Oblomovka

2003-01-05»

I've just found out that Lee Felsenstein will be talking about the Jhai remote IT project at Stanford this Wednesday, 2003-01-08, 4.15pm. If you're in the area, it should be an interesting talk.

It's also Saint Joshua Norton's birthday deathday. I shall have to find a way to pay my respects at the Bill Gates Building.

I've been settling into a slow lazy orbit of gadget-stasis. After a lifetime of craving all kinds of gizmos, I ended up with a shortlist of things I wanted two years ago. I have since failed to add anything new to it and slowed purchased everything else at bargain-bucket rates when they've ceased to be fashionable.

In the end, I realised that there was only one thing left on the list - a USB key drive. You know, one of those 64MB widgets you can hang off a keyring and plug straight into a USB port, where it magically appears as a normal drive on Mac, PCs and Linux. When I first decided I wanted one, they cost hundreds of dollars and were highly first-adopterish. Now they're cheap and ubiquitous, I thought it was time to take the plunge.

Never quite works that way, does it? About the same time, I read on Slashdot about a new generation of these little drives, with a new generation of chipsets. As well as store files, they could work as MP3 players and voice recorders too. I got the cheapest of these, the splendidly named Yo!Fun 130 for Christmas. It does MP3 playing and voice recording as well as file storage - and it can take SmartMedia cards. It's also very diddy and wee.

Unfortunately, it's the strangest engineered piece of consumer electronics I've seen. Inside it, I estimate it has an MP3 player/voice encoder chipset tied together with rope to a mass storage chipset, with a complicated pulley and winch to connect one of them to the outside world at a time. Neither know of each other's existence. You switch one or the other in, you have to crank a switch on the side of the box. If you sniff the USB output, you can watch this happen. One moment, the USB is saying "Hi! I'm a perfectly normal USB storage device made by Dull Company of Taiwan", the next the winch activates and "Zzzzt! Wait! No! I am, in fact, an MP3 player made by Somebody Different of South Korea".

Each chipset uses a different storage format. So every time you switch, you have to reformat all the memory. Want to copy some files across, then listen to MP3s? Forget it - you'll need to delete one or the other before you can move that lever. This isn't systems integration: it's systems smooshing.

Yo!Fun also isn't Linux compatible - not really surprising, I suppose, given that it's not even compatible with itself. So I took it back, and got a Cendyne Gruvstick. Bit more expensive. Slightly better. At least that presents itself as just one thing to the USB interface. Unfortunately, it's not anything that anyone outside of its own device driver would care to comprehend.

The Gruvstick uses the STMP3410 chipset which, in theory, supports the USB mass storage protocol (the standard that lets you just slam these things into Macs, PCs or Linux without needing drivers). But the Gruvstick spurns this petty interoperability for what looks like its own magic moon language. Having your own language is, of course, the very definition of proprietary. But I have to say, after poring over dozens of specs and snooped USB traffic - what a weird way of doing things. The standard says, 0x28, when it wants to read some data. The Gruvstick has exactly the same function, only *it* uses something like 0x03. Thus, presumably, doubling the work for the engineers, and rendering it utterly incompatible with anything other than their specially written drivers. Drivers which crashed Quinn's Windows 2K machine. (I may be wrong about the details of this, incidentally - and this is a blog, so it's almost obligatory to be a bit wrong. But it still looks like the Gruvstick is being proprietary for proprietary's sake. And there's not a single thing its software does that the standard USB storage protocol doesn't support. Except, I guess, DRM.)

Anyway, the upshot of this is that the Gruvstick needs its own drivers. Drivers you can only get for Windows. Now this makes it useless for my purposes - not just because I'm such a Linux wonk, but because I want to use it as a replacement for floppy disks. How can I transfer files, if I need to install drivers to get the storage device to be even recognised on a foreign machine?

So I took the Gruvstick back. Then, finally, I did the sensible thing. I went to the Linux USB working devices list and searched for what I wanted. There, I found some optimistic reviews of the Daisy Diva MP3 Player/File Store/Voice Recorder/Compact Flash reader. This, it looks like, does it all right. Normal USB Storage protocols; no weird hybrid shit; Linux support - plus, it's pretty much the same price as the Yo!Fun. And it's got a slightly less silly name.

I haven't bought it yet - because I made the mistake of visiting the rest of their catalogue. Now I'm wavering between that, or the Daisy Music Pen, which is all the same stuff (sans CF reader) in a pen-sized form factor. Again, it's cheaper than the Gruvstick. Or should I really splash out and get the same company's PhotoClip? Which is - glad you asked - a combined MP3 player, file store/CF reader, voice recorder, still camera, webcam and video recorder. $149, although I don't know how much of that is Linux accessible.

I'm still in the middle of deciding. But I've learnt three lessons: one, the folk who make the sensible engineering choices are probably the smarter and cheaper manufacturers too. Two: you always do your best consumer research in the two hours after you bought the goods. Three: no matter how long you stay out of the gadget rat race, there's always one more object of desire.

2003-01-01»

It was back in February of 1998, and I'd written a throwaway line in NTK about a story I'd heard regarding John Carmack, creator of Quake.

... JOHN CARMACK wins $20,000 at Blackjack by making himself
"consistently behave like a robot" (donates it to Free
Software Foundation) ...

A few days later, I got an email. From Richard M. Stallman. He'd had my rumour forwarded to him. Would it be possible for me to put him in contact with this John Carmack, so they could confirm that he'd like to make a donation, and work out the best way of doing so?

So I found myself writing a reply to Richard Freaking Stallman, with Only Bloody John Carmack in the cc: field. It ended:

Mr Stallman, meet Mr Carmack.

Bcc:d on the same mail was almost everybody I knew in the whole world ever.

I was grinning for days. I had done practically nothing, of course - but what a great way of doing nothing: putting other people's money, opportunities and genius together and then standing well back.

Which is why Lee Felsenstein is such a personal hero to me. As the moderator of the Homebrew Computer Club, Felsenstein made it his life's work to introduce opportunity to genius, in a framework where everyone benefitted - and maybe made money too. He pushed Jobs and Woz closer together, stitched together alliances between dozens of fledgling Silicon Valley companies in the Seventies, and encouraged them all to co-operate openly, without proprietary controls. He saw his job as putting the right people together to make the world a better place.

Oh, but there's more. Felsenstein wasn't just a co-ordinator of genius: he was an engineering genius himself. He designed the Osborne-1, the first popular portable computer. He was rolling out free networked public-access terminals in the Bay Area in 1972. In 1993, he wrote a piece for Dr. Dobbs Journal, whose mere title should give you a taste of how far-thinking it was. It was called "The Commons of Information", and it ended with this call to arms:

Our task, as technologists, is to build the tools that get us through ... to the future we want. We've already done half the job by creating the personal computer such that it took on a life of its own and evaded capture. Now the task of furnishing the agora remains. Anyone up for another adventure?

I often wondered what adventure Felsenstein was up to these days. Earlier this year, I got a chance to interview him and find out. A lot of the details are in this Irish Times piece, but here's the capsule summary:

Felsenstein's friend, Lee Thorn, was a bomb loader on an aircraft carrier in 1966 and participated in the US bombing of Laos, between Thailand and Vietnam. Years later, he formed the Jhai Foundation with a Laotian refugee, by means of small reparation. Last year, he approached Felstein with a challenge: could he spread the power of his revolution to the agricultural communities of Laos?

Felsenstein got to work. He's built the solution. It's a bicycle-powered, ruggedised luggable, with a localised version of Linux and constructed from cheapo commodity parts. It's got an aerial, too: it uses WiFi to connect to a central Internet hub in the market town.

Using it, villages that currently have no electricity, telephone or decent roads can monitor the prices of crops, negotiate group purchases with other villages, and make business deals without spending days away from the farm. And with email and built-in VoIP, the families will be able to make direct contact for the first time with the Laotian Diaspora - the relatives who left the war-torn zone to earn money in the capital and beyond.

It's an incredible project. The New York Times named it one of its best ideas of 2002. And Felsenstein, using his old-style Silicon Valley wiles, has brought the cost of full five village system to just $25,000.

Unfortunately, it looks like the international grants they secured to do this won't come through in time before the first Monsoon rains begin in May. So they're scouting around for this tiny amount, before the whole project gets flooded out.

Here's Lee's email plea in full. Here's his list of what the money can do:

Your donation will pay for:

• $10 20 lbs. shipping costs
• $25 Keyboard
• $50 Headset
• $75 Antenna
• $100 Battery
• $250 Bicycle Powered Generator
• $450 CPU or Mountain Top Solar Panel
• $850 Base Station
• $1,000 One RT US-Laos Trip for One Technical Consultant
• $1,500 One Complete Jhai Computer
• $2,500 One Complete Village Set-up
• $3,000 Relay Station
• $25,000 The Full 5 Village System

You can PayPal the Jhai Foundation on their donations page (mention that it's for "Remote IT").

Better still, send them ten bucks or more and then blog about it.

You see, I'm no good at this. I'm trying to give the foundation publicity, but I've already screwed up. I must have scared away 99% of the potential donators just by talking about Stallman and Carmack. I wrote the Irish Times piece too early - and I even mispelled the name of the Foundation in the print version. This entry is too long. It's in this titchy little font. Dooomed!

But you - you're good at this meme-spreading thing. Your blog has bazillions of readers. They're all rich, sensitive, and good-looking just like you. You can just link to the Jhai donation page and mention the project and why it's cool, and it will become cool, and have enough money to make it to Lhaos before the rainy season. Put in a link to the New York Times piece or my Irish Times piece for more info, if you like.

And remember, because this is charity, you don't have to worry about how popular it is. You can blog it even if it's already on Daypop! Everyone will still love you and admire your charity. Lee Felsenstein, the rabble-rousing fomenter of the digital revolution, and you, the best goddamn fomenter in the Distributed Republic of Blogistan, working together at last. Or, in other words:

Mr and Ms Blogger, meet Mr Felsenstein.

Anyone up for another adventure?

So my first New Year's Resolution was to catch up with the 140 or so old unreplied mails that I've had hanging over my head for years. And I did! (Green line line is my inbox, blue box my must-reply sword of Damocles)

Welp, all downhill from now on in. Cheers!

PS DON'T EMAIL YOUR CONGRATULATIONS.