Category Archives: Internet

Modern-day Twilight Zone

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Imagine that the typical money-for-ransom is traded with a weird request like: “If you want to get your dear princess back, the prime-minister will have to have sexual intercourse with a pig on live television.” Will the prime-minister do it? Or more importantly, in a heavily socialized society where viral content dominates the people’s attention span, would they want him to do it and would they watch?

Or imagine that you live in a future where the most common way of making an income is to work on huge energy-production buildings where people pedal specialized stationary bikes to produce the energy that the rest of the world will consume. The alternative of leading this boring and tiresome life is to become a star in worldwide-broadcast reality shows that range from singing or pornography to physical abuse. Is everything better than the bike?

Or imagine instead that everyone has a brain implant that allows recording and reviewing every memory they have ever had and, by using a small external device, people can simply rewind and fast-forward to a particular memory and display it on a nearby TV for everyone to see. Now imagine you suspect your wife is cheating on you and you over-analyse every memory that you have of her with the guy you suspect she’s having the affair with. How long would it take you to go insane?

BlackMirrorTitleCard

(Image source)

These stories are the plots of the 3 episodes of the first season of BBC’s wonderful series Black Mirror, a techno-paranoia drama where each episode features a different story, a different cast and a different reality. In a modern-day Twilight Zone-like setting, each story brings us a potential future for our society that, albeit seeming a bit extremist, will definitely leave you thinking if this is really what you want for your future.

I definitely recommend everyone to see it. I dare say it’s mandatory for anyone with any kind of technology enthusiastic view of the society.

Shutting down Google Reader

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The news came as a shock, at least for me: Google decided that Google Reader will be shut down as of July, 1st. A lot of reasons have been flying around, with the official statement being that Google needs to focus on fewer products and some saying that they need the engineering team behind Google Reader to start working on Google’s social products (read, Google+). To this, I say: what engineering team?

As far as I can tell, Google Reader hasn’t been updated in ages. Nothing (or close to it) has changed for the last months, if not years. It seems to be, for better or for worse, a finalized product. And if they say the use has been declining, I’m guessing that there isn’t even a storage or server use problem. So, what has its team been working on?

I really don’t get it, but then again, this is and has always been a free product, so we can’t actually demand anything from Google other than a clean way to export our feeds, which they already provide.

Now the future. And this is the part that worries me the most. For me, RSS has always had its own and rightful place in my social activity on the Internet. I don’t (usually) mix it and I totally feel that it’s a completely different ball game from things like Twitter or Facebook. They have a different purpose, but they perfectly complete each other.

RSS is my curated news[1], Twitter and Facebook is everyone else’s. And I value each one differently. But I have to say that RSS has played a larger role on my daily on-line activity. I might not check Twitter if I’ve been having a very busy day at work, but I always check my RSS every once in a while. And for RSS, Google Reader has always been the weapon of choice for me.

I don’t use it directly, but it’s the basis of my feed collections since Reeder (which I use on the Mac), Flipboard (which I use on the iPad) and Byline (which I use on the iPhone) all access the Google Reader API directly. And this provides the bliss of my RSS management: if I read in one application it syncs to all other applications.

But what now? Sure, there are alternatives, if you like to use them directly. But what if, like me, you use it through third-party apps? Will they all agree on one single service? Unlikely. Will they all dispute the 1st place now that Google Reader is stepping off the podium? Most definitely. And there goes my RSS management bliss: synchronization.

Well, I may be wrong[2]. Let’s just wait and see. July is still a few months away and the Internet always finds ways to surprise us. But I’m feeling less than optimistic about it. At least, I’m not reacting like this other guy that apparently is entering a real spiral of raging hate:

(via @pedromelo)

  1. Yes, I use Yahoo Pipes to customize most of my feeds [↩]
  2. Fingers crossed [↩]

Are we close to simulate the human brain?

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Back in 2007, US researchers have simulated half a virtual brain of a mouse on a supercomputer. Interestingly, Ray Kurzweil, in his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near“, accurately predicted the amount of computing power necessary for that scientific achievement.

What’s really interesting is the prediction that he made for 2013. Check this graphic:

Supercomputer power

(Image source)

2013 is portrayed as the year where the human race will have enough computing power, according to Kurzweil’s predictions, to simulate an entire virtual human brain.

I still believe that the challenge regarding simulating the human brain is in the software, not in the hardware[1], but this will sure be an interesting year for artificial intelligence research.

  1. There’s still too much about the inner works of the human brain that we don’t know [↩]

Mac not entering sleeping mode? Check Internet Sharing

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When I close the lid of my Macbook I usually just assume it will go to sleep as expected. This one time, however, when I got back to my office and opened the lid I noticed the Mac was absurdly hot for a computer that has just been in sleep mode.

I decided to test it again and close the lid. To my surprise, the usual flashing light on the macbook didn’t flash at all. It just remained steadily lit. At first, I thought it was some hung app that was causing this so I decided to close every app and check if there was some process using the CPU heavily, but that wasn’t the case. I even tried rebooting and still that didn’t solve the problem. I checked the power settings and nothing pointed to it being the responsible for the sleep mode prevention.

After some googling I ended up discovering this neat command that allows checking the state of your power settings:


pmset -g assertions

This command displays a summary of power assertions. And according to the documentation: “These assertions may prevent system sleep or display”.

It’s worth a shot. This was the output:


Assertion status system-wide:
 PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep 0
 PreventSystemSleep 1
 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep 0
 ExternalMedia 0
 UserIsActive 0
 ApplePushServiceTask 0
 BackgroundTask 1

Listed by owning process:
 pid 477(helpd): [0x0000000c00000226] 00:54:25 BackgroundTask named: "com.apple.helpd.sdmbuilding"
 pid 1621(InternetSharing): [0x00000008000017bc] 00:00:02 DenySystemSleep named: "com.apple.InternetSharing"

Bingo! Internet Sharing! I totally forgot about it. Since I’ve been working with the Raspberry Pi lately, I had setup the mac to share its Internet with the mini computer. But I forgot to turn it off. And it makes perfect sense that it prevents the computer from sleeping because it’s sharing the resource that it may be currently used by some other computer.

After turning Internet Sharing off it all went back to normal. Just decided to share because it might happen to someone else.

How to activate WebGL on Safari for Mac

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WebGL is starting to draw quite a lot of attention as a simple way to display 3D-rendered scenes on your browser and since it is now supported by the major browsers, it is accessible enough for anyone who wants to try it.

However, if your browser of choice on the Mac is Safari you’ll most likely see an error when trying to access a website with WebGL-based content. This is because Safari does not support WebGL by default and it is not that clear how you get it working on the Mac. In fact, the extension is “hidden” in the Safari settings and you need to perform this two-step process to activate it:

  • First got to the “Preferences…” menu and in the “Advanced” tab check the option “Show Develop menu in menu bar”. This will add a new menu at the menu bar with the word “Develop” on the bar. Shocking, I know!

Show Develop menu in menu bar

  • Then in this newly added Develop menu, choose the option “Enable WebGL”, et voilá!

WebGL Option on the Develop menu

Mind you this does not work for Safari on Windows. To view WebGL-based content on Windows, you may want to consider using Chrome or Firefox.