Tech News Today

Back in June 2010 Tom Merrit left CNET to start a daily tech show on the TWiT network. It’s serves as my main source for tech news, like a 6 o’clock news for tech.

• Official Site
• Wikipedia
• iTunes Link

Industrial Strength Nightmares

I’m fairly musically agnostic. I really like a lot of different genres of music. ISN Radio is my main source for Industrial music. Not a huge fan of the host (sorry), but the music makes up for it. If you’re interested in expanding your music horizons, check it out.

• Official Site
• iTunes Link

CBC’s Spark

It’s from the CBC it’s about technology, they interview smart people and it’s awesome.

• Official Site
• iTunes Link

The Talk Show

Daring Fireball’s Jon Gruber is kind of like the Rush Limbaugh of Apple punditry. He mainly talks about how awesome Apple is.

• Official Site
• iTunes Link

Film Sack

Four extremely nerdy men in their late-thirties review bad movies. If that is not great enough, their “Bonus Sack!” commentary is especially great.

• Official Site
• iTunes Link

MBFloods.ca is a resource for crowd-sourced flood data. Background info is on Ushahidi.com.

MTS has a few webcams setup around the province, The Winnipeg Free Press plotted them on a google map.

Look at all the water!

A VPN (or Virtual Private Network) is a system for securely joining a remote network over the internet, typically they’re used to allow remote workers secure access to their company’s internal networked file system and other network resources. When a computer connects to a VPN all internet traffic can be configured to route through that VPN. As a side-effect, this re-routed traffic appears to be coming from whatever geographic location the VPN server. In other words, if you connect to a VPN in the USA, you can use geo-restricted sites – like Hulu and Pandora –  from anywhere in the world; if you use a VPN located in the UK, you can access BBC iPlayer and Spotify. You get the picture, see Wikipedia for all the glory details.

A while ago, someone decided that they could charge money for access to this side-effect. When you to a search for something like US VPN you get a tonne of results, some free, others paid. It’s hard to tell them apart and for the most part, they’re fairly similar. The main differentiating factors for the purposes of watching geo-restricted video are connection speed and cost.

Truth be told, before VPNAuthority contacted me I had not tried using a VPN to access US content, at least not in a very long time. I had assumed that the free options were too slow and the paid options weren’t worth it. I’m not about to shill for VPN Authority just because they set me up with a free account (sorry guys). It’s only fair to pit them against some of their competitors. So, I took a look at 2 other services: HotSpot Shield and CastleVPN. HotSpot shield seems to be the most popular free VPN and I picked CastleVPN because they had a professional looking website.

HotSpot Shield

Price: Free, ad supported.
Locations: US only
Speed Test:

Verdict: With the low speed and even lower ping, watching Hulu is very erratic and practically impossible. As if that wasn’t bad enough, HotSpot Shield injects ads above the main body of the page you’re browsing and let’s just say the ads tend to be of the low-quality, annoying nature. I would not recommend HotSpot Shield.

Castle VPN

Price: 12months @ $7/mo – monthly @ $9/mo
Locations: US Only
Speed Test:

Verdict: Although the download speed is a fair bit slower than HotSpot Shield, the low ping times seem to making up for it. Page loads were reasonably fast and watching Hulu was worked fine. I’m unsure how/why the upload speed is so much faster than download, or how this affects the overall connection. At $7 – $9 per month I’m not sure that the service is worth it though, more on that later.

VPN Authority

Price: 12months @ $5.30/mo – monthly @ $7.10/mo
Locations: US, UK, Czech Republic, Slovakia
Speed Tests (US, UK):

Verdict: Relatively speaking, the download speed are great on both sides of the pond! The other two services offer their own applications that simply the install, setup and connection process for both Windows and Mac. Unfortunately VPNAuthority does not have an installer for mac, so the setup process is a little more technical. Then again, I prefer using a native OS feature whenever possible.

Conclusion

Two of this blog’s most popular posts of all time are “How to watch Hulu in Canada” and “How to watch Comedy Central from Canada.” It’s really hard for me to recommend a paid VPN solution when there are perfectly workable – free – solutions/hacks, if you have the time to tinker. The downsides of hacks are that they’re tailored for specific websites and they really only make sense in a desktop environment. Though when I was streaming video through a 3 – 5Mb/s VPN tunnel I found browsing at the same time to be painfully slow. So for that reason, I wouldn’t really recommend using VPN unless you’re dedicated to watching online and nothing else (well, I suppose you can do low bandwidth things like twitter or IM).

I might recommend a paid VPN solution to someone who’s cut their cable and has some sort of home theatre PC or set-top box. As far as I can tell, both Boxee and AppleTV support VPN settings. Since most of the content we actually want to watch is geo-locked to the USA having decent access to a US IP would give you a much fuller experience. With a VPN, you can just set it and forget it. At $5 – $9 per month is significantly less than you’d paid to access US content via cable TV.

As far as VPNAuthority’s service specifically, their prices are low and their level of service is high. For that reason, I would recommend them. But, I’d want to do a more comprehensive comparison of their competitors before declaring them “the best VPN service evar”!

Worth Noting

Detectability: Based on my limited knowledge of how they work, I believe it would be fairly difficult for a website to block VPN traffic outright. But, I assume these VPN services route a lot of customer traffic through a given IP (or range of IPs). It may be possible for a site like Hulu to flag these IPs as suspicious if they detect a large number of requests coming from a small number of IPs. If the traffic looks suspicious enough, they could technically ban an IP range. I don’t know whether this would happen or how easily someone like VPNAuthority could recover from this.

Security: Seeing as VPN tunnels are secure channels, another added bonus of is security over public wifi. Using a VPN is makes you invulnerable to firesheep. On the flip side, a nefarious VPN provider could preform a man-in-the-middle attack on you.

Pay Website: While a VPN will technically give you access to paid services like Netflix.com, Amazon’s MP3 and movie stores, spotify etc; these services almost may require you to have a credit card with a US (or UK) billing address.

Legal: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but it’s worth noting that this type of work-around is almost certainly against every one of these website’s terms of service and I would not be surprised if it broke some industry-written US law. Use at your own risk.

After hearing Scott Johnson talk about Pomodoro on a few of his podcasts, I decided to give it a try last week. In all honesty, I did very little reading on the subject, I based my implementation on his description and reading through the (short) Wikipedia entry. In theory the Pomodoro Technique is supposed help you force yourself to stay 100% focused on a given task, by giving you a 5 minute break as a reward. At the end of the day, the sum of the breaks is should be less lost productivity than the sum of all memes, IM jokes, emails and reddit visiting, etc that you’d normally be distracted by throughout the day. It worked for me, for about 6 hours. Overall I had mixed feelings about Pomodoro.

My main productivity boost came from shutting down IM and twitter clients; turning off email checking; and making a conscious effort to avoid all web usage. After the first couple of pomodoros it became really easy for me to do this for a 25 minute stretch. Once I was in the zone, I felt really productive and got a lot of work done.

While 25 minutes was the prefect amount of time to try to trick myself into doing a small task, it didn’t leave a lot of time for larger tasks (hell, this blog post has taken me way more than 25 minutes to write) and it didn’t give me a lot of leeway to sync up with other people’s schedules. I found myself needing more than 25 minutes for some programming projects and I had to postpone a phone call in order to stay on target.

In conclusion: all that said, give it a shot. Especially if you’re self-employed or self-motivated. You’ll probably learn something about yourself, your workflow, the kinds of things that distract you the most. Who knows, it might be a better fit for you.

PS.

• Check out PomodoroTechnique.com for a bunch more info.
• I used a little desktop timer Focus Booster. It’s great, except it doesn’t give you the 15 minute breaks after 4 pomodoros.
• There are a bunch of iPhone apps for Pomodoro.

1. Car Talk

Car Talk has been on NPR for 33 years. It has been podcast for 3. The hosts, Click and Clack even made a cameo in Pixar’s Cars as Rusty and Dusty Rust-Eze. I am probably one of the last people on earth to have heard the show. I’m not too sure how to explain my fascination with the show.  If you’ve ever owned a car, or ridden it one, I highly recommend this show.

Wikipedia
Official Site
iTunes Link

2. The 404

As a die-hard Buzz Out Loud listener I was initially turned off when they hijacked the BOL feed at CES 2009 (or was it ’08?). I didn’t give them a chance for quite some time. Once I gave them a chance I quickly grew to love their brand of humor. If you’re of BOL or anything on the TWiT Network, definitely give these guys a listen.

Official Site
iTunes Link

3. AppSlappy

Scott Johnson w/co-host Eric take about iPhone apps news and reviews. It’s basically the same tried and true formula used on The Instance: a little bit of news, some  rumours and scuttlebutt, a few reviews and user feedback. Makes for a great and informative show.

Official Site
iTunes Link

Honourable Mentions: Everything else from Frogpants Studios – Scott Johnson is the new Leo Laporte; The Movielicious; Hype Machine Radio

Most Irrelevant Podcast of 2009: The Dawn & Drew show. I know they’re pioneers and I used to be a big fan. But it just became too much of the same boring 90s psuedo-hippie BS. 2009 is the year I finally unsubscribed for good.

1. Pandemic

Pandemic is the most original and interesting game I’ve played since being introduced to the board game revival a few years ago. In short: it’s a fully co-op game where you work as a team to rid the world of viruses. You play with a team, each player has certain special skills.

With 3 ways to lose and only 1 way to win the game is also really, really challenging…in a good way. The gameplay mechanic is such that you’re essentially racing against the clock, in a losing battle against global pandemic on multiple fronts. Also because it’s a fully co-operative game, players often in a situation where they need to coordinate moves and ability.  I’ve found that the main opponent is often the players egos. We’re so used to competing against others for a solo victory that actually co-operating and managing resources amongst each other is the most challenging element.

The game is technically set up for 2 – 4 players. I’d recommend a full 4, the smaller games are essentially scaled down from the 4 player game.

Publisher’s Site
Best Dang Games Video Review
BoardGameGeek

2. Agricola

Agricola is a farming, resource collecting game. It is well balanced, complex and loads of fun. The starting conditions of the game are so variable that I have yet to come up with a general strategy for Agricola. It’s been the #1 game on BoardGameGeek for quite some time, the only reason I’m ranking it lower than Pandemic is simply because I think pandemic is a more unique game.

The game is playable with 1 – 5 players. Agricola is a little different than most games, you have an almost completely different set of starting conditions and a different deck of available cards depending on the number of players. This lends to it’s extreme re-playability.

Board Games With Scott extensive 30 minute video review
BoardGameGeek

3. Bang!

Published in 2002, this game certainly isn’t new and it’s not actually a board game. Bang! is a wild west theme card game. Each player has a hidden role card (except for the sheriff) and different win conditions based on their role, this guess and bluff gameplay element makes it a great party game. Additionally, players are dealt character cards with unique abilities and hit points.

I don’t think the game is as well balanced as it could be, it’s quite hard for the sheriff to win and extremely hard for the outlaws to lose. But the game is quick, lasting about 15 – 30 minutes, so you can easily play 3 or 4 games in a sitting. If you think of each game as a “round,” the fact that players change roles each game lends to great fun overall.

4 – 7 Players. I recommend at least 5.
PS. It’s translated from Italian, some of the rules a nonsense. Read the FAQ.

BoardGameGeek
Wikipedia

Most Over-rated Game of 2009: Powergrid, currently #3 on BGG. The mental math is extremely difficult and really takes away from the game experience. It’s also unclear what steps need to be taken in order to win, the win condition is not concrete enough. The art is nice though.

Most Anticipated Game of 2009: Battlestar Galatica. Seems fun. That is all.

I had a Eureka! moment earlier today when I originally started this post, it occurred to me – newspapers could learn a lot from the Nine Inch Nails distribution model. In a nutshell, the NIN model concedes that music is free, instead of trying to charge people for something that already free, they charge fans for limited edition tangible goods: things like special run vinyl, signed copies of things, tee-shirts, etc.

A couple of ways I think the newspaper industry could add value to their dead tree version:

1) NO ads
2) ONLY distribute coupon type ads in print, don’t make them available online. Encourage advertisers to pay extra for these premium coupons.
3) Free stuff – throw in some tickets to stuff, maybe a glossy photo of scantily clad firefighters. Whatever the audience would apprieciate.
4) Allow subscribers to opt-in to receiving an email copy of their favorite section of the newspaper. An emailed copy would be easy to take with you on a mobile device like an iPhone without having to lug around a fat wad of paper.

I have no idea how the finances work out for any of these ideas. I just really think that if the print newspaper needs to survive, then publishers need to inject some value.

In walks AppFigures.com. This site provides exactly the type of data I would expect Apple to provide. It automagically grabs your iTunes sales reports every day, then uses the data to generate Google analytics style charts and graphs.  Before using this site I only had a vague idea of how many apps I’d sold.

If you’re an iPhone developer I highly recommend you drop everything and start using this app.

(Thanks to Josh for the comment recommendation)

I spent a few hours this week trolling random strangers, just to see how this type of conversation could possibly work. I was surprised to find myself getting a major feeling of deja vu. Omegle reminds me a lot of my early days on the internet in the late 90s. It reminds of random conversations on ICQ before spam bots forced me to lock down my profile; or IRC conversations. Even though you technically had to identify yourself with at least a nickname or email address; back in those days social networks really didn’t exist and ever major search engines weren’t that great. A search for someone’s nickname or email address was not likely to turn up any results.

On to the review:
A lot of the strangers I bumped into were outright trolls. I’d say a good 70-80% of the people on there are teenage boys (in spirit) trying really hard to offend random strangers, with stupid ASCII art, gross-out links, stupid phrases/memes, request to “cyber,” random gibberish, the usual. It’s worth mentioning that there are no reporting mechanisms, you cannot flag or ban a user – that, after all, would make the service seem less anonymous. It’s the perfect breeding ground for trolls.

The interface makes it easy enough to shutdown a conversation and start a new random chat. So despite the rampent troll population, I found it possible to have a normal/serious/civilized converation. The key seemed to be to start the conversation by saying something to the affect of “please be normal.” It was when I had these (few and far between) “normal” conversations that the deja vu really set in. I had conversations about the weather, what I ate for lunch, the strange customs of far away lands, faux debates about religion, politics, websites…I got the feeling that I’d had every one of those conversations 10 years ago.

What was old is new again.

It’s hard to say whether the site is going anywhere, or if it’s creator even wants more out of it. In it’s current state, it’s nothing more than a moderately amusing time wastes. But I thought the same thing about twitter when it first launch.

I’ve just released my first iPhone app – iPlayPhone – it’s a toy phone for toddlers. I built it for my 1yr old son who’s always running off with my phone. It’s simplictic but super fun. All the buttons play goofy sounds. The onShake sound totally baffles my son, he’s like “woah, i shake it and is makes sounds…weird.”

Here’s the iTunes link: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=308425921