Since then, I realise I’ve developed a bit of an aversion to tech specs. “Does it do the job? OK then.” That kind of thing. I still play games, though mostly on the iPad or the PS3. The games work, work well, and I don’t need to think about whether they’ll work on my device before trying them.

So, having said all that, I was looking at the Mac App Store this morning. I saw two games I recognised, Arkham Asylum and Duke Nukem Forever. I had a look just to see what the screenshots were like, and noticed on the descriptions of both games a set of ‘important requirements’. Actual system requirements. Both are below.

Lists of numbers. Reference to ‘video cards’. Integrated video chipsets. ATI X1xxx series. I only know what these mean from fairly long experience. It should be obvious just what bullshit jargon terms they are to dump on someone who just wants to play a game. Without support, they’d have to find out what a video card is, or a video chipset. Volumes formatted as what? What volume? The space inside my computer? Do I have to move bits around? Searching for X1xxx will never return anything particularly helpful either.

But what do you mean it’s all in “About This Mac, then click More Info… then System Report and, oh my!” It’s all utter, utter, bullshit. It’s a contemptuous arrogant put down of the potential buyer – you don’t have the technical knowledge to play a game. Go away and write your shopping lists, little person. Why should technical knowledge of the workings of a computer be a requirement for gaming? Strategic and tactical thinking, yes; problem solving, yes; all sorts of things, yes; knowledge of video chipsets, no. Solving the problems of finding this stuff out is not a game, it is not fun.

But it’s not really the game studios’ fault. They’re often doing something with the game that does require specific hardware. Like it or not, for a lot of games it’s just not worth making it run on everything. What’s needed is some clear bullshit-free way of letting the buyer know whether this game will work on this computer. There was some thing talked about by Microsoft (and others) a few years ago of having a ‘standard’ spec for computers at specific times, so you’d get the “2008 High End” computer and the “2007 Mid Range” computer and so on. Game boxes (for this was before digital download was big) would say what they worked on, and you’d of course know what your machine was (so the magical thinking went), and would buy accordingly. Of course it came to nothing. The strength (and limitation) of the PC gaming market is the flexibility and variety of PCs, and besides you’d just be replacing one lot of jargon with another, albeit friendlier set.

But wait, I’m on a Mac. I’m looking at this games using the Mac App Store, an app that’s running on my computer. It knows what the spec of my machine is. Why should I need to know what the lists of numbers are? That’s the computer’s job!

The Mac App Store can (but doesn’t) tell me if my machine is capable of running the game well. There are loads of ways to do it that would be friendly and informative and yet be face-saving and PR-fluffy enough for both Apple and the game studios – from a “This game was designed for a bigger/better/faster/more computer than yours” to just not featuring games that won’t run.

Yes, it’s more work for Apple to maintain the App Store, a little harder to publish ‘featured app’ lists, but surely that’s better than just dumping it on the poor sod who just wants to play a game?

Weirdly it’s this that might push me over the edge and into real Google alternatives, and it comes down to how I’ve ended up splitting my computing and online life. I use my iPad a lot. In many ways it’s my main machine (if such a thing makes any sense these days) – I use it for everything I do when I’m not working. It gives me a psychological separation of the computers in my life – I like the different experiences on the different platforms and, to sound a bit pretentious for a moment, use them to moderate my thinking and actions. If there’s something that’s not convenient (or possible) on the iPad then I have to ask myself whether it’s something I should be trying to do at that point, or whether I should just set a reminder to myself for when I’m next ‘at work’ at the laptop. I think it’s a fairly good system. It works for me.

The biggest difference in my ‘usual stuff’ of things to do has been with email. I use the native Apple Mail app on iOS, and the Gmail web interface on the laptop. There’s a difference in tone and function between the two things – it’s not that either is better or worse for work or social email, it’s just that I maintain that separation. I’m not dogmatic about it, I have to be practical, and I use the Gmail web interface on the iPad interface from time to time, but it’s not a polished experience, it doesn’t feel quite right, and so it reminds me of my self-imposed separation, so I don’t do too much ‘in the wrong place’.

And so, back to the point. With a Gmail app on my iOS device (how could I not try it?) then maybe it’d get too easy. And that makes me think how much of the rest of my life is on Google’s servers. And maybe I shouldn’t do that. I think I need something based somewhere else, preferably in a country with decent data protection laws. I don’t want to be a systems admin, but I’d like some control over things, maybe a managed server somewhere with email and calendaring on it. I know I won’t want to swap it for another megacorp’s thing (like Yahoo, Hotmail or iCloud) but I dunno, what are your alternatives to Google’s hegemony? Answers on a tweet, gratefully received.

I can understand why you’d want a nice generic tag to encode various numbers and whatever, but I don’t see the point in getting rid of a really useful and unambiguous tag like time. The arguments for replacing it seem to be about fairly specific use cases, dimensionless numbers, ranges of numbers, temperatures and so on. Fine, I can see that. It might be useful. What I object to is this sense of a ‘grand scheme’ creeping back in for HTML to become more like XML - a nice neat encoding of all the world’s data so that it can be easily indexed and rationalised by big systems. There’s much talk in that thread of microformats and machine indexing as if that was a major goal in making websites. I dunno, I figured it was about letting people read stuff.

What I liked about the development of HTML5 was the idea of ‘paving the cowpaths’ - looking at how people use HTML and either making that ‘official’ or adding stuff to make it easier. What we ended up with was a reasonably sensible set of tools that were nice and generic, salted with ones for a few specific use cases, like dates and times and form inputs or whatever. Yes, you’d be putting the tags in for a machine to understand them, but that machine would be a browser, something to present what you’d done - the need for marking up your content was obvious and understandable.

I liked the balance between neat and scruffy that HTML5 represented but this idea seems to be going too far back to the neat end, it smacks of XHTML2. You neats, you’ve got your XML, go and play with that, and let us be scruffy with our HTML.

Pave the damn cowpaths, stop planning highway systems in the sky.

So. Most people on earth are in computer cities buried underground. They’re in digital form of course, and live at a different rate from normal people. There are some normal humans, clinging to a primitive life. Other people are in artificial bodies and live on the moon. This last lot look at the stars. They notice two neutron stars about to collide and warn people on earth. So it turns out th earth gets fried, there’s a daring rescue of the normal people by the digital ones and then they find that the stars collided because if gravity leaking through from another universe and this means th galaxy is about to go, so they fly off in a spaceship to somewhere they can transmit themselves through into another universe.

So that’s what I remember. Might have been a particularly vivid dream after eating cheese late at night, but I don’t think so. I hv an idea it was Greg Bear but I don’t recognise it in th Wikipedia list of his books.oh, and one of the main characters might have been called Orlando. Not sure.

Update: Identified! It’s Diaspora by Greg Egan.

I use Dropbox and Gmail all the time, and both contain a mass of data that comes from different aspects of my life. Gmail contains both some of the first messages I exchanged with my partner, some deeply personal conversations with family members, but also a load of business correspondence, receipts, order acknowledgements and many conversations with friends. Similarly, Dropbox contains the working copies of several projects, stuff for my sites, shared files on various projects with colleagues, a load of personal scribblings, sketches, family photos, found images and books, PDFs and saved pages. Neither service gives me any option to separate those collections, those facets of my life, from each other, and I think they should.

The need for some kind of extra ‘barrier’ becomes more apparent on something like the iPad, where there’s a crossover between the private and the shared. It is (as many have noted) a personal computer, but one you’re likely to hand to someone else to play with an app or read something. If they opened up the Photo app they could see all your images, if they open up Email, they’d see all your emails, if they open up Dropbox… you get the idea. As a default, it’s certainly not a bad one, but I’d like for all these things just to specify that, say, emails tagged with ‘Bank’ or pictures in the ‘Family’ album have some kind of restriction, anything from a simple warning to full-on password protection.

Of course, adding something like this would also be useful if you’ve a load of porn stashed on your iPad, Dropbox or laptop, which in any discussion of privacy is the elephant in the room everyone is apparently too damn coy to point out. Perhaps that’s because it doesn’t (and shouldn’t) matter. I’m pretty damn sure that for each and every individual there are things they want to keep somewhere accessible but don’t want to share, regardless of whether it’s eyewateringly hardcore pornography or a fondness for the music of Justin Bieber. Not every part of our lives is equally public or equally private, and software, for crying out loud, should accept and support that.

* I should point out I have nothing against Mr Bieber, or his eyewateringly hardcore pornography.

I would have restored from a backup, but my last setup had a few problems, so I’ve started from scratch. It’s all nice. The thing is, this browser history thing that browsers do is really quite intrusive. I’m following a path of enquiry, open a new tab and boom, there’s a load of thumbnails of stuff I’ve visited ‘most often’ or ‘recently’. Like I give a toss. Why would I want to see that in the middle of… what was I doing again? See, I’m easily distracted. I imagine I’m not alone in that either. It feels like a feature for feature’s sake, something Apple did to show their fancy schmancy graphics capabilities in the browser, and other browsers have to copy. I can imagine the rather edge-like use-case that led to it: someone wants to visit That Site They Visit Often, they open a tab, and woo there it is, click, and load. How convenient for them. But who would do that? Perhaps I’m assuming a hell of a lot but if you’ve the nous to open a new tab (and anecdotal evidence shows this might be something relatively ‘power user’ types would do) then you’ve probably the nous to bookmark your favourite sites as well. Maybe not.

Besides, since browser makers assume you share your user account and browser with your entire family (what else would the justification for ‘private browsing’ be?) as soon as anyone else has been on it then your ‘frequently visited sites’ will most likely change quite a bit. What would be the use in that? The list will become dominated by the browsing habits of the more obsessive and relentless internet users in the household, and if they forget to turn on private browsing, who knows what new and unexpected insights you’ll gain into their character?

The ports and whatnot in the side of a laptop collect a lot of dust, which bothers me in a vague sort of way. I doubt it does much damage at all, but I don’t really like it in there, as it were, and it just seems inelegant to have these gaping holes in the side of my oh-so-strokable sleekness of a laptop. Even if we went all-out for induction charging, what about USB, headphones and the like? Can’t we do something about them?

The only reason you need to stick any plug into a socket is to hold it in place. There’s nothing to stop you poking your finger in there (apart from the size of your fingers) so there’s no problem with touching the connectors, so why not have them smoothly flush with the side of the laptop, with magnets to hold connectors in place? You’d have an odd-looking pattern there for sure, what with the connectors and whatever insulation they need from each other, but it’d be smooth, clean and sealed.

You could (please) make the pattern symmetric and nicely avoid the ‘which way up?’ irritation with existing connectors (looking at you, USB), and I guess you’d need some kind of protection from idiots who would force the connector on sideways and try and fry their equipment to prove a point (and a lawsuit).

The big problem would be the ‘legacy issue’, with so many cables and connectors out there, but that’s the sort of problem that (however wastefully) tends to go away fairly quickly. Besides, adaptors would be fairly easy to make.

Anyway, just a thought.

But I have an idea. It might work on more public networks, but mainly I’m thinking about it for the kind of private services like Twitter, i.e., the ones that aren’t utilities, with their public service obligations. It’s simple enough. Go invitation-only.

But aren’t there invitation-only sites out there already? And don’t they have spam? Yes, yes there are, and they do. That’s why my idea has a something else, a little thing that exists in real-world social networks, but is apparently absent in online ones, for various reasons:

Responsibility.

Yup. When you invite someone to a service, you’re responsible for them, and to a lesser extent for those that they invite, and so on. You can invite more people as long as the people you’ve invited aren’t spammers. So say we’re dealing with a Twitter-style service. Imagine you’re an utter bastard and you’ve invited all your Charlene449 and your HotChick9221 types and they’re busily pumping out messages about Great Deals On iPads and Super Low Pharma Prices and inviting yet more spam accounts themselves and soon you’ve got a bloody great outbreak of spam. Oh dear. But some of those accounts are going to get reported for spam. Soon, there’ll be enough reports for automated systems to take action (or maybe you’d have human intervention, I don’t know). So far, so normal. But this is where my idea comes in.

If you invited a spammer, you don’t get any more invitations to give out for a while. If you invited more than one spammer, you don’t get any more invitations forever. What’s more, if you invited more than one spammer, none of your invitees get to invite anyone. If more than some proportion of your invitees are spammers, your account is closed, as are all those you invited. If you’re a spammer, your account is closed, as is that of everyone you invited.

And there’s more! I was thinking of strategies to get around it and get outbreaks of spam from time to time, and that would be to create accounts that themselves don’t spam or invite spammers, but invite accounts that do invite spammers — so you have your little node of disruption in your network, staying just far enough away from the damage to presumably stay undetected. Well, I’m thinking that would also be fairly easy to detect over time, if a branch of the network is persistently affected by spam, you’re going to look at ancestors of that branch, and check their behaviour. This would probably require some human intervention (but the alerts could be automated) but would work.

Now, ideas are cheap and implementations aren’t. Balancing the rules to get a system up and running would be quite a challenge, but this is something that game designers do for a living — this is effectively a combat system. Could something like this be imposed on an existing system? Would you want to? Something like this might be very good at keeping spam down, but it might also be prone to DOS attacks on other users. That’d would require human intervention to detect, arbitrate and resolve (which could get expensive), but for specific social networks, like Ffffound, Dribbble and the like, it might just work.

So, community types, would it work?

They’re both pretty simple to explain — I’ll take a photo every day for the whole year (and post it to Flickr) and read one book a week for the whole year. The photo one isn’t a problem, I can take loads of pictures — I kept a photoblog going for 5 years after all — and having to take one everyday adds a documentary necessity to the whole thing. Basically it doesn’t matter so much if you post shitty pics now and again (or the whole time, I hear you critics snipe!) because it’s just whatever camera you have wherever you are.

The books thing is a bit trickier. Books aren’t all the same length, or written to be read at the same speed, so sticking to a strict schedule might not do the books justice. I decided to keep to an average rate instead of strictly one a week. So, this is the list so far, which I’ll happily admit does include a couple of re-reads (hey, good books deserve it):

1. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
2. Ubik, by Philip K. Dick
3. The Drowned World, by J. G. Ballard
4. The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
5. The Bridge, by Iain Banks
6. Currently reading: The City and The City, by China Mieville

Ubik and the Drowned World I read in about a few hours each, they’re pretty thin in terms of pages and plot (insightful review, huh?) but the Stephenson book was a good (enjoyable) week-and-a-half job. The City and The City is pretty damn good, even though as an ebook it’s a little disappointing — whichever software they used to put it together didn’t understand the ź character, and given that the book is mostly set in a city called Besźel, this can get pretty fucking annoying, as you can see on these screenshots:

All those extra line breaks ruining the flow of text? Yup, those are because the ź characters are all oversized, blurry, crappy images. I am firmly in the pro-ebook camp, but crap like this is just insulting. I like the idea that ebooks could replace the cheaply-produced books — the novels, biographies, whatever — leaving my limited amount of shelf space free for the quality books, reference materials, beautiful editions, graphic novels and the like, the kind of book where the physical artefact is as much a part of the pleasure of it as the content. But I think the publishers and Amazon (and other vendors) need to make sure that the typography is at least up to a decent, error-free standard. We shouldn’t still be seeing character encoding issue on the open web, let alone copyrighted, (supposedly) professionally produced books from major publishers.

Anyway, this wasn’t meant to be a sodding great rant. I’ve got a list of books waiting, so I’d better get The City and The City finished this weekend, you know to keep up to my schedule. Kinda. Now, if I decide to add War and Peace into the list, I’ll be doing some schedule juggling then, I’m sure.

My immediate reaction is ‘No! I’m glad to be out of there!’ but I had many happy times there and there are so many memories attached to it, so yes, there will be some things I miss. But what?

I used to live here.

Certainly not the light. That flat was really fucking dingy — magnolia paint, small windows and dark beige carpets all over. It even had carpet in the bathroom. Yes. In the bathroom. What kind of utterly insane idea is that? No shower either. Just a crappy too-small-for-anything bath. The landlord’s idea of getting yourself clean was clearly sitting in a glorified trough of water tainted with your own dirt in a dingy windowless room with a carpet to absorb any splashes and provide ideal festering territory for any fucking bacterial or fungal infestation you care to imagine. Yeah, sounds great doesn’t it? Really fucking homely. Get me World of Interiors on the line, they’ll want this for their fucking cover article. Did I mention that there were no windows? Yes, it had this extractor fan in the ceiling that would come on with the light, never really actually doing anything other than providing a check in a box on some regulatory form and making a fuck of a lot of noise. Turns out it vented into the loft anyway, so it’s probably a good job it didn’t work properly. It was shit. I won’t miss the bathroom.

And let’s not forget the kitchen. Cupboards so shallow that the doors wouldn’t shut if you dared to put anything as enormously huge as a dinner plate in them. A dinner plate! Fancy that, people wanting to eat off plates designed to be eaten off! Even then, the cupboards on the wall were put in so that you couldn’t actually open the window properly. In a kitchen. You can’t open your kitchen window. Woo-fucking-hoo. Oh and of course despite the kitchen being microscopic the landlord had decided to install a full size massive stainless steel behemoth of a kitchen sink, right in the middle of what would have been a useful counter. No thoughts of, “Oh, if I put this sink in the corner, there’d be room for a dishwasher, or a freezer, or anything”. No, instead they’d made sure the only space left for a washing machine was right next to every single fucking copper pipe that came out of the boiler. Yes, in our flat the spin cycle was a fucking symphony, with the roar of the damn thing blasting out of every radiator in the damn flat. Really good planning that. I won’t miss the kitchen.

Is there anything I do actually miss? It’s hard to tell. I don’t think I could miss anything if I was to compare it to the new flat, but there are a few things I did quite like at the old place — the view was often interesting, I could hear the sea some nights, and the place did look rather fancy from the outside. But the new place has so many things to recommend it — it’s bigger, lighter, airier, easier to clean (wooden floors!), it has a proper shower, it has a balcony, it’s right in the centre of town and is really, really near the pub I was already thinking of as my local. Now it really is my local. I hear the landlord has added an extra crate of my favourite beer to his order. Bliss.

And in case I ever want to see the old place again, I have thousands of photos featuring it in various ways. Thousands. And just before we moved, I took some more and made a panorama.

This was the view from my desk.

It is quite an interesting view. It was always nice when the starlings came over, they’d cover the rooves opposite and fill the air with their noise, then fwoosh they’d be gone. I never did get around to filming them.

Maybe that’s what I’ll miss.