You see, Theora and H.264 are shooting guns at each other and Theora is shouting about freedom and H.264 is talking about money and Firefox is a fox and he likes Theora and Opera is a singing fat lady and she likes Theora too and Apple is an apple with leaves and a bite out of it and it likes H.264 and Google is a rainbow and it likes both of them and Dirac is hiding in his room and crying because nobody pays attention to him.

There. Now you know.

My MacBook Pro died. Well, okay, it still works, except for the graphics card. So if I could figure out the keyboard shortcut to turn on the screen reader, I’m sure I could pretend to be blind. Actually, no, I would really like a monitor, so it’s unusable for me. Unfortunately, Apple isn’t quite mass-producing parts for 2007 MacBook Pros anymore, so it’s on back order. The guy at CAVA told me to expect it by “the end of February”. Loooooovely.

Fortunately, a lot of my stuff is stored on the web and external drives, and I can still pull any essentials off my Mac with a convoluted process involving holding down the “T” key for a very long time. So it’s time, for at least a little while, to free myself from being dependent on one computer. I have a 2 gigabyte USB stick on my keychain for the bare essentials; for everything else, it’s time to live in the cloud.

Every day from now until I get my laptop back, I’ll be babbling about my experiences using any computer I can find, but with as much of my own settings and stuff as I can access. Hit the jump for day one…

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

Around 5 PM I got the call about my part being back ordered. I called Apple to see if maybe, possibly, could they tell me if a local Apple Store had it in stock without me needing a 4 AM Genius Bar appointment just to possibly be told that it isn’t. Nope. Well, okay then.

Fortunately, I have an Android phone (yes, it’s the G1, what other Android phones are out yet?), armed with browsers of Steel and the best mobile email app ever. What it doesn’t have, though, is an office suite (or Google Docs support), screenwriting software (or Zhura support), a decent MSN/Yahoo IM client, or battery life. While it’s likely to get Flash before the iPhone, it doesn’t have that either right now, which means I still need a computer to get any Photoshop capabilities at all. So I grabbed a USB stick which I’d gotten for Holidaynakuhmas and brought it to the Monkey Bar, which is SVA Studentese for “the student center.”

The Monkey Bar has three G5 iMacs. This would be great if they had more than 256 megabytes of RAM. Opening more than a couple tabs in Safari made them cry tears of blood. I was only using Safari to find a Mac version of Portable Firefox, which I downloaded from FreeSMUG, whoever they are. This did not help at all. Now browsing the web still ate 75% of the memory and often 90% of the CPU as a result, but at least I hadAdblock.

From the same people I grabbed Portable Adium, which crashed spectacularly when I tried to run it next to Firefox. Then I remembered I have a Meebo account so why bother? I also grabbed their version of Cyberduck; haven’t touched that yet, but I don’t expect to on one of those machines.

But I had all my Firefox extensions, especially Feedly, so all was good when the computer would respond. All my passwords and cookies get saved to my USB stick, so that makes life easier. Now I just have to find a way to sync it with the Windows version.

All this isn’t very cloudly, though; I’m talking about local apps a lot, even if they are on a USB stick. Well, that’s because so far not much is new and exciting. I do all my screenwriting on Zhura and have for a while. I’ve used Google Docs before for a lot of things, and I often connected to Meebo to IM people whenever I had to boot into Windows. And I’m posting this via the web.

I expect that I’ll be uploading anything that won’t fit on my USB stick to some kind of web server…like, um, Plankhead.com. So, let’s make that my first discovery…

Discovery From The Cloud:

Replace big hard drives with a personal web server.

I’m sure there are tons of other services that let you upload stuff to a private area and share it in a public area, all for less money. But I’m paying for unlimited space and bandwith already, so why not?

I’ll try and figure out a new thing which I can do in the cloud instead of on a local machine each day. The ultimate goal is to make every computer I find nothing more than a “terminal”, a gateway to all my stuff on the web. Like Uplink but without the bank hacking and constant techno music.

I still miss my Mac, though.

Now for the long version. Ubiquity, according to Wikipedia, “allows web users to create mashups of other web services without requiring much technical background.” Thank you, Wikipedia, for this accurate description which completely and entirely misses the point. They also state, “Ubiquity is a collection of easy and quick natural-language-derived commands that allow users to get information and relate the same to current and other webpages.” That’s more like it. Yeah, I should really edit the article to clarify those two sentences. Brb.

"Goo"gling with Ubiquity - OMG AWESOME!

Okay, there we go. Now that Wikipedia agrees with me, it must be true, so Ubiquity is a Firefox extension that lets you type natural-sounding commands at your browser to make it do things that would normally require 3722438 clicks. And it is the best thing like ever.

Instead of going to Google to do a search for, say, “pandas using iphones”, and then clicking the search button, then clicking the result, you use Alt-Space (Control-Space on Windows/Linux) to open Ubiquity, and type “google pandas using iphones”. And it will load the results. Right there. No new page. Then you can click on one of the results and it loads!!! (Okay, so that’s only two clicks turned into one, but it’s definitely faster, especially since just typing “goo” is enough for Ubiquity to fill in the “gle”).

Wikipedia in Ubiquity - WHEEEEE!

And speaking of Wikipedia, you can search that with Ubiquity. At the moment all you get are small previews of the articles, but that’s probably enough to curb incidents of wiki-time. Again, simply typing “wiki” is sufficient, and a quick press of the Down arrow key will switch to the “link-to-wikipedia” command, which will paste a link to whatever Wikipedia article you type into whatever you’re typing.

Know what you want, but not what the command is? Ubiquity has tags.

The great thing is that commands seem to have tags, so you can type “image” to bring the “flickr” command onto the list. By default, it’s below “google-image” because that actually has “image” in its name, but it gives you the feeling that this thing is very, very smart.

But the amount of things you can do beyond that are absolutely ridiculously awesome. Here’s one of the developers, Aza Raskin, showing us some of the more interesting things Ubiquity can help you do in a voice that reminds me of Quentin Tarantino’s:

That ability to add a customized map to Gmail without leaving the page is really nifty. It also proves that this thing could, theoretically, do anything. It’s like Quicksilver for the web. And the best part is how you can add new commands, which is probably the best idea for extending software since…well, since ever.

IM IN UR UBIKWITEE DOWNLOADIN UR COMMANDZ

Commands for Ubiquity are pretty easy to make, so naturally lots of people have jumped on it. But you don’t have to download anything to use their commands. Instead, they publish a Ubiquity feed, and you subscribe to that. Then Ubiquity will grab that new command, and (if you checked the auto-update box) automatically get updates to it entirely transparently. Okay, so it’s pretty much the same thing as “automatically update my plugins” but it feels more natural and automatic for some reason.

But those Alpha-y rough edges I was talking about before? Jono DiCarlo, also on the Ubiquity dev team, mentions that Ubiquity commands are very inconsistent:

Currently, using Ubiquity is like programming in PHP — where some standard library functions are_like_this() and other functions areLikeThis(). I have to look up the names of functions almost every time I use them in PHP, because there’s no consistency.

It’s not going to be as simple as adding a standard, because Ubiquity commands can’t contain spaces, only hyphens. This means you can’t say “email Dave with gmail”, which would be a very, very natural way of doing things (hint, hint, Jono, though that’s probably the solution you’re going to announce in your upcoming post). But considering the developers have come this far with the amount of epic win in Ubiquity, I’m sure they’ll come through.

By the way, the company that the Ubiquity developers also have (they’re doing Ubiquity for Mozilla Labs, so it’s not under their company name) has something called Enso, which appears to be a Ubiquity-esque thing for your entire computer. I’m not positive, since it’s Windows-only at the moment, and I’m not interested in booting into XP if I’m not going to use it much.

But long story short, Ubiquity is absolutely vital for your enjoyment of life. Get it.