Blob
>the personal blog of david n wallace
[aka Dave the Lifekludger]

Technology is the tool – the value is in social infrastructure.
(unknown)

New iMac arrived. Still gotta plug it in and try it. Here’s specs and first images (as if you’ve never seen one before).

IMAC 24″/SD
2.93GHZ INTEL CORE 2 DUO
4GB 1066MHZ DDR3 SDRAM-2X2GB
NVIDIA GEFORCE GT 130 512MB
640GB SERIAL ATA DRIVE
APPLE MIGHTY MOUSE
WL KYBD & USER’S GUIDE-X
COUNTRY KIT,IMAC 24-AUS

I made a decision yesterday while travelling home – I’m going to make allowance in my will towards the ongoing existence of my digital identity.

Now, don’t panic, I’m not ill and don’t intend on dying anytime soon. But it will happen. And it so happens that with recent changes in living arrangements I’ve been in the updating Will mode for a while. (Read there – I’ve been slack in finalising it.)

Anyhow, I was thinking about how we talk about how the things we do digitally are so more ’sticky’ or permanent and how one should be careful of what we put online as it will be ’searchable forever’. But will they? Forever is a long time and while I understand the sentiment in such arguments, the fact is that if I let my domains expire that a lot of what I do would be inaccesible. And someday even the information from them that is stored in google’s cache will be expired. Then, it will be gone. Much is said about how to not do things personally online that might jeopordise opportunities in the future, but I don’t see much about what to do if you actually do want to ensure the ongoing nature of the opportunities you have taken.

Now it might not be so bad for things to disappear, really, when it comes to anything personally I do. However I thought of Lifekludger as an entity and how I believe in what its potential is and how such potential might not be realised in my time. Lifekludger will depend on the increasing nature of online connetedness between people and so while progress and time might be on it’s side, time and progress isn’t for individual human beings.

So I thought about how much of what I do online is important to me and how much I value what it is I’m building oline – whether personally or otherwise. And I figured that if I was serious about it then I should do something to help it survive after me. Hence I thought of the Will.

Here’s my plan. I’m going to put in my Will that a certain sum of money be taken from my estate and put in an interest bearing account with responsibility of maintaining given domains and hosting company fees falling to a pre-determined and informed trusted person. I figure all these online cost are likely to get cheaper in future anyway so the outlay won’t be huge and interest might even account for most of it. At current prices I’d only be looking at about a $3-5k amount. And if Lifekludger finds legs before then well and good, my personal domain will survive even longer … FWIW

So there you have it. Have you thought about the longevity of your digital identity?

Dave – Lifekludger

PS: As would happen, after writing I see there’s a startup called Legacy Locker that deals with the distibution of passwords to online accounts. This doesn’t however allow for ongoing expenses involved but I might consider using a service like that in conjunction. That said, who will guarantee survival of a Third party online service?

So, after losing my job and access to a Exchange box I set about finding a way instead to sync my WindowsMobile PDA (hereafter referred to as PDA) with my Mac.

I visited a few online ‘gobetween’ sites and soon found a minefield of caveats.

http://soocial.com – looks very promising but only does contacts. It syncs from mobles (NOT WM yet), Mac, via a Prefrences app, Outlook, Gmail. All pretty well. Except that’s slow in showing the effects and I got in a heap of a muddle not letting the results show before tryig something else. Anyway, only a part solution.

http://goosync.com – syncs PDA< ->google, does calendars by default. neat, easy to understand, works with PDA using a wifi/3G connection and an app on the PDA. However, to get it to do contacts and tasks it’s a premium service payable by the month and being in UK that’s expensive.

So I gave up and thought I’d bypass online altogether and bought Missing Sync http://markspace.com. Figuring it’s been around long time, rather pay once for a PDA< ->Mac solution than ongoing for a PDA< ->online one.

After three days trying to get MissingSync to work I spat the dummy and wrote asking for a refund and let me go on my way to preserve my sanity. They want to try help me get it working, poor dears, [sigh] and so that saga’s still underway.

So, back to looking at using online as intermediary and find maybe a service that’d do contacts and another calendar using google as a PDA< ->online< ->Mac gobetween.

Google’s own sync offerings seemed best way to go – http://www.google.com/sync/

A big stumbling block I came up against here is that the Google sync offerings for Mac< ->google only work on Leopard versions of OSX (10.5.x & later) and I have Tiger (10.4.x).

So I gave up on the whole idea of using my Mac iCal and Address Book and instead focused on the PDA< ->Google sync. And just use online offerings.

I used the mobile sync for WindowsMobile found here http://www.google.com/mobile/winmo/sync.html and it works a treat. A trap for wary players – when you first setup ActiveSync on your WM device it defaults to overwriting you contacts on the PDA with those from Google. I’d cleaned mine out on Google intending to fill with clean lot o my Macs Address Book. So I filled my PDA WITH NOTHING! And remember, I can’t sync my Mac< ->Google as I am a lowly Tiger user.

Never fear, if you are in that situation, use this excellent little app http://bborofka.com/A_to_G/A_to_G.html to export your Mac Address Book details and import into Google. Then reset ActiveSync to “Keep the item on my device” if there is a conflict (found in ActiveSync on your PDA, under “Edit Server Settings”, “Advanced” button (bleedin obvious, hey), and re sync.

So, I’ve got flawless sync happening between my WM5 based PDA and my Google account’s Calendar & Contacts. And the Google< ->Mac side of things will just have to wait until I get Leopard on my Mac.

At that stage I’ll then use the inbuilt Address Book gmail sync (after using this hack http://lifehacker.com/393855/enable-google-contact-sync-without-an-iphoneipod-touch) and to sync iCal on Mac to Google calendar I’ll use “Gsync” http://googlesync.sourceforge.net/ or http://code.google.com/p/calaboration/ to get ‘inbuilt’ iCal sync.

Phew

Dave

HiveMind [http://fiveprime.org/hivemind/]

Interesting what vanity searches turn up sometimes. Often lead you to services and sites either never seen or long forgotten.

A link to me turned up in my email this morning pointing to the Flickr search tool over at HiveMind [http://fiveprime.org/hivemind/].

It does really fast searches on tags, interestingness, user, contacts and allows searching by license too, which makes it a great tool to find Creative Commons materials.

Check it out.

Dave

Technorati Tags: flickr, hive mind, creativity, tools

When the Review of the National Innovation System was released last month we thought it was worth talking about on our podcast. So Myself, Mike and Laurel hooked up, to be joined during the show by Kristin.

I had created a aggregated feed around the topic using Yahoo Pipes and pimped it on Twitter and through our blogs. During the podcast we talked about the desire to extend the conversation around the Review. Right there and then we found the domain ventureaustralia.com.au was available and Laurel snapped it up for us to do something on.

A big focused was on the report being released initially locked down in PDF format. We tossed around the idea of setting up a site and posting each part of the Review in it. Since then it’s now been unlocked and released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. Which is good to see.

I tossed around ideas of how to make better use of the aggregated pipe feed at the new domain. I contemplated turning every feed article into a blog post at the site, but in a sense that would just be centralising the debate. So I hit on the idea to parse the pipe through something that simpified the pipes layout, bought it under the venturousaustralia.com.au domain and added ability to promote sharing. A kludged Simplepie implementation was what I stumbled on.

See the results at http://venturousaustralia.com.au

Dave

Technorati Tags: innovation, venturous, nis

Over a month back on my Lifekludger blog I mentioned in a blog post titled “Mind control interface a near reality” the Epoc Headset, being developed by Emotiv.

The other day on the New Inventors on the ABC here in Australia my friend Mark Pesce gives a shoutoput to me. Ref 1min in.

See the snipped video below.

[green]qiQFNSOBEDY[/green]

Was tracking Beth Kanter’s journey via Skype, Twitter Qik on her way to ConnectingUp 2008 Conference in Brisbane.

Followed a Twitter on Sat afternoon that she was streaming live on Qik – unfortunately she quickly experienced the bottleneck that exists to any serious entry of Australia participating the Information Economy – our network access.

Click here for full image of above.

Dave

Technorati Tags: beth kanter, cup08, network, cu08, connectingup

thisismyjam.com – a neat new mashup service to create a jam session.

http://dnw.thisismyjam.com

Dave

Saw via twitter a friend of mine, who happens to sing beautifully, had found karaoke on My Space. So I went to listen.

Dave

Technorati Tags: ksolo, myspace