Head in the cloud

No apologies to New Line Cinema or people with actual photoshop skills

A little while ago I admitted I was worried that after purchasing a Nexus 4 I would become a walking, talking advertisement for Google. A week later and I used some dodgy Titanic analogies to confirm that I was indeed in love with my new phone. Fast forward 9 months and my Nexus hasn’t let me down once—unlike my Blackberry, which constantly disappointed me, but, as with any problem child, I still loved it and just bitched about it behind its back.

Speaking of being let down by technology, my alleged laptop decided recently that it had had enough of being carted around in my K-Mart backpack, and decided to passive-aggressively fry its own battery rather than admit truthfully that it didn’t want to go on another jaunt with me to the library (P.S: my therapist thinks the reason I anthropomorphise my devices is that I feel it’s a lot healthier to have 8hr+/day relationships with things I consider ‘friends’ rather than pieces of humming silicon. Also my phone is rly cute).

Anyway, my laptop still works, but only if it’s plugged in. For a while I ignored its childish protests and carried it around along with its trusty power cord. Portability is important for me at the moment, because I’m “writing” a Master’s “thesis” and am “studying” a lot at the university library. Things were peachy if I could find an outlet, but more often than not this involved spending hours finding available powerpoints and then draping the cord precariously across tables, walkways, time/space continuums etc.

Also, for some reason, the designers at HP decided it would be a nice idea to build a brick right into the power cord itself. I wonder if this is actually an anti-theft device: not to use as a weapon against thieves, but rather because the would-be burglar is just too tired to carry the cinder block power cord further than three steps.

What this is all leading to (eventually) is that I finally got sick of my laptop’s resistance and started thinking about alternatives. Because I like tactile (and positive) feedback when I type I ruled out buying a tablet, although I did briefly consider one of those tablets that look like a laptop but can then detach from the keyboard. I ultimately decided against this because most of them were really small and I have kipfler potatoes for fingers. Also I learned my lesson from a flimsy phone I had circa 2010, which had a screen that flipped up and exposed the keyboard (my god, remember flip phones?).

Flipping, spinning and detachable doohickeys are fine in theory and look good when the salesperson is demonstrating them to you, but the reality is you want something INDESTRUCTIBLE and when intentional partial destructibility is built into the design then you just know something will go wrong sooner rather than later. The only time I will allow any of my devices to be taken apart at will is when we finally perfect Lego/phone technology, which granted this guy has given a pretty good go but clearly portability was way down on his design brief (also, vale Blackberry).

Image courtesy http://gadgetsin.com/

Enter the Toshiba CB30 Chromebook. According to the Toshiba website, it

STARTS FAST AND STAYS FAST

TO KEEP YOU ON CLOUD NINE

Who can resist such corporate poetry? I’ve been informed that the words ‘starts’, ‘fast’ and ‘cloud nine’ are all joint owned by Toshiba-Google, and so I have reprinted them here with their benevolent permission (but how could they refuse? I’m pretty much writing a 600 word ad for them).

Look, I’ll be honest. I don’t write tech-heavy reviews of products, or even really evaluate them properly w/r/t other options. I’m more of a gut-feel kinda writer (i.e. lazy) and the DPP seal of approval for the Chromebook is an emphatic WINNER. Here’s why:

- It has a battery life that lasts more than a tenth of a second. This isn’t me being hyperbolic; if my old laptop becomes unplugged it means instant death. So in this case, a battery life of 8 hours seems like an eternity.

- It’s light. You might not have gotten the subtle hints when I was talking about portability and brick power cords before, but my old laptop is a pain to carry around. The only bad news about getting the Chromebook is that I now seriously have to consider buying a gym membership, because lugging the HP around was the only thing keeping me in shape.

- It’s cheap. Maybe too cheap. To be honest the build quality is middling at best. I admit the whole thing feels a bit like one of those fake laptops you give to a seven year old that has lollies inside (Toshiba-Google: possibilities of lollies being included with next Chromebook? You know those stickers that are like ‘Intel Inside’? Imagine if it said ‘Fantail Inside’). But, surprisingly, the keyboard itself feels nice, and this is where 90% of computer-human interaction takes place.

-It’s not a Mac. I will never, ever get over my irrational aversion to Apple products (except iTunes. ILY).

The elephant in the cloud (SWIDT) at this point is that the computer is pretty much totally dependent on internet connectivity. I admit being so reliant on Google servers not fucking up is a little concerning, but really, I already depended on them anyway. I would advise against cloud computing unless you’re like me and have an unhealthy obsession with backing stuff up and have predictable file naming systems. Right now I back up everything I’ve written for the day on a USB, and when I get home to my housebound HP I download everything out of the cloud onto my hard drive. 

The whole internet connectivity thing isn’t really a big deal anyway, because I figure if I’m in a place without WiFi then I’m not there to study anyway. Plus if worst comes to worst, the computer can save documents temporarily offline and then update once an internet connection is established again. Feel free to quote this ‘feature’ to me when I lose three days of work due to a connection error.

So there you have it, an unbiased, unpaid, well-thought-out endorsement for the Chromebook. I figure that if I keep doing this often enough Google will one day send me a real thing to review. Of course, knowing me, that will be the day after I pledge everlasting and unconditional allegiance to Apple.

Quiz❤p

I’m not ashamed to admit that lately I’ve been using an app which trawls its extensive database in order to pair me with a suitable partner. When a match is found, a few questions are asked, some brief answers given, but—generally—after spending a few minutes with them via my phone, I never talk to that person again.

Sure, there are more ‘traditional’ ways to get what I want without resorting to a phone app. I know for a fact that on Wednesday nights my local pub puts on an event for people who are after the same thing as me. But the truth is only QuizUp can give me twenty-four hour access to other people who want to play general knowledge trivia. It’s just the kind of connectedness I’ve come to expect in our ADSL2+ 100mb/s 4G society.

QuizUp is simple. You pick a category that interests you and are then paired against an opponent. There are seven questions per game, and you have ten seconds to answer each. Since you’re playing against somebody else, speed is important. The quicker you answer, the more points you get. If you both get the question right, and answer at the same time, you will both be awarded the same amount of points. If you answer incorrectly you get nothing.

Things get interesting towards the end of the game, because the last round is worth double points. There is a special QuizUp-specific type of frustration that arises when you’ve been leading the entire game only for Susie from Ireland to overtake you in the last round by somehow correctly remembering that James Buchanan (1791-1868) was the only U.S President to never marry. Interestingly I’ve found the only way to soothe this frustration is to play another game. And another.

Part of the addictiveness comes from the game being based around the XP model, in which players can level up as they play (and win) more games. As with all XP games, the points are meaningless outside the game itself, yet it soon became incredibly important to me that I acquired as many of them as quickly as possible. I began to find myself becoming unreasonably agitated when I found myself in situations (studying, showering, sleeping) where it would be inappropriate/impossible to answer questions re past winners of Canada’s annual film awards (aka The Genies).

The real fun begins when you start challenging your friends to play. What better way to destroy a friendship than by challenging your otherwise mild friend to a three-minute battle for knowledge supremacy? In fact I imagine QuizUp is second only to being asked by someone to help them move house on the ‘Best Ways to Strain an Otherwise Perfectly Nice Friendship’ list (other items on the list include being asked for unreasonable discounts from your place of work, and being forced to help them entrap a large spider that has made its residence in their glovebox ((for what it’s worth my plan is always to incinerate the entire car immediately. Spiders in enclosed high-speed metal boxes =/= life longevity))). I estimate that within the first twenty-four hours of playing I directly influenced/forced no less than five people to download the app. Couple that with this keyword-heavy post and I really feel that QuizUp owe me something (NB: I will accept payment in XP points).

WRT to the first two paragraphs, and at the risk of overdoing the whole dating app thing, playing QuizUp has made me think there might some sort of market for a combined dating/general knowledge app. What better way to weed out potential mates than by forcing them to display at least a basic level of intelligence? You can even choose specific categories on QuizUp, which makes me think that Tinder should have some sort of quiz tailored for your own purposes. Anybody who answers ‘yes’ to the questions ‘Do you sometimes leave Vegemite-covered knives on your pillow?’ or ‘Do you ever find yourself  wearing football jumpers when not explicitly involved in a game of football?’ will be instantly deleted.

I’ve now had the game for three days, and times are tough. I’ve destroyed my data limit. I’ve developed a nasty callous on my answering thumb. I process everyday conversational questions in multiple choice answers (What should we have for lunch? Sandwiches. Burritos. Salad. Soup.) I’m not looking for sympathy. I just want answers.

The Past is Just a Story We Tell Ourselves

I saw Her at the cinema the other night. It’s the sort of film that should be seen in a group setting, not least because by the end of it I felt a strong desire to be near other people. Cosmic loneliness aside, the act of watching a film with others is simply more fun. The scene where Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) frantically bring each other to climax was greatly enhanced by the nervous laughs of a cinema unfamiliar with human/operating system sex (hint: GET USED TO IT, PEOPLE). 

Full disclosure before I go on: I’ve only seen the film once and I’ve abstained from reading much commentary on it. These are both conscious decisions. I can’t wait to watch it again but I want to get my initial reactions down before they’re tempered by an overly conscious re-watching. Furthermore, I feel the issues dealt with in the film will be interpreted so differently by everybody and I don’t yet want other people’s thoughts thrust upon me. For the same reason I’ll forgive you if you want to stop reading, at least for the time being. If you haven’t seen the film then definitely don’t read on. This post is full of spoilers and my malformed opinions.

Rarely a week goes by without an opinion piece or essay appearing that cautions against our overreliance on small electronic devices to do our bidding, or global entities that are fastidiously collecting all manners of personal data. Privacy is usually the key issue; the discussion often revolves around how much of our personal information we’ve given up/will be willing to give up for the sake of convenience. Her addresses these issues by exploring not the consequences of what happens when that information is used against us, but rather when that information is used to seduce us.

Truthfully, it’s a premise that isn’t overly original: ‘what if a person fell in love with a machine?’ (I can think of a Futurama episode that dealt with the same topic). Along the way the film also deals with other sci-fi staples such as the future of artificial intelligence and what, if anything, is unique about human experience (is it having feelings? Samantha in Her says she has them. Is ‘erring’ human? Samantha, while hyper-intelligent, still makes judgement mistakes. Does it boil down to having body? Humans are not unique on earth in this respect).

What makes Her worth watching is not necessarily the premise but the way it presents this premise. The film, set in the near future (say 2025) does not ask its audience to make giant conceptual leaps. In the film, mobile technology looks familiar, even if it is much more powerful. Most people carry around a small mobile device and an earpiece, and screen input has become secondary to speech recognition and audio feedback. Visual UIs are only used when absolutely necessary—nobody in the film ‘reads’ emails but rather has emails read to them—and when they do appear, visual interfaces are just as likely to be immersive projections as they are to be screens or monitors. 

The idea of somebody walking around apparently talking to themselves is not comical or unfamiliar as it would have been ten or even five years ago. As Craig Mazin pointed out in the Scriptnotes podcast, the level of technological advancement in the film is believably restrained. Mazin said it was nice that in the film people still opened their (physical) mailboxes with a key, rather than, say, a series of voice commands or ridiculous tubes depositing mail straight into the living room. The film avoids the 1960s flying cars and treadmills ‘World of Tomorrow’ trope and instead depicts our own world after a couple of minor system upgrades.

There is no escaping the fact that the movie toes a fine line between deconstructing a patriarchal fantasy (a man who finds a woman to do everything he wants/needs) and actually perpetuating this fantasy. But I think Samantha has enough of her own agency, and Theodore is too thoughtful, for the movie to go down this path. The only domineering male character (Amy’s husband) is clearly portrayed as a jerk and is jettisoned halfway through the movie. This is not to say the movie is flawless (I don’t think it passes the Bechdel test) and there is, I believe, a more complex feminist analysis to be constructed from this film, one which I would be very interested to read.

One of the things I liked about the film was that its commentary on the business side of technology was practically non-existent. There was a short moment with an Apple/Microsoft-like commercial which enticed people to try the new personalised OS1, but aside from that there was no heavy handed commentary or suggestion that Silicon Valley giants are trying to take over the world or enslave us by having us fall in love with our computers. Had this been the case, the movie would have turned out very differently. It would have become a film about corporations and greed rather than a film about human-computer (and human-human) relationships. There was no scene showing Theodore actually buying the device, no gimmicky ‘Troubleshooting’ gags; in fact, as far as I could tell, no company name for the manufacturer of OS1 was ever given. Theodore’s lack of interest in contacting the manufacturer of his software—even at a point where it is malfunctioning and his OS can’t be ‘found’—means the story can focus on the relationship between Theodore and Samantha (yay) rather than Theodore and a multinational corp (yawn).

I also really liked how the majority of people in the film accepted the idea of somebody dating their OS. Her is set in a world where technology is not cold and domineering but rather pleasantly complimentary. People in the film seem much more willing to accept that just because something happens online doesn’t make it any less ‘real’; a problem we still struggle with when we lament the lack of ‘real’ or ‘human’ interaction that (mostly) younger generations seem to be eschewing in favour of connecting over devices. Of course, in the film the connection is with an operating system rather than another person which, for all the willingness for people to accept it, ultimately carries its own problems. 

  

The major problem with loving your OS, it turns out, reflects our greatest fear of technology: that it will supersede us. There is a primal fear that the technology we create will end up destroying us. This is generally presented as apocalyptically violent, as with the atomic bomb in Dr. Strangelove, or Skynet in Terminator, but Her deftly turns the idea of physical destruction on its head and replaces it instead with emotional destruction. The film reinforces the fragility of human existence: we are so lonely, so vulnerable, that we seek companionship wherever we can find it. Once found, we cling to it stubbornly—blindly—and it seems ridiculous that we’re always so surprised, so hurt, if (when) it doesn’t work out. Perhaps that is the quality that makes us uniquely human: our willingness to continue to do something even when we know it will bring us pain. Yeah, that sounds about right.

Swept Off My Feet

It’s great when a brilliant person admits to doing something mundane because it makes you think you might be brilliant too. This was my thought process when J.K Rowling revealed she was an avid Minesweeper player. Aside from proving that she uses Windows (because only dark witches or wizards use The Operating System That Shall Not Be Named), Rowling’s confession confirmed that playing Minesweeper may not be a total waste of time but rather one of those absorbing activities (like gardening or showering) that allow the creative juices to flow unselfconsciously.

Unfortunately it turns out that as well as being a better writer than me, Rowling is also a superior Minesweeper player. Her best time for clearing the Expert level is 99 seconds. My personal best is solving the Beginner level in one second, thanks to that game-breaking glitch which pops up every once in a while and lets you win on the first click.

For what appears to be a simple game, Minesweeper has a convoluted history. Minesweeping games existed before the Windows version, and the first program that resembled Minesweeper as we know it was a 1983 game called ‘Mined-Out’. The game was written by Ian Andrew and designed for the ZX Spectrum, an early personal computer popular in the United Kingdom. The ZX Spectrum was a revolution in home computing at the time, featuring a colour screen and up to 48kb of RAM (for those keeping score, the computer I’m writing this post on has 4GB of RAM, or 9.5367 ⁷ times the amount of RAM of the Spectrum).

Screenshot from Mined-Out, an early minesweeping game written for the Spectrum ZX computer.
Image courtesy of www.minesweeper.info/wiki

Mined-Out featured aspects of gameplay that would be familiar to Windows Minesweeper players, such as a gridded playing field, numerical clues indicating the number of mines adjacent to your current location, and increasing difficulty levels. The game also included features which never made it to Microsoft’s iteration of the game, such as the bizarre ability to win bonus points for successfully rescuing ‘female worms’ from the dangerous minefield. I suppose I’ll leave it up to you to decide if this makes Mined-Out superior or inferior to the well-loved (but worm-free) Windows version.

Following Mined-Out were a number of similar games which expanded on the minesweeper concept, such as the fun sounding ‘Relentless Logic’ (1985), named from this melodramatic passage from the game’s introduction:

You have two tools at your disposal. One is a mine detector. It will tell you how many mines are hidden in squares surrounding you. You also have one of the most important attributes known to man ... RELENTLESS LOGIC.

The game’s premise is simple: you are a private in the US Marines who has inexplicably been given the critical task of delivering a message that will save the United States from oblivion. In order to deliver your message you must successfully negotiate a minefield. It’s a shame that Windows Minesweeper doesn’t provide a context for your dangerous (and seemingly never-ending) task, but I suppose there are only so many times a low ranking private can save the lives of 313 million citizens before the concept becomes tiresome.

Screenshot from Relentless Logic
Image courtesy of www.minesweeper.info/wiki

The Windows iteration of Minesweeper (a.k.a Winmine) was written in 1989 by Microsoft employees Robert Donner and Curt Johnson. Johnson had already written a rudimentary minefield game, and gave the source code of this program to Donner who had expressed interest in testing out Windows’ programming capabilities. In the early versions of the game, the mouse cursor was represented by a foot which became a bloody stump if the player clicked on a mine. The game was released as part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack games suite in October 1990 (which, according to the packaging, is ‘the most fun you can have with Microsoft Windows!’). When Microsoft released Windows 3.1 in April 1992 Minesweeper (and Solitaire) were included with the operating system, and a global addiction was born.

No caption necessary.
Image courtesy of http://www.minesweeper.info/wiki

Fast forward to 2013 where I am now playing the newest version of Minesweeper included with Windows 7. I’m sad to say the latest iteration has lost some of the minimalistic charm of the earlier versions. The dull grey grid has been ditched and replaced with shaded coloured squares, and the default (and frankly terrifying, especially if you inadvertently left your volume up too loud) 8-bit bomb sound has been replaced by an OTT animation of the mines exploding. But the most grievous loss is the familiar smiley face overlord who would turn wide-eyed and open-mouthed every time a move was in the process of being made. Sadly, the proficient sweeper is now robbed of the thrill of watching old mate smiley face throw on a pair of chic sunglasses when the minefield is successfully swept. And we call this progress?

Windows 7 Minesweeper, sans the smiley face.

At this point you may or may not have questioned the inherent political incorrectness of a game involving land mines. The International Campaign to Ban Winmine was created by Sergio Chiodo in 1999, and the organisation cited that the game was offensive to landmine victims and those who risk their lives to clear real life minefields. In the latest versions of the game Microsoft enabled an option for sweepers to play on a field of daisies instead of land mines. The UN has also used Minesweeper inspired posters to alert people to the unknown number of active landmines around the world which claim 65 casualties every day. 

Tiptoeing through the tulips in Windows 7.

About the only thing that hasn’t changed in the latest version of Minesweeper is that I’m still rubbish at it, and it took me several (i.e. twenty five) attempts to win a game on Beginner level. It’s a game that requires patience, attention to detail, the ability to recognise patterns, and a grasp of basic number logic. I am terrible at all of these things. My current win percentage is 8%. My main strategy—a term which I use liberally—is to click around the board at random until I either step on a mine or uncover enough squares to make the game appear winnable. At this point I apply some rudimentary logic and flag about half the mines before becoming stuck/bored and clicking at random again.

Never underestimate the power of the internet to bring people with similar interests—no matter how seemingly niche—together. For most people, Minesweeper is a brief respite from the drudgery of day-to-day existence, and the packaging of the original Microsoft Entertainment Pack reflects a game built for casual play: ‘No more boring coffee breaks! Frustrated when your calls are put on hold? Minesweeper will keep you entertained.’ But for some, Minesweeper is serious business. A small but passionate community of Minesweeper players gather together on the Authoritative Minesweeper website, and the site’s collection of high scores, rules and in-depth discussion of what on the surface appears to be such a basic game is indeed authoritative to the point of obsession. The site also includes a wiki which is surprisingly detailed and includes invaluable tips, most of which proved my suspicions that there are indeed proper ways to be a good Minesweeper player and ‘clicking randomly’ is not one of them.

Due to my penchant for being fascinated by highly passionate/obsessive people—a penchant positively correlated to the apparent unimportance of the passion/obsession in question—I spent a lot of time reading through the Authoritative Minesweeper forum. The community has coined a variety of Minesweeper related words and concepts such as ‘chording’, a playing technique using both mouse buttons which increases speed; ‘3BV’, an abbreviation which relates to the number of left clicks required to clear a given Minesweeper board; and ‘Elmar Syndrome’, when a player equals their personal best time many times without breaking it—so called after German player Elmar Zimmermann who was stuck on his own personal best time for 13 months before finally breaking it.

On the forums you’ll find people discussing many things to do with the game, but like any group of competitors, the primary discussions revolve around skill improvement. The best players sweep at an alarmingly rapid rate, so much so that at first I was suspicious that the high score videos posted were fake. After reading pages of tips and strategy on the forum, as well as estimations of time spent playing the game daily (upwards of four hours in some cases) I could only conclude that these players are indeed that good (as shown in the video below).

On the forums, advice is given (whether asked for or not) on how to improve sweeping times, including these tips from user EWQ Minesweeper, who suggests ‘lubricating your mouse to reduce friction [seems sensible], increasing screen resolution to see more squares at once [ditto], using a flatter mouse to reduce air drag [um…], sitting closer to the screen to see squares sooner [hang on…], and using a shorter mouse cable for faster clicking’ [I’m pretty sure physics doesn’t work like that].

The community takes competitive play extremely seriously. As with any competitive pursuit where personal prestige and records are involved, cheating occurs. Those accused of cheating will be asked to provide further evidence of their sweeping skills, and anybody caught bending the rules will usually be shamed out of the community. Common cheating tactics include using Photoshop to doctor screenshots of record scores or using ‘solver’ computer programs. Suspected cheaters’ videos are scrutinised heavily by other players; one cheater was only caught years after the fact when another player was watching the record video ‘for fun’ and noticed an inconsistency in the playing board numbers. Other cheaters will go to great lengths to make their cheated scores seem legitimate, meaning that they may spend months posting fake times before claiming a new record.

To combat cheating and to regulate the playing field so that record times could be comparable, in 2002 a group of players established The Winmine Congress. Consisting of an elected group of hard-core sweepers who corresponded via email, the Congress attempted to provide a governing body for competitive Minesweeper players. The Congress followed a surprisingly familiar political trajectory and was accused of lacking transparency by other community members. It was eventually superseded by the establishment of the International Minesweeper Committee in 2005. The IMC has banned the use of Microsoft Minesweeper from being used for official rankings because the game has several bugs and known issues which drastically increase the potential for players to gain an unfair advantage. The total actions of Congress and the IMC remain vastly outside the level of detail I wish to cover in this piece (and probably a level of detail that few people will ever require), but if you’re curious, webmaster Damien Moore has gone to great lengths to preserve its history and detailed accounts of the groups’ actions can be found over at the Minesweeper wiki page.

Minesweeper adheres to Bushnell’s Theorem (coined by Nolan Bushnell, whose diverse resume includes being the founder of both Atari and Chuck E. Cheese) which states that good games should be easy to learn but difficult to master. Anybody with basic numeracy skills can understand the rules of Minesweeper very quickly, but the difficulty increases when the size of the playing grid increases. This allows players to scale their own difficulty levels and to keep challenging themselves as they become more proficient.

Furthermore, Minesweeper is an ego-destroying, soul-challenging, mind-numbing one player game. There’s undoubtedly something uniquely satisfying about competing against your own inescapable flesh, especially when you’re so bad that the only person you would remotely have a chance of beating is your own losing self. Even if you’re not quite at the level of investing in the most streamlined computer mouse, Minesweeper is compulsively addictive. A big reason for this has to do with the game’s simplicity and minimalism. The real challenge of Minesweeper lies not in finding mines, but rather in finding a way to force yourself to stop.

Many thanks go to Damien Moore et al. over at http://www.minesweeper.info/wiki/ who are responsible for the wonderfully detailed record keeping which formed the basis for my research for this post.