Facebook vs. Hipsters

Tom: In early July, while holidaying in New Zealand, I crashed my snowboard and wound up stuck in hospital, bedridden, for two weeks. After the first few days the pain subsided but I was left with basically nothing to do. New Zealand may be one of our closest neighbours but I was still stuck in a foreign country with very little in the way of company or entertainment. Smart-phone to the rescue! I was able to pay for internet access using my debit card and soon acquired a plentiful supply of megabytes to consume – the largest culprit being Facebook. It allowed me to keep in touch with people while I was stuck in hospital, look at all the photos of the rest of my friends as they continued their holiday and I even got to talking with someone I hadn’t seen in years. This may seem like old hat to you more regular Facebook users but this was the first time I’d used Facebook in months.

Sure, I jumped on the bandwagon when it first got going. But I soon found out my time was better wasted on other websites. While Facebook did offer an amazing degree of connectivity, I found that the people I really wanted to talk to I saw on a regular basis anyway. If not, I’d just call or text them. The games and apps were generally just rehashes of things that could be found better elsewhere and the ability to share links and videos inferior to bookmarking sites like reddit or digg. While easily accessible, I generally found Facebook to be just mix of activities I could do somewhere else and I gradually stopped using it. There was, however, one thing that kept me coming back on the odd occasion; the photos. If I want to see all of my friends photos from a concert for instance, Facebook makes it incredibly easy. In fact, I can barely remember a time when photos would be shared by any other way. That aside, I generally steer pretty clear of Facebook.

As far as I know, this used to be a fairly ‘uncool’ thing to do. Facebook was growing and growing and people who still hadn’t migrated weren’t up-to-date. But in much the same way as its predecessor, Myspace, Facebook is beginning to lose its favour with the masses. Ironically, because of how large its getting. Where once Facebook was a place to chat to your close friends and tend to your farm it’s now been taken over by every member of your family, young and old. How can a place where your Auntie Ruth scolds you on your language be considered cool any more? I think Facebook is doomed to fail because of its accessibility.

Although It still has some way to fall before entering the ‘niche realm’ of Myspace I think it’s only a matter of time before people move on. But with such a large following its unlikely Facebook will ever quite fall of people’s radars. I just think it will simply become a smaller scale version of what it is now, and ultimately a place to share and view photos (the only truly useful function it has now). The question becomes: “Where will everybody go?”. I don’t see social networks dying any time soon, people love to socialise. A Facebook replacement will have to be similar enough for people to be comfortable yet different enough for it to be fresh. Well, if you followed the Facebook privacy issue a few months ago you may have already heard of Diaspora: the new kid almost on the block.

Facebook’s privacy has always been under heavy scrutiny (in fact, it’s privacy policy has undergone so many revisions it’s now longer than the United States Constitution) but it was a roll-out of changes in December 2009 that sparked an internet uproar. The changes included making user profile photos and friends lists publicly visible, even for users who had explicitly chosen to hide this information before. Information like the gender of partner you are interested in and relationship status became viewable to those even without a Facebook account. At one point it was actually impossible to keep information like your friends list private at all. Many people lost faith in Facebook’s ability to keep their personal information private, and among those were four college students who went on to design Diaspora. In their own words: Diaspora is the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network – or at least will be, it’s first release is in September. Will this be the new Facebook? I’m not entirely sure. It looks incredibly promising (I might just have a soft spot for open-source) and I think if people are willing to give it a shot it will prove to be much safer and far more useful than Facebook. While only time will tell, we migrated once already and I think it’s about time we migrated again. My only concern is for all those abandoned farm animals..

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This is a submission for my University’s magazine, The Pelican. You can see Aaron’s here.

How to Torrent Faster

Tom: Hello blog, it’s been a while. Be it busyness or laziness I’ve been neglecting you, I know. But I’ve got a lot of work to do today and I’m avoiding it at all costs so it looks like you’re going to benefit.

My name is Tom, and I am a leecher.

I’ve been addicted to leeching from the very beginning. In the past I’ve always had quite a slow internet speed; songs would take hours, movies would take days. I figured if I capped my upload speed at 1kbps I wouldn’t waste bandwidth. I was right, my download speed went up and I started leeching torrents off the community. Even when I finally got a decent provider it never occurred to me to give something back – I wanted my torrents to be finished as fast as possible. Just as a youtube commenter is happy to verbally assault a fellow tuber with abandon, I was never going to be in the same room as these people and I was happy to steal from them. In fact, I would still be leeching to this day if it weren’t for a single problem; my torrent down-speed slowed to a crawl and I had no idea why.

I made sure my firewall had exceptions, my ports were forwarded and I had a solid speed from my provider. Why was I torrenting at 3kbps? I scoured the internet for an answer and was quickly rewarded with one. Apparently most torrent providers keep a record of your download/upload ratio and will supply you with bandwidth accordingly. Basically, If you screw the community by leeching you will be punished with a terrible down-speed. The knowledge of this annoyingly fair system meant my leeching days were over, If I wanted a good speed again I was going to have to start giving back. I opened my clients preferences and made a life changing decision: I uncapped my upload speed. The result was astonishing, my download speed skyrocketed but my upload speed was still quite low. Only when my torrent finished did I understand. While I was torrenting my upload speed would stay low as to not impact my download but when my torrent was finished my upload speed would pick up. Mind = Blown.

Torrenters of the internet, my bad.  I was not aware of this ridiculously simple system of downloading/uploading. In the future I will endeavor to reach a ratio of 1.5 or something. To those of you who leech as well, turns out there’s a system for rewarding those who give back to the community so we’d better get on that.

Photo Time!

Tom: I tend to pick things up quickly then drop them just as fast. Something I’m determined not to give up on is photography, so to motivate me into taking more photos I thought I’d post some of my better ones on here. Feedback, both positive and negative, is much appreciated. You can click on any of the images below for a larger version.

First up is a few of the better macro shots I got from Aaron’s garden. I think this is the style of photography I enjoy the most.

This last photo is one I took while experimenting with long exposures at night around my neighborhood, I think this one was about 20 seconds. The photo is unedited; my see-throughness is from only being in the shot for about half of the exposure.

I may have looked a little crazy while I was taking shots like the one above. In one of them I set the exposure to about the 30 seconds and tried to get as many poses in as possible. That meant setting up the camera, opening the shutter and dancing around in front of it periodically stopping for a moment to expose myself in that position. Good times.

After looking through my photos I think I’m sufficiently motivated to take some more. If they’re any good, I’ll put them on here too.

Sesame Street

Tom: Like many others, I go to bed very late and spend a large portion of my evenings on the computer. I do not plan this, I just seem to find myself stumbling bleary eyed into my room at three in the morning far too often. While the subject of my late-night browsing varies from night to night two things are inevitable; I will start with reddit and finish with youtube (it doesn’t need a link, you know damn well what it is).  This means that I generally start my evening reading a left-wing slant on current events and the wee hours of the morning watching people fall down. Such is life. What was special about last night was that rather than bounce between various genres of youtube videos I spent the majority of the night watching Sesame Street. I will now share with you the highlight of said viewing session.  You may wish to remain distanced from fragile objects as the combination of nostalgia and laughter can result in a kind of tearful thrashing about.

Side note: Anyone else totally forget about Snuffy??

The Time Has Come

Tom: Tomorrow I return to university. It’s been an enjoyably long break but it’s time to go back. With my return to uni I’ve decided that despite having posted nothing in a long, long time, I’m going to make an effort to put some more stuff on here. Surprisingly, my weekly status report says people are still visiting this place. For the strange souls who appear to have bookmarked us, be prepared for an actual update.

Now, the actual content that I will be posting has yet to be determined. In fact don’t be surprised if it’s just photos of miscellaneous objects from around my house.

The Frog

Tom: It was dark and I was leaving my house through the front door when I realised there was something slimy on the door knob. I turned on the light to find…

There was frog on it.

After taking plenty of photos I tried to move him (or her, I wouldn’t know how to check) to the garden. He secreted some kind of clear fluid on me and leapt from my hands out into the night. Initially I was afraid that he’d used some sort of defence mechanism but it turns out he just peed on me.

Fusion and The Future

Tom: This story caught my eye earlier today.

Maybe this means I’m an optimist. Or even a sucker; a fool. All I know is that when I meet Moses, the 60-year-old scientist who runs this place, and he shows me a tiny pellet, about the size of the multivitamin I take every morning, and swears it will provide an endless supply of safe, clean energy, I want to believe him.

Personally, I believe the next major step in technological evolution lies in fusion power. As the non-renewable energy sources of our planet begin to dwindle, people are already looking at greener ways of making electricity. Not only can fusion provide energy with little to no carbon footprint, it produces it at a scale that could provide for our ever expanding population and allow us to achieve things like inter-planetary travel. Isaac Asimov explained that the next level of technology  after constructing flying machines is to take control of our own primary. Fusion would achieve this by replicating the forces that power the sun, ushering humanity into a new age of science and technology. Or maybe I just read too much science fiction.

First Day With My Shiny New Camera (it’s actually black but, yeah)

Tom: My camera finally arrived in the post today. If I had another one I’d show you a photo of it.

After reading through the quick-start guide that came in the box, I decided to take it down to the park for a test drive. As I’m still learning the ins and outs of aperture size and whatnot, I took these ones with the camera’s automatic mode (click on the thumbnails to see full images).

I then proceeded to experiment with various settings like ISO and shutter time (the results of which I will not be posting as they all look terrible). Nevertheless, I’m getting the hang of it and I’m hoping to have some manual shots for you next time.

Overall, I’m finding the Nikon D40 a joy to learn on and you can expect plenty of photos to pop up on here and my new Flickr account. Until next time..

Some Things You Might Have Missed

Tom: While getting news has certainly been made easier with the advent of computers and whatnot, there’s a lot of stuff happening all the time. So much, in fact, that it’s obviously impossible to try and keep tabs on everything. So even though it’s past midnight and most people won’t be reading this until tomorrow, here are a few bits of today’s news you might have missed.

With the ratification of the Libson treaty, the Pirate Party now have a second seat in European Parliament and at 22, Amelia Andersdotter will become the Parliaments youngest member.

My political ambitions include a thorough revision and change of the copyright legislation, a complete removal of the patent system and a more balanced approach to security, safety and the market versus privacy, where the latter in particular needs to be taken much more into consideration. I believe in strong civil rights, even in a digital environment. (source)

Meanwhile, down in South Africa, fish stocks are dwindling and great white pelicans have turned to eating live gannet chicks. While certainly a neat trick for the pelicans, entire gannet colonies are in danger of being destroyed. With food scarce in the water, cape gannets (same bird family as pelicans) are spending extra time away from their nests hunting, leaving plenty of time for opportunistic pelicans to nab a quick meal. While this behaviour is a great example of adaptablity, cape gannets (who can live up to 25 years) are getting scarcer and scarcer.

That’s all for now as I am quite sleepy.

Hello Again

Tom: Kudos to Aaron for posting all week. I’m always interested in ways of forcing yourself to do things and I might even try something similar at some point. For now, I just thought I’d give you a little insight into what’s going on in my life/head.

This Saturday is my 18th birthday. Down here in Australia that means I will legally be able to drink, gamble and be charged as an adult. Yay! My only regret is I forgot to break a bunch of laws while I still could, but that’s ok, I’ll just have to do my wrong-doing internationally.

While I’m sure not much will actually change once I’m 18, I’m looking forward to being able to go to 18+ events like concerts. The timing is pretty good as concert season is coming up (actually, it could be a lot better. I could have turned 18 before concert season). But 18 or not, I still don’t have any money. To rectify that, I recently quit my job as a waiter at Sizzler and got myself two new jobs. The first is at the patisserie across the road from my house (so freaking convenient). The second is working for CBH, a company that handles most of the grainharvest in WA. The job is a few hours away so I’ll be staying with a friend’s family for a month. The job itself will be mostly labour but the pay is great and I’m thinking the time away will give me time to write. Or not. Either way, I get lots of money.

In other news, a hobby I’ve always meant to get into is photography. With my birthday on the way, I figured now was the perfect time and I enlisted some relatives to band together and buy me a camera. The result:

After consulting the the internet, I decided on the Nikon D40. Not only is it one of the cheapest DSLRs around, it’s apparently very beginner friendly. You can expect amateur photos to start popping up on this blog as soon as it arrives in the post.

That’s all for now but before I go, I suggest you have a read into the news of what happened to Professor David Nutt in the UK. Regardless of what your opinions are on the safety of drugs like ecstacy and cannabis, the way the government has written off his and the rest of the drug safety board’s scientific opinion in favour of a political agenda has scientists resigning like dominoes.