Category Archives: Social Media

New Year Resolutions

Posted on by
1

This new year I resolved to be done with Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. I had abandoned Twitter a long time ago, Reddit was easy as I was never really invested in that platform anyways, and then most recently leaving Facebook behind.

It needs a little characterization. I haven’t deleted my Facebook account, but what I have done is ceased to engage on that platform. I still do check in once a week just to mop up my timeline recommendations from people putting my name on their posts and otherwise just establishing a heartbeat there so that the people who are on the service and follow me notice that I still live. I suppose that eventually even bothering with the heartbeat updates will grow tiresome and I’ll give up on that as well.

I have instead moved my entire social networking existence to a new service called Imzy. It’s at imzy.com, and I encourage everyone to join me there. There are some pretty good AUP rules in place and communities can also have extended rules, building off the core AUP of the site itself. Imzy is a perfect place to have real discussions with people online. There is a culture in Imzy which I haven’t found anywhere else. It’s this lack of trolling that I witnessed and it’s what led me to dump Facebook.

I don’t know what this means for this blog. Imzy is a great platform all on its own, and when it comes to blogging, my user community has a lot of features that my blog can’t meet. The sense of community I think is what is missing from a lot of services, and my blog. This service is mostly just a billboard for me to yell at the darkness. There aren’t any real conversations going on here, unlike in Imzy.

I figure if I don’t post more blog entries I may just archive all of this stuff and shutter the service completely. Then again, I may just be lazy and let this blog long-tail it to eternity. Only time will tell.

Assert The Win

Posted on by
Reply

Sometimes it’s the best thing to assert you win and walk away from a toxic problem. So far today I’ve done that quite a bit. What have I abandoned?

I’ve walked away from Facebook. It’s been four days since I even logged into Facebook and since then I haven’t missed it. I’ve been catching up on my news; the Spiceworks Community board consumes a lot of time. Then after that, I turned my attention to my Pocket list. There just isn’t enough time anymore to deal with Facebook. When I logged into it, I had eighteen notifications, and I frowned and realized that I didn’t care that much. I’m writing a lot of my thoughts into my journal after coming to the realization that sharing with others isn’t going to be a positive experience. Now nearly everything on Facebook is an unpleasant experience. So, abandoning toxic things seems to be a good thing for me.

Another toxic system is Office365. Microsoft and I go back for a long while, right along with my almost palpable hate for that company and their products. Going into just how Office365 lets me down is very dull. Nearly every interaction has me wishing I could just close my laptop, put it in my backpack and run away from my life. Everything that has some Microsoft technology associated with it has me frowning in deep disappointment. Alas, there is no way to escape the Great Beast of Redmond, so we gnash our teeth and endure the horrors.

The final horror is WordPress itself. I use a stock theme, Twenty-Twelve. It’s not a custom theme. It’s not slick or responsive. It’s just a dumb theme. So while reading my blog, I realized just how much I wanted to change the line-spacing for my post entries. This is where my expectations fork, there is an Apple fork and an “Everything Else” fork. The Apple fork has been proven time and time again, that the answer is simple and shallow and easy to get to, understand what the change will do, and make it work. Then there is everything else. Here we have WordPress itself. I wanted to change the line-spacing on my theme. So I go to the Dashboard, and I spend ten minutes blindly stabbing at possible places where this option might be hiding to no effect. Then I do a Google search, which is the first and last place that most possible solutions are born and die. A good Google search almost always results in the answer you are after. So, “WordPress vertical line spacing” led to a place that eventually had the solution in it, but the theme didn’t match what I was expecting. This is the core of frustration, so I modified the search to include the themes name itself, and that helped. I found the setting, and it was in a CSS stylesheet file. I left the WWW when it was still HTML only. CSS irritates me. But anyways, hack CSS, that’s the answer. It’s a dumb answer, but that’s it. So I find about 130 places where line-height is an option. I laugh bitterly at the number. Which section to edit? Are you sure? So I gave it a shot. I set the line-height to 2.0 and then looked at my site. I can’t tell if it improved or not. But the most adaptive solution is to assert it did what I wanted. Mark the win as a notch and move on. Do I care? Well, I wanted to do something. I did something. Did it work? Probably not.

But then we get back to that first fork. That’s why I love Apple so much. Nearly everything they touch MAKES SENSE. I don’t have to struggle with some labyrinthine mystery. Maybe my edits will work, maybe they will break whatever it is, maybe it won’t matter. Maybe any setting I change will be overridden somewhere else, by something that was never documented. That’s the core design principle of both WordPress and Microsoft. I suppose we should just be happy that the most basic functions work. Much like the Internet itself, the fact that any of this works is a daily miracle.

So instead of writing a huge rant, one that nobody wants to read and nobody cares about I will assert that I won, psychologically move forward and be able to forget the conditions that led me to those particular experiences. The blog doesn’t work like you want? Don’t go there. Facebook a cesspool of ugly humanity? Skip it. Microsoft? Ah, if only it would burn to the ground. But we can’t have what we wish, even if we’d do anything for our dreams to come true.

So! Hooray! A Win! Facebook, WordPress, Office365! Just stop worrying about the bomb. It’s “Someone Else’s Problem®”

Google Schmoogle

Posted on by
Reply

Today is a day for Google to let me down. Generally, a lot of technology companies end up in the same dustbin. They always promise some glittering awesomeness, but when you start to engage with them, you discover that the awesome is rather half-baked. In this particular case, the first two Google technologies were their Music Play property and Android.

Google Music, or Google Play, whatever it’s called, has a lot of the music that I uploaded from my iTunes when I still had music files that I used to play on my iPod. My musical use has migrated to streaming technology, specifically Spotify for which I am very pleased with. I often times miss my old iPod with my music loaded on it. There was something about the shuffle feature on my old iPod Nano that fascinated me. The old shuffler felt almost psychic or at least sensitive to my environment and conditions. I think it is because the device had its RNG on-device and it was a wearable device. There is something still there I think, and I think back on it fondly. A lot of my music is on Google Music, and today I thought I might uncork some of it. I opened my Safari browser and discovered that Google Music doesn’t work without Adobe Flash. As a general rule of thumb, I don’t use Adobe products at all if I can help it, and that is especially true of Adobe Flash. There was a point in the past where you could have installed HTML 5 on the Google Music site, but Google has since eliminated that option as far as I can tell. So, strike one for Google.

The next strike came when I tried to use my Samsung Galaxy Nook device. This device is loaded with Google’s Android operating system, and I’ve railed against this before. In this particular case, it is related somewhat to the dead horse I keep on beating in regards to Google Android. I had my Nook open, and I was trying to use it. The interface is sluggish as hell, but I have grown to accept that. There is an app I have on my Nook, it’s called “Clean Master” and it’s designed to be a system maintainer for Android. From my experience, paired up with what I’ve seen claimed by “Clean Master” application is that Android is a wet hot mess. Every time I use the app, it finds 350MB or more of “Junk files”, and does scans for “Obsolete APKs.” This scan takes an exceptionally long time. So I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole with the device, trying to get it “cleaned up” because it’s “dirty”. This application is dutifully chugging away, apparently just circling around the same batch of directories for about ten minutes accomplishing nothing. I tap the big button at the bottom. “STOP”. Nothing happens. I then tap it a few more times. “STOP”. “STOP”. “STOP”. In the end it was a comedy, and I started to mumble “STAHP” to the device. At the top of the application is another control that says “Advanced Settings” thinking maybe I could turn the scan for “Obsolete APKs” off. Nope. Tap, nothing, tap, nothing. Tap tap tap tap tap tap. The device stops working altogether and then boop, new screen and it’s back to working! But the options there are useless. So then I try to use the “Home” button, and the Nook just dwells there, thinking. about. it. Then the Home switcher screen appears, and I make the throwaway gesture to get rid of “Clean Master” app. There is “nothing” running on the device, but it’s mostly just sluggish as hell.

So that is what informs my opinions about these companies. Google, Samsung, and Apple. I include Apple because I have a lot of Apple devices, and they don’t behave like this. Even with two giant corporations working together, Google and Samsung, they can’t even touch on what Apple does. My iPhone 6 behaves for me, mostly, and in comparison, it is far better than what Samsung and Google bring to the table. My chief issue is the disconnect between the hardware stats, the Samsung is supposed to have more resources than the Apple products, so it comes down to the OS? It may simply be a fight between iOS and Android in the end. To really focus on my issue, it is all about user interrupt. On my iPhone, the user interrupt, which is to say the events that the user wishes take top priority. The interface is “snappy” and “gets my wishes” and “performs”. Whereas in Android, the user input seems to be treated like a queued wishlist that the user inputs and waits for the device to act on if it wants to, or not. I know it’s not designed to behave this way, or at least it shouldn’t. But the behavior is what informs my opinions. I’ve got an Apple device that is snappy and responsive to me versus a Samsung/Android Nook that seems to want to do its own thing. There is another company represented, and that’s B&N. Mostly at this point I think of B&N as a bystander. They aren’t really involved anymore with Samsung or Android, they’re just marketing books through a channel, and they happened to choose this channel. For what the Samsung Galaxy tablet is, it’s core function that I use it for, which is an eBook reader, it is satisfactory. For a general use tablet or a mobile device capable of more than just eBooks, though? No. And I can’t understand why people who use Android accept this behavior so blindly. Perhaps that’s what being a fan is all about. If you are fond of the underdog, the scrappy alley fighter, then I suppose Android has some romance to it. You want the sad, somewhat over-concussed street-fighter who sometimes pisses himself and forgets his name to come out on top in the end and win the day.

So with these two starting experiences today, the answer is to lower your expectations. I expected too much of Google and of Samsung. The device is just a simple eBook reader, it really can’t be anything else. I will never willfully purchase another Android device, so there isn’t any reason to declare that Android is dead to me, it was dead on arrival after all. The only thing that I can say is that other people seem to enjoy it, and in the end that’s all that matters. After seeing what this Samsung Galaxy can do, I don’t understand the why behind Android’s success, but they are successful and in that, well, that’s good. It’s just not for me.

As for the music, I again lower my expectations. Instead of searching for some way to access my Google Music without Adobe Flash, I’m instead going to try an application that can help me migrate my music collection off to a Spotify playlist, maybe. In that, I have very little faith, and I’ll probably just give up and stop thinking about it altogether. I find myself not really fighting about technology anymore. I find that I’m more apt just to turn it off, put it in a drawer and forget about it for a few decades. If I were a technology company, I would really love to find out what kind of technologies people have put in their drawers and forgotten about, and find out why. That would create a great laundry list of things “not to do” when devising new technologies.

Network Monitoring

Posted on by
Reply

I’m in the middle of a rather protracted evaluation of network infrastructure monitoring software. I’ve started looking at Paessler’s PRTG, also SolarWinds Orion product and in January I’ll be looking at Ipswitch’s products.

I also started looking at Nagios and Cacti. That’s where the fun-house mirrors start. The first big hurdle is no cost vs. cost. The commercial products mentioned before are rather pricey while Nagios and Cacti are GPL, and open sourced, principally available for no cost.

With PRTG, it was an engaging evaluation however I ran into one of the first catch-22’s with network monitoring software, that Symantec Endpoint Protection considers network scanning to be provocative, and so the uneducated SEP client blocks the poller because it believes it to be a network scanner. I ran into a bit of a headache with PRTG as the web client didn’t register changes as I expected. One of the things that I have come to understand about the cost-model network products is that each one of them appears to have a custom approach to licensing. Each company approaches it differently. PRTG is based on individual sensor, Orion is based on buckets, and I can’t readily recall Ipswitches design, but I think it was based on nodes.

Many of these products seem to throw darts at the wall when it comes to their products, sometimes hit and sometimes miss. PRTG was okay, it created a bumper crop of useless alarms, Solarwinds Orion has an exceptionally annoying network discovery routine, and I haven’t uncorked Ipswitch’s product yet.

I don’t know if I want to pay for this sort of product. Also, it seems that this is one of those arrangements that if I bite on a particular product, I’ll be on a per-year budget cost treadmill for as long as I use the product unless I try the no-cost options.

This project may launch a new blog series, or not, depending on how things turn out. Looking online didn’t pan out very much. There is somewhat of a religious holy war surrounding these products. Some people champion the GPL products; other people push the solution they went with when they first decided on a product. It’s funny but now that I care about the network, I’m coming to the party rather late. At least, I don’t have to worry about the hot slag of “alpha revision software” and much of the provider space seems quite mature.

I really would like anyone who works in the IT industry to please comment with your thoughts and feelings about this category if you have any recommendations or experiences. I’m keenly aware of what I call “show-stopper” issues.

Shifting Platforms

Posted on by
1

I go through cycles of having an interest, and then not having an interest in social media. Twitter and Facebook are the core services that I’m thinking about here. Amongst these services, I’ve given up on Twitter. I no longer engage with anyone in Twitter and the leading edge of loud, noisy chatter has carried on without me. If I do run the Twitter application, it’s mostly to witness some event as it unfolds, like a news source, or to jump on some shame bandwagon when a public figure makes a terrible mess of their lives by saying or doing something stupid.

I am about to give up on Facebook as well. There are many reasons for this renewed effort to leave the system. I am tired of the see-saw polarity between stories. The negative political stories mixed in with the positive reaffirming stories build up a kind of internal mental noise that clouds my day and keeps me from being focused. Another reason to leave is the interface has become somewhat moribund on its own. You can sometimes comment, sometimes not. The only option to express your reactions when it comes to feelings is “Like” and the entire service has become self-balkanized. I have friends and family on Facebook, but out of all of them, I only follow a few and I’ve muted the rest. I don’t really miss the engagement, but always having to think about tailoring my thoughts based on the audience has started to give me fatigue.

I think then that it may be time for me to go back to writing blog posts on my WordPress blog. The blog encourages longer format writing, and I expect that engagement will drop as I won’t be using Facebook. In a lot of ways, it is a kind of social addiction and the only way to break it is to wean off of it. Perhaps cold turkey is not right, but rather cool turkey.

I don’t expect anyone to follow me off of Facebook. I will share my blog posts to Facebook so people can still see what I write, but the engagement will drop off. Feel free to comment on my blog if you wish. Otherwise, that will be that.

On a more technical note, I changed how the stories are shared across systems. The original way was to publish a WordPress entry, which would share to Tumblr, and that would then share to Twitter and Facebook. I have torn that down and set it so that WordPress itself shares to Facebook, Google Plus, Tumblr, and Twitter. It’s a more direct path that doesn’t require people to slog through my Tumblr. I think it’s more direct this way.

HP Pavilion Boot Loop Problem

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday I ran into a devil of a time with a HP Pavilion slimline workstation at work. This machine was beyond it’s warranty with HP, so no help from them. I had a machine that presented these symptoms:

  • Computer powers up normally.
  • All BIOS-level diagnostics pass.
  • No error codes or beep codes whatsoever.
  • Once the HP BIOS Splash screen fades, the computer should boot into Windows. In this case, Windows 7. It does not. The computer reboots into the HP BIOS Splash screen. Ad infinitum.
  • You can enter BIOS Setup, you can also access the Boot Menu to select other boot sources, however the F11 key to start System Restore is unresponsive.
  • All first-tier efforts to clear the error were taken. BIOS reset to factory conditions, as well as holding down the power button to clear the power supply controller. None of these resolved the issue.

I then plugged in a copy of Knoppix that I downloaded and installed on a USB memory stick. I could have also burned the ISO file to a DVD and used that as well, but the USB was handy. When I use Knoppix this way, I like to enter this “Knoppix Startup Cheatcode” into the prompt right after it boots: “knoppix 2” (without quotes, of course) and this starts the Knoppix system in  the INIT 2 run level, which is single-mode text only interface. I don’t need X-Windows, and in this case, that just gets in the way.

Once at the CLI for Knoppix, I figured the boot flag, the boot manager, or the MBR was shot for the primary partition on the hard drive in the machine. Diagnostics indicated that the primary hard drive was fine, so it wasn’t a physical failure in the HD. I knew that the first (and only) hard drive in systems like these were most likely /dev/sda, you could search the “dmesg” log if you have doubt on where in the /dev the primary hard drive is. Knoppix has the “fdisk” command, so that was my next stop. I knew that this particular HP machine had a Windows Recovery partition stuffed in it, so when I started “fdisk” I displayed the partition map and there were three partitions: /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, and /dev/sda4. I looked at the sizes and figured that the biggest one was the damaged partition, the middle one was probably for swap or scratch or something, and the last one seemed sized properly for the recovery partition. Honestly it was a guess. I turned the bootable flag on for /dev/sda4 and then off for /dev/sda1, then wrote the partition map to disk and then issued the command “shutdown -r now” to reboot out of Knoppix. Technically you could have just unplugged the machine, but I’m a big fan of orderly shutdowns even when the consequences are irrelevant – it’s a good habit to have.

The machine booted to the HP BIOS Splash screen, and then Windows Recovery started. Once the recovery partition got going I noticed a cutesy HP menu appeared offering me a selection of options. I started out with the simplest option which was something like “Microsoft Windows Boot Recovery” and it ran for maybe a second and then offered to reboot. I went for the reboot and that fixed the issue. Windows started but instead of a regular startup it went to the recovery menu, which I found fine since that was where I was going to go anyways by pounding the F8 button like a madman. I selected “Safe Mode With Networking” and then plugged in my USB memory stick containing TRON and got TRON working on the system.

Once TRON was done, I rebooted and let chkdsk naturally freak out about the structure of the NTFS partition in /dev/sda1. Chkdsk did what it had to do, and the system booted normally. I then set it for redeployment.

I figure if anyone else has this issue, this blog post might be helpful. If it helped you out, and you’re willing, maybe dropping a wee tip in Bitcoin or Dogecoin would definitely be appreciated.

Geek Excursions: BitMessage

Posted on by
Reply

Along with my curiosity surrounding Bitcoin, there is a similar technology that has been released for public use called BitMessage. This system is a really neat way to securely communicate in a secure method that involves absolutely no trust whatsoever. It’s a completely decentralized email infrastructure and has captured a lot of my spare attention. BitMessage works a lot like how Bitcoin does, you can create email addresses on the fly, they are a long sequence of random characters that your system can display because you have both a public key and a private key. In a lot of ways BitMessage deals with the biggest problem surrounding PGP/GPG, which is key management. Nobody really wants to manage keys or use the system because it’s extra work. Plus even with PGP/GPG, your identity is written on your keys for everyone to see.

Getting started with BitMessage is a snap. First you need to download the BitMessage client, and you can get that at bitmessage.org. There’s a Windows and Mac client available, you can start it and be instantly attached to the BitMessage network, ready to create new “BitMessage Addresses” and throw them away just as easily. So, for example, you could reach me by sending me a BitMessage to this address: BM-2cWAk99gBxdAQAKYQGC5Gbskon21GdT29X. When you send a message using BitMessage, its to this address and from an address that your client makes, so the conversation occurs securely and since every node has a copy of the data it’s impossible to tell who is getting what information. I think an even more secure method would be to cross BitMessage with a PGP/GPG key. The only problem with a key like that is that classically PGP/GPG keys require that you include your email address as a subkey so that you can be identified by a human-readable email address when looking for your public key or when someone else is looking for it, to verify a signature for example. The PGP/GPG system doesn’t require an email address, you can of course create a public and private keypair using PGP/GPG and make the email address up from whole cloth, and instead just let people know the key ID that you want them to use. So technically if Alice wanted to secretly communicate with me, we could give each other our public keys to start and then use BitMessage as the messaging mule. I don’t see how any eavesdropper could make sense out of any of that data flow. It’s unclear what the contents are, the PGP/GPG encryption keeps the contents of the message secure, and BitMessage itself seriously obfuscates if not outright eliminates being able to tell where the messages are ultimately going to or coming from.

I have to admit that BitMessage is very user friendly and very handy to have. My only issue with it is that I don’t know anyone who uses it, but perhaps this blog post will change that. If you are interested in this bleeding-edge crypto/privacy software, I encourage you to chat me up on BitMessage for serious matters or for fun.

Geek Excursion: Cryptocurrencies

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been thinking on and off about Bitcoin ever since it was written years ago. Right around the end of last month, in December I thought I would look into it again. Turns out the environment has grown considerably since the last time I looked at it, by leaps and bounds! I figured now would be a great time to dip my big toe into the stream, so I found an online exchange and pursued Bitcoin with them. This exchange was ExpressCoin and the purchase deal was mailing them a US Postal Money order, they’d cash it and then send me the Bitcoin equivalent. Since this was a conversion from Fiat money (in this case United States Dollars) to Bitcoin, the exchange rate was around $330 per Bitcoin. The $10 investment gave me 0.03120712 Bitcoin.

Right after that I started lurking on the Bitcoin subreddit on Reddit and discovered two other currencies, Litecoin and Dogecoin. Then just after that I discovered the Cryptocurrency Faucet websites, places where they hand out free money for proving that you’re human with a captcha, and the off chance that exposing you to advertising will pay for the money flowing out of the faucet.

I still think a great part of all these cryptocurrencies is still quite firmly fixed in the hobbyist framework, the enthusiasts are on the “bright” side of the currency and the speculators are on the “dark” side of the currency. All of these currencies that I’ve engaged with display pretty wild volatility in comparison with any linked Fiat. My buy-in rate was around $330 per Bitcoin, and now weeks later, that’s at $218.87 per Bitcoin. There seems to be two camps developing, the first camp is quite keen on ignoring the Fiat exchange rate and trying to ignite their currencies inside themselves. One of the most positive and tightly knit communities surrounds the Dogecoin. Seeing how the Dogecoin enthusiasts communicate and cope with their currencies volatility is a lesson in lighthearted, altruistic generosity. People who hold Doge appear to be very ready to donate it to other people as encouragement, sympathy, or even on a lark. As you go from Doge to Litecoin to Bitcoin you see a lot less of the pleasantries and a lot more of the cold hard business of currency work and trading.

I think one of the most fascinating parts of these new currencies is how everything is starting from the very beginning – including questions of trust and honor. Because all of these coins are decentralized and unregulated there is no capacity for a “chargeback” mechanism, and when this runs up against mechanisms in other currencies, like the Fiat, where there are “chargeback” mechanisms in place, you run the risk of being seriously defrauded. I completely understand the fear and the very careful progress that these cryptocurrency traders make, but it does speak volumes about just how awful and corrupt some people are. We don’t assume people are trustworthy and honorable, so we need many complicated structures in place to cope with the unknowns. This gap in honor is, I feel, a huge part of what these currencies should work on next. How do you measure honor? How do you establish trustworthiness? I got to thinking about it, and every time I think I have a solution I run into an edge case that blows my concept out of the waters. The only thing that I think might work is arranging honor and trustworthiness in a way similar to the “Web of Trust” that PGP and GPG cryptographic systems rely on to establish trust. PGP/GPG never really took off for mass adoption and that’s always been a very sad thing for me, but I really like the “Web of Trust” idea that they pioneered. That people can trust others when there is reputation on the line, backed by money perhaps, there would need to be some sort of contingency addressing on the line as well. So if Bob wants to establish his trustworthiness and his honor he puts his money on the line for it. But the problem with this is that someone who is not honorable could just come along and lie about Bob and take his money, sending you right back to the start again. It’s fascinating, that Bitcoin decentralized money, but we need to figure out how to decentralize trust as well.

The US Government has done its due diligence in preventing egregious misuse of the Bitcoin currency to be used for illegal purposes by attempting to regulate how centralized exchanges transfer Fiat into the cryptocurrencies. It seems that Bitcoin and all the others are very elegantly designed in so far that despite all these regulations there is a community of individuals willing to operate as nano-exchanges that help bring everything back to its decentralized and unregulated roots. Half of the fun of playing with cryptocurrencies is being at ground zero for all these fascinating developments and arguments and seeing how something so new develops and unfolds.

So far I’ve got some small parts of a Bitcoin, some small parts of a Litecoin, and gobs of Dogecoin. For myself, I am very interested in figuring out ways to secure the relationships between traders, working on terms of honor, trust, and faith. If anyone has ideas that they would like to share, please leave them in the comments below. I would really love a nice conversation about securing honor, trust, and faith between traders.

Apple Watch

Posted on by
Reply

On September 9th, 2014 Apple unveiled their iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, Apple Pay and Apple Watch to the world. It was a really poorly kept secret that Apple was working on a wristwatch, so nobody was really surprised when Apple came out with their new designs. All we didn’t know what to what extent Apple was going to go with the technology.

They released more details on Apple Watch. The more I learned about the device the less I found myself thinking it was a good idea. There are so many places where this new watch is a problem.

Humans Have Limited Attention

We haven’t learned how to properly cope with the iPhone and now Apple is going to release an even more disruptive and attention-stealing device on the population. I’ve heard stories of crackdowns in Chicago where the police were pulling over people who were using their mobile devices while they should be driving their motor vehicles, and then learn that on the heels of the crackdown that the police recorded nearly everyone was breaking the law. Pulling over those people would have effectively shut down the entire highway! We just do not have the proper respect for all the technology in our lives, we cannot cope with these bright shiny attention-stealing devices while we are in command of an even larger device that requires our undivided attention at all times. So now Apple is going to put something even brighter and shinier on our wrists and we’re going to have what little attention that is left between our vehicles and our mobile devices divided again by this cleverness strapped to our wrists.

The tight integration between iPhones and Apple Watch will make our addictions to these devices even more challenging to master as well. Many people I know have a very hard time disconnecting from their devices anyways, now that there is an intimate extension of that device that we wear? I can only see this getting worse for those people who want others attention when we are all physically together. I’ve heard anecdotal stories where entire families sit in one room but nobody talks to anyone else because they are all besotted with their technology. What will this mean when the technology is always with us and on our wrists?

Haptics

The Apple Watch, a wearable device includes technology that includes haptics, or the sense of motion or vibration, both in the user interface with the light tap versus the deep press and the vibrating device buried deep into the watch itself. This will only worsen our abilities to control our attention and in itself is a place where we are going to have trouble. The watch can be paired to another watch and send heartbeats across the network, it’s Apple’s romantic notion of intimate communication. I can foresee a paired watch between a married couple and the husband feels his wifes pulse quicken, he worries that she’s having a stroke or a heart attack and rushes home to find a strange car in his driveway and a strange man in his bed. Cheating spouses is just the tip of the iceberg, this watch could be used to cheat in so many other places – cheat at the Casino with a complicated card-counting or odds-calculating routine piped into the players Apple Watch, or exam cheating by looking at the watch and seeing the letters for the answers appear as drawings on the Apple Watches screen.

How will these situations play out? For cheating spouses, there are the courts, so that’s rather a dull thing, but for the others I could see a new no-watch policy being extended to driving vehicles, entry into a casino, and standardized testing events like the SAT.

Nothing for the Sinister

The one thing that I noticed after discussing the Apple Watch with someone I know who is left-handed, that the device completely abandons functionality for the left-handed amongst us. It’s a hard choice Apple has made. Either you build a right-handed watch and a left-handed watch, or include handedness configurability in your design. It’s obvious after looking at the demo pieces that Apple has nothing set aside for the left-handed of us and have left a significant part of the population out in the cold. They could still use the device, but it will be much more awkward for them to actually use the device. I can see the detraction of non-handedness to be a compelling reason to not go ahead and purchase an Apple Watch.

Another Power Hungry Device

The Apple Watch is power hungry. It needs to charge nightly in order to continue to function. I find myself looking at the function of my wristwatch, a Seiko 5 Analog Automatic and immediately find what I have on the end of my arm, this watch, to be much more useful and compelling than this Apple Watch. My Seiko, if I care for it properly will never need winding as the mechanical automatic winder will never wear down or degrade or stop working. My motions feed the watch, and as long as I wear it every day, just living my life means that my watch will continue to count out seconds and sweep out the minutes and hours. My Seiko cannot do all the things that the Apple Watch can, but it can do the one thing a wristwatch should do very well and that is keep track of time. So far my Seiko has retained proper time for the few months I’ve had it. There is no technology in there that is synchronizing it to atomic time, and there is no need for that precision in my life. A watch that is bound to the power grid seems to be a risk to me, and since the most recent power outage, which for me was last night, the idea that my fancy Apple Watch could run down and just be a chunk of expensive metal and glass really concerns me.

Welcome to the Apple Silo, Penthouse Level

The Apple Watch creates an entire new floor to the Apple lifestyle silo. People are usually drawn in with a consumer device, like an iPod Nano or an iPhone, and then they are buying Macs and now the Apple Watch. I have to admit that Apple has a very good compelling company story, and they are leveraging this story magnificently well. They know that one Apple device usually turns into another, and before you know it you are knee-deep in the Apple Digital Lifestyle. The watch requires the iPhone to function, this is a very bold and possibly hazardous step for Apple to take. All the rest of their devices are independent devices, but this one, this Watch, is utterly dependent on an iPhone to function. I think this is the first fundamental break with the legacy of Steve Jobs and represents a really dangerous case for Apple. They are betting sales on pre-existing devices. That is either very ballsy or really stupid. This will only reinforce the cultural divide between people who flaunt this luxury versus people who do not. If you have an Apple Watch, then you necessarily have an iPhone. I can see this becoming a new and really upsetting hazard in big cities. Before it was a mystery what was plugged into a pair of headphones, it could have been anything from a cheap transistor radio, to a cassette Walkman to an iPod or iPhone. Now it’s really something quite different. If you see someone with an Apple Watch, you know that their iPhone isn’t far away. You are advertising that you have an iPhone to everyone who notices your watch. In small communities where theft and robbery isn’t a problem this won’t even show up on the map, but I foresee in bigger cities like Chicago and New York, that this will take on a new life all its own. A new spate of “Apple Watch” theft events. People getting mugged because of what they have on their wrists marks them out as being ripe for the plucking.

Price

The Apple Watch comes in three editions. There is the plain edition, the sports edition, and the luxury edition. The different editions put an embarrassing irony to the features that the phones are sold around, the replaceable wristbands most specifically. Why couldn’t it have just been one watch with different bands for different editions? Make the initial purchase for the core device and then let people swap out wristbands for the luxury components of the deal, if you want a canvas strap, a rubber one or a gold one, let those be options. Instead of that, there are three distinct Apple Watch varieties.

Then there is the price. $349 for the Apple Watch! In our society, what middle-class person would dangle such an expensive bit of technology on their wrists? Again I’m drawn back to my Seiko 5. The comparison of prices for what I need in a watch is all the reason enough to turn my back on the Apple Watch. My Seiko 5 cost me $70, that’s five times cheaper than the Apple Watch for a device that will never run out of power for as long as I don’t run out of power! It blew my mind, when I saw the price tag on the Apple Watch. I figured this could have been a jubilee celebration from Apple, they have billions of dollars buried in their company treasury, they could have made the Apple Watch a loss-leader for their iPhones, priced it at $70 and it would fly out the doors. Apple would lose money on each unit, but they’d make it up on the back side with all the cultural silo’ing that comes with using a device like an Apple Watch which necessitates an iPhone to go along with it.

Apple is betting that their Apple Watch will play as much as their iPads and iPhones did, selling millions of units. It may sell, and it very well may sell well, but I don’t think that $349 is worth this sort of technology. If it could do more, or if it was independent of the iPhone that might have helped, but it’s expensive, hazardous, and risky. I can’t see it really shining in sales numbers like the other devices did. Apple should have set it’s very lofty estimates for sales of the Apple Watch much lower. It’ll likely have the same sales numbers as the iPod Touch or iPod Nano.

I won’t be buying the Apple Watch. I have everything that I need already. The iPhone I have is enough, and my Seiko 5 does a magnificent job and you can’t beat the features or the price. I can’t imagine anyone I know actually going ahead and buying this thing, but we will see how that all pans out next year when it’s available for sale. This is going to be a hurdle that Apple doesn’t jump over gracefully.

Alternatives to Clouds

Posted on by
1

I’ve been toying around with a wonderful free utility from BitTorrent Labs called BTSync. You can find it here: http://www.bittorrent.com/sync.

What really drew my attention was the lack of centralized service that stands at the core of BitTorrent technology. It’s distributed, without any company or cloud provider dwelling in the background. All the hardware is owned by you, the “secret” code you use to share that identifies your sync experience also forms the encryption key so that the data that is flowing across the network is secure from prying eyes. Because you own all the hardware and encryption covers the data exchange, you can store whatever you like in your BTSync’ed folder and not have to worry about anyone else peeping over your shoulder or removing material from your storage without your knowledge or permission.

This free system has clients for workstations and mobile devices, so it really can be a drop-in replacement for services like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive. You can share the secret with anyone you like and anything you place on the folder set up with BTSync will synchronize across all the connected devices. You can also send “Read Only” secrets to sync your folders to people who you want to have your files but don’t want them deleting or changing your files and since this uses BitTorrent technology you won’t have to pay hosting fees and the more people share the data, the faster the system sends updates and changes and new data to all the subscribers.

I’ve created a Work folder, a Sync folder and have them set up on my work machine, my work laptop, my Mac Mini at home, and my iPhone and iPad. Since I own all the hardware, the maximum storage that I can store on this system is only limited by the smallest storage unit amongst all the shared machines. The folder lives on a 1TB USB HD at home, at work I have hundreds of GB’s available and the same as on the laptop. The storage in Mobile isn’t the same as a full workstation as the BTSync app doesn’t actually download data to store on the mobile devices directly but rather downloads a file list making it possible for you to pick and choose what you need on mobile when you need it. If you need security in the storage components you could leverage Encrypted Disk Images in Mac systems and TrueCrypt Encrypted Volumes on Windows machines. For Linux clients, you could likely use loop filesystems set with EncFS or something like that.

The applications for BTSync are amazing. Freed from middlemen companies I can store anything I like without having to worry about some company evaluating what I’m storing or even being able to respond to warrants to reveal what I’m storing on the service. Something like this could be a great benefit to companies that need to share files without having to worry about “buying into the Cloud” since everything is free. You can run a BTSync on a server, host a folder and share the secret out to all your employees and have a very handy share drive and even if your central server fails, copies of your data are stored on all the connected workstations so to recover the data all you would need to do is download the small BTSync client again, re-establish the shared secret code, identify a folder and watch as all your connected clients swarm and return all your data back to the “central depot” server.

Another wonderful option is to host a family shared folder, where you can store anything you like, securely and backed up amongst all the connected workstations. Alternatively, if you were an aspiring artist you could place a folder with all your work and establish a read-only secret and publish it on your social networks. Not only would all your fans be able to have your work, but you’d also be able to cleverly transform them into a swarm of willing backup sources for your work. If an artist has their secret code and a copy of BTSync client and they lose their primary system and all their data, they can just get a new system, re-establish the client and secret and smile as all their work comes back home as it was stored on all your fans computers. That’s amazing to me!

Getting started using this utility is a snap. Download the client and install it on your system. Then on whatever storage medium you like create a new folder. In the BTSync application itself you can create a new shared folder with a single click, there is a “Generate” button which creates the shared secret for you, you can then determine if you want it to be full-sync or read-only sync and then point the app to the folder you want to share, then minimize the app and you’re all set. Send the shared secret code to anyone you want to share with and your data will immediately be sent to their systems according to your preferences.

BTSync is the best of all worlds. You have a secure cloud infrastructure without anyone in your way, judging you or risking any intrusions from companies or governments.