IPocracy

Passing The Turing Test

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There's a lot of talk of Turing Tests recently. Can it really be so hard to fool people?

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Power Booster

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This really should exist: a simple external battery system for portable computers.

It's all about tradeoffs: weight vs. stamina. If I'm going for a few hours down to the cafe to work, I don't need an all-day battery. If I'm flying to the States, I want enough charge for eight hours of work, including videos if needed.

Carrying extra batteries is fine in theory but swapping batteries in and out is a pain. Further, you can only charge them by using them. This means you can't leave that extra battery charging somewhere. Before a trip you have to spend time explicitly recharging it… a pain. And since batteries are different for each notebook, they're expensive and sit around wasted when you change notebooks.

So here is a simpler solution. The power supply, that small black slab that transforms 110v/240v into the 12v the notebook needs, it has an interface. Onto that interface you can plug an extra booster battery, also a small black slab. It charges when the PSU is plugged in, and feeds the 12v output when not. You can get boosters of different capacities - 2.5Ah, 5Ah, 10Ah, etc. Boosters conform to a standard interface so there are many vendors, who actually compete on price and quality.

The nice thing is that you can, when you travel, keep your spare batteries in your bag, plugged into the PSU, so the laptop on your knees remains light. And of course the same boosters can work with any PSU, any laptop.

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Spirit Hotel, Bratislava

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Perhaps the strangest, yet compellingly enjoyable, hotel I've ever stayed in.

For a random meeting we decided to stay at this hotel in Bratislava:

This is what my room looked like:

The hotel is a kind of live-in surrealist piece of 3D art where every surface, object, and view is shaped and decorated. It's just above the train station, a half hour walk from the center of town. I'd probably go back there just to check if it was still as weird as before.

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New Macbooks

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What surprises will we see from Apple on October 14th?

Engadget reported today of an Apple "notebook" event on October 14th. Here are my predictions of what we'll see in Apple's new line up. Just hunches:

• Solid-state disk offerings across the board, 64GB up to 256GB on the top of the line notebooks.
• LED backlighting on all models.
• Keyboard backlighting on all models except the lower end models.
• Speaking of "lower end", a relatively cheap and small notebook, not a netbook but close. Thin, white, plastic, 0, 11" screen.
• At least one model with 3G built in and sold in conjunction with mobile operators and iPhone contracts. Can you say "Macbook web access included in contract"?
• Aluminum cases for the high end, cheapo plastic for the proles.
• At least one model with a touch screen, starting the move towards an Apple tablet.
• More case color options. Time to accessorize!
• New Macbook Air with a removable battery and 256Gb SSD but still no second USB port. Rats!

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Cloning Kubuntu

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How to clone a nicely running Linux configuration to a new system. I did this with a Kubuntu set-up but it's a general technique that will work with any Linux box.

Here is what happened: I have Kubuntu running very nicely on a Thinkpad X61, and I wanted to get a second-hand X40 for traveling. If you don't know these machines, they're worth looking at. Light, tough, and they run for up to 8 hours on one charge if you push the right buttons. Last week at a random meeting I noticed that about half the participants seemed to have the same little notebook. The X40 is the older version of this ultralight model.

I got my second hand X40, and of course Kubuntu installs fine. But I wanted to clone my existing, tweaked notebook. Most explanations assume the drive sizes are the same but my X61 has a 160 Gb drive and the new (old) X40 a 40-gig drive.

So here is how I got a perfect copy onto the smaller machine. You will need a portable USB drive, or a large USB stick.

Make your backups

First, create a tar file of all system files:

sudo bash
cd /[root directory on removable media]
tar -czf system-backup.tar.gz --one-file-system /bin /etc /lib /sbin /usr /var

Second, create a tar file of your home directory

sudo bash
cd /[root directory on removable media]
tar -czf home-backup.tar.gz --one-file-system /home/myname

Prepare the target system

I installed Kubuntu from the same CD I'd used originally. This ensures I have the same Linux kernel version.

Restore the backups

I attached my USB disk (and confirmed KDE's proposal to mount and browse the disk) and opened a shell window. Then I restored the two backups:

sudo bash
cd /
tar -xzf [path to removable disk]/system-backup.tar.gz
tar -xzf [path to removable disk]/home-backup.tar.gz

Reboot

That was it. My X40 is now a perfect mirror of the X61, including all configurations, stored passwords, ssh keys, etc.

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Brussels Les Bains

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Bruxelles-les-Bain is a kind of month-long party - bar - playground that the city erects along the old canal zone.

It's kind of a "thank you" to the residents of the city for putting up with the chaos and traffic all year long.

This week it's started to be great weather and the beach is filled with people of all ages, sizes, colors. Uniquely for a city with large immigrant populations, Brussels seems to mix really well. Not everyone likes the crowds, the smell of roasting fish, merguez, and goat and beef barbecues. Not everyone likes the endless line of little bars, serving every possible kind of drink. Not everyone likes the playgrounds, the beach volleyball, the boules, the long stretches of sand and little trees.

But for those with a little time on a warm evening or relaxed weekend, Bruxelles-les-Bains shows what a relaxed, uncomplicated city Brussels has become, as people of all origins and colors mix happily and without taboos.

All that's missing, for me, is wifi so I could write this blog on the beach.

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Economics Of Evil

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For some time I've been studying the creation of on-line communities. One of our principles in the activist world is that a community needs a bad guy.

Now, one of my examples for non-activist people is Wikipedia, which is one of the most explosively successful on-line communities. The question is, who is the bad guy in Wikipedia?

At first sight, Wikipedia is a purely positive thing. People contribute knowledge, discuss, edit articles. True, there are some idiots, trolls, and vandals, but overall the results seem to be great. So great that Wikipedia does better than any traditional expert-based encyclopedia. So, does this mean a positive community can work?

The other day some friends and I were discussing a new project to create a kind of wikipedia-style encyclopedia of art and antique objects. The question came up… what about edit rights? Who can edit? And in the answer, I finally understood why Wikipedia works, and why the bad guy principle is so right.

"Anyone can edit," I proposed. "But what about vandals, idiots, and trolls?" came the question. "Let them edit, it's part of the process. The original authors get annoyed, fix the articles, and get emotionally attached to the whole thing. The more edit wars you have, the more people care, and the stronger the community".

So, lacking a clear external bad guy, those people who make your life miserable when you try to do something useful may, in fact, be exactly what you depend on to get out of bed in the morning. Here's a toast to the trolls!

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Aliopacto

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I've been writing short stories over the years. They tend to disturb, that is the point.

I've now put them onto a new site, http://www.aliopacto.com. Alio pacto is Latin for "a different way", it was the title of a book I started some years ago. One of the stories on that site is from the book, the others are random things, the products of early mornings and days on trains.

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Continuous Exposure

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It struck me that the whole concept of digital camera, in imitating the old film cameras, has a fundamental inefficiency. There is, perhaps, a better way.

I've been taking photos. Nikon D40X with 18-135mm lens, a fast and efficient tool that produces the quality I was used to in the old days of B&W film SLRs.

But is the "shutter" the best way to take a picture?

Let me introduce the concept of "Continuous Exposure" or CE. A CE camera has no shutter, though it does have a button for taking pictures. CE needs decent but not perfect optics, it needs no optical zoom, can achieve film speeds of several million ISO, can achieve resolutions of many orders of magnitude better than the actual sensor. The one thing CE is not good at is capturing fast motion.

CE works as follows. The sensor is always active and captures an image continuously, sending it to an image buffer for processing. The image buffer has a very high resolution, as much as 250 megapixels. The sensor data is added, in real time, to the image buffer, using algorithms to detect movement and shake. The image buffer is constantly re-centred around the sensor data. As the image buffer aquires sensor data, it refines the detail of areas where there is more data, so that even in an image with very light and dark areas, both will aquire fine detail. As the sensor provides more and more data for an image, the image buffer gets more and more detail, achieving its full resolution after a fraction of a second or in some cases, a second or two. When the image buffer has fully resolved the image, a small 'Ready' indicator shows on the camera, and the user can take the image. A picture taken before the sensor is ready will show less detail in some areas, especially those moving more rapidly.

Why use CE? Mainly, it replaces expensive components with software and processing power. A much cheaper sensor, combined with a large image buffer and efficient processor can produce better photos than the best professional equipment. Optical zooming becomes less important, as sufficient detail can be aquired to make very smooth digital zooms. Low light hand-held photography becomes much easier. CE can be combined with video recording; lower-resolution video, and high quality selected images.

CE does not, of course, exist. The way to make it would be to prove the software algorithms capable of producing high quality images from video streams (which can act as a kind of CE sensor simulation). The algorithms, once designed, would need to be turned into silicon, since general purpose computers are not feasible in low power cameras.

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Light Notebook Shootout

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After several months of using a MacBook Air, I picked up a Lenovo X61.

Both machines have lots of great features but since it's the things that don't work which eventually matter, I'm going to make this shootout by listing all the things that annoy me.

Cost: The MBA is too expensive. Seriously, this is 2008, we don't expect notebooks to require a second mortgage. Yes, the build quality is great, yes the LED screen is sweet, but over 3,000 Euro is way too much for a notebook.

Battery life: The MBA does about 5 hours average, if you don't do anything heavy like watch video. The X61, which I've tuned to use under 10 watts (thanks, PowerTop) gets over 7 hours of work. Why can't I watch more than a couple of hours of video without killing the battery?

Ports: Part of me loves the "zero ports" attitude of the MBA. But the part of me that uses cameras, iPods, and external portable drives thinks that Apple was smoking weed when they decided that one USB slot would suffice for everything. Neat, yes. Practical, no.

Operating systems: The X61 came with something called "Windows XP". What the heck? I thought they'd have banned that virus trap by now. Still thankfully Ubuntu wiped that out. The MBA refuses to dual-boot Linux. I might be able to wipe OS/X but then how do I manage my iPod? Apple has me trapped, and it's not nice.

Ubuntu: I know this is not part of the X61, but why do I have to tune the operating system to make the notebook work properly? I don't mind editing X.org config files but I'd pay money (seriously) to get an Ubuntu install that works out of the box with my hardware.

Gnome: What is it with that WiFi panel, why can't I get the WiFi to work and worse, why can I not debug the problem??? If you're going to hide stuff, fine. But don't make it impossible to fix when your fancy panels don't work. Update: it magically works, now. Hmfh.

OS/X: Please look at apt-get and learn how software distribution works post-1999. Downloading and clicking on installers is so Windows. No, no, no. Also, Apple, listen: if you want people to stick with your lovely boxes, please make them run KDE or even Gnome so we don't need to find material to run Linux on. It's a 386 CPU, and a BSD kernel, no?

Real estate: Why does the MBA have a huge bevel around the screen and keyboard? It just makes the thing larger than it needs to be. Chop off an inch all the way around, and suddenly the MBA starts to look more portable. And why does that X61 have a huge bulking battery that weighs more than the rest of the machine? Surely something more elegant could be designed.

Screen: In 2003 my ASUS notebook had 1240x1024 resolution. So why do both the MBA and X61 have pathetic resolutions that hark back to 1999? What, TFT technology hasn't improved since then? We don't need the pixels? Pathetic.

Conclusions:

• The MBA delivers a perfect experience where "experience" is redefined to mean "75% of what you actually need".

• The X61 delivers everything you need, where "deliver" means "if you remove the horrid Windows XP and put on a real operating system, you're on your own and Lenovo will pretend you don't exist."

It still astounds me that serious notebook manufacturers have not realized how important it is to deliver fully working, fully specified machines running modern operating systems. Hopefully the crop of cheap small Linux notebooks will show how it should be done.

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