Sky’s Blog @ The Dalai Lama Foundation — Spreading the word in a networked world

I was amused and delighted by the topic, but a schedule conflict prevented me from attending a meeting at the Institute For The Future (IFTF) about “the quantified self” a month ago. The topic, however, is completely intriguing to me as I find my life increasingly digitized - as if it weren’t already. (See The Quantified Self Group.)

I picked up an iPhone app called EveryTrail, and have been testing it against measured walking/running courses all weekend, and also tried to use it to measure a walk from my house to the Ferry Building and back on Sunday (it was way off due to GPS inaccuracies in the skyscraper canyons of downtown San Francisco, but it’s spot-on when the GPS satellites are unobstructed, such as on the waterfront).

Here’s (below) a Saturday hike I did from Crissy Field to the Golden Gate Bridge, then back along the Embarcadero to Pier 23, with a return to Crissy Field - a little more than 10 miles. You can double-click to zoom in on the map, and you can drag it to see the kind of detail this app records. The iPhone has to remain on (not sleeping) the entire time in order to record the GPS data, and I ran the battery down below 20% over the course of almost 4 hours. I was also wearing new shoes, and I can hardly walk today my feet are so raw. But it was a lot of fun.

Crissy Field, Marina, Embarcadero

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

I have Ubuntu 8.04 running on an old Toshiba “tablet PC” whose touch-screen no longer functions (and Windows therefore malfunctions), and yesterday Ubuntu 8.10 was released so I jumped right on the bandwagon to try to install it so I could test it out.

My choice was to install using VMWare Fusion on Macintosh OSX, so I downloaded the Ubuntu 8.10 distribution, burned a CD, installed VMWare Fusion’s 30-day trial version for OSX, and then first installed 8.04. That installation went without a hitch, as Fusion detects the CD and the version of Ubuntu and goes right ahead and without any problem installs a virtual machine that seems to run flawlessly.

Installing the 8.10 distro, however, was odd. Fusion first warned me that it was a pre-7.0 Linux distribution, but allowed me to move forward.

Once installed (which I let run overnight because it just was a terribly slow process), 8.10 did run, but “VMWare Tools” didn’t install. So I found the VMWare Tools install volume and ran a “manual” installation from Terminal. It required (automatically) recompiling a lot of modules for the (upgraded Linux) kernel. Following that process, I was able to reconfigure the screen to greater than 800×600, which I guess means that the tools were successfully installed. I installed a few plug-ins (such as Flash for the browsers) and they work just great. A bit scary, but looks like it was a success.

I didn’t need to refer to other sources, but look around if you find you need help.

It’s been a whole month since I wrote anything in my blog? What happened? (Or rather, what did not happen?)

Well, let’s just blame it on Twitter. Or on the new iPhone. Or on two clients wanting 70-hour weeks from me all month. Or on processing 4 hours of teacher training videos.

Nah, let’s just blame it on Twitter.

Twitter seems to have taken a big bite out of my blogging energy lately.

I primarily use Twitteriffic on my iPhone to both follow and to create new tweets, but I also love Twitterfox (a plug-in for the FIreFox browser) if I’m at a computer (it just pops up a little panel showing the most recents, and lets me quickly twipe a new tweet whenever I feel the need.

But why do I even bother with Twitter? - because I get stoked with a dozen new ideas every day! In the old days, “kids” used Twitter to vacuously and narcissistically communicate “I’m having breakfast” or “I’m on the bus” or “I’m at the coffee shop.” But somehow a large number of busy people realized that not only was this a waste of a good communication medium, but something better could actually be done with it - and now what we do is communicate concepts, places, activities and ideas of interest to our group. Someone might be experiencing writer’s block and need inspiration and put out a call for help that explains the concept she’s working on, and get back a half dozen interesting tangential ideas! Another might have returned from a trip and posted photos - and will put up a tweet pointing to the photos. Someone else will be at a conference and will tweet about each speaker’s primary concept.

You have to carefully pick who you “follow” (whose tweets you subscribe to) on Twitter, but once you have your list tuned well, you have constructed a channel that lets you really stay in touch with the ideas and activities that will surface as blog posts and news in the next 24 to 48 hours. And you get a real boost from knowing what your friends and colleagues are working on and thinking about.

At first when Mike Liebhold (of IFTF) pointed me at the Netshare iPhone application from Nullriver, I was hopeful that we possibly could have a “tethered iPhone.” This means we could use an iPhone to allow our Mac to have access to the Internet when on the road.

3G phones are generally capable of being linked or “tethered” to a computer via bluetooth or USB in such a way that the computer can use the phone as a connection to the Internet. I used my Moto RAZR that way for several years, paying for a $20/month data plan. Although tethering provided between 40k and a maximum speed of 80k (bits per second) or roughly 2x phone line speeds, it was nevertheless really handy in those moments when I was far from free wi-fi or phone lines. And I had long ago dropped my AOL dial-up service, so dial-up wasn’t really an option.

And since using the iPhone to connect a computer to the net is a violation of AT&T’s terms of service, none of us ever thought that such an app would be sanctioned and appear in Apple’s online store. Obviously it would be done for “jailbreaked” iPhones, but probably not for those remaining solidly in the AT&T fold.

But the app did appear. Then it disappeared. Then it reappeared. Oof. Was it Brigadoon? Or was it the Flying Dutchman?

So when the app was visible online, this afternoon, I quickly plunked down $10 and downloaded Netshare to test.

Turns out that it doesn’t really tether the phone. Instead, what it does is serve as a SOCKS proxy for your computer, which means the computer can access web sites (including secure HTTPS) thru the phone’s 3G or EDGE connection. That’s really handy at those times when nothing else’s available, but it’s not quite everything that we need. You couldn’t get email onto your computer thru this app, for instance. (At least I haven’t figured out how to.) But you could do webmail. And anyway, you can do email on the iPhone if you have your accounts set up right.

So I’m happy with it as an emergency standby.

Technically the way it works is 1) you configure your Mac to create an ad-hoc Wi-fi network; 2) you configure the iPhone to join that network; 3) you bring up Netshare on the phone, which runs a SOCKS proxy on port 1080, available to any device that’s on the ad-hoc wi-fi network, and voila the Mac has access to HTTP and HTTPS sites thru the proxy software running on the iPhone. The access out “the other side” is via 3G or EDGE.

Slick, and unexpected, and a violation of the TOS, but still this is going to save my neck at some point in the future.