I Deleted my Google+ Account

Posted by JoshMiller

Mar 7

I have complained some about Google+ in the past but I held out hope that it would get better.  Unfortunately, it’s just gotten more empty and Google is pushing it’s more annoying bits into it’s other products at full steam.

So I killed it.  I deleted it.

Why bother?  Why not just let it sit empty and unused?

First off, I’ve been going through a sort of natural “rejection” of all of this tracking in data mining.  Not having Google+ somewhat relieve this, at least from a mental standpoint.  Google knows enough about me as it is.

Second, I’ve also found I am more and more rejecting social media.  Facebook’s timeline and filters have made it unusably bad.  Twitter is still good, but I’ve been closing many of my other accounts which I don’t really use.  This goes back to the whole privacy/data mining issue.  I honestly would probably delete my Facebook page except I don’t want to lose my Facebook.com/JoshMiller URL.  I can let it sit stagnant in hopes it gets better to keep that.

Google+ does not offer special unique URLs.  So who cares if I delete that account.

Third, it makes a statement to Google.  Even if they aren’t seeing me, the individual, it says “one less”.  A stagnant account is not the same as a missing account when it comes to numbers.  Facebook touts how many billion unique it gets, except Facebook is almost definitely padding it’s numbers with people who don’t even know they are logged in but “touch” like buttons etc across the web.  Google does this too for Google+.  The number of users they push just isn’t there.  No one uses Google+.

No one.

Knowing Google, eventually they will just force it on everyone anyway eventually.  Which is fine, because I’m slowly migrating less and less towards using Google’s services anyway.  I have always been a pretty big Google Fanboy but I really don’t use many of their services in the end.  Gmail, Calendar, Analytics, Adsense (not that I have made a penny off of it), I used to use blogger and I want to use Docs but the interface is so god awful.

The Internet is changing, and I’m just not sure I like the direction it’s heading I guess.

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Evernote on Windows 8

Posted by JoshMiller

Mar 3

I will totally grant that this is the whole new Beta style experience and may not be, hopefully is not, final.

Evernote for windows 8 sucks. Specifically, the Metro App, Evernote, sucks.  It is completely useless.  I was pretty excited when I saw it was available in the App store because, as I’ve blogged extensively about recently, Evernote has become the center of my organization.  Here’s a shot of Metro Evernote, some stories I’ve clipped from online, some blog posts I wrote…

ScreenShot001

It looks nice, I will not argue with that.  I love this huge almost newspaper look.  Several Metro Apps use this and I really wish I had an RSS reader that would do this (there may be one, I have not figured it out yet).

The problem is all in functionality.  I can open and read notes all day long.  Great.  I can’t seem to edit these notes.  Most notes, I don’t need to edit.  The pages that are webpage snapshots, I don’t want to edit those.

The blog posts?  I do want to edit those.  I want to correct things, I want to add to them, I need to edit them.

I can make new notes.  So there is hope that the edit feature will be added.  Considering “editing notes” seems like it would be pretty high up there in a “note management app”, I am more hoping that I just overlooked it.  The interface is different and somewhat confusing.  I checked all of the menus though with no luck.  Slide to the left and get the Taskbar pop out thing, not there; Slide right, it brings up the charms menu, not in there.  Right click and it brings up a menu on the bottom with New Note and Sync, but no Edit option.

There is another issue though, which I hope gets fixed.  Here’s a contrasting look of the normal Evernote Program, which I installed alongside the metro version (because I use Evernote a lot).

ScreenShot002

Notice it has a great organizational system going on.  I get a list of all of my notebooks on the left, I get a list of things in each notebook next to that, and I get the Note I’m working on next to that, in this case, an old review of a Transformers Comic.

I went to a fair amount of work developing a usable notebook hierarchy so I don’t have to see everything at once and I can quickly find things.

Evernote for Metro gives me exactly one notebook, “All Notes”.  I also don’t think it syncs everything, because, as shown in the first shot, it says “January – 40 Notes”.  I’m up to something like 300+ total notes now.  January is when I started using Evernote “hardcore”, I transferred hundreds of articles from Instapaper, I started importing all of my old writing.  Probably 75%-90% of those 300+ notes were created in January.

And it lists 40 notes?  Really?

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Windows 8 “Full Time”

Posted by JoshMiller

Mar 2

So, I talked yesterday or so ago about downloading and trying out the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.  I liked it but I know that if I keep it locked in a Virtual Machine I’ll never really use it.

I toyed with the idea of blowing out my Netbook and using putting Windows 8 on it to use full time.  I did the next best thing, I did a dual boot.  I wiped out my unused Ubuntu install, cleaned up and shrunk my XP partition and threw Windows 8 on the new space.

So I’m using it, on a real machine.  Of note, I have heard reports that most Netbooks may not meet the minimum resolution requirements for Windows 8, the HP Mini 311 I have runs at 1366×768.

I logged in with my Live account just like on the Virtual machine.  One thing of note, that Solitaire that I mentioned picking up on the VM?  It automatically showed up in this fresh install, which is pretty neat.  So I decided to load up a few apps I regularly use.  That built in Internet Explorer is kind of neat but I hate that I can’t easily switch between tabs.  Or at least, I have not figured out how to do it yet.  Also all my syncing and junk is in Chrome now, so. Chrome is in.

ScreenShot004Next up was Windows live Writer, which, despite being a Microsoft product, doesn’t appear in the app store.  I also added the Printscreen software I use so that I can make spiffy screen shots.

I also downloaded drivers for my Netbook.  They are listed as windows 7 but I took the chance it would work because the touchpad needs a driver in order to disable “tapping”.  This way, when I type, I don’t cause the courser to fly all over the place with my thumbs.  It’s stupidly simple but it’s pretty much the primary reason I never could get into using Ubuntu.  There is no way to turn this off in Ubuntu.  Suggest away, but I have literally tried everything already.  Others have had this issue, it has something to do with the way the touchpad is emulated by the OS or something.

Anyway, Windows 8…

On the new features of the actual OS, I decided to look into the whole X-Box thing.  There is a strong suggestion that you can play X-Box games or X-Box marketplace games on Windows 8, which would be pretty bad ass.  In fact, Solitaire has “X-Box” written across the top of the Start menu tile.

ScreenShot002I looked into it.  I did a search for the Scott Pilgrim vs the World game, because I really want to play it, but I don’t own an X-box.  Fortunately, it has a free demo, which means I’m not wasting money.  UN-fortunately, it didn’t work as expected.  I could “buy” the game, but it just gave me a message that it’ll be waiting for me in my X-Box download queue.  This is really lame.  If this functionality isn’t going to be added, it needs to detect that I don’t own an X-box and not show me these games and, at the very least, not let me buy them.  I can see many angry people who tried to buy a game only to find that it doesn’t work on their PC, X-box only.  This functionality is neat, but I guarantee that MS knows if you own an X-box or not.

My next complaint, which may be able to be corrected, or may end up being better in the future iterations.  I suppose at this point it’s not really a complaint but something I want to fix…  When you open the Music or video app, the default screen it to show the marketplace (presumably the Zune Marketplace).  I get that they want to push their own store, but it really needs to default to my own library.

ScreenShot003On a related note, it does auto detect music in my “My Music” folder.  Simple test, pull music across the home network and drop it in.  This is nice.  not so nice, I store my music remotely, and I have yet to find a way to map that network drive to be included in my music collection.  I have limited space on my laptop and I could probably store everything I want to listen to easily in a gig or so, it would be convenient to use the network storage.  I’m not saying it’s not doable, but I didn’t find a way to do it in the time I tried.

Which brings up my main and only real complaint so far…

I don’t use Apple products.  This isn’t some lame “Apple sucks” crap, I have two legitimate reasons why I refuse to use Apple products.  Firstly, Apple is too expensive.  Secondly, I have no desire to get “trapped” in the Apple ecosystem.  I’m already irritated being semi trapped in the android Ecosystem on my phone, but honestly, over the life of my phone, I have maybe $30 worth of apps I’ve paid for.  If something better came along *cough*WindowsPhone8*cough*, I could fairly painlessly dump Android.  Which I may do, because the new Windows stuff is really interesting and exciting, and I like Microsoft.

This whole App store, limited search locations, auto detect media, tiled start thingy?  It feels, very very much like an enclosed ecosystem.

I hate that.

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Windows 8 and Raspberry Pi

Posted by JoshMiller

Mar 1

So, just to start off, before anyone gets the wrong idea, this is not about Raspberry Pi running windows 8 or anything.  It is some discussion on two recently released technologies and actually amounts to “Two Blog Posts One entry”.

Raspberry Pi

Register here to express an interest in Raspberry Pi-001052The other night, as Midnight at the start of February 29th my time to be precise, Rasbperry Pi announced the launch of their product.  Rasberry Pi is a charity/non profit producing extremely cheap and small and basic design computers.  This is an ARM processor, like you’d see in a tablet, with 256mb or so of flash memory on a board the size of a credit card.  It has USB inputs, a power socket, an Ethernet jack, which is the largest component on the thing as near as I can tell, and an HDMI out.

It also costs somewhere in the ballpark of $35.

I really wanted to try to get one.  There are any number of projects you could use it for from a small media box, to a small dedicated emulator box to whatever.  I have read some suggestions over on /g/ that it’s not as capable as it’s touted but I didn’t read the entire thread so they may have been referring to some alternative product or something.   Still, for $35 it seemed like a neat experimental toy.

Sadly, the initial run was only 10,000 and as near as I can tell, it was UK exclusive.  It also had enormous demand, both retailers offering it essentially had their websites completely crash.  Neither seemed to be willing to ship over seas, or at least, to the US.  I gave up after about a half hour of just trying to get the page to load. 

I’m not upset about it, I’m sure it’ll be put out somewhere locally within the next few months.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview

win8installWhen Windows 7 came out, I tried out the preview/beta of that too.  I may have gone as far to install that on a spare laptop.  At this point I’m just using Windows 8 in a Virtual Machine using Virtual Box.  There were a few issues but I found a simple fix here.  The fix was that, by default, “Enable PAE/NX” was not selected.

Simple.

So I loaded it up.  It detected the virtual network connection perfectly, which is great because Windows 8 has all sorts of neat online integration.  The best analogy I can give is to any Smartphone with Android or iOS (I assume, never used iOS), and presumably, Windows Phone 7.

For example, my sign in, is my Live account.  I don’t use my Live email for anything so that’s not too exciting but when I entered my Google account into it, it picked up my contacts, it picked up my email, it picked up my Calendar.  Everything. 

This is very excellent.  I went through a lot of work a few years ago making sure everything was consolidated and would sync properly via my Google account, Android has already made it worth it, this is just Icing on the Cake.  It’s too bad that my corporate employer would freak if I tried to push all of my emails to my Google account the way I did at my old employer, because I’d have everything all in one place once again.

Ah well, I barely get any email at work worth reading anyway.

Anyway, some interesting aspects.  There is some interesting X-Box live integration going on.  I’ll need to investigate earlier, but as near as I can tell, “Games for Windows Live” is just becoming X-Box Live.  There also seems to be some marketplace sharing involving the games on X-Box Live, and I’ve heard a rumor of Windows 8 supporting playing 360 games.  This is all speculation and I have some other speculation I may get to related to this in a later entry.

win8solitairI tried out Solitaire, because it’s simple and free.  Interestingly, it shows up now in my GFWL online account.  I actually have always been kind of jealous of the whole X-Box live ecosystem.  Steam is great but they have zero Social going on.  Hell you can’t even make a Steam Badge without using some third party.

The Solitaire game ran extremely slowly though, which was disturbing.  I didn’t have any sort of graphical acceleration enabled on the VM, something I fixed later, so I may have to try again to see if that was related.  On the other hand, needing a 3D card to run Solitaire is very much in the camp of “Really Fucking Lame”.

Anyway, I will need to use  it more and throw some third party stuff at it like Steam and Chrome to make a better judgment overall.  I will say, I like Metro way more than I expected.  It needs some tweaks to work better with a mouse though.  It’s like, it wants Gestures that I can’t give it.  Also, the pop out menus are confusing but only because I’m not used to them and how to work them.  Also related, I’m not sure how well those pop out menus will work in a touch interface either.

There is a basic desktop but the lack of a normal Start Menu and it feeling like it’s basically just an “application” and not the base of everything disturbs me slightly.  Other applications I have running do not appear on the desktop Taskbar, as an example, it’s all still on the left hand side pop out task window thingy.  I suppose that doesn’t make any sense if you have not used Windows 8, but basically, mouse over to the left side and a thing pops out with thumbnails of everything running.

I am not sure I like this system, because nothing has a clear “close this” option and it is very easy to get a whole pile of crap running stacked up in the background.

I guess to close up I’ll just say, I do like Metro, but I think this combo Metro/Desktop idea they are pushing, may be a completely shit idea.  Give people one or the other.  On the other hand, if I can get a beefy Windows 8 tablet with a dock that turns it into a Desktop system, that could be great.  I just lack confidence that a Windows 8 Tablet will be able to run say, Team Fortress 2 or even World of Warcraft with any sort of decency.  Basically, the gamer in me, hates this.  It’s the same reason I don’t use Ubuntu full time.  I like it, it’s neat, on a basic level it’s more than functional.  It completely falls apart for any real games.  Yeah, yeah, “use a console for that” but why the hell would you ever use a controller for FPS games.  Or any game that’s not a platformer for that matter.  Don’t even get me started on Touch for games….

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Recent Custom Transformers

Posted by JoshMiller

Feb 28

I’ve been working on a few custom Transformers recently.  I really am not quite sure on the naming conventions here.  For the most part I stick to just repainting existing molds, though I do occasionally modify minor aspects.  For example, my recent Deluxe Spychanger WARS is pretty much just a straight repaint of DotM Roadbuster, both being NASCARs.  However, I cut a few bits off of his head so it would be more helmet-like and less “Redneck Transformer”.

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Anyway, I’ve started the second in what I hope to be a series of all six with Spychanger Ox.  I’m pretty much pushing the Japanese names for these, not so much for some lame reason like “The Japanese is the true pure names” but more because I already have Classics Ironhide and Mirage and I don’t need some lame “slap a familiar name on it” Spychanger version.  The idea is that these guys can fit in with the rest of my Classics stuff.

I’ve always liked the Spychanger but I hate that they are tiny and match boxed sized next to everyone else.  The plan for the rest is to use the following:

Wheeljack as X-Car/Crosswise – I’d probably settle for Tracks is I could get one cheap.  The robot mode doesn’t work as well but the vehicle is a pretty good match.  I have no way to replicate the translucent plastic of X-car unfortunately so he will probably just end up being lightish blue with silver accents.  I may experiment with some sort of mix of the two colors for sort of a swirly sheen or something.  I am not sure of the logistics really yet.

Sunstreaker as Eagle Killer/REV – This one will be pretty simple given that they are both Yellow Lamborghinis.  I’ll probably mostly just repaint the black parts of Sunstreaker red and add the body markings over the yellow.  Getting an extra Sunstreaker may be prohibitive in the short term.  i don’t need the engine block thing so it may be possible to get an incomplete one for much less.

Mirage as Counter Arrow/Mirage – Another with very similar color patterns to it’s original toy.  They are both White and Blue Indy cars.  A few touch ups on a few points and it’ll be a quick one, though like Sunstraker, an extra Mirage may be a bit tricky to come by for a cheap price.  The gun becomes the front fender too so skipping out on that for an incomplete version doesn’t work.

Jazz as Artfire/HotShot – Artfire was a Porche, it seems appropriate to use RTS Jazz as an update.  Getting a Jazz may be tricky but we already know he’s getting a new head mold so there is a strong potential that the mold will be put out again later this year in the new Generations line up.  Getting the base will be easy.  Repainting it may not be too bad either, though if they reuse the mold to give us Richochet that almost feels like cheating since Ricochet and Artfire share many colors and traits.

Anyway, I have not really toyed much with getting a good method of sealing these once I get done, so the paint tends to be a little fragile.  As such, my process, for now, is to paint up the vehicle mode pretty well the way I want it, then shoot photos of it. 

Then, Transform the toy into Robot mode and finish up painting the thing.  I mostly display my toys as robots anyway, so I have no need to convert it back.  Some molds are better all around for repainting.  WARS turned out to work out better than expected for avoiding part rubbing but I have a Motormaster repaint of Classics Ultra Magnus which gets his shoulder paint all shredded to bits during transformation due to the way it transforms.

I imagine there is some way to seal these, i just have not looked into it.

I also am working on doing updated photoshoots of my old Custom projects which I’ve been uploading to the local gallery, though there is not much there right now.

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