One thing that greatly saddens me about digital media and communicating via the internet or other technology is that we then start choosing which people we communicate the most with based on the technology they happen to use. Like if you use Facebook mostly, you’re probably going to communicate a lot less with people who don’t use facebook. Same goes with SMS, IRC, etc.

I think that digital tools should make it easier to choose who we want to communicate with, not dictate part of that decision. A big way to fascilitate that is to allow different media to interoperate. If you used email before say 1998, then you might recall it was very common for email systems to not work with other email systems. There isn’t really an easy way to do this these days, and then we have companies built on business models that rely on trying to get you to only communicate using their medium (Facebook is a good current example, AOL is a old and dead example).

I’ve been trying to do this for good long while, so that people can communicate with me using their chosen medium, no matter which medium I happen to like. Here are some examples of things I’ve done to help further this goal:

• having Google Voice number as my “mobile” number, which forwards to:
  • my Vonage home VoIP line
  • a free IPKall phone number which connects to an antisip free SIP account, which runs on:
    • Ekiga on Ubuntu
    • Telephone.app on Mac OS X
    • built-in VoIP support on Nokia N810 running Maemo
• using Google Voice for SMS, which gives me
  • a web interface for sending and receiving SMS
  • an method for sending and receiving SMS via email
  • plus my custom procmail script, which forwards SMS to my Jabber IM account
• having my Skype account forward to my home phone when I’m offline on that service
• Using Adium and Pidgin to sign into AIM, Jabber, Gtalk, Facebook Chat, Yahoo IM, Twitter, Bonjour XMPP Chat, and IRC

So that gives me two main interfaces to deal with: email for voicemail, SMS, email, and Facebook messages; and IM for the whole range of chat/instant messaging platforms including SMS. I do a lot of emailing, so I usually SMS from my normal inbox, and I get voicemail there too, so I can quickly reply back. Then as long as my laptop has internet, which is almost any time I’m sitting in front of it, then you can reach me via the telephone. No more missed calls because my house or office doesn’t have standard cell/mobile service. This stuff is getting easier and easier, there is no good reason to accept being pidgeoned-holed because of some company’s bad business model.

There is a struggle on the internet to fight against its very nature. The internet is really good at freely spreading bits, but media companies want to control the bits as much as possible. We can see one aspect of this struggle in the arms race between tools for downloading from video sites like Vimeo, YouTube, etc. and the efforts that those companies put into preventing people from downloading the video.

For a long time, I was using a javascript bookmarklet, which was really nice and easy to use. But that stopped working, so then I started using online services like http://savevid.com and http://keepvid.com, which work pretty well. I was recently introduced to Download Helper, which is the best video download tool yet. Its a Firefox plugin that will download the video after its been fully played. So just press play on the video, then go to Download Helper on the toolbar and select download, and wait for it to come down.

http://at.or.at/hans/pd/play/200voices.zip

I was just working on a library of objects for creating and managing many instances. In the process I created a couple examples to play with:

• ticker.pd, a 100 voice clock ticker, make it tick very fast!
• run-200voicestest.pd, a 200 voice sample stretcher and panner

These are based on voicepoly/voicepolywrap, which aims to be an easy-to-use replacement for nqpoly4. You can drop voicepoly.pd and voicepolywrap.pd into your path and then use it from anywhere without having to copy it into your project.