For some time now something has been bothering me:
In America, where I live, it seems that the trend is to pass over any electronic devices that allow any freedom in their use (thus also requiring thought.. something in very short supply within my local community), and to especially disregard anything that is new, innovative, or powerful for that which has the most facetime on television.
Clear evidence of this is the popularity of the ipod touch over that of the cowon series of devices. After talking to quite a few people about their choice they admitted they did no research or "shopping around" for their media player, instead opting to buy the device they heard about the most. No less than 5 people insisted that the apps (they were surprised to find that the term was short for "applications") on the iphone are very useful. They proceeded to demonstrate said usefulness via an application that required you to tilt the device to get virtual pee inside of a virtual toilet.
It became immediately clear to me that in America, if not in other countries (and for all I know it's the same everywhere), the ability to play pee-pee games and make virtual chocolate milk on your portable media player is far more important than having good sound quality, expandable storage, and wide support of various media formats. Apparently, nobody buys an mp3 player to listen to music anyway - they just want to shake the thing around and pretend to go potty standing up.
Sometimes it is not the end-user nor is it the instructions delivered to them from advertising campaigns they see on Allmighty Television, instead it is the pre-market business shenanigans that ruins things. Take for example the Skiff...
Whatever your opinion may be on digital readers, the fact is that some people (like me) really like them. After an extended period of reading from a normal (LCD/Plasma/CRT) screen, there is a lot of strain on your eyes. If you are reading a book, or one of the E-Ink powered digital readers, then very little strain is put on your eyes and you can continue reading pretty much as long as you like.
The Skiff was (or is.. we may see something from it yet) a digital reader sporting a few unique features. The thing was at least somewhat flexible, came equipped with a very large touchscreen so that you could read newspapers, magazines, and comic books on it, and was the thinest of the e-readers. It would also support video. There was a lot of buzz about it for some time, then... nothing. It turns out that the company responsible for The New York Times has purchased the platform for the skiff, but not the device itself. The skiff website went down shortly thereafter. The device itself seems to have disappeared from the map. Why? In the words of John Biggs, "the US belongs to iPad and Kindle".
Why?
The iPad, though not without it's applications, is really nothing more than a gimmick to get you to spend money you do not have. The screen is mediocre, and it has next to no processing power.. in fact, it's little more than an enlarged ipod touch with no flash support. [The lack of flash support is because they can't control free content as easily and therefore make less money...imo.] Adobe is not without a response to this. I can't resist mentioning that apple has a long history of restricting content and generally parsing, if not outright censoring the material that you have access to, and even the material that you can create.
But what the heck, lets face it: People don't want to create things, or even enjoy the things other users have created.. what they want is to have the newest device they saw on TV or heard about on Facebook so they can feel stylish, cool, and modern.
Why would you want to think for yourself? The TV does that for you.

War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength

Big Brother is watching you.

Installing Flock and extensions in Ubuntu

I ran across a little post about people having issues installing flock on ubuntu 10.4 (and I'm sure other ubuntu iterations as well) and many more posts about people then having issues with installing flash plugin (for youtube and similar sites). I posted solutions where I could ~ even though, to be honest, about 5 minutes of quality time with google would have readily presented them with a solution.
Now, for those of you who are finding this post on google, I will save you some trouble. This is how you install flock on ubuntu as well as how you can fix the flash problem.


Place the file (currently flock-2.6.1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2) that you can download from flock's website in any directory where you feel comfortable installing it. Then, right click on the file and choose "extract here".
Now, go to your desktop and right click a blank space and choose "create launcher". A window will then open up and you want to choose "Application" under the "Type" field, Name it what you want (e.g. "flock") then for the "command" field you want to click "browse" and navigate to the flock directory you just extracted and select "flock-browser" then click "open".
I extracted this in my home directory, so after doing this the "Command" field looks like this "/home/shirase/flock/flock-browser" then you can close that window. There will be a new icon on your desktop that launches flock; you can drag this to the bar at the top of your screen if you wish.
Doing things this way (the only way i know how) you will have an issue with installing addons, like flash. There is a way to get around this:
Open up a terminal and type "sudo nautilus" after you enter your password and nautilus (a file browser) opens, navigate to "usr/lib/firefox/plugins" and copy (for the flash plugin needed for youtube) "flashplugin-alternative.so" and then paste it into your flock addons directory. This will be wherever you installed flock to (in my example, i installed it to my home folder, so you would go to /home/shirase/flock/plugins on my computer). Of course, for different plugins the name will be different, but they will still be copy/pasted from and to the same location.
Hope this helps.
References:
Ubuntu community documentation on installing flock.
Blog post detailing how to get flash working in flock on linux.