We'll spend the first week of the Chinese New Year in Xiamen, which is a two-hour flight from here. All I know about Xiamen is from a recent Neal Stephenson novel, and that featured a lot of explosions and gunfire, which I hope we can avoid (on the other hand, come to think of it, the Spring Festival is quite heavy on pyrotechnics). I did learn that Xiamen is very close to Taiwan, though, and am looking forward to the warmer climate.

The new year is the Year of the Dragon, which is my year.

Speaking of rich "alphabets", I encountered my first Chinese CAPTCHA this week, on the Ikea page, where Cissy was selecting a free promotional gift:

What is going on with the Euro? Most of my income still comes from Japan, and I get a paycheck for the same amount every month. The same amount in Yen, that is, but when it arrives in my German bank account the Euro amount has been consistently increasing (significantly) for quite a while now. That is all good and well, but over the last couple of weeks, my African investments are also coming back with currency exchange gains. In guess that means that Europe is now under worse management than a random selection of African countries.

Now that I have three Twitter accounts, I have to say I am very grateful that the 140 character limit is indeed a 140 character limit, and not a 140 byte limit. While that makes no difference for ASCII people, and only a tiny difference in the German language (umlauts), this is great for Chinese or Japanese tweets. For those, every character takes three bytes, but still counts as just a single character. In languages with such a rich "alphabet", you can say so much more in the short space of a tweet.

I am not much of a music listener, and my iPod is mostly used for podcasts, but when I do listen to songs I obsess about play counts.

Probably because I am not much of a music listener I rely on iTunes to tell me what I like and the two smart playlists with recently played and most played songs are essential here. I consider it productive work to set the iPod to shuffle and skip or don't skip through what it throws at me, building up useful statistics in the process. I pause playback when leaving the room in order not to get inaccurate numbers. When I am only listening with half an ear while doing other things and catch myself having sat through a song I didn't like instead of skipping it, I panic. I am concerned if play counts should be recorded at all when I am only listening with half an ear while doing other things. I worry about the loss of information when I listen to Cissy's iPod, and about the implications of her listening to mine. The thing I hate most about the dying battery in our beat-up fifth generation iPod with the broken screen (five years old, but still my main player since I cannot get myself to buy a replacement iPod Touch since that model has gone so long without an update) is that when it suddenly shuts down, it tends to lose play counts. Never mind that I have to continue walking in silence for half an hour and later figure out where to resume playing in the middle of the two-hour podcast episode, I'll never be able to find the three great songs again, that I had just discovered in shuffle mode.

Part Twelve: The Reida Eleven Inch Wall Clock with Thermometer and Hygrometer delivers important data points.

This should help me decide if I dislike the Shanghai weather less in winter (too cold) or in summer (too hot). At the moment it shows an indoors temperature of eleven degrees (very consistent over the last few days). Good that I have an extensive collections of sweaters (that can also be combined into multiple layers), not to mention my Bingjie Keeping Warm Trousers.

The hygrometer apparently does not indicate the likelihood of rain fall.

Everything Thilo feels he needs to overshare ...

I have for a long time already been giving star ratings for every movie I am watching (not too many these days) and every podcast episode I am listening to, and also writing short reports about almost every book I am reading. I am now trying to extend this and let the world know about everything else as well.

I am calling it thilo+, for the moment it is just a twitter stream, but I have some more ideas for it. There will even be limited social features (to the extent that you will be allowed to voice agreement), the project will help sustain my continued absence from Facebook or Google+ (both of which I find quite scary but long the convenience of), and to promote a positive atmosphere it will only include recommendations (i.e. three or more stars out of five).

In China, the Lunar New Year is more important than the Gregorian one: The Year of the Dragon will begin on January, 23rd, and there will be a week-long national holiday (Spring Festival) then, but that this year New Year's Eve, even though a Saturday, has been declared a working day is a bit much. Elimination of week-ends to compensate for bridge days is in itself quite common here, though, and it is important to clump holidays together so that people have a chance to return home, which can be far in China.

We are not going home for New Year, we are going to Suzhou tomorrow for three days, about a hundred kilometres (a 25 minutes train ride) to the west of Shanghai.

If you are looking for a last-minute Christmas gift for yourself or others, or just some computer game entertainment for the holidays, consider the Humble Indie Bundle, the fourth installment of which is currently available, but only for two more days.

A collection of twelve games created by independent developers, offered in an innovative pay-what-you-want model that also supports charity (Child's Play and the American Red Cross). Includes full and non-DRM downloads of all titles for all three major PC operating systems, plus soundtracks and Steam keys.

• Gratuitious Space Battles
• Cave Story+
• Jamestown
• Bit.Trip Runner
• Super Meat Boy
• Shank
• NightSky HD
• Crayon Physics Deluxe
• Cogs
• VVVVVV
• Hammerfight
• And Yet It Moves

I was quite surprised to find the new iTunes Match icon which must have appeared sometimes last week. Given the fight that the various groups representing rightsholders in Germany continue to put up against all kinds of Internet content services, I had not expected that to materialise for a long while (if ever). But it seems that for 25 Euro per year you can now officially put your library of non-iTunes-purchased music into Apple's digital locker, allowing you to stream it to all your fruity devices or just upconvert low-quality CD rips to 256kb DRM-free tracks.

Being not much of a music listener, iTunes Match itself is not a service I am interested in, but along with it comes iTunes in the Cloud, the ability to re-download songs previously purchased from Apple. Remember the broken track I got in October? Probably not, but I do. I was now able to click on a nice little cloud symbol and that got me a new version of the file, and this time it was complete. Happy. Plus I still have the voucher for another free song that I got from customer support. Double happiness.

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.

The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.

The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.

The man Jack paused on the landing. With his left hand he pulled a large white handkerchief from the pocket of his black coat, and with it he wiped off the knife and his gloved right hand which had been holding it; then he put the handkerchief away. The hunt was almost over. He had left the woman in her bed, the man on the bedroom floor, the older child in her brightly colored bedroom, surrounded by toys and half-finished models. That only left the little one, a baby barely a toddler, to take care of. One more and his task would be done.

He flexed his fingers. The man Jack was, above all things, a professional, or so he told himself, and he would not allow himself to smile until the job was completed.

A toddler escapes a knife murderer by climbing out of his crib and walking up the hill into a graveyard where the ghosts decide to take him in and look after his well-being until he grows up. Neil Gaiman tells his story in eight chapters, each of them set two years apart and a short story in its own right. Wonderful writing, won numerous awards in the young adult categories and beyond, inspired by The Jungle Book, in a perfect mood for bed-time stories or Tim Burton movies (even though the equally qualified Neil Jordan is apparently working on it now).

Pioneer One is a science-fiction TV show about a satellite crashing near the US border in Canada and the team of Homeland Security officers dispatched to investigate it. It has won the Best Drama Pilot at the 2010 New York Television Festival, and if you enjoyed The X-Files, you will probably like this one as well. I would have written about it earlier, but delayed until the premiere of the season's sixth and final episode (which happened last week), so that you can watch all of it without waiting for the next one. That plan did not really turn out too well, since it is quite a cliffhanger ending.

For lack of a better word, I wrote TV show, but Pioneer One has nothing to do with television networks. It is completely independently financed by viewer donations and distributed via BitTorrent and streaming sites. That has been made possible by everyone working for free, and the whole budget being ridiculously low: That award-winning pilot was done for just $6,000, the stated donation target for the whole season was $100,000 (which has unfortunately not been reached yet, it currently stands at $86,175). If you do like it, please donate, for example using Flattr.

For the second season, though, the team has decided to "secure more substantial funding", because they cannot continue working for free and calling in favours forever, they want a bigger budget to be able to scale up the scope of the show, and they need to be able to schedule and produce a whole season without having to stop for months at a time whenever money runs out.

I have to admit that I have never read any of the famous Hergé comic books, so that I do not know how true Steven Spielberg's take on characters, topics and atmosphere is to the source material, but I am pretty sure that he injected a healthy dose of Indiana Jones into the mix that was not there before. But a healthy dose it is, and combined with a lot of visual gags (that may very well have originated with Hergé) and wonderful transitions between scenes it makes for a very enjoyable movie.

8 points

I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare--or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad--who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping. There's no doubt the man's right. It's absolutely that way with me. Take, for instance, the fairly rummy matter of Lady Malvern and her son Wilmot. A moment before they turned up, I was just thinking how thoroughly all right everything was.

It was one of those topping mornings, and I had just climbed out from under the cold shower, feeling like a two-year-old. As a matter of fact, I was especially bucked just then because the day before I had asserted myself with Jeeves--absolutely asserted myself, don't you know. You see, the way things had been going on I was rapidly becoming a dashed serf. The man had jolly well oppressed me. I didn't so much mind when he made me give up one of my new suits, because, Jeeves's judgment about suits is sound. But I as near as a toucher rebelled when he wouldn't let me wear a pair of cloth-topped boots which I loved like a couple of brothers. And when he tried to tread on me like a worm in the matter of a hat, I jolly well put my foot down and showed him who was who. It's a long story, and I haven't time to tell you now, but the point is that he wanted me to wear the Longacre--as worn by John Drew--when I had set my heart on the Country Gentleman--as worn by another famous actor chappie--and the end of the matter was that, after a rather painful scene, I bought the Country Gentleman. So that's how things stood on this particular morning, and I was feeling kind of manly and independent.

Coming right off Sherlock Holmes, I cannot help but notice some similarities between the famous detective stories and P. G. Wodehouse's writings about Bertie Wooster and his manservant Jeeves. Both are about the adventures of two English men who share an apartment where a variety of curious cases is brought before them, one of the pair possessed of remarkable problem-solving capabilities, the other recounting the story in the form of memoirs, published in a series of novels and short stories, books that are now the works for which their authors are mostly known for, characters that have become more popular than their creators, have appeared in film and television, and have even given names to information retrieval computer products.

Only four of the eight stories in My man Jeeves are about Jeeves and Wooster, but the other four are very similar in style, structure and content and feature Reggie Pepper, an earlier prototype of the rich and idle foppish young English gentleman.

Amazon is trying to re-launch in China, and as part of their rebranding (they are changing their Chinese name) they are advertising with the domain name z.cn. As of now, this just redirects to amazon.cn, and it is not clear how Amazon got hold of the domain, or if they even own it at this point (the WhoIs database entry points to someone called Wang Hanhua), but that is certainly a neat URL, almost as cool as PayPal's developer portal.

Angry Birds and Plants versus Zombies are popular in China, too, and the appeal of the cartoon characters has far extended the computer (or rather: mobile phone) games that spawned them. You can buy all kinds of toys, clothes and accessories featuring them here. They have reached a level of omnipresence akin to Mickey Mouse, Snoopy, Kitty-chan or the local contenders Pleasant Goat and Big, Big Wolf. Plants versus Zombies has also been turned into a successful trading card game for children. Not all of this is trademark piracy, there are a couple of big-name commercial companies that use the characters in their marketing campaigns, all the way up to nationwide TV commercials and coupon codes in soda bottles.

I like cloud computing. It makes computing hardware and network resources a commodity much like electricity, available to anyone, anytime, anywhere, freeing you, your programs, and your data from depending on particular physical devices. The network is the computer. That was Sun Microsystems' vision, and we can see it becoming a reality now.

Unfortunately, the more popular consumer-grade cloud services are all proprietary offerings, which undermines the commodity aspect quite a bit. You end up with vendor lock-in and loss of control over your processes and data. Depending on the kind of service and how well it integrates with others, this can become a real problem. Something like Dropbox is still relatively easy to replace, because you can at any time take your files elsewhere. But even with Dropbox you have the problem that all those programs that you have been using with it probably support only Dropbox and no other service. And trying to leave Facebook for another network while still being able to continue to chat with your friends and bringing all your posts and photos along seems downright impossible. You may not ever want to feel the need to migrate away from Dropbox or Facebook, but what if your cloud company goes out of business? Happened to me when drop.io was acquired.

In addition to lock-in, there is also the problem of centralisation, which also seems contrary to what cloud computing and the Internet itself stand for. If everyone has all their personal data stored at Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, the consequences of those services going down, losing data, leaking data, or being forced to disclose data could be disastrous. And with companies who let you use their services for free, you have to wonder in how many ways they monetize your information behind your back. Remember, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product.

So what I would like to see instead is open standards for interoperability between these cloud services. It should be like email: Every email application in the world is expected to be able to talk to every email service provider, and all email service providers are expected to deliver messages to customers of other email service providers. As a result, there a lot of email service providers, no single provider has everyone's email, you can choose the one you trust, you can have multiple email accounts for different purposes, you can even run your own email service (which most companies actually do).

When Apple's iCloud service was still in the rumor-mill, there was speculation if it would take the form of an updated Time Capsule device, something that people would buy and put into their home network and that would serve as a hub for synchronisation and backup between their devices. Especially since iCloud is more geared towards keeping all your devices in sync with each-other (as opposed to sharing content with other people), that seemed like a good idea. Taking this a little further, I'd love to have all my devices form an ad-hoc private network over whatever connection is available to them, with a dedicated hub being optional and not really central, and the ability to just use a Mac mini or something hosted in the cloud (but completely under my control) to run this hub. Instead, they built a massive data center, and when it goes down, Siri won't talk to you anymore.

It's getting late.

I don’t have too sharp a sense of time any more, but I know it must be after eleven, and maybe even getting on for midnight. I’m reluctant to look at my watch, though—because that will only remind me of how little time I have left.

In any case, it’s getting late.

And it’s quiet. Apart from the ice-machine humming outside my door and the occasional car passing by on the highway, I can’t actually hear a thing—no traffic, or sirens, or music, or local people talking, or animals making weird nightcalls to each other, if that’s what animals do. Nothing. No sounds at all. It’s eerie, and I don’t really like it. So maybe I shouldn’t have come all the way up here. Maybe I should have just stayed in the city, and let the time-lapse flicker of the lights short-circuit my now preternatural attention span, let the relentless bustle and noise wear me down and burn up all this energy I’ve got pumping through my system. But if I hadn’t come up here to Vermont, to this motel—to the Northview Motor Lodge—where would I have stayed? I couldn’t very well have inflicted my little mushroom-cloud of woes on any of my friends, so I guess I had no option but to do what I did—get in a car and leave the city, drive hundreds of miles up here to this quiet, empty part of the country . . .

When a book gets the Hollywood treatment, it usually means the addition of three things: A happy ending, a love interest, and a car chase. This pretty much sums up the main differences between Alan Glynn's novel and its movie adaptation. Most of Eddie Spinola's story is essentially the same: He bumps into his ex-brother-in-law, gets into possession of brain-function-enhancing drugs, borrows some money from a Russian loan-shark to get into stock market day-trading, excels at that and gets hired by an investment banker to broker a massive merger for a huge bonus. But he does not have a girl friend that he needs to win back, he is not being chased by a mysterious man trying to steal his stash, and without giving away too much, it should be obvious from the bookending opening paragraphs that while Eddie Spinola pictures himself in an ending very much like the one Eddie Morra gets to enjoy in the movie, things do not quite pan out that way.

I brought back my third Mac mini from our recent trip to Japan (it is cheaper there than here in Shanghai). Unlike its predecessors, it is not going to be a replacement machine, but an addition: I am going to continue using my MacBook Pro as my main computer (especially for work) for the foreseeable future, but its hard disk has been filling up, and the new mini's first main purpose is to offload our media libraries.

Hardware

Nice things come in small packages. The mini was quite compact to begin with, so that the new one is only half the size of the other two is not a big deal for me, but I do appreciate that they have done away with the external power adapter, which used to be almost the same size as the computer itself, and thus rather inconvenient. Probably as part of the shrinking process, but maybe just because Apple just wanted to kill it, there is no optical drive anymore. I cannot remember when I have last used the drive on my MacBook Pro, so that is probably not a problem. The three use-cases that come to mind are installing the operating system, watching DVDs and ripping audio CDs. The first does not apply anymore, since Apple no longer ships disks and has replaced the process with a combination of recovery partitions, memory sticks, Time Machine backups and downloads. For everything else, one should be fine as long as there is at least one other computer with a drive in the household. A welcome addition is the SD card slot on the back.

Magic Trackpad

The first thing I noticed after turning on the machine was that it did not detect my USB mouse. That is a pretty bad situation, because you cannot do anything with a Mac without being able to move the pointer. It is also a complete mystery to me, since at least the basic functionality of USB mice is very standardized, and the same mouse works just fine on the MacBook Pro. Fortunately, I also bought a Magic Trackpad, which seems to be getting a prerequisite with the ongoing move towards gestures. There was another unexpected hurdle connecting it, though, as I was prompted for a Bluetooth peering code. A Google search (which I would not have been able to do without another computer at hand) had the solution (just type 0000), but why this dialogue is necessary is unclear to me. It must have been a bug, because it is not mentioned at all in the Trackpad's manual. Not quite the unboxing experience you want from Apple products.

Time Machine migration

There is a Migration Assistant that you can use to get your data from your old Mac to your new one. It has a number of options, including restoring everything or individual users' data from a Time Machine backup. I used this to migrate Cissy's user account and it worked like a charm: The new user account was created, all data was copied and everything looked just like on the old machine, from account icon to desktop background to open tabs in Firefox. From my own account I manually copied just the iTunes library off the backup disk. That also worked without problems. I want to do the same thing with the iPhoto library (another seventy gigs that the MacBook Pro could do without), but before that I will have to set up Time Machine backups on the new mini. I cannot quite decide if I want to enable backup encryption. While that is of course something that I have been wanting for a long time, the feature is new in Lion, and I would not be able to share the encrypted disk with Snow Leopard.

Lion

I cannot say much about the new operating system version yet, because my main Mac is still on Snow Leopard (and will probably stay that way), and I have only really used the new computer while I was setting it up (my day-to-day interaction with it at the moment is limited to updating my iPod every morning). Cissy does use the computer a lot, and has offered no complaints, but she practically lives in Firefox and hardly sees the OS at all. From what I have seen so far I like the new approach of showing applications full screen and using a three finger swipe to switch between them. Of course, this will probably not work for all kinds of applications, and there is currently no good way to integrate this in a multi-monitor setup. As for "natural scrolling", the reversed scroll direction is less confusing than I feared. If you are switching to Lion exclusively, this should not be a problem at all. Even if you are using going back and forth between Lion and older Macs or non-Macs, you'll pretty soon figure things out. It definitely helps to use a trackpad only on Lion, and a scroll-wheel mouse otherwise.

Standing desk

Our standing desk construction unfortunately does not accomodate a monitor, so we had to revert back to a more traditional arrangement for now. We replaced the chair with a yoga ball to make amends.

Edward Morra is a struggling writer in New York. His life is in as much of a mess as his apartment is, and his girl-friend is no longer willing to put up with it and has left him. But then he runs into the one figure, that for sheer tenousness, absurdity even, stands towering above all other of the potential relatives that can be foisted upon you, alone and multi-hyphenated, his ex-brother-in-law Vernon. Vernon used to be a drug dealer, but now he claims to be doing consulting work for a pharmaceutical company, and that the insanely expensive pill he presents to Edward with the promise to remove his writers' block has been through clinical trials and is FDA-approved. Edward takes the pill and it immediately and drastically increases his intellectual capabilities, allowing him to finish his book and turn his life around. But of course, there are side effects, addictive properties, withdrawal symptoms, supply issues, and violent criminal elements that soon come into play.

The movie is based on the 2001 novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn (which has now been renamed Limitless to match the movie, but its protagonist did not get the same treatment and is still called Edward Spinola). I was delighted to see it in the Kindle store on sale for just 1.49 Euro instead of the list price of 8.38. Too cheap to not get it.

7 points