Social Experiments
looksideways

Perth boy now in Singapore.

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November 28th, 4:39am 1 comment

iPhone playing two tracks at once - Trance Mandarin

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In my preparations for my upcoming China trip, I've been listening to some audiobooks to give me a headstart with Mandarin. I don't expect it to teach me huge amounts in the time that I have, but anything I expose myself to can't hurt.

While listening to audiobooks is OK, they can get bland. It's just voice. Literally, voice. At least there are a few different voices, but I am always aware that the rest of the spectrum can be filled up with something. Hence I was determined to find a way to play music at the same time as listening to these podcasts. On a computer, it's easy - open up two media players and run them at the same time. But on iPhone it's a little more difficult.

I imagined that there must be an app out there that allowed you to have separate audio streams with their own levels, mixed into a final channel. I began by searching in the App Store for 'simultaneous songs/audio', and found no results. I tried forums as well - there were a couple of posts on the Apple Community Forums from 2010 that had no useful responses. One suggestion mentioned reversing those y-audio cables you can get to split an audio signal into to headphones.... bit of a shame. As it wasn't a huge problem to me to have music with my audiobooks, I decided to let it be for the time being, and just put up without the music.

Then on the bus on the way back from the east, I had a stupidly brilliant thought. That app I was imagining with separate audio streams already exists and I've been using similar apps for the last eight years... it's a digital DJ deck! I felt so stupid. I immediately downloaded Djay as it's constantly refered to as a brilliant app and is now on sale for $1.99 over Thanksgiving.

And quite rightly, it's a wicked piece of programming. I run ASOT on one deck, and then load my audiobooks into the other deck. There are a number of shortcomings - the first is that a 200MB, 2hr ASOT podcast takes about three minutes to load into the deck. This is fine as you can listen to the audiobook first, and then the ASOT kicks in when it's ready. The second is that although there is an automix function, you can't have one deck continually push track after track from a playlist once the previous track finishes. The automix is for mixing between decks. But that's fine - loading tracks is a breeze and manageable.

The app as well is buttery smooth. No doubt it is killing my battery - I had it crash my phone already today, but then I don't think having a full 2hr podcast on the decks is the way it was meant to be used.

At the end of the day, it works and I'm happy. Now I've just gotta learn to speak. Zai jian!

 

Posted
October 18th, 10:37pm 0 comments

Facebook in Circles

F8 is yet another tech conference I go mad for, alongside WWDCGDCE3Google I/O & TGS. And this year, the newly-christianed Timeline and redesigned Ticker were rolled out to the public almost immediately. Within hours, people had come up with wicked Timeline designs, reviews and reflections. It was a good F8.

Like every Facebook rollout that takes place, people moan and complain about how the new design is the most tragic thing to have ever happened, join a group to 'bring back the old Facebook design' and a week later everyone accepts and moves on. Generally, public opinion has settled for the design, and are accepting the roadmap for the Timeline becoming the enew profile standard.

While I think that the new design is much more functional and aesthetically pleasing than the previous iterations and obviously has been inspired by more than simply a short stroll in the park, there is one fundamental change to the way the information is presented to us that I feel reduces my belief of what Facebook really meant to be.

As someone who is away from my vast network of my friends regularly and dependent on online social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to stay in touch with friends, I relish the thought of catching up on the lives of others through vicarious observation. One of my old school friends was pushing a campaign in London to win an entrepreneurship competition to see Richard Branson. Another school friend is living in Korea for six months with her boyfriend. A girl from small-town Busselton in Western Australia is living in NY.

These people I don't have much direct contact with, nor did I live near them at all, but after seeing them appear in my news feed on a semi-regular basis, I became engaged with their various narratives… the stories of their lives. It was cool. My network is so geographically diverse that I watch these people doing different and amazing things.

Now the obvious reasoning behind the Ticker is to condense the streaming content to the side bar, and then hero in on the top stories, which I think Facebook thinks are the stories I want to read, or that which are the most relevant to me. Unfortunately, there is no real way to tell Facebook what I think my top stories are.

I decided to see how much content actually came in, so I went to my News Feed. Of the first 25 stories that came in, 21 came directly from my friends here in Singapore. The four that weren't Singaporean were from my Australian friends, but really they were acquaintances. 

So it seems that the majority of my top stories are determined based on geography. Although I am sure that the frequency of interaction with users has a part to play in determining whose lives I see and whose I don't, there are still people who I can't explain appearing on my news feed. Maybe they were the only ones who were recently posting… I don't know. But it doesn't seem logical.

It makes sense that they prioritise those who are geographically closer to me in the News Feed than those who are on the other side of the world as they are much more likely to have an impact on my day to day happenings. I'll likely see my neighbour during the day than my friend of ten years in South Korea.

Facebook would argue that all the details are still there - they have been shifted to the side. But now it's wall of text that never ends - continuous, scrolling text. Words and words and words. It reminds me the purpose of film credits - they have to acknowledge all the people involved somehow, so they make it as small and condensed as possible. It achieves the goal, albeit it's not exactly pretty.

My primary concern is that we lose so much from our outside networks. We lose the ability to scroll down and down to see the familiar faces of our friends whether those pictures are from parties, holidays, or the library. And a picture is worth more than a thousand of words from the ticker. They are infinitely more social - this is one reason why things like social photo apps such as Instagram are taking off, and even the idea of photo-sharing was one of the reasons Facebook got a foothold on the social platform market early on. I don't want to read about someone adding a photo. I just want to see it.

And so my News Feed is now primarily reduced to those people around me. The people I would likely see during the day. For some people, this isn't an issue, as Facebook compliments their day to day lives and happenings. But for some people like me, we want to see what everyone else is doing, not just those who are in our city. It's one of the reasons we go onto Facebook. I know I'll have a conversation with my neighbour, and I enjoy preserving that sense of natural discovery through face-to-face communication than finding out from online networks.  And although I am aware I can browse different networks with Facebook's new Smart Lists, not being able to change the News Feed from its default geographically-preferential blog sets a clear stance as to how Facebook perceives the nature of social interaction to be.

In essence, Facebook is reducing the likelihood of our outside networks intruding on our close, inner friendship circles. As a result, we become more circular. We mix with our friends who lives closer to us, and mix less with those away from us. And this effect multiples upon itself - my strong relationships become stronger and my weak relationships become weaker. Without the user making a conscious effort to dilute their social network habits from the defaults that Facebook presents, we are at risk of dropping those friends who we contact intermittently but not regularly. 

I don't think it's a terrible thing, but I miss the more open networks. I hope they will change, or at least allow us to dilute our news feed with more than those who live on our street.

 

Posted
October 3rd, 6:12am 0 comments

Tablets - great for media consumption, not for creating in the classroom

After Amazon's Jeff Bezos set the stage alight last Wednesday with his new Kindle Fire, there were some very powerful responses raised in the reporting that followed. Distilling most of the thoughts eventuated in what people acknowledged to be the first real competitor to the iPad. Why? Because it's doing what tablets are meant to be doing, and doing it well at a price less than half of the entry-level iPad. What Bezos also established that not only was the tablet market here to stay, but that the tablet in itself has a unique role to play within our digital ecosystems. That role? It is definitely not for traditional content creation.

I am a firm believer of this notion. After owning and using an iPad daily within the first month of hitting the shelves in 2010, you can colour me impressed. The interface is slick and speedy, iOS is extremely stable and like most things from Apple, 'it just works'. Not to mention the fact that it is one of the most beautifully engineered pieces of tech currently on the planet. Yes, I am proud to admit this. Unforunately, iOS is not the most beautiful mobile OS on the market right now. That title goes to Windows Phone 7.

The most amazing thing about the iPad however is the ability to read, watch and play games on the device with minimal effort. I really need to stress that it is built to consume media. Like an empty box waiting to be filled, the iPad begs to be crammed full of mp4s and PDFs. I have dropbox sync everything to GoodReader, so any change to my documents is instantly downloaded, whether I am at school, home, or in a coffee shop. My magazines are found in GoodReader. Books are stored in iBooks and GoodReader. Evernote works, as always. My jazz real books are found in GoodReader too. Comics in ComicZeal4, and movies in CineXPlayer. I now can easily avoid printing like a disease nowadays, as everything I can now keep on my iPad. Why waste a sheet of paper for a plane ticket booking?

However, as useful as it is to review files on the iPad, the one thing that the iPad is not is a traditional content creation device. The thought of churning out a page of notes is dreadful. Annotating on a PDF? Not as intuitive as you might think. With no physical keyboard offering tactile feedback, the concept of touch typing is completely destroyed. While at a pinch I'll take notes from a meeting into Evernote, they are never longer than dot points and single line paragraphs. I would love to say that efficient note taking is possible on the iPad, but after trying and trying, it simply is no-where near as efficient as pen/paper and laptop.

Not only that, but it also is not built for another traditional form of content creation - illustration. When the iPad was first introduced, artists around the world celebrated at the thought of a touch sensitive and thin digital tablet for sketching and illustrating. Unfortunately, there was Jobs' famous "You blew it" comment about a stylus and a tablet, and the only styluses to come along are inadequate and lack touch sensitivity. Currently, the best choice for a Wacom-enabled digital sketchbook is EEE PC's EP121 or the newer Samsung Series 7 Tablet, both of which run a fully fledged Windows 7 OS instead of a mobile Android or iOS build. They are completely different beasts altogether - a PC in a slate form.

The only way that I can see it being used for content creation is within the realm of new media such as digital music. Having a dynamic touch interface means that the iPad can be programmed to interact with music creation software to get producers and DJ's away from their laptops during gigs. That said, as a traditional music creation device.... yeah it doesn't really do much. The two standouts are Pianist Pro which I use for for vocal training on-the-go, and the Korg iMS-20, which is an authentic recreation of the classic MS-20 analog synthesiser.

Also interestingly, Autodesk's 123D Sculpt showed up in the App Store a couple of weeks ago and is another good example of using a touch interface for manipulating blobs of virtual clay in 3D, allowing for some basic 3D modelling. These can be exported into desktop modelling packages. Unfortunately, the advantages of interacting with the clay through your fingers is marred by a lack of touch sensitivity.

Bezos' keynote last Wednesday made very clear his position on the way tablets should be used within our lifestyles. There were no sales pitches about word processors, video editors, or or even the inbuilt email client that arrives on the new flagship tablet. It was all about media, media, and media. Tablets aren't meant to write thesises or take notes in class, because tablets that is not what they were built to do. They are great for reading notes, but not marking them up, let alone writing.

Please don't buy yourself a tablet and believe that you will use it to replace your laptop. I guarantee you that you won't. You'll end up trying to convince yourself that your purchase will not be regretted, and you'll try to fudge convoluted workflows to justify your expense. If you buy a tablet, accept that it is a device built around entertainment and reading. Trying to do classwork on it is like using a tricycle to ride around Australia. It's possible, but there are a million other choices that are better. 

My advice for the classroom? Ye ol' pen and paper for the most part. 50c no-lined exercise book from the concourse stationary shop (the one that plays that dreadful American-daytime-soap music) means you can scribble and mindmap your class. Then use your laptop for hardcore writing and presenting.

Then do your readings on your iPad and stop printing those 20 page HBR reports with 12 pages of appendices.

Posted
September 28th, 12:53am 0 comments

Conversation, interrupted… by phone

Mobile phones are amazing. The ability to instantaneously speak with nearly anyone in the world is what we only dreamed of a mere few decades ago. I want to talk to my friend down the road? No problem. I want to catch up with my sister living in Australia? Oh yeah, there are no issues doing that either. Now we live that reality, for better and for worse. They were once cumbersome bricks that travelled in cars, making only telephone calls. Now we can use them to call, text, email, navigate, play games, create art and read. And with new devices, comes a new range of etiquette expectations.

Mobile phones have changed the way we communicate, and will continue to evolve our behaviours as their uses become more varied - along with the arrival of mobile internet on smart phones, within a year we can expect our phones to replace those leather-bound friends we protect in our back pockets. Yes, the days of the humble wallet are numbered, and with tech such as Google Wallet and INES, those days are counting down fast. The phone will become not just the communication centre of our lives, but also our lifestyle hub.

I find my mobile is a great communication tool. Of course, the origins of the mobile phone relate to voice calls. When I receive a phone call from someone, it's usually a pleasant and nice surprise. It can sometimes bring great news, an interesting story, or eventuate in a catch up with friends later this evening. Sometimes, it's the simple inquiry of "What are you doing?" Other times, it can be downright irritating - it might be at an inconvenient time, or I might simply not wish to speak to anyone.

And as much as I appreciate it when someone calls, I really appreciate it when I am speaking with someone directly in person.

What irks me is that this isn't always reciprocated.

You see, communication involvement ranges on a spectrum from being highly involved to minimally involved. An example of minimally involved communication might be a tweet or a wall post sent from a phone. Some asynchronous communication. When I tweet someone, there is an understanding that when I send a tweet to a friend, I might be doing something else at that time. In fact, for those who know me, I am most probably doing something else at that time.

Same as when I SMS - I know that I don't expect an SMS back immediately. Even though I know most people will read the message and then leave it until their phone beeps at them three times, they don't respond in a hurry. Why not? Because they know it's OK not to write back immediately. It's seen as too eager. It's the unwritten social code of SMS. 

That's cool - my friends don't mind. They know that I have the same expectations as themselves. I don't expect them to answer my SMS immediately. Golden rule, hey? Do unto others as you would expect them to do unto you. For tweeting, wall posting and SMSing, we understand that the amount of effort exerted by the sender is relatively small. Therefore, it's a low form of communicative engagement.

Contrast that with someone who meets you in person. Say you set a time, date and location, and you agree to meet one another for the purposes of doing whatever. You deliberately plan ahead, rather than spontaneously shotgun a message through the ether. You can chat, you can laugh, share coffee, stare into each others' gaze - the most important thing is that you commit to see one another in person. In person. Even if you bump into someone at the supermarket, you are still staring at someone face to face. The only technology involved is your evolved larynx that reproduces speech. There is no higher form of engaging with another human. That is of course until the day they manage to fuse brains together into one tubular entity for the sake of 'communication', but you probably won't be as free to share a coffee when they are doing that one. 

So when you are sharing those chats, laughs and gazes with your friend, your phone rings. Someone wants a spontaneous engagement with you, but at a lower level of engagement. However, you have already engaged with someone at a higher level - you are doing the chatting/laughing/gazing thing with them. 

My question is why would someone prioritise a phone call over a face-to-face engagement? To me, the person calling can wait. Sure, what they might have to say is important… but everything is important these days. The girl who sweeps the floor at the coffee shop is doing something important. The gentleman selling the Big Issue is doing something important too.

To me, the most important thing in my mind at that moment is the person right in front of me. Therefore, I choose to leave my phone to ring out. On iPhone, you press either of the volume buttons when it rings, and it shuts off both the buzz and the sound. Do I feel guilty? No, not really. I would expect people to do the same to me. I would expect them to understand that I am already engaging with someone. If I were to say, "excuse me, I'll be taking this call," it's similar to putting someone on hold on the phone and picking up the other line. You are multitasking engagers - that would seem rude, wouldn't it? 

And typically, the type of important event I am told about over phone could have easily been answered in an email or SMS. The importance of that event typically borders on something like, "We cannot book a study room on Thursday," or "Where are we going for dinner tonight?" And even if something life changing was hanging on that phone call, would the different between me knowing in a half hour as opposed to immediately change the outcome? If we look at the large perspective of life, probably not.

I blame the regime our society us trained us with - we inherently fear missing out on something important. This is particularly evident in Singapore, where kiasu, a Hokkien word that translates to 'fear of losing,' is thrown around the management university both in word and thought more than I'd like. We are so afraid on not coming in first, that we sacrifice the simple pleasures in life, like an uninterrupted conversation with someone. 

The phone is the second highest form of communicative engagement behind face-to-face communication. However, society encourages us to prioritise the phone over a real world meeting. 

I am not undermining the importance of communication with voice - I am a huge advocate for rich media communication experiences. What I do believe however is that we can more efficiently express ourselves given the technologies we have today. The truth is our mobile phone is no longer a brick that lives in the car, locked to a life making only voice calls. We can SMS, tweet and email our friends in less time than it takes to have a phone conversation. You have myriads of ways to communicate with people. Use them, and indulge in the pleasures of uninterrupted face to face conversation.

Filed under Smartphones Society Tech
Posted
September 25th, 6:35pm 0 comments

New gear - flashes and keys

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In the last two months I have been seriously considering picking up some photography and music gear. After balancing the numbers, I figured the poor American dollar meant that it would be cheaper to pick it up from the US and have it shipped to me here in Singapore, than to actually buy here in Singapore itself. Case in point - Akai MPK is US$70 on Amazon. Buying the same keyboard locally is over SG$200. I could buy more than two from Amazon for the same price.

I set up an account with Shipito.com earlier this year for this purpose of buying overseas. Shipito act as a middleman between users and US-based vendors, and as as result I have an American postal address. They are exceptionally efficient and provide a huge amount of information to us through their website. I had a DHL Priority package sent to me - it departed Torrance, California last Wednesday, and was delivered to me Friday evening. Shipito are really cool guys and I highly recommend them. Their service charges are extremely reasonable as well.

I bought an Akai MPK Mini, a 580EX MII Speedlight, Hoya 72 UV filter, speedlight extension cord, some Bose IE2 headphones for gym, Honl speed strap and colour filters, a diffuser, intervalometer and a mini softbox. Needless to say, Friday was a good day.

Posted
September 23rd, 3:45am 1 comment

The day I believed my Macbook had been stolen

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Two days ago, I had a big scare. Nothing really bad happened, thank god. It's not like I lost a finger or severed an arm or heard that a friend of mine got hit by a car. Really, it's more of a #firstworldproblem. I was scared that my laptop had been stolen. It wasn't actually stolen, but as far as I was concerned, I had convinced myself that it was. Ultimately, it was a reminder of how carelessness can eventually cause huge headaches.

Now I tend to be pretty pedantic when it comes to minding my personal possessions. I blame this on my Mum, who once as a (very proud) single traveller, ensured that we take as much care guarding our personal possessions as she once did. This means I have habits now like 'idiot checks', when you scour an public area before you leave for any dropped items, and wrapping my bag strap around my leg when sitting on a plane or train. It's very useful though, as I haven't had any major cases of lost phones or cameras. This time however, I let my bag out of my sight, and things went badly. 

The story is rather simple. I had been asked to help out performing at SMU's ICON Peace Ceremony. It is a yearly campus-wide event that celebrates the international diversity of SMU's students, where we walk holding flags and celebrate the peace we have here in Singapore. I had been asked to play not only the Australian flag-wielding patriot, but also the piano for Gloria and Charles, who were singing Andrea Bocelli and Celine Dion's 'The Prayer'. I stashed my satchel bag in the back corner of a secured meeting room within the Office of Student Life. The staff assured me it was a safe area. I had my MacBook Air in that bag, so I had hoped it wouldn't go walking.

So we did practices from 10am through to the ceremony, and had lunch afterwards. It was about 2pm before I got back to the student office to pick up my bag. Evidently, I was a little later than the others, and all the remaining bags had been emptied from the secured room and placed next to the door in the Office. Inside the room, board staff members had gathered for a meeting. My bag was not outside. After communicating with a staff member inside the room with sign language, it was decided that my bag was not in the secured room either.

What a mess. I decided that I needed to check the inside of the room, however the meeting was still place and the room could not be entered until the meeting had closed, which was likely to be over an hour. I left my number with Jeremy, one of the OSL staff. He assured me that he would check himself when they finished. I headed back to the hostel with my wallet and water bottle.

About an hour later, I received a call from Jeremy - he said he had looked in the room and it was not there. He was very sorry, but promised to call back later if he had any more information. He talked about CCTV amongst other things. I was quite astonished - I had believed my laptop had been stolen.

Then, a barrage of questions stole my concentration. What was the last thing I was working on? What would be the first thing they see when they open the screen? Would I have to buy a new Macbook? How much do they cost? More importantly, where exactly was my laptop? Who was looking at it? What were they looking at? Were they keeping it for themselves, or would they sell it? I mellowed on the thought that somewhere in Singapore, my laptop existed. 

After I had straightened out my thoughts, I tried to establish exactly my emotional reaction to the situation. I opened up my big Macbook and went to my mail client, looking to see what would be seen by the new owner of my other Macbook. First mistake: I didn't have my master passwords set for when my laptops wake from sleep. My inbox was a hive of personal information. There were Facebook messages, my address, my name, PayPal sending me receipts. Every one of my accounts was open for the taking. 35,000 emails just there. And sure, it's not like I have any really personal pieces or thoughts in my email accounts or anything personally damaging, but they contained my life. No doubt they could access my Facebook, Twitter, Google accounts if they went online. And my DropBox syncs directly to the computer too. That's another case in itself.

What was the most painful thought was not the fact that these-would-be-thieves had a new laptop. Rather, it stressed me out that every facet of my life was stored, in some way, shape or form, on that laptop. I hoped that if it had been stolen, they would format the drive and be on with it. They can have a new laptop, fine, but I don't want them going through my stuff. And I'm sure that would be the first thing they did. Going through the con. The victim's possessions. Finding out who they were, and what they could salvage to make their theft even more profitable.

I realised I had invested a stupid amount of blind faith into my theft-protection scheme. Some things are just unavoidable. So if in this case I had lost my laptop, I would ensure that next time my laptop would be lost, they could do what they want with it, as long as they didn't have my life. That's all I wanted. I decided that if I didn't hear back from Jeremy with some better news in the next few hours, I would go through and change all my accounts. Even if they could read my life from that day backwards, I would not let them read what followed. I remember reading that Apple is rolling out Find my Mac with the iCloud. Alas, I don't have a developer account so I missed that boat. I continued feeling sorry for myself, and read some case studies on Macs that had been tracked and found with software like Undercover and the open-source Prey. If only I had installed something like this beforehand!!

Thankfully, I heard back from Jeremy within another hour. The news was that he had found my bag - it seems that I had put it in the furthest possible point of the room. It had my laptop in. I was hugely relieved.

Nevertheless, some lessons were learned on Wednesday. I have set master passwords on both my laptops, and a family licence of Undercover for up to five devices on one already. The other I will fix this afternoon.

Moral of the story: Don't take your computer privacy lightly. Keep master passwords set and don't take chances.

 

Filed under stolen Macbook SMU Tech
Posted