Benad's Junk List

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To follow up on yesterday’s post, it isn’t just reminders and tasks that I need to remember about, but also random pieces of information. As such, I like using note-taking software so that I can quickly write down stuff that I have to remember. As with tasks, lots of cellphones come with some rudimentary note app. Again, with iCloud on the iPhone it all gets backed up and synchronized. But that brings up another important point about notes: You cannot use some note-taking software if it doesn’t have some online synchronization capability, otherwise the notes will be not backed up and will be restricted to whatever device they were taken on. With “cloud” synchronization, at least your notes can follow you.

So, what are the options? A simple possibility is to write a text document in Dropbox ( http://www.dropbox.com/ ) which can be directly edited on any computer, and on the iPhone you can use PlainText or Nebulous to edit the file too. You can use OneNote from Microsoft Office 2010 on Windows and use the various apps on phones, but I found their synchronization process to be abysmally slow.

Another option is the free service Wunderlist ( http://www.6wunderkinder.com/wunderlist/ ), completely free on their web site and using an app for all possible platforms. Doesn’t have much features, but incredibly simple to use, including note sharing. Also, unlike using a plain text file in Dropbox, you can search for text across your notes. Finally, for power users that want to take voice notes, pictures, file attachments and so on, Evernote ( http://www.evernote.com/ ) is for you. I even migrated my bookmarks to it. Has apps for all platforms, and a few browser plugins to let you “clip” parts of a web page as a note. I also found their desktop application to be incredibly powerful and versatile, and note searching is fast and searches even within attached documents and pictures. There’s a free version that only limits the amount of data you can upload per month to a reasonable amount (60MB) but the paid version at about $45 a year gives you 1GB upload per month (once uploaded it’s there forever).

So, here you have it. Simple plain text notes using Dropbox and PlainText or using Wunderlist, and power-user notes with Evernote.

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It seems like I completely forgot to post something Monday. Technically speaking, it means I already broke my New Year’s resolution. If only I had set a daily reminder to post something each day… We now have several ways in today’s phones to set up recurring reminders. Many phones come with built-in software to do recurring alarms and task lists. On the iPhone and using a free iCloud account those tasks will even synchronize across the various Apple products, their web site, and Outlook in Windows. Yet those various interfaces tend to be clumsy enough to enter a new “to do” item, enough to not want to bother. With Siri on the iPhone 4S it’s easier, but then you need to buy an iPhone 4S. And what if you don’t want to use a cellphone, or if you have one but is a dumb, basic cell phone?

For me, I’ve been using the service aptly called “Remember The Milk”, at http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ . The user interface may seem messy at first, filled with features and gizmos, but at its basis using a simple one line of text you can enter a new task with a due date or time, location, tags, recurrence, priority and duration. For example, the following sets a new task for tomorrow at 10AM with priority 3 (low) with for the list “fun”: “Play game !3 ^tomorrow 10am #fun”. Using that syntax, tasks can be entered through their web site, their mobile web site, by email, by instant message and using their apps for iPhone, Android and so on. For reminders of tasks due for a day or a specific time, they can be sent by email, SMS, instant message or through their apps. And this is why after all those years I still use Remember The Milk: wherever I am, I can easily add tasks and get reminders in any form I want. If entering new tasks was not easy or flexible enough I’d be too lazy or distracted to do so, but with RTM a simple email or using their iPhone app with a quick line of text is sufficient. Also, in years of use, the RTM service missed sending me reminders only once.

The RTM service is free, but synchronization and “push notification” through their cellphone apps require a $25 yearly fee. It’s well worth it if you use an iPhone or Android.

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Redline, the Japanese animation by Takeshi Koike released in 2010, may be a juvenile car racing movie in a pseudo “Heavy Metal” world, but is a great piece of art and a joy to watch. After having done a short animation piece for the Animatrix, Koike spent the next 7 years or so on this movie. It reuses similar themes and style of racing, speed, and visuals with those bold dark lines. Yet, surprisingly, Redline’s 100 minutes of animation shows a consistent level of visual artistry that doesn’t cut corners. Each frame is beautifully hand-drawn in a style that defies the usual tropes we now expect from Japanese anime. The drawings show a level of detail normally reserved only for animation key frames or comic books. The backgrounds do not feel like out-of-place artworks and integrate elegantly in the overall style.

While the story is not quite deep, almost all characters, including the minor ones, are developed well enough to support an entire “Redline” TV series. The races themselves are some of the finest races I’ve seen seen in a movie, at the same level as Vanishing Point, the Blues Brothers and Death Proof. The first race before the opening titles will keep you at the edge of your seat with its impeccable pacing, editing, music and visuals. Much had been said already about how this movie seem completely out of place compared to the entire Japanese animation industry. On its own, outside of that context, it still remains an impressive masterpiece of its young director, and an incredibly fun, over-the-top action movie.

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Starting with the fifth movie of the Harry Potter movies, David Yates consistently directed the rest of the series. I say “consistently” because they do feel alike in style, a reprieve compared to the changing styles introduced by the third and fourth movies. Also, unlike the nearly direct scene per scene adaptations of the first half of the series, your can feel the struggle to fit in a story that is far bigger than the average 140-minutes screen time. And yet, the increased “adaptation” for screen works well enough that viewers that haven’t read the books (like me) can still appreciate the more “streamlined” story. It is to note that at this point the fans are so rabid that even if Yates to an average job his movies would be blockbusters, and yet it genuinely feels like at the very least Yates does a good effort to make movies that stand on their own as artistic works. The fifth movie grows the Harry Potter universe more with this “order of the Phoenix”, and intermingles that story line with one about a school curriculum reformation. The latter was quite enjoyable on its own, yet seems somewhat disconnected from the former which ties in with the overall series’ story arc. Some annoying aspects that started to be introduced are Harry having “visions” because he is somehow connected to Voldemort, and the use of teleportation. Both work well as plot devices on paper, but seem glaringly cheap when displayed on screen. Also, Yates loves his blacks, making almost-dark scenes difficult to follow. I even had to turn up the brightness from the BD player since even the TV couldn’t cope with the darkness. This made some sets, like the whole end confrontation (in the dark with shelves of glass balls and the battle that follows) not only confusing, but feel like it was just a clever way to save money on the sets. In the end, it is an enjoyable movie, but not much more.

With the sixth movie you can tell that Yates is more comfortable with it’s directing style and with adapting the book’s story. The story feels far less “all over the place”, and is maybe the first story of the series that focuses almost entirely on the main story arc of the series. Thus this story cannot be enjoyed much unless you had at least partially watched or read the previous books. One annoyance, though, is that the disparity between the age of the characters in the script and the actors becomes too distracting, or maybe that’s just me. Otherwise, this movie has some of the best acting, art direction and story line of the movies. Overall, this movie is one of the best of the series, after the thrid movie, and makes it nearly impossible to not want to watch the last book.

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In a move that reeks of hypocrisy, I bought a season pass of the current season of “30 Rock”, knowing full well that its producers, NBC, was behind the crafting of SOPA and PIPA, both that I thoroughly trashed earlier this week. Why then? Should I had just pirated the whole season? Or protest even harder, since “they” shut down megaupload, by not watching 30 Rock at all?

Here’s the thing: while a bit too expensive for my taste, iTunes is the easiest way to watch TV shows. No need to install some software to pipe some RSS feed into some BitTorrent or Usenet downloader, no need to re-encode the video file for my iPad, no need to track manually which episodes I’ve seen or when within an episode I’ve stopped watching, and so on. Oh, and it’s not like in Canada I have many legal choices. Apart from the price element (seasons are as expensive as their DVD equivalent), iTunes ends up being the best competitor to piracy by making it as convenient and easy to use as possible, a bit like Steam is for games, Netflix for movies and Rdio (or iTunes) is for music. So I’m essentially sending a message by encouraging digital distribution that respect its users rather than stifling them with draconian DRM and exorbitant prices. It’s not like I’m unwilling to pay, but I’m not going to encourage companies that stifle innovation from competition through political bribes. At least Apple, Amazon and Google are trying their best to move media distribution to the future, and by the amount of money they’re making out of it, it seems to work.

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If you want to have a proper and entertaining explanation of why there was an economic crash in 2008, then you have to ready the book “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis. Even though I’ve finished reading the book a month ago, my bad memory of names make me unable to remember the various actors in this recollection of events. The narrative centers around a few investors that predicted that many so-called highly secure triple-A mortgage bonds were effectively crap, and by buying insurance on them were effectively betting against them. Step by step Lewis describes the odd rise and structure of those so-called credit debt obligations, and how it created a Ponzi-like scheme of credit default swaps. While those financial instruments were purposely made to be difficult to grasp, the author still manages to properly explain how CDOs and CDS came to be, operated, and due to lax deregulation and sheer personal greed nearly caused the crash of the entire US economy.

So, yes, a highly recommended read, even if like me you’re not much into economic matters and simply want an insight on the culture of the few that control so much wealth.

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A few major web site, noticeably (for me) Reddit, Google and Wikipedia publicly displayed their opposition to a set of bills that were on the verge to be passed into law in the United States. I won’t go too much into the detail of those bills (Reddit did a good job here: http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/technical-examination-of-sopa-and.html ), but in short what were supposedly be bills against web sites that sold or give away counterfeit goods (including intellectual property) are simply a covert way to give to some large corporations the right to shut down any foreign web site they want without any court oversight. Of course I’m against that monstrosity that didn’t even do good job at hiding its true purpose (stifling competition and censorship), but that’s not what’s surprising me the most about it. Its original near universal support by both Democrats and Republicans made it quite clear that under the guise of naïveté and incompetence both the House and the Senate is completely corrupted by corporate interests. With their near control over media, the big news sources barely mentioned it before today, because they work hand in hand with large corporations to subvert whatever “representative democracy” remains. Since the few people left that are not completely disillusioned vote based on vicious advertisement campaigns on those controlled media, and since two years ago the supreme court ruled that since corporations are people, free speech is a right for all “people” and money is “speech”, then at last corporations can spend unlimited resources bending public will and bribe the population as a whole, then now the democratic system is effectively subverted by money alone.

All of that, 15 years ago, would have been considered a crack-pot conspiracy theory with far-fetched ideas. Today, the largest Internet company in the world (Google) displayed on their home page an implicit agreement to the theory that at this point the United States is a form of corporotracy. Oh well, middle class, quality public education a good healthcare was fun while it lasted. Now I don’t mind that -20C temperature in Montreal anymore…

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I’m a bit torn between using my new iPhone 4S as-is or buying a case. For the past few months I used it “naked” with no case whatsoever, and I can say that it has much better grip than the 3S because both surface sides are flat and a kind of glass that grips easily. I’m still worried about two things though: accidentally dropping it, and battery life. So the first case I looked into is Mophie juice pack air ( http://www.mophie.com/ ), white to match the phone. It would double both as a protective case (back and sides, and there’s a front bezel for when it falls flat on the front surface) and as an additional battery. I don’t worry too much about doubling the iPhone’s battery life, but more about preserving the built-in battery (at the cost of the Mophie’s) as much as possible. The “air” version of the case is thin enough to be used as if it was a “normal” case.

The other possibility is to get the LifeProof case ( http://www.lifeproof.com/ ). Its primary purpose is to make the iPhone waterproof, and also protects the phone from dust, snow and drops. And by “waterproof” they really mean it: shower, pool, and so on. The downside is that it’s a little bit clunky, headphones may need to use the provided connector to work, and once in the case you should leave it there for as long as possible. It may be overkill (or overprotective, actually), but then I can’t find anything that protects the phone better other than a separate waterproof pouch. So, which is more important? Protecting the phone when it’s pouring outside and I forgot my umbrella, or extending its battery life?

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