Nouvelles musiques: adieu la radio [fr]

[en] Years ago, when I sold my car, the radio stopped being my source for new music. Now it's TV series, Facebook, and Tumblr.

Il y a des années de cela, lorsque j’avais une voiture, je passais chaque jour du temps sur la route à écouter de la musique et… à chanter avec. Des périodes CD (c’était avant l’iPhone!) et des périodes radio. J’aimais la radio qui ne parlait pas, qui passait simplement de la musique.

C’était là que je découvrais de nouveaux artistes. Grâce à la radio que j’achetais des CDs (toujours ou presque dans les bacs à 10-15 balles).

Quand j’ai vendu ma voiture en 2007, j’ai perdu non seulement mon local de chant préféré (heureusement je chante avec Café Café, sinon mes pauvres cordes vocales se ratatineraient) mais aussi ma source de nouvelle musique.

En fait, j’ai aussi perdu mon lieu principal d’écoute de musique. J’aime travailler dans le silence, je n’arrive pas à lire ou écrire en musique. Alors j’écoute de la musique quand je fais le ménage ou quand je retouche des photos mais… c’est vrai que j’aime le silence.

Aujourd’hui, piétonne, j’écoute aussi de la musique en marchant ou dans les transports publics, mais c’est très frustrant pour moi de devoir “la fermer” et de ne pas chanter à plein poumons comme j’en ai envie. (Non, je ne suis pas “celle-là” dans le train qui chante pour tout le wagon avec son casque dans les oreilles…)

En plus, merci iPhone, la musique a maintenant une rude concurrence: les podcasts. Je suis accro à On The Media et à Radiolab, par exemple. (Si vous avez des émissions de qualité comparable à me proposer en français, je suis preneuse, hein.)

La radio a donc complètement disparu de mon radar — si ce n’est sous forme de ces podcasts, ou lorsque j’y passe 😉

Depuis quelques années, donc, j’ai conscience que mon “répertoire” musical stagne. Je n’achète plus de CDs depuis longtemps (un des derniers était Back to Bedlam de James Blunt) et malgré ce que pourraient croire certains, je ne suis pas une grande pirate: trop paresseuse pour télécharger “illégalement”, je me contente d’acheter des morceaux isolés sur iTunes. En passant, j’ai la sensation de payer pour le service plus que pour la musique (vous m’entendez, là-bas?)

Source première de nouvelles musiques? Les séries TV (et films), Grey’s Anatomy en tête. Un petit coup de Shazam pour identifier le morceau qui passe, et hop, j’achète.

Deuxième source? C’est ça qui me fait écrire aujourd’hui: mes fils d’actualité sur Facebook et Tumblr. Mes amis qui partagent vidéos et morceaux qu’ils aiment. Parfois, j’achète.

Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms (RSAnimate) [en]

[fr] Excellente explication du pourquoi (et comment) le système éducatif d'aujourd'hui est... coincé. Héritage des Lumières dans un monde qui est aujourd'hui celui de la technologie et de la globalisation: dur, dur!

This is the second RSAnimate video I’ve watched (the first one was Dan Pink) — I love them. The graphics really help you understand and remember what is being said. Watch this one, and listen to Ken Robinson explain the root problem of today’s education — it’s only 10 minutes and you will not regret it.

And when you’re done, do what I’m going to do right now: head over to the RSA YouTube channel and watch other videos.

Ye Olde-School Personal Blogs Are Still Around [en]

[fr] Le blog personnel existe toujours. On a parfois tendance à l'oublier, noyés que l'on est sous la masse des machines à audience que l'on appelle "blog" ces jours.

Yesterday evening I was winding down when I thought of checking a bunch of old-school (personal) blogs I visit once in a while. If you’re not an old hand, and you’re looking for some good personal blogs written by those who made up the blogosphere in its golden hour, read on:

There are of course tons of other great blogs out there. But most of these were around in my early days of blogging, and it warms my heart that they still are.

What are your favorite personal blogs?

Thoughts on Dystopian Tech Future Vision [en]

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.

F.lux: Better Lighting For Your Screen [en]

[fr] 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!

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.

Real-Time is Burying History on the Web [en]

I am somebody who believes that history is an extraordinarily important asset in trying to understand our present. Unfortunately, when we are too focused on the future, and innovation, and moving ahead, it’s very easily to neglect history.

I’ve seen it as a characteristic of developing countries (sweeping generalization here, stop me if I’m wrong), with the thoughtless chopping down of centenarian trees and bulldozing of historical monuments in Bangalore. What’s important is where we’re going — we don’t really care about where we came from, and in some cases, would rather forget.

And we’re seeing it now in the hyper-technological cutting-edge world of the internet, where web history is being sacrificed on the altar of instant (do read Suw Charman‘s excellent post and then come back here).

A year and a bit ago, the theme of LeWeb’09 in Paris was “Real-Time Web”, and indeed, everybody was a-buzz with everything real-time. So much so that I had to give that year’s official bloggers a little wake-up call (I blogged it later) a day before the conference, because I was hearing increasingly worrisome comments (to my “official bloggers’ mom” ears) along the lines of “well, I actually don’t think I’ll blog much this year, I’ll mainly be tweeting”. I was interviewed about something along the lines of “curating the real-time stream” by my friend Cathy Brooks (there’s a priceless moment in that video, watch it), and overall, everything was about now, now, now, now now nownownownownownow.

I’m tired of real-time.

It feels to me as if we’re driving with our nose in the steering-wheel, never stopping long enough to look behind us and see what road we’re on and where it’s really heading. I’ve noted over the last year or so that a lot of our content is migrating into these real-time flowy presency streamy services, and that some of the precious tools we had to make sense of our online publications are all but dead, like Technorati.

But link rot aside, it’s all still there online. And that makes it all the more frustrating to know that we just don’t have a way of getting to it in a useful way, as Suw describes very well in her article. In response, Reg Chua points out that search is skewed towards speed and the present — a perfect corollary to our obsession with real-time and progress.

My tweets from day 1 (December 8, 2006 with a lot of enthusiasm) are still online somewhere. Here’s the oldest one I could lay my hands on (the podcast in question was Fresh Lime Soda), thanks to the wayback machine (if you go down that alley, note how we get a peek at what early tweeting was like in pre-hashtag times). It makes it all the more maddening that they are impossible to access if I don’t have a link to them. Twitter has them, they’re there, but they’re not organized in a way that makes them of any use.

Sidenote: this blog post is moving from “lack of access to general online history” to “lack of access to personal online history”, which is a subset of the problem.

Within that “personal online history” subset of the problem, let me state that I find it a disgrace that Twitter will not even let its users download a copy of their own data in the service, barring the last 3000 tweets.

I understand the need to restrict access to the huge number of tweets in the database for general use. I get that. But I don’t get why I should not be able to do a one-time download of what I put in the service.

I hate the expression data theft because when you take data, you always leave a copy somewhere (and theft removes the copy), but in this case, this is what it feels like. Twitter has my data and can do stuff with it, and I can’t. That just doesn’t feel right. (And don’t wave the “Twitter is free, don’t complain” argument in my face: just like Suw, I would be more than ready to pay for Twitter as a service, but they won’t let me.)

Away from Twitter and back to our obsession with real-time and what it is doing to our history: where are the online historians? who is going to build the tools we need to dig through the tremendous wealth of data online? the buzzword of 2011 seems to be “curator”: well, we don’t just need curators to avoid getting knocked over by the firehose of the real-time web — we also need curators (preferably machines) to help us organise and sort through our online history.

 

Plagiat et piratage: pas la même chose [fr]

[en] Copying files and redistributing them (aka "piracy") has to do with distribution. Plagiarism, on the other hand, has to do with attribution. Two very different things that I'm sick and tired of seeing confused ("hey, you're not against file-sharing, so why do you complain when people lift your blog posts and republish them elsewhere?")

Cela fait bien longtemps que je désire clarifier une confusion que je vois souvent: celle entre “piratage” (entendons: copie de fichiers) et plagiat.

En effet, si je minimise (selon certains) la gravité du problème que représente le piratage, je m’élève absolument et radicalement contre toute forme de plagiat.

C’est parce qu’ils confondent les deux que certains se retrouvent à me dire “oui mais bon, toi qui défends (!) le piratage, tu peux pas te plaindre quand on utilise tes textes sans permission!” Eh ben si, ils ont tort, et je peux.

Explication: le plagiat consiste à faire passer pour sien le travail créatif d’autrui; le “piratage” consiste à distribuer ce travail contre la volonté du détenteur des droits.

Exemple: si je suis une méchante pirate et que je télécharge ou redistribue une chanson de Madonna, il est très clair que Madonna est l’auteur du morceau en question. A aucun moment, dans l’acte du partage de fichier ou du “téléchargement illégal”, je ne prétends que cette oeuvre est la mienne.

Autre exemple: si je trouve un article sympa sur un blog et que je le copie-colle dans le mien sans en indiquer la source ni l’auteur, je suis une vilaine plagiaire (ça vaut pour les étudiants qui font de même dans leurs travaux académiques). Je me fais ainsi tacitement passer pour l’auteur.

Encore un autre exemple: si je prends une chanson de Madonna et que je la distribue sur mon site en tentant de la faire passer pour mon oeuvre, je suis une vilaine plagiaire. (Et aussi un peu bête, parce que vu la popularité de Madonna, il y a peu de chances que mon subtil subterfuge passe inaperçu!)

Ça me paraît assez clair. Pourquoi tant de confusion?

C’est l’introduction de l’article Wikipédia cité plus haut qui m’a mise sur la piste. Il y a deux éléments complexificateurs (joli mot, hein?):

  1. le plagiat ne se limite pas à la copie à l’identique, mais est également invoqué en cas “d’inspiration” un peu trop lourde par une autre oeuvre, si celle-ci n’est pas reconnue
  2. “Le langage courant ne distingue pas en pratique entre le plagiat, qui relève de l’appréciation esthétique ou morale, et la contrefaçon, terme juridique, qui est un délit contre le droit d’auteur.” (Je vous cite ici directement l’article “plagiat” de Wikipédia parce qu’ils le formulent assez bien.)

Comme la désinformation ambiante assimile la copie de fichiers à de la contrefaçon (un autre article à écrire, si ce n’est pas une évidence pour mes lecteurs: la contrefaçon a pour objectif d’enrichir quelqu’un en cours de route), et que la contrefaçon est la forme juridique via laquelle on lutte contre le plagiat, il n’est pas étonnant que ce soit tout embrouillé dans la tête des gens.

Donc non, les pirates (ou copieurs de fichiers) ne sont pas des plagiaires, à moins qu’ils tentent de faire passer pour la leur l’oeuvre d’autrui. Je pense qu’on fait beaucoup de foin pour rien autour du piratage. Oui, clairement, les industries dont le business model repose sur le contrôle de la distribution de biens physiques comme supports d’oeuvres de l’esprit dans une économie de rareté ont besoin de se réinventer, mais au-delà de ça, c’est loin d’être la fin du monde et de la créativité.

Annoncer la paternité d’une oeuvre qu’on distribue, par contre, est quelque chose qui est pour moi d’une importance capitable, et je le défendrai bec et ongles. Certes, il y a le “plagiat inconscient“: on est sans cesse inspiré par ce dans quoi on baigne, au point de s’attribuer en toute bonne conscience ce qui est à autrui — je ne parle pas de ça. La création ex nihilo, je n’y crois clairement pas. Mais je crois qu’on se doit l’honnêteté intellectuelle de donner crédit à nos sources.

C’est pour ça que j’apprécie tant Creative Commons, qui offre des licenses mettant l’accent sur cette question de paternité, tout en levant beaucoup des restrictions sur la distribution qui sont intenables à l’ère du numérique.

Blogging Feast and Famine [en]

[fr] Je n'ai jamais pu me résoudre à planifier la publication de mes articles, ici. Sitôt écrit, sitôt publié -- tu parles de gratification immédiate. Ces temps, je me demande si je devrais peut-être changer ça.

One thing I’ve never managed to bring myself to do is schedule my blogposts here on CTTS. I do it for other blogs I’m involved in professionally, but I find that once I’ve written something I simply do not have the patience to wait for it to see the light of day. Slave of immediate gratification am I indeed.

Does it bother you when you get nothing to read for days or weeks, and then a flood of blogposts over the space of a week or maybe even a day? Should I be a little less writer-centred and a little more reader-centred?

It’s something I’m wondering about these days.

DupeGuru: You Own Less Data Than You Think [en]

[fr] 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.)

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!

Two Deaths [en]

[fr] Deux décès, l'un humain, l'autre félin, et mes réactions assez différentes aux deux.

Two heart attacks, even. The first is Bagha, you’ll have guessed. Jean-ChristopheThe second is Jean-Christophe, who was deputy head in the school I taught at and with whom I stayed in touch over the years: fellow blogger and lifter, I enjoyed our lunch-time conversations about social media, web technology, education and the various things of life. He was a really friendly, genuinely nice person. I didn’t know him very well, but we did hang out once in a while. He wrote a very nice piece about me for Ada Lovelace Day in 2009. He died almost exactly a month after Bagha.

I was very, very shocked by Jean-Christophe’s death — and remain shocked. You don’t expect young, healthy people around you to drop like a stone and die in the middle of a basketball match (he was 42, a regular player, didn’t smoke…). I was also shocked by Bagha’s death, but the grief was so great that I just couldn’t stop the tears for days on end, and it took over.

Two deaths, one human, one feline, one of a being who shared almost every single day of mine for 11 years, the other which I would see a handful of times every year. Two different reactions on my part. On a slightly “clinical” level, I’ve found it interesting to observe how I’ve been processing both these deaths. Beyond the obvious animal vs. human difference, I’ve realised that what really counts is the role they were playing in my life.

Jean-Christophe was a truly lovely person. His death pains me, and even though he was somebody I trusted (to the point of collapsing in his office during my first year of teaching when things were not going well at all) we weren’t close. He was somebody I knew and appreciated, a part of my network (our discussions revolved primarily around work and common interests, not each other’s lives). If I think of his family, my heart breaks for them, but I am not touched as if it were my family.

Not seeing Jean-Christophe is the normal state of my life, so beyond the shock of the announcement, I am not confronted much with his death. A couple of times I’ve thought “oh, I should ask Jean-Christophe if he knows somebody who…” and caught myself. Beyond the shock and discomfort of seeing the sudden death of somebody who is just a few years older than myself, and of knowing that a wonderful human being is no more, the impact of Jean-Christophe’s death on my life has been pretty minimal.

Maybe this minimal impact (compounded to the fact I was in India for the funeral so couldn’t attend and therefore share others’ grief) has allowed me to stay in some stage of denial — or maybe the fact he was a rather “weak tie” in my life simply makes the whole grieving process less painful and visible.

Eclau oct 2009 24Bagha, on the other hand, even though he was “just a cat”, was part of my everyday life for years and a primary emotional attachment. His loss is a huge disruption in my life, all the more because he was an elderly cat who had started to require care — some parts of my life were organized around him. Making sure somebody was there for him when I travelled, coming back home to give him his meds, being available to take him to the vet when things weren’t quite right.

Except when I was in India, I have not been able to “forget” his death much. The flat is lonely without a feline presence. Another cat naps on the couch at eclau (I’m happy about that, though). I’m still surprised that I can stay out when I hadn’t planned to. I can leave stuff lying around in the flat (even food) and nothing happens to them. Open cupboard doors are not important anymore. I’m not woken up at 6am by somebody furry who wants to be let out.

When somebody asks a group of people “who has a cat?” I have to keep my hand down now. I don’t have a cat anymore. I’m not a cat-owner. I’ve had a cat since I was nine, even though my first cat, Flam, lived at my parents’ for three years when I moved out, and I was briefly catless between her death and the moment Bagha officially became “my” cat. But being a cat lover and owner has always been a big part of my identity, which I feel I have now lost (risky parallel: does it feel like that to long-time smokers who give up the cancer-stick?). Of course, I will have cats again (after India early 2012 is the current plan), but right now, I’m part of these petless people.

Almost everything in my life reminds of his death. I still have a photo of him as background image for my iPhone, because I’m not sure when the right moment to change it would be, and what to replace it with. Though I’m slowly rebuilding a layer of habits and memories of my new life without him, I feel his loss almost every day — some days worse than others.

This makes me realize that in a way, it is less the intrinsec value of the being who died (who would dare put a cat’s life before that of a human being?) than the role played in one’s life and one’s emotional attachment that determines the amount of grief. Sounds obvious, uh, nothing new under the sun here. But it has another taste when you’ve reached the conclusion all over again by yourself.