Category Archives: Technology

Computers and technology, outside of social media and the web.

Another Linkball

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Une pile de liens.

[en]

This pile of links has been sitting so long waiting for me to finalize it that it’s in danger of becoming stale. So here we go.

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Posted in News and Politics, Technology | Tagged linkball | Leave a comment

Sync Multiple Google Calendars on iPhone: Finally Figured it Out!

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Instructions pour synchroniser plus d'un calendrier Google avec son iPhone.

[en]

This is something that has been annoying the hell out of me for some time, now. I use at least half a dozen different Google calendars to keep track of my stuff, but when adding a Google account to iCal, all it does is add the main calendar.

I had come upon a hack which consisted in adding each Google calendar in iCal on the computer separately, rather than using delegation. A few weeks ago I was doing some digital housekeeping, and forgot why I had initially done that, and switched back to normal delegation. There went all my lovely syncing.

Let me explain things a bit more clearly:

  1. I have a bunch of Google calendars.
  2. I prefer using the iCal application on the computer and on my iPhone rather than the web interface.
  3. I want everything to sync.

Now, getting Google calendar to sync with iCal on the computer is quite straightforward: add a Google calendar account to iCal following these instructions, and under the “delegation” tab, include any secondary calendars you may have.

It gets tricky with the iPhone. You might think that now that you have your Google calendars in iCal, you will find them on your iPhone if you configure your iPhone to sync calendars with your computer. But no. iCloud or no iCloud, that’s not how it works.

So, you can add a Google account to your iPhone under Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account… > Google Mail. That’s fine if you have only one calendar, but not if you have more than one, because there isn’t anything like the “delegation” function you had in iCal.

So, if you have more than one like I do, here’s what you need to do:

  1. Add your Google account as a Microsoft Exchange account as described here.
  2. Head over to https://m.google.com/sync/settings/iconfig/, select your iPhone (or other device), and choose which calendars you want to sync.

It’s pretty straightforward, but (a) you have to know about it and (b) do not forget the trailing slash in the URL above. I kept getting “device not supported” and 404 errors which were driving me batty until I figured out what was the cause. Almost gave up!

Thanks a lot to @zecege who patiently tweeted to and fro with me while I figured out all this!

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Posted in OSX | Tagged caldav, gcal, google calendar, ical, ios, ios5, iPhone, solution, sync | 3 Comments

Ada Lovelace Day: My Middle-School Maths Teacher

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Cette année, la femme que je voudrais mettre en avant pour Ada Lovelace Day, c'est simplement ma prof de maths de 8-9e, Mme Niklès (en espérant que j'écris son nom juste -- je ne me souviens plus de son prénom). A l'époque, j'aimais les maths, et j'avais décidé d'aller faire le gymnase en section X ("maths spé" comme on disait). Peut-être que le fait d'avoir une femme comme prof de maths a contribué à m'encourager à investir cet intérêt. Qui sait?

[en]

I’ve been wondering who to write about for today’s Ada Lovelace Day. Trying to think back to women who’ve influenced me as far as my interest in science and tech goes, there aren’t that many. I’ve had role-models, of course, and female role-models, but not so much in that department.

One person who does stand out a bit, though, is my maths teacher in 8th or 9th grade. I wouldn’t exactly call her a role-model, but she was my maths teacher, and she was a woman. I’d always liked maths, but it was around that time that I decided that I was good at it (it’s when we started algebra) and was going to go for the special maths class in high school (well, it’s called “Gymnase” here and the name of the class was “section X”, but that’s only of interest to locals who understand what it means).

Anyway, though she was maybe not the teacher I liked the most, or looked up to particularly, she was a perfectly good teacher. And looking back, I wonder what role having a female maths teacher at that stage of my life played for me — maybe without me realizing it. It’s an implicit way of sending the message “hey, girls do maths too”. We were an all-girl class, by the way, so there wasn’t much “boys vs. girls” competition around more traditionally “boyish” topics.

So, here’s to Mme Niklès (I hope I’m spelling her name right), who quite probably played a role in encouraging me to be a geeky maths-y sciency girl, simply by being a maths teacher who also happened to be a woman.

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Posted in Blogging, Technology | Tagged ada lovelace day, ald11, maths, teacher, women | Leave a comment

It’s Ada Lovelace Day Today — Participate!

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Aujourd'hui, Ada Lovelace Day (voir mes articles passés à ce sujet, souvent en français).

Une journée pour mettre en avant les femmes admirables (connues ou pas) qui oeuvrent des les milieux traditionnellement masculins de la science et de la technologie. Participez, vous aussi, en publiant un article sur votre blog!

[en]

In 2009 and 2010 Ada Lovelace Day took place on March 24th. Not, as many thought, Ada’s birthday, but a random date that just happened to be that one. This year (and the next ones!) Ada Lovelace Day is taking place on October 7th, today, that is.

In 2009 I wrote about Marie Curie, and in 2010 about my friend Suw Charman (both articles are in French). I also seized the occasion to write about women travelers on the ebookers travel blog: Ella Maillart and Sarah Marquis. I’m very honoured that a few people chose to feature me in their Ada Lovelace Day blog posts (our sadly departed Jean-Christophe amongst them).

Ada Lovelace Day is about showcasing women in science and tech (STEM). Girls need same-sex role models more than boys do, and ALD is about making them visible.

Who are you going to write about today? I’m personally not sure who I’m going to write about yet. I know a pile of great women doing great stuff in social media, and it’s hard to choose between them, but I’d like to find somebody to talk about outside my direct industry.

You’ll have the answer as I write my post later on!

 

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Posted in Technology | Tagged ada lovelace day, ALD, ald11, role models, stem, women | 1 Comment

Vous avez un Mac? Installez Hidden

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Got a Mac? Install Hidden, which for $15/year will allow you to track your computer (screenshots and built-in camera grabs included) in case of theft. Source: This Guy Has My Macbook.

Free open-source alternative: Prey -- seems a tad more complex after looking at the screencast, but also allows to cover phones.

[fr]

Hidden, c’est l’application qui a permis à Joshua Kaufman de fournir à la police les données qui ont permis de récupérer son MacBook volé.

Pour $15/an, la petite application dort sur votre ordinateur, prête à être réveillée via votre compte en ligne si votre appareil est volé. Hidden prend des photos avec la caméra iSight, des saisies d’écran, et envoie tout un tas de données permettant de localiser votre Mac disparu.

Je viens de payer et de l’installer — très facile. Il y a un mode test qui permet de vérifier que tout fonctionne avant d’en avoir vraiment besoin! A ce prix-là, ce serait dommage de s’en passer.

Alternative: Prey — à regarder le screencast, semble un poil plus complexe (mais gratuit et open-source) et permet aussi de couvrir des téléphones.

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Posted in OSX | Tagged hidden, osx, prey, securité, theft, vol | 2 Comments

Solar Impulse Blogger and Podcaster Programme for Brussels — This is it!

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On a du solide maintenant pour le programme blogueurs de Solar Impulse durant notre semaine à Bruxelles (la semaine prochaine, que ça file vite!)

Si vous êtes dans le coin, inscrivez-vous vite pour voir l'avion en chair et en os (euh en cockpit et en panneaux solaires) et peut-être même tailler un brin de causette avec Bertrand Piccard et André Borschberg, co-fondateurs et initiateurs du fantastique projet!

Si vous êtes plutôt côté Paris que Bruxelles, sachez que l'avion y sera durant le Salon du Bourget et que nous préparons aussi des accès privilégiés pour blogueurs et podcasteurs. Pour ne rien rater, inscrivez-vous sur la liste d'annonce pour le programme blogueurs (pas de spam, c'est promis) et on vous tiendra au courant.

Je vais traduire l'article en français, mais je pense que ce sera demain seulement, vu mon emploi du temps pour aujourd'hui! (sait-on jamais, des fois on a de bonnes surprises...)

[en]

News of special interest to my Belgian readers, cross-posted from the Solar Impulse Blog. Thanks for helping spread the word about this blogger programme, time is short (happenings are next week!)

Solar Impulse 3

Now that the HB-SIA is safely parked in its hangar in Brussels airport, we’re getting serious about finalizing the details of the blogger programme.

As announced, there are four occasions we can invite you to take part in:

  1. Plane visit: Elâ and I will host a small group of bloggers and podcasters on Monday 23.05 morning 9am at the Solar Impulse hangar for an informal visit of the plane. A chance to meet up, chat, ask questions, take photographs, etc.
  2. EUFORES/EREC cocktail on Tuesday 24.05 evening: an occasion to brush with political celebrity, this cocktail is an invitation-only “intimate” event of about 300 people for which we have a certain number of passes to distribute to bloggers. This will take place in the hangar where the plane is.
  3. Green Week side event with European Commissioner for Environment Janez Potočnik on Wednesday 25.05 evening: this event is slightly more accessible to the general public through Green Week, but we will save you the hassle and bring you in as our guests, again, through a certain number of blogger invitations. This event will also take place in the hangar, of course.
  4. Breakfast discussion with André and Bertrand: Saturday morning 9h30-11am, come to the hangar for a discussion table with André and Bertrand while we all have breakfast together! A chance to ask your questions, talk about anything related to the project, film, photograph, blog, tweet, you name it. For 60 minutes, we will leave the two founders of the project at your mercy ;-) (we trust you’ll hand them back in once piece so they can get to work on what’s left to be done after this, though!)

All are still open (I’ll update this post as needed) but be quick, space is limited. So far, we are able to accommodate all those who have contacted us (you’ll be hearing from us soon), so if you want a chance to meet the team and see the plane for real, it’s worth applying.

We’ll of course have stickers and a certain number of booklets about the project (particularly for those of you coming Monday and Saturday).

An extra opportunity we’re throwing in for you is that if you come to one of these four occasions, we would like to invite you to write a guest post on the Solar Impulse blog. No obligation of course, and we’ll set a time limit (upto July 6th), but we think it would be cool if we open up the blog to other bloggers.

Please use this form to apply for the exclusive blogger/podcaster programme.

If you aren’t a blogger or a podcaster, Saturday afternoon will be open to the general public (you’ll have to sign up though). Keep your eyes open for more news on this blog, or sign up as a Friend in our supporter program and we’ll let you know. If you are a “2.0-type” photographer, it’s worth applying too if you make your photos available through Flickr under a creative commons license (meaning, you allow bloggers and other online people to use your photos to illustrate their writings, as long as they credit you, of course).

Our main aim with the blogger programme is to help spread information and enthusiasm about the Solar Impulse project. So when you take part in the programme, we expect you to help us with that by:

  • producing publicly available content about your experience and the Solar Impulse project on your blog or podcast in a timely manner (we’ll link back to it on our blog, of course)
  • making your photos available under a creative commons license (let us know if this is a serious issue for you)
  • and it’s always appreciated if you disclose that you participated as part of the blogger programme!

What’s next?

If you’re not around to come and see us at Brussels airport, you might still have your chance. Early July (you know how we roll now, we won’t be able to tell you the date until the last moment) the prototype is flying to Paris for Salon le Bourget.

There won’t be much to see at take-off and landing (Paris and Brussels airports are huge, you’ll be better off glued to your screen watching the video stream!) but there will be short in-flight interviews with André (we’re waiting to see how many slots we can secure for bloggers) and probably a press conference upon arrival (to be confirmed). We’re also seeing if it’s possible to give access to the press conference to certain bloggers/podcasters. More soon.

In Paris itself, the plane will normally be available to the public in the afternoons — but it’ll basically be a path around the plane with many many thousands of people streaming by. So we’re thinking of doing something similar to Brussels: a private visit with a small party of bloggers and podcasters one of the mornings, and another discussion table (like in Brussels) with André and Bertrand. The rest of the time, Elâ and I would be available to receive you by appointment. All this is to be confirmed, of course, but like that you know what we’re planning!

I’m also busy thinking about introducing an “official Solar Impulse blogger” status. It’s still pretty fuzzy for me (so suggestions welcome!) but it would basically entail a certain number of privileges and requirements for the bloggers/podcasters in question.

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Posted in Solar Impulse, Technology | Tagged andré borschberg, bertrand piccard, blogger programme, BRU, brussels, brussels airport, green week, greentech, solar cells, solar energy, solar impulse, visit | Leave a comment

A Few Tools I Like

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Petite collection d'applications et de services qui valent la peine d'être explorés et utilisés, selon moi.

[en]

Quickly, before collapsing in a little sleepy heap, some tools I want to write about here, but am not writing about because I want to do it properly and that takes time, and I never get around to doing it.

So, maybe I’ll talk about them more in detail later on (some of them I already have talked about), but just in case, here are tools or apps I like and would encourage you to look at these days:

That’s it chickens… I might add a few if I’ve forgotten, my bed is calling!

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Posted in OSX, Tools | Tagged iphone apps, osx, recommendation, tools, useful | 1 Comment

Thoughts on Dystopian Tech Future Vision

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Quelques idées qui me sont venues en écoutant le podcast On The Media. Les visions dystopiques de notre futur technologique nous tiennent souvent pour des victimes passives et oublient de tenir compte des mécanismes de compensation que nous mettons inévitablement en place pour résister au changement. On met nos téléphones mobiles sur silence, et si tout le monde commence à porter des verres de contact avec reconnaissance faciale, on portera des masques ou on trouvera d'autres stratégies pour compenser (plus réalistement, il y aura peut-être moyen de bloquer la reconnaissance, tout comme on peut bloquer les moteurs de recherche).

J'aime l'idée selon laquelle la technologie nous permettrait "d'être plus de ce que l'on est déjà".

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These last weeks I’ve been catching up with On The Media (partly thanks to being back in the saddle), and earlier this evening I was listening to the February 18 piece on “Our Future With Technology”.

I had a few thoughts as I was listening that I’d like to share with you.

First of all, I quite strongly believe in the position defended by Brooke at some point which says that technology mainly allows us to become more of what we are. This is along the line of what I try to explain about “dangers” of the internet regarding teenagers: most of the trouble they face online is the same kind of trouble they face offline. Yes, sometimes with a twist, and other consequences. But in a very general way, the internet is not a completely alien place — as our local online world sociologist Olivier Glassey said a few months back during a talk I attended, we need to stop thinking of the “online” as a “separate space” (the expression he used is “le lieu de l’altérité”).

A bit later in the show, they are talking about augmented reality: what will it be like when we can wear glasses or contact lenses which, along with facial recognition software, will allow us to identify the people we come upon in the streets? OMG-there-will-be-no-privacy-anymore the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it <insert more dystopian panic here>.

I’m always surprised that this kind of thought experiment never includes things like “well, some people might end up covering their faces” or “we’ll start wearing masks” or “there will be a way to opt out of being ‘facially recognized’” or… whatever coping mechanism one can imagine. Because as technology advances and disrupts the way we are used to living, we also evolve coping or evading mechanisms to resist change. Why does run-of-the-mill dystopian thinking always depict us as passive victims of the unstoppable advance of technology?

We’re not passive. We usually actively resist change. For example, we now carry on our phones everywhere we go, but we choose to mute them or screen our calls — something that was pretty unthinkable 30 years ago when all we knew was landlines.

With the dystopian glasses on (the show was constructed as an attempted dialogue between utopian and dystopian visions of our tech future) the idea was brought up that augmented reality might at some point allow us to ignore or obliterate what we disagree with — extreme example: not seeing people with radically opposed views to ours. Bob concluded “people obliterate people”, which in my sense is right: we are already obliterating what we don’t want to see. Technology might allow us to do it better (“becoming more of what we are”) but sticking to what is familiar and ignoring the rest is fundamentally human. If I wasn’t so tired right now I’d fish out this article I read (no memory where) which shows how we very selectively remember what already fits in our worldview and obliterate the rest.

I see the “people obliterating people” thing at play in India. In the same spaces (I’m talking of streets or neighbourhoods here), you have completely parallel and distinct societies that live on with very little knowledge or understanding of each other. Literally invisible to each other.

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Posted in Technology | Tagged cellphone, change, coping, dystopia, face recognition, future, on the media, strategy, Technology, Thoughts, vision | Leave a comment

F.lux: Better Lighting For Your Screen

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f.lux adapte automatiquement la luminosité de votre écran à l'espace environnant. Fini les écrans surbrillants tard le soir, et possiblement les problèmes d'endormissement liés au fait de baigner dans une forte lumière bleue jusqu'à 2h du mat'. Essayez!

[en]

F.luxYou probably know by now that optimal screen brightness is similar brightness to that of your surroundings. My dad recently pointed me to f.lux, which I have installed and started experiencing (happily). From their website (lifted shamelessly):

Ever notice how people texting at night have that eerie blue glow? Or wake up ready to write down the Next Great Idea, and get blinded by your computer screen? During the day, computer screens look good—they’re designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn’t be looking at the sun. F.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day. It’s even possible that you’re staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better. f.lux makes your computer screen look like the room you’re in, all the time. When the sun sets, it makes your computer look like your indoor lights. In the morning, it makes things look like sunlight again.

Gone are the days of adjusting brightness so that I’m not looking at a blinding screen when online in the evening! And I love the idea that this might fight the “wide awake at 2am” syndrome by fixing the lighting issue. Of course, you may disable f.lux at any time for an hour, if you need your white balance back for any reason.

Download for OSX, Windows, Linux.

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Posted in Technology | Tagged computer, ergonomie, f.lux, light, sleep problems, sommeil | 2 Comments

DupeGuru: You Own Less Data Than You Think

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Pour faire la chasse aux doublons sur Mac, Windows ou Linux, je vous recommande chaudement d'essayer dupeGuru! (En plus, système de rémunération des développeurs intéressant: Fairware.)

[en]

One of the consequences of putting an SSD into my MacBook and using CrashPlan and an Amahi home server to store my data and backups is that I have been forced to do a little digital spring-cleaning.

I had:

  • a 500Gb HDD in my MacBook, which hit “full” some time back before I freed up some space by moving stuff to an external HDD
  • an external 320Gb HDD, initially to store photos and videos, in practice filled with undefined junk, most of it mine, some of it others’
  • an external 250Gb HDD, initially to store a mirror of my MacBook HDD when it was only 250Gb, then filled with undefined junk, most of it mine, some of it others’
  • an external 110Gb HDD, containing disk images of various installation DVDs, and quite a lot of undefined junk, most of it mine, some of it others’

As you can see, “undefined junk” comes back often. What is it?

  • “I don’t have quite enough space on my MacBook HDD anymore, let’s move this onto an external drive”
  • “heck, do I have a second copy of this data somewhere? let’s make one here just in case”
  • “Sally, let me just make a copy of your user directory here before I upgrade your OS/put in a bigger hard drive, just in case things go wrong”
  • “eeps, I haven’t made a backup in some time, let me put a copy of my home directory somewhere” (pre-Time Machine)

See the idea?

dupeGuru logo.Enter dupeGuru. I’ve wanted a programme like this for ages, without really taking the time to find it. Thanks to a kind soul on IRC, I have finally found the de-duping love of my life. (It works on OSX, Windows, and Linux.) It’s been an invaluable assistance in showing me where my huge chunks of redundant data are. Plus, it’s released as Fairware, which I find a very interesting compensation model: as long as there are uncompensated hours of work on the project, you’re encouraged to contribute to it, and the whole process is visible online.

Back to data. I quickly realized (no surprise) that I had huge amounts of redundant data. This prompted me to coin the following law:

Lack of a clear backup strategy leads to massive, uncontrolled and disorganized data redundancy.

The first thing I did was create a directory on my home server and copy all my external hard drives there. Easier to clean if everything is in one place! I also used my (now clean) 500Gb to copy some folder structures I knew were clean.

Now, one nice thing about dupeGuru is that you can specify a “reference” folder when you choose where to hunt for duplicates. That means you tell dupeGuru “stuff in here is good, don’t touch it, but I want to know if I have duplicate copies of that content lying around”. Once you’ve found duplicates, you can choose to view only the duplicates, sort them by size or folder, delete, copy or move them.

As with any duplicate-finder programme, you cannot just use it blindly, but it’s an invaluable assistant in freeing space.

I ran it on my well-organized Music folder and discovered 5Gb of duplicate data in there — in less than a minute!

Now that I’ve cleaned up most of my mess, I realize that instead of having 8 or 900Gb of data like I imagined, reality is closer to 300Gb. Not bad, eh?

So, here are my clean-up tips, if you have a huge mess like mine, with huge folder structures duplicated at various levels of your storage devices:

  • start small, and grow: pick a folder to start with that’s reasonably under control, clean it up, then add more folders using it as reference actually, better to set a big folder as reference and check to see if a smaller folder isn’t already included in it
  • scan horribly messy structures to identify redundant branches (maybe you have mymess/somenastydirectory and mymess/documents/old/documents/june/somenastydirectory), copy those similar branches to the same level (I do that because it makes it easier for my brain to follow what I’m doing), mark one of them as reference and prune the other; then copy the remaining files into the first one, if there are any
  • if you need to quickly make space, sort your dupes by size
  • if dupeGuru is suggesting you get rid of the copy of a file which is in a directory you want to keep, go back and mark that directory as reference
  • keep an eye on the bottom of the screen, which tells you how much data the dupes represent (if it’s 50Mb and hundreds of small files in as many little folders, you probably don’t want to bother, unless you’re really obsessed with organizing your stuff, in which case you probably won’t have ended up in a situation requiring dupeGuru in the first place)

Happy digital spring-cleaning!

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Posted in OSX | Tagged data, directories, dupeguru, duplicate, files, folders, server, spring-cleaning | Leave a comment