The Substantially Similar Weblog

There should be some name for spam blog comments are actually relevant to the entry to which they respond. Might we someday reach a point when spam becomes so relevant that we actually like it?

[Tags]Spam[/Tags]

Dear LazyWeb:

Our kitchen laptop is on its last legs. I’d like to replace it with a standalone LCD and a cheap, quiet, low-power CPU with just one or two gigabytes of storage for the operating system (music and other data are stored on a server in the basement). Can someone point me in the right direction? This is an instance where Google doesn’t provide an obvious leading/consensus solution. Most searches for solid state computers point to laptops, which isn’t what I want. The closest thing I’ve found is the Zonbox, but I’m not interested in their network/subscription storage model. Ideal specs:

• Total cost less than $300 (preferably less than $200)
• High-end Pentium III or lower-end Pentium IV, or equivalent. Should be able to play ogg files and browse today’s overactive websites at the same time without user latency. No need to support graphics-intensive applications like gaming or video editing.
• Built-in wireless networking. Support for a PCMCIA wireless card would also be acceptable. Most data will be accessed via an NFS share on the WAN.
• 1GB or 2GB of Flash memory for storage.
• Standard VGA out, preferably at least 1280×1024 (although 1024×768 would be okay).
• USB ports for keyboard, mouse, possibly external hard drive storage when needed.
• Painless Debian/Ubuntu installation, including out-of-the-box suspend/resume functionality.

Suggestions?

Michael Hirschorn in this month’s Atlantic reduces my generation’s entire cultural zeitgeist to a single word: quirk.

Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting. It’s easy for David Cross’s character on Arrested Development to cover himself in paint for a Blue Man Group audition, or for the New Zealand duo on Flight of the Conchords to make a spectacularly cheesy sci-fi video about the future while wearing low-rent robot costumes. But the pleasures are passing. Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the ’90s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd … but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair—a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn’t require you to take creative responsibility. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Hirschorn makes a fair point which, I think, can be restated that much of the content I enjoy is really just candy.

The Atlantic seems to have recently figured out its readership (or at least figured out me). Hard to Swallow (by B.R. Myers, who more typically writes about Korean issues) is a pointed moral critique of modern food lovers (chowhounds?) and food writing (including Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, much read by my contemporaries). If I weren’t already a vegetarian, I might take umbrage.

“Insider baseball” pieces on Karl Rove and Michael Gerson are also excellent, and in the case of the former quite timely.

To wrap up this encomium, props to the magazine for its clean new website design, which I believe premiered today, and for including an embedded Youtube video in the online version of the quirk article.

Fascinating and surprising (at least to me) observation on the Netflix Community Blog about user demand for half-star movie ratings:

So here’s what I learned from months of testing this across the country: when we make the ½ star options possible, we get fewer ratings. Significantly fewer ratings. We have argued these results internally for some time, and our best guess is that the complexity of doubling the number of choices from 5 to 10 deters many people from rating, so they just give up. (“3 stars? No, 3 ½ stars.. no… 3 stars… no… oh forget it…”)

Netflix was offline for nearly 24 hours — almost weeks in Internet time for a business whose entire existence is online. It was astonishing, at least to me, that a major Internet service could be disrupted for so long.

According to my people on the ground in San Francisco, a transformer explosion was the cause.

It’s a good reminder that the Net is more fragile than we might think.

UPDATE: the original source in California recants. The Netflix outage remains a mystery. Explanations are welcome.

As I sit here waiting for my 8:23am train, which actually will never come, I just discovered http://www.wheresthet.com/ (“Where’s The T,” if you need it spelled out). This third-party site serves a no-frills, no tables, no graphics, no flash, sensibly organized list of MBTA interruptions. This is one of the best implementations I’ve seen of this sort of thing — absolute simplicity. I immediately added it to my cell phone bookmarks and Google Reader subscriptions.

More information from the creator.

A very nice addition/complement to the search keys extension, google search with keyboard shortcuts. Just add &esrch=BetaShortcuts to your query string, e.g.. You can make it permanent from the Firefox search bar by editing google.xml to add:

<Param name=”esrch” value=”BetaShortcuts”/>

Earlier: search keys extension for patent search.

I’m still figuring out whether Twitter is more than a distraction. It occurs to me that it has perhaps the three most important design elements for a successful new web-based (and particularly social-networking) technology:

1. Twitter works as a simple general-purpose tool with very little structure determining how, exactly, people are supposed to use it. Compare, for example, with the many social networking sites (Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe.net, etc.), each of which have a fairly specific idea about how people should use it (dating, professonal networking, and, um, whatever they do on Tribe, respectively). The only limitations on how Twitter can be used are a few aspects that are defined by the medium — basically, messages short enough to fit into an unextended cell phone text message.
2. Twitter doesn’t duplicate any existing system or medium for communication. Compare, again, the social networking sites, each of which has some version of “email” that is internal to the site. Would I ever want to “send someone a message through LinkedIn” if I actually had their email address? Twitter, on the other hand, doesn’t have an exact one-to-one correspondence with any existing email, text messaging, or instant messaging systems. It’s a sui generis form of communication.
3. Twitter doesn’t require everyone to sign up to participate. Anyone can follow my Twitter feed without actually having their own Twitter account. This is essential to solving the “critical mass” problem. Of course there are benefits to establishing an account, but as far as I can tell, the only features that you don’t get without an account are those which necessarily would require an account. (Compare, again, most of the networking services mentioned above, where you need an account to view people’s profiles.)

(Add to this, of course, the now standard requirement that Twitter is free, at least as in beer.)

Now, I’m still not exactly sure how best to use Twitter, but there are some interesting commercial and non-commercial applications featured on the Twitter blog, e.g, this promotion from Dell, and this guy “Twittering My Diabetes.”

Via tikirobot, an interesting interview with Craig Newmark. My favorite newly-learned fact: Craigslist never holds meetings.

Just to prevent people from thinking I’ve gotten old and stodgy, I’ve joined the Twitter bandwagon. Here’s my feed, which also appears in my sidebar. I’m reminded of a Utah Phillips quote, from a different context:

Well, and I’m open to all those things. If you live in California, you’ve got to be open; if you’re not they pry you open.

I’m not sure whether I really agree with Twitter–it reminds me of this interesting collection of postmodern thoughts from n+1 magazine:

The Decivilizing Process

As the specific addressee of any set of remarks becomes less important, in the midst of more and more babble, it will become more and more difficult to remember the special status of listening human beings, in the confusion of shouted orders.

But, hey, it’s worth a try.