But I think the most exiting thing will be to see Gotland in the winter :-)

The event takes place on the 10th of December in Visby. See you there!

Those would give me the ability to have the same interface no matter laptop, iPhone, iPad och any other device and as the kronan på verket; seemless syncing via Dropbox.com

… but it didn’t turn out that easy at all albeit the current plain text frenzy spreading the interwebs …

First of all; Writer for iPad doesn’t support subfolders, so it doesn’t integrate well in my workflow if I don’t want to change my way of working and my folder structure. I had to use the PlainText app on the iPad for the files that I kept outside Writers default folder.

The not so plain text encoding.

On the surface the apps looks great; just use the plain text format to encode your textfiles. But little do the user know that the plain text cake comes in a variety of flavours.

PlainText from Hog Bay Software has really strict UTF-8 encodig rules, anything not UTF-8 would not work in PlainText. I like that, that’s my kind of keeping it strict and minimal.

[Update] PlainText now supports the UTF-16 format since v1.2.

Writer from Information Architects on the other hand encodes plain text files as UTF-16.

Writeroom (also from Hog Bay Software) does not have any control of how it encodes the documents, it simply opens the files using the OSX native open file functionality, and there is now way to change the default encoding via Writeroom settings. Result; a new file created in Writeroom would not be UTF-8.

Jesse the developer of PlainText and WriteRoom says in the WriteRoom Google group: “Sorry setting the default setting isn’t supported. I just use the default OS X call for opening the file, and that’s supposed to detect the format most of the time. You can try opening and saving the file in TextEdit, I think that will add a utf-8 metadata attribute that WriteRoom will use to open the file correctly.”

Then there is the fourth part of the party; OSX TextEdit app. By default TextEdit is set to use ”Automatic encoding” when opening and saving plain text files. So it keeps the current encoding of the document; open a file from Writer (UTF-16) will save it as UTF-16. Open a rich text document (.rtf) will save it as rich text formatting and so on.

The result has been a minor nightmare full of files beeing blank in one app, working in another and a lot of logging into Dropbox.com to revert and restore files.

The solution for now …

Here is what you have to do to get all files cleaned up and working on all devices/apps.

Start off by opening TextEdit, change the “Open and Save”-settings to “Automatic” for opening and “UTF-8” for saving files. Then open all the textfiles that you want to ‘clean’, or that you have in your writing-envirionemnt. Do ”Save as …” and make sure the encoding is set to ”UTF-8” in the Save as dialog. After that you have to go back and change the default TextEdit “Open”-settings to “UTF-8”.

After that you must download the Writeroom 2.5 development Beta from the WriteRoom Dev Versions cos it supports setting the default encoding to UTF-8.

Writer still has to change it’s standard encoding into UTF-8 … we’ll have to wait for that to happend.

PlainText has loosened it’s encoding rules and now reads UTF-16 (iA Writer files).

Read more or register over at Marknadsforeningen.info

See you here!

After the first one or two steps where the video was uploaded to YouTube and published on Erics site credit in most cases were lost.

So my tip is to always include your name/site/twittername or something on the first frames in the video, but don’t pester the poster image with it.

If you don’t do that you might miss a ton of goodwill if your work goes viral.

Jeremy Messersmith – Tatooine from Eric Power on Vimeo.

I’ve embedded the Vimeo version cos it has the correct credits :-).

We teach you to read and write so that you can understand the world around you and have a chance to create your own values and views. So that you can form, affect and change yours and others opinions. So that you can engage in causes that you value. So that you maybe one day can change the world.

Our understanding of why we shall teach you this is based on the way information have been distributed the last 100 years; from a variety of sources with exclusive access to information; sources that decided to filter and shape the information the way they saw it and then distributed it to the rest of the world in the form of tv, newspapers, radio and printed matter.

Unfortunately the media landscape have changed dramatically; when newspapers, radio and tv were born they were independent, they tried to stay neutral and represent the truth. Today only a handful of outlets owns the news, the tv, the radio and the music. Truth and neutrality is no longer guaranteed.

Today you kids have to rely on the internet to stay independent. But with one big differance; there is no one collecting and gathering the truth for you. You have to do that yourself. The good thing is that it’s out there free for any of you to access. It’s in the Twitter streams, the Facebook statuses, the blogs and the open source tools, the api:s, the openGov projects, the UN databases, schools, librarys and a lot more.

But if you don’t know how to access, compile, compare and work with all this raw data you will be as easy mislead as we have been.

So, kids, I’m not saving up huge amounts for you to spend on housing, education and leisure in the future. I’m working my ass off to learn programming; PHP, Javascript, jQuery, C++, XML, JSON and more so that I firstly can make a living and help Malin support you and our family. Secondly so that I can give you the tools and knowledge to access the worlds sources of information and independently investigate and evaluate the world that is ahead of you. So that you can be free to find out things for yourself. Cos without the basic knowledge of computer programming you will not be able to draw your own conclutions. You can not form, affect and change yours or others opinions. You can not engage in causes that you value. You cannot change the world.

/Dad.