Just for yucks I am using a linux box in my house as gateway for all the devices in my house, I just want to be able to see what is going on at the network level and do a little more finegrained control.

I considered using “dd-wrt”:http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index but it is not keeping up with router releases – it is not available for any of the routers on the shelf at best buy locally, for instance. and these router boxes are kind of a mess anyway, super limited on ram and storage, which constrains what I can do. i can easily build a cheap linux box with ethernet in, wifi out. the only advantage the router boxes have are the 4+ onboard wired ethernet ports. but wired ethernet seems to be going the way of the dodo in the home.

There are a ton of code bases to choose from. Here are some that seemed notable

* “untangle”:http://www.untangle.com/. commercial product but also some open source light version which they try to hide on their site. which makes me think the open source thing is 99% of the commercial thing. nice UI. They obviously don’t really want to support people like me tho, probably will steer away from this. * “clearOS”:http://www.clearfoundation.com/Software/overview.html. similar but looks even more open-sourcy, they say the right things about supporting open source community. * “ipfire”:http://www.ipfire.org/. very open sourcy and modern (git repositories for instance). git repositories seem active * “zeroshell”:http://www.zeroshell.net/eng/. old school open source (not git based for instance), looks a little rough around the edges, but very complete. * “devil linux”:http://www.devil-linux.org/home/index.php. boots off cd/usb so easy to try but doesn’t seem to have the network depth of the previous choices

i’ll probably start with an ipfire trial. unless someone has a better idea.

Back in about 1990, I sold almost all my vinyl when I went fulltime to CDs. I did keep a few treasures – some Beatles, Floyd, Yes (“Roger Dean covers!”:http://www.rogerdean.com/paintings/), Led Zeppelin. But I sold the rest and moved on. Every once in a while I pull a vinyl record off the shelf to show the members of the younger generation so they can marvel at my backwardness.

I have moved on from CDs as well, quite a while ago. In fact I am probably in my 2nd generation of post-physical CD use – 1st gen was ripping all my CDs and just using digital copies everywhere. Now I just use Spotify and its ilk and don’t buy much music at all. But I still have 5-6 banker’s boxes of CDs in the garage, and they are taking up valuable space (that I could use to store more valuable stuff, like small kitchen appliances – rice cookers, bread makers, etc).

Sell? Does anyone want to buy old CDs? Are there aficionados that value CDs because they sound “warmer” than digital versions? Just throw away? Will I ever want the full CD resolution of any of this music ever? If I just throw away, but still listen to the ripped versions I have, am I in trouble if the RIAA goons show up some day? Maybe I can just take a picture of them all in a pile and the RIAA would accept that as proof of ownership (not likely). Do I have to sort thru and figure out which are available on Spotify and so can be thrown away without creating a legal liability for me, and keep the CDs that aren’t readily available online? What a pain.

OK I have been diligent in using this phone, I really want MSFT to have a competitive offering in the phone space, it would be good for me as a customer and good for the region.

But I am starting to get frustrated, and looking forward very much to my next phone.

* Back button versus Home button. If you enter an app from the Home screen, it is a fresh new copy, always. If you enter from the back button, you come back where you were. So suppose you are drafting an email, go to the browser to grab a url to stuff in the email. If you get back to email via the homescreen, your in-process message is gone. F^&k. You have to go back using the back button. Stupid. Annoying. Bites me every freaking day, several times. Apps should remember where they were. * The bottom row buttons become unresponsive once a day – the home, back, search buttons. No amount of pressing helps. Reboot. This is extra special if you were composing something, jumped to the browser to get a url, and then can’t get back. Grrr. * Prominence of the Bing button. Way too easy to hit unintentionally, I constantly bring up the Bing page which I never want. It is not that I hate Bing, it is just that I can easily search from the browser address bar and I don’t need a big freaking button that is too easy to hit on the device. * Spontaneous TellMe invocation. No idea why but at least once a day, the voice reco dialog pops up. Often when I set the phone down at night and plug it in – about 10 seconds after setting it down, TellMe pops up. No idea why. Voice reco blows (on all phones) and I never need this feature. * Tabbed browsing. Something is wrong with it, it is way less intuitive than with the iphone, I don’t understand when tabs are created or reused. I end up never using tabs.

Very soon, this phone is headed for retirement. What will I get next? Well I will wait to see the purported September iPhone refresh and make a decision then. The Nokia hardware is solid and I like it, but I don’t feel great about the overall experience, and I’m still pissed that this device has been orphaned by MSFT. I could go Android as well, the Android user in the family is very happy.

* “The Disappearing Spoon”:amazon by Sam Kean. Breezy walk through all the elements and their quirks, along with the back stories of their discovery and the quirky, sometimes petty scientists involved. * “Whiter Shades of Pale”:amazon by Christian Lander. If you like Portlandia, you’ll probably chuckle at this. * “Kill Decision”:amazon by Daniel Suarez. Guy writes a solid thriller with great short term technology extrapolation. I assume he will write a followup to this, there is certainly a very dystopian tale to write. * “Blackout”:amazon by Mira Grant. The first book in this post-zombie-apocalypse series was awesome, complicated characters and no storybook endings. But in this, the third book, I feel like the author chickened out and went for the happy ending and single dimensional villains. Still fun but could have been more… * “Forty Stories”:amazon by Donald Barthelme. There is an de Kooning on the cover of this book, and that serves as a hint to the type of stories you will find in here. I’m not sure there is a writing genre called Abstract Expressionism but these stories sure seem to fit the bill – patchworks of elements that seem to form coherent wholes but I’m never quite sure of the intent.

Beautiful design, mythically rare.

Months into my ownership, on Microsoft’s home turf, and a young attractive barista in Seattle says to me “Hey, didn’t you use to come in the Bellevue Square Starbucks?”

Preening and smiling, I respond “Yes.”

And she says “I thought I recognized you. That is, I recognized your phone.”

Gabe is a smart guy and he is “concerned about Windows 8”:http://allthingsd.com/20120725/valves-gabe-newell-on-the-future-of-games-wearable-computers-windows-8-and-more/

And there are investors like “Bronte Capital”:http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2012/07/changing-my-mind-on-microsoft.html?spref=tw who are abandoning their MSFT positions.

Both super smart guys and I respect their thoughts and analysis, Gabe in particular you ignore at your peril.

But really – the catastrophe for MSFT happened long ago, the consequences are just being fully realized now. Win8 and Surface and Azure are responses to that catastrophe, and are necessary, though they are very late to the party.

The lock on developer mindshare was lost in 1995 with the advent of the Internet. I stood in front of a room of developers in late 95, trying to convince them to develop Windows-specific content for Internet users, and got savaged. This was at the height of MSFT’s dominance and the leading edge of developers had already moved on to platform-independent install-free solutions like HTML and Java. There was no getting them back. Some parts of MSFT fought hard to stem this tide in the late 90s but ultimately the company never had the focus and products to remain relevant to these developers. The development community moved on to Internet-friendly technologies – first HTML and Java, php, perl, python, ruby, aws, etc etc etc.

Similarly, the tide has been running against the “MSFT OEM model for 15 years”:http://theludwigs.com/2012/02/msft-and-the-decline-of-the-pc-hardware-ecosystem/. Buying a PC hasn’t been a great experience for years and the OEMs gave up on design leadership years ago.

MSFT is now making bold moves to address the erosion of developer relevance and the erosion of the oem model, but the Win8 and Surface and Azure may all be a little late, or may take some time to stem the tide. They are necessary steps, they are not the catastrophe, they are the response to the catastrophe. They may not be enough, MSFT may have to continue to take big risks to get back to a position of leadership and growth in some segments. At almost any cost, MSFT has to get back out in front of the developer parade for some significant segment of developers.

* “Massive”:amazon by Ian Sample. “Soul of a New Machine”-style telling of the chase after the Higgs. Not very technical, more about the people and personalities. OK but I’d like a little more science content. * “Arguably”:amazon by Christopher Hitchens. Well, after reading this, I am embarrassed to claim that I review books, or even read them. Hitchens knew how to deeply read, and man could he completely eviscerate an author. A full book of these essays is a bit much to wade thru, this is powerful stuff. * “Herzog”:amazon by Saul Bellow. This is a struggle. We all have our inexplicable neuroses, but wandering thru the depths of one character’s particular bag of irrational introspection just isn’t that compelling. * Contrast with “Disgrace”:amazon by J. M. Coetzee. This story of an aging man struggling with his irrelevance grabs you from the first paragraph and holds you all the way through. I tore through this.

So apparently the “hammer is going to fall on PSU tomorrow”:http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaaf-dr-saturday/ncaa-announce-penalties-against-penn-state-monday-paterno-141212517–ncaaf.html. Who knows what will happen, but I think it is reasonable to assume that PSU will be uncompetitive in football for at least the next 5 years. Either because of massive financial penalties (this seems likely to me as it penalizes the institution directly), significant scholarship reductions (less likely in my mind, as this hurts future kids), loss of TV and bowl exposure which has financial and recruiting implications (this will certainly happen), an outright ban on the team (unlikely), and the resultant flow of staff and players to other schools. It is hard to imagine that PSU will field a quality program for years.

So what does the Big 10 do? I am sure there are very active conversations today.

* Stand by PSU. The noble thing to do. And the Big10 at times has tried to be noble. I could certainly live with this. But you can bet this would hit the Big10 in the pocketbook, it will affect the next round of TV rights negotiations. And on every discussion of the Big10 standings, or Big10 allstar teams, or whatever, there will be that PSU logo and the PSU issues will come up. It is going to be a thorn for the league. But I could live with this. * Dump them ASAP and try to fill their spot with 1 team. Given how damaged the Big10 would be with PSU in the league, I think the league would make substantial compromises to get the right 12th team in, so this may be ND’s best time to strike a deal that preserves some of their special treatment. * Dump them ASAP and make a big play to the south. Try to pick up the disaffected ACC football programs who aren’t getting the revenue they should because of their ACC affiliation. This would be costly, but there are no cheap solutions in sight. If you could pick up 3-5 southern teams, this would create a dramatic positive press story and allow the league to bury the PSU story.

My bet is that the league does not stand by PSU. They may throw PSU a bone and say that they will reconsider them for full membership in 6-7 years but this is just window dressing. to I wonder if this PSU story was a motivator for some the Pac-12 schools who submarined the Big-10/Pac-12 linkup.

UPDATE: and so we know. The Big10 will stand behind PSU, as PSU works thru it’s misery. It is going to be 10 years before PSU is a competitive team again, if that. I’m not sure this was the right business move for the Big10, but it is noble. Perhaps having PSU ever-present in the league will serve to remind every other coach and institution, every day, that they need to put the kids and players first.

* “Ruby for iOS development”:http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/05/exclusive-building-ruby-ios-applications-with-rubymotion.ars. Fascinating stuff. Moving beyond ObjectiveC seems like a good thing. $200 seems a bit steep. * “Simple explanation of F stop”:http://www.petapixel.com/2012/04/02/a-simple-explanation-of-f-stop-numbers/. Useful. But beware, “simple” == 15 minutes, because the topic just isn’t that simple. * “Convert handwriting to LaTeX”:http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/07/20/converting-hand-drawn-equations-to-latex-and-mathml/. Kind of awesome. Tho I tend to learn the easy keyboard equivalents for LaTeX pretty fast, but still this is awesome * Rich has a bunch on “Wifi channel selection”:http://www.tongfamily.com/archives/2011/11/wifi-channels-which-are-the-best/, I am probably massively suboptimal. * “Sugru self setting rubber”:http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/07/12/back-in-stock-sugru-multicolor-pack-self-setting-rubber/. Awesome stuff. * What are you going to do with all your obsolete incandescent bulbs? I bet it won’t be as cool as the “Bulb Box”:http://www.alhamaddesign.com/collection1.html#8

I thought we were past that. Anyway I used “SignNow’s online notary feature”:https://notary.signnow.com/, sadly “Docusign”:http://www.docusign.com does not yet have a notary feature.

So the way the SignNow feature is supposed to work is this – you upload a document, they throw you into a video chat with a notary, the notary asks you all the notary type questions, looks at your ID, accepts your signature, stamps the doc, and you are done. It could be a great convenience. And the people at SignNow were incredibly gracious, they are just rolling out this service, they worked super hard to make sure I was satisfied. I could hear the notary on the other end working with her tech support to solve issues as they cropped up.

But the stupid Adobe Flash in-browser video control is killing them. It would never work on my machine (Brand new macbook pro retina, google chrome). I restarted the browser to no avail. We finally go to the point where the notary could see me, and we could hear each other, but I could never see the notary, all I saw was a frozen Flash control. This isn’t the first company I’ve seen struggle with the Flash control, that thing is a killer.

But thanks to the diligence of the SignNow folks I did get a notarized doc and so my problem was solved. For their sake I hope they find a solution that doesn’t need this Flash thing. I assume they are completely nonstarters on the iPad.

The whole experience does make you wonder about the value of notarization, if you weren’t already wondering. Has this process really made my signature more trustworthy and reliable – I mean, the notary was in Virgina, attesting to my signature in Washington, for a lease document in California.

Mutant eggplant? Fermented grape jelly? Jolly Joe’s Candy? Or maybe just a starfish at low tide.

“Big move for yahoo”:http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/googles-marissa-mayer-tapped-as-yahoos-chief/?hp. I’d make job 1 cozying up to Apple and help supplant all the Google services on Apple devices. If Yahoo could become the most relevant internet content brand on the iPad and iPhone, that would be a good step forward. The weather, stock apps would be fine places to start, along with the maps app but that horse may have left the barn.

OK it is wonderfully fast, the 768G SSD is awesome, Aperture opens in seconds. I love the speed. Love.

But – one spontaneous reboot. Address Book hangs on first run. The migration utility took forever and silently gave up trying to transfer my music and photos over, I had to do those manually. Had to boot into the repair utility to fix some “strange permission problem”:http://osxdaily.com/2011/11/15/repair-user-permissions-in-mac-os-x-lion/. Software Update tool failed updating iTunes twice.

Not conclusive yet but something seems a little off.

I’m several days late to the news about “Docusign’s most recent funding”:http://www.geekwire.com/2012/esignature-company-docusign-raises-475m-names-mary-meeker-board/. Congrats to everyone involved, it is great to see the company continue to move ahead. I’m an increasingly frequent user of the app, the iPad experience is pretty good, and I know the team is working to make it even better. I have pretty much retired the old “print-sign-scan” cycle that I used to do on everything. There are still a few things they need to make better for me – notably docs with multiple signers – but great great progress by the company. I am starting to see docusign originated docs from non-tech people show up in my inbox unprompted, that is a good good sign.