The Particular Finest

That Tangled Sense of Loss

I’m still in the midst of my Change of Scenery. It’s improving well; DAVDroid offers a FLOSS 2-way sync client for Android. It’s been working great; contacts and calendar are syncing correctly, and it’s great.

Still missing is an app.net client. I’ve been talking about needing that client a lot, but only recently started to figure out why.

Change of Scenery

It has come to pass that I am nearly pried free of primary engagement in the Google Privacy Invasion Machine. PRISM¹ and subsequent revelations pushed me out of Gmail, where I am now on an alternative host while I set up private mail handling.

Instead of Google, I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine.

They're Not Stupid, You're Just an Asshole

So this link passed by my desk recently. Go read it; it’s a horrifying look at someone trying to solve a problem and doing it with the knowledge they have. Knowledge that opened massive security holes, leaving the entire server vulnerable.

Commentary around my friends and acquaintances ranged from “Oh dear lord” to “What an idiot.”

Dear Esther

I finally got to play Dear Esther last week. For those who don’t know, it’s a first-person story, told through the lens of a videogame. Set on a barren, windswept island off the coast of Britain, the storytelling is done through small in-world touches set against occasional narrated pieces.

There’s nothing to pick up, or interact with, nor buttons to solve or weapons to fire. The scenery is beautifully rendered, both above and below ground, and combined with the slow walking pace creates a mellow, meditative atmosphere.

#gaming

New Camera

I recently also bought a new camera, a new piece of hardware able to be thrown into a pocket and carried around. Good enough to sport interchangable and upgradable lenses, offering the full range of settings and dials that I might wish to fiddle with.

My Nexus 4 has always had pretty crap optics, and images from my phones are just never as satisfying as what I could get from my DSLR.

Startup Weekend Wellington

So a couple of weekends ago I ended up at Startup Weekend, my second event.

Startup Weekends are a blast. 54 hours of utter crunch, sleep deprivation and stress, the end result being a thing that you can say “We built that” at the end of.

#all kinds of busy

Went Home

I played through Gone Home last night, and it was wonderful.

It’s the story of a girl, seen through the eyes of her big sister.

Old Glass

So my third “new” lens arrived this morning, bought from local ebay-alike Trademe. It’s an old piece of hardware, hailing from the early 90s. It’ll work rather well on my rather new, fancy DSLR.

For the most part I only own and shoot old lenses. I have nothing bought new, nothing that doesn’t have its own history, scratches and warts and problems.

On Being Awesome

So it turns out, Dell can ship a nice Ubuntu laptop, where everything just works.

I though this was an impressive achievement, as even though boutique outlets like ZaReason have been able to ship Just Works Linux kit for some time, having a first-order supplier offer Linux kit could help drive adoption.

Papers, Please

So I picked up Papers, Please over the weekend. It’s a … strange … game in the more serious gaming genre, simulating the act of a border agent in a repressive regime.

The gameplay consists of judging people by their paperwork, through intentionally minimalist and sometimes difficult to interpret graphics. If they answer correctly, they get admission. If they don’t, a supplicant can be denied entry; or worse, detained.

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