victim to hackers. No doubt coincidentally, those curious to learn more about the Deputy PM's school days in South Australia by clicking on the "old scholars" tab are confronted with an advertisement for "free black nude pictures" -- via A big night for Barnaby Joyce

Of course, the site has not been "hacked" in any way. In setting the site up, I thought it a fun experiment to give the Old Scholars a way to re-connect, and create mini sites of their own within the pages of the Unley site. The hope was that they might create groups for the chess club of '94, or the lazy boys of the class of '67, or whatever. Then they could write messages on each other's pages, write reminiscences of the times they had, and generally use the site in any way they saw fit to reconnect and share with one another. I installed the excellent open-source software Elgg, and enabled a feature called "blogs" (short for "web logs") so people could fill the pages of the site with all their memories. I had hoped it would be a long-lasting record that would share some of Unley's rich history.

'Till the spammers got hold. Elgg is a well-known piece of software, so spammers have written scripts that scour the web for open installations of Elgg (such as ours is), automatically create user accounts, and start writing blog posts promoting their spammy sites. What they are doing is taking advantage of sites that are open to the public, and is so far from hacking it's ludicrous. It's no different from me creating a pretend Facebook account called Spammy McSpams and posting links to porn from there².

The Old Scholars site has the ability for legit users to flag such stuff, and I've tried to make it as obvious as possible. My only problem was presuming people would make use of such features when given. To prevent such "hacking" in future, I've disabled the blog feature, as no one was using it except the spammers. I've also cleaned the site up, so horny journos will need to find some other source of black nudes³.

Just wanted to clear that up.

We have begun testing remove participant internally and hopefully it will hit externally within a month

-- Lars Rasmussen, one of the lead Wave developers.

In a Wave entitled "Google Wave User Black List", Lars piped up to offer advice on the best way to avoid and take action against known trolls and abusers and offered the above titbit about the imminent release of the ability to remove participants from Wave.

This is big news for Wave, and one of the most important features noticeably missing from the Google Wave interface. Wave abuse, trolling and destruction are all unavoidable realities of using Wave at the moment, and although usually infrequent, can significantly lower the enjoyment and tone of a Wave. Unfortunately, while every one can agree that a removal tool is necessary (and there's an unusable greyed out button to show that the Wave team think it's important as well) it hasn't been implemented yet. One of the reasons for this delay must be the extraordinary thought and research that must be put into such a feature, to make certain that the feature itself is not abused. Care must be taken to see that users who are added and then removed retain some control of their legitimate contributions within context. The ability to remove people from such a collaborative space is an enormous can of worms, and one that most people would agree is important enough to get right the first time.

The wave that Lars opened up on was created to list known trolls and spammers.

bq..  

• Once you have added public with full access, making an abuse user read-only is more effective than removing them from the wave will.
• There will soon be a way for you to report abuse directly to our internal abuse team
• The feature you are asking for: block a user from a particular wave and all future waves created by you is exactly right but it will take us many months to get there...

-- Further feedback from Lars

This is tremendous news, and along with the ability to make participants read-only, and even score them with karma //the.geekorium.au/karma-a-way-to-keep-wavers-in-line/ give users a powerful arsenal to shape the Wave experience the way they want.

Hat tip to The Shiny Wave: Google Wave User Black List.

{{< youtube eB3RJ1U_MJA >}}

I'll be purchasing Caravan Palace ASAP. I've found a group that embodies the music I love. Apparently it's called Electro Swing. I haven't heard a single one I haven't liked yet.¹

Here's a neat little gadget/bot combo that could prove very useful for public waves if the system caught on.

Add the Karma Gadget and Bot to your waves and use it to rate your users (out of five stars). If users get consistently low scores, they will be automatically kicked from Waves that choose to turn on this option.

Of course there are some potential problems with such a tool: if a user expresses unpopular views in one wave and gets poor ratings, they might find themselves banned from any future wave that uses the tool, regardless of the subject. If the tool took off in popularity it could be quite horrible to find yourself on the end of such banishment.

On the other hand, if the tool doesn't get popular it would be unreliable for crowdsourcing opinions, letting in known trolls who had just not been rated on enough waves.

Despite these shortcomings however, I would love to see this developed further (and even be integrated as part of the official spam-fighting tools of Wave), as I see great potential in harnessing the opinions of others in keeping waves free from known trolls and spammers.

One potential use case is the immediate banishment of those frustrating bots that pop up all over the place (Kanye-bot anyone?). I'm uncertain whether bots are in the firing line (Karma-Bot itself seems immune and doesn't show up in the rating gadget). I'm also unclear about what happens if something like the public group (which can be rated) gets consistently bad reviews.

As of writing, the gadget does not carry out bans and won't until Google implement the kick-out feature. I will be following this tool as it develops, and I'll be looking for opportunities to use it. And if you see me on a wave that uses Karma, please be nice!

Karma: A Reputation Rating System for Google Wave Users.

Want to share a public wave with someone who hasn't jumped on the Wave bandwagon? Need to publish a Wave in a way that keeps it safe from editors and wanna-be trolls? How 'bout this Wave Reader that takes a wave and displays it as a web page without the reader needing an account.

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Take the URL http://antimatter15.com/misc/read/? and tack on the wave ID you want to publish, and BAM! a simple published wave. For example: "Things to do in Adelaide", a wave put together by Taryn Hicks. It's shiny and blue, and the information is easy to read without needing a Wave account. In addition the creator has made it possible to publish a private wave, simply by adding the gwavereader@googlewave.com bot to the wave!

A tool like this should be an official feature of Google Wave. One of my biggest concerns is that as wave becomes more popular, people will begin to publish tonnes of handy information as waves only (this has already begun). The problem with the current embedding tools are that they require the reader to have a Wave account, and just as importantly a browser that can handle Wave. Sadly this is the opposite of the open and free web the founders of the Internet envisioned. But with tools like the Wave Reader, we're on the way to getting simple, clean HTML pages of information the way we're accustomed to. To generate some clean HTML you can use to make a totally static page out of a wave, add &html=0 to the URL.

So head over to the Art of Wave Reader to get a good idea of how to use the tool and pick up a bookmarklet that will open your current wave in Wave Reader. You can also download the code. You may notice it's now up to version 5.2 (the blog post was about 4.6) and is a marked improvement from even a week ago, now making extensive use of HTML5 and CSS3. Wave Reader is released under a GNU General Public Licence v3.

I can't recommend Wave Reader highly enough and wish a feature like this was baked into wave. It's fast, good looking, and very useful.

Such a missed opportunity. Instead they announced some sort of e-reader thing.

In the first major update to the Google Wave client in what feels like ages, the Wave team have implemented two new features that will make a big difference in managing your waves. The first fixes one of the most shocking things about the first release: that anyone you invited could come along and edit any part of your wave. Of course the point of Wave is collaboration, but sometimes it was conceivable that you might not like anyone to be able to hack away at a wave, particularly once a wave was made public. Many good useful waves were effectively destroyed by granting the public editing rights.

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Well, with the release of the Read-Only feature, you can now specify select users and groups as read-only participants, meaning they can see your waves in production, but can't edit them themselves. Perfect for the thousands of informational waves that are available, particularly those that might not have been edited in a while but might be ripe for archiving. To make a user or group read-only, simply click on their icon and select read-only from the new drop down box.

The second feature is one of the other most requested tools - the ability to restor a wave to a former state. Those destroyed and damaged waves I mentioned? Now they have a chance of resurection, without the annoying cutting and pasting that went with the process before now. While playing back a wave, click Restore when you're at the point before it all went pear-shaped. You won't lose any data, as the state will be copied to the end of the playback and you can still see the changed that were made after that point.

Between these two new (some would argue vital) tools, Wave becomes more than a novel real-time experiment, and begins to take shape as the useful documenting, collaboration tool it always promised to be. Of course, there are still more changes needed before it becomes a reliable collaboration tool (revert single blips, read-only main blips with posting rights) and the team promise much more in their announcement post, but this is a terrific first step.

There's this new craze on Twitter¹ to get people to ask you questions anonymously and answer them on Twitter or your website. It uses this little site (run by FormSpring.com) called formspring.me to solicit questions, and people derive some amusement from it.

BUT

The day I heard about it, I thought immedaitely of skribit.com which I had only JUST installed on my site a week earlier and does exactly what formspring.me does only prettier, usefull-er and integrated-into-your-site-ier which for me are all important things.

See that little blue tab over there -> ??

That's the Skribit tab. It says "Suggestions", but if you hover over it, it says Skribit too! Click it. I dare you. I'll wait. You can come back by clicking the little (x) in the top right... Go on...

See that form? It lets you ask questions, just like Formspring. It even lets you do it anonimously, just like Formspring. Unlike Formspring, Skribit lets you add tags, follow questions until they're turned into posts, and generally interract more with the person you're asking. But it's not just for anonymous questions. Paul Stamatiou (one of the creators) has been using it on his site since he started building it, and his readers suggest posts then vote on the topics that they want to see him write about, which was the whole reason he made it in the first place. It's all about curing Writers Block, which I own up to having about 99% of the time² .

Well Skribit launched at the end of last year! They've been open for business for a while now, but they're pushing to get the word out for twenty-ten³ , and I had to write a post about it so I could tick that off my Skribit to-do list. So if you're already using Formspring.me (bleh) or just want some feedback from your readers in a way that makes you accountable and helps you keep track of it then you should probably go install it. It keeps out of the way, and it's kinda pretty. It's easy to install (there's a Skribit widget for Wordpress too) and integrates with Twitter and Facebook so your lazy readers don't even have to log in! If you're interested try the tour to get a feel for it (or just test it out here), or read about the people who made it

And to my reader(s)⁴ you can leave me suggestions on what you'd like me to write about, or ask anonymous questions, just like all the cool kids are doing! Try it⁵!

Of course this post's disparaging remarks against formspring were not endorsed or condoned by Skribit⁶ .

While browsing this site, you might be confused by our inconsistent use of Wave, wave and Google Wave to refer to what seems like a million different things within one sentence. Here is a simple guide:

• Google Wave refers to the internet-based client made by Google - the interface you use to read and browse waves. Also known as Wave the Product.

• Wave refers to any implementation of the Wave Protocol. Currently this is limited to the Google Wave implementation (see above) and a Python server called PyGoWave. Any software that can read and publish waves is also a Wave Client as it accesses the Wave protocols. Wave can also refer to the Wave Platform - the API and hooks that let people create extensions to build extra functionality on Wave. As the extensions should work on other Wave servers, they get Capital Letters.

• Finally, waves (little w) are the actual end product of the Waves listed above. They are the individual messages you send to people using the clients and servers, and are roughly equivalent to emails. As in: "Hey, did you get my wave last night? I need those Johnston numbers by midday."

I think in the near future there will be docking stations everywhere with a screen and a keyboard. You simply pull out your phone, plug it into the docking station, and instantly all your applications and data are available to you. Chrome, Google Apps, and Android make this vision possible.

via Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Google vs Microsoft on the browser, cloud, and mobile platforms.

Dammit! I said this to people 3 years ago. I should have written it down, if only to prove that I'm at least as good at imagining the future as Don Dodge. Of course it might never happen like this, but the thought that 3 years after I first said it, Don Dodge can now see it happening before his eyes at Google is kinda gratifying.

This was a sign used in the Singapore Design Festival 2007, that has somehow made it's way out into the wild. We need more zones like this marked around Adelaide. Draken413o took this very artistic shot of it.

The next was an entry in a Worth 1000 contest to inject superheroes into well known works of art. I love it.

Google has just unveiled their plans for group waves. The Google Wave Blog outlines the steps to set up a Google Group (yes, you have to use another tool) then add the group as a contact in Google Wave.

The service does not yet allow you to add users by their googlewave.com account (gmail.com only), and the permissions can only be handled through the Google Groups interface. It also seems that to avoid spam (being able to send messages to an everyone in a public group at once) users must pro-actively seek out the group wave and follow it to move it to their inbox [currently waiting for confirmation of this].

Like any Wave feature, this is still being developed and its behaviour could change over time. The Wave team have said they will continue to enhance the groups feature to make groups easier to navigate.

Waving with groups - Google Wave Blog.

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While attempting to complete my first group assignment as an external student at University, I realised how much harder it was than while I was an internal student.  If you're an internal student you see each other at least once a week,  making it hard to ignore the fact you have an upcoming assignment. Also you actually get to meet and talk with people and elect  to be in their group (if the group selection process is left to the students). Being external, I had to post a random post on the discussion board and hope I was choosing the right people. And then hope they didn’t ignore my emails or wait a month or so to reply.

Google Wave would have been one of the best tools for this group assignment. Email meant a group of four people were all individually emailing each other and also at times emailing all four of the group. I ended up with snapshots of what was happening, who was having what role, and what the plan was. With Google Wave, all the communication would have been in one Wave, or even multiple, but it would have been available for the group to read and to add and edit. The plan of the assignment, of who was writing what, and how we were writing it could have been kept at the top of the wave, and edited as needed. The parts assigned to individuals could have been put in the wave and the group could know exactly where the assignment was up to, and edit other's parts as we went.

The two main features of Google Wave which would have positive affects on a university group assignment, would have been the real time editing and the ability to highlight. Real time made it more like conversation, without having to wait for emails to be sent, or having to work out who could possible meet in the City to catch up. Highlighting would allow those edits to be prominent or for individuals to reinforce any point they needed to make.

If like me you find Chrome gives you the most stable, enjoyable experience of Google Wave, you might also be pining for the notifier extension Firefox users get.

Well now Chrome has a neat little extension that does the same thing. Jeremy Selier has built a neat little plugin that shows you how many unread waves you have in your inbox. It checks every thirty minutes by default (at the request of the Wave team), but you can set it to check more frequently in the extension options.

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Something that makes a sound, or pops up a notification box (Growl-style) would be even more useful in some circumstances (Firefox is still my main browser of choice). However, if you need a simple way to see new Wave activity without checking the window every couple of minutes, this might just be the thing.

Chrome Extension - Google Wave Checker

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not visually appealing, but a terrific track

When I find music that I like I can't let it go until I share it. This is one of those tracks.

{{< youtube tgbNymZ7vqY >}}

This is so great I wanted to laugh and cry. I miss the Muppets so much. Whoever is responsible for their Youtube channel needs to be paid ten times what they are getting, for bringing back the spirit of the Muppets from before Jim died. The last few movies and straight-to-video offerings were quaint and fun, but nothing like what they used to be. Youtube is their new home, and is suits them well.

Bravo! Encore! More! More!

YouTube - The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody [1080p].

I don't want a separate app where I have to gather all my friends and influencers in one place all over again - I have that in Twitter.

What I want from you is a way to flag a user (secretly) as someone whose opinion has aligned with mine in the past, so that when they say "I love this new movie", I'll be reasonably certain that I will too. And if I could flag someone's opinion as wrong¹ most of the time, then I will know that when they say "I love this song", not to bother clicking through to it. It might mean that some of the users in my stream have slightly darker or lighter updates so I can tell at a glance which ones I've flagged as trustworthy or mostly wrong.

Heck, just being able to easily see that someone is in a "trusted" private Twitter list with a glance at my main stream would be double handy. Do that.

Thank you for listening. If you do this, you will win the world.

PS. to all the people I follow: I'm not talking about any of you. I think all of you have fantastic taste. It's those oter people I worry about...

Now I'm rather pleased that I can get myself around Wave, post links to my photos and generally do all the good stuff.

There are however, people of my acquaintance who are a lot more technologically 'ept' (it should be a word, you know -  the opposite of inept) and have started mucking about under the bonnet of Wave.

One of these is Dave, and the other day he introduced me to a little gadget he calls 5x5.  The object of the game is to totally fill the grid with black squares. Clicking on a square results in that square (and those around it as seen in the initial pattern below) toggling its colour. There is a solution in 14 moves.

I'll hand over to Dave to explain what it is, how it came about,  and how it works.

5x5 is a puzzle I first saw as a DOS PC thing back in the late 1980s. I wrote my own version of it back then (just for fun) and, ever since, it's sort of been my "try a new environment" project. I've written versions for DOS, Windows, OS/2, the old Palm Pilot and even for GNU emacs.

Some time back I quickly wrote a HTML/Javascript version so, given that that's pretty much all a Wave gadget is, I reworked it as a gadget. The main difference with this version is that it's coded with the state of the game held in the Wave. This means that a) you can always come back to it and it'll be how you left it and b) everyone who is part of the Wave can see what's happening and can also make moves.

All you have to do is use the "add a gadget" toolbar button (the one that looks like a green jigsaw) and just input this URL in the dialog that you get: http://serenity.davep.org/5x5/5x5.xml

Hmm - the fun stuff begins!

Oh, and PS ... I couldn't do the puzzle (/grin) not even using Wave's fabulous "playback" feature!

Get a Google Wave invite in half an hour. Leave a comment on a post at First Waves and get your invite tonight!

I just nominated someone for a Wave account and they received it within thirty minutes. That and the number of invites I last received (30) lead me to think that Wave accounts are no longer the hard-to-get commodity they once were.

Oh well, no more $100 invites on eBay.

Probably the most important part of the Wave experience for new user has been the ability to search for public waves to join. Without Public Waves many people would not have enough of a network to really experience Wave in full, and the Wave community may not have grown as quickly as it has. Public Waves have allowed quick access to tips and tricks, unofficial support and general chit chat on a diverse range of topics.

The downside of this was a significant gotcha: just clicking a public wave was enough to add you to the Wave permanently and drag the wave into your inbox. From that point, your only recourse to silence the wave was to mute it (archiving only works as long as no one else contributes), and muting does not remove you from the wave.

The inability to remove yourself from a wave you have participated in is an accounting feature I guess. When the development team finally gives us the ability to remove ourselves, we still need to know which waves we have participated in.

But back to the sticky business of autofollowing public waves. What it meant was the risk of associating with Waves you never meant to follow. A misplaced click (very easy in the fast-flowing river of public waves) meant a new wave in your inbox and your face on the top of a wave. For example, clicking a wave called  "I hate my boss" immediately associated you with that wave!

Today Google have rolled out a new feature to fix this. Two new buttons now let you Follow and Unfollow a wave. When you click on an interesting public wave, you are no longer added automatically. Once you click off that wave, it will disappear into the stream and you will have no further part in it. To monitor it in your inbox/folder structure, you can now choose to follow it (using the Follow button of course), and it will move into your inbox, where you can treat it like any other wave you are in. You can move it to folders, searches will include it and it will behave like a normal wave with one key difference: you will not appear in the list of wave users at the top.

This makes a huge difference, and means that public waves now take on a sort of social networking aspect, as you can follow the information and people who interest you without being directly involved (sort of like feed readers or Twitter lists). It also improves the user experience by making public waves something you have to explicitly choose to have in your inbox.

To remove a wave from your inbox, you can simply click Unfollow and the wave will disappear as though it was never there.

Keep in mind though that the public wave behaves as it used to the second you edit it. As soon as you create or edit a blip, the wave will add you as a participant and the wave will appear in your inbox as though you had followed the wave. This makes perfect sense, as participation triggers all the accounting measures that must keep track of who made what changes. Unfollow will not remove you from the wave, it will merely be archived from view (the old Mute function).

All in all these changes are a welcome fix to one of the most vexing problems of the initial release. I look forward to seeing the other improvements as Google Wave develops!

Follow your waves - Google Wave Blog.

Google fan Lookon has created a Bot to post to his Posterous blog, and written detailed instructions on how to do it.

It's straight forward enough, add the bot and log in to the form it gives you. The next time you add the bot to a wave, the first wavelet gets posted at Posterous and it returns the URL for you to check.

Posterous seems to have the most diverse posting options of any blogging software available, and the addition of posting from waves puts it again at the forefront.

Now the bot needs to monitor comments and return them to the original wave for even tighter integration.

How to write a blog using Google Wave Robot for Posterous [Western Bridge over Google Wave]

(via Kerrie Anne's Fridge Magnets)

Set suitable expectations. Despite the months of buzz, and blogosphere- and Twitterverse-wide clamoring for Google Wave invites, the product is still in preview and has some rough edges. Therefore, it does all parties good to be realistic, even if everybody is psyched to be the first kid on their block to use it on a live project.

6 Tips For Using Google Wave On Your First Project.

This is the first of six excellent things to keep in mind when using Wave for the first time, let alone on a project. Wave is full of potential, but people seem to forget it's still just getting off the ground.

I love that people are using it for projects already.

By now if you've been using Wave long enough you should know that a search for [with:public] gets you a big long fast updating list of all the Waves that people have shared with the world. If you've been reading the Complete Guide to Google Wave you might know to narrow down the search with tags and terms too.

But were you aware that Local Waves have popped up everywhere as well, and you can find users near you just by plugging your city/suburb into the search (with the public wave search) eg. [with:public city name]. If you can't immediately find a Wave for your location, you can start one! Just create a crafty title, and make the Wave public. Encourage people who join to mark themselves on a map, and shout out their Twitter/social details for people to connect elsewhere.

Have a tonne of fun, and stay safe!

Blatant grab for readers: Leave a comment anywhere on First Waves for a Google Wave invite. @reply me so I can get email details.

You can spend ages getting used to Wave and what it can do, and still not learn the best way. Fernando Fonseca has jotted down five things that he recommends you do when you first fire up wave, to help you break in.

<a href="http://www.bitrebels.com/geek/dont-miss-these-5-things-about-google-wave/">Don’t Miss These 5 Things About Google Wave! [Bit Rebels]</a>

Gina Trapani, Adam Pash and the Wave community have put together a short ebook on Google Wave. I'm certain as Wave becomes more complex and useful, this guide will grow and change to match. Gina and Adam are two of the cleverest technology writers on the web today, and their book is set to become one of the most authoritative documents on Google Wave.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave

Welcome to the new look First Waves! Please let me know if anything looks out of place, and have fun!

I have been pretty tired lately. My bubby girl has not been sleeping well overnight for weeks, and as a result I'm not getting as much sleep as I'd like myself. In addition, I get headaches whenever I try and concentrate, which I had been putting down to tiredness, but might actually be the fault of my new glasses prescription, so I'm seeing my optometrist on Friday to sort something out, and hopefully that will clear my headaches up a little.

Despite this, I've created a site called First Waves to post the latest news about Google Wave and the Wave Protocol. I was updating pretty frequently until this week when the headaches got too much for me, and I couldn't think straight to pull it all together.

I'll get into updating it again ASAP, but I'd be encouraged if anyone reading this wanted to check it out and leave a comment or whatnot. I'll be migrating it to Wordpress in the near future too, and enhancing it with some more information about me, and some links to essential Wave resources.

That's my update. Thank you for listening.

First, the extension installer gives you an option in your New Wave menu to “Go Trick or Treating”. When you click that, it creates a new wave and inserts a gadget (try clicking around that to see what surprises await). Then, whenever a user types ‘trick or treat’, the robot fetches an image from Google Image Search for either a yummy candy bar, or well, something not that yummy.

From the Google Wave Developer Blog

No one I know has ever celebrated Halloween (it’s relatively new in Australia), and I say “Bah humbug!” (wrong holiday I know). But for those of you who want to get into the spirit of it (bad pun I know), but don’t want to leave Wave, this might be for you.

Trick or Treat Extension

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When to use Google Wave [Google Wave Help]

Some use cases for Google Wave at the Wave Help page. A quick run down of how you could potentially use Wave if you’re stuck for ideas.

I lost track of what week we're up to, and I've got a few updates to roll into this one, so my titles are off.

Had a major assignment and a test since last time I updated, so I thought it might be time to report how they went.

I was happy with my assignment and my grade of Satisfactory, until I realised I could have gotten Outstanding! Apparently my only mistake was to not:

Keep the instance variable on the same line as its label.

Eg in my toString class I put:

public String toString() {
    return super.toString() +
    " Place: " +
    place +
    "; State: " +
    state +
    "; Postcode: " +
    postcode +
    "; Country: " +
    country;
}

Instead of:

public String toString() {
    return super.toString() +
    " Place: " + place +
    "; State: " + state +
    "; Postcode: " + postcode +
    "; Country: " + country;
}

Obvious, but worth marking me down? Maybe I did something else wrong, but I don't think so.

I also attempted the test which included a section on Arrays. I haven't done any study on arrays. I was worried. But the test was open book, so I learned what I needed as I went, and even had time to attempt the merit. My result?

So I'm pretty happy with that.

Now on to Polymorphism and Interfaces!

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Minor interface tweak: The default Wave avatar for new users (and bots) has been slightly updated with a bit of shading around the edges.

Not a very big deal at all. Just interesting to see what things the team are tweaking.

The Next Web attended the Google Wave GTUG (Google Technology User Group) meetup in London where Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon (the two responsible for Google Wave) gave a presentation on some upcoming Google Wave APIs. James Glick from The Next Web has included a dot-point summary of the most important parts, a few of which I have included below. Read his article for even more juicy inside information.

bq.. To cut a potentially exhausting blog post short, a summary of snippets from their presentation include:

• Extension gallery to be fully up and running in months with a wider collection and sharing functionality.
• An extension store is planned where developers would be able to display and charge for apps.
• [... snipped ...]
• Google Wave will be able to be deployed within networks and intranets for organisations and companies to use internally.
• Although it has been requested by a substantial amount of preview users, there are no plans to intergrate Gmail or any mail with Google Wave. The APIs though, will provide developers with the ability to do it in the future…

-- Read the article at The Next Web for more

The rest of the items on Glick's list show Wave team is obviously committed to improving the experience for everyone. The four items I've included above highlight for me the potential for Wave to grow beyond the bounds of what Google can achieve and put it firmly in the hands of developers who can make it a thriving, useful tool. If Wave can ever dethrone email as the default form of communication, it will be because of these for things: The ability for developers to extend it and make money from it, for businesses to deploy their own secure versions, and for Wave to send and receive email. Although it looks like the Google team don't have plans to bake email support in, I am confident it will not be long before such an extension is built and available.

Wave has a WYSIWYG interface for styling your blips. For those of us used to working on the web however, the default Bold/Italic/Dot-point tools can leave a lot to be desired. Many wont have a character pallet handy, or remember the windows/mac keyboard codes for producing various glyphs either. But if you’ve worked on the web long enough, you might be familiar with HTML/unicode character entities such as & (&) and • (•).

If you need to add various characters to your waves, and are familiar with HTML entities, then the Character Entity bot might be what you need. Add character-entityappspot.com@ to your wave, and whenever you write a character (in the format &code;) the bot will happily convert the code into the correct characters for you.

Here are a few to try:

• © becomes ©
• ↔ becomes ⟷
• ∴ becomes ∴

A more detailed list can be found at W3 Character Entity Reference Chart

Character Entity Bot [Google Code]

“…developers have asked us a lot for a market place where we’ll help them sell their extensions to our users including a revenue share so we’ll also make some money from it. “I’ll be very surprised if we don’t go down that route.” - Google Wave to have application store | News | TechRadar UK

This will be a very important development in the success of Wave. The iPhone has grown enormously by making high quality apps simple to pay for and receive. The key difference for Wave will be that the protocol is open for anyone to extend, and the main client (the Google Wave interface) is web based.

I predict this will mean a lot more extensions will be made open source or free. Of course it’s highly dependent on the quality and user experience of the store. If a developer can make an extension open source, but still make it available in the same marketplace many will choose to do so.

Keep in mind too, that over time other clients will emerge that will access the Wave protocol, and it will be interesting to see if the marketplace will extend to such clients.

One thing I've been wondering is how we'll get the chance to invite more people to Wave. I was one of the lucky ones who got in on the first round, and had invites to share, but those I've invited haven't been so lucky. Currently my invite counter is sitting at “00” too.

As soon as we're confident that the system can accept more users, we will add a wave to your account that allows you to nominate friends and colleagues for an account. Once you have the capability to invite people, the wave appear in your inbox.

-- How do I invite people to try Google Wave? [Google Wave Help]

So we'll be seeing this eventually (goodness knows how it's added - magic fairy dust perhaps), so don't fret - All in good time!

For the geeks out there (oh wait, that's all of you) this gadget is for you.

The Wave Dice Gadget generates a dice-roll for you, and supports "standard PnP dice types".

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Go get your game on in-wave!

Wave Dice Gadget [Google Code]

I use portable Firefox for browsing at work with a modified user-agent (pretending it’s Internet Explorer, of course!) and Google Wave keeps alerting me the browser is not supported. To bypass this annoying check, go directly to https://wave.google.com/wave/?nouacheck. Of course, some browsers just can’t handle the storm: in my experience so far, Opera 10 fails to load Wave every time with a nasty error. - Fors: Shortcuts and searches in Google Wave.

gxg at FORS covers three things you should know about Wave. We’ve covered Shortcuts and useful searches already, but the information about URLs is important and useful.

One take-away from the section on searches is the reader tip published at Lifehacker about limiting waves to certain languages.

The Wave experience can quickly become frustrating as your conversations get longer. It can take a couple of mouse-clicks to reply in the middle of a blip and then again to finish the blip. If you’re constantly shifting from keyboard to mouse and back again, your productivity can quickly suffer.

But take the time to learn some of these handy shortcuts and you’ll find the user interface less baffling and the usefulness of Wave will increase (I guarantee it!). For example, you can use "Shift + Enter" to:

Reply to a message at the end of a wave. The new message will appear at the same indentation level, at the very end of the wave.

[... But also has the ...]

Same function as ‘Done’ button - signifies you are finished editing your addition to a wave.
Just this one shortcut has made my experience of Wave a thousand times better. You might find something that helps you out too!

Keyboard shortcuts [Google Wave Help]

Put this in the same basket as Waveboard, the Mac only stand-alone app for Wave. Waver takes the iPhone/mobile Wave interface and puts it in an Adobe Air window on your desktop.

It’s a simple idea: take the minimal interface and make it available (faster) on the desktop, to dash off quick messages and keep an eye on your inbox (or other important folders). Because it’s so small you can pop it into a corner of your screen and keep working. While Wave is getting its feet, it also saves you dedicating a tab to it while letting you participate and build up the community.

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Unfortunately because it’s simply a view to the mobile interface it suffers one of the same beta flaws - it does not sync changes until you click “done”. So if you’re used to the behaviour of the regular wave interface, you might find it difficult switch back and forth regularly. Additionally, none of the keyboard shortcuts from the main interface work, so you need to mouse around a lot more.

If you need a simple interface to use Wave, Waver might be for you,

Don't get what all the fuss is about Wave? Don't have the time to watch the original hour-twenty demonstration? Lifehacker has chopped the presentation up into bite-size chunks to highlight the parts they think are most important.

The Google Wave Highlight Reel

Waveboard is an app for the Mac (and coming soon for iPhone) that puts Google Wave into it’s own application window. Observant readers might recognise that this is not really all that different from using Fluid or Prism to create a stand-alone site-specific window. Links from the site suggest it is related to Mailplane, a similar concept for Gmail.

Additionally, the demonstrated iPhone application seems to be no different from what Google has already made possible simply by bookmarking your Wave page to the home screen.

If however you don’t wish to worry about setting something like this up yourself you may wish to give it a try.

Waveboard is free software (at time of writing). Waveboard\

One of the biggest complaints from first time Google Wave users is the tidal wave of information and updates that threatens to suck their precious time away as they watch the chaos unfold.

In a carefully tended wave, the noise and chaos are minimal, but in some of the larger (public) waves, users have given up hope of ever keeping on top of it all.

Charles Lehner has created a simple chat gadget that might help calm the swell, by focussing some of the chat into a form most of us will recognise: IM. By introducing this gadget to a wave, you can give people an outlet to speak that brings in years of built up convention for managing the flow. People understand Instant Messaging, so you can add this gadget to bring  normalcy to the new medium.

Perhaps you could embed this in a wave and encourage people to use it for idle chitchat, leaving the rest of the wave for the real-time collaboration on the task at hand.

As with other gadgets the Playback function records every new person who gets to the chat, and every message, so be aware that this can blow the size of your wave recording out with a lot of extra updates to wade through if necessary.

"Retro" Chat for Google Wave [Wave Samples Gallery]

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I think us Wavers should be worried…

michaeltalbot

If you’re wondering where to start when you first open Google Wave, try these 11 simple tasks that will give you a feel for the interface and the design decisions that went into it. For example, Tip 7 is:

7. Creating Folders in Google Wave allows you to create categories for your Wave documents. This is also useful to clean the Google Wave Inbox of older Waves and file the Waves documents.
   To move a Wave document to a Folder: click on a Wave document and dragdrop it to the Folder name.

Google Wave Tips

Also check out this simple tip to add video to a wave

Emaily is a bot that sends an email alert for every new blip in a specified wave.

If your main inbox is your email inbox then this bot could be an important part of your wave testing, at least until Wave catches on with more of your personal network. Instead of keeping Wave open all day, have this bot send you a ping when anyone updates the important waves.

One day though I hope to see the flow reversed, and email will flow in and out of Wave instead.

Emaily [Wave Sample Gallery]

Using the WaveVotely bot, people can vote on which public waves are useful or fun. The results are collated at the Waverz site.

Votely - Votes for public Waves

With so much happening at once in Wave it’s easy to be overwhelmed with it all. Save yourself some grief and use these handy searches to make managing the flood easier.

Three Google Wave Searches Worth Saving [Smarterware]

Original link

The subject matter might be dry, but this 7 minute video demonstrates the collaborative power of Wave when developers create useful tools for it. Note the real-time updates throughout the entire process, including the creation of the model.

PS. Google Wave Blogger calls Gravity The Best Business Example of Google Wave, Period!

SAP Community Network Blogs

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Google Wave – Down for maintenance

So this is what happens when they need to fix something? It’s kinda soothing.

PS. Those clouds move.

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Google Wave won’t run in Internet Explorer.

Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5’s offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web’s users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology

Google Wave Developer Blog

Just a quick note to say sorry for the unstable feed. I changed it to point elsewhere and back again, so it gathered multiple entries quickly a few days in a row. I'll stop doing that now

I believe that people who don’t see what Google Wave is for are simply looking at it from the wrong angle. Wave is not a social tool. It’s not Twitter, it’s not GTalk, it’s not Facebook. It was never designed to appeal to the crowds of geeks who are currently trying it out. Wave is built for the corporate environment. It’s a tool for getting work done. And as far as those go, it’s an excellent tool, even at this very early stage.

danieltenner.com - What problems does Google Wave solve?

{{< youtube W5zJZQjP094 >}}

Watch the Astro Boy trailer on Youtube

Not the same Astro Boy of previous incarnations. Not at all challenging or interesting.

I was a fan of the 80’s Astro Boy series, which I’ve begun watching again as a adult. I haven’t ever read the original manga though which I’m sad about. I am a big fan of the robot boy with the rocket legs and the machine-gun butt though so I was stoked to get to see this new CG animated movie version.

I was a little disappointed. It’s a good movie, but it feels like it lost it’s edginess. The original cartoon was creepy at times - a bit dark and disturbing. Maybe things don’t creep me out like they did when I was younger but this felt sugary-sweet and a little to happy. The music was cheesy kid-move fare, and the plot was wrapped up so happily I thought I was going to puke.

Yes it’s a kids movie. Yes it wasn’t pitched at me. But the original cartoon had genuine moments of despair and heartbreak for the characters. Why the makers of this thought that kids couldn’t handle some of those concepts now is beyond me.

The whole thing was a bit too Dreamworks-esque. It borrowed ideas and elements from so many other animated movies (and relied way too much on the so-scared-I-peed-myself gag) it ended up uninspired and dull, instead of exciting and fresh like Astro Boy was when I was a kid.

It’s a standard kids movie: harmless and fun. But it’s not the same Astro Boy of previous incarnations, and it’s not at all challenging or interesting.

This rates 2.0 stars ★★☆☆☆

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Google Wave Add-on for Firefox at That Smith

Gina Trapani (who is fast becoming one of the foremost experts on Wave) has collated 14 use cases for Wave that were put forward by Lifehacker readers. Top of the list? Education!

Google Wave's Best Use Cases [Lifehacker]

I should preface this post with an introduction.

I’m Cathie and I am the “bloody end user” component of this blogging team.  We figured that if Wave is going to be the ubiquitous thing that Google envisages, it will have to be workable by everyone - not just the more “savvy” of those amongst us.

So what I’ll be doing is coming at Wave from my perspective - perhaps not such a big picture view - but a fingers on keyboard aspect.

Okay … so one of the first things I looked for once I had my Wave account was a Twitter interface thingamabobby

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Some useful robots and gadgets that aren’t so well known

GO2WEB20 Blog: 11 Wave Tools You May Not Know Exist\

This in no way represents a new social networking tool, and I think using it as such would be rather cumbersome. The beauty of it is, the user can control the experience and dictate its purpose.

Google Wave Is The Future of Real Time Collaboration

Gina Trapani gives an overview of the things you absolutely MUST know as you dive into Google Wave

Google Wave 101 [Lifehacker]

All of this freedom - being able to add to, edit, or delete anyone else’s blip in any wave - doesn’t just lead to accidental destruction but concerns about people “putting words into their mouths”, and raises a number of trust issues for many.

Early thoughts on Google Wave

I'm certain that this will not be as big an issue in later iterations of Wave, and there are already some safeguards in place. Nevertheless, it is a real issue to watch as Wave matures.

{{< youtube rDu2A3WzQpo >}}

What is Google Wave?

A short "Google Wave for Dummies" type clip that highlights a tiny but important fraction of what Google Wave can do. A great introduction for the non-technical (and the technical!)

What is amazing is that Google has developed a real-time communication framework that can work in a federated environment. People aren't getting it right now because they're expecting the beta to all be about polishing the User Experience. But it's not about polishing: it's about defining. -- Macro Linz » The Point You're Missing About Google Wave

Let’s face it, most of us we’re absolutely thrilled when we could jump on Gmail when it first arrived. The rebirth of communication is here and this time its waving at you! Visit us often and get involved in our forums for ways to get your hands on your own Google Wave invitation.

Creating a community for Google Wave invites and more!

So while I'm girly-blogging (see my cupcake post from earlier today) I thought I'd share a bit about our use of cloth nappies. I'll try and give a blokey perspective, and as Mil says guys talking about cloth nappies are hot, I'll willingly give it a go.

Before our little one was born, Mil convinced me to give cloth a chance. Cloth nappies are reusable and softer than disposable, and over the two to three years a kid can be wearing them, can save you a lot of money.

I love the smug feeling I get from using cloth nappies¹, but the biggest draw for me was just doing the math.

Over two years, at six changes per day, with nappies ranging in price from 39-66 cents per nappy, disposables would start in price at $1708². This is the absolute least it would cost for only two years of disposable nappies. All it would take for this cost to blow out is more changes per day, a slightly less cheap-and-nasty nappy, or for the child to take longer than two years to be potty trained. Cloth on the other hand has cost us about $1100 for a supply that should last us until she doesn't need them any more, and even a couple more won't put us over the cost of disposables. We splurge a little on special flushable liners so we don't have to do any poo-scraping to keep our nappies clean which raise the price a little more, but all in all we're ahead so I'm happy.

I'll point out that cloth nappies aren't the squares of white towel that they used to be. These days they have the functionality and usability of disposables without the waste. They look and behave like a regular nappies, but come in all sorts of cute styles and patterns (including BATMAN).

It has a goddamn CAPE

I was a bit apprehensive about keeping them clean, but it's pretty damn easy. We toss used ones in a bin with a "wet bag" liner, and do a load roughly every two days. You have to hang them the "right" way or they stretch out of shape, which sounds a little fiddly but they're really not that hard to keep on top of. Looking over our water bills for the last two years, we aren't using significantly more water than we were before either. Importantly, we don't have to touch them during the cleaning process, so it's really not much more hassle than disposable at all.

Finally, most of the best ones are made from bamboo or hemp, and sewn by Australian mothers so we're using products that help our economy and are great for the environment. They really are a better alternative.

Of course people can be very sensitive about their use of disposables, and I really don't wish to offend. I can certainly see the appeal of disposables for time-pressed and stressed parents. But I'd encourage you, if you are about to have kids to at least consider cloth nappies - these aren't your mother's nappies.

If you want to know more, there is a lot of information on the 'net. The entire Australian cloth nappy industry has flourished due to the internet, and information is everywhere. Mil informs me that two great places to start if you're interested are the Australian Nappy Network or Nappycino. If you leave a comment I can try to answer some of your questions and point you in the right directions.

I've also written a review of one of the special night nappies we use over at Do I Keep It if you're looking for a great night nappy.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled geekiness. Thank you for sticking with me through my namby-pamby posts today!

The ""Sandman" Night Nappies":https://shpnappies.com.au/product/heavy-wetter-sandman-night-nappy/ by Sustainable Hemp Products are a specially made cloth nappy for use at night. It contains a fitted outer layer in a variety of cute patterns, a double layered insert you can clip in and an optional booster for extra absorbency. Made from bamboo, they provide a soft, comforting and dry night's sleep.

Designed to last without a change overnight, our daughter Amelynne has really put them through their paces. The longest we've had her in one has been 15 hours, and the nappy lasted the distance without soaking through the outer layer. We cover it with a Dancing Bears Bear Bottoms fleece cover that prevents leakage if it ever occurs (which it has a couple of times). All in all, we've been extremely satisfied with how long they last, and how soft they are for our girl.

One of the issues with any night nappy is that if your washing machine isn't up to it, they can stink up a bit over time, but a quick rinse first thing in the morning keeps the smell from getting locked in, and the next night they smell just fine.

We chose the Sandman night nappy because they are made by a work at home mother who has always provided excellent customer service. They are excellent value for money, and come recommended by a number of mothers who use cloth. They also dry very quickly for a night nappy, as they can be pulled open and spread apart due to their clever design.

I would give them 4 1/2 stars for their low price, super absorbency and comfort, and the excellent customer service we've received from Sustainable Hemp Products. If you are looking for a reliable cloth night nappy, a "Sandman" nappy might be just what you need.¹

Totally manly.

Totally.

So anyway, I made cupcakes today. To be fair I live with two girls, so I did it for them¹. Monnie is running a Cup Cake Camp soon, and being the chef of the family felt like I would probably end up being the one to make cupcakes for it, so I thought I had better practice.

Then Elle showed off her baking skills, and Twitter is talking about it non-stop, so being the sheep I am² I jumped on the bandwagon.

And I gotta say, if you make your cupcakes right, they are awesome. None of this lemon icing crap, or straight vanillaboringpants flavour. I made mine with 70% cocoa chocolate cherry ripes, 70% cocoa chocolate ganash icing, and glace cherries on top...

So I don't care if it's not totally manly. They were totally tasty, and I'm totally in Mil's good books for making them.

And if you're nice to me I'll make them again (or something similar) for Cup Cake Camp Adelaide!

A conversation I had with my sister recently:

Carlynne

have we discussed inglourious basterds yet?

me

you mentioned it

Carlynne

You seen it?

me

no

Carlynne

WHY IN THE HELL NOT

me

the next movie we go see will probably be up

Carlynne

WHAT IN THE SHINY FRICK DO YOU WANT TO SEE THAT FOR

NO SCALPING OF NAZIS IN THAT ONE

SEEEEE IIIIIIITTT

me

but, but

it has a baloon house

:(

Carlynne

SCALPING.

OF.

NAZI'S.

me

HOUSE.

WITH.

BALLOONS ON.

Carlynne

ok. ok fine.

lets go over this again however

tarantino has made one of his best films, its funny, ironic, so well shot its ludicrous, featuring someof the best performances ive seen in a while and JEWS SCALPING NAZI'S and you have no immediate plans to see it.

so...

me

One more timefrom the top.

There is this house see?

And it's got BALLOONS on

BALLOONS

And the BALLOONS make the house a floaty-flyey house

Carlynne

oh man. bit of throat hurty from too much laughing.

Extra Value: I asked my sister via text message if I could use our conversation for a blog post. Her response?

"Do it. Ho."

I may have skipped one there I think. Class was good this last week. I had a look at the example code we were given for the last hand up I did, and used it to properly break my long code into methods.

I don't think I've quite reached that "click" moment that people say will come, but it was nice to finally get that a class can be handled in the same way as the less complex data types, ie you can pass a class to a method, and assign place-holder classes like you can with any int or String. So you have something like this:

private static Unit rentUnit(){
    Unit unitToRent = unit1;
    return unitToRent;
}

Which should be obvious, but I didn't get it until this week. So that was my big moment, and I wasn't sure it had sunk in, but then I began the first part of our major assignment, and knew I'd got it when I was setting up my constructors and throwing classes around like they were any old boolean...

So yay for me! I'm actually finding the first part of this assignment too easy, and would have liked it a bit harder so I could properly test myself. But I'll take it easy and learn it slowly so I get it properly. I really want to do this right the first time.

Why don't I just learn, once and for all... if I've not seen someone in ages, and want to talk and hang out and drink... DON'T GO TO A MOVIE. Unless the movie is the greatest movie ever, I'll just be disappointed.

Stupid life doesn't have do-overs if you do it wrong the first time.

Online communication fraught with peril. An innocent conversation with a friend can turn nasty in seconds with the slip of misplaced word. Umpteen times this week I have put my foot in my mouth, or written something only to spend the rest of the day worrying if what I wrote might have offended someone. Written communication has never been so difficult. Why has it gotten harder, the more ways we have to communicate?

Of course everyone knows that written communication is less effective at conveying emotion and subtleties of meaning than face-to-face conversations do. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a grimace and a hug, I'd say are worth far more. But online is how many of us choose to interact these days (it's quicker and lets you continue to do other things while chatting) for better or worse, and we need a way to communicate that puts across our full meaning.

I hate writing. Not because I'm particularly bad at it,¹ but because once I start I feel the need to qualify everything I say with insight to show that I am not as dumb as my words would make me seem. I do it face to face too (which I suspect might be even more painful for the receiver than my written parentheses) because I can't bear the thought of someone thinking I haven't thought about what I'm saying enough to see the other side. When I write it though, it increases the effort I have to put in to produce something I'm happy with, and litters my writing with brackets and footnotes. If I'm not prepared to put that sort of effort in I just don't write.

I'm kinda feeling the same way about Twitter too. Now with 140 characters, it might seem I shouldn't have that problem, but the limit is exactly what make me nervous about tweeting. With so few words, how can anyone possibly make themselves completely understood? Most of the time it's not a real issue, as what I say is fairly innocuous, but occasionally the limit can really hack meaning from your words and leave you with something that is drastically misinterpreted.

Personal chat is even worse. You think you have more scope to make yourself understood, but it's much more immediate and often words come out, when you really should have thought about it more. It also gives you the illusion of knowing someone better than you actually do, so something you might say face to face with someone you know well sounds rude or mean in a chat.

Online communication has rendered my entire vocabulary meaningless in this new context. Words and their equivalent emotions are often entirely different online. We add emoticons and abbreviations such as LOL that we wouldn't use in real life.² My favourite emoticon is colon-p ( :P ) which is my get-out-of-jail-free card for saying something that might be taken badly without it. It really is a cheap cop-out when a re-write or complete scrapping of the text might be a better option. I hate myself for using LOL and :D as I'm pretty sure my mother "taught me better than that".

But the alternative is thinking everything through too much. and like I've said that doesn't make me write better, it makes me not write. I had to just write this post, or risk never seeing it written, so you'll forgive it's slapdash nature.³

I would like to develop my online vocabulary. I'm not sure what that entails though. I suspect using Twitter has helped, but I'm still coming up short when it comes to making myself understood. Perhaps it will just take time, like learning any new language or culture. Perhaps I will never master it.

How has your vocabulary changed due to online communication?

I've never known what I'd call the type of music I enjoy. Back when I was in high school it was whatever you'd call what that Snow guy was doing (also see the Jim Carrey Spoof). About the same time I enjoyed a very embarrassing singer named Gillum who happened to be the triumvirate of terrible nineties music all in one annoying package, a white Christian rapper. I'm including the video, but please only watch if you have a strong constitution or no longer value the will to live.

{{< youtube aRJHNh-90uU >}}

If you're extra brave, skip back to the beginning and watch the intro...

I have to give my friend Ben Fuller credit for at the time pointing out that my favourite rapper wasn't actually very good. If only I'd listened.

From there it was down hill for a few years. Until I reached my twenties. I'm not sure my taste was much better, but I happened to stumble on some music I loved. Still Christian stuff, but somewhat better. For a doubting Christian, there was nothing better than Chris Rice's Smell the Color 9, and I LOVED Questions for Heaven.

I have to say though, my current taste in music is very different.

Somewhere in the last little while I've developed a taste for what I'm told is dance/electronica (well that's what hey call it in iTunes). The problem is, that most music that pops up when I go looking under that category is repetitive synthy stuff that does nothing for me. The common link with a lot of the stuff I seek out is that old-timey sound from the 1920's that's associated with the Charleston. It's full of muted trumpets and energetic beats. But really, anything energetic and slightly old timey really gets me.

Listen to bei mir bist du schön by Waldeck, Back and Forth by Doctor Steel, and Come on a My House by Nasty Tales and his Orchestra to get a feel for my absolute favourite sort of music.

That's not to say I haven't got wider taste than a subset of electronica. My iPhone Genius pulls up equal measures of Lisa Mitchell, Bertie Blackman, Gotye, Regina Spektor, Emiliana Torrini... I think I may have a thing for soft sounding women (sorry to lump you in there Wouter). I even (shamefully) purchased the Voodoo Child song with that woman from Neighbours 'cause it sounded fun at the time.

I'm a fan of the themes of my favourite TV shows (yes I listen to them as music, but if it includes the terrific new Doctor Who theme by Murray Gold you can understand right?). But I think this stems from my upbringing on classical music that somehow got pushed to the side by awful whiteboy rap. It's cliched but I love Pachelbel's Canon in D,¹ and the Dance of the Knights from Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev.

My mother shared the Mamas and Papas with us, and I picked up a love of silly songs somewhere along the way too.

All in all I think my musical taste is pretty varied. I think like most people it incorporates a lot of stuff that made me feel good when I needed it at one time or another, or has memories attached. If you hunt through my site or my Twitter and Blip accounts you'll find a bunch of other stuff I really enjoy too.

I'll leave you with a new song that I'm enjoying a bit at the moment. It's not my absolute favourite, but it's pretty high up there, and very fun. It's by an Aussie artist called Unkle Ho. It's called Big Bad Rag, and has more of that trumpety old timey goodness I was talking about.

{{< youtube IjkjO0AvIDc >}}

And it's listed as Hip-Hop in iTunes, so I don't know, although it reminds me of something I tweeted

I like... What's hip-hop called when people don't ruin it by talking > over the top of the music?

Sorry Hip-Hop fans.

This post was inspired by discussion with Elle leading up to her posting "You are a radio star..

It's 9:30, so class just finished, but I left at 8. Another night of confusing information that would probably make sense if I'd read the text before hand, or wasn't being taught by someone who's thinking of examples on the fly and can't finish a sentence before moving on to another concept.

I'm gonna just sit down tomorrow and current text be damned, read a whole bunch of chapters and just work on the half assed examples in the text I have. Hopefully that will keep me going. I can't keep putting it off.

My next chapter is Methods, so hopefully that might answer some of my questions about when to use methods and how.

Quickie:

• Last class was useless, as I forgot my USB with my current work on it so I couldn't actually use the time to keep working on my assignment.

• I got the assignment written and handed up, but I wasn't happy with it. I have the control stuff sorted (if, while), but not the OO-ness of Java.

• The assignment code felt bulky and wrong, and I need to split it into separate classes/methods, but just cant figure it out.

• My text still hasn't arrived and I'm using the 2002 version. It's out of date and the exercises are absolutely brimming over with wrongability

• There is something weird about fully understanding every example you attempt to write, and knowing exactly what the lecturer is talking about, and reading all the chapters you are supposed to, and still finding that the assignment you have to submit in a week is beyond what you know you know. It feels like the assignment was stuck into the flow of the course prematurely.

That is all. If you are a Javahackercoder and you are reading this, and you can spare a bit of your time to help explain a few things to me about making decisions about which parts of my code to create objects/methods from, I'd be eternally grateful¹ .

People here are always joking that my boss and I need to clone ourselves. Usually because computers seem to only behave when we're peeking over someone's shoulders. With the "Digital Education Revolution" (more computers per school), having a clone seems like it might be the only way to keep on top of it all.

Seems someone at Microsoft has a sense of humour about it, and sent us this clever "cloning kit" to promote their range of management tools and software licensing options. I though it very clever.

{.alignnone width="375" height="500"}{.tt-flickr .tt-flickr-Medium}

Kinda seems a bit naughty!

That is a pure Twitter-bait title. I have no clue how to make my baby girl sleep except through time and patience. But I needed a hook to get you here, cause I just wanted to tell you about my baby girl.

I don't normally use this blog for very personal stuff any more, unless it's tech related or stuff I find on the 'net. But I have in the past and I choose to today. Pray indulge me a little.

Amelynne Grace was born 13 months ago today. My first child. A gorgeously round chubby little thing with light brown hair and her mothers eyes. We get comments all the time about how lovely she is, how much she looks like me. I'm not sure if people are being polite (and really, who would want to look like me), but I see the most beautiful thing in the world when I look at her.

Just-born babies are supposed to be at the peak of cuteness ¹, but this one just keeps getting cuter by the day. Maybe parents see it best in their own children because a relaxed and happy playing child is one of the most joyful things you will ever see, and they're most relaxed around their own parents. If you've looked at my Flickr stream, there's no shortage of pics of her. But they're a tiny percentage of the actual photos I've taken and will not share with all and sundry². I keep taking them because each day her smile gets cheekier, her eyes get sparklier, and her wonder at the world more and more obvious.

She walks now. Not a full walk mind you, but a shuffling along the wall or a couch. She's figured out that dropping to her butt and crawling will get her anywhere she can't hold on to something. She's unstoppable.

On the other hand she's calm and patient and gentle. We were worried going into pregnancy that Mil's illness would make a super-active baby a nightmare to look after. It was a risk that paid off well for us. Whilst somewhat clingy at times, she plays happily by herself a lot and asserts an independence that has made Mil's job somewhat easier.

That's not to say she's not difficult sometimes though. Despite my title, we're still struggling to put her to sleep reliably and easily. But even in that she astounds us regularly when she does put herself to sleep easily. You can just tell she wants to do it herself and it's very gratifying.

She still only has one tooth. The others are almost there, but refuse to come out. But even that has just managed to make her look cuter.

And every day I ask myself how can she get cuter?

And every day she does.

Do you see? Do you see what I mean?

So I just wanted to share that. Wanted to share that I have a baby girl who brings me more joy than I ever thought possible. It's clichéd, but the honest truth. And to those of you who understand that, I hope for all the best for you and your children. To everyone else, I thank you for sitting through my little gush and promise it won't be like this around here all the time.

Thank you for reading. Share about your own families in the comments below.

://www.flickr.com/photos/stickergiant/2478273711/

Photo by teamstickergiant

I try a lot of new widgets and technologies on my blog, to see what they offer and make my website more exciting¹. While I can usually appreciate what they are trying to do, I more often than not find that the increased page-load times or disparity with my blog's look usually compel me to uninstall the thing before too long. And I'm certainly not too attached to a thing to hesitate to uninstall it if it's messing something up, or has some sort of bug.

This post is about one such widget that's tenaciously holding on, and the reasons I'm still using it.

The Lijit search widget is a little doohicky you can install (with code or plugin) on to a lot of popular blogging sites with minimal fuss. Like a lot of widgets, Lijit offers multiple configurations and designs and serves a single purpose. In this case, Lijit offers a sort of enhanced, social search. Using Google as a back-bone, Lijit takes over whatever boring backend search you might have and offers more relevant results (using Google's magic sauce) with some extra special stuff thrown in. The "special stuff" is relevant links and results from any other satellite site you might like to add. For example: I post to Twitter a lot, save links on Delicious, re-share stuff from Google Reader and post photos to Flickr, amongst others. Lijit asks for all the details of the services you use and then includes results from those services as well!

But that's not all! It also figured out who's on my blogroll in the side bar there, and includes the people in my network on Delicious², and can include stuff it finds from them that also might have anything to do with the search. So not only do my visitors get increasingly relevant and useful info (as there certainly isn't any here), but my friends and associates also get some extra loving! It makes the search so much more productive than looking for keyword matches in a single site's database.

Enough about the search though! This post was inspired more by the awesome service I have received from the Lijit people, not once, but twice now. While the search is good, I'm a fickle, fickle man and am prone to change things around here without much thought. I somehow (I can't remember if by choice or mistake) disabled the Lijit search on my site and would probably have never put it back. Except that Jacqueline from Lijit contacted me soon after and very politely enquired if there was a reason I had disabled the product.

Normally that might trigger my stalking alarm, but I pushed my misgivings aside and came over here to turn it back on. When I did I noticed it was misbehaving a bit and told Jacqueline as much. She had someone in their support department look at it straight away and I had an answer in a matter of hours. I've been happy with it ever since. It provides detailed analytics of my user's searches so I can better target what they're looking for too.

Until yesterday, when out of the blue the plugin started adding extra buttons to the top of my site. I immediately bitched about it on Twitter, then wrote an email to Jacqueline again asking her to look into it (it's OK, she nicely said I could at any time!). By the time I woke up today, Jaqueline had written back to say she would look into it, and another lovely person called Tara had emailed me to say she saw my complaint on Twitter and already had someone investigating. By the time I had even checked my email it had been fixed.

To me, that is exemplary. I could have used their official support channels (although surprisingly couldn't find them -- they might want to look into that), but instead in both cases took the lazy option to uninstall/bitch about it. In both cases Lijit cared enough about my experience that they're actively monitoring for mentions of their product, and more importantly acting on them quickly to fix the problems.

So yay to the Lijit support team. I hope your product lives a long a happy life. Keep up the good work, and thank you for a fantastic service! And anyone who's now interested in trying Lijit out, search for something in the search bar up there. And when you sign up to Lijit, add me to your Lijit network.

So I have neglectfully not blogged since my update during class last week. All week I was thinking I had already. When my mum¹ said she'd read my site and hoped class would get better for me I realised the impression I had left you with was still that I had no idea what was going on, and it was all over my head.

Thankfully that is not the case! Last week I discovered that I'm right on track, I'm keeping pace with my class, and I'm thoroughly enjoying myself. Working through some problems on Monday and Tuesday night was a blast, and I'm really enjoying what I'm learning. That said I hit a roadblock when the final problem asked me to create a sort of menu system for creating and updating the details of housing units. In class last week we covered if statements, and this week loops, so I don't feel at all bad about leaving the problem till this week, as I'm pretty sure the best way to handle the menus is with loops.

On the other hand, I'm not certain the best way to structure things. I could whack the whole code into the main method, and play it like a batch file, or I could fumble about a bit and try breaking the code into classes/methods and seeing how that goes. One way I know will work, the other is the right way... So I've put it off for homework this week and hopefully I'll get enough into my head tonight to help push me the right way.

So no code examples this week. I suppose I could chuck something in here, but they're all getting mighty long (and who's reading it really?), even to do the simplest tasks.

Thank you everyone who's been commenting and answering my silly questions. It's all really helpful, and makes me feel like I'm becoming a part of the programming community!

Michael J. Braude wrote a post on why he'll never be a "web guy". The gist being, the annoyances of writing for the web are not the sort of challenges he wants to tackle as a programmer.

Then Jeff Atwood gave his two cents on why programming for the web is where it's at — it's fast, it gets seen by more people, and more and more great apps are being made on the web.

I'm sure Michael has a point. I think the way he said it got up Jeff's nose a little (it certainly got up mine), but it's valid. For some, the web just seems simple and trite. My lecturer thinks like this I suspect. I also agree with Jeff that it's somewhat myopic — if you dismiss web apps, you dismiss a lot of clever, well written programs right out of the gate.

The debate got me thinking about why I'm studying programming. I'm a web guy, but not even "smart enough" to "throw an ASP.NET webpage together". But I see the innovation in web pages. I also see how useful these technologies will be moving forward. While Michael is coding apps that will work on one type of system sitting on someone's desk, programmers like Jeff are making universally accessible programs that are instantly available to anyone with access to the internet. I could learn to regurgitate borrowed code in half-arsed web pages and validate Michael's argument, but I'd rather learn to do it properly.

When I was leaving high school and thinking about what to study, the web was just starting to become mainstream. One teacher I got advice from had been programming years earlier and painted a picture of a world of drudgery, typing pre-written code without chance for innovation or personal expression. It was not a nice picture. I probably let myself be swayed by it too much I'm sad to say now.

What I discovered in the years after, is how exciting the world of web programming can be. Instead of being a small cog in a giant programming machine, a web programmer can be a vital part of a small team who's work can be seen instantly. Of course I know now the same can be said of non-web programming, but the web was what opened my eyes.

So I'm going back to study to do something I should have done all along. And I'm going so I can understand: "virtual methods, pointers, references, garbage collection, finalizers, pass-by-reference vs. pass-by-value, virtual C++ destructors, or the differences between C# structs and classes". And then I'm going to use that knowledge to make the best web programs I can make. Maybe along the way I'll learn enough that web programming seems trite to me too, but I'm not expecting to. I agree with Jeff, and strongly believe good web apps are only going to become more important.

I want a slice of that action.

I managed to code me up some of the exercises from chapter 4, and I'm all over classes. The final exercise was to create a Robot class that took a name, weight, bad habit(?), artificial intelligence level, and whether it could see. As an extension exercise, it could also have a "memory module" that allowed 5 mutations (changes) to either the bad habit, or the AI.

My Robot.java class is below:

public class Robot {
    private String name;
    private double weight;
    private String badHabit;
    private boolean hasVision;
    private int aiq;
    private int mutations;
    private boolean decommissioned;

    public Robot(String name, double weight, String badHabit, boolean
        hasVision, int aiq){
        this.name = name;
        if (weight < 0){
            this.weight = Math.abs(weight);
        }
        else {
            this.weight = weight;
        }
        this.badHabit = badHabit;
        this.hasVision = hasVision;
        this.aiq = aiq;
        if (this.aiq <= 0){
            this.aiq = 0;
        }
        if (this.aiq >= 3){
            this.aiq = 3;
        }
        mutations = 0;
        decommissioned = false;
    }

    public void mutate(){
        mutations++;
        if (mutations >= 5){
            decommissioned = true;
        }
    }

    public void setBadHabit(String badHabit){
        if (!decommissioned){
            this.badHabit = badHabit;
            mutate();
        }
    }

    public void addModule(){
        if (!decommissioned){
            if (aiq < 3){
                aiq++;
            }
            else {
                aiq = 3;
            }
            mutate();
        }
    }

    public String getName(){
        return name;
    }

    public double getWeight(){
        return weight;
    }

    public boolean getSight(){
        return hasVision;
    }

    public String getAIQ(){
        if (aiq 0){ return "Non Existant"; } if (aiq 1){
            return "Low";
        }
        if (aiq == 2){
            return "Medium";
        }
        else {
            return "High";
        }
    }

    public String getBadHabit(){
        return badHabit;
    }

    public void displayDetails(){
        System.out.println("The robot's name is " + name);
        System.out.println("The robot's weight is " + weight);
        System.out.println("The robot has a bad habit of " + badHabit);
        System.out.println("The robot can see = " + hasVision);
        System.out.println("The robot's AIQ is " + getAIQ());
        System.out.println("The robot has undergone " + mutations + "
        mutations.");
        System.out.println();
    }
}

It's long. It's also full of stuff I didn't end up using in the test class, as I hate typing out System.out.println(); over and over to test stuff, so I included the outputs in a displayDetails() method. Probably should add those as tests at least once, just to check my syntax, but that would make my test even longer. This is my RobotTest.java class:

public class RobotTest {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Robot robby = new Robot("Robby",104,"Smoking",false,1);
        Robot bender = new Robot("Bender",200,"Drinking",true,2);
        Robot vacuum = new Robot("Vacuulux",20,"Sucking",false,-1);
        Robot astro = new Robot("Toby",-80,"Playing too much",true,3);

        robby.displayDetails();
        robby.addModule();
        robby.setBadHabit("Spitting");
        robby.addModule();
        robby.addModule();
        robby.setBadHabit("eating before swimming");
        robby.setBadHabit("dying");
        robby.displayDetails();

        bender.displayDetails();

        vacuum.displayDetails();
        vacuum.setBadHabit("breaking down");
        vacuum.addModule();
        vacuum.displayDetails();

        astro.displayDetails();
        astro.addModule();
        astro.displayDetails();
    }
}