10 Reasons for getting out of the Cloud

The Cloud is convenient, it’s easy to set up, it’s often free. What’s not to like? Well, after I’ve been on cloud services for a while, I’m getting sick of some of the serious issues associated with investing time and effort on platforms run by other people for their agenda. Which is why I am on my own damn site, paid for by me, under my control. Since I toted this as a listicle, here are 10 reasons to avoid Cloud services.

Cloud: All Your Base (data, work, time, thoughts) Belong to Us
Cloud: All Your Base (data, work, time, thoughts) Belong to Us
  1. All your data belong to us. Facebook is the poster child for this, but it’s the age old problem, if you aren’t paying for the product then you are the product. This is the biggest issue with cloud services – the surveillance and advertising model is the original sin of the Web.
  2. It’s easy to set up but surprisingly hard to maintain. In one short period Pachube became Cosm which became Xively, and I get to change my code and learn new, poorly documented APIs
  3. Cloud providers come and go. They’re just plain unreliable. I’ve been hit by several – UK Intuit’s Quicken XG, Google Reader, the Vox blogging platform, Pachube, Flickr ratcheting down functionality before Marissa Meyer sorted it out
  4. Cloud is for the moment, not for the long-term. If it’s all done and dusted in a year or less, cloud is great. Crowdfunding, broadcasting an event, running a survey, printing a book – great. Building relationships, building a brand (musicians on Myspace, f’rinstance), lifelogging or even expecting to pass your baby snaps to the parents of your grandchildren in 50 years? Don’t expect the Cloud to do it. Will there even be a Dropbox or Flickr in the 2060s?
  5. The wrong sorts sticking their nose in your business, From Gmail reading your mail (and mine too, because I don’t use it but know people who do) and narrowcasting ads to you all the way to all the Snowden stuff. How the heck do people sleep at night using Mint, for instance – and what is it with Intuit and bad ideas?
  6. The hostage to fortune business – when free becomes paid and you’ve invested a lot of work in the platform. All the work you get to do again, even if you can get hold of your data.
  7. The freemium/in app purchase issue. Apps seem to be classics here – they start off useful in the free version but after a while they are either upgraded to exclude the useful feature you were using or simply don’t support your version of iOS, which seems to be how Apple enforce hardware upgrades!
  8. Data loss or theft. If Jennifer Lawrence’s pics weren’t on iCloud then brute force hacks or no, you have to get up close and personal to nick them from her phone. Sure, it’s convenient to have your Stuff available everywhere, but some things should be hard to get to 😉
  9. You don’t get to control your stuff – how long it is up, who it is sold to, how it is used. That’s how all the papers get a free photo of any miscreant nowadays – they used to have to send a runner to pap them at the courthouse, but it’s so much easier to get it off Facebook. Presumably a nice little earner for the company, too. The credit often says ©Facebook
  10. Upgrades that break stuff. Sure, you get these all the time without the Cloud, though the likes of Debian and MS seems to get this to work most of the time. Sun Tzu says make the battle at a time and place of your choosing – you can upgrade when your system is quiet, or at least when you are ready to fight the consequences.

One Ring to bind the all – the one that sums it up:

Facebook - for the moment, not for ever

One word. Facebook. It embodies both what is great about the Cloud and what is so evil about it – all at the same time. It does the ephemerality of Cloud so well, Facebook couldn’t even exist without the cloud, it’s the quintessential cloud app. It could take the Mission Impossible approach to your messages after a month or so:

Facebook needs this
Facebook needs this

but then stashes everything you say to use it against you in the future with Minority Report advertising.

The cloud rolls up form, function and purpose. And very often my purpose is at odds with that of the Cloud provider. The Internet is a means of communication and publishing. I put up my first web page about 20 years ago. It isn’t there any more, but if it had been important to me I could have seen to it that it’s still there. If it’s important to me then I can make sure this is still here at this URL in 2034, Although I can’t even take back something said on the Internet, if I want it not to be available here in a year’s time I can fix that too. Whereas if it’s on somebody’s else’s information space or real estate I can’t. Nothing I could have done would have preserved my Vox blog, or the information I imported to Quicken XG1

So I’ll use the cloud – but for things that don’t matter or that have no requirement for longevity. Cloud is about fire and forget – Twitter is a fantastic cloud application because a tweet has no value after a few days. Dropbox is fabulous to share files with a pal, or even temporary backup files as long as I don’t mind various governments taking a look. I won’t use the Cloud for anything strategic. That means anything I want to be there for more than a year, anything to do with personal finances, and anything I’d like to depend upon or look back on in ten years time or more.

The journey starts with the first step – bringing my own audio home, so 2014 scarpering Swifts is now native mp3 audio, not embedded from Audioboo(m) any more.

In all fairness to The Cloud, that means I take a fair few hits for freedom. I get to worry about my own backups and maintenance, and I lose out having everything available everywhere.

  1. I only used it for a week before the awful reality sank in that I was renting the use of the program, not owning it. If I want to run Quicken 2004 in 20 years time, I can run a XP machine disconnected from the Internet and still use it. ↩

Raspberry Pi Soundcard From Logitech Headset

The Raspberry Pi has no audio input, and I had a pair of Logitech USB headphones that had gone faulty – the earth on the headset was a dis. The USB part seemed to work, but headphones live on borrowed time, connectors and wiring tend to go, and everything is sealed, So I wondered if I could reuse the circuit board as a Pi soundcard. Stereo output but mono on record, of course, but still useful. It’s all part of experimenting to make a low-cost audio field recorder that can start by itself. Nothing is designed to be repairable here, so the plastic USB module case was pinged apart with a flat-bladed screwdriver. Initially I wondered if the black stuff was a blown capacitor, but it was on both sides of the board so I figured it was probably glue from the connector, which was confirmed when I unsoldered the connectors, it came off like a gluey film.

Logitech A-0365A USB headphones control board
Logitech A-0365A USB headphones control board

Headphone cable uses fine strands of individually enamel insulated wires wrapped around a synthetic fibre core. The good thing about this is your headphone cable breaks later than if you used normal multi-strand audio cable, given all the flexing it has to take. The bad thing about it is it’s the devil’s own job to solder, because as you heat the strand the synthetic coating melts, robbing you of heat and re-insulating the enamel you’ve burned off. So I unsoldered the existing cable and threw it out, and soldered a stereo jack plug for the headphones and a phono line socket for the microphone. I then extracted the original microphone capsule from the headset and soldered it to a phono socket just to test this out in the original circuit conditions. Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Soundcard From Logitech Headset”

Flat Screen UIs make Fumbling Fools of us all

Did the music for a wedding using my PA today. The bride and groom were lovely, friends of ours and at was a great day. A wedding is an odd PA/DJ sort of job, It’s not the same as a party, or even running a mixtape for a party. Most of it can be scheduled up front – to the extent that there are firms that hire out a no-DJ wedding system

The job was made easier for me as the bride had made her selection of classical music, with a section for the getting seated bit and a long stretch for the after the event part. So far so good. The venue was the lovely Christchurch Mansion in the main park in Ipswich, and the weather smiled on the happy couple for the event and afterwards

So all I have to do is run the playlist. Because this is classical music the sequences are long, and you don’t have to do the DJ crossfading thing between tracks. Easy-Peasy, right?

Wrong

Some parts of a wedding are a stage show. Stuff needs to happen in time. Usually there’s the entrance of the Bride, and the signing of the register. Both of these are a performance, and timing is crucial. Whatever you do as the music operator you do not want to screw this up the entrance of of bride, in short you need to know that your music is gonna start on time, every time, and you are going to fade it out at the right point. The bride selected Pachelbel for this

The registrar also has to say various things at various points, and they don’t want the music to be running while they’re talking. With classical, pulling the music is easy as a fade down – it’s a bit more of a drag if you have to fade a pop song just as they are getting into the main part, you probably have to rehearse timings, but this wasn’t a problem I had.

Making the right thing happen, on time, on cue is not easy with an i-anythingwithatouchscreen.. It might be easier with a Nano or something with an old-skool gonzo keypad and LCD, but a touchscreen is a vile UI for this job. Not only is there a little bit too much latency between the press on the screen and something happening, but it’s far too easy to screw up and then you have to pad your way through a series of menu choices to say no that isn’t what you want, you want this to happen instead. Continue reading “Flat Screen UIs make Fumbling Fools of us all”

Adapting A Makita Universal Charger For Other Nimh Batteries

We standardised on 18V Makita NiMH cordless drills at the farm. NiMH is older tech and heavier than LiIon, but the price/performance seemed to be about right there. We’re not hauling these up ladders or carrying them for miles. The trouble with cordless drills, well the NiMH ones, is that you have to stop using the drill as the battery runs down – when you hear the change in note as the power fades, switch the battery. If it’s you who will be paying for the replacement battery you will do that, but if it’s something used by many people that doesn’t happen, because it’s hassle to go get another battery.

Under the harsh load of a drill, that means as the voltage of a cell falls to 0, soon current gets forced backwards through the weakest cell and it dies. So you get a pack with a few duff cells in them, and have to junk the whole thing. The moral of the story is change the battery as soon as the sound changes and the power drops…

battery pack
battery pack

Continue reading “Adapting A Makita Universal Charger For Other Nimh Batteries”

PICE case and WiFi upgrade for the remote farm camera

The issues with the Raspberry Pi farm camera were of waterproofing and of iffy Wi-Fi range. Both of these are addressed in the new version. The PICE waterproof case from the guys at EdVenture marshals this motley collection of bits

Pre-PICE prototype
Pre-PICE prototype

into something a bit more organised. There’s no getting away from it, the PICE is quite expensive at about the same as the Pi itself, but it does solve a lot of the mechanical problems of trying to run a Pi outside with a camera. The landscape version is the one i needed, since the case is only water-resistant with the top horizontal – the Pi is mounted on that and even if water does get in it falls to the bottom away from the Pi. The previous version of the PICE took the picture in portrait mode with the case oriented for best water resistance, which isn’t so useful for our aims.

This is a good interim solution – it gets the cameras into a tighter configuration, and should let me pull back the main MiFi box back to a more central location to serve the rest of the cameras. As a result each camera will draw less power which is good. The Edimax EW7711 USB WiFi unit has a better performance than the USB nano-dongle – the reason is obvious when you look at the size of the aerial of the nano

size really does matter in some applications, and and aerial much less than 1/4 wavelength is going to struggle to get the signal out
size really does matter in some applications, and and aerial much less than 1/4 wavelength is going to struggle to get the signal out

although it’s 2.4GHz the wavelength is still 13cm; you still need to get enough metal in the sky to get the 300m path length to work, unless you can mesh. Continue reading “PICE case and WiFi upgrade for the remote farm camera”

Remanufacturing a 12V power tool battery

Cordless power tools often die not because they’re worn out but because the battery fails, or only holds a charge for a short time. Every tool’s battery pack seems to be different, either from the sheer cussedness of consumerism making you buy a new tool, or because nobody has standardised battery packs, You can fight back, because though the battery packs are all sorts of sizes, the parts inside are usually drawn from standard sized parts, they’re merely packed in different ways.

I had a cordless strimmer, once advertised years ago in the Guardian, from a no-name supplier with two battery packs. Both of which are now duff – a strimmer is a fairly hard life for the battery packs with about 50-100W. Here’s how I remanufactured the battery packs. These are NiCd battery packs – the key issue to to replace like with like. You can replace NiCd with NiMh but don’t cross any other chemistries.

A possible source of raw materials
A possible source of raw materials

Continue reading “Remanufacturing a 12V power tool battery”

Facebook Is For The Moment Not For Ever

Ah Facebook, can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Too many people are on Facebook that I’d like to be able stay in touch with. Jennifer Golbeck has a point, however.

Social media in general should be about the moment. [ref]where a moment is about a month, maybe a year if you stretch it[/ref]  It’s a stream of consciousness, not a diary or a novel, or even a Captain’s Log. Think about it – most social media is a ‘hey guys look at this’ There’s no need for it to become ‘evidence that may be used against you in future’ or ‘material that supports Facebook’s business model when we can work out how to monetise it’

The solution is relatively simple. Go to the Timeline and erase everything that’s older than three months. It’s not so easy to do, but it is fascinating to read the absolute banality of your Facebook status updates from years ago. There’s no reason for much of it to persist. Never mind Facebook, even I’d use it against me – every day you live is a day you won’t see again. What exactly made posting that fat cat picture such a great use of my time 🙂

As a side effect icing all that banality makes your FB timeline much tighter and cleaner. The banality is fun at the time, but the time has passed ‘ere six months are gone. I’m not so naive as to believe Facebook deletes the associated meta-data, so there’s a case to be made for reducing the dross proactively. It’s what a blog is for – so you can own your data. There’s a difference between disseminating information and giving up the rights to it – while you can’t unsay anything on the Internet, you don’t have to give it away for resale.

Swifts getting ready to leave

Seems like it’s been a successful year for our swifts, they have been breeding and screaming parties are heard overhead.

They’re still as hard to record as they were last year, however there are more of them it seems. I got the AT XY mics on the job this time. Maybe next year I will try a seriously long boom pole to get the mic pointed straight up in the air and use the directional pattern against some of the noise and traffic rumble of the town, but I’m still of the view swifts sound best in the city!