Media

The Digital Unconformity

Doc Searls — Wed, 06 Mar 2019 13:00:00 +0000

Will our digital lives leave a fossil record? Or any record at all?

In the library of Earth's history, there are missing books. All were written in rock that is now gone. The greatest example of "gone" rock first was observed by John Wesley Powell in 1869, on his expedition by boat through the Grand Canyon. Floating down the Colorado river, he saw the canyon's mile-thick layers of reddish sedimentary rock resting on a basement of gray non-sedimentary rock, and he correctly assumed that the upper layers did not continue from the bottom one. He knew time had passed between the basement rock and the floors of rock above it, but he didn't know how much. The answer turned out to be more than a billion years. The walls of the Grand Canyon say nothing about what happened during that time. Geology calls that nothing an unconformity.

In fact, Powell's unconformity prevails worldwide. The name for this worldwide missing rock is the Great Unconformity. Because of that unconformity, geology knows comparatively little about what happened in the world through stretches of time ranging regionally up to 1.6 billion years. All of those stretches end abruptly with the Cambrian Explosion, which began about 541 million years ago. Many theories attempt to explain what erased all that geological history, but the prevailing paradigm is perhaps best expressed in "Neoproterozoic glacial origin of the Great Unconformity", published on the last day of 2018 by nine geologists writing for the National Academy of Sciences.

Put simply, they blame snow. Lots of it—enough to turn the planet into one giant snowball, already informally called Snowball Earth. A more accurate name for this time would be Glacierball Earth, because glaciers, all formed from snow, apparently covered most or all of Earth's land during the Great Unconformity—and most or all of the seas as well.

The relevant fact about glaciers is that they don't sit still. They spread and slide sideways, pressing and pushing immensities of accumulated ice down on landscapes that they pulverize and scrape against adjacent landscapes, abrading their way through mountains and across hills and plains like a trowel spreading wet cement. Thus, it seems glaciers scraped a vastness of geological history off the Earth's surface and let plate tectonics hide the rest of the evidence. As a result, the stories of Earth's missing history are told only by younger rock that remembers only that a layer of moving ice had erased pretty much everything other than a signature on its work.

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Neuranet's Flexitive

James Gray — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 15:24:05 +0000

by James Gray

The new Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Standard Ad Unit Portfolio's support for flexible ads is intended to improve the ad experience for users and boost revenue potential for advertisers. An updated solution from Neuranet, its Flexitive 2.0 responsive design software, is designed to solve today's design challenges and give media companies and agencies a significant advantage in adapting to the IAB's new Flex Specifications and Lean Guidelines that were released in summer 2017.

Flexitive 2.0 is the next generation of Neuranet's HTML5 cloud-based platform that supports more advanced responsive design capabilities for building high-quality, animated HTML5-based designs that adapt to unlimited sizes across any device, operating system, app or browser. The new standards were designed to promote user-friendly digital advertising that can scale across device types easily.

Flexitive also incorporates the LEAN principles of lightweight, encrypted, AdChoices-supported and non-invasive advertising. Neuranet emphasizes other key features of Flexitive 2.0, such as an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface that requires no coding knowledge, unlimited sizing of a single design, two-click creative design variations with instant scaling, export for use in more than 30 ad servers and more.

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Will Anything Make Linux Obsolete?

Doc Searls — Tue, 09 May 2017 11:27:19 +0000

by Doc Searls

Remember blogging? Hell, remember magazine publishing? Shouldn't be hard. You're reading some now.

Both are still around, but they're obsolete—at least relatively. Two cases in point: my blog and Linux Journal.

Back when blogging was a thing, in the early 2000s, about 20,000 people subscribed to RSS feeds of my original blog (1999–2007, still mothballed here). At its peak, I posted many times per day and had a strong sense of connection with my readership.

Same went, by the way, for my postings in Linux Journal, on our website and on one of our own blogs, called IT Garage—lots of readers, lots of engagement.

Most early bloggers were journalists by profession or avocation—good writers, basically. Some blogs turned into online pubs. BoingBoing, TechCrunch and TPM all started as blogs.

But blogging began to wane after Twitter and Facebook showed up in 2006. After that journalism also waned, as "content generation" became the way to fill online publications. Participating in "social media" also became a requisite function for journalists still hoping to stay active online (if not also employed).

These days, I blog only a few times per month, for readers that range in number from dozens to hundreds. Usually I duplicate those posts in Medium, where they get about the same numbers. Meanwhile, I have 23.7k followers on Twitter (as @dsearls). Although that's a goodly number, you could say the same for the average parking space. (Which, if it could speak, might say "Hey, I had 25k impressions on passing drivers today and engaged 15.") From what I can tell from counting clicks of shortlinks I produce with Bit.ly, most of my tweets are clicked on by a few dozen people, tops. I'd gladly trade all my followers (and my Klout score of 81) for the actual readers I had in my old blog. But alas, this is now.

Thanks to loyal subscribers, Linux Journal is still trucking along, proving it is possible to operate a journal that isn't just another sluice for "content".

But we have to face the facts here: content production has clearly obsolesced journalism—just like TV obsolesced radio, cars obsolesced horses and printing obsolesced scribes. All of the obsolesced things do persist, but in a diminished state relative to what obsolesced them.

To understand why and how, it helps to raid the works of Marshall McLuhan, the media scholar best known for saying "the media is the message" (or "the massage"—he said both) and coining the term "global village" decades before the internet materialized one.

The analytic system McLuhan and his colleagues created for understanding how one medium obsolesces another is the tetrad (Greek for group of four). Every medium, he said, does four things. These are discovered in answers to four questions:

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Sicker Than Sickbeard?

Shawn Powers — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 18:30:20 +0000

by Shawn Powers

When I wrote about Usenet and Sickbeard a while back, I got many e-mails that I had broken the first rule of Usenet: don't talk about Usenet. I'm a sucker for freedom though, and I can't help but share when cool programs are available. This month, I switched from Sickbeard to NZBDrone for managing my television shows.

NZBDrone is a program designed to manage a local collection of television shows. It also has the capability of working with Usenet programs to automate the possibly illegal downloading of episodes, but that's truly not all it's good for. NZBDrone will take your TV show files and organize them into folders, download metadata and let you know if you're missing files. It also will show you when your favorite shows are going to be airing next.

Although it hasn't given me a problem, the fact that NZBDrone runs on Mono makes me nervous. The installation guide on the http://www.nzbdrone.com Web site makes setup simple enough, but there will be a boatload of dependencies that you might have to install due to its Mono infrastructure.

NZBDrone will work with your existing Plex media server, XBMC machines and SABNzb installs, and it automatically performs most of its features if you allow it to do so. The interface is beautiful, and even with a large collection of television shows (I have more than 15TB of TV shows on my server), it's very responsive. Whether you record your TV episodes, rip your television season DVDs or find your episodes in other ways, NZBDrone is a perfect way to manage your collection. It's so intuitive and user-friendly, that it gets this month's Editors' Choice award!

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Native(ish) Netflix!

Shawn Powers — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 19:01:43 +0000

by Shawn Powers

The folks over at http://www.iheartubuntu.com recently put up a challenge to the Linux community to get Netflix to work natively under our beloved OS. Thankfully, Erich Hoover stepped up to the challenge and patched the Wine Project in a way to allow Firefox/Silverlight to be installed and actually work with Netflix's DRM'd Silverlight!

Screenshot from

The process is a little complex, and it involves patching source code before compiling, but Erich plans to create a PPA with all the compiling already done. Eventually, he intends to create a standalone Netflix-playing app that incorporates all the pieces of Wine and Silverlight. Thankfully, Erich didn't wait until the project was complete before sharing his success. If you want to play native(ish) Netflix on your Linux desktop without virtualization, check out his instructions at: http://www.iheartubuntu.com/2012/11/netflix-on-ubuntu-is-here.html.

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Plex Media Server + Roku = Awesome

Shawn Powers — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 17:19:28 +0000

by Shawn Powers

Plex always has been the Mac-friendly offshoot of XBMC. I've never considered using an Apple product for my home media center, so I've never really put much thought into it. Things have changed recently, however, and now the folks behind Plex have given the Linux community an awesome media server.

Installing the media server is fairly straightforward. Instructions are available at http://www.plexapp.com. The server application runs on a headless Linux server and is configured via a Web interface. After you've pointed Plex Media Server at your video collection, the real magic begins.

Fire up your Roku, any model, and search for the Plex channel in the Roku Channel Store. With some simple configuration, your Roku will be able to browse your entire media collection and stream HD video to your television. The responsiveness is incredible, and the video quality is astounding. I was expecting pixelated video with stuttering playback over wireless, but everything was smooth. Your local media behaves just like Netflix! For more information, check out the Plex Web site: http://www.plexapp.com.

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Roaming Media

Michael Nugent — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 18:36:18 +0000

by Michael Nugent

Portable music doesn't need to be restricted to headphones. Here's a step-by-step how-to on setting up a music system that follows you around the house like a puppy.

Like many of you, I store all my music digitally on a central server in my home. The problem is when I walk from room to room, my music doesn't come with me. I could carry around an iThingy or put it on my phone, but I'd rather not have to wear headphones, and no matter how awesome they are in their class, tiny phone speakers still are tiny phone speakers. Fortunately, I have a lot of computer hardware lying around from past upgrades, so it was fairly easy for me to come up with some small, older systems for each area of my house. Now, instead of listening to music on a little device, I use a device to tag my location and have the music follow me wherever I go.

The system is easy to build and uses mostly off-the-shelf open-source programs. In addition to the player and control system, you need a way of tagging your location in the house. I use the Bluetooth radio on my phone, but you also could use RFID tags, Webcams with motion detection or facial recognition, or pretty much anything else that will let the system know where you are. For this setup though, I'm assuming you're using a Bluetooth device.

The central piece to this project is a server-based music player. I am using the Music Player Dæmon (MPD), a wonderful server-based system released under the GNU General Public License and available from the repositories of most Linux distributions. Install the software with your favorite package management system. In addition to this player, you need to set up a streaming system. Icecast fulfills this requirement and also is widely available. Install it as well.

Configuring MPD is fairly straightforward. The default file for your distribution is probably very similar to the example below, but you may need to change a few things. The music_directory entry should point to the directory that contains the music files and one bind_to_address should contain the non-loopback name or address of the server. If it binds only to 127.0.0.1, outside boxes may have trouble connecting to it.

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