Archivist

    Keeping track of one's digital history is becoming distinctly non-trivial (in programmer terms, this means a challenge that you're not going to do in a day, or a week, and may not actually be a solvable problem).

    I've got a PC with a selection of very large drives in, each containing backups of archives of backups of previous drives going back to the last century in some cases. I've made various attempts over the years to clear this up (or down, whatever you prefer) but there's still many gigabytes of files that may or may not be interesting to me in the future.

    I've also got a whole host of other devices (Amigas, phones, tablets, laptops) that may or may not have content I'm interested in. In 2014, one can comfortably expect this to be video and photos, but historically I've also created text files, music, programs, models - in fact, while the quality may be terrible I've made most types of media at some point.

    What should I keep? What should I throw away? More importantly, how does one find the time to examine and categorise one's digital history?

    When I get (even) older, will I regret pruning and purging content I've created? What kind of emotional response will those WoW screenshots I just deleted have evoked?

    I took a look at some screenshots from my Lady Aerlinthe quest, one of my first (and at the time, pivotal) MMO experiences. I can barely remember the event while looking at the pictures, it doesn't really mesh with my brain-stored memories. I always find this surprising, for some reason.

    When I'm 64 and I've accrued another couple of terabytes of history - will I ever go back and look at it? Will anyone else?

    I have very vague memories of, as a child, watching my father work a slide projector, showing off his holiday travel photos that he'd had processed into little boxes of slides - a box as long as your arm and as wide as your hand could hold nearly 100 pictures. Now I have a box under my stairs that's smaller which holds nearly every important picture or video I've taken in the last decade, and we're talking about tens of thousands of images and thousands of videos. I can just imagine the looks on my boy's faces were I to sit them down and begin and the beginning!

New shoes

Isaac has his first pair of shoes. He's running around the house like a small, pink orang-utan, arms held up in the air for balance. He's so gorram cute. Definitely different in temperament to Gabe. I think they're going to be good friends ;)

Second birthday

This weekend, it would have been Elijah's second birthday. This is just a quick note to say, while we appreciate people want to send cards (and we love the fact others recognise he was, and still is, a hugely important part of our lives) ... sending a "happy second birthday" card isn't really the way to go. It's not a happy day. It's something we commemorate, but I think the idea of celebrating it is pretty strange for us.

If you do want to make Nic super happy, a "thinking of you" card would be hugely appreciated. As for me, it's obviously massively important to me but I'm not a flowers or cards kind of guy - maybe buy me a beer ;)

A huge amount has happened over the last two years, not least awesome little Isaac. We've both gained a little distance from the most disruptive and disgusting event in our lives. It's touched us all, mostly in negative ways but we do try and take positives from it where we can.

Hopefully we're making some progress with the GMC investigation into the consultant's actions on the day. More info on that to follow.

Technology socks

    Somewhere between rocks and sucks, my recent Sonos purchase has been driving me mad today. When it works it's fantastically transparent. A combination of Spotify premium and every compute device in my house acting as a remote means I've been listening to a hell of a lot more music this past two months than probably the whole of last year - oddly enough not a much wider variety, simply the same tracks many more times.

    I'm truly loving it, when it works. When it doesn't (like today, when I'm unable to authenticate my Spotify account via Sonos, for some unfathomable reason, or like last week when my wireless network acted as though my friends has brought an EMP generator into the house) it makes me realise just how frustrating it is when things don't "just work".

    My Neato Signature Pro, purchased at about the same time, has so far simply "just worked". I plop it down, it vacuums the room, I empty the dust box, rinse and repeat. Fantastic technology. I'm certain that if it had usability or reliability issues, I'd be slagging it off but it hasn't demonstrated any problems yet, so in my books it's perfect.

    Technology is hitting many targets now that even recently I would have considered science fiction. I'm confident that we'll hit a few more benchmark points over the course of this decade; Consumer VR for entertainment and (more importantly) teleconferencing / teleparticipation. Automated vehicles (although this is likely to bleed into the next decade before it becomes predominant for private transport). Home automation devices that require motion of the unit (robot vacuums that deal with stairs, decorating robots, cleaning robots able to deal with showers and baths, that sort of thing).

    The main thing that will stop any general public acceptance isn't the feature set - there's a certain minimum bar in all the above examples that will be good enough. No, the thing that will stop general public acceptance is if these devices don't "just work". If the technology hovers between rock and suck, most people simply won't deal with the foibles and down time, they'll steer clear.

And relax

We've had a lovely Christmas, and I hope you all have too (or if you're not celebrating Christmas, I hope you've had a lovely week!)

Windows Hate

I'm undoubtedly late to this party after being steered clear of Windows 8 by ... well, pretty much every single person I've spoken to who has had the pleasure of using it. However, now I've moved close to my brother we've decided to set up some backup hardware (rsyncing between houses) and for some reason that's still opaque to me he's decided to set up Windows 8 on the microserver that's intended to be his disaster recovery machine.

Oh my days, what a terrible piece of software windows 8 is. Metro is effectively useless, and realising this they've obviously decided to remove every useful piece of the desktop mode to force you back to metro. I'm incredibly lucky to have multiple machines in this house - if the Windows 8 machine was the only one I'll be damned if I could find out how to launch a browser, just so I could google "how the hell do I do anything on this piece of crap operating system".

I'm intending to control it via RDC, which we managed to set up on my mac a few days ago. The mac part of that process was "download and install the app". The windows part of the process appeared to be "expect things to work - oh no, of course not, reboot the machine - yes - no, yes, no, well, maybe, just plug a monitor in, right, great, and now a keyboard, fantastic ok NOW you can remote control me". Utterly defeating the point. After a bit more random configuration, we got the remote desktop working.

Except, of course, the default power settings while the PC is plugged in are "go to damn sleep". Where do I change that setting? Easy!
Boot the machine.
Now log in to Metro.
Find the settings icon.
Open up Control Panel (this kicks the machine into Desktop mode, obviously)
Navigate the control panel to "power settings".
click a button which effectively translates to "show me the damn buttons"
click "managed"
click "show me the damn buttons"
navigate the tree to "hibernate"
click "show me the damn buttons"
enter a setting of "zero minutes" into the box
voila, you've now stopped the machine from going to sleep. simples! The fact this took me 10 minutes of digging around (and I usually know what I'm doing) just boggles my mind.

The whole experience is an abomination. Nothing makes any sense. I don't want to interact with a designed-for-touch UI on a desktop machine. Even the guys at the office who have touch monitors don't want to use Metro. The desktop, they have managed to remove the single thing that makes windows 7 so quick to use - the start button. I've been using OSX for the last couple of years, and that has plenty of niggles but I can use it at least. Whatever ships with recent Ubuntu - that's usable. Windows 7 - that's usable. Windows 8 - I have no goddamn clue. It appears that if I want to do anything more complex than launch a browser or look at whatever stupid feeds have been set up for me, I have to learn some crazy arcana just to be able to invoke my programs.

The menu bars are hidden unless I poke at some specific screen corner (which is obviously great fun while trying to find that feature over a remote desktop where the desktop is in a window and the mouse isn't clamped to the display). When you try and alter settings, you're presented with reams of flat text on flat colours - there's absolutely no affordance as to what is a clickable element, what is informational - it's just idiotic.

Thank god I moved over to the Apple ecosystem. There, I said it. I feel like stabbing myself in the eyes but with tens of billions invested in R&D and tens of thousands of purportedly very smart engineers, Microsoft have managed to make an operating system I can't operate. Well done all!

Recognition smiles

Three months old in a few days, and we're starting to get regular smiles and gurgle-chuckles. It's awesome. There's something fantastically connective about a recognition smile - putting my face in front of his face and seeing him beam. Love it.