The Famous Home Office Hits 7.0

One of the great things that can happen on the internet is meeting people that have common interests that you would otherwise not run into in the normal course of life. There have been a number of people I have met this way that I now keep in contact with and one of them is Stefan Didak. We met up along with our wives in Southern California in 2011 and had a great time!

If you don't know who he is, you might recognize him from his home office. As a fellow home office aficionado, it's always fun to look at all the tech gear. (Yes, obviously I enjoy tech hardware and home office layouts.) This picture from his site gives some idea of how expansive the layout is.

The newest iteration is now at 7.0 and is very impressive. As I am designing my new home office and studio space, it is very interesting to look at his whole design and assembly process.

The hardest part of the office design for me is choosing the right desk and desk layout. In particular, I have hesitated to buy an expensive desk since I tend to change things around frequently or, in the case of moves, change is required. It's great to see a really good layout for lots of systems and monitors and it gives me great ideas for how to better design my own space.

You'll find the main office pictures at Stefan Didak's Home Office page and the assembly at the Home Office Version 7 Setup Making Of page. Both are definitely worth a look and a bookmark!

Downloading YouTube Videos with OpenBSD or Similar

From time to time, it is nice to be able to download a YouTube video for offline viewing. There are commercial tools to do this but I always tend to avoid those. Last week I discovered the tool I have wanted for years. I'm probably the last one to know about this but here it is.

The tool is called youtube-dl and simply takes the YouTube URL and downloads the best quality available. It is hard to beat that. I have now downloaded a variety of BSD videos that I want to watch at my convenience or while traveling. (The bsdconferences YouTube Channel is a great place to start.) There are, of course, many other command line options that I have yet to explore.

Fortunately, youtube-dl is available in OpenBSD Ports as well as MacPorts and Homebrew

If you have issues downloading videos, enclose the video URL inside quotes. This seems to be more necessary with some operating systems (probably due to different shells) than others. I had no trouble with the ksh(1) shell in OpenBSD but tcsh(1) in FreeBSD was problematic without quotes.

"Why don't MacBooks come with cellular networking?" →

Marco Arment made some excellent comments as to why Apple is not including any sort of cellular data connectivity in any of the MacBook lines. This is one of the only major things lacking from Apple's laptop lines.

With LTE, you can burn through a 5 GB data cap in an hour if you’re downloading big video files, and it would be easy to burn through the cap in just a few days if you’re streaming HD video — which, in 2013, is commonplace.

Back in January, I had some major problems with my Verizon FiOS business connection where only the Verizon-provided ActionTec router would work. The rest of the details are for another post but I ended up using my Verizon 4G LTE USB data card as a stopgap until Verizon could do a truck roll. I only had the 4G LTE USB data card and router as our connection for about 36 hours and many of those hours were while we were sleeping. Using YouTube and a little bit of Netflix from our Apple TV units during that time we easily burned through 8GB of data. I had to upgrade our Share Everything plan with another 2GB so we didn't go over that month.

I have been using 3G EV-DO since around 2005 just like Marco. The advent of 4G LTE has really transformed the way I use cellular data. I would absolutely love to have it built-in to a MacBook of any sort. As it is, I currently either have some sort of router in the car, occasionally use a MiFi device, or tether (actually using Personal Hotspot via WiFi for the most part) to one of our 4G LTE iPads. Marco also makes some good suggestions about what could be done.

To start, Apple could just put cellular-connection detection and responsible-usage logic into iTunes and Software Update. That would be sufficient to launch with new 4G MacBook models at WWDC, then they could have a session on the new API and start enforcing responsible practices in the Mac App Store. Along with maybe working something out with Netflix, they’ll have addressed the biggest accidental bandwidth hogs that most people will face.

It would be very disturbing to have the latest HD TV show episode, which easily tops 1.5GB, download in the background. Unlike with 3G, you might not even notice because 4G LTE is so fast. As Marco points out, it would also be essential to disable automatic software update downloading. As a technical professional, I would be willing to deal with these issues manually but most consumers would not want to be bothered and would not have any idea there would even be an issue until they started receiving data usage alerts or, even worse, a massive cell phone bill.

Built-in cellular connectivity in laptops is also mostly aimed at business users except in the case of the various Chromebook models. The Chromebook is unique in that everything is web-based and not very much data is transferred except for streaming media. Apple may not be including cellular data because of the focus on consumers rather than business users. In any case, I think Apple needs to create a new API for OS X as Marco suggested sooner rather than later. Apple can obviously implement 4G LTE cellular data just fine in the iPhone and iPad lines so I hope the MacBook lines are the next frontier. The next generation MacBook Air seems like the perfect candidate to me.

Nexus 7 Becomes Interesting with Ubuntu Tablet →

Update: As of April 5, 2017, Ubuntu Tablet is no more. See this blog post for the details.

Due to my use of iOS devices like the iPhone, iPad, and iPad mini, I have not been interested in any Android devices. None of the available devices have had any advantages over whatever iOS devices I have been using at the time. That appears to be changing but it has nothing to do with Andriod. I still have no interest in Android at all but I do have an interest running Ubuntu on a tablet. As was announced a couple of weeks back, Ubuntu is pushing into the phone and tablet markets.

A couple of days ago I discovered the Ubuntu installation instructions for the Nexus 7 tablet. I'm interested in any feedback from someone who has tried this process. I will probably wait until after Ubuntu 13.04 is released on April 25, 2013 but running Ubuntu on a Nexus 7 might just be worth it.

elementary OS Looks Promising

Last night, I was investigating some alternative operating systems to the instability I have experienced with Ubuntu 12.10 on my Lenovo ThinkPad X230. Because of virtualization software, I need some form of Linux that works well with Intel HD 4000 graphics and is pretty stable. I installed Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon two days ago on my X230 and I am somewhat impressed. On a forum post, I discovered something even more interesting.

Like Linux Mint 14, quite a few other distros are based on a Ubuntu core. One I had never heard of before is elementary OS.

The above screenshot of a Pantheon desktop sure looks like what I like in Apple's OS X. The dock at the bottom and menubar at the top is great. I'm tired of the Windows-modeled taskbar at the bottom that KDE, Cinnamon, and most other desktop environments employ. I also just discovered that version 4.10 of Xfce appears to have some similarities to OS X as well.

I am put off somewhat by elementary OS Luna's status as Beta 1. There still appears to be some work to do to get to a stable release but once it does, elementary OS looks like it might be a very attractive option. If elementary OS interests you, now is a great time to get involved.