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Chrome OS without Google

English: Main logo and icon for the open sourc...

I have spent a good deal of time with Chrome OS and the Chromebook. The one troubling thing about it is not that it is an operating system in a web browser. You know that going in. It is Google.

Recent events have made all of us a bit wary about Google Services, while still using them. When Google recently launched Google Keep, a decent service in its own right, no one trusted it. Before the Reader debacle, the Google enthusiasts would try it. Now, many are afraid to love a new service.

GigaOm picked up on a feature request for the Chromium OS, the Open-Source version of ChromeOS. The feature would establish an API to allow for extensions to integrate into the file manager, allowing cloud services other than Google Drive to act as ‘drives’ inside the file manager.

Elsewhere, in the Chromium Project, there is a reference to using Chromium without a Google login, but so far, even on the open-source project, you need Google. But, one can ask…if you are going to do Chrome without Google…what’s the point? You might as well run a full-fledged OS.

Years ago, computer design was based on ‘dumb terminals’ and powerful servers. Today’s computers are significantly more powerful than those ‘powerful’ servers. But the truth is that many of us now would rather be able to access identical experiences on multiple devices. But, products like Owncloud prove that while we may wish these things, we want more control and certainty about them. We want control.

Will be looking to see more in this direction. Free services versus Paid Services vs Self-Hosted services. Would welcome your thoughts on this, and what areas you think are worth exploring.

 

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Published on April 5, 2013
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In Brief: HDHomeRun Prime Now Supports DLNA

SiliconDust has finally released the option of DLNA support for its HDHomeRun Prime. As of last week, this feature is available for general release.

SiliconDust HD HomeRun (HDHR) network dual-tun...

The limitation is that protected content can only be streamed to a player supporting DTCP-IP. This is a potential problem, as support is limited. SiliconDust does have plans to release an Android app. They did release an app(Link) for unencypted channels, which goes for $2.99.

Not much help right now, but if more devices can be made to support this, it could be an alternative to cable boxes, even for those of us unfortunate enough to be on Time Warner Cable. Imagine a single 4 tuner Prime and a series of inexpensive DLNA DTCP-IP devices could be a replacement for the $10-$15 per month cable boxes. The entire setup could pay for itself in less than a year.

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Published on April 5, 2013
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In Brief: Bought Vinyl Records? Amazon Has You Covered

Vinyl record.

I really wished I had purchased my vinyl from Amazon, because today, Amazon expanded its AutoRip service to vinyl records purchased since 1998.

AutoRip automatically adds MP3 versions of songs to your Amazon Cloud Player Account. When Amazon released the AutoRip service, they backdated any eligible CDs purchased from Amazon, and they have now extended this to Vinyl Records…interestingly tempting, but a marginal improvement.

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Published on April 4, 2013
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Information Overload – Trying to Reorganize A Workflow

In January of 2011, I wrote a story on the subject of Organizing Your Workflow with Instapaper and Pinboard. This was in response to the announcement of the impending closure of Xmarks(which later did not close), and the announcement that Delicious was shutting down. This had brought me to Pinboard.

Pinboard-Home

Pinboard is currently available at a rate of just over $10 for a lifetime subscription, plus $25/yr for an Archival Account.

At the time, I used Instapaper, a Read It Later service, as a holding pen for stories, which I later archived in Pinboard. In April of 2011, I announced the move to Read It Later(now Pocket). There were many good reasons for this, however, the refresh from Read It Later to Pocket made service lean more toward the visual.

Which brings me to May of 2012, where I once again pondered the subject, right after I read Clay Johnson’s book, the Information Diet. At the time, I vowed to get my information overload under control.

Here we are, March of 2013, and…it is worse. I finally declared bankruptcy on Pocket(Formerly Read it Later). I exported everything I was most definitely NOT Reading Later, and sent it to Pinboard. There is some duplication there that has to be cleaned up, but now I have 25,000 bookmarks to go through and prune. The archive of which takes up 25GB.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this isn’t working, but I’m changing plans once again. I need a plan that allows me to reference old material I have in the archive, while keeping track of more relevant material. For now, I’ll be living in Pinboard, without benefit of a secondary service. But I am open to suggestions.

Will update you as this develops.

 

 

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Published on March 31, 2013
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Running Personal Services on a Low End VPS

For those of us who like to tinker with client/server software for personal or household, there are many good options. You can use a Raspberry Pi as a server, for example. You can use an old computer.

Both of these would have services running out of your home or business. But, as we are an increasingly mobile society, you might not have good upstream bandwidth, or your ISP may block ports into your home. So, that is where a low-end VPS offering comes in.

ChicagoVPS.netWe chose ChicagoVPS, which offers a $12/year 128mb VPS, with 10GB of storage space and 100GB of monthly bandwidth. That is more than enough for personal use. They offer three locations: Chicago, Buffalo, or LA. There are similar services averaging around $12-15 a year.

This is not the sort of service where you expect a lot of reliability. The service has had some hiccups,  but as long as you backup and take adequate steps you should on any service, there shouldn’t be any problem.

On a 128mb instance, I have Tiny Tiny RSS running, as well as ZNC, and a few other random services that I only use for my own personal interests.

What do you think? Do you have any other recommendations for a tiny VPS? Do you have alternative providers you recommend for cheap VPS services?

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Published on March 28, 2013
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Reader Refugees – The Death of Google Reader

English: Screenshot application of google read...

It has been a long two weeks since Google announced the death of Google Reader. This left many people scrambling for new solutions as the clock countdowns to its shutdown on July 1st, 2013.

 

There are many alternatives out there of various types. Feedly, for example, has been working on a Reader alternative that uses the same API. The service is also working to offer more Reader like features to welcome the over half a million Reader Refugees. They seem very determined to be the new Reader, and are even welcoming those interested in their API-compatibility to enable their applications to keep working.

 

For me, however, this was too fancy. Most of us who are interested in replacing Reader emphasize text. We want the experience of a newspaper, not a magazine. Most Readers use the traditional Inbox style of receiving, akin to email programs. The information is the most important part.

 

For this, I skipped over TheOldReader, which was designed to mimic the original Google Reader design, and went straight to two open source projects.

 

Newsblur

newsblur

 

 

 

 

Newsblur is the brainchild of Samuel Clay. In addition to the standard Inbox display, it allows you to view the original site in context, or the feed version. It also offers options for sharing a feed of what you find most interesting with others, and teaching the application what you find interesting, so it will highlight that. Newsblur offers a public API for people to build on, and the entire codebase is open source.

 

There is an Android app, and Clay is looking for an Android developer, but complaints of crashes, as it is an open-source project, were quickly cleaned up by a volunteer. There is also an iOS app.

 

The exciting thing is that with the renewed interest, Clay is ramping up. A new host for the service, more robust infrastructure, and more.

 

Newsblur can be installed by you as a standalone product, or you can pay for their hosted service, currently at $24/year.

 

Tiny Tiny RSS

tt-rss

Tiny Tiny RSS(TT-RSS) is another open-source project. Like Newsblur, it offers an API, a web interface, and an Android app. There are no hosted options for this, so you have to roll your own, which is what I did, using a Low-End VPS.

It can run on simple hardware, out of your home or on rented space.

Conclusion

 

The truth is, if you host your own solution, you can be reasonably sure it will continue to be there(as long as you keep paying the bills).

But there is something to be said for having someone else worry about it, as well as supporting the developer. So, even though I’ve settled into TT-RSS(and gave the developer the $2 for the Android app), I paid for a year of Newsblur so I could see how it develops. I never considered self-hosting of a Newsblur instance.

Next, I’ll spend a little time on where I’m hosting TT-RSS and why.

 

 

 

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Published on March 28, 2013
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Some Changes to the Site

Loading Mail onto Railway Post Office Car

It is time for some housecleaning.

  • There is a new layout to the site. Feel free to provide comment on this post of what you think
  • We have a weekly newsletter, which will send you the posts if you prefer that to other means of subscription. This replaces the previous Feedburner Email service with Mailchimp.
  • We’ll be doing some cleanup of the site content to make it easier to navigate and trying to launch some new content.
  • Feedburner feeds are no longer active, and will redirect to the native theme.
  • We can also be engaged on Twitter or Facebook, should you wish it.

[newsletter-sign-up-form].

Published on March 28, 2013
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Reflecting on Life with a Chromebook

Acer Chromebook C7

A week ago, we announced a product review challenge. Spending time with a Chromebook to see if it could be our daily driver. Let’s review the conditions of our challenge. We’d use the device in lieu of our primary productivity machine. So, we’d still have our Android phone for what we used it for. So, it wasn’t the ‘only’ thing used.

Let’s go over a few areas…

Mail

Most mail services have a webmail option, so this isn’t an issue. We use Google Apps mail for our primary address anyway, which is browser based.

Social Networking

We’ve never been able to find a Twitter client we really liked anyway, so using web based ones wasn’t any better or worse. Facebook and Google Plus are web-based anyway, so no difference there.

Chat and IRC

There are no good Chrome extensions for IRC. But most IRC servers have a web client. Will do in a pinch. For chat, we tried a few options. The Chat by Google extension is nice, but only supports one account. We have two, a personal and a business account. So we tried Imo.im, Trillian, etc. Imo.im, nicely, supports desktop notifications.

Productivity

We usually use OpenOffice for simple word processing, but Google Docs is a fine option.

Connectivity

We found an SSH extension for connecting to our Linux box.

So, after all this, what is the conclusion?

We spend much of our day in a browser. This blog is run on an installation of WordPress. The interface is browser based. Our email is browser-based, although we have used email clients in the past. More and more things are based in the browser, so it is logical to have a computer that offers just a browser. And as a secondary system, that is fine. But we’re going back to a full Linux-based system for our daily use.

To that end, the Acer C7 Chromebook is a great secondary system. The touchpad was the only part of it that truly annoyed. But the solution there was to simply hook up an external mouse. After a week, we installed ChrUbuntu, a Ubuntu Linux fork designed for use on Chromebooks, and now dual-boot.

In order to install an alternate OS on a Chromebook, you have to place it into Developer Mode, which means you get an annoying splash screen every time you boot. It also doesn’t support a boot menu, so you have to change settings in a terminal window to switch OSes. But it does give the machine the ability to run full-fledged programs. And there are a few that, if ported to Chrome, might cause us to revisit this.

On a weekend trip, we opted to take the Asus Transformer, a 10 inch tablet with a keyboard dock, over the 11.6 inch Chromebook. So, a few native apps might change our mind.

What do you think? Leave a comment on the matter.

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Published on January 28, 2013
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Taking the Chromebook Challenge

Acer C7 Chromebook

The Gadget Wisdom labs has recently acquired an Acer C7 Chromebook for testing purposes. The C7 has a list price of $199 and offers an 11.6″ screen, a Celeron processor. The hard drive and memory are upgradeable.

It’s competition in the Chromebook space is the $249 ARM-based Samsung Chromebook.  But, while the Samsung is sleeker than the Acer C7, it lacks the possible benefits of a x86 processor and upgradable components if you want to hack the thing.

But, why buy a Chromebook(other than the compelling price for a secondary system), even if you want to hack it to pieces? Many people live in their browser anyway, so why not have a computer that lives entirely in the browser?

So, that is a challenge we’re prepared to try. We’ve been setting up web-based equivalents of our standard daily programs, and will be trying to live with ChromeOS only while our primary machine gets a clean install of the latest version of its OS.

Will we last a whole week, which is the goal? Or is ChromeOS only good for trips where all you want is a browser? How does it compare to our experiments with the Asus Transformer, which is Android with a keyboard dock.

Stay tuned.

 

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Published on January 18, 2013
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Back to Thinking About Podcasting Studios

Alesis MultiMix 8 USB Podcast setup left side ...

Audio equipment has a special passion for us for some reason. None amongst our numbers are musicians per se, but the interest remains.

As you may know, the Android Buffet podcast is also a project of the Weneca Media Group, the unofficial parent of Gadget Wisdom and a few other sites. Much of our sound equipment collection is based on serving the needs of that podcast…and actually consists of three basic studio models.

  1. The Home Studio – This is a permanent installation…well, as permanent as we get
  2. The Mobile Studio – This is the single-person mobile studio, designed to fit in a carry-on bag.
  3. The SELF Studio – Used only once, at the SouthEast Linux Fest, this was enough equipment to do a multi-person show live.

Everything continues to evolve each time we assemble it for a trip. The requirements we have are simple.

  1. A co-host and/or guest, coming in over the Internet.
  2. A mostly live to tape performance…editing a podcast is a pain…so we quickly gave it up.
  3. Live audio streaming.

Video sounds like a lot of fun, at least as fun as doing audio. However, the amount of work and cost required to do video is exponentially higher for less of a return. Many podcasts do video as merely an extension of audio. You end up with talking heads, which is sometimes interesting, but not quite worth the effort.

Streaming, when coupled with a live chat room, is a great thing. Many shows offer both of these, and it has become essential to our podcast model. We started out hosting ourselves, but now use a third-party Icecast server. It’s running right now, running repeats. Tune in at androidbuffet.com/live.

The issues come in designing the equipment to run this. We tried slaving everything through a single computer, but using an analog mixer meant connections went into the computer and back out again, which was also confusing. So, ideally, each function should have an independent system.

  1. Co-Host/Outside Audio
    • This has been done by a computer of varying processing capabilities as well as an old Android phone.
  2. Streamer
    • There is no Icecast streamer for Android(volunteers to port it, anyone?)
    • Tried using a Raspberry Pi, but there were some issues. Will be revisiting this with the new 512MB Pi.
  3. Recorder
    • This has been another computer, but also a dedicated hardware recorder which supports line-in and records to SD cards for easy and quick editing.

Part of the problem is, of course, Linux. There are some limitations in Linux compatibility and software. But we aren’t changing that, or using a hardware mixer. Everything else is up for grabs.

More specifics to come, but would appreciate suggestions to simplify this, while maintaining the quality and ease of recording.

Published on December 26, 2012
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