This week I learned that on iPhones without a button you can switch apps by swiping left/right on the illuminated bar at the bottom.
Yet another reason not to force quick your apps!
Author: ryan
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Piracy, retro, flying cars, and more – This Geek in Review for Jan. 10, 2020
For a blissful few years, the streaming shows meant subscribing to Netflix. Some would also use Amazon Video, because, why not? They were already paying for it with Amazon Prime. But then a lot of the media companies decided that they also need to get into the streaming game for those sweet, sweet subscription fees. So now we have Hulu, Disney+, AppleTV+, and HBO Now. This doesn’t include the “TV” services such as Sling and YoutubeTV. And coming soon is NBC’s horribly named Peacock (which, if they want to do it right, they need to get Katy Perry onboard for the song). All of these services are doing one thing, making piracy great again.
I’m a big retro fan, which makes the list of 52 Fun Retro Facts I learned in 2019 even better.
We didn’t get our flying cars by 2015, but that doesn’t mean we can’t imagine what they may have looked like.
Over the years I’ve kept bookmarks with various services. One of the first services I used was Del.icio.us. This past week I found this gem from 2005, the Xbox 360 Has Nothing On Atari 2600.
One of my favorite moments in the Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd was the robot at the end, and I’m not the only one who likes practical effects. In some ways, the ’93 Jurassic Park looks better than the more recent movies due to the mixing of practical and CGI effects.
Have you ever wondered what the consoles do in the Apollo Space center? Now you do.
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A bright star in the Star Wars universe
Just a couple of storm troopers working for what’s left of the Empire I finally finished the last 3 episodes of the The Mandalorian and I’m impressed. It’s easy to find fault in the Star Wars Universe, I’m looking at you episodes 1 & 8, and the internet seems to have a habit of magnifying the negative. So, today dear reader, I’m here to celebrate The Mandalorian.
SPOILER WARNING, I may mention specific plot points and characters, so if you haven’t seen all 8 episodes, I recommend you do that post haste!
The premise
The Mandalorian takes place 5 years after the fall of the Empire in Return of the Jedi. Although the emperor is dead, remnants of the Empire still exist. It is in this world where the protagonist of the story, the Mandalorian, take place.For some reason, the group of fighters called Manadalorians don’t have names. Throughout the season, our character goes by the nickname “Mando”, which rhymes with Lando, and that stands for… nothing but a terrible nickname. But we don’t have trouble, just Mando does.
Mando works in his corner of the galaxy, taking on the jobs that are tough and pay well. This is where he takes on the job of delivery “the child”, which the internet has dubbed Baby Yoda all because he looks like Yoda. He doesn’t speak, but he does use the Force. Out here, the Force and the Jedi are still myths. Apparently Luke needs a better publicist. After rescuing the child, most of the season shows Mando on the run.
Season 1 is in the bag
I liked The Mandalorian a lot, minor quibbles about his name aside. It’s a gritty look on the Star Wars universe, where people are trying to survive. The first scene is episode 8 is my favorite scene of the season. If you have a passing interest in Star Wars, then you’ll want to watch the 8 seasons. They are all available now on Disney+, so you can join, watch the episodes, and then cancel. That was my plan, but now I think I’m going to watch The Clone Wars and Rebels first.
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Why Telegram is the best messenger service
I don’t take lightly to using the term best, but in this case, Telegram earns it. There are several reasons and features that make Telegram the best. Unfortunately, the state of instant messaging clients is always in flux, so if you see something out of date, shoot me an email!In the beginning
In the beginning, besides talk on Unix systems in the 60s and 70s, there wasn’t much to interactive messaging on the computer. Email existed at the time, but it functioned pretty much how email functions today. You send a message and then wait for a reply, maybe a long time for a reply. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) came into the scene in the late 80s. For the first time, you could have conversations with one person or many, across the world interactively. IRC is a distributed messaging service that is still in use by hundreds of thousands of people today. Although IRC as a service is not well known, it was the birthplace of hashtags used on Twitter and Instagram today.
AOL popularized instant messaging in the late 90s and 2000s with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). I remember creating a group in AOL messenger to chat about the episode of Friends we were watching, before that was even a thing. Unfortunately, while AIM was very easy to use, it was not very mobile.
Then came SMS text messaging. At first, texts were expensive ($.10 per text) and only worked with people on the same provider. A Sprint customer could not text a Verizon customer. Interoperability came next, allowing people to chat across providers. SMS had it’s limitations, mainly through the feature phones at the time. The phones had limited space, so you had to delete texts once your phone started complaining.
All of the texts you received were dumped into a list, each message listed separately. There wasn’t the back and forth, conversation style texting we have now. That didn’t happen until the iPhone was released in 2007. Now we had text messaging that looked like AOL Instant Messenger, and the world rejoiced.
The decline of AIM and the rise multiple instant messengers
AOL had a lock with instant messaging, but, they did not make the transition to mobiles as fast as they should have. This lead was given up to a plethora of instant messengers, all trying to be the most popular. Nowadays, the most popular messengers are Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, and coming in at around 7th, is Telegram. Since iMessage is only available on iOS devices, worldwide it is not very popular.
The popularity of a messenger varies greatly by country. If you live in the US, then there’s a very good chance you’ll be using Facebook Messenger and not know anyone using WhatsApp or WeChat. Whereas, if you live in China, your whole life is going to be in WeChat.
Enter Telegram
Nice history lesson Goz, but why would I use Telegram? Well, I’m here to tell you, it has several benefits:
It’s not spying on you
I stopped using Facebook Messenger the day I started seeing ads for a topic I had only discussed in a private conversation. The app is removed from my phone, along with the Facebook App. Since you can’t escape Facebook, I try to limit its destruction as much as possible. I only use Facebook in an incognito or private browsing window on my computer or phone.
It’s FAST
When you send a message with Telegram, it’s almost instantaneous.
It’s cross-platform
Telegram has a client for almost any platform, from macOS to Windows to Linux, along with Android and iOS. It’s awesome being able to read/reply to conversation from any machine.
Chat without sharing your cellphone number
It’s gotten to the point where sharing your cellphone number with others is a dangerous game. The CEO of Twitter had his Twitter account hacked by a group that found out his cellphone number. Telegram gives you an url you can share to others so they can add you, mine is t.me/gozar.
Keeping your cellphone number secret is very important in this day and age, and should be given out as little as possible. I use a Google Voice number for most things, and keep my cellphone number private.
Telegram gives you a t.me address with your username. Others can contact you with this address and without either of you knowing the other person’s number.
It offers groups and channels
Our family has a private group with only family members which is used as a private social network. We can share pics and stories among family members, quickly and easily. This makes it really nice to share items that you would be uncomfortable making public on the internet.
A channel is a broadcast only group, where only a limited number of people can post but hundreds of thousands can join.
Fine grained control of notifications
Is that family group flooding you with notifications? Turn them off for that channel. Same with people.
Unlimited storage
Telegram is a great way of sharing pictures, files, and music with yourself or others. I mostly use this for sending pictures from my phone to my computer. Storage is unlimited, but file size is limited to less than 1.5GB.
Location capabilities
You can attach all sorts of information in a chat, including your current location. Telegram can share your location, live, for a limited amount of time. This is great when you are in large public place and are trying to meet up with others.
Telegram also offers location based chat and contact sharing. Going to a concert? Once you get there you can create a chat based on the area and chat with others in the current location. You can also share your contact information with nearby users.
No smartphone, no problem
Do you have a parent that doesnāt have a smartphone? They can still be involved in group chats with a desktop computer, laptop, or tablet. When creating an account you have the option of Telegram calling you instead of texting you, so others can get chatting on Telegram with only a land line phone.
Pinned chats
Family and friendsā chats can be pinned to the top of the list in Telegram, allowing you to quickly and easily find those chats.
Text formatting
Have you noticed that most instant messaging is boring text with now personality? Well, Telegram offers bold and italic formatting, along with
preformattedtext. Simply enclose your text in two * for bold, two _ for italics, and ` for preformatted text.Send messages without a notification
There are times when you want to let a person know something, but itās not important enough for them to get a notification. Telegram lets you send silent messages, so the recipient wonāt get a notification on their phone when the message arrives. There is still a notification in the app though.
Schedule messages
Do you want to remind someone of an event? You can create the message now and schedule it to be sent automatically. This is a pretty cool feature, and comes in handy. Hold down on the send icon to activate.
Stickers
Ok, stickers arenāt a must have feature, but there are enough stickers that you wonāt have a problem finding the one that matches your feelings at the moment you want to send a message.
Bots
Anyone can create a bot for Telegram. Bots are programs that can be used in a private chat or group chat to add other features. Iāve written two bots. One lets me send myself notifications from the command line. The other lets me add entries to my journal or items to my to do list.
Most people will not be creating their own bots. For those, there are a ton of bots already created that add features to chats.
Downsides
There is a big downside to Telegram, and that is its reliance on basing your account around your cellphone number. Remember where I said not to give out your cellphone number? Well, you’ll have to ignore that advice to create a Telegram account. Account creation takes place with your cellphone number, and, if you want to find people you know, you have to upload your contacts. This isn’t as scary as it sounds, since phone numbers are hashed by Telegram1.
You don’t have to upload your phone book to use Telegram. Once you are logged in, you can search for others to start a chat.
I also donāt like the inability to send a reaction to a message. Instead, I end up sending an emoji or sticker to the chat, which appears to clutter things up.
Monopolization
The most popular decentralized messaging is email, but a lot of people don’t like to converse of email. What’s nice about email is that you have your choice of provider and address. Using any of the instant messaging services shifts you to their silo, where your are stuck. IRC can be a solution to this issue, but the learning curve is too steep for most.
You have nothing to lose to try it
Convincing people to try another messenger is hard. Convincing people to download an app is even harder. But, Telegram is worth it.
1When you hash information such as a phone number, you convert it into a unique random set of data. This conversion is one way, you can not convert the hash back to the original information. As Telegram hashes the uploaded numbers, there is no way to convert that back to the original phone numbers.
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The problem with text messages and more – This Geek in Review for Jan. 3, 2020
We’ve made it to 2020! Amazing. It was just yesterday we were partying like it’s 1999.
If you’ve wanted to message me, you know that I’m not a big fan of texting and would rather use something better. Here’s one of the many reasons why, in November 168,149 Valentineās day text messages were sent. How did this happen? Your text messages aren’t just handled by your cellphone carrier, there are companies out their that deal with interoperability between the cellphone carries and your messages may be stored all over the place.Did you ever think that packs of Skittles could be identical?
The Wii was a cultural phenomem when it was released, and it is still relevant in the speedrunning community. Unfortunately, I think the video game consoles have gotten pretty stale, no one is willing to push the envelope. Nintendo is trying with games such as Ring Fit Adventure which is cool, but I’d like to see more. And, if you doubt how popular the Wii is, Just Dance 2020 Sold Better On Wii Than PS4 Or Xbox One In Its Opening Week
You hear stories of people buying art at garage sales that turn out to be rare, well that is starting to happen with videogames
I was an Atari user throughout the 80s. Even so, I have a passing interest in the Commodore Amiga, but not enough to go through buying one today.
There are a couple of technologies that I was too young to get to experience, 8″ floppies are one of them. Until recently, the Air Force was still using 8″ floppy disks for a missile launch control system, but thankfully they’re upgrading. If you are wondering what 8″ floppy disks are like, hold up an iPad. It is slightly larger than an 8″ floppy.
Lt. Uhura Recruits for NASA
How to frustrate and confuse people
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Start journaling with a simple text file
Photo byĀ Cathryn LaveryĀ onĀ Unsplash Journaling has many benefits, and for those of us that can’t remember what we did yesterday, journaling is also a way of keeping track of what we have done. In the future I’m hoping I’ll be able to use my journal to pass down my exploits to a younger generation.
My history of journaling
I’ve tried a few different approaches to journaling. For a long time (over 20 years) I’ve run a blog at RyanCollins.org. This works for big ideas that I don’t mind making public, but there are always entries that I would like to keep private. So, for a while I was using an iPhone app. This was ok, but I didn’t like having my journal in some proprietary format.
I tried to use email. Google allows + aliases, so I could email to [email protected] and set up a filter to automatically label those emails as my journal. The problem with this was that if I didn’t email right away, the dates and times wouldn’t match the email. Plus, there was no way to edit past posts.
Next up was a private journal hosted on WordPress. This worked pretty well. If you want to journal, doĀ check them out. When creating a blog, you can set it to private, so no one can see it except for you after you logged in. The P2 theme is very good for journaling. It shows a box at the top of the page in which to write your posts.
Where I am today
After experimenting with the above ideas, I settled on a simple journal based on a text file named after the year. The journal for this year is
2019.markdown. I write in Markdown, which is a way to write plain text but with formatting. Since the journal is plain text, I know I’ll always be able to read it, no matter what computer or device I use.It takes nothing to try it out. Download a plain text editor such as Atom. Create a new text file named
2019.markdownand start writing!I don’t enjoy using a full-blown word processor such as Microsoft Word or LibreOffice. Too much bloat to impede adding a journal entry. Plus, they are harder to save as a plain text file.
How I format my journal
Some people split off a text file for each day. This leads to a bunch of files (365 per year to be exact, 366 in a leap year). I prefer to keep the whole year in one file. My current journal for 2019 is approaching 28,000 words. Which seems like a lot, but the entire file is 166K. This is prettyĀ small in the grand scheme of things.
I start each day with the date and the day of the week:
# 12/27/19 - Fri(For my European friends, you’ll probably want to put it in day/month/year format.)
Each entry is one line, starting with the date and time:
2019/12/27 15:29 - Working on my journaling article for ryancollins.org #blogYes, I am not consistent with my date formatting, maybe I’ll fix that next year. I also add hashtags to the end of the entry. These hashtags may be people’s names, or subjects of the entry. For example, when I write an entry about a movie I’ve seen, I’ll tag it with #media. If it’s a fact I’ve learned, it will be tagged with #til. An accomplishment is #accomplishment. These tags are there to help me find information in my journal.
Inserting a date and time
For Atom, there is a package you can use to automatically insert the date and time. Other text editors usually have the option to do the same.
Journaling from mobile
This is all well and good, but what about adding entries from your phone? To do that, you’ll need to save your text file in a cloud storage system such as Dropbox, iCloud, or Google Drive. Dropbox now has a limit of three devices on the free account, but that probably won’t be a problem for you. Save your journal in your cloud storage, and then edit it with any text editor on your mobile device. For the iPhone, there is Pretext (Free) and iA Writer ($8.99). Android users can use Markor (free) or iA Writer ($8.99).
2019 and beyond
I have never been this consistent with journaling before this year. Looking back at my past journals and notes, it looks like I get the journaling bug every fall, but lose steam and stop by spring. I’ve kept it up easily for an entire year.
