CEROwrt Best Kept Secret, Dave Taht, Email

Hey Dave, 

On the G. Carlin style rant. A literary masterpiece shouldn’t be altered. One of these days a tech archivist will stumble upon that piece, and say, “Oh my fucking god, that’s awesome, and so encapsulates that era.” Keep it, it’s under appreciated. 

 

I read about your struggles with your project, the time out of your life, and I’d guessed about the pull of other projects, and hard choices. It seemed to me that CERO was a best-kept-secret that everyone should hear about. Your system, which is more like an operating system, than firmware, felt right from the beginning, and ready for the next step, beyond mainline Linux and Openwrt, and on to mainline users. 

 

I see that you have a chicken and egg dilemma, in that too much of a good thing has several outcomes, so which do you choose? Sometimes funding is slow to come in the very early stages. You’ve had a rough time, funding and working at the same time. I thought that writing about it might bring publicity that would help with funding. Because routers are more important now, than before, I wondered why a tech journalist hadn’t picked up on your project. I see a few stories have begun to appear in the New York Times, and tech magazines about MESH.

 

MESH networks are socially important to places like Ferguson, MO, towns under duress. Just think what a crude but fast mesh could have meant to that community, and similar communities at risk for civil emergencies, or for that matter, survival after hurricanes or earthquakes or whatever is in our future, since our physical communication infrastructure is disappearing. Think about the Comcast merger that will determine the speed of WiFi or who is allowed to log on and who is not. I’m guessing not a profane blogger who wants to make an awesome point.

 

A MESH network, where nodes can be thrown up on demand, and healed when others go down, is the future. And, without the bloat, the CERO MESH is possibly easier and faster than other firmwares. And though it’s a bit complex for the average person, someone always knows someone who can help them with it. The Netgear router you’ve chosen is inexpensive, prevalent and usable, and that makes it easier for CERO to spread quickly after this most recent release. It’s good hardware.

 

Current router firmware is so full of holes that fixing one is like digging a deep hole in the ground, and throwing the dirt in behind us, only to have it fall right back in the hole, and fill it up again. Even after the Asus, Cisco, name it, debacle with USB and other flaws in router firmware, manufacturers don’t seem to get it. People have had enough disengagement with security, with buggy software that wasn’t well developed to protect them or speed up their connection. 

 

Your firmware is ahead of its time. That makes it difficult. We’re just learning how little manufacturers feel about customers, and how necessary it is to our everyday lives, for banking, relationships, shopping, and future lives, when  online medical consultations become ordinary, and maker communities design prosthetic limbs to print online, and a shitload of other services that we haven’t thought up, yet, happen online, but can’t do without.

 

All of this stuff, I’m sure you know, but it never hurts to say it again.  Feel free to reprint the stuff from my blog on you site or wherever it helps you. I’ll be following your progress with interest.

PAINTING W/ WORDS

Word painting is a slowing of time so we can see, feel, 
think, in that order.

Images blur at a biological level

morning stares back at you,

a cool morning

w/ color upon color

stare long enough, you become a part of it,

a painting, that is

Inside looking out

standing still, looking back into your life

ragged and jagged, the picture from within

the frame,

flawed but clear

But the morning’s brighter

one whole flows into the next

no frame

messy, beautiful, concrete

Real life

the colors so amazing

we have to paint it in pigmented words

to catch the tiniest, chunk of it.

Word painting is a slowing of time so we can see, feel, think . . . love, hate, forgive, live, imperfectly, a water color, vague, contentious, sassy life.

Photo from Jen Bingaman, M.A. LMHCA  The Case Files: Frida Kahlo

This Is a Book My Darling. A Magic Book…The Book Began To Talk To Her. Her Eyes Got Wide

BURNING THE PAGE: THE EBOOK REVOLUTION AND THE FUTURE OF READING. It shows us how magic came to be. It tells the story about a modern day sorcerer, Jason Merkoski, who spent his life working on the “front lines of the ebook revolution.”

Like FAHRENHEIT 451 the page was burnt, destroyed in the most anarchic invention in the twenty-first century, the Kindle book. To save the page it was deconstructed from atoms, and resurrected to bits.

From paper to zeros and ones. From print to Kindle, and later from bits to bits, conceived on a screen and published onscreen. James Merkoski and the Amazon team quietly changed our lives, and changed a world-wide paradigm that’s been the thread woven into our daily life for centuries – the bound book.

It’s a narrative about the Kindle-dot-com – Amazon, about “Google, Jeff Bezos, and the ghost of Gutenberg. It’s a true story of the eBook revolution—what eBooks are and what they mean for you and me, for our future, and for reading itself,” but mostly it’s the intimate memoir of an inventor entwined w/ the memoir of the Gutenberg invention, the book from beginning to present.

It’s a love letter written to the book as we’ve known it and an elegy to it’s passing. It’s an imaginative glimpse into the new technology that has revolutionized reading and writing books; it is the socialization of books.

Digital books were available before the Kindle; only the Kindle caused a revolution in reading. Before that digital texts were the province of disparate publishers of history books, technical manuals, and fiction books, mostly from established writers like Stephen King. eBook publishing was reserved for the few forward thinkers, sometimes self-publishers, the techno-savvy who, early on, published eBooks in the digital space as a PDF file, a file both awkward and serviceable. The personal Kindle reader, and app, and the flexible-format MOBI file revolutionized eBooks.

The Kindle incarnation proved it could almost displace the much-loved book bound in leather, paper, and cloth with distinct smells and feels, and an almost living presence to bibliophiles. It begrudgingly won us over.

Burning the Page carries forward this astounding history that has happened right under our noses, in writing, story, and a style that begets “pastness, presentness, and futureness, joined by association” tying all these concepts together. It’s a complex style that works as best I can describe it.

Amazon Kindle books have breached the “third digital revolution” described by Neil Gershenfeld, “in which matter and information merge”, where things are turned into bits and bits are turned into things. James Merkoski captured a Gutenberg moment in his book just as one epoch is ending and another beginning. Book lovers and Technosociofiles will not want to miss this one.

Why Bit Coin Fascinates Me, and Why It Matters To You

Bit Coin fascinates me not because it is a get-rich-scheme or a convenient way to buy weed off the grid, which I don’t smoke, but don’t mind if anyone else does, or because I’m a Libertarian with gold on hand, I’m not. Bit Coins are the perfect storm heading our way, and the perfect opportunity.

Bit Coins or Bit currencies are the tip of the “Fat Tail.” Fat tails “are events that appear highly unlikely to occur but that are earth-moving when they do.” Bit coin is the Cat 5 hurricane coming to you and me in the next five to ten years. It could be your best friend or your worst enemy depending on how world wide acceptance shakes out.

Bit currency is an emergent electronic payment system similar to Pay-Pal, which is an over simplistic way towards explaining it but about the best I can do. It’s an electronic money system whereby we all could become merchants. It’s a system where a few law abiding entrepreneurs now pay for a pizza or buy a WordPress site or sell yard sale items without a credit card or without cash. It’s a money-medium that’s convenient for not-so law-abiding people to buy and sell items, or move money they don’t want traced. It’s a money system without bill collectors. It’s permanent; you can’t get your money back. All sales are final.

Speculators are drawn to it. It has a future. It’s security is okay — that is until you cash out your cyber bits in exchange for dollars. That’s a crack in the system right now. There are robbers waiting to take your money when you cash out. It helps if you’re tech savvy. And, oh yea, speculators may try to crash the currency so they can buy it back from you when the price drops like it recently did. Or you may lose your encrypted back up file or accidentally wipe it out, and your Bit coins are gone. Yet, this nascent system is the tail end of the hurricane.

Since it’s an emergent system, it’s also similar to a snowflake or a termite cathedral or DNA replication or Wolfram’s computations where a pattern begins simply but generates complex designs over replication. Like DNA something pleasing might come from it like a baby or like the termite cathedral something not altogether likable. Emergent systems like Bit Coin don’t emerge in a vacuum, they bring other systems to the forefront with them, hence complexity.

Eric Schmidt, Googleplex person, says that by 2020 the entire world will be online. If so, we will want to buy and sell from our neighbors, which will include the entire world, which will require other emergent systems as helpers. If that’s so, a fairly secure Bit currency is going to be necessary, a stronger Maker culture will most likely be put in place, and a faster transportation system might have evolved.

We’ll need a world wide communication system to propel the buying and selling, and making, and a same day world wide system for delivery of concrete goods, and a maybe an unsettling shift in government. But like termites when disturbed governments are self-organizing, and seem to fare well after turmoil, coming back stronger and we should hope, more democratized.

A fairly secure Bit currency: Fairly secure but not absolutely secure Bit currency with a fast connection, and maybe free phones, is all that’s keeping us from buying instant art from an African artist in Timbuktu or hand knit wool socks from North Korea (well maybe more). The network doesn’t need to be absolutely secure, just secure enough. If products were cheap enough that I could afford to lose money on a small percentage of my purchases or sales, then it would would work as a currency. If we accepted a small loss it could work. It might be called fuzzy accounting for Bit currency instead of bank or credit card accounting where each penny is accounted for, and an over-priced transaction fee is charged.

A healthy Maker culture: Couple Bit currency/micro payments with a home or community based, Maker printer, and an artist living in Timbuktu, Africa, could send me her sculpture plan, created in her village, or the North Korean, homemaker could send me his sock design created in his village, ready to print anywhere in the world on a Maker printer in any suitable medium, be it yarn, wood, plastic, or steel. Or if the fat tail is really fat, and imaginative, those original North Korean socks could be delivered same day by a transport fueled with a NASA UW fusion rocket recently proposed to reach Mars within 30 days. Far fetched, maybe, but … I’m still waiting for my robot.

So, why should Bit currency matter to you and me? Bit currency is an emerging technology that’s going to revolutionize commerce. It may not stay in the present form but mutate into something we haven’t anticipated yet. Whatever it is when Bit Coin was unleashed it was like going through a gate that had a one way spring, there is no going back — Bit currency is here, and it’s a reality. Oh, yea, there are going to be Bit currency billionaires made just like railroad moguls and oil barons. Wouldn’t you like to be one of them.

Watch Bitcoin anyone? Ripple arrives.

It’s a circus this morning. Opened up my digital wallet, BitCoinSpinner. One Bitcoin’s worth $69.11 at this moment.  It dropped like a rock from $266.00. A new sheriff is in town – Ripple backed by Silicon Valley behemoths announced they were releasing into the wild 50 billion coins in May for those who sign up. A new posse is trading up Bitcoins for Ripples this morning, raking gravy from the nerd-famous, volatile currency for drug lords, libertarians, and those who can’t help themselves. Mt. Gox sounds like a biblical place but it’s the Japan based home for a centralized, math-based, coin exchange. Looks like the Winklevoss twins have saved the day or BitCoin currency I should say. The trade slide has stopped for now, the wounds cauterized. Watching the currencies battle it out is like watching a new sport for the new decade — Bitcoin-ball.

Bitcoin has received its most high-profile endorsement yet as the Winklevoss twins, famous for their legal battle with Facebook, reveal they could be the largest holders of the controversial digital currency – just as the bubble bursts and the price plummets.

“Burning the Page” book: twitter faux pas

Somehow during a phone conversation I wandered into Nick Bilton’s Twitter feed. He writes Bits column for the New York Times. While I’m talking and clicking I tweeted that I’d read the first chapter of Burning the Page. Twitter message pops up goes something like your account has been revoked. Oh, well, big deal. It took me just a second after my phone conversation ended to see I had interrupted Bilton’s conversation tweeting about a book he may or may not review. Am I an unintentional spammer or just damn rude? Burning The Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading is already on the Huffington Post this morning. Nick if you read this, sorry ’bout that.

“Burning The Page” is a great name for a book, especially if it’s by Jason Merkoski, book innovator who worked on the Kindle team to bring us eBooks on reading devices. So, far I’ve read the first chapter, and it’s yellow with highlights on “far off futuristic ideas.” I got sidetracked though. Merkoski added a hyperlink to Twitter for gifts like a digitally-autographed cover for his book. Ooh, proper good, and wicked keen idea his, this Reading 2.0.

Only thing is I’m antisocial, and resist Twitter. I’m a novice. Technosociofile has a slightly used account, so much so that Twitter sends me an email saying it’s good to see you, it’s been sometime since you joined in the conversation. But Merkoski’s autograph lured me to Twitter.

Bilton’s feed is the only Twitter Feed that I follow. He gets the futuristic stuff right in his column. I read his referrals. I am embarrassed to say as a Technosociofile that a social network that’s as widespread as Twitter is pointless to me. I’m such a privacy freak that I break out in hives near Facebook, and like fellow techie-paranoids, I wipe out my last web info with the Google tool that asks if I want to erase it from the beginning of time. If I had more time I’d spend it tearing down my system and rebuilding it again, not Twittering.

What Twitter does give me is long form journalism in the form of Bilton’s excellent Tweets. So, I’ll pursue the in-depth stories through my email alerts for Bilton’s Tweets where I don’t sign on, and refresh that which should not be refreshed — Tweets. In the meantime, I’m anxious to get to chapter two of “Burning The Page.”