Riding the Waves to Eternity: Hangin’ with the Cosmic Surfer

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To live the dreams we always had

Feb 13, 2019 | Dead Water, Facebook, Linux

Journalist Kashmir Hill recently made an attempt to cut the ‘big five’ tech companies from her life—Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple. She wrote about it in Gizomodo and links to all the articles are here: https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five. Hill cut each in turn for a week then went for a final week without any of them.

By ‘cut out’ I mean she tried to go the whole way and used a custom VPN to block any IP Address associated with the five companies in any of their manifestations. It wasn’t entirely successful, and is probably not an exercise easily repeatable by most of us anyway, but it drove the provocative content of the exercise, and made me consider again aspects of my own life and tech.

The articles are smart, funny, troubling and provocative all at the same time, and I recommend you read them.

The first thing that struck me was the sheer quantity of tech. in the life of Ms Hill and her family. For Amazon there was:

  • An Echo
  • An Echo Dot
  • 2 Kindles
  • 2 Amazon Prime credit cards
  • Amazon Prime video and TV
  • 2 Prime accounts.

We certainly use Amazon, but we have none of the above things, though we might have an old-ish Kindle in a drawer somewhere. We have no Apple products in the house except a 10-year-old (at least) iPod mini that still worked last time I tried it. With Google, I’ve used Gmail since 7 August 2004 when it was still in Beta, and have both an Android phone and tablet. Nonetheless I rarely use Google Apps apart from Calendar. My wife has a Chromebook and an Android tablet and phone.

This isn’t a Luddite mentality; I’ve been around the internet since around 1990, just about when Mosaic came along to make things interesting, and most of the last 20 years of my working life have had to do with eCommerce in one form or another. I’ve blogged since 2002. But I do continually assess my relationship to technology and how much I let it dominate me (bearing in mind I spend most of my day in front of a laptop). As regular readers know, I deleted my LinkedIn and Facebook accounts and now only keep Instagram (@ianburdon) and Twitter (@Cosmic_Serf) as social media—and I’m trying to cut back on Twitter screen time. I use WhatsApp. I’m also ad-blocked to the max and routinely refuse cookies; to the extent I can I block trackers, but that’s a losing battle I think.

I keep in regular contact with four people from my schooldays, and I realised a while ago that I am the only who has ever had a Facebook account, and I’m the only one with Twitter. One of my friends uses an old flip-top phone by choice and I’m not sure if he has a regular email address; he and I communicate by phone or in person.

I certainly do use my phone for pics., for here and Instagram and Twitter, and I have some good, if ageing, digital cameras, but most of the time I use film (35mm or 120) and am thinking of processing my own black and white film again for the first time in decades. I do stream music, but more likely I play CDs in the office and vinyl in the front room when I’m alone. I have a working Creative Zen MP3 player I’ve had since 2007.

I was interested in Hill’s attempt to cut out Amazon; that is the one that ultimately failed because of Amazon’s dominance of infrastructure. By blocking AWS, anything hosted there was also blocked including, to my surprise, Signal. During one week, her devices tried to ping Amazon servers 300,000 times at 3,800  different IP addresses.

I was interested too in the Linux alternatives Hill tried out; I have a couple of laptops running Linux but I don’t use them much. They’re functional but also in many ways a PITA if you want a consumer-level experience or even anything more than that. I have a Linux phone somewhere which I really liked but it fell by the wayside because I couldn’t get alternatives for the few Apps that I do use.

Ms. Hill finishes by saying she’s going to buy a watch. Ironically enough, the decision I took years ago to stop wearing a watch was one of the most freeing things I’ve done. I have a couple of watches that I wear from time to time if the situation requires it, but most of the time they stay in a drawer.

And I think that’s the spirit in which I respond to the articles. I’m 60 this year and I like the differences tech brings to the way I live now. I like being able to have conversations (voice or video) with my sister in Texas and my daughter in Michigan without having to book time on international telephone exchanges. I like the way I can control my bank account balances and transfer money and pay my bills from my phone. But I also remember the internet as it used to be and the idealism we all had back then. I don’t want to rehash things I’ve written about previously (https://www.cosmicsurfer.co.uk/?p=2631) but I do want to affirm that old idealism, which remains my default setting.

 

 

Linux Dancing

Oct 13, 2013 | Linux

So I’ve been doing OK with Ubuntu although Opera has been running a bit slowly when I try and use Facebook. I’d heard good things about Mint Linux and thought I’d load it onto the same machine and dual-boot Ubuntu and Mint.

Every OS I’ve used in recent times – whether from Apple, Microsoft or Ubuntu – has immediately recognised our home wifi and allowed me to connect. Not Mint. Mint refused even to recognise that the laptop had the means to connect to a network at all other than through Ethernet.  “Well that’s odd”, I thought, and went on line to find out what I had done wrong only to discover that this was a known problem with Mint although it was fixable. True to the stereotype of Linux the interwebs then provided a string of instructions on how to fix it.

I didn’t bother. If Mint can’t even do that ‘out of the box’ then I can’t take it seriously as a consumer level OS. And so it was removed from the laptop post haste.

Lessons learned, and all that.

Ubunt-2 too

Aug 19, 2013 | Linux

I’m starting to get used to Ubuntu. Part of me thinks that the user experience of Windows 7 is a lot better but that may well just be familiarity talking. As yet I have no fixed opinion and no doubt time will tell.

Screenshot from 2013-08-17 17:01:18

Part of the 1.25%

Ubuntu comes with Firefox pre-installed but it has been behaving a bit oddly so I’ve just installed Opera instead and we’ll see how that goes. I use Chrome on my Win 7 laptop for a couple of things, along with Firefox and Opera, but given Chrome’s tendency to phone home a lot I’m moving off it. If I didn’t have so much invested in gmail I’d probably move away from it too. Mind you I have several email accounts of various vintages so it is probably time to think about a rationalisation.

Some of the spur for this has been the whole NSA/Snowden thing. It isn’t as though I have anything to hide but equally I didn’t grow up in a surveillance state and I’m not hugely impressed by the way society has developed into one. That is not the only spur of course, I’ve been thinking about diversifying a bit for a while just to keep things interesting, but it was an effective call to action.

Also, although I don’t really have many geek credentials, the most recent figures I’ve seen give Linux in its various forms a market share of around 1.25% overall. I don’t know what the UK share is but there is something stupidly satisfying about being one of the minority!

Ubunt-2

Aug 17, 2013 | Linux

This isn’t exactly world shattering news but this is the first post to be written here on a laptop with Ubuntu Linux as its OS.

This is my old Dell laptop – I’ve had it around 4 years I think and it came from Tesco with Windows Vista installed. I never had a problem with Vista but the laptop did seem to be getting a bit creaky with age and I probably could have done a re-install of Vista had I felt like it.  Instead I backed it all up to an external drive and installed Ubuntu which, so far, is quite interesting.

I’m not geeky enough to really explore it yet, although I suppose installing Linux itself is a rite de passage. I have to say that it was a pretty easy thing to do once I’d worked out what the problem was last night and the desktop itself, though not what I’m used to, is fairly intuitive so far. In fact it was so easy that that with the installation disk I created I would have no problem installing it on my other (Windows 7) laptop if this one falls over.

Also, I found my passport.