Do any of you microblog? Do any of you have a Twitter account, or use any similar service like Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, or Identica? I’ve been microblogging for about 6 months, as you might have noticed since I’ve got my Identica syndicated to Facebook using the excellent openmicroblogging Facebook app (source code here), but I’m still not sure whether it is a worthwhile endeavor or a colossal waste of time. (If “Twitter” is the magic word for you, I now syndicate my Identica on Twitter as well so you can follow me there.)

On the plus side, it takes much less time to *finish* a micro-post or tweet than to finish a serious blog post, and therefore I am able to do it much more often. Posting interesting, relevant stuff to my blog on a regular basis takes conscious effort, discipline and willpower. Posting something interesting in 140 characters can be tricky but easy to complete and therefore more immediately rewarding. Ultimately, writing enough interesting tweets to match the length of a real blog post takes as much if not more effort, but like most mere mortals I often have difficulty finishing what I start, and finishing and releasing stuff frequently seems superior to letting stuff stew in my brain until the Great American blog post emerges.

Also, microblogging can replace some of the functions of social bookmarking (which doesn’t seem to have really caught on the way microblogging has), namely sharing links with my friends and spreading memes (mwahahahaha). I am still extremely excited about the next generation open source / decentralized version of Ma.gnolia, Ma.gnolia 2, but I am not desperate enough to use any of the current social bookmarking services while I wait… the network effects are just too limited. (I like open source service Connotea for instance, but it doesn’t actually let you friend people or anything… it’s missing the “social” part of social bookmarking!) Given the existence of microblogging, I now mostly want to use social bookmarking services to build a public online searchable database of articles that interest me… a reference trail, rather than a way to alert friends to what is currently interesting to me.

On the minus side, deep analysis is impossible in microblogging, and it is difficult to have thoughtful discussions with a 140 character word limit. At best you can reference thoughtful discussions occurring elsewhere, or respond with pithy one-liners that summarize your positions. Summaries can frequently be hilarious (brevity is the soul of wit) and to the point, often people add words without adding meaning/substance. But there are still fundamental limits to what can be said on a microblog, and therefore I think it would be sad if microblogging took away too much time/effort from real blogs such as this one.

Additionally, there are a limit to how many useful links you can include in 140 characters, and it can be difficult/impossible to include pretty pictures or videos in microblogs without the help of external services. As long as you are happy with following links that may not be a problem, but something is lost I think when you can no longer bundle all of the media together in one cohesive page.

No doubt there are other pros and cons that I haven’t thought of. What do you think?

UPDATE: The Identica badge at http://kentbrewster.com/identica-badge/ won’t work in Livejournal because LJ bans scripting languages like Javascript from LJ posts. Phooey. The Twitter badge does work, however.

UPDATE 2022: Neither badge works in WordPress, and I can’t seem to use the official Twitter embed for some reason. I had to remove the old Twitter badge to get the page to load.

I am in love with this panorama photo-stitching program called Hugin. Perhaps it is because it is open source and cross-platform. Perhaps it is because of the adorable logo, which is a person hugging a panoramic photo. But most likely it is because it makes really beautiful panoramic photos for me with almost no effort on my part. All I did was take a few pictures by spinning around in one place, feed those photos into Hugin, and ta-da!

Aren’t they pretty? Why don’t you download Hugin too and give it a try?

Today I’m in Burlingame, CA at the First Annual Seasteading Conference, sponsored by the Seasteading Institute… it’s all about building floating platforms on the ocean and living on them. I’m liveblogging it on my identi.ca, and there are other people using the tag #seasteading08.

Tomorrow and Sunday I will be at the Free Culture 2008 conference at Berkeley, hosted by Students for Free Culture of course and its Berkeley chapter. People will be microblogging that with the tag #fc2008.

I’ll be speaking at the University of Utah this Monday, September 22nd, noon-1:30pm in the Collegiate Room in the Student Union. The title is “Free Speech, Free Software, Free Culture: The Movement for Cultural Participation”. (I’m always torn as to whether to title my talk something witty/silly, or to try to be serious and official-sounding, but I usually go with the latter because different people have different senses of humor and I don’t want someone to skip my talk because my attempts at humor on the advertisements didn’t agree with them.) I’ll also be giving a talk to some librarians beforehand about the Diebold case etc., and afterwards I’ll be doing a “how to start a chapter” workshop with the brand new Students for Free Culture chapter which is starting up there. Monday will be a busy day ^_^

If anyone is in Salt Lake City on Monday night, I’d be interested in meeting up for dinner… just leave a comment or drop me a line. And naturally, if you attend the University of Utah, please come to my talk!

UPDATE: Apparently my talk is only open to invited guests, perhaps because they are serving lunch. If you want to attend, please contact me so I can put you on the invited list.

Is anyone else on Identi.ca? It’s an open source, decentralized Twitter-like microblogging project, and it is pretty awesome. Among other things, you can post to it using a Jabber account such as Gtalk or LJ Talk, and it can send you your friends’ updates over Jabber as well. (I understand this functionality has been broken/disabled on Twitter for a while.) Anyone can install their own version of the software driving it, called Laconica, and friend people on other Laconica services (such as Identi.ca itself).

If you want to follow my posts or “dents”, just subscribe to skyfaller on identi.ca or use the RSS feed you can find on that page.

Hope to see you all there!

On a completely abstract level, if you had a choice between using proprietary software on OS X, or installing Windows in order to use some open source software which for some reason only runs on Windows, which would you do?

I suppose the answer might turn on how good you think OS X is (partially open source, prettier, easier to use, less crufty) and how much you hate Windows, but perhaps this question is more complicated than that?

Frequently I find myself waiting for the nightly builds of some open source program to fix some bug, or to add a feature that doesn’t exist in the stable version of the software. It would be wonderful if there were a good way to be notified when a bugfix or feature appears, either in the unstable or stable versions.

For instance, right now I need some open source software that can capture a screencast from the output of my computer screen. VLC is supposed to support this, but that feature does not work in the stable version on OS X. The next version of VLC, 0.9.0, will apparently have a GUI for recording output from an iSight camera or your screen, but although the GUI is there in the unstable builds, it doesn’t succeed in saving to a file yet. I would like to be notified when VLC supports recording screencasts on OS X.

For another example, I would like to start using Thunderbird 3 with the Lightning calendar/todos add-on… Thunderbird 2 has been boring and stagnant for a long time, and I’d like to help the Thunderbird 3 effort in any way I can, at least by testing the nightly builds. However, there is a showstopper bug which prevents you from switching back and forth between the mail pane and the calendar pane (it gets stuck in calendar mode), and until that is fixed Thunderbird 3 is unusable for me. I have subscribed to the bug so I get an e-mail every time someone submits a patch or makes some uninteresting comment on the bug, but really I just want to know when the darn thing is fixed so I can use Thunderbird 3 again. I don’t want to get all of this extraneous e-mail.

What I’m imagining is a sort of social networking interface, or perhaps a Digg/reddit voting interface like Ubuntu Brainstorm, for bugs/features, where you can get a feed for each bug / feature request, or “friend”/”favorite” them on the website. Then you can either track all activity on the bug/feature request, or simply get a single update e-mail when the bug is fixed or the feature is implemented. This would be really awesome as a global interface for all open source projects, but a more realistic goal may be for something like this to be released as an easy to use/install open source package which all projects use and thus the interface is at least familiar even if it is not a single interface/website for every project under the sun.

Will someone please create this for me? 😉

I’m trying to split up the bill from my last trip to Target between Karen and myself, and it is rather difficult because I’m having trouble decoding the cryptic labels on the receipt.

300PC ALUMIN = The poker chips+cards that I bought for the semi-weekly poker nights my law school friends have. They are in an aluminum carrying case.

GAIAM TANMAT = The yoga mat that Karen bought. (It’s tan.)

RISK BOOK = A Risk game in a box with a book-like form factor.

AUTO OPEN = An umbrella which has a button that automatically opens the umbrella and automatically collapses it if you press it again (sadly you still need to manually retract the umbrella after collapsing it, but it’s still cool). You’d think they could say “umbrella” on the receipt, though.

So I’ve figured some of the items out. But what about:
ENERGIZER
ENERGIZER
ENERGIZER

I’m guessing we bought 3 packs of batteries, but couldn’t they be a little more descriptive? Like, what kind of batteries were they?

Or, for the grand prize of un-descriptiveness:

MERCHANDISE

Yes, merchandise. I bought merchandise at Target, big surprise. BUT WHAT KIND OF MERCHANDISE WAS IT???

The mystery remains.

I have been very disappointed in my law school grades the last two semesters. My highest grade 1st semester was a B+ in Torts, and my highest grade this semester was a B+ in Criminal Law. This is unacceptable.

I have decided that I will not shave my face again until I land at least one grade of an A- or above in a law school class.

This could be a relatively brief beard-growing episode, since I am taking a class on Copyright at the law school this summer. My final exam is in 5 days on July 10th, and hopefully I’ll have my grade back around the beginning of the semester. I could get an A in that class and terminate my beard after about a month.

Or I might not get an A until the end of the fall semester, which could mean growing my beard into January or beyond. But hopefully it will end sooner!

Wish me luck.

More posts to follow about the details of beard growing when I find time to research it.