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Sara's blog

Hello and welcome to my blog! I am Sara, mom to Gini and Karl and married with my wonderful husband Antoin. Like them I also like computers, linux, electronics and robots. In my blog you can read more about what I am thinking about the internet, life and the world in general. Enjoy reading!

December 31, 2008 : new products I am dreaming of

Well, it's the end of the year and as usual newspapers, magazines and blogs are busy looking back or predicting what's going to come in the new year. There are articles with lists of the most innovative companies in 2008, the must haves in software and technology and so on.
After reading through many must have lists thinking that I don't really need any of this I started thinking about what I would really wanted.
Was it that I was getting old and therefore had no wishes anymore? Sure the iphone has some appeal and from time to time I still need a new computer or a new camera. But at the moment there is nothing out there that I really feel I must have.

As a child I was dreaming of many products that are a reality now. I was always frustrated of the difficulty to order e.g. English books in my local bookstore. Or I got frustrated when it took weeks to exchange letters with my friends. All this has changed now: with the internet it is so easy to order books and other items world wide and be in touch with friends who are on the other side of the globe in a mouseclick.

When I played around with the rudimentary graphics program of my first computer (an Atari 1040ST) I wished so much for a graphics programs with the capabilities of The Gimp. You can imagine how pleased I was to discover The Gimp ten years later!

So I can say many of the product wishes of my youth have finally materialized. But of course there are new things I can think of now. Here are three ideas (the first more personal, the other two with more universal appeal) that randomly came to my mind:

First after thinking about graphics programs and the Gimp I was thinking of Blender, the free 3D graphics suite. And yes, when I play around with Blender I sometimes can't help thinking that it is still as rudimentary as the first graphics program I was using. Don't get me wrong, Blender is a great program and gets more and more sophisticated with every new version but still the learning curve is very steep, it isn't exactly a program that would be famous for its ease of use (I never tried out Maya or other commercial 3D software but everything that I read about them leads me to think that they are as difficult to use so what I write here applies to all 3D programs out there so far!). I dream of a program that really makes it easy to get a story idea into an animation, a program that isn't in the way to create new stories quickly and easily, so easily that everybody can use it without having to spend months to learn it!

Another useful invention would of course be a search machine for things. In the family of a friend of mine they have a kind of calendar and each time after my friend has found a certain amount of things her loved ones were so desparately looking for she gets a special treat she can choose. So I think this is a problem that is more universal. And while that treat thing is of course a great idea I would still prefer a machine that could find those things for me. I could imagine a machine that stores the names and photos of everything my kids have and all the things must have a little gps device inside and whenever something is missing we just need to ask the machine. But it would be very hard work to give all things precise names and put gps devices on them. So there must be a better solution out there.

Finally the third invention I am looking for that I think we all could need is a kind of a time machine. No, not to travel in space and time but a machine that produces more time. And the time it produces can only be spend with your loved ones! There is so much equipment out there that claims to help you make your work more efficient. But all it ever managed is that we have to work even longer hours. I see so many people who work all day while their kids are in school and they still work in the summer when their kids go to summer camp. And then one day their kids are big and move out and the parents never really got to know them, never build a relationship with them. I think this is very sad indeed. So such a machine surely could be helpful too.

So where are the creative and innovative people out there who create such new products that we really need instead of programming yet another facebook or twitter clone?!

I wish you all a very successful, healthy, peaceful and prosperous new year 2009!

Sara

October 13, 2008 : tuxpaint

On one weekend every year we have a big meal with our families and this year it was our turn to host them all. Among our guests were my cute litte 5 year old niece Clara. She had not been introduced to computers previously but now the general consent was that it was the right time. As she loves drawing and painting it was naturally that we thought of letting her try tuxpaint first. And she loves it! The first five minutes she was a bit clumsy with the mouse but then she had grasped the concept and the rest was easy. Tuxpaint is a very intuitive program that she understood immediately without much further explanations from us.
In case you haven't heard about tuxpaint before: it is a paint program for children with very nice features. Of course you can "just" paint, there are enough brushes and colours you can choose from. But you can also e.g. stamp nice images into your picture or paint a rainbow with the magic button.
Some years ago my creator Katja already wrote an article on tuxpaint for linuxfocus.org that you can read at: http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/March2004/article333.shtml
And the tuxpaint page is: http://www.tuxpaint.org/
Thanks to Bill Kendrick for writing this great program!

October 05, 2008 : plurk versus twitter

As I've already said in my previous post I am in the mood of trying out all kind of social networking sites. As I like twitter I thought it would be nice to find something similar. So plurk came next. When I signed up the site immediately suggested some people I should become fans of (the equivalent to following in twitter). So I decided to follow them. But well, somehow I cannot really get used to the timeline they use. With twitter I find the messages I find interesting much much easier. Why? Because they are all visible at once. In plurk messages also must be so short as in twitter but still you need to go over them with your mouse to see them completely. And with the timeline you never see all new messages at once if you have been offline for a while. And I am definitively not a fan of this karma points that kind of try to pressure me to plurk often in order to avoid negative karma. But while I think I could still get used to all this the feature I am really missing is a search for interesting other plurkers. Yes, they have a button to show you interesting other plurkers but unfortunately their opinion of interesting and mine are as different as can be. Twitter for example let's me search for keywords in the name and short bio of others and with tweetscan.com I can also search for keywords in other people's tweets which means a whole lot to me. I simply don't have enough time to invest hours and hours reading through this interesting plukers list to find someone I might want to follow. And admittingly without knowing other people on plurk already I feel a bit out of place there. Only three of the many people plurk suggested me to become a fan of decided to become a fan of me too. And other people I became a fan of also didn't bother to become a fan of me. So for me the people I have met on twitter are a whole lot nicer! I haven't completely given up now because for some unexplainable reason I like those three people who decided to follow me (even though I found at least one of them on twitter too) but so far I find twitter a lot more appealing.

October 03, 2008 : My web2.0 experience

At the moment I am in the mood of trying out all kind of social networking services. True, a few months ago I said this is not for me but now I feel that trying out something new and getting new impressions and maybe new ideas can't be too bad.
So I opened a facebook account. A friend of mine had invited me a couple of months ago so of course it was obvious to start with that. After creating my account I typed in all my friend's names and email addresses by hand. I found it too much of an intrusion of my privacy to hand facebook over my email password as I didn't feel like changing it afterwads and I have a natural distrust of all those services and sites. This is no special critisism of Facebook however as most (or all?) of those social networking services offer this feature. And I had extra created a new email address that I only use for my social networks (of course this makes it harder for friends to find me but I really care about security!)
Ok, hurrah, after searching for my friends a handful really had facebook accounts already! So I sent them friend requests and they accepted.
Hmm, some people only have very few friends there while others have hundreds! At the beginning when I saw that some people had so many friends I also felt like I needed to try to find everybody I have ever known. But when I was about to send a friend request to still another person I hadn't been in touch with for years I stopped thinking, why am I doing this? I said to myself that I know where this person lives and if I looked in any of my older address books I could probably even find his phone number. But in all those years I never really felt the wish to contact him, so why now? So I finally stopped.
I think people on facebook are very different. There are young people who add everyone they get to know without thinking and this is fine for them. They are young, they have lots of time and they don't have so much experience. And then there are people who just "collect" friends. You see when I was a teenager I was writing letters with a lot of girls from all over the world. And there I also had pen pals who had over 100 other pen pals. They were collectors, some of them very organised, they sent me a card to fill out with my name, birthday, interests and hobbies and then they wrote letters to me accordingly. While other people collect stamps or autographs they are collecting pen pals or now facebook friends. Of course nobody can keep in touch with so many people, especially not on a deeper level. When I was a teenager for a short time I had around 75 pen friends. But I realized soon that there were only around 5 I was really exchanging very personal letters often and around 15 other people that I really liked, all the rest had just become pen pals by chance and we stopped writing soon and now I don't even remember their names. And finally then there are those on facebook who really try to have only real friends that they want to be in touch with for ever.

While it is nice to send virtual (growing) flowers, sea garden creatures and bears or read what others are doing right now I must admit that it starts to become a bit boring. Anyhow these are my friends with whom I correspond anyhow. So while it is a nice platform and might help to stay in touch I don't feel it is really necessary in my life. Maybe I am too old already?! Scary...!!!
I finally also created a fan facebook page for tuxgraphics but still need to find a way to promote it. So I'd be happy to see you as a fan there!

Next I tried orkut, a social networking site from google. I created an account, joined some groups and looked at the profile of their members. Oops, a few days later I had a comment in my scrapbook (don't remember if this was really the name, anyhow I mean the corresponding feature to Facebook's wall). And it was from someone I remember I had looked at his profile. A bit later I found out that people get a notice who looked at their profile. Had I known this had I never looked at any of those profiles at all, I would have been much more cautious at least about what profiles to look at... To tell the truth I was so upset that I decided to delete my account which is no problem with orkut.(I read that in facebook you can deactivate your account but this wouldn't really delete all your data, well, haven't tried it out yet). Maybe I was a bit too quick in deleting my account, now I know to be cautious and usually first read a bit about a service in wikipedia before I am joining. What I liked about orkut was that you can check out how your profile looked for friends and for the public. Then I didn't value it so much but now after more experience I do.
In facebook I of course am a member of the multimix city network, this was almost automatically done so by facebook. At the beginning I had my profile open for other multimix city network members to see but since a friend started writing more personal messages on my wall I decided to make it more private and only viewable for friends. However I have no real way to verify if it really is.

Okay, next on my list was myspace.com. Without knowing much about social networking facebook and myspace were the two names I had heard about. So of course I needed to create an account here too. I didn't like that they wanted a post code. Why do they need that kind of information? Isn't it enough to provide a name and country?! Well, I finally decided to create an account nevertheless. What a strange site! None of my friends has a myspace account and I didn't look at too many other profiles yet or tried to contact anyone (after the orkut experience I felt a bit shy for a while) but I had almost as many friends there just after a few days like on facebook! How does this come? Well, right from the start Tom was my friend as well as "A place for Mulimix City Citizens". You are able to delete them at any time but when you don't know anyone else that would be really sad of course. Okay, 2 friends. I joined a group and shortly after that a computer shop owner whose profile is full of all the products and services his shop offers wanted to be friends with me. I happily accepted. Next came a heavy metal band. As I prefer working on an old firefox browser flash player doesn't work here (it's usually very helpful as it keeps those unwanted advertisements on the webpages I am reading out of my sight) I didn't have the chance yet to listen to their music. Okay, okay, I could go to my other computer and try it out there but... So what should I do? I remembered that in my teenage years I really liked "Iron Maiden" for a while. So why not be friends with this unknown band? I accepted that friend request. And I accepted all the friend requests that followed from bands of all kind of musical flavours. Anyhow I like music in general. But to be honest it starts to feel like spam to me now.

I don't know exactly when but during the last four weeks when all this happened I happened to come across an article that quoted someone saying that homo analogous was someone who still thought email was great and had never heard about twitter. Hm, I still think email is a great way to communicate with people and when reading that article I had never ever heard about Twitter before. What was this? I am really so grateful Wikipedia exists and knows all the answers! It's kind of a mini blog. In 140 characters you can tell the world (or better your "followers", the Twitter name for "friends") what you are doing. Quickly I created a twitter account. For a few days nothing happened. I didn't really know what to tell the world. Then I tried it out and tweeted a few times. Next I looked at other tweeds and finally chose one to follow. It seems I made a good choice because after that followers started to arrive. Happily I decided to follow their tweeds too. It is strange, I have read so many articles with people saying they never found out why Twitter is so great but at least up until now it's the service I clearly appreciate the most. You don't need to send a friend request, you simply decide to follow someone else whose tweeds you find interesting. And yes, even though I only really choose one person myself I find those people interesting who decided to follow me and I enjoy reading their posts. Of course it's too short a time to call them friends yet but that's not the important thing. They give me new ideas and perspectives.
Yes, spam unfortuantely exists on twitter too. I had two people following me who had already stopped following me by the time I checked on their profile and I could see that they just wanted to get attention to their bad products. Fortunately you can block those users but like with email spam you can't stop them to create a new account and do it again.

Well, as I am writing this I am aware that there are thousands of other services waiting for me to try them out. Still undecided which to try next.

Have a nice day,
Sara

PS: I just noticed that our fridge is buzzing around quite rhytmically today. Does it mean he is on myspace too? Or is it rather a sign it is coming to its end of life?