How Fast Are You?

Break free for free!

That Bald Guy calls me a cult member, and he’s right: I have the Apple Kool-Aid running down my face after glugging down gallons of it. But I have taken a positive step.

After spending years paying $99 for a suite of services I never really used that much, I was glad to be getting push synching for my hard-earned dollars. But it wasn’t worth $99.

$12.99 a year, maybe, but not a Franklin. I mean, I can just sync at night.

Thankfully, a new web site has created a way to use Google as a *free* MobileMe alternative with push contacts & calendar on your iPod touch or iPhone, thanks to NuevaSync and Google. In order for this phase of your MobileMe recovery, you will need the iPhone 2.0 OS. To upgrade, connect your iPhone to your computer and click “Check for Updates” in iTunes.

NuevaSync links Google Calendar and Contacts with their Exchange server, which enables you to sync your Google info with devices that support Microsoft Exchange. You can sign up here.

Read more here. And welcome back to reality.

via xkcd.

What’s In a Name?

The full and proper name of this website is “How Fast Are You? How Dense?” (sometimes abbreviated as HFAYHD) and reading the explanation of what the name means is kind of like having a joke explained to you: by the time you’ve heard the entire explanation, you get why it was supposed to be funny, but that time is now long past. Having said that, what follows attempts to explain why this website is called “How Fast Are You? How Dense?”, and by the time you finish reading it, you will probably understand why it has such a obtuse and grammatically inappropriate name, but you will almost certainly no longer care. Plunging onward:

Once upon a time, in a far off land called “The 80’s”, there was a magazine called Mondo 2000. It was the coolest thing ever. It covered a future full of wearable computers and smart-drugs and virtual reality and everything that was going to turn us all into gloriously posthuman cyborgs that lived and breathed information. And this future had just arrived, this very minute, and minds and bodies would never be the same. In a word, it talked about cyberpunk.

This herald of the “future now” (Mondo) had a tag line: “How fast are you? How dense?”¹ This, also, was the coolest thing ever. In the darkly dystopian future that was due any second now, we gloriously posthuman cyborgs would be using this as a recognition signal, a handshake protocol. We would greet everyone with a demand for bandwidth specification: How much information can you provide me with? How quickly can you accept the information that I have to impart? Because us cyborgs need information like a fish needs water, and I don’t have time for niceties.

This site attempts to provide you, the reader, with interesting information at as high a bitrate as our day jobs allow. Because you and us, we’re all are gloriously posthuman cyborgs, and we’re living in the cyberpunk future. For example:

Wearable computers? That cellphone in your pocket has more computing power than 3,600 desktop computers from The 80’s and is probably connected to the Internet, a massively interconnected system of billions of computers and providing a medium through which billions of people and companies work and play.

Smart-drugs? In a survey of 1,427 scientists, 62% percent said they had taken drugs like Ritalin, and 44% reported using Provigil, to improve their mental performance. It is estimated that 7-20% of college students have taken drugs like Ritalin and Adderall for the same reason.

Virtual reality? Look no further than Second Life, World of Warcraft, or any of the other dozens of virtual locations where meet to play, socialize and create.

So, welcome to the future. Now, how fast are you? How dense?

Complaints? Requests? Corrections? Threats? Bribes? Anything else that won’t fit in a comment form?

Charlie Stross went on vacation recently, read some pulpy books, and when he got back, posted a bit about the state of the SF and horror genres, and what their respective best-sellers say about the state of the reading public.

For starters, the strange rebirth of the horror field is quite illuminating. We used to know what horror was about — it was about Killer Whelks menacing a quiet English seaside town, from which a strong-jawed but quiet fellow and a not-totally-pathetic female lead might eventually hope to escape with the aid of a stout two-by-four and a lot of whelkish squelching after trials, tribulations, and gruesome scenes of seafood-induced cannibalism. Then Stephen King came along and transcended, becoming a mini-genre of his own. Attempts were made to replicate the phenomenon, but instead the bottom dropped out of the market.

The new horror isn’t about whelks, killer or otherwise: it’s about vampires, werewolves, and middle America. With police and detectives. Hell, you could even call it cop/vampire slash and have done with it, except that you’d be missing out on the tedious Manichean dualist drivel into which all these series eventually descend (unless they end up as soft porn instead — a very lucrative market, as Laurel Hamilton and her imitators have discovered — call it the fang-fucker subgenre). For the sad fact is, there seems to be some kind of law about contemporary American horror getting into furry sex by volume three then suffering a fit of remorse and going all god-bothering and Jesus-fondling by volume six. It must be all the crosses and holy water they need to fend off the blood sucking fiends, I suppose, but the endless re-hashing of tired old religious-sexual neuroses is getting to be a stereotype of the genre, and it’s not healthy. Horror isn’t about being born-again: it’s about bloody screaming catharsis, not a warm security blanket of belief that blocks out all menaces. But in the new horror, if the bloodsuckers are remotely sympathetic the story turns into some kind of supernatural redemption epic, and if they’re not, the protagonist eventually goes all googly-eyed and born-again.

What an interesting &mdash and frankly, sad &mdash point. And I can’t say I disagree with him. But what do you expect from American culture? We use sex to sell everything, then tell people that sex is a sin against God and nature.

He also draws some conclusions from the rise of the alternate history sub-genre of SF:

Probably the fastest-growing sub-genre in the swamp is alternate history. I’ve been known to dabble in it myself, I hasten to admit: it can be fun and educational, a desert topping and a floor wax. But mostly floor wax these days, I find, because a lot of authors who should know better are turning to it in a mad collective ostrich-head-burying exercise rather than engaging with the world as it is.

Yeah, that’s pretty much dead on. Americans don’t want to think about the here-and-now, ’cause it sucks. Between Dubya, bombs in our Gatorade and our iPods, a costly and perhaps illegal war, constant reminders of the “threat” of terrorism, the NSA spying on our fellow citizens, oil dependency, poverty, pending thermonuclear war with Iraq, pending war with/between everyone in the middle east, the end of the world as predicted by the Aztec calendar or whatever, etc., etc., ad nauseam, people want to escape. Fans of alt-history must find a great deal of solace in a revised world similar to our own. It doesn’t require a lot of thinking or the absorption of new ideas, just a different flavor of today. How nice. No wonder it sells so well.

But all is not lost.

Oh, there are exceptions. Vernor Vinge is swimming strongly against the flow in “Rainbows End”, where he envisages a future just a couple of decades hence where the machines dance. Peter Watts is doing stuff with the genre that just shouldn’t be possible (evolutionary biology, exobiology, and vampires in spaaaaaace — all done with a deft touch of plausibility and a refreshingly pleasant dose of bleakly nihilistic existential despair). And there are a few others.

In closing, let me point you to one of the others: Chris Nakashima-Brown. He’s got links to a bunch of his short-stories on the intertubes and in print, one of my favorites being Welcome Back Qatar. Good, smart, reality-based stuff.

Silver nitrous girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny.

Man, that cat can write.

I can’t believe I missed this. RU Sirius has two podcasts: The RU Sirius Show (which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago) and NeoFiles. I’m not sure what the difference is between the two as far as topics are concerned as they both seem to cover a pretty broad spectrum, but they’re both brimming with excellent interviews with fascinating people. RU himself is perhaps cyberpunk’s most prominent real-world prophet, with a firm grokking of culture (pop, fringe and otherwise), history, drugs, technology and art.

Since I seem to be coming to the party a little late, I’ve been catching up with The RU Sirius Show and there’s a bunch of really good stuff there. This morning I listened to a two-part interview, which I strongly recommend, with Mel Gordon, author of Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin and The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber):

» Show #48: Seven Addictions & Five Professions (MP3 link)
» Show #49: The Hipster Whores of Weimar Germany: Mel Gordon pt. 2 (MP3 link)

NeoFiles, the other podcast RU hosts, seems equally populated with interesting folks. I’ve only listened to one so far, an interview with author Chris Nakashima-Brown, and it’s a doozie. Mr. Nakashima-Brown seems to have taken the whole cyberpunk/near-future-fiction thing to heart and is doing sterling work with it. Anyone who can write Jorge Luis Borges into a lost episode of The Love Boat deserves ~26 minutes of your time.

» NeoFiles Show #49: The New Cyberpunk SF (MP3 link)

Well, that’s what my great aunt used to say, anyway. Sadly, it now applies to me.
Forgive me, for I have sinned… and not in a good, delicious way.

I’m the Mac Guy ’round these parts. The Cultist. The guy who almost got the tattoo. But now I’ve seen some of the error of my ways. Read on; I’ll be pentitent in short order.

The EFF has been doing wonderful, soul-affirming work against DRM. They are toiling day and night to make sure that your online and offline music purchases are yours when you pay for them, not rented or loaned or watched over like black market food lines by the KGB. Bravo, lads. Bravo.

On the other side of the clue bin was me, clicking on .99 crack in the ITMS like a happy little monkey. Ta-tick. Wee! Ta-tick. Neat!

Today, I got the point.
And from now on, no more clicking. No more endorphine doses in dollar increments. No more filling out my life’s history and having it dial back to the mother ship for approval. Today, I am a free man, and it feels real good.

You can say “Duh” now, if you haven’t already. So, thank you, Cory. Thank you, Bald Guy.

Hell, at this point, I just might go whole hog and install Ubuntu.

Wanna make quick notes to yourself about what you do during the day? Kind of a log thing? Lifehacker has a tidy little VB script (sorry, Mac cultists) that’ll do exactly that for you.

I’ve updated it a tad to use my preferred date and time format (kinda Unixey), enclose the date in brackets, and separate the date/time from the description with a tab character to make it easier to import into a spreadsheet, should the need arise. (I would have posted it on the lifehacker comments, but you need an invite.)

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'-----------------------------------------------------------
' QuickLogger v.0.1a
' Appends the date and a line of text to a file.
' Based on code written by Joshua Fitzgerald, 7/2005.
' Modified by Gina Trapani, 7/2006.
' Modified by thatbaldguy, 7/2006 (unauthorized).
'-----------------------------------------------------------
Option Explicit
 
Dim filename
filename = "C:\logs\worklog.txt"
 
Dim text
text = InputBox("Add to "&filename&":", "Quick Logger")
if text <> "" then
 WriteToFile(text)
end if
 
Sub WriteToFile(text)
 Dim fso
 Dim textFile
 Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
 Set textFile = fso.OpenTextFile(filename, 8, True)
 textFile.WriteLine "[" & DatePart("yyyy", Now) & "-" _
  & Right("0" & DatePart("m", Now), 2) & "-" _
  & Right("0" & DatePart("d", Now), 2) & " " _
  & FormatDateTime(Now, 3) & "]" & Chr(9) & text
 textFile.Close
End Sub

Log on, my friend.

Worth1000 has a new Photoshopping contest, Bad Ads 3. I’m only posting this because That Bald Guy called me a cultist, and… um… maybe he’s right. Here’s the proof. Click on “view full”, ‘cuz the fine print is the kicker.

And, just for him, there’s this one, too. I won’t admit I laughed. You can’t make me.

Speaking of DRM and how it is teh suck, Ars Technica has a great article today by Nate Anderson about the history and future of DRM cracks. It’s a good ‘un. Here’s a snip from the intro:

Like a creeping fog, DRM smothers more and more media in its clammy embrace, but the sun still shines down on isolated patches of the landscape. This isn’t always due to the decisions of corporate executives; often it’s the work of hackers who devote considerable skill to cracking the digital locks that guard everything from DVDs to e-books. Their reasons are complicated and range from the philosophical to the criminal, but their goals are the same: no more DRM.

We’re going to revisit the history of the most famous DRM cracks. While the stories themselves are fascinating, one of the merits of such an exercise is to use the lessons of the past to consider the challenges of the future. Along the way, we’ll address the following important questions:

• Will DRM someday be unbreakable? Do content companies care if it is?
• Who or what is a “Beale Screamer”?
• What does the history of DRM mean for new technologies such as Blu-ray discs and HDCP links?
• Can a marker violate the DMCA?
• What’s more important: technology, Congress, or the market?
• Will a Stalin statue make a brief cameo appearance in the conclusion of this article?

We’ll start our survey with one of the most-used DRM schemes in the country, Apple Computer’s FairPlay.

Via Ars Technica.