Geek News and Musings

• I’ve decided to pull the trigger on a MythTV like box. After recording a show via HD Over the Air, I plan to move it over to a 3TB NAS so I can watch it on any of the computers I have. Is MythTV overkill for my purposes?
• If I had a Windows 7 install disk that was previously used, and an unused product key from a Windows 7 upgrade disk, could I use that for a fresh install on a second computer?
• My question is actually about where I can store game data on a xBox 360. Will any flash drive or USB hard drive do? Can I just get a cheap OEM hard drive, put it in a cheap case and call it a day?
• I’m looking at workflow mapping tools, and I’m finding a lot of variety. Any recommendations?
• This has probably been asked a million times, but is there a way to stay signed-in to Lifehacker? It seems like very time I read an article in a different tab I have to log in again to comment on it.
• Is there a convenient Android app that would let me receive voice phone calls in the middle of the night and also, of course, let my alarm clock ring, but would essentially put my phone in something like a pseudo-airplane mode for everything else?
• How can I work around an iPod headphone port that only plays sound out of one side?
• Anyone know if I can automatically sync a Nike+ sensor with another (iOS) app?
• I’m pretty sure my power supply bit it the other day. Are there not so obvious things to be aware of when replacing a power supply?
• I’m trying to copy a 20gb folder to an external HDD. If it’s getting stuck, is this the hard drive’s issue, or is this because Explorer’s being glitchy?

More »

It’s not the same as the built-in NFC of Nexus S Android phones, but if your bank provides smaller credit cards with NFC chips, you can easily add one to your iPhone 4. More »

Pixable is a free webapp that, after connecting to your Facebook account, creates feeds where you can view photos and videos shared by friends. It does not display status updates, polls, Farmville posts, or check-ins, so if you’re annoyed by your friend’s updates Pixable is right up your alley. More »

If you have a large enough freezer you can spend an entire day cooking to have an entire month’s worth of tasty, cost-effective meals that require little preparation other than baking. More »

Greetings from Tokyo! Sean Bonner, who I’ll be meeting in a few days along with the Safecast crew, shares word of a nifty, limited-edition USB gadget to benefit Japan tsunami relief.

The tsunami and earthquake have faded from the headlines, but the need for aid is still real. Incubot, in conjunction with partners World Events Productions and CustomUSB, have created a line of Japan Relief customs 2G USB drives: limited edition, fully licensed, and in colors honoring the japanese flag. Packaged in “Ganbari Japan!” custom boxes.

100% of profits go to Japanese Red Cross Society and to Safecast radiation monitoring efforts.

Every day I try and do the media rounds to see what’s happening. The Journal, the Times, the Techcrunch, and the Twitter. Twitter is consumed via a number of aggregators that I rotate, mostly settling for News.Me and the Media something newsletter that the guy from MySpace produces.

Techmeme gets my votes about once a day, in the following order: upper right hand corner for the latest breaking, lower right hand corner to see what’s falling off the edge, then straight to the middle clump where two or three stories reside if anything’s really jumping. I’ve usually read the top in the other venues by then.

Google+ is not on this list, yet. Mostly because I haven’t got a handle on its core value as a news trigger. If you’re Scoble, the value is obvious as he is now demonstrating by turning it into his blog. But sooner or later the service will have to decide what it wants to be when it grows up — a conversation hub with no tools for rapid synthesis of knowledge, a social graph to challenge Twitter (it’s getting there fast), or some other thing perhaps more substantial than currently appreciated, like a stalking horse for YouTube live streaming aka the social broadcast network.

SBN we’ll call it has all the earmarks of a Gmail beta operation. Launching it on top of Hangouts with their limited reach even if daisy chained will not scare the networks until google flips the bits around and couples live streams with API access to embedded comment streams like the ones we use on Gillmor Gang sessions from the Friendfeed API. 10 Hangouters is more than enough in the context of a live chat of hundreds, and the API can be broadened to allow concentric groups to nominate or be given the microphone from a joint console.

This will put pressure on Google to provide a way in for the Tweet stream, since aggregators like Seesmic and others will have the same API access and an incentive to merge the multiple social networks. Facebook will be in the odd role of having little to offer here, what with YouTube’s huge clout in video marketshare. The Skype deal is a longer term strategy for climbing into a classic 3 or 4 network clump, with Apple/Twitter bargaining access to AirPlay all the more important.

G+ project manager Bradley Horowitz buttonholed me at the TechCrunch August Capital party to say he enjoyed this week’s Gillmor Gang live cast earlier that afternoon. The team’s proactive approach to interacting with field test users is good politics, but it also underlines the need to respond to criticisms such as Scoble’s laments about a buggy and crash prone iPhone client. If SBN is a not so hidden priority for Google (especially in the wake of Google TV’s Wave/Buzz like performance) then the kinds of viral crowds live streaming will invite will make fixing the Scoble-sized instability on iOS mandatory.

The last thing G+ needs is to go directly against Twitter (and Apple) in an Android/iOS shootout. For one, it blows a huge hole in the G+ social graph while it is still forming. For another, given Facebook’s Microsoft-induced stupidity about an iPad client, what part of 90% share of the tablet market do you want to lose. The only thing G+ HTML 5 on the iPad has going for it is that it sucks less that HTML 5 on the iPhone. SBN makes iPad native more likely.

The last few weeks in Washington make it clear that both parties have decided on waging the political campaign in realtime via social. Live casting blends just as well today with party fundraising if not more so than when Obama ran the table starting early with the Iowa caucuses. The Republicans have clearly understood the need to frame their agenda in a way that promotes realtime tracking of what is now a Twitter news cycle. The cable networks may offer round the clock coverage, but even political junkies like myself tune in once Twitter alerts hit the push notification bus.

CNN jumped out ahead last week with the ability to broadcast live to the iPad if users already subscribed to Comcast or several other cable or satellite services. Once iOS 5 hits with its notification hub, we should be able to move from a push notification directly into the cooperating video stream. SBN can take advantage of the same opportunity in September, but they need to convince Horowitz and Gundotra to put some engineering cycles into pulling Twitter alerts not only from iOS but from the other platforms.

Scoble doesn’t like the idea of a Friendfeed-like aggregation of the Twitter stream, but that speaks more to the lack of filtering tools in G+ than anything more fundamental. And the firestorm over businesses not having first class citizenship would be significantly neutralized while we wait if we could push brand stories into our G+ streams to seed the live cast model. Frankly, this is going to happen sooner than later, and I vote for sooner so that the resulting feedback loop will prompt Twitter to accelerate its live streaming and Tracking to feed the push notification network. I’ll call that PNN.

This last week we’ve all watched in horror as the story unfolded about an Airbnb user who had her home ransacked a month ago.

Other than the sideshow of us getting dragged into the story, it seemed to be winding down yesterday. The company appears to be bending over backwards to compensate the victim and avoid another of her blog posts where she writes about how scared she is, still homeless and shaken after the ordeal.

Now another victim has come forward.

Troy Dayton first wrote about how his Oakland home was rented by a meth addict with a stolen identity in a comment to one of our posts about the company. I contacted Troy and we spoke by phone today about what happened. His situation is very similar to EJ’s.

Here’s Troy’s original comment:

Something very similar happened to me about 2 months ago.

In addition to valuables stolen, the thieves/addicts did thousands of dollars of bizarre damage to my rented home and left it littered with meth pipes. They were identity thieves, too and all my personal information was strewn about. Further investigation of my own led me to evidence that the people were not just thieves but were also dangerous. I too, feared for my own safety and would not stay at my house for some time.

I had a similar problem with haphazard communication from people at AirBnB. I gave them multiple opportunities to make me a happy customer to which they did but then retracted their offer after their was miscommunication among the team. Sometimes days went by without hearing from anyone, while I was fear-stricken, totally disoriented, and angry. It was almost the most absurd customer service crisis one could ever imagine. But I am one squeaky wheel, and we eventually found an agreeable solution that I was generally pleased with.

I have since both rented my place out and stayed in others’ homes from airbnb.

Here’s what I learned: if you rent out your home, there is a limit to how much AIrbnb can do to protect you. It’s not their fault, but it is their fault that they up-play how much they protect you and downplay what people should do to protect themselves. At the end of the day you are renting to a stranger. You should check there ID’s and phone numbers to make sure they match. I would ask for a link to a social networking site like linkedin, FB, or couchsurfing if there are not credible testimonials on AirBnb. I would chat with them on the phone prior to agreeing to rent to them. Had I done these things, the people that ruined my house would have never made it in.

Also, go with your gut. My gut said something wasn’t right about the people that rented my place, but I didn’t know how to handle that gut feeling and wasn’t sure how airbnb would have treated me or them had I told them I didn’t want them to stay even after they booked it.

Here’s a way Airb’nb can turn this into another revenue stream: Most rental insurance won’t cover this because you are essentially subletting. If major theft and damage is as rare as Air bnb says it is, which I believe is true, then they should be able to get a great insurance policy tailored just for their customers that they can sell for an additional fee to the renters.

Also, as short-term renting like a hotel becomes more common and other websites move in on Airbnb they are going to need more value to justify their very high fees, perhaps insurance and background checks would be a great addition. Of course, if I was the insurance company, I’d require the owners of the property being rented to double check the ID’s of the people checking in to be sure that the background checks are actually for the people checking in.

At the end of the day, I think AirBnb is well-intentioned but I think they are struggling with such fast growth and the management and communication systems have not scaled as fast as their business. Some PR and customer service nightmares are to be expected. My understanding is that they are hiring as fast as they can…but having been a part of teams of 20 somethings that multiply by orders of magnitude in a few months I can attest to the mayhem that surrounds this process. I hope they make dealing with catastrophic problems like the ones EJ and I experienced a top priority.

By phone today Troy told me about how the woman brought in friends to his home. They went through everything he owned, he said. “There were meth pipes everywhere,” he says, and damage to the bathroom and closet doors caused by, he guesses, a human foot or head, and probably an axe. They stole a computer from him as well as small amounts of cash that he left in the apartment. Any electronic device with a light they took apart (he guesses they were paranoid about being monitored). They unscrewed everything in his refrigerator and mixed things together. They stole his clothes, or shredded them. He found a sweater in the freezer.

They also stole his birth certificate, and left evidence behind that they were running a identity theft operation.

When they finally left the apartment, they left more than meth pipes behind. “They also left a cat” says Troy. He eventually got the cat back to the original owner

I then traded the cat for the return of my keys. The owner of the cat was a friend of the girl who rented the place’s boyfriend and had no idea about anything or how his cat wound up in a trashed apartment in Oakland.

A knife was left behind with a man’s name written on it in whiteout. The police said he was a known person, and dangerous.

Troy didn’t feel safe returning to his home. He contacted Airbnb as soon as he discovered what happened. There was one surreal moment, he said. He finally tracked down an emergency email address – urgent@airbnb.com, but when he emailed it autoresponded with a message to email the email address he just emailed.

From: Airbnb Community Support
Date: Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 11:43 PM
Subject: Request received: Emergency Situation: tenants ruined my apartment and stole things
To: Troy Dayton

– Please respond above this line. –
Thanks for contacting Airbnb community support!

Your request (#124683) has been received, and is being reviewed by our support staff. Please note that, due to an overwhelming number of inquiries, our responses may be delayed. Thank you for your patience.

If this is an absolute emergency, please e-mail urgent@airbnb.com and we’ll get back to you as quickly as possible.

The Airbnb Team
www.airbnb.com/iphone
@JointheAirTeam

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Troy Dayton
Subject: people ruined my apartment and stole stuff
To: urgent@airbnb.com

please call me asap [phone number redacted]

He says “This freaked me out when I was frazzled. Hundreds of millions in venture financing, millions of dollars in fees, and no 24-hour help desk for emergencies? What am I paying them the exorbitant fees for?”

He did finally talk to someone at Airbnb. At first he asked for $1,000 and new birth certificates, which were stolen. They never responded to that:

“In the end, $1000 dollars and the return of my birth certificate would make me whole in this situation. Anything you can do to help that be the outcome would be greatly appreciated.” Interestingly no one from AIrBnb ever addressed that request.

He then asked for a month of free nights at Airbnb. They eventually said yes, as long as he kept it to studios and one bedroom places. But they gave him no instructions. He started booking places, but they then told him he could only book places at the same cost as his apartment. They eventually reimbursed him for the places he already stayed at but cancelled future bookings. In the end they allowed him 21 days, and up to $125/night.

They also said they’d cancel future bookings at Troy’s home, but failed to actually do that, he said, causing more confusion.

Remarkably, Troy was happy with that. He doesn’t think the company owed him money for damages because he thinks it’s his own fault for letting the woman in.

Troy also still uses Airbnb. He insists on seeing identification, though, and doesn’t rent to people with new profiles without pictures. He thinks Airbnb should post more suggestions on its site about how to avoid bad renters, and they shouldn’t promise so much. “The reason they’re able to charge these high fees is becuase they lull people into a sense of false security. If they disclosed that, people would just use Craigslist.”

In the last few days Airbnb has suggested that nothing like EJ’s situation has happened before. A typical quote:

With a single booking, one person’s malicious actions victimized our host and undermined what had been – for 2 million nights – a case study demonstrating that people are fundamentally good.

Most of us read that as saying that this is the first time something like this has happened. As I read it again, though I see how it doesn’t say that. It’s carefully worded to suggest these things never happen, but it doesn’t outright say it.

What’s really hurting Airbnb is all this massaging of statements to victims and the press. With both EJ and Troy the company seemed to express lots of empathy, but negotiated hard and delayed on any actual compensation.

I haven’t contacted Airbnb about this new story since they dispute what they told me on record for the last story. If they have anything to say, I’m happy to post it. Just send it to me in writing, please.

Here are pictures Troy sent me of some of the damage. I don’t know why, but what I really want to see is the sweater in the freezer, and the cat.

The first pic is the holes made to the closet doors.

Second pic is the axe slash that split a major portion of the bathroom door

third pic is the kitchen they trashed which show that they had started
packing up all my food, presumably to take with them. It also shows my
personal files strewn about.

4th pic is of a meth pipe

We’re back for a new episode of OMG/JK — featuring both of your hosts reunited in the TCHQ studio (I was back in SF for our Mobile First CrunchUp). Oh, and this episode also includes a cameo by a man in a large yellow jacket. I won’t spoil it.

We kick off this week’s episode by diving into Twitter’s new ad format, which allows brands to place Promoted Tweets at the top of their followers’ streams. Twitter has long been toying with various ad formats — will this one please users, or just annoy them?

Next up we have Facebook’s secret iPad application, which leaked out as part of an official update to its iPhone application. MG got his hands on the app and tested it before Facebook cut off access, and his first impressions are good — tune in to get the details.

Finally we discuss Airbnb’s recent fiasco, where a host had their home destroyed by guests,and how the startup has responded to the issue. Note that this episode was shot a few days ago, so we don’t discuss our most recent post about the situation.

Here are some posts relevant to this week’s episode:

• Twitter’s Adam Bain Talks Promoted Tweets In Timelines — Why You’ll See Them, And Why You’ll Like It
• And Then There Were Ads: Promoted Tweets Appear In Your Main Stream (If You Follow That Brand)
• Facebook’s iPad App Is Hidden Inside Of Their iPhone App
• Facebook’s Secret iPad App Exposed [Pictures]
• The Moment Of Truth For Airbnb As User’s Home Is Utterly Trashed
• On Safety: A Word From Airbnb
• Airbnb Victim Speaks Again: Homeless, Scared And Angry

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Wood Pellets are a byproduct of the timber industry; you can get a 40lb sack of them for around $4-6 in the US. They are commonly used as fuel for stoves or as livestock bedding. Many people these days are using them as inexpensive environmentally-friendly cat litter. More »

This week there was no question whatsoever which comment you guys thought was the most insightful. There was also no question which comment you guys thought was the funniest. And while they were totally different comments… they were both by the same person. We’ll get to the funny comment in a minute, but let’s start with insightful. Winning hands down was el_segfaulto with his statement, “as a developer,” in response to the news that Spotify was sued for patent infringement just weeks after entering the US market:

There is a reason why I do not release code anymore and am reluctant to even help others out on message boards. I’m a decent developer, I’ve never been great on prettiness but when it comes to security fuggedaboutit. I’ve been threatened with patent litigation before and it is not a pleasant process. When I was in grad school I had the resources of a major U.S. university to help. Their pack of rabid lawyers outmatched the trolls’, but the sad reality is that the amount of money, time, and energy expended was wayyyy more than was warranted for the little piss-ant project that I was working on.

Now that I have a cushy government job and consult on the side, I simply can’t afford to be sued for creating a JavaScript/CSS vertical dropdown menu (I kid you not, I received an email saying I was violating a patent for doing that). What happens is that all of the neat ideas that me, and others like me have are simply going to stay in our brains out of fear of having our lives ruined by a parasite suing us in East Texas.

If you give a group of engineers a problem and each one of them comes up with a similar solution guess what…it’s not that damned novel! Creators (artistic and technological) need to realize that they are not special little snowflakes and not every idea that comes out of their minds is unique and amazing.

If only policy makers and judges would read stories like this one.

Coming in second was a short comment from rw, in response to the IFPI’s suggested plan of forcing Google to put “red lights” next to search results for sites that the industry claims “support infringement.” rw points out that this might backfire on the industry:

I think they should do it. That way we know which sites they don’t want us to go to so we can get to those same sites faster.

There were lots of really good insightful comments this week which got a lot of votes, but I narrowed the list down to three picks for editor’s choice. First up, we have HothMonster pointing out something very fundamental in explaining when using “free” works as a part of a business model:

The caveat is, free only helps sales if your product is good.

The AC thats gonna come in here calling us all freetards is mad because his content was shit so no one ever wanted to pay for it. But he overvalues it, so he will never get it

Then we have a knowledgeable Anonymous Coward explaining why the court order in the UK for BT to block Usenet provider Newzbin2 is pointless:

Of course attempts to dismantle Usenet failed: we designed it precisely to resist such approaches.

Usenet was (and remains) the largest and most successful experiment in mass communication ever. (This is not to say that it doesn’t have issues — clearly, it is, and the largest of these is abuse, particularly spam.) And there are quite a few services which index it, search it, collate it, archive it — including Google. It will be interesting to see if this ruling is extended to them.

But in the end, it won’t matter. We simply won’t allow Usenet to be shut down. If necessary, we’ll tunnel it, encrypt it, whatever it takes to sustain no matter what any mere court says. Usenet is far more important than the entire content industry combined, and is certainly run by far more intelligent and clever people. We will always win in the end.

So if the entertainment industry wants to pointlessly expend its resources in this failure: by all means. It will reduce those available to take on other targets

Finally, it’s a comment from another Anonymous Coward, explaining how he went from being a recording industry supporter to something else entirely:

At this point back in 2001, I had a music collection of about 1600 albums. I’d been buying about 100+ albums a year (2 a week on average) for about 15 years. At the time I was a very strong supporter of the RIAA’s position on file sharing and copyright issues.

But then Sept 11th happened and I was out of work for three months. Not only did I end up selling most of my cassette (about 850ish) to help make ends meet, but it allowed me a lot of time to do a lot of reading.

Slowly, over the period of a year or so, I began to see the logical fallacies (if not outright lies) of most of the RIAA’s arguments and often dishonest business dealings (Sound Exchange, for example, gets to collect money for artist - even if those artists don’t want them to - and they get to keep the money unless an artist has a membership, which basically means cutting them a percentage of your money - whether you want to or not - or they get to keep all of it. And THAT is EXACTLY what the copyright clause was intended to prevent).

I’ve gone from being a strong supporter of the recording industry to one of their biggest critics. I’ve also gone from being a good customer (2 albums a week) to not having bought a single major label album new (I still get some from secondhand stores occasionally) since mid-2004. The vast majority of the music I’ve picked up in the last 7 years either comes directly from the artists/bands themselves or independent marketplaces like eMusic (or it did until the major labels bought into it and pretty much ruined it).

And none of the loss of business has anything to do with file sharing.

And, now over to the Funny side, where el_segfaulto wins the gold as well (nice week, dude!). This time, it’s for his comment explaining how he learned that copying was stealing:

I hate agreeing with ACs but I have a story that will help. A few days ago I was hiking in my beloved Sierra Nevada mountains outside of Lake Tahoe. I saw a beautiful snow-capped peak just to my left. I harmlessly thought that I’d take a picture of it. Well I snapped my photo and wouldn’t you know it, the entire damned thing disappeared!

A park ranger came up to me demanding to know what had happened. I told him that I had taken a picture of the mountain. No sooner had I uttered those words than a fleet of black helicopters descended on our location. An engineer jumped out of the first one, grabbed my camera, and proceeded to pull out all of the bytes one at a time with a very tiny set of tweezers.

It took most of the weekend, but the mountain is now back to where it was (along with a couple of families camping in the mountains and a very confused black bear). The moral of the story is copying things, or even remembering them can be critically damaging to our planet, and thus our children.

And won’t somebody please think of the children?

Coming in second place was Prisoner 201, discussing questions about the arrest in the UK of someone that the police insist is the spokesperson for LulzSec, but who others are less sure is the right guy. Prisoner 201 settled the matter conclusively:

They have an IP address.

Of course they have the right guy

On the editor's choice list, we've got an Anonymous Coward responding to the news that the Associated Press doesn't know its Farenheit from its Celsius, declaring 100 degree temperatures to be literally near the "boiling point." The AC pointed out how this < href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110725/12061315242/associated-press-carelessness-reaches-boiling-point.shtml#c53">proves something else:

I guess the Hot News Doctrine works after all - I haven’t see this story reported anywhere else!

Nicely done. And, last but not least, we’ve got another Anonymous Coward responding to new research claiming that time travel is impossible. The AC explains why any physicist should always say this:

Saying time travel is impossible is a really safe bet. If it turns out time travel is possible, they can always go back in time and change their statement.

But since they haven’t changed their statement then that means time travel is impossible.

Peer review that shit, I win

I think that “Peer review that shit, I win,” may become my new catchphrase… so thanks for that! In the meantime, another week has begun, and I’m sure we’ll have plenty to talk about this week. I keep waiting for one of those “slow news days” that critics in the comments talk about, but haven’t found one yet…

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