Author: harold

That’s funny when I think about it.

There is not a lot of products we use that are changing us as much as alcohol does. We forgot about it because beer and wine are all over the culture of hundreds of millions of people but seriously:

Weed makes you sleepy and horny and laugh. Coffee is almost the perfect opposite. Cocaine makes you chatty and friendly and brings you restlessness. But none of them are making you miserable and pathetic as alcohol can or does. When I went back to France in November I was struck by how much there is drunk people around, from 8am to 8am. All the time, hanging out. On Sunday mornings, the RER station would host vomit here and there, in the corners. During the last World Cup I saw so many people drunk as fuck, going for a ride in Paris when France was defeating Spain or Portugal that even used to it I was shocked. Like it’s 7:30pm and they can’t already walk by themselves, peeing anywhere. Creepy and gross. Being in California is such a change for that. And no, it’s not because the wine is bad.

I think you’ll have to click it.

I’ve been drunk quite a lot since I’m 15. France, cheap and widely available alcohol. I know the feeling. I know how you don’t give a shit about anything but because I’m not a big mouth character, even deadly drunk I would not do stupid things or embarrass myself too much: I would gently lay down and sleep, while feeling I’m at Six Flags for a long time. But I’ve seen so many alcohol poisoning with people passing out stuck in some extreme drunkenness that I guess it always made me aware that as casual alcohol is, it’s deadly strong if you don’t manage it. One time I woke up with a full hangover and all I wanted was some Pastis, badly. I knew I had to stop immediately. 

It strikes me that you can be so out of yourself while being drunk, like saying things you totally don’t think at all and will not remember, not being able to control your body, feeling the need of violence. How you turn aggressive, how you switch from being happy to feeling like shit in 5 seconds. 

Almost as annoying and helpless as a crack addict except that you don’t have to suck dirty cocks to get some more. You just have to go to the liquor store. Which is a good thing I guess: prohibition doesn’t solve anything.

Anyway alcohol is quite a hard drug but because it’s so widespread in our societies since 10,000 years, there’s no question about it. It’s interesting how Western Culture is blind to something that causes a lot of problems (how many early dead, how many families destroyed, how many women beaten on pure alcoholic rage; we’re talking about hundreds of thousands if not more). It’s crazy that you can be drunk in Japan and lay down on a sidewalk like a piece of shit while you can’t smoke weed without big trouble, like 5 years of jail just for marijuana possession.

Old internet picture never gets old. 

In France these days, young people are using Facebook to RSVP massive boozefests. It started in November with 3 000 people and 50 acute alcohol intoxication. A few days ago a new record fell with 10 000 people and one dead. 

Seriously having alcohol as the only legal and Occident-White-approved drug is a total disaster and a fucking joke toward drug policy and health. When I’m stoned I can write/read a complex article or just enjoy to take the sun quite surely even more then. When I’m drunk, I can’t do either of them. I just want to drink more and talk louder.

Google Android.

I have owned an HTC Hero for four months now. I’m looking around it as a user/customer but also as a developer/creator.

OHAI

The Good

As a phone experience, well it’s the best I’ve ever had with everything you like on smart phones these days: seeming less interaction with social media, useful apps and games. I’m kidding for the last, I don’t play on my phone. And I’ll talk about Android games in the bad I guess ^^ But the awesome good is: you are free. No motherfucking iTunes sync my ass ever. Never.

For the developer side, setting up the environment is easy and the SDK is well done in terms of readability. I for now didn’t see anything obscure or weird. I had never worked with Eclipse and Java before and well it’s not making me crazy yet, as I was expecting. Nice.

The Bad

Games usually suck on Android. Like really, thanks to Java The Big Butt. It might change though, with a JIT Compiler coming up. But more important is the fact that major apps like the Gmail one sucks hard. On a Google OS powered phone!  They really want us to launch a browser and go online where Gmail UI –on mobile web- is much better. Ha! Thanks but I’d rather have an app. Facebook does the same. Sorry but my browser on my phone is just to quickly check a link. On a 4” screen I don’t want 10 tabs.

Or the camera app, trackball to take a picture? Stupidest idea in the world (shaky pictures guaranteed). Also, there are some mysteries sometimes: I can’t find the Amazon app and install it on my phone, no matter where I go. Can’t find it on the Market on my phone, can’t have it with QR Code (no matches), tried in Paris, same here in LA, like this app doesn’t exist for my device. Frustrating even if hey, I was living without it last year just fine.

Also, but it applies to any app market, there’s some pretty bad written apps, would it be in terms of stability or UI. Hell, the Digg application is such a piece of shit. The Evernote one is weird and not intuitive at all etc

For the dev, I didn’t go deeply enough to say, except that I’m surprised how there’s not as much resource as I would think. Besides the traditional “Hello World” and a bunch of useful examples, well it seems like you have to try to do your stuff then. So it’s not really bad, just a little bit dry.

The Ugly

The Awful Market Fragmentation. This week an article went out about this subject.

The phone business is complicated: you have manufacturers, carriers and on top of that the Operating System, Android provided by Google. The OS is now reaching the 2.2 version next month. My phone is stuck at the 1.5 version because HTC the manufacturer, is too busy selling brand new phones updated with the 2.1 version. They said they would upgrade old phones –not phone carrier or Google job!- and they lie (update postponed two times) because they’ve never done/see that before: people were buying new phones. Now? With these little pocket computer sold at 300$ at least, people don’t want to change all the time anymore, not just for the price: we’re all setting stuff and don’t want to throw everything away and start over. But the hardware race is on, my phone is only available since 10 months and there are already some Android twice as fast with 4 times the memory embedded. They really want users to go crazy and buy the last “now seriously, it does everything super fast” device.

It’s getting worse in America Fuck Yeah, where there’s GSM and CDMA. GSM is the thing we all know with the SIM card and all, used by 3 billion people around the world. CDMA is mainly available in the US and they are of course totally incompatible (no sim card in it).

It is really annoying because it feels like a trap everywhere: even with an open source OS on a phone I bought without any contract from any carrier (which are giving full data access only on year contracts and not on prepaid cards), I am not free. Depressing.

[Dev side] The thing is my phone can totally run the last Android version as I tried with a custom ROM. There’s a parallel market where people would “cook” your phone OS bringing the last updates from Google (that’s why the Nexus One is nice: the only phone where you don’t have to wait for any manufacturers or phone carrier updates; direct from Google) and making people donate/pay for premium access and custom options. The 2.1 update brings a lot of little improvements for the user but a lot more for the dev. Therefore what version to target if you want to build an app?

For example my phone does multitouch. On Android 1.5 it’s not allowed to use it apparently, though some apps use it (Dolphin browser). On 1.5 I can’t pinch zoom Google Maps and on 2.1 I can. And it’s working perfectly.

Also, two app store? Why Google? Couldn’t it be easier if you had updated all phones to Android 1.6 and the new market for everybody? It’s not helping selling apps for sure and developers can’t live on free software all the time.

It was supposed to be simple guys, WTF? Contracts, patents and agreements between network and communication giants must be ridiculously insane behind the curtains. Add the never finished software development process on top of it, and you get a real mess.

It’s going to be very interesting with Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 at the end of the year. The thing is Android has a really positive reputation amongst people, getting sick of Apple’s behavior. But the problem with open source always has been to support both users and developers (something MS is really good at; WordPress is a good example of a big scale successful open source business) and if Android’s support is basically “buy a new phone”, people will switch, even to walled garden. Remember the Vista mess when MS thought that every Windows user would upgrade their machines and vendors their drivers? Didn’t work out well. Windows 7 works from 2003 machines to now. More than 100 million licenses (which means at least 150 million computers running with it) sold in six months.

So dear Android Ecosystem, just a few words for you:

Don’t. Screw. The. Users. You. Already. Have. If you do, the’y’ll bury you into oblivion.

 
Yeah yeah yeah. Be my friend but don’t fuck with me buddy.

Food.

It seems to be in the top 3 discussion here in LA or maybe the entire US. Maybe top 2 actually.

Food is everywhere. On TV it’s purely insane, it’s a joke with my girlfriend: “get our Supreme Dunkin Deep Fried Chicken Burger PLUS two Beef Tacos and French Fries with unlimited dipping sauce only for nine ninety-nine!”. Sometimes it’s not far away from that and every 10 minutes. It creeps me out.

Calories is the unit. Everybody talks with calories and knows quite deeply about nutrients or how much calories you can have in the day.

I never knew or took care of that shit, ever. Just knew that sugar was not food, that eating vegetables can almost be unlimited and that water is all you need to drink.

I’m lucky of having grow up in France with healthy home cooking for all my early years, leading me to do the same. I’m lucky of being born in a country, Europe, where the food system is maybe a little less corrupted by financial expectations and more driven toward health of its people (seriously, the FDA is a sad joke).

I realize that chance by watching two absolutely must-see videos especially for you US people. First, why would we eat better? Well to feel better, for a longer time.

How to live to be 100+

What he’s saying about the heavy plant based diet and exercise, the Grandmother Effect or the father not wanting to pay to do pretty heavy stuff in the house and do it by himself like this old multimillionaire Californian man… Well this is almost exactly how I grew up. How my parents –for no particular reason except that they were not sure it would dramatically improve their lives- would not buy robots to do the cooking but use their arms to do all these kitchen tasks to make something to eat. 365 days a year. How they would work every weekend –and enroll me- in the garden, fixing things and never ever have a 8 hours couch/food/tv program. I would of course want to do that and eat more pies and more burgers but somehow, I would say to myself that if I’m never sick, always in good shape and feeling good then the family diet must probably have something to do with that.

But also I need to be active. I always want to do stuff, fix, create I really have a hard time sitting on a couch more than for the length of a movie. I felt that there’s a sweet spot of body activity where the food quality I absorb in reasonable quantity doesn’t really matter –it just needs to be diverse-, it can even be the worse fat ass burger ever. My body is working so well it detoxifies itself. The human body is an amazingly smart, self-cleaning machine, if used. Not for burning calories, which is a dumb version of saying that your body is a full system and needs in order to activate all its parts including protection against bad stuff, to run. When sitting on a chair, it’s idling.

The second video is talking about that and also, how sugar whatever it’s processed –HFCS– or not is a poison. And in large quantity in all the US food. I looked at a yogurt in the fridge. No HFCS, but 23 fucking grams of “sugars” in a 170g portion! It’s like 5 sugar cubes in half a mug of coffee man. It’s ridiculous.

Sugar: The Bitter Truth.

Have you ever tried not to eat any sugar at all? I did. It was the worst experience ever, but I learned something this day: I can’t live without it, even if my body doesn’t really process it.

I decided to stop any sugar a few years ago, from the morning cube in the coffee to yogurts to the chocolate at night just to see what it would be. It took me three days before feeling absolutely, terribly depressed like an old crap on the sidewalk. I wasn’t expecting that at all, I remember going back from the store, feeling sick looking at all these cookies and sugar things all around. I went back buying some Petit Ecolier half a hour later.

I couldn’t believe that it was MUCH harder to stop sugar than stop smoking. Like, it’s not even the same scale. You usually substitute smoking with eating candies. You have nothing to substitute for when you stop eating sugar and your brain goes crazy really fast for that. At least for me.

Anyway again in this video, Robert H. Lustig shows how no soft drinks is a must-have for any kid diet. Just water and milk. That’s how I lived and still do though I can add some wine now. But if people around the world were drinking as much soft drink than I do or my family does, there would be no soft drink companies at all. And that would be ok.

I think I’m even immune to it now. Every time I try some Coke my stomach doesn’t even want to speak to me. It just gets mad at me and it is right when I see the slides of the above conference.

*tractor beam*

Someone in my family grew up with daily Coke from 6 to 12. She had a belly. She stopped soft drinks for the same amount of time and moved much more. She lost it. It demanded a lot of efforts and it was hard.

So seeing how a Coke can
is the equivalent for your metabolism of a beer can –hence bellies-, I’m not surprised. But you can’t say that it shouldn’t be allowed for kids to parents giving their children soft drinks. I mean, if you want to stay friend with them.

And that’s sort of depressing. The importance of food and diet here in the US feels oppressing sometimes and more precisely, out of proportion because the answers are rather simple and your genes don’t really matter: there’s good and bad carbohydrates cholesterol fat whatever, you will never have the perfect diet recipe by suppressing something –except sugar, but it’s hard- and that calories count is a really, really poor measure. Just eat the less processed food possible –never would be a good start-, not too much but diversified food, no processed drinks either and be physically active. Incroyable. We know that since the 60s ffs! It doesn’t stop parents. Even in France and Europe, obesity is growing up: less bread (glucose, good sugar) more buns (sucrose and HFCS, bad sugar) is a signal of a wrong  trend for sure.

I don’t care about food (in terms of taste) as much as I care about balance between my everyday activity and the fuel I need for it, adjusting it. That’s the important part for me, and I don’t want to track that with an app or follow any diet on the internet. I want it embedded in my habits. I just have to teach my body, over and over again with the bad –but kind of good let’s face it- food spreading endlessly around me (I’ll miss my perfect, healthy baguette forever).

Be careful, don’t slip. That’s what I’m saying to myself. Especially since I saw Wall-E.

Twittersearch on fan noise.

I believe i will have to bring back my Macbook Air. the fan is making constant noise and runs at 6/7ks rpm…not good.

The fan on my Newertech MiniStack 2.5 is failing for the third time. I really can’t say enough lousy things about it.

Solved one problem with iMac now have loud fan noise which is driving me crazy – !!!!! Ahhhhhhhhhh can’t stand it!!!

The noise of my fat PS3’s fan drove me so mad that I got a slim.

XBOX360turn down the fan noise please.#xbox360

New northbridge fan ready to install. The old one was driving me nuts with noise.

I HATE MACBOOKS!!!!!!!!!!! Why does the fan freak out and make loads of noise every time I try to film something?!!!!!!!!!

I hope my laptop fan thingie isn’t dying….I hate when it makes the odd noise….

Hm. My mactop fan shouldn’t be making that rattling noise, should it?

My laptop fan is making a buzzing noise. I shook it, and it just got louder. Just like a baby.

Checking on obscenely loud computer fan noise I’m tired of listening to. Time to crack the case.

etc. Needless to say my Dell laptop is doing the same too. All computers and piece of hardware start being silent and after some use they all are getting damn noisy, thanks to this weak design that is a cheap fan blowing hot air on an expensive silicium chip to make the temperature drop. Isn’t it stupid?

I know, we can’t really get rid of them for now, and the smaller fans are, the more they make noise and are unreliable. Hence the problem with laptops.

On the other side by making less powerful chip we can be fanless, like smartphones and netbooks are showing it. But of course we lose a lot of comfort (forget about the 24” screen and forget about the fast as “immediately” when loading a heavy web page).

Good old silent days, please come back thank you.

TDP

To understand how much we are close –and yet far away- to solve this problem and have both silent and powerful computer there’s a measure unit: TDP Thermal Design Power (in Watt). It represents the maximum amount of power the cooling system in a computer is require to dissipate. The number is usually 20 to 30% lower than what the chip is able to output when really stressed out (video encoding, games). So you always need to have more than what your processor can dissipate. Of course the faster the cpu is, the bigger is the TDP.

Full List of CPU power dissipation (long loading is long). Wikipedia, I love you.

First there’s a huge dynamic: from the single core Atom running at 1.6 GHz you can find in netbooks at less than 3W to the quad core Core 2 Extreme QX9775 at 3.2 GHz rated at 150W.

To dissipate a cpu passively with a simple chip-sized radiator it needs a TDP inferior to 10W. In a really compact environment like a phone it needs less than 3W.

If you want to passively without any need of fans to dissipate a typical 2010 desktop computer at around 65W/90W with a midrange graphic card, you need like 25 Kg of steel attached to a radiator on the CPU. Temperatures at full charge are as high as 90°C (194°F) or more on a finger nail-sized surface. Don’t forget that we need to dissipate three literally burning chips in a computer: the CPU, the GPU and the Chipset which is responsible of all the interaction with components.

25 Kg of thick black anodized aluminum does the job. But man! 

Yeah it’s kind of insane.

For the rest of a configuration though, the problem is already solved even for the high end market: sound card? No need of fans. HDDs? Not really. SSDs? Not at all.

Because progress of making cooler chip is always matched by the progress of making them more powerful, we always end up on the last trend because manufacturers (basically five companies: AMD Intel Nvidia Motorola IBM) would say that “the market decides and people want more”. Hopefully they now know. They stopped pushing the thermal envelope and the clock rate to focus on resource management, adding more core for the same energy output after facing some problems of..

Reliability

A really important parameter in being satisfied with a computer or any digital device is to have the less maintenance possible to do on it. With the extreme temperature of today’s chips and the fact that they need fans, these weak points getting clogged and making noises or simply killing machines by dying, reliability is not better but worse than 10 years ago (is the fan 3 not working well or is my watercooling pump dying?). And it requires more management than ever before.

Before the Pentium and the 100 Mhz barrier, computers were not requiring any special care. Since circa 1997, fans are obligatory and IT help desks became Dissipation Garage.

In a fanless world, machines are maintenance free. They are virtually more stable than a rock in a field. They can be covered of dust like your media center under the couch, no problem. All year long, you don’t hear anything and you don’t have to bother at all. You know there is not going to have any problem unless something heavy fall on it or if there’s some water damage. Otherwise you can forget about it and that’s the beauty of the fanless design. You know it. Your TV. Your fridge (almost). Your Hi-Fi. I want that in the computer world. All around me. But there’s more reasons for going this way.

Sustainable development and human rights

First, we need to make these hundreds of millions of machines to be useful as long as possible to avoid stupid waste. Having fanless design all around would make it easy because computers usually come out useless because of the weak fan design. If they could work without any problem and any noise I still would have my old machines, computing for a cause 24/7.

Too much electronic waste. Way too much. Discarded electronics represented 5 to 6 times as much weight as recycled electronics, polluting entire region of the world.

Think about it next time you use your phone or your gamepad.

Second, we all know and don’t want to admit it that all the digital devices and computers are made by hands by 16-18 years old Chinese women working 90 hours a week (more at Kotaku). It’s called slavery and it makes me sick just to think about it. Especially whe
n as you gadget lovers, my eyes sparkle when they see a nice and new piece of hardware.

It has an awful human cost. And I want that to slow down and even stop some day. I want these girls to use what they actually make. I want them to connect and learn as much as I did and do, thanks to the magic world of computers.

So to resume in two lines it’s either:

more power=>more power consumption=>more heat=>more noise=>less reliability=>more waste=>more slavery

or

more efficiency=>less power consumption=>less heat=>less noise=>more reliability=>less waste=>less slavery

After decades of the first, I want the second for a while. Please?

So when I’m said that as a music producer I’m legitimately anal about the noise that machines make, it’s not just that. Really.

U.S. mom’s rejection of 7-year-old outrages Russia. Me too.

Like I said in a direct French-to-english-translation on Twitter, I was adopted at 6 in France and it was already hard. It still is, in some weird ways. So I’m not surprised. I just can’t believe that the US mom did that this way, fucking up the kid some more. She may not be a mother at all and that may be totally a good thing.

I read a take on a similar adoption working out well. Yeah, with people around for years, paying extra attention to a child growing up, it works. It’s just a gigantic energy investment and this mother was obviously not prepared.

Matching Lacoste shirts 10 years before they were hype in the Paris suburbs, sense of unity bla bla.

I said horrible things to my parents too. Like yelling I don’t love you and I want to go home (foster family) or secretly wanting really bad things happening to them. But things like that happen all the time with children, adopted or not. You’re just more eager to really express it when you don’t have any connection with your parents but a legal piece of paper.

And then you grow up. You feel that as adoptive parents they do a lot. Just by looking at how friends parents behaved could tell me that my parents with all the differences we had, were taking care of me and being attentive. Even if I didn’t like it. I was looking at it as a boring process before hitting 18 years old, the age where I could do whatever I want.

But it takes time. Patience. For both children and parents.

So in this respect, I think international adoption should only exists when there’s no more kids ready for adoption in the country. In the US each year there’s around 100 000 children available for adoption. Almost every year, half of them are not adopted. Searching for the poor kid at the opposite of the world always seemed weird for me. Weird in the way “you are just thinking that you are somewhat a god spreading happiness and it’s more about how you feel than actually helping a child” way. It’s even worse in France: 4 000 children adopted each year, 3 000 coming from foreign countries says Wikipedia.

Anyway, I guess the good thing is that adoption is happening less and less even if we’re talking much more about it now (adoption was huge in the 70s but taboo).

So you may ask: would you adopt a child? I wanted to when I was in my 20s. Now I’m 30 and man, I don’t feel I ever could. I don’t feel I could ever have a child actually. Trying to think about it is like googling google at Google HQs, a wormhole appears in my head and makes me feel like antimatter. Or something like that.

There’s not a day without thinking about building a passive house. The number of benefits from having a passive house (PH) is just the key and the answer to a shitload of problems, like global warming. It’s available right now.

The principle is simple: best insulation possible so that you don’t need classic heating system because machines and humans are enough to heat a superinsulated room. Also, trying to get the maximum out of the sun with big and wide exposure to the south.

Get the point?

Numbers? Well Wikipedia says it all:

• This is between 75 and 95% less energy for space heating and cooling than current new buildings that meet today’s US energy efficiency codes. The Passivhaus in the German-language camp of Waldsee, Minnesota uses 85% less energy than a house built to Minnesota building codes.^[25]
• In the United Kingdom, an average new house built to the Passive House standard would use 77% less energy for space heating, compared to the Building Regulations.^[26]
• In Ireland, it is calculated that a typical house built to the Passive House standard instead of the 2002 Building Regulations would consume 85% less energy for space heating and cut space-heating related carbon emissions by 94%.

When you think that the majority of carbon emissions come from housing more than anything else, you understand how much this PH is important to the world.

We just need to be effing efficient and Planet Earth will be fine.

More at ArchDaily. (photos by Paul Ott)

Anyway, the important thing in PH is insulation. Insulation is complex and you must think “wait, it costs a lot and it’s full of chemical stuff so PH being 100% clean, my ass”

You are wrong. Introducing to you the best insulation product ever. It’s 100% natural. It grows anywhere with no need of pesticides or fertilizers. After a natural treatment (mixed with lime), it doesn’t burn, nor can be eat by animals or bugs. Oh, and it’s water-resistant of course. Did I say that it was also an excellent acoustic protection?

It’s call HEMP. Which is illegal in the US of course, it would destroy so many businesses. Also, Monsanto doesn’t have the patent on that shit and never will so they’d rather ban it. US people, time to wake up.

That being said, what are the benefits of the PH in terms of Quality of Life? They are numerous:

• Inside temperature is homogeneous; it is impossible to have single rooms (e.g. the sleeping rooms) at a different temperature from the rest of the house.
• Since there are no radiators, there is more space on the rooms’ walls.
• The air is fresh, and very clean.
• A 100€/year of heating bill, even with bad ass winter is totally achievable.
• You need a third of the time you need to build a classic house. It’s 66% faster to live in the house you are building if you want: a PH for 4 people can be build in 4 months.
• Construction cost used to be around 14% more expensive upfront than conventional buildings but in Germany the cost is already equivalent. And if you’re aiming for a lot of wood instead of cement and choose hemp insulation over the conventional polyurethane and chemical ones, it gets dirt cheap (Paris price is around 7 000€/m² when you can build a PH for less than 2 000/m²).

The bad things:

• It doesn’t work well in a tropical climate.
• The house becomes a system. Therefore you need to tweak it from time to time (having plants so the air doesn’t get too dry, verifying ventilation systems and make them efficient all along the year, etc).
• Because you need to minimize the number of surface exposed to the outside, PH are by design meant to be as square and tight as possible. The more the house is spread out, the harder it gets to regulate heat/cool.

Do. Want.

I didn’t know what to aim for if I was thinking building a home. Now I do.

26°c. ‘Nuff said.

Time to get ready to drive to San Francisco and have a wedding weekend before getting back to LA all the way along the coast, looking at the ocean.

Sounds good to me!