Category: Technology

Sam, what computer should I buy?

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I get the “Hey… you know lots about computers. What computer should I buy? I don’t really want an iPad because I like keyboards.” conversation often. Whether at a party, a church event, a meeting with a client… it seems to happen at least once a week.

So, here is my answer (well, the Summer 2014 version at least).

The Acer C720P Chromebook.

That’s my Acer C720P alongside my brand new Macbook Air 11 in the photo above (well, it’s technically Merianna’s).  The Acer cost me $279 and the Macbook cost me $1100. That alone is a big differentiation for many people. However, the Chromebook is a little workhorse of a computer. I literally use it to run my business when I’m on the road, and frequently at home or in the office.

“But Sam,” you say, “aren’t Chromebooks useless when they aren’t connected to the internet? I need to do things on my computer besides just check email.”

That might have been a logical reason for why you should buy something like a cheap Windows computer from Best Buy rather than a Chromebook last year or especially two years ago. However, Chromebooks have progressed a great deal over the last few years (especially months) and now allow for offline applications, heavy graphics programs, and using or editing media like video or audio in addition to all the goodness that comes with web apps in 2014. Even games are catching up.

Plus, it has a touch screen. I maybe use it twice a day, but when I do it’s pretty nifty.

For 90% of people, a Chromebook is a fantastic choice as Google continues to optimize and improve the ChromeOS experience.

The Verge agrees with me today (go read their review for all the specs and details):

The best Chromebooks combine high-end touches with low-end prices, and the C720P has more of both than most. First and foremost, it has a latest-generation Intel processor. That alone makes the C720P feel like a fully capable laptop, not a tablet or smartphone. If you’re looking for a Chromebook to use as your primary computer, don’t buy anything without Intel inside. The C720P also has all the ports and trappings you’d expect from any good laptop, a keyboard that works fine without being totally exceptional, and a really good trackpad. This is a pure workhorse machine, but it’s truly a workhorse.

via The best Chromebook you can buy | The Verge.

So save yourself the trouble of buying a cheap windows laptop or the expense of buying a Mac if you’re going to be doing mostly web intensive things or office related activities. If you need a computer that will handle Adobe Illustrator, 324 Excel macros, and your Sony video editing software… buy all means buy a $1,000 + Windows or Mac machine. Most of us don’t need that, just as most of us don’t need a pick up truck (although I do love mine).

 

Against the Natural Order of Things

A seemingly prescient revelation from Douglas Adams as I come ever closer to turning 36:

  • Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
  • Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
  • Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

via Cory Doctorow writing for Tor Books in a piece titled You Are Not a Digital Native: Privacy in the Age of the Internet.

As someone who first got on the internet at age 12 thanks to a very nerdy friend back home in rural South Carolina and then the world wide web the next year (thanks to that same friend who would go on to move away the following year but exposing me to the wonders of bulletin boards for long distance communication in 1994… wonder whatever happened to him?) and still thinks the web is revolutionary and has found a career in it, I can relate.

Personal Domains as Apps

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I keep wondering what to do with this site.

For a long time, I’ve been an advocate for folks having their own domain and using that as a “blog” of some sort to share ideas, thoughts, creations, stories, writings, photos, videos etc. When I was a middle school teacher, I was especially insistent about this to the point of having all of my students set up blogs for their portfolios (many of which still use the domains they set up years ago according to my Feedly account, which is great to see).

However, we are moving from an era of writing-for-the-web first into a nascent ecosystem of writing for an app first. Rather than concentrating on their websites as well developed marketing vehicles complete with many pages, subpages, and temp landing pages, many of my marketing clients these days (at least the smart ones that listen to me) are focusing on the notion that the mobile web (and / or apps) is the more profitable place for focus.

We’re watching companies like Google, Dropbox, Yahoo, and Facebook break down their once monolithic web portals into divergent apps that separate out their photo, newstream, chat, and video components. Even companies like Twitter have Vine. It’s a fascinating phenomenon that will only accelerate in the coming months and years as the web continues to change and bifurcate its various evolutionary chains. The web that my four and six year old knows will be very different than the web I’ve known for twenty years because of this evolutionary path as well as the rise of wearables, the web in our vehicles, and the “internet of everything” that will continue to bring transformations to our human dwellings.

In the meantime, I’ve been wondering about the nature of this personal namespace. I still think everyone should have a personal domain that they call their own. I love and cherish the idea of a web that is federated and based on a model of flowing river that routes around problems rather than being a flow of syrup that is held up by any barrier that is put up by walled gardens and monolithic user experiences. However, that’s not in the schadenfreude of 2014. I’m constantly caught up in the ease and reliability of using Facebook or Twitter as my blog, Instagram as my photo sharing service, and GOogle+ as my repository for photos and videos that are for family only.

But what if there’s a middle ground?

What if personal domain blogs (or portfolios if you will) have the possibility to be “apps” that represent our own content and offer an experience of who we are to interested people? What if these types of personal blogs like what you’re reading is less of a blog in the 2005 sense, and more like a “sam harrelson” app that gives glimpses into thoughts that I want to communicate and share? It’s a matter of semantics, to be sure, but in this case words do matter.

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Just spent the last hour side loading Google Apps onto my wife’s Kindle Fire HD. Amazing to me that Amazon makes this process so difficult.

Don’t get me wrong, I like most of what Amazon is doing in the media side of things but it has to hurt the Fire platform (tablets, now TV, and soon phones) to make installing Google apps pretty much impossible unless you know or are an Android nerd.

This is the Saddest “We Sold for $8 Million” Post I’ve Ever Read

Readmill was a fantastic app for reading and discovering new things to read. I’ve enjoyed the small amount of time I spent in the app and am sad it’s going away. The “epilogue” post from their site after the Dropbox acquisition for 8 million is a hard read for fans but the stats below tell a good, but brief, story:

Readmill’s story ends here. Many challenges in the world of ebooks remain unsolved, and we failed to create a sustainable platform for reading. For this, we’re deeply sorry. We considered every option before making the difficult decision to end the product that brought us together.

via Readmill Epilogue – Readmill.

There’s a Reason Why Boring Interfaces Like Reddit Engage Crowds

People visit sites repeatedly because they can do things about things they care about. Here’s a great answer on the topic of why Reddit has such high engagement with people across a variety of backgrounds, age groups, interests, and ideologies despite its rather “ugly” interface:

Read Quote of Oliver Emberton’s answer to reddit (website): Why is reddit so famous despite such a boring interface? on Quorahttp://www.quora.com/widgets/content

In other words Function > Form in most cases (if you’re looking for visitors interested in more than the pretty shingles on your shop).

Link Rot

I’m extremely interested in the digital dark age we’re producing, especially when it comes to link rot…

Eight years later, the site still exists, essentially frozen in time. That provides an interesting window into the phenomenon of “link rot,” or hyperlinks that used to work but now point to dead pages. Our analysis found that 22% of the Million Dollar Homepage’s pixels now fail to load a webpage when clicked.

via The Million Dollar Homepage still exists, but 22% of it has rotted away – Quartz.

Please Enable 2FA For Your Own Good and Ours

No one likes to take the time to make passwords online. When you’re setting up your CBSSports account to fill in your March Madness brackets, you just want to get to work. No one’s going to hack you, so you just use the same password there as you do for your Bank of America account and GMail. Who cares, right? You’ve got nothing to hide.

And then you get “hacked” and it’s no fun.

Being a “techy” person, I get lots of questions about how to avoid being “hacked” (it’s fascinating to me how that word has changed its usage as geek and tech culture has become mainstream).

My response is normally:

1) Never use the same password twice. Ever. Use a service such as LastPass if you’re into that (I am).

2) For each of the online services you use, make unique and long passwords that include random characters and even nonsense strings that only you know (I know, I know… this isn’t completely foolproof but it helps prevent the script kiddie hacks). Try to avoid common terms such as “password,” “changeme,” or “123456.”

3) Never use the same password twice. Ever.

4) If you can, enable 2 Factor Authentication.

5) Never use the same password twice. Ever.

Step 1 is usually when the person loses interest in my advice. But you should really enable Two Factor Authentication (2FA) as soon as possible if you’re at all concerned about your online accounts or just want to have a good lock on your doors to keep honest people honest.

TwoFactorAuthor.org has a nice list of major services that we all use, with links to relevant instructions, such as Google Accounts, Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook, even Steam or Etsy etc.

There’s no reason for you not to do this today.

Two-factor authentication! In this age of endless massive hacks we seem to be in the middle of, it’s one of the easiest ways you can dramatically boost security on your online accounts.

But which sites actually support it? It can be a pain to keep track. Fortunately, a new, community-driven list keeps a running list of all the big sites that have some form of 2FA enabled (and encourages you to nag at those that don’t).

via Here Are All The Sites You Should Enable Two Factor Authentication On (And The Ones You Should Yell At) | TechCrunch.

Inflationary Theory Confirmation and Human Nature

That humans have confirmed the Higgs boson and much of the underpinnings of the inflationary nature of the universe shortly after the Big Bang (gravity waves!) in the last two years (not to mention other advances in biological, psychological and sociological sciences) in a time of scientific budget cuts and anti-scientific thinking in our country gives me great hope for our species in this still young century.

We’re explorers, and these understandings of the universe around us leads us to greater deeds here on earth with the right guidance. Or to put it another selfish way, every dollar we put into science leads to many many more in return.

While we are capable of disastrous and terrible actions, we’re also capable of learning from our past and correcting our path as a species. Here’s to our better natures in this incredible time of human exploration…

Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.

Inflation has been the workhorse of cosmology for 35 years, though many, including Dr. Guth, wondered whether it could ever be proved.

If corroborated, Dr. Kovac’s work will stand as a landmark in science comparable to the recent discovery of dark energy pushing the universe apart, or of the Big Bang itself. It would open vast realms of time and space and energy to science and speculation.

via Detection of Waves in Space Buttresses Landmark Theory of Big Bang – NYTimes.com.

Jealousy

I’m jealous that my wife has such a great domain (her firstname .net) name. I can’t complain, of course, but still…

Followed by rearranging the schedule for Wednesday nights in order to postpone what was going to happen on the canceled service at another time and rearranging the other Wednesday nights to accommodate for the made up service that had been canceled.

via Day 1 of Icy Conditions as a Pastor | Merianna Neely Harrelson.

Don’t Make Any Plans During This Window of Time

Good luck getting Comcast to show up for the closing [CARTOON] | ITworld.

I can’t say I’m excited about the impending deal in which Comcast buys Time Warner, but things couldn’t get much worse.

Ultimately, I’m still hopeful we’ll get either Google Fiber here in SC soon or a cable provider will give me the “dumb pipe” I want in particular since I’ve been a “cord cutter” for eleven years now.

Either that or T-Mobile just allows me to use its network for data.

via JR Raphael on Twitter

ZeroScope Launch

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I’m really excited that Harrelson Agency is helping out with the launch of ZeroScope this month. We’ve been working hard on this project for the past six months.

Here’s a little info:

Stethoscopes should not be a cause of the spread of disease by healthcare providers. ZeroScope is a one-use and easily applied device that attaches to the drum of a stethoscope and provides immediate and complete barrier defense between the instrument and the patient receiving care.

We’re looking to raise the money needed to help us launch ZeroScope as a cost effective and ubiquitous device to solve the problem of hospital acquired infections that lead to more costly treatments or even death.

via ZeroScope Stethoscope Barrier Protection for Patients | Indiegogo.

If you can, go help us out with the manufacturing and shipping costs. If you can’t do that, spread the word on your favorite social networks of choice.

Many thanks!

Here’s the official IndieGoGo widget:

http://www.indiegogo.com/project/zeroscope-stethoscope-barrier-protection-for-patients/widget

Finally, Basecamp Android App!

Basecamp has a native Android app now! Fantastic… big part of what we use at Harrelson Agency to do what we do.

Basecamp for Android was designed from the ground up to work great, look sharp, and take advantage of the capabilities of your recent Android phone and tablet. Create new projects on the go. Open links directly in the app. Jump to any project from a shortcut on your home screen. You can attach or save Basecamp files in Dropbox, Google Drive or wherever you store them. You can even start a new message with text you wrote in another app. Basecamp works the way you do on Android.

via Basecamp Announcements.