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I was listening to the [latest episode][1] of “Unprofessional” with Lex Friedman and Dave Wiskus, and found myself quite intrigued by one of their sponsors, [Transporter][2]:

Transporter is a private “off-cloud” storage device for syncing, sharing, accessing, and protecting your digital life. No cloud, no fees, no privacy concerns. Your files are only stored on your Transporters and computers and mobile devices that you authorize.

Basically, you purchase a Transporter device — empty or with a hard drive pre-installed — plug it into your router, and then use it just as you already use Dropbox or Google Drive. Files are accessible on devices you authorize, and you can share individual files or folders with friends and family.

There is [an iOS app][4] for accessing your data on-the-go, and while it’s certainly not the prettiest app in the world, at least [the icon isn’t blue][5].

I can see something like this being a fantastic solution for people who [may have concerns about their privacy][3] when it comes to a cloud solution. And, though there is [a higher up-front cost][6] compared to Dropbox or Google Drive, there are no recurring fees. A Transporter with a 1TB drive is $299, 2TB is $399, or if you have your own drive you can buy an empty Transporter for $199.

I’m going to pick up a Transporter with the 2TB drive this week, and will report back once I’ve had a chance to play with it.

[1]: http://www.muleradio.net/unprofessional/38/
[2]: http://www.filetransporter.com/learn-more/
[3]: https://brooksreview.net/2012/07/dropbox-security-4/
[4]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/connected-data/id613859212?mt=8
[5]: https://brooksreview.net/2010/10/seeing-blue/
[6]: http://filetransporterstore.com

[Fraser Speirs][1]:

> The entire article follows the pattern of building up small issues (and non-issues) to be insurmountable obstacles, then quietly admitting that a solution actually exists.

What site is he talking about? Out of context it could really be any major tech site these days…

(For the record he was debunking an “anti-iPad in enterprises” article which, surprisingly, was not posted Cnet.)

[1]: http://speirs.org/blog/2013/4/27/it-does-not-love-ipads-and-thats-a-good-sign.html

I knew nothing about the sale of Instapaper until well after the news was posted online. After reading the news I wasn’t sure what to make of the entire situation. My knee jerk reaction was to cancel my account and just use Pinboard.in instead. However I stopped to consider what, why, and who was taking over: Betaworks.

I knew that I knew the name Betaworks, but I couldn’t place it. A quick check of their site reminded me: Digg.

Digg is really relevant to talk about in order to understand my thoughts on the Instapaper sale. When Digg first came out, I fell in love with it. For me Digg was *the* way to see the greatest anything on the web, it’s where I found out about a lot of the sites that I read and love today. I was a huge fan of the corresponding podcast and just enjoyed the service in general.

Then Digg went sideways and there was a lot easier and better ways to stay on top of the web. Digg died for me.

When Digg was relaunched I gave it a try via the iPhone app. The Digg iPhone app is still an app that I use and check multiple times a day, I really like it.

The design, the content, everything in Digg right now is really great. Betaworks, in this bloggers opinion, has done a fantastic job taking Digg back to its roots.

***

Which brings me to Instapaper.

I really love Instapaper, and I admire the hell out of the work Marco Arment has done to build and maintain the integrity of the service. But I worry about its future under Betaworks.

I have no doubt that Betaworks can keep the usability of Instapaper in place, that the speed and reliability of service will only improve, but I worry about the soul of Instapaper. Specifically, that it is a service worth paying for in a segment that has immense competition from free providers, and that Betaworks will keep it a privacy conscious, paid service (well mostly paid).

I know that Betaworks has to make the purchase pencil on the ledger, whether they paid $1, or the “reported” $100 Billion dollars. ((I know of no such reports, but if CNN can make shit up, so can I.)) I worry that the service will eventually have to change, but for now I think it is a win for the current Instapaper users — with a healthy caveat of keeping a close eye on any ToS changes that may or may not come.

[Tom Rogan writing about why conspiracy theories are usually good][1]:

> And yet… Tsarnaev is innocent until proven guilty. In this sense, his supporters are little more than amateur defense attorneys — odd and pathetic, perhaps, but harmless. And they’re actually helping uphold the American tradition of a presumption of innocence. This is freedom.

The more we question things, Rogan argues, the more accepting we are of reality. It’s an interesting viewpoint and hard to disagree with.

I’ll see if I can get my buddy to join my crazy meet up — he knows more conspiracy theories than anyone I have ever met and it’s entertaining as hell.

[1]: http://theweek.com/article/index/243355/why-conspiracy-theories-are-good-for-america

[Jason Kottke on some of the first weblogs][1]:

> Those weblogs were idiosyncratic, about a little bit of everything, and sent people away to keep them coming back — a stark contrast to the late-’90s portal strategy of “stickiness.”

Also a stark contrast to most major blogs of today. Think: TechCrunch, *The Verge*, Huffington Post — they all have designed their websites, and link in ways, that show how much they loathe sending away even one click (unless it is to an advertiser that is). This type of thinking is just ridiculous and arcane — sadly it is also standard web practice.

[1]: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2013/04/kottke/

[Federico Viticci has a very detailed review][1] of what is new in Drafts 3.0. I haven’t used the app, but to call it a scratchpad any longer is really unfair. There is a tremendous amount of power in Drafts — one could spend months in the app configuring it.

I have a lot of respect for the work that has gone into Drafts, but I just need the scratchpad, so [Scratch][2] it is for me. I’ve come to realize I am just not a person that wants to, or needs to, use apps on my iPhone to do all sorts of crazy other stuff. It makes it too complicated for me to think about and adds too much cruft and not enough just doing.

I don’t do much work on my iPhone any more — that’s been off loaded to my iPad(s). So when I pull out my iPhone there is a specific thing I want to do:

– Check App.net
– Post to App.net
– Check Email
– Send an email
– Add a task to OmniFocus
– View tasks, or mark tasks off
– And much more

My point is: I know what I am doing when I grab my iPhone, so why not just use the actual app. If I use it often it’s already on my homescreen. This is why Launchpad, Drafts, Triage, and other apps really didn’t stick for me. That’s not to say those aren’t great apps, but they tend to add too much cruft for me to stick with them very long.

[1]: http://www.macstories.net/reviews/drafts-3-review-better-ios-automation-and-workflows/
[2]: http://gokarbon.com/scratch/

[Panic has released Status Board][1]:

> Status Board takes your data and gives it meaning. Use the easy built-in widgets. Or massage your data for our Graph and Table widgets. It’s going to be awesome.

Like every other nerd, when [Panic teased about Status Board back in 2010](https://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/) I really wanted to get my hands on it. I had absolutely nothing to use it for, but sometimes you just must have pretty things. Status Board, the iOS app is indeed very pretty.

That first day though, I had nothing to put on it. Now, just a little while later, there are tons of panels that one can add — [Viticci has a collection of them here][2].

The best of the lot is the work done on the [Mint integration][3].

What’s more fascinating to me is the allowance for CSV files in the app. I tried this out and it works as expected. Ideally I would like more control over different aspects of the CSV display, but it is indeed a quick and pretty way to display data.

I am not sure if I will ever find a place where Status Board becomes a real tool for me, but that’s certainly not going to stop me from trying — because it’s an app you *want* to use.

[1]: http://panic.com/statusboard/
[2]: https://pinboard.in/u:ticci/t:statusboard
[3]: https://github.com/maximevalette/MintStatusBoardHelper

[Harry Marks,][1] responding to [my “country club” post about App.net][2]:

> App.net is as inclusive as you can get because it puts users and developers first, not big-name companies and celebrities. App.net treats its user base as more than just one big antenna for ads and there are actual support channels that don’t end in .py. That means a lot to me.

Marks is arguing that I am wrong about App.net being an exclusive club, and thus being *the* reason to join App.net. But I think the above quote supports my position.

It’s true that a large reason to join App.net is so that you are using a service that cares, instead of one that wants to shit ads all over you. But App.net specifically cares because the user cares. It’s not altruism driving the culture at App.net, if it was it would be free and free of ads.

Both App.net and App.net developers stand to gain from more users *and* better users. To get that kind of “better” user you need a user that cares about furthering the service, and thus the country club analogy.

My point wasn’t about exclusivity as much as it was about two other items:

1. Not everyone can, or will, pay to join App.net. Just like a country club.
2. Those that do pay to join, immediately feel invested in the service and thus will continually do their part to better it, not worsen it. Again, just like a country club.

If you are a golfer, you have no doubt golfed at a public course. Public courses are full of golfers which don’t replace divots (gasp!), drink (double gasp!), or drag their golf carts over the green and any other taboo golf infraction there is in the book. Now go to a private course of any nature and the amount of people you see doing those things almost drops to zero.

This is the difference I am referencing.

With Twitter and App.net you see a lot of the same behavior as you do between public and private golf courses. People are vigilant about SPAM on App.net and so too is App.net, and thus there is little (if any) spam that most people see. Look at Twitter. You can report spam all day long, just keep tweeting “iPad” and you will get flooded, but Twitter can’t stay on top of it. I can only speculate as to why, but they *should* be able to stay on top of it.

People follow what is happening with the App.net, pay for apps, and so forth — not so with Twitter. On Twitter people just follow what celebrity has joined, and look for the free apps that do whatever.

These are important facts which are made possible by more than just people being treated as customers, it’s about a mutual level of respect. Respect for the user, for the service, for the greens.

When people feel invested in anything, they take more care with it and that’s why App.net is like a country club.

[1]: http://curiousrat.com/are-you-the-customer
[2]: https://brooksreview.net/2013/04/first-class-baby/

[Seth Godin on skeuomorphic design and businesses][1]:

> Yes, it’s far easier to get understanding or buy in quickly (from investors, in-laws and users) when you take the shortcut of making your digital thing look and work just like the trusted and proven non-digital thing. But over and over again, we see that the winner doesn’t look at all like the old thing. eBay doesn’t look like Sotheby’s. Amazon doesn’t look like a bookstore.

The iPhone doesn’t look like a rotary phone, or an iPod+rotary phone. And on.

There’s a lot of places where skeuomorphic design is just fine: largely when it doesn’t interfere with the usability of an object. But I loathe things like bookshelves for my iBooks, and page curls, and so forth. These get in the way, as there could be so much better information display if “trying to make it familiar” wasn’t the goal.

[1]: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths%5C_blog/2013/04/skeumorphs-failure.html

[Duncan Bayne lists the sites he is using to replace Google][1]:

> I’ve replaced Drive, Calendar and Contacts with my own installation of ownCloud. It’s great – I’ve got full two-way sync with my Android devices, and complete control over my own data.

I had never heard of [ownCloud][2] before, but it certainly looks very nice. The hardest part of trying to move away from iCloud/Drive/Dropbox is that there is simply no developer support for other options.

So while it is easy to move away, there are very few tools/apps that support other services. I fear we will find ourselves in a Google Reader type situation with Dropbox in a few years — all of a sudden we have a real reason to move, and every developer is scrambling to update their apps to support 1,000 new services that pop up.

It’d be much easier to just not have apps that solely depend on Dropbox. Much in the way that [Ulysses III][3] can use local storage, Dropbox, iCloud, and what have you.

[1]: https://github.com/duncan-bayne/duncan-bayne.github.com/wiki/Expunging-Google
[2]: http://owncloud.org
[3]: http://www.ulyssesapp.com

[Rolf Dobelli on the health hazards that reading news presents][1]:

> Online news has an even worse impact. In a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increases. Why? Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which in itself is distracting. News is an intentional interruption system.

And:

> News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive.

This is a fantastic read and well worth your time to read in full. I’ve been working to slow down my personal consumption of news and instead try to focus on books and longer-form articles, but it certainly is not easy — I’m not used to it.

The first block quote above really struck me when I think about my own writing and the amount of links that I put in a post. I’m torn between trying to have only the bare minimum of links, or instead having a bibliography of sorts at the end of each article, thus allowing the reader to move more freely through my writing.

On the flip side is the annoyance factor of such a bibliography-type change — at least I know that I would find this supremely annoying if I were the reader.

For now I will just stick with trimming the fat in my RSS reader.

[1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli