Geeks of Bohemia

Last year, during a mammoth three-month procrastination streak from re-drafting my novel, I kicked off a microfiction project called Airless Diaries, equal parts keeping my hand in and butting my head against the caged-rat syndrome that comes with any full-time job. I had a moderate amount of success: a few regular readers, one or two very good contributions from other writers, and I wrote a lot of rough-edged stories over the stretch that it ran for. You can read the archives over at my old Blogger site.

The brief was simple. To participate, you wrote a microfiction - story, prose, stream of consciousness - in no more than 30 minutes. When the timer hit bottom, you submitted whatever you’d written so far, typos, half-baked conversations, and all. You were supposed to imagine that you had thirty minutes of oxygen (in your house, radiation suit, abandoned space station) with no chance to survive. And thus to write the literary equivalent of a last meal.

Then I up and went back to uni, and the project inevitably died. Now that my first year of study is nearly over, however, I fully intend to resuscitate Airless Diaries, but this time do it right - build a proper application around the concept rather than simply running it on a blog with an email submissions system.

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Like the new digs? I wish I could say I was responsible for this bit of bohemi-grunge candy, but it comes to you via a freebie from the excellent design blog, Smashing Magazine. As luck would have it, this theme captures the essence of what I want this blog to stand for: the sometimes uneasy intersection between art and technology , and the prose that ties them together.

I’ve been missing the mark, lately, so consider the facelift a resolution to find my focus and stick to it. Ever since
Airless Diaries went on hiatus (about the same time I started my IT degree: big coincidence), I’ve been fucking around with this place without really doing much with it; like a housesitter at an abandoned lot. No longer!

Like many nerds I firmly believe that code is art. On the other hand, I also think that art is art, too. So every post you see from here on out has to meet one or the other of the aforementioned. Or it’ll be something cool I’ve done. Tha’ss okay, right?

Recently I read an article where someone called Twitter the ‘telegraph service of the internet’. That seemed a pretty good description to me, and gave me an idea for a little Twitter application, which I hope to knock up over the weekend.

The idea is very simple: an @replies page that is a roll of telegraph sheets. You can flip through your telegraphs one by one, and reply to any given telegraph (I doubt I’ll make you use the handle and do it via Morse Code…although I admit the idea is tempting) via the same.

I found this nice CC-licensed image of a Costa-Rican telegraph sheet via Flickr to use as the base for the telegraphs. Now all I need is a reasonably high-resolution image of a telegraph handle. Anybody got one on hand?

Ideas for later versions:
- Read telegraphs out via a synthesised grainy-radio voice, including full-stops read out as ’stop’.
- Translate any @reply to or from Morse Code.
- Give up on this fairly limited idea. It’s just for fun, you know?

So, finally fed up with Ecto’s clunky UI and TextMate’s seemingly unreconcileable dislike of Wordpress 2.5 tags (although this may be Wordpress’s issue, I hear), I was all but ready to give up and live in the web interface, with all its restrictions.

I despaired at that idea though - I write a lot of my blog posts while in transit, on the bus or train, so it makes sense to use a client that lets me do all the work - capturing images, writing, tagging, and so on - except for the actual posting, while I have no internet access.

Then I tried Blogo. It was everything an OS X (and a Ruby) app should be - small, sleek, tightly focused on doing a single task in a better and more unique way. I adore the way it sits unobtrusively in the corner (I keep it on every Space), and I adore the Contribute-style preview that actually places your post in the context of your blog’s theme.

There are so many, many things to love about it, except for one thing: their activation system. I loved Blogo so much I bought it on the the first day of my trial, entered the serial number, as normal, activated it online (as you expect).

The next day I took my laptop with me as usual, on the bus, fired up Blogo to do the day’s post…and…horror! Blogo will not launch, not even allow you to use the interface at all, unless you’re connected to the internet. None of the reviews on TUAW, TAB or the like have noticed this yet (I guess they’re just ‘always on’).

It seems to me that constant phoning home, even if it weren’t severely destroying Blogo’s usefulness to my particular circumstance, is just bad form. You aren’t Microsoft, guys, you’re indy mac developers. Sure, piracy will always be an issue, and certainly, you have to take certain measures to protect yourself, but requiring an internet connection to even launch the application? What the heck?

The very concept of a blogging client is to provide an alternative (better) interface to our favourite blogging systems. Wordpress’s entry system is very, very good. If I could use it wherever and whenever I liked, I would never look at a blogging client, let alone pay for it. So Blogo’s authors have made a pretty serious misjudgement by removing one of the few true advantages of a desktop client (the other being multiple blog support).

Even Valve’s Steam, the most notorious of popular systems that phone home, has an ‘offline’ mode. You already have our license key, guys, you already will know if we leak said key and it starts getting installed on hundreds of computers - what possible reason do you need to phone home every time I launch the fantastic little app of yours…that I’ve paid for?

I think, for the first time in my Mac software experience, I want my money back.

One of the things my good friend Chad does very well is following up a post with two relevant and thematically related songs. Not being one to let a good idea go un-stolen, this week I’m trying something similar, lest those who know me believe my Last.fm profile which suggests I pretty much listen to Gorillaz’s Demon Days 24/7. I’m also beginning to see a pressing need to expand my musical tastes independently, for absolutely no reason at all.

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