Imagine a world...

Where all the world's films and TV shows were available through a single outlet. Subtitled in different languages, even dubbed if you want that. Where gargantuan servers were not needed to store every single film or show. Where you didn't get Netflix's favourite phrase "Items related to X". Where you pay a single monthly fee to gain access to all this cultural richness (and the stupid stuff). Media from the very start of cinema up to modern-day blockbusters and ratings earners.

Best of all, where this wasn't illegal?

The music industry went through a huge turmoil over the last couple of decades confronted with the pervasiveness of the net and visual media is going through the same now as bandwidth increases dramatically (in the next few days, I'm upgrading to a 1Gbps download/300 Mbps upload fibre service that is cheaper than my 2Mbps/.2Mbps ADSL service was). BitTorrent is the bête noire of all media, but its brilliance is in how it uses everyone's power together to distribute everything.

It is a commonly-held truth that people who indulge in piracy are also some of the greatest purchasers of media at the same time. You might argue that they test the waters by downloading copiously and pick and choose what they want to support with their money. I myself may have downloaded the odd album or film, usually when it's not easily available in any other form or I've been in a hurry, but it has never prevented me from buying said film, TV show, CD or book.

Imagine if these media hoarders were rewarded in some manner by opening up their presumably immense storage to others to make everyone's downloads that bit faster? Where serious collectors of German Expressionism could make their passions available to a larger audience. Let's further imagine a scenario:

You pay a monthly €/$/£ 20 fee. You can download what you like, legally, for that money and the money gets distributed in some fashion to rights owners. If €/$/£ 20 seems too expensive, restrict it with a lower cost offer, say €/$/£ 10 but no HD, or €/$/£ 5 where you can only get three items per month.

For every byte you upload, because you are effectively part of a BitTorrent network, you get paid (somehow) €/$/£ 0.00000000001 (for every GiB you upload you earn €/$/£ 0.01). Rather than spending money trying to punish people you reward them for helping. Heck, the biggest hoarders with the biggest pipes might even turn a profit on the deal, but then if they do the service to all the other users gets that much better.

Stop the vicious circle and turn it into a virtuous one. Like Cory Doctorow says "Copying stuff is never, ever going to get any harder than it is today" (http://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/). The Internet is a wonderful thing, let's make it work for us.

InDesign is good but so annoying!

Just a rant really. I'm engaged in creating documentation for a software product. There are probably going to be about 2.3k pages long. I'm outputting to PDF for the moment, so it will be completely digital (plans are to take it to wiki, but that's for later) so there's no output to dead tree.

I was struggling with the Table of Contents feature and it was hard to find any help, even with the whole interweb in front of me.

Anyway, just by clutching at straws I discovered the Bookmarks window that I found contained bookmarks I'd never knowingly added. Clearing all the extraneous bookmarks might have done the job - just waiting on the export of a PDF...

Yay! That worked! /me dances!

In other news, the other thing that bugged the shit out of me in InDesign was the fact that my books constantly have warning triangles saying "you edited this document (a chapter of the book) outside the book!" It is *never* true but that doesn't seem to matter to InDesign. Anyway, the solution is as dumb as you might expect: If you have the Book window open while you edit, save and close your chapter, all will be fine.





















Next problem, Updating the ToC is broken. Instead of going away to trawl the documents and then building the complete ToC, iD now does the trawl, but only builds the first page. Every time I have to manually add a new page and reflow text onto it, whereupon it builds the remaining pages (of which there are about 30 now). This one I haven't resolved and can get no help on aside from exporting to IDML and re-importing, which didn't work.

Problem 3. Do not make cross-references until the very end of your editing of your document. If you do it earlier you will find that typing slows down to one character per second appearing on-screen.

Automation

It's ridiculous to do the same operation over and over again rather than letting the computer do it by itself. When rendering I don't do a bunch of F9 (LightWave's Render Image key) and then compile them into an animation, I hit F10 (Render Scene). Likewise, I lose so much time in Photoshop saving images as PNGs, but now I can use Actions:

1. Load an image you want to save as PNG;
2. Open the Actions window in Window > Actions (coincidentally F9 is the default keyboard shortcut)
3. Create a new Macro, name it, assign it a Function key shortcut and give it a colour if you like then hit the Record button.
4. Save your image as a PNG (you only need do this once now)
5. Now, whenever you want to save an image as a PNG you only need press your assigned key. You will get the Save As... file requester pop up where you can write the name you want but the filetype will already be set to PNG.

Only two things are lacking here.

1.  The ability to choose a keyboard shortcut that is better than a Function key with possible Ctrl or Shift modifiers;
2. The ability to get rid of the stupid interlace requester that always pops up when saving as PNG. 

 I will add more automation stuff here as I do it.

Moto G - it's cool! It's broken :(......... it's fixed! :)

I've been using a Samsung Galaxy S2 for some time (talking of which I need to put it on eBay now) and while the phone was an amazing improvement over my Motorola Defy (remember the phone they advertised on the telly as being "lifeproof"? It really wasn't), it seemed more and more tired compared to the S3, then S4 and phones from everyone else. Then Motorola announced the Moto G (XT-1032) and it seemed my perfect (for the moment) phone had arrived. I was all set to buy one and then I heard that the next model, the XT-1033 was announced and would have the capacity for a second SIM. Since I go to England and the states quite often it made sense to get that version of the phone rather than the XT-1032, but it wasn't ever going to be available here in France. So I bought one from Negri Electronics in Las Vegas. It cost me $337.22 (€253.95) including shipping and I ordered it on 13 Feb 2014 (just checked, it was a Thursday not a Friday).

The phone turned up at the beginning of March 2014 and I was full of the joys of spring when it arrived, as any hot-blooded young man is with new tech. I bought myself a case for it that came with three screen protectors that I perhaps foolishly didn't use and a touch screen stylus thing. I didn't really like the case compared to the soft silicone of my Galaxy S2 case. It felt hard with little pointy bits. Anyway, we're a week into March 2014 at this point, okay? I hadn't had the phone for a month when, on 12 March 2014, I took it out of my pocket while sitting on my scooter to score me some Ingress. The scooter was stopped and the stand down. It *was* raining, but since the moto g is lauded for its waterproofivity I wasn't worried. Even when it slipped through my fingers as I took it out of my pocket I was only mildly concerned, the thing was in a protective jacket and I'd seen a Beetle run over one for Jeebus' sake!

My smug confidence was shattered at about the same time as the screen on my phone as it did a lazy "buttered toast" flip in the air to land screen side down onto a sharp bit of gravel.

To add insult to the already grievous injury suffered, I received a demand for roughly €80 in import duty for this phone the day after it crashed to the ground and died. Woo hoo. :|

I did the rounds of the net and the one mobile phone repair shop local to me. They took the phone, turned it over and said that they'd never heard of it and couldn't I have broken a Samsung like everyone else?

Hmm, drawing board return. The interweb provided me with a company that not only supplied spare parts to shops like the one I'd been to, but also offered them for purchase by individuals. Based in Shenzen, China I thought "urgghh, I'm going to get got for more import duty", but it seems that only applies to finished, boxed products. I tried ordering a replacement screen and digitiser (http://bit.ly/1s6Eo5t) 14 March 2014, but they were out of stock. I asked again a week later, still no stock, and again a fortnight later, nope, and again a month after that, still no joy. Finally,19 May 2014 I was happy to see eTradeSupply *finally* got the necessary part in stock and I ordered one of the above and the necessary Torx screwdriver to go with it (another €67.31). 

The new screen arrived 27 May 2014. That evening I broke down my moto g based on this video from eTradesupply. A nerve-wracking half hour passed, but the phone was back together and turned on okay. But there was an issue...

For some reason eTradeSupply not only do not ship their replacement screen with an "ear speaker", the speaker that is used when you hold the phone to your head rather than the loudspeaker on the back of the phone, but this also means you can't use headphones since the same speaker provides for them. I wasn't going to order a €0.50 item with a shipping charge of €14.40 and so discussed with them. I had contact with a nice lady Fara Lau and suggested some things to make the site better and how I was going to get this very necessary part. In the end, a friend needed a new screen for his phone too and I bought a case for the moto g and eTradeSupply gave me €5 off the deal, so what should have been about €30, half of which was the shipping, was now ~€25 - a teensy bit more acceptable.

After I fitted the new speaker the night before last my phone has been great. I'm dubious about its continued resistance to water now since the sealed unit has been opened so many times, but that's okay. I finally have a good working phone. Bloody typical that now the MOT-4G variant is available. It does 4G but only has 8 GB of onboard memory. That doesn't matter since it now has an SD card slot! Gah! It's also cheaper than this 16 GB version (naturally). It doesn't have dual SIMs however.

Anyway, given that this is now really my phone (since I rebuilt it twice), I felt the right to root it, which was pretty easy to do (unlike my S2). It would be nice if there was a stable build of Cyanogenmod because that would go straight on there too.

For rooting, it suffices to follow the simple instructions presented here: xda developers (thanks to Aashish-kkhckr). Since this kills the standard Motorola bootloader you will get a warning message instead when you power on your phone. I'm half-tempted to replace that message with my own picture, but it's amusing to have it there and it's something you only see when booting your phone, not just turning it on.

Finally, a review of the phone. It's great. A charge lasts easily a day (although I tend to charge more frequently to keep the battery level at the sweet spot between 40-80% percent). The camera is fast but not at a good quality. I'm not just talking about the megapixel quantity but also the quality. Have a look at the pictures above for an example. The dual SIM element is a boon I fully intend to take maximum advantage of finally (I ended up in Blighty while the phone was out of action so I couldn't try it then), and overall I'm very happy with this phone. It's still small by comparison with the Galaxy S4 and S5, which is great and the 1280x720 screen is beautiful (I have a Slimport cable arriving in the next day or so so I can test output to the TV).

PS. This lauded "budget" phone has ended up costing me roughly €426!

I feel the need, the need for speed!

Picture it. The date is mid-October 2013. I've been trying for months to get a faster ADSL signal to no avail - I'm just too far from the exchange. I'm getting this result on Speedtest:

Earlier on in the year, I saw a new box go up on a crossroads about 500 m from our house. It was a fibre optic box - yay! It was owned by Orange, only for Orange customers - boo! (I was with SFR, Orange's main competitor). I asked them how I could get the fibre goodness and they said "Well, Orange has an exclusive because they put in the equipment, but that exclusivity runs out after a year." Fine, I thought resigned to living in the (very) slow lane while my neighbours whooped it up at high speed around me.

Then a sales guy from Orange came around and explained that not only could I switch but that Orange would pick up the cancellation fees from SFR, that it was a FTTH connection and that it came with a TV box that could have a 3D Blu-Ray player, etc. Woohoo! Back in business... There was a question of whether I wanted 100 Mbps or 200 Mbps. I would have frankly been very happy with 100 Mbps, but that offer didn't include free phone calls around the world and since we speak to folk in other countries probably more than we do to people in France, we needed that phone service. It turns out that it was no more expensive than the deal I was getting with SFR, so even better.

Around this time, I started getting better download rates from SFR:

But still only D- from Grade F. I called SFR and explained that I was cancelling and they tried many things, including dropping the price considerably, but I explained that while they'd been good to me for the last eight years I needed the speed for my work. "Fairy nuff", said the lady (or the French equivalent) and so I was on my way to Orange (I left them eight years ago because their broadband speed was even worse than SFR's).

There was a moment of worry since Orange maintained that my scheduled installation date was just not possible and so after a couple of hours of listening to execrable hold music and shouting they agreed that I should have had my installation and so arranged it for the Thursday. The guy came, but had trouble finding the phone junction box outside in our garden. Since the house was built (and before we took occupancy) a tree had sprouted and grown laaarge. In French gardens there are usually a couple or more junction boxes. One for water, one for phone and perhaps one for gas - the electric is on the wall outside the front of the house. Well we had to dig to get to the water one, a concrete box buried under a mass of dead leaves and mulch and the box was caved in on two sides by the roots of the tree, so we feared the worst for the phone box situated in the same place, but that we couldn't find. Kevin the tech called off the visit, citing an inability to find the box he was looking for. My very good friend Tom came over to help after Kevin had gone and he managed to find the phone box, buried deep in the mulch, but still in good nick. I called Orange and they got Kevin to come back the following Tuesday. It had been more than a week since I had cancelled SFR and yet my connection was still working! I didn't know how long it would hold out, and since the whole point of moving to fibre was to support my work I really needed to keep a net connection, even if it was at a shit speed. It was still running Tuesday morning when Kevin came back and together we sorted it out (actually I'm sure I was getting in the way more than anything, but he was very kind - I was too excited!). He got it all set up and left about four hours later...

Obviously I just had to check Speedtest. I had gone from:





A-fucking-+!!!! My 200 Mbps connection was giving me nearer 300...

My thanks to Orange, who were initially shitty, but really got on the case and made sure I was completely happy (my speed dropped last week to just 100 Mbps and I explained that while I was ecstatic to even get that speed, it wasn't what I was paying for and they even sent an engineer around to check - turns out that in my tidying cables I had managed to swap a couple around and to get the extreme high speed, the RJ-45 connectors on the ends of the ethernet cable need an 8-wire connection rather than just four and I had managed to swap cables. The engineer said nothing.)

To give you some idea of what this means, a bittorrent of LibreOffice would take me about an hour before. Now it's done within two minutes. I'm actually actively looking for large downloads just to test my connection.