Trust Tommy

One of the most common questions about email is what’s the best way of accessing it. There are two main ways.

1. Through your browser, going to www.gmail.com or www.hotmail.com.

2. Using a desktop like Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird or Apple Mail.

There’s no right or wrong answer here, so I’m just going to lay out the pros and cons of both options.

Some things to consider about web-based email.

1. An internet connection is required. If you’re away from home, on a plane or away from wifi or your dongle, you can’t access your email.

2. Your email interface is only as fast as your internet connection. If someone’s throttling your speed with major downloads, you’re stuck at a snail’s pace (you might as well stick with snail mail in that case…)

3. Generally speaking, syncing won’t be as good between web interfaces and mobile devices like iPhones, BlackBerries and such than a ‘native’ interface. What I mean is that syncing will be better between the mail app on your iPhone and the Mail application on your Apple computer because they were made by the same company and generally talk to each other better. I speak from experience of using an iPhone with both the web interface and Mail on an Apple, by the way.

What I do

I use Mail.app for a couple of reasons. Firstly, when I go up to Dublin and have emails to write, I can write them offline and Mail will automagically send those emails I write whenever I pass through somewhere with wifi (protip: Avoca Rathcoole has free wifi). I mean, sure I could write those emails in something like TextEdit but then I’d have to copy and paste and whatnot.

What you should do

I can’t say for definite. It depends on a couple of things. Maybe you don’t have enough space to keep 10,000 emails on your computer, or maybe since you have to use the web interface on public or friends’ computers you don’t like changing when you’re at home.

Apart from the ability to write emails offline, desktop apps don’t have anything huge “on” the web interface.

Like much in the computer world, it’s a matter of personal preference!

I connect my phone to the computer, intending to copy over the photos from RENT from the weekend, only to find a pop-up appear in iPhoto.

Pop-ups, both online and offline, are the bane of my computer use. I mean, I don’t want to be interrupted in what I’m doing for anything unimportant, which pop up messages almost universally are.

‘The hard-drive that iPhoto is using is low on disk space. Are you sure you should like to continue?”

I open Finder and look at the bottom of the screen to see just how much (or how little) space I have. 700 MBs. Hmm, doesn’t seem all that little, I think to myself – that’s a decent quality movie, or 2 House M.D. episodes. After tweeting my annoyance at the pop-up however, I find out that in fact, anything under a GB will cause my laptop not to work at optimal levels.

I’d been having hard drive problems for a good while now, and I couldn’t trace them. The only big things on my laptop were my music collection (about 1,500 songs, or 8 GBs) and my photo collection (3,500 pictures, about 6 GBs) – so how come I have less than a GB free? My hard drive is 80 GBs, and I can account for 12 of that from two things – which are the only big things on my laptop, I know that. So where’s the rest of that?

I know that sys files will take up some space, but I’d be damned if they’d take up anywhere near half the HD space, let alone 68 GBs. My only guess was that lots of little things were hidden away in my desktop, library and downloads folders.

Something had to be done, I decided. I thought about restoring my laptop to factory defaults after backing up my merge 80 GBs onto Dad’s behemoth of a 320 GB external USB drive – but that would have required the Snow Leopard original install disks, and those CDs are kind of hard to come by in our house – along with various cables and such. And so, after some googling, I found out of a second solution which did much the same thing:

- Create a new user account
- Give it admin privileges, demote the old (to be deleted) account to ‘limited user’
- Delete the old account without saving the home folder.

And that’s what I did. The back up of the original “Tommy Collison” account took about an hour; during which time I ate dinner and did homework. Maybe it was my laptop on its last legs, but the process to delete “Tommy Collison” after creating the second account “Trust Tommy” took longer than expected because System Preferences crashed (colloquially known as “beach balling”) numerous times. After forcing a restart, the system gave way and let me delete myself.

After that, I logged into my new account – Trust Tommy. 26 GBs free, which jumped to 35 after I deleted the save of the Home folder that Mac OSX had made.

So, I’d effectively wiped everything off my laptop – save for the Applications folder. I also saved App Support and Prefs from the /Library folder. At 6 GBs in total, I deemed that a small price to pay to save those – it meant that everything else was just how I liked it

I left Dad’s hard drive copying back over stuff I needed overnight. Desktop and Downloads were known black spots for things getting stuck and then bloating the folders and the hard drives, so they were left untouched. Music, Pictures, App Settings and Prefs were the only things I felt I needed.

This morning, I looked at how much space I’d saved from nuking my own computer for the greater good. 5 GBs free.

Hang on – I didn’t do all that for 4.3 GBs. I looked at Music to make sure everything was in once. Music/iTunes/Library contained all the different artists – no problem there. However, /iTunes/Untitled also contained all my artists. I made untitled the last time I changed laptops and couldn’t save my music. It contained the contents of my iPhone’s music library copied back over onto a computer. And now my music was on my new account twice. I deleted Untitled, freeing up 8 GBs of space immediately. I went into iTunes and double checked that I could still play all my music, which I could, proving that /Untitled had been a duplicate.

And so, 12 GBs were free on my laptop. Much better.

Resetting up applications didn’t take long; Apps like NetNewsWire (RSS reader), EchoFon (desktop Twitter client) and Chax (iChat hack so as to allow MSN addresses) needed were just a quick login, while Chrome could be reconfigured easily by just importing the file of all my bookmarks, history and such. Mail.app was also very easy to set up.

From usage so far, all I can see that I’ve lost (which I knew before that I would lose) is song play counts. That’s where Last.FMcomes in – my play counts are now stored online and not on one machine, just for such an occasion as this.

Speaking of which, whenever I tried to use Last.FM on my old computer, it’d crash, forcing me to use the older (OS9) classic version. Now, I’m able to use the new version, which, critically, supports iPod scrobbling.

So, how do you solve a problem like no hard-drive space? Back it up, nuke it and start afresh.

The problem with last using Last.Fm is that it puts my obsessive music-listening habits out for the world to see. Then again, one could argue that I’m the one putting them up.. :)

I do love the service though – if my laptop got stolen/broken tomorrow and the hard drive got wiped, I’d love my music library. That’s not a massive problem, mind you – I back up my (admittedly small) music library on Dad’s external USB hard-drive pretty regularly.. but that doesn’t save play counts. In what I think is iTunes’ single greatest FAIL, play counts aren’t copied over when you move the files about the place. That’s why Last.FM is so useful for me – remote play counts.

As you can see from the picture – the soundtrack from the musical “Chess” is being listened to a lot in my library these days… the cast wakes me almost without fail most nights around 3am. I’ll get up and stretch my leg by walking to the kitchen for a drink of water before going back to sleep. When I do that I like to listen to music and C for Chess seems to always be selected in my blind mouse jerks in iTunes.

If you wanna connect on Last.FM; I’m TrustTommy on there too.

Last week, Adobe Photoshop celebrated its 20th birthday. Its huge status in the computer world can be measured in numerous ways; the fact that it’s the second most pirated piece of computer software in the world (Microsoft Windows XP comes first, if you’re interested), the fact that the verb ‘to photoshop something’ is now used in popular culture. I think, though, the biggest effect that it’s had is the simple fact that we can no longer believe what we see.

This photo flew between people’s email inboxes around 2002, when Photoshop was as out-of-the-mainstream as it’s possible to be. It was used by advertisers and hardcore computer geeks, in a time when home computers were still relatively new.

It sent the (at that time quite small) internet into a flurry — ‘you think you’re having a bad day at work?’ was the caption attached in the subject line of emails. Then, someone pointed out that great white sharks (like that in the picture) hadn’t been seen around the San Francisco Bay area (see the Golden Gate Bridge in the background?) since the 1960s. It soon transpired that the photo that was doing the rounds was actually two photos, one on top of the other. The helicopter had indeed been in California, but the shark had been in (ironically named) False Bay, South Africa.. but what’s 10,265 miles (16,519.9162 kilometers) between friends?

Photo manipulation is as old as photography itself and it’s not just used for sensationalism. It was popular with political figures for removing characters unpopular after the photo had been taken.

In the photo on the left, Stalin is accompanied by Nikolai Yezhov — he worked in the political system rising in 1934 to the Central Committee of the Communist Party; in the next year he became a secretary of the Central Committee.

He became an enemy of the State and was erased from Soviet history after leading the failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing bureaucratization of the Soviet Union.

After he fell from power, he was arrested, shot and his image removed by censors.

The rise of photo manipulation means that it’s very difficult to tell whether the photo is, for the want of a better phrase: ‘being truthful’. Was that person always there? Were there others? Was that crowd enlarged? We can no longer be certain of any of this.

For clarity, photo editing isn’t removing people or showing a shark attacking a helicopter — removing red-eye and other small actions would still come under the umbrella term of ‘edits’.

Is it right?

I can’t say for definite. I think that it largely depends on your motive. Cutting out a person because he’s fallen out of some dictator’s good books isn’t as bad as removing creepy red-eyes from your holiday snaps. Then again, it’s a slippery slope. From red eye it’s not a big jump to removing a stray mole or hair. There are only baby steps between them.

Quoting from a recent magazine article:

A guy I know was a journalist back in the 80s. He once interviewed Margaret Thatcher and afterwards, he asked if he could get a quick picture with her. She consented and it now hangs in my friend’s kitchen. He told me how people who come to the house and see the picture often commend his Photoshop skills — ‘how’d ya get a picture like that?’ they ask. The idea that the picture is actually genuine seems to be far from a lot of people’s minds.

Is this the future?

Do you remember I explained how Foursquare worked earlier this month?

It’s come under fire from a new website for the (supposed) burgling opportunities it provides — PleaseRobMe searches Twitter for tweets containing containing FourSquare checkin information (you can give FourSquare to automatically publish a tweet when you log in somewhere) and it takes it that since you’re out and about, burglars can take advantage of that fact and rob you.

Two assumptions are made here:

#1 – That where you live is in the public domain. I blog a lot but my house location isn’t online. I haven’t added it as a FourSquare location (I’m not that insecure that I need to be mayor of my own abode) either. So just because someone might know I’m not at home when I tweet “En route to Dublin” or someone sees I checked into Cappagh Hospital.

#2 – That when I’m not at home, the house is empty, which is not always true.

The whole debate of ‘will FourSquare get my house robbed?’ is more a bigger question on the pros and cons of location sharing in general. Your location is sensitive information and people should be careful with who and when they share it.

Don’t forget that FourSquare is different to Twitter in that you need to be friends with someone to see their checkins — and for that they need to be approved. Also, if I wanted to go to La Cucina for some rocky road goodness in secret, I could choose ‘no’ when it asks me if I want to share the location of the place I’m checking into with my friends. That way, I still get the points and whatnot but all my friends see is “Tommy C checked in @ [off the grid]” instead of “Tommy C checked in @ La Cucina” and the Rocky Roads stay secret :)

Apologies for the break in posts recently — server issues were experienced left, right and yes, even centre too.

However, I’m back now so it’s all back to normal.

…Or, at least as normal as one can expect ’round these here parts.

The latest social networking that’s slowly becoming mainstream is one which puts more onus on the location-based parts of networking sites. Enter stage left — Four Square!

Four Square revolves around ‘checking in’ at locations like bars, cafés, restaurants and even shops. You connect with friends and so you can see where your pals are and meet up with them. People can’t see where you’re checking in unless you accept their friendship request — which takes care of some privacy concerns, and you only check into places you want to (it’s not automatic — you have to open the app and select your location (e.g. Eason’s, 40 O’Connell Street) from a list of nearby Four Square spots). If where you are isn’t listed, you can add it, and then other people who come to where you are will see “Eason’s, 40 O’Connell Street” on the list of nearby Four Square spots. When you check in, you gain points, and a leader board of you and your friends can be seen on their website/mobile application. It resets every Sunday at 11.59pm, so points are only good to you for a week before everyone reverts to 0. The person with the most check-ins at one location becomes the ‘mayor’ of that location.

Why?

First and foremost, local Italian restaurant La Cucina are giving away pizza slices to mayors of the restaurant. :D

As with all social networks, interaction is what makes it fun. I can see that Patrick Collison has checked in at La Cucina, so I can go meet him there. Also, I can see popular cafés in an unfamiliar cities by how many people have checked in.. or at least one where I’d fit in (heavy technology users for the win!)

Also, bragging rights play a big role. You get a real-time leaderboard that shows how many points you and the people you ‘friend’ are on. Also, mayorship is a hotly contested role, and interneceine revolts are not not uncommon:

Four Square requires an internet connection to ‘check-in’ at spots, and all major smartphones are supported (iPhones, Andriods and Blackberries. Those are device/app store links, by the way). Normal-phone SMS check in is available in the USA and should be available here in Ireland soon.

On Thursday, I was up in Dublin at physio. As always, I took my phone with me and listened to music, read Twitter and caught up on RSS on the journey.

However, when I sitting into the car to go home, I got the ‘warning: less than 20% battery remaining” message.

Ok, I was listening to music for the best part of 2.5 hours, and the screen’s brightness was up at the top but there’s no getting around the fact that 3 hours of battery isn’t wonderful. It’s certainly much less than Apple’s website boasts it is.

Then again, if we add up the amount of time I’ve had my iPhone (11 months) and how old it was according to the eBay seller I bought it off (3 months), it’s nearing the time when one would be beginning to see battery deterioration in electronic goods.

I decided to rectify my battery problems by buying a battery pack from CompuB. I’d have liked one that fitted just like a case around your iPhone but things like that for the 2G iPhone are notoriously hard to come by – the problem when your iPhone’s 2 years out of date.

However, CompuB did have something for me, so future trips to Dublin won’t be met with similar battery woes. It’s handy actually, iPhones aren’t the only thing it charges — anything that connects via USB, so cameras and such are charge-able too. All for €19.99

I haven’t used it fully yet, so I can’t tell if their boasts of ‘2 hours extra battery’ are accurate. Full report coming soon!

Coming up next — MusicSunday!

Christina, a friend of Patrick’s from America, is creating a book on Happiness. To do this, she’s using the people who have made me happiest in life, and the people who have made you happiest in yours.

So why not go help out? Head over to happymem.com and submit your story.

An instance you always look back on that makes you smile or laugh. A time in your life that you thought was miserable but, looking back, was magical. You can be brief or prolific, silly or profound. You can give background details or you can leave them out. You can focus on the minute, the hour, the weekend, the year. Spend a little while thinking (it’ll be fun, I promise) and then start typing. If you’d like to submit anonymously, feel free.

Here was mine:

I climbed the last of the subway steps and looked around, watching my breath rise in bursts in front of me. “Look for the grandiose buildings”. I recited John’s instructions to myself. As I gauged the lofty stone buildings in front of me, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and turned on my heel to push the button for the pedestrian crossing to continue my journey, which had begun at 7am Irish time earlier — much earlier — that day. John had also warned me that Boston drivers were unforgiving and sure enough, those Chrysler bumpers looked like they could make short work of me. While I was waiting, I extracted my (well, John’s, technically) small video camera from my jacket pocket.

“Pan across Boston at night” I narrated, swiveling around to take in as much of the city as possible in my short video. “It’s been a long day but it shouldn’t be too long more to the café. Like Patrick said -”

My voice-over was cut off by the low bleeping of the traffic light as the little green man made his much-anticipated appearance. Hastily stowing the camera back in my pocket, I crossed the road.

Crema Café, it aspired, was hidden away in a corner of Brattle Street, between a restaurant and what appeared to be a mountaineering store. I stepped in and was immediately greeted with the low babble of talk and the smell of coffee and cinnamon. The place was busy, but not crowded so full that movement or discussion was restricted. No tables were free downstairs so I climbed up the stairs at the back to the balcony of sorts. It was less full — perhaps thanks to the friendly chalkboard message requesting that patrons limit their time at the tables to one hour. Shrugging off my jacket and scarf, I retrieved my book — The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown — from the depths of my bag, trying not to let the contents of my over-packed bag spill out onto the floor. Then, I settled down to wait for one of my brothers to show up, and thus, a great weekend was preordained.

Go on, click here to submit

Sleep Cycle is an app for the iPhone & iPod Touch which has been getting a good bit of media attention recently. Then again, it’s not exactly your everyday game or list application — it measures how deep you sleep is throughout the night and wakes you up when it senses that you’re in your lightest phase of sleep.

How?

It’s quite simple — almost deceptively so, and this is where the rumours/accusations of it being fake stem from — using your iPhone’s accelerometer (the thing that detects if you’re holding the phone in landscape versus portrait mode) to measure how much you move throughout the night, it places your sleeping habits in one of three categories: Deep Sleep, Dreaming and Awake.

That’s all it is. You place it beside your pillow (behind your head) when you’re going to sleep and it does the rest. Those afraid of being woken by calls can solve this by putting their phone on airplane mode.

The second feature is that it wakes you up. “Oh.. great!” I hear you say. Aha, but, does your alarm clock wake you up at a set time, and you virtually always feel crappy because you were in a really deep sleep?

I thought so. Nevermore, thanks to this app. Because it knows how deeply you’re asleep, you give it a window of time in which to wake you up (for example: no earlier than 7am, but not later than 7.30am) and it chooses a spot where you’re very lightly asleep — and thus you don’t feel like crap getting out of bed. It also wakes you up gently – gently lilting noise which gets increasingly louder.

You can see screenshots of the graphs in the posts – my first two nights using it. I slept soundly the first night (I was even comatose (as I call it) from 5am-7am) but the second night was a pretty crummy sleep. My iPhone’s currently in Irish, if you’re wondering why it’s not English.

The app is currently only 79c on the App Store. Click here to buy it while it’s on sale. (iTunes App Store link)

I’m not involved with the developers of this app; they didn’t ask me to review it