Rolandt

“Meeting…” is an ongoing series from NYT Open that features New York Times employees from different corners of the company. In this installment, we meet Nimpee Kaul, a lead program manager for the Messaging Platforms group.

What is your name?
Nimpee Kaul

What are your pronouns?
She/Her

What is your job?
I am a lead program manager for the Messaging Platforms group within the Core Platforms mission.

What does that mean?
I work closely with Messaging platform teams to enable them to operate effectively and deliver work efficiently. My primary focus is on planning, execution and communication for the teams and projects I work on. I also program manage key strategic initiatives across the organization.

How long have you been at The Times?
It’s been over a decade now. I can’t believe it’s been so long — it feels like I started yesterday!

Most Times employees are working remotely right now. Where are you working from these days?
I live in Princeton, NJ with my family, and that’s where I am working from these days.

How do you start your day?
I make myself a warm cup of lemon and ginger tea, and I read the news.

What is something you’ve worked on recently?
I program managed the Verizon High School Access Initiative, which provided free digital access to the Times website to every high school student and teacher in the United States.

Tell us about a project you’ve worked on at The Times that you’re especially proud of.
I am proud of most of my projects, but the recent Verizon High School Access Initiative was one that made my heart swell with pride due to the social aspect attached to it.

What was your first job?
I was an analyst at a pharmaceutical company.

What is something most people don’t know about you?
I love assembling furniture.

What is your secret to career success?
Take full ownership of your story.

What is your superpower?
I am persistent.

What are you inspired by?
Heroic stories of real people.

Name one thing you’re excited about right now.
My yoga journey started with the Art of Living program about five years ago and today I can safely say that I can recommend different asanas for different physical conditions. At this stage, I am excited to be very close to becoming a yoga instructor.

What is your best advice for someone starting to work in your field?
Don’t be afraid of failure; learn from it.

More from “Meeting…”

Meeting… Tiffany Peón, Senior Software Engineer at The New York Times
Meeting… Storm Hurwitz, Senior Analyst at The New York Times
Meeting… Jasmine Chan, Engineering Manager at The New York Times

---

Meeting… Nimpee Kaul, Lead Program Manager at The New York Times was originally published in NYT Open on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From August until the end of October, the tech world is filled with new product announcements.

We expect to see big reveals from companies like Samsung, Apple, Google and more, but this year, Microsoft is also entering the mobile fray with its dual-screen Surface Duo.

A listing for the Surface Duo hit the FCC earlier this week, but now the device is showing up on the Bluetooth SIG certification page. According to The Verge, typically, when a device appears on both the FCC and Bluetooth SIG, it’s usually just a few weeks away from launch.

Previous rumours suggested that the Surface Duo might launch in July, though now it looks like Microsoft plans to release the handset in the coming weeks.

The Verge says its sources state the Duo was originally planned to release at Build earlier this year, but due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft changed its plans.

Backing up this report, Often-reliable smartphone leaker Evan Blass says that the Duo is coming to AT&T in the United States. Blass usually gets his hands on marketing images, materials and network information close to the time a device launches, so it’s likely the handset is coming in a few weeks.

Microsoft has not yet shared official hardware specs regarding the Duo, but it’s rumoured to include a Snapdragon 855 chipset, 6GB of RAM, up to 256GB of storage and two 5.6-inch screens.

Source: Bluetooth SIG, The Verge, Evan Blass 

The post Microsoft Surface Duo hits Bluetooth SIG page appeared first on MobileSyrup.

David Ehrenfeld, in Beginning Again (1994), describes our civilization as a ragged flywheel, over-built, patched and rusty, spinning faster and faster and beginning to rattle and moan as it comes apart:

There goes a chunk — the sick and aged along with the huge apparatus of doctors, social workers, hospitals, nursing homes, drug companies, and manufacturers of sophisticated medical equipment, which service their clients at enormous cost but don’t help them very much.

There go the college students along with the VPs, provosts, deans and professors who have not prepared them for life in a changing world after formal schooling is over. There go the high school and elementary school students, along with the parents, administrators and frustrated teachers who have turned the majority of schools into costly, stagnant and violent babysitting services.

There go the lawyers and their hapless clients in a dust cloud of the ten billion codes, rules and regulations that were produced to organize and control an increasingly intricate, unorganizable and uncontrollable society.

There go the economists with their worthless pretentious predictions and systems, along with the unemployed, the impoverished and the displaced who reaped the consequences of theories and schemes with faulty premises and indecent objectives. There go the engineers, designers and technologists, along with the people stuck with the deadly buildings, roads, power plants, dams and machinery that are the experts’ monuments.

There go the advertising hucksters with their consumer goods, and there go the consumers, consumed with their consumption. And there go the media pundits and pollsters, along with all those unfortunates who wasted precious time listening to them explain why the flywheel could never come apart, or tell how to patch it even while increasing its crazy rate of spin.

The most terrifying thing about this disintegration for a society that believes in prediction and control will be the randomness of its violent consequences. The chaotic violence will include not only desperate ruthless struggles over the wealth that remains, but the last great violation of nature. What will make it worse is that, at least at the beginning, it will take place under a cloud of denial and cynical reassurances.

So now we have city and state governments suing the federal government for sending unmarked and untrained paramilitary secret police, unrequested, into their streets to terrorize, intimidate and kidnap innocent citizens as a sheer show of their employer’s political might. A DA in Philadelphia has asserted that if they do the same in his city, he’ll have his own police arrest them. There is a term for what happens when two domestic militias battle for control of a place inside a country. It’s called civil war.

What Trump has done, and is threatening to do in many more places that don’t and won’t vote for his disgraceful party, is nothing less than a declaration of war on citizens of his country in areas that don’t support his incompetent, massively corrupt, out-of-control administration. It’s been predicted for a decade or two — when oppression, inequality, brutality and injustice reach the kind of level they did in the US in 1860, or today, something has to give.

The title of this post comes from a Hemingway novel in which the protagonist is asked the question “How did you go bankrupt?”, and his answer is “Gradually, and then suddenly”. Last year Tim O’Reilly borrowed the phrase to describe how technological change happens. But far more importantly, just as it describes how financial and economic collapse occurs (through many, many depressions and appropriately-named “shocks”), how evolutionary dead ends occur (so-called “punctuated equilibria”), and how social and political collapse occurs, it also describes how ecological and civilizational collapse occurs.

This is endlessly baffling to the human mind (notably those trying to make sense of historical events) because it is in our nature to look for patterns, continuities, things that seemingly applied in past and so presumably should apply in future. The hockey stick pattern, where a long slow rise is followed by a sudden catastrophic fall, always catches us by surprise, even as we are being warned of looming “tipping points”. Likewise, the idea of exponential growth — the proverbial doubling of the grains on each additional checkerboard square — is largely unfathomable to us, which is why we can’t figure out how any more than 1.5ºC of average global warming will wreck our planet and render most of it uninhabitable, or how pandemics can occur. Like the money spent on the global war machine, these are simply mind-boggling numbers, and our brains just give up trying to make meaning of them, or assess what should be done about them. Let’s just go back to believing in what, we always thought, used to work well enough.

Gradually, and then suddenly, is how the slow rise of corruption, greed, waste and stench in American politics and corporatism since the 1980s (the Reagan years), and beneath that, more profoundly, since the failure of “Reconstruction” in the 1870s — and their analogues in the rest of the world — have brought us to the global socio-economic precipice we are now teetering on.

Gradually, and then suddenly, is how planetary ecocide has soared since the start of the cheap-oil-fuelled industrial era, and beneath that, more profoundly, since the invention of agriculture and the tools used to kill other species thirty millennia ago, has brought us to the global ecological extinction and runaway climate-change precipice we are now teetering on.

This is what happens when a species that is obsessed with its personal survival over the welfare of all life on the planet, achieves ascendance through a combination of astonishing innovation and sheer brute force. The death rattle is now as deafeningly loud as the LRAD sound cannons used to quell the protests of the righteously outraged.

We see this in the streets and faces of our beleaguered, oppressed, exhausted citizens. We see it in the massive and endless contraction of all forms of more-than-human life, the despoiling of the land, soil, water and air, and the desolation of habitats for all but own rapacious, insatiable, disconnected species.

We have, if we have been watching closely, seen this slow collapse building momentum, for millennia, from when we first left the trees of the tropical forests in search of a new livable world in the advent of past ghastly climate changes (which, like the current one, crept up glacially on our early forebears, and then very suddenly, in a matter of a few years, overtook them).

The current long slow collapse is becoming sudden. But not in a Mad Max way. Earl Mardle writes:

For nearly 20 years now I have been muttering that highly complex systems do not degrade elegantly; they resist like hell, then they collapse. It’s how [our bodies] die, for example. I have also been muttering that the complex system based on the US imperial fiat has been showing secular signs … that it is not happy and neither able to enforce its will nor adapt to the changed conditions…

And then Trump refusing to confirm that he would accept the result of this year’s election. Are we going to see the same unmarked federal troops arrayed around the White House, facing National Guard or Army deployments with their weapons pointing at the centre of the US Executive Government? And who will shoot first? It used to be a dystopian film script idea. It isn’t any more.

Our civilization (like all others before it) is behaving like the body of an old person slowly being overwhelmed by an accumulation of incurable illnesses, reflecting just the natural frailty of all systems as they age, as well as some serious, but too late to rectify, mostly unintentional neglect.

When I predict that our thirty-millennium-long* civilization will soon end, I mean we will see a series of sharp declines and partial recoveries over the next six or so decades, before its heart stops beating once and for all. The last 60 years of a 30,000 year ‘life’ may seem drawn out, but it is only 0.2% of the civilization’s total lifespan, the equivalent of the last 60 days of a long human life. Just as 50% of medical costs of a typical human are spent in the last 10% of their life, we look likely to extract 50% of the world’s resources, and render extinct 50% of its species, in the last 10% of our civilization’s life, just desperately trying to keep the useless old bugger alive a little longer.

And like a human life, it won’t be a precipitous health collapse, but a whole series of small shocks and injuries — just as heart attacks and chronic diseases of the organs lead inevitably closer to organ failure, despite expensive surgeries and transplants. So we can expect to see more suffering — more and deeper and longer depressions, currency failures, wars, governmental collapses, and of course horrific droughts, storms and other climate shocks that will eventually make civilization’s infrastructure too expensive to maintain; we’ll just stop trying to repair things that seem certain to break again soon.

Five to eight decades left — the blink of an eye in cosmic time, and even in our beleaguered planet’s long and varied life. But don’t mistake this for breathing room — this is the final 0.2% of our bloated, sickly civilization’s remarkable, colossally-destructive life. This is the end stage of collapse we are witnessing, the sudden part, by all accounts except our own.

The Trump ‘era’ might be viewed, if there is anyone left to observe it after civilization’s collapse (the history books may one day be viewed as unbelievable fantasy stories, if our post-collapse descendants can even be bothered to read anything so irrelevant to their staggeringly simplified lives), as the start of civilization’s final senescence, the tragic point at which the old man, after a long and violent struggle with everyone and everything he met during his unhappy life, finally lost his marbles, and started to behave completely incoherently.

There may be moments of clarity in this final period of delirium — we might finally start to recognize the horrific oppression we have meted out to billions of our fellow humans through systemic racism, sexism and other diseases of terminal patriarchy. But it is too late to rectify or heal these ghastly afflictions — the game is up, and there is no time for those who, outrageously, unfairly, missed their turn to play. Soon we will realize that, in order to keep the avaricious, heartless, insane old man alive, we have foolishly sold and mortgaged everything. Nothing remains, already, except debts, debts extracted thoughtlessly from future generations, that can now never be repaid.

The death rattle, the drumbeat. This is how it ends. And after us, finally, the dragons.

 

---

*  If you start counting with the invention of the flint arrowhead and spear that enabled the mass slaughter of the planet’s great mammals.

I’m stuck on a new TV series from Amazon Prime: “Tales from the Loop.” This is science fiction in its purest form, removed from the explosions and laser battles that have predominated in film and video “sci-fi” for the last 40 years. Science fiction is, or ought to be, an exploration of how people and … Continued

The post The eerie, romantic attraction of Amazon’s “Tales from the Loop” appeared first on without bullshit.

In my latest CBT session today I once again confronted the spectre of perfectionism that haunts my life and work.

It’s a difficult thing to discuss because most people would frame this as having ‘high standards’ of oneself. Perfectionism is different, though, and my therapist helpfully differentiated it for me by describing it as ‘not looking after yourself’.

There are so many facets to this in my life. Yes, I do regular exercise, but I’m competitive when doing so. I remember seeing a video once where the actor Will Smith said that if you got on a treadmill next to him at the gym he would die rather than getting off first. That’s me.

Even during lockdown when there’s no-one to compete against, I’ll compete against myself. It’s a losing battle as I approach 40, I literally can’t run as fast as I used to.

I compare myself against other people and against younger versions of myself all the time. I try and act in ways to control people’s impressions and opinions of me. To use the terms I use with my therapist, I ‘put on a mask’.

Admitting this to myself is actually more difficult than admitting it to others. So just to be clear, I am explicitly telling myself that it’s OK to be me, that I’m allowed to slow down and take a break, and that there’s no point in being in competition with anyone, let alone myself.

---

This post is Day 14 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

Pierre Ripoll provides several ways to visualize periodicity using animation. Moving dots, rotating spheres, concentric circles, oh my. He uses D3.js and it’s an Observable notebook, so you can see what’s going on under the hood.

Tags: animation, d3js, periodicity, Pierre Ripoll

Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte
My wife started cooking Indian food recently and it’s phenomenal pic.twitter.com/qCNblsMkuM

Today, Mozilla is pleased to announce that we’re joining the Ford Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations to launch a request for proposals (RFP) for research on open source digital infrastructure. To kick off this RFP, we’re joining with our philanthropic partners to host a webinar today at 9:30 AM Pacific. The Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS) is contributing $25,000 to this effort.

Nearly everything in our modern society, from hospitals and banks to universities and social media platforms, runs on “digital infrastructure” – a foundation of open source code that is designed to solve common challenges. The benefits of digital infrastructure are numerous: it can reduce the cost of setting up new businesses, support data-driven discovery across research disciplines, enable complex technologies such as smartphones to talk to each other, and allow everyone to have access to important innovations like encryption that would otherwise be too expensive.

In joining with these partners for this funding effort, Mozilla hopes to propel further investigation into the sustainability of open source digital infrastructure. Selected researchers will help determine the role companies and other private institutions should play in maintaining a stable ecosystem of open source technology, the policy and regulatory considerations for the long-term sustainability of digital infrastructure, and much more. These aims align with Mozilla’s pledge for a healthy internet, and we’re confident that these projects will go a long way towards deepening a crucial collective understanding of the industrial maintenance of digital infrastructure.

We’re pleased to invite interested researchers to apply to the RFP, using the application found here. The application opened on July 20, 2020, and will close on September 4, 2020. Finalists will be notified in October, at which point full proposals will be requested. Final proposals will be selected in November.

More information about the RFP is available here.

The post Mozilla Joins New Partners to Fund Open Source Digital Infrastructure Research appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

The post Here’s a first look at the government’s COVID Alert exposure notification app appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Dan Fumano at The Sun nails it:

Although polling — and election results — consistently show most Vancouverites generally support spending on biking and walking infrastructure, many fiscal conservatives are quick to point to those areas when it’s time for financial belt-tightening.

This week’s staff presentation proposes continuing with the planned rehabilitation work on the Granville Street Bridge, including seismic upgrading, at a cost of $24 million, but reducing infrastructure spending on the Granville Street Bridge, Drake Street and Gastown.

And it’s not just Council that will be enticed to cut cycling infrastructure out of current plans.  Park Board too.

It’s been the NPA Park Commissioners’ strategy (John Coupar’s in particular) to prevent any serious bikeways through parks (Kits especially) through delay and deferment.  This fits their agenda perfectly.  Now the question is whether Council will adopt the strategy for the city as a whole.

We are at this remarkable moment when cycling use has increased dramatically as a consequence of the pandemic.  Trips are measured in the tens of thousands, even the hundreds of thousands.  Users are more diverse – in age, ethnicity, style and location – beyond hope and expectation.

But even at a time of a declared climate emergency, the same ol’ stereotypes and politics seem to prevail.  When even the disabled advocates insist that two lanes of Stanley Park are needed for cars, and parking spaces are the highest priority, when golf-course improvements get green checkmarks over greenways, it’s apparent that the need for advocacy, for political champions on elected boards, and for community support are as important as ever.

Actually, more important than ever.

 

 

The job of a book proposal is to convince an acquisitions editor at a publishing house to make you an offer. So obviously, you should write it for editors, right? Wrong. Editors don’t want you to tell them what you plan to do. They want you to show them what you can do — for … Continued

The post Writing a book proposal? Appeal to readers, not publishers. appeared first on without bullshit.

Office headsets are designed to address a specific need: They allow you to take or make calls from a computer or mobile device while hearing and being heard over the distracting noise that surrounds you.

Wireless headsets can connect to your phone and allow you to talk even when you’re dozens of feet away from your desk. Wired headsets, which are less expensive, eliminate battery-life concerns and stress over potential Bluetooth issues.

After testing more than four dozen popular headsets, we’ve found that the Poly Voyager Focus 2 is the best wireless headset and the Jabra Evolve2 30 is the best wired headset. If you’d prefer an old-school monaural Bluetooth headset that wraps over one ear, we like the Poly Voyager 5200 UC.

All three options offer the sound quality, comfort, and features that professionals who spend all day on the phone need.

Technology was a small industry until very recently. It was exciting and interesting, and it was on lots of magazine covers, but it wasn‘t actually an important part of most people’s lives. When Bill Gates was on every magazine cover, Microsoft was a small company that sold accounting tools to big companies. When Netscape kicked off the consumer internet in 1994, there were only 100m or so PCs on earth, and most of them were in offices. Today 4bn people have a smartphone - three quarters of all the adults on earth. In most developed countries, 90% of the adult population is online. 

The change isn’t just that almost all of us have a computer now, but that we’ve changed how we use them.  This is my favourite chart to show this - in 2017, 40% of new couples in the USA met online. It’s probably over 50% now. Anyone does anything online now. 

Tech has gone from being just one of many industries to being systemically important to society. My old colleague Marc Andreessen liked to say that ‘software is eating the world’ - well, it did.

The trouble is, when software becomes part of society, all of society’s problems get expressed in software. We connected everyone, so we connected the bad people, and more importantly we connected all of our own worst instincts. All the things we worried about before now happen online, and are amplified, changed and channeled in new ways. Meanwhile, the problems that tech always had matter much more, because they become so much bigger and touch so many more people. And then, of course, all of these combine and feed off each other, and generate new externalities. The internet had hate speech in 1990, but it didn’t affect elections, and it didn’t involve foreign intelligence agencies.

When something is systemically important to society and has systemically important problems, this brings attention from governments and regulators. All industries are subject to general legislation, but some also have industry-specific legislation. All companies have to follow employment law, and accounting law, and workplace safety law, and indeed criminal law. But some also have their own laws as well, because they have some very specific and important questions that need them. This chart is an attempt to capture some of this industry-specific law. Banks, airlines and oil refineries are regulated industries, and technology is going to become a regulated industry as well. 

Part of the point of this chart is that regulation isn’t simple, and that it can’t be. Each of these industries has lots of different issues, in different places, with different people in positions to do something and different kinds of solution. We regulate ‘banks’, but that’s not one thing - we regulate credit cards, mortgages, futures & options and the money supply and these are different kinds of question with different kinds of solutions. De La Rue is good at making banknotes that are hard to forge, but we don’t ask it what affordability tests should be applied to mortgages. 

To take this point further, cars brought many different kinds of problem, and we understood that responsibility for doing something about them sat in different places, and that solutions are probably limited and probably have tradeoffs. We can tell car companies to make their cars safer, and punish them if they cut corners, but we can’t tell them to end all accidents or make gasoline that doesn’t burn. We can tell Ford to reduce emissions, but we can’t tell it to fix parking or congestion, or build more bike lanes - someone else has to do that, and we might or might not decide to pay for it out of taxes on cars. We worry that criminals use cars, but that’s a social problem and a law enforcement problem, not a mechanical engineering problem. And we mandate speed limits, but we don’t build them into cars. This is how policy works: there are many largely unrelated problems captured by words like ‘cars’ or ‘banking’ or ‘tech’, some things are impossible, most things are tradeoffs, there are generally unintended consequences, and everything is complicated. 

‘Tech’, of course, has all of this complexity, but we’re having to work this out a lot more quickly. It took 75 years for seatbelts to become compulsory, but tech has gone from interesting to crucial only in the last five to ten years. That speed means we have to form opinions about things we didn’t grow up with and don’t always understand quite so well as, say, supermarkets. 

In addition, in the US and UK I’d suggest the triggers for the change in awareness of just how much tech suddenly mattered were the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum, both in 2016, and the roles that social media may or may not have played in those. This has polarised and intensified some of these conversations around tech by linking them to much broader polarising themes, and sometimes to a tendency to displacement - it can be tempting to blame an external force rather than ask yourself why your fellow-citizens didn’t vote the right way. 

All of this means that the move towards regulation has sometimes been accompanied by a moral panic, and a rush for easy answers. That’s a lot of the appeal of a phrase like ‘break them up!’ - it has a comforting simplicity, but doesn’t really give us a route to solutions. Indeed, ‘break them up’ reminds me a lot of ‘Brexit’ - it sounds simple until you ask questions. Break them up into what, and what problems would that solve? The idea that you can solve the social issues connected to the internet with anti-trust intervention is rather like thinking that you can solve the social issues that come from cars by breaking up GM and Ford. Competition tends to produce better cars, but we didn’t rely on it to reduce emissions or improve safety, and breaking up GM wouldn’t solve traffic congestion. Equally, changing Instagram’s ownership would give advertisers more leverage, but it’s not a path to stopping teenaged girls from seeing self-harm content. Not everything is captured by the pricing system, which is why economics text books talk about ‘market failure’. And if you ask the average person on the street why they worry about ‘big tech’, they’re unlikely to reply that Facebook and Google might be overcharging Unilever for video prerolls. 

Part of the appeal of applying anti-trust to any problem connected to ‘tech’ is that it sounds simple - it’s a way to avoid engaging with the complexity of real policy - but it’s also worth noting that the rise of tech to systemic importance has coincided with the second half of an industry cycle. Smartphones and social have matured and the leading companies in those industries mostly have dominant market shares, just as IBM did in mainframes in the late 1970s or Microsoft in PC software in the late 1990s (and because tech itself is so large, and global, being a leading company in tech makes you very big). This lends itself to a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: these companies have gained big market shares at the same time as the problems emerged, so that must be the cause of the problem. 

The more one thinks about real policy, though, the more one sees that many of the most important debates we have around technology have deeply embedded tradeoffs. At the beginning of this year I attended a conference of European competition regulators: the head of one agency said that they tell a tech company that it must do X, and then the company goes down the road to the privacy regulator, who says ‘you must not under any circumstances do X’. Competition policy says ’remove friction in moving data between competing services’ and privacy policy says, well, ‘add friction’. In other words, policy objectives come with conflicts. We are probably about to get into another big argument about how Apple controls what you do on an iPhone, and there’s a Venn Digram to be drawn here: there are Apple policies that protect the user’s privacy and security, policies that protect Apple’s competitive position (or just make it money), policies that do both, and policies that really just reflect Apple’s preferences for the kind of apps it would like to see. How exactly do these intersect? You might not want to let privacy regulators or competition regulators have the only word on this. 

Of course, this is how policy works - you have to pick tradeoffs. You can have cheaper food or more sustainable food supply chains; you can make home-owning a wealth-building asset class or you can have cheaper housing. As voters, of course, we want both - I want my parents’ home to appreciate and the home I plan to buy to get cheaper. A UK minister recently told me that his constituents complain about two aspects of government data collection: the government knows too much about them, and also they have to enter the same information into too many different government websites. 

This is how policy works, but in the past these were all national debates. The UK, France and USA have very different models of libel law, but that wasn’t a big problem because no-one was really publishing a newspaper in all three countries. But network effects are global: any software platform of any scale grows globally, so how does it follow local law? For its first 25 years, the consumer internet has operated by default on US ideas of free speech, regulation, privacy law (or the absence of it) and competition, partly because that’s where most of the internet came from and partly because the internet wasn’t really important enough for clashes of these cultures to move from irritation to legislation. That’s clearly changed, and we’re moving to a world of multiple, overlapping regulatory spheres. 

Some of this is undoubtedly nationalism and protectionism. Some rests on concerns about national security, either a fear of spying or of media tools being used to promote particular narratives by unfriendly states. But the core of it, I’d suggest, is the rather basic Westphalian principle that a country’s government has the right to say what can happen in that country. This isn’t just about ‘China’ versus ‘the west’ - different liberal democracies have different views on how free speech works, for example, and no-one outside the USA cares or even knows what the US constitution says about it. Equally, each sphere will find its own approach to the liability questions that America groups under ‘section 230’, and again, no-one will care what solution the US comes with. The same variance applies to privacy, competition itself and whole bunch of other issues, right down to very micro issues like whether an Uber driver is legally an employee or Airbnb’s impact on house prices.  

Indeed, even the basic mechanisms of regulation themselves can look very different in different places. To simplify hugely, the US has a rules-based, lawyer-led system in which the basic unit of regulation is generally a court case, with a guilty or innocent verdict, and a punishment. Conversely, both the UK and EU have outcome-based, practitioner-led systems that focus on principles and ‘reasonableness tests’ rather than detailed rules and may never go to a court - this can look very alien to US lawyers, and vice versa.

These regulatory spheres are probably going to start bumping into each other. GDPR made it clear that rules would increasingly apply no matter where your servers are: if your users are in the EU, you have to obey EU rules, and for practical reasons that probably means you have to obey them for all of your users. CCPA effectively does the same in the USA, where California has increasingly become the national privacy regulator by default. An intriguing further step came from this case, in which an EU court held that Facebook must take down libellous content not just in Austria, where the case began, but globally. Meanwhile, the new Hong Kong security law appears to apply to behaviour by non-HK residents outside HK, which is truly extra-territorial. The obvious next question is what happens when an extraterritorial rule collides with a trade-off. What happens when the UK says you must do something and Germany says you must not? 

So, we have divergence in regulatory policy. We also have divergence in where the companies themselves are coming from. In this, Tiktok is the symptom of a broader change, or perhaps a catalyst for realising it. For most of the last 25 years the internet was American by default partly because that was where the companies came from, and that may be changing. In 2008 the US was 80% of global VC investing; now it's 50%.

Silicon Valley is still the global cluster, but it's no longer the only place you can make great products - software is diffusing. So what happens if now lots of people love a Chinese product? (For a fun contrast, note that the Russians tried to subvert US social networks but the Chinese built their own.) Tiktok claims 800m MAUs outside China. The US talks about banning it, but you can't ban every cool new app, and yet we need to be conscious that any Chinese company (or company with people in China) can be told to do anything by the Chinese state, and they don't have a choice. So, what are the scalable, repeatable rules?

This really just scratches the surface of the complexity we might see, as companies used to thinking in terms of inherently borderless platforms collide with five or ten or fifty different regulators and governments around the world. Complexity itself is an important consequence: this chart attempts to capture the cost of regulation for different US retail banks by size: the smaller the bank, the higher the proportionate cost of compliance. This isn’t an original observation: regulation is a regressive tax that tends to slow down innovation and impede startups.

Regulation, of course, is another tradeoff. Some time between 1850 and 1900 or so the industrial world worked out that regulating industry is necessary, and since then we’ve been arguing about how and how much, industry by industry, from industrial food to banking to airlines. Now that gets applied to tech. That’s not a great book title, but it’s probably the next decade or two. I started my career, in 1999, at an investment bank in London that had 900 people and one (1) compliance person. Today it might have 100x that. So, how many compliance people will Google have in five years?

Note: many of these slides come from a presentation I gave in Davos at the beginning of 2020: ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’.

Former covert CIA operative and Savannah, GA police officer Patrick Skinner, nails the horrendous irony (his “exquisite paradox”) of what’s happening in Portland:

The exquisite paradox — of protesters demonstrating against being treated as enemy combatants by their local police departments, only to be met with federal forces doing the same thing but with better equipment and zero local accountability — is wrongheaded and unjust all around. Law enforcement knows the power of a name, the power of identity, the power of accountability. It insists on all three of those things from the public in almost every interaction. Yet during a time where identity and accountability are needed most — at the time of most tension — law enforcement says it will provide neither.

---

exquisite paradox was originally published in stating the obvious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Amie Eh @poly_distortion
The NDP and its leader Jagmeet Singh have, in particular, used their leverage to secure increased support for strug… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Two new Datasette plugins this week: datasette-copyable, helping users copy-and-paste data from Datasette into other places, and datasette-insert-api, providing a JSON API for inserting and updating data and creating tables.

datasette-copyable

Datasette has long provided CSV and JSON export, but when you're working with smaller amounts of data it's often most convenient to move that data around using copy and paste.

datasette-copyable uses Datasette's register_output_renderer() plugin hook to add a whole plethora of new export options, powered by the excellent tabulate Python library (which I'm also using in sqlite-utils).

The default output format is TSV, because if you copy tab-separated values to your clipboard and then hit paste on a cell in Google Sheets, Excel or Numbers the data will be imported directly into your spreadsheet, preserving the columns and rows!

The other supported formats are everything that tabulate supports - LaTeX, GitHub Markdown, MediaWiki, JIRA and more.

You can try the plugin out on some New York Times Covid-19 data (for Harris county, Texas) over here.

Clicking the "copy to clipboard" button selects the content in the textarea and copies it to your clipboard. I wrote about how this works in a TIL.

datasette-insert-api

Ever since Datasette plugins gained the ability to write to the database back in February I've been looking forward to building something that really put it through its paces.

datasette-insert-api is a relatively thin wrapper around my sqlite-utils Python library which unlocks a powerful set of functionality:

• POST a JSON array to Datasette to insert those objects as rows in a database table
• If the table does not yet exist, Datasette can create it with the corresponding columns
• If the table exists and has a primary key, records with matching primary keys can replace existing rows (a simple form of update)
• If unknown columns are present in the data, the plugin can optionally alter the table to add the necessary columns

The README has the details, but the simplest example of it in action (using curl) looks like this:

curl --request POST \
  --data '[
    {
        "id": 1,
        "name": "Cleopaws",
        "age": 5
    },
    {
        "id": 2,
        "name": "Pancakes",
        "age": 4
    }
    ]' \
  'http://localhost:8001/-/insert/data/dogs?pk=id'

The plugin works without authentication - useful for piping JSON into a database on your own laptop - or you can couple it with a plugin such as datasette-auth-tokens to provide authenticated access over the public internet.

Speaking at Boston Python

I gave a talk about Datasette and Dogsheep for Boston Python on Wednesday. Ned turned around the video really quickly - I start talking at 8 minutes and 52 seconds in.

I used a collaborative Google Doc for the Q&A which worked really well, as the questions accumulated while I was presenting and I then got to address them at the end. I spent some time after the talk fleshing out my answers with extra links - here's the resulting document.

Upgrading this blog to Django 3.1

The first Django 3.1 release candidate came out earlier this week, and I've upgraded my blog to this (a one-line change I made through the GitHub web interface thanks to Heroku continuous deployment).

I also upgraded my Heroku PostgreSQL database to v11 so I could take advantage of the new search_type="websearch" option for PostgreSQL full-text search added in Django 3.1 - James Turk contributed that improvement and wrote about it on his blog.

This means my blog search engine now supports advanced operators, like "phrase searches" and -subtractions - try that out here: "signed cookies" -django.

content-length and datasette-clone progress bars

When Datasette runs against an immutable SQLite database it lets you download that database file directly. Datasette development version now includes a content-length header specifying the size of that download.

... which means my datasette-clone tool can now show you a progress bar!

$ datasette-clone https://fivethirtyeight.datasettes.com -v
Fetching fivethirtyeight.db, current hash 7ba632a14f29375c289d96400947e2d5fcdad3a4b5a90883d6286bd4e83ede78 != None
268.79 MB  [##########--------------------------]    28%  00:02:14

github-to-sqlite tags

I wanted to build myself a SQL query to show me my GitHub repositories that have commits which have not yet been included in a release.

It turned out I needed to build a new import command for this: github-to-sqlite tags github.db simonw/datasette - which fetches all of the tags for the specified repository.

Here's the relevant issue and here's a monstrous SQL query that shows me repositories with commits that are ready to be shipped in a release:

with most_recent_releases as (
  with ranked as (
    select
      repo,
      tag_name,
      published_at,
      row_number() OVER (
        partition BY repo
        ORDER BY
          published_at DESC
      ) rank
    FROM
      releases
  )
  select
    *
  from
    ranked
  where
    rank = 1
)
select
  repos.full_name as repo,
  most_recent_releases.tag_name as release,
  commits.committer_date as release_commit_date,
  (
    select
      count(*)
    from
      commits c2
    where
      c2.repo = repos.id
      and c2.committer_date > commits.committer_date
  ) as commits_since_release,
  'https://github.com/' || repos.full_name || '/compare/' || most_recent_releases.tag_name || '...' || repos.default_branch as view_commits
from
  most_recent_releases
  join repos on most_recent_releases.repo = repos.id
  join tags on tags.repo = repos.id
  and tags.name = most_recent_releases.tag_name
  join commits on tags.sha = commits.sha
order by
  commits_since_release desc

Try it here.

TIL this week

• Upgrading a Heroku PostgreSQL database with pg:copy
• Registering temporary pluggy plugins inside tests
• Updating a Markdown table of contents with a GitHub Action

Releases this week

• twitter-to-sqlite 0.21.3 - 2020-07-23
• datasette-clone 0.5 - 2020-07-22
• datasette-copyable 0.2 - 2020-07-21
• datasette-copyable 0.1 - 2020-07-21
• datasette-insert-api 0.4 - 2020-07-21
• datasette-auth-tokens 0.2.2 - 2020-07-20
• datasette-insert-api 0.3 - 2020-07-20
• datasette-insert-api 0.2a - 2020-07-19
• twitter-to-sqlite 0.21.2 - 2020-07-18
• github-to-sqlite 2.4 - 2020-07-18

mkalus shared this story from Approaching Pavonis Mons by balloon.

---

In an earlier comment, Hristo Naydenov asked:

I don't wanna be a nuisance, but as someone who wants to write sci-fi, I find it quite difficult to figure out how to start. Maybe the foundation doesn't have to be a truly original concept, but the development that follows has to be. Where did you get your inspiration from? How do you start writing something so amazing? Do you start off based on a single, simple idea, and build as you go, or do you have a big outline that depicts everything that you plan for the book as a summary which you then follow with details?

With apologies for the self-aggrandizement implicit in quoting that remark, there is something worth addressing here. I've been asked similar questions in interviews over the years, and I imagine I've given reasonably consistent responses, but since such things tend to be ephemeral, there's no harm in returning to the subject.

I'm currently working on my seventeenth solo novel for Gollancz and will soon make a start on my eighteenth. I've also written a collaborative novel with Stephen Baxter, and a Doctor Who novel for BBC books. One or two of my novellas, such as Slow Bullets, are approaching the length of short novels. There are also two unpublished novels that I wrote in my teens. That's easily twenty novels, each of which was (at the very minimum) around half a year''s work, and some which took considerably longer than that. I do feel, then, that I have some demonstrable experience in the business of writing novels. Over the twenty-odd years that I've been writing to contract, too, one might have assumed that I'd have narrowed down the process to something that I could repeat with confidence, a formula for work which allows me to build a novel to a schedule and a budget, where the latter is measured in the amount of creative energy that can be reasonably dedicated to the task over a given period, knowing that one intends to write more novels in the future. The truth, though, is that much of the act of creating a novel still feels essentially mysterious and unpredictable to me, and I still enter into each enterprise with trepidation. Over those two decades or so, I've convinced myself that I can, for the most part, finish novels within an agreed interval, and that somewhere along the line my subconscious will furnish a few story elements that were not in mind at the outset. But the generative process still feels a little like jumping out of an aeroplane, knowing that the ground is six to nine months away, and that one or more parachutes will probably open before I get there. But I don't know that for certain: it's just a level of reassurance built up from experience, but which I know could be easily undermined.

Writing circles like to stuff authors into immutable categories: plotters and pantsers. The categories are more or less self-evident. Plotters do all the structural work up front, mapping the book out in fairly high resolution before committing a word to the page. Pantsers ("seat of the pants") just go for it, and see where the journey takes them. I don't think any writer is wholly one or the other, though. I'm certainly not. I've given both approaches a try, at either extreme, and there are merits in both. But over time I've satisfied myself that I need a middle ground: some sense of an outline, while erring on the sketchy side, and a lot of scope for narrative diversions and surprises along the way.

Over those twenty or so books, I've written several that were based on detailed structural plans, with chapter by chapter outlines. Redemption Ark was one, On The Steel Breeze another. Other books, such as Pushing Ice and The Prefect/Aurora Rising had a reasonably detailed outline, though not to the extent of the aforementioned. Chasm City, Elysium Fire, House of Suns, and several others, were written with the barest outline, just the vague shape of a novel in mind as I started out. To me, there are good things and less good things about all those books, but it doesn't feel to me as if the highly planned ones are necessarily superior to the others, although I may have started them with more confidence. But in the instances where I did start with a detailed plan, there always came a point where I had to deviate from it, sometimes quite abruptly. My feeling here is that novels are fractal, and the devil is in the details. No matter how well I seem to work out the story mechanics ahead of time, when I actually get down to the nitty-gritty of getting it onto the page, I find pitfalls that were always there, waiting to trip me up, and for which the detailed outline provided only a false confidence.

What do I mean by that? I think the problems are always on the level of motivation. In an outline, you can write "they agree to go to Mary's house"  and you're done. But when you come to write it, you're faced with making that plot turn function in a way that the reader will accept as being seamless and plausible within the terms of the story you've already established. Why do they agree? Why Mary's house, and not Steve's? Why go today, and not next week? Resolving those possibilities is, I think, the kind of "hidden" work that is really what writers get paid for. If it's done convincingly, the reader doesn't notice the blood and sweat expended behind the scenes. In my experience (and it probably only proves that I don't go about outlining correctly) no amount of up-front work helps to smooth out these wrinkles ahead of time. In the books I mentioned above, where there was a detailed outline, the work would often grind to a halt for many days while I tried to work my way through what appeared to be an innocuous plot development. For me, the cost-benefit analysis was simple: weeks of planning don't buy me much of an advantage when I'm knee-deep in the novel. So over time I've backed off on the up-front labour and now prefer to proceed with only a rudimentary outline. This can very from a few scribbled lines on a whiteboard, to a few paragraphs in a document, up to maybe a few thousand words in all. But I don't regard any of it as sacrosanct, and I almost welcome the point where the story breaks loose of the plan, because then I think I might have a chance of surprising myself, and perhaps the reader as well.

None of this gets us close to the inception of the novel, though. Where do they come from, these things? I could give many different answers, and all would be individually true for specific novels, and not generally untrue for any of them.

1. A reaction against the last book, or the last few books. After finishing House of Suns, which had come on the heels of The Prefect and Pushing Ice, I knew I could not embark on another novel which had airlocks in it. That's why there are no spaceships in Terminal World, and in place of sterile space structures, there's a lot of planetary scenery and relatively rustic set-dressing
2. A desire to explore a specific theme, necessitated by a novel. When I began Pushing Ice, I'd been thinking a lot about the tensions between our modern view of life in the cosmos (the Fermi paradox etc) and the traditional SF set-up of competing galactic cultures. The book's central idea is an attempt to square those two irreconcilables. I knew I could not tell the story I wanted to tell within the constraints of the Revelation Space universe, so it had to be a standalone book with a new universe.
3. A visual image which demands that a story be built around it. I have an over-active visual imagination and I'm presented with set-pieces that nag at my imagination until a story begins to accrete around them. Occasionally, these images are triggered by music. In the case of the Poseidon's Children sequence, I saw a woman of African ancestry aboard a huge spacecraft, faced with a terrible, world-shattering decision. That scene, suitably evolved, didn't emerge until the second book but it was the genesis of the whole project, along with the emotional textures stimulated by a recording by the late Ugandan musician Geoffrey Oryema,
4. Music (see above). I consume music avidly and it plays a central part in my creative process. The moods or images conjured by a song can be enough to generate a novel, and govern the aesthetic of the whole work. Century Rain was sparked by the emotions encountered while listening to a piece by Goldfrapp. House of Suns, among other influences, was written while listening repeatedly to the song Hayling, by FC Kahuna. You'll have heard it, even if you don't think you've heard it. For the new book, for what it's worth, I have been listening to Scott Walker's The Seventh Seal and Dead Can Dance's Black Sun, repeatedly. These songs were also on repeat while writing Absolution Gap.

With lockdown orders arounds the world, places that we’re allowed to go sound different. The MIT Senseable City Lab looked at this shift in audio footprint through the lens of public parks:

Using machine learning techniques, we analyze the audio from walks taken in key parks around the world to recognize changes in sounds like human voices, emergency sirens, street music, sounds of nature (i.e., bird song, insects), dogs barking, and ambient city noise. We extracted audio files from YouTube videos of park walks from previous years, and compared them with walks recorded by volunteers along the same path during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis suggests an overall increase in birdsong and a decrease in city sounds, such as cars driving by, or construction work. The interactive visualization proposed in Sonic Cities allows users to explore and experience the changing soundscapes of urban parks.

The 3-D view shown above is visually interesting, but the top-down view is the easiest to read, looking like a stacked area chart over a map.

At distinct points on the mapped paths, a gradient line represents the distribution of quieter and louder sounds. Louder sounds appear to take up more space during the pandemic.

It’s hard to say how accurate the sound classification is through this view, but as I poked around, it seemed a bit rough. For example, the chart for Central Park in New York shows bird sounds making about 0% of the footprint, but you can hear birds pretty easily in the audio clips. I’d also be interested in how they normalized between YouTube clips and their own recorded audio to get a fair comparison.

Nevertheless, it’s an interesting experiment both statistically and visually. Worth a look.

Tags: coronavirus, machine learning, MIT Senseable City Lab, park, sound

The Art of the Personal Project is a crucial element to let potential buyers see how you think creatively on your own.  I am drawn to personal projects that have an interesting vision or that show something I have never seen before.  In this thread, I’ll include a link to each personal project with the artist statement so you can see more of the project. Please note: This thread is not affiliated with any company; I’m just featuring projects that I find.  Please DO NOT send me your work.  I do not take submissions.

 

Today’s featured artist:  Nigel Cox

 

DRIFT by Nigel Cox

This ongoing series entitled DRIFT, named equally for wind blown snow and for my meandering outdoor search for subjects – not to mention a car steering technique- began in New York City in 2006.

The contrast between delicate individual snowflakes and the humbling and disabling power of a snowstorm has always fascinated me. I see vehicles becoming blanketed in snow representing that dichotomy whilst providing interesting forms, textures and color compositions.

Most of the images were shot close to my home in Brooklyn. As the cars are densely parked in that area I never have to venture more than a few blocks each time I shoot. Every vehicle provides a unique canvas but I’m often drawn to the ones with interesting colors, carefully studying every angle, seeking out elements that arrest my eye.

Snow dampens sound and for me, that tranquility, combined with bitter cold and scarcity of people, allows for a heightened level of concentration and patience. As a result, these images feel very personal and remind me of why I fell in love with photography at an early age.

To see more of this project, click here.

APE contributor Suzanne Sease currently works as a consultant for photographers and illustrators around the world. She has been involved in the photography and illustration industry since the mid 80s.  After establishing the art-buying department at The Martin Agency, then working for Kaplan-Thaler, Capital One, Best Buy and numerous smaller agencies and companies, she decided to be a consultant in 1999. She has a new Twitter feed with helpful marketing information because she believes that marketing should be driven by brand and not by specialty.  Follow her at @SuzanneSease.  Instagram

Success is more than a matter of your talent. It’s also a matter of doing a better job presenting it.  And that is what I do with decades of agency and in-house experience.

 

The post The Art of the Personal Project: Nigel Cox appeared first on A Photo Editor.

------------------------

Visit our sponsor Photo Folio, providing websites to professional photographers for over 10 years. Featuring the only customizable template in the world.

------------------------

I did a jack-o-lantern this week for the first time in probably 15 years. I am happy with the result.

Anil Dash, Jul 23, 2020

Facebook has in the past advocated the idea of requiring a single validated identity for all users, so it's no surprise to read Sam Lessin, a former Facebook VP, recommending that "government should mandate that all social networks  of any size adopt a national version of the coveted blue 'validated'  check mark confirming an authentic identity." There are problems with this idea, as Anil Dash makes clear in this response. And sure, such a system could be abused. But more importantly, it makes my identity depend on their approval. For example, as Rick Klau says, it "makes a citizen's speech dependent on the government's continued support of that identity."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Mattt Thompson, NSHipster, Jul 23, 2020

This post offers a more technical look at many of themes we've explored here in recent months, and especially the idea of the data-driven web, linked documentation, and automated software design, though it draws more from the semantic web than I would (quoted):

• Representation: Software components should be represented by a common, language-agnostic data format.
• Addressability: Packages, modules, and their constituent APIs should each have a unique URL identifier.
• Decentralization: Information should be distributed across a federated network of data sources, which can cross-reference one another by URL.

The difference between my view and this view is that I collapse the first two of these into one point: there is no representation, and so addressability is essentially content-based, not name-based. This, essentially, is also the difference between connectivist and constructivist approaches.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Mahnaz Charania, Christensen Institute, Jul 23, 2020

We've suggested in the past that one of the major benefits delivered by elite schools is access to an influential network of friends. This article, while observing that "the American educational system is one of the most unequal in the industrialized world," proposes measuring this networking gap. Now this article focuses on academic achievement. It says "students’ social capital—their access to, and ability to mobilize, relationships that help them further their potential and their goals—was found to have a greater impact on their math and literacy skills than instructional resources." Maybe so, but this may be a straw man. The real networking effect happens later, when students are in careers and relying on their networks for employment opportunities and career advancement. Anyhow, the article proposes a "a four-dimensional framework for measuring students’ social capital" that really feels like they pulled it out of their, um, hat, but may be a good starting point to address this. Here's the full paper (29 page PDF) treating this subject, and it's well worth reading.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

mkalus shared this story from OldHacker.org.

---

koney-scanlines:

IMSAI 8080 and Altair

Mike Rose, Mike Rose's Blog, Jul 23, 2020

This blog post is presented as a story, which is my absolute least favourite way to either teach or learn about something. I recognize that a lot of people are fine with stories, though. Still, I'm going to do my analytical best to extract an account of 'what it means to care' from this story, and you can rely on my version or the original, whichever you prefer. Here it is (all quoted):

• absolute regard for children... unfaltering belief in their potential;
• this affirmation of potential (is) deeply egalitarian;
• (validation of their) intellectual worth;
• few ready explanations for their failure;
• rigorous self-assessment.

Maybe this is care, maybe it's a caricature, but this is what I got out of the article. Image: Literary Hub.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Anyone new to a job has probably thought or even asked:

“Why do you do it that way?”

and gotten the age-old answer:

“Because that’s how we’ve always done it.”

It’s human nature to stick with a solution that works and is familiar. When a workflow is so ingrained that it’s a habit, that’s good because it allows the task to become less about the tools and more about what you’re creating.

Paradoxically, though, familiarity can also lead to inflexibility, a resistance to change that undermines the very productivity that the solution enabled in the first place. It’s an inertial force that’s hard to resist, but I think it’s important to push back against it. Not solely for the sake of efficiency, but also to improve the results of your efforts.

The trick is knowing when experimentation with new workflows is unproductive fiddling and when it’s meaningful exploration. I’ve seen too many people fall into the trap where improving the process becomes the goal itself.

Early last year, I decided I was finished with letting tasks dictate how I work. I work across the Mac, an iPad Pro, and an iPhone all day long. Some jobs are more suited to one device than another, and some I just prefer to do on a particular device. The point is, though, that it’s something I want to be my choice, instead of something foisted on me by the nature of the work itself.

I’m fortunate that most of what I do migrates effortlessly from one device to another. Still, I’ve historically had two weekly responsibilities where I’ve felt tied to a Mac.

The first was producing the Club MacStories newsletters using Mailchimp’s web app. As I wrote last January, Safari’s updates in iOS and iPadOS 13, which made web apps work roughly the same on my iPad Pro as on my Mac, solved that problem for me.

The second Mac-bound task was podcast recording and production. I recognize that there have been ways to accomplish podcasting on an iPad for a while. However, when it comes to recording in particular, I didn’t want to change the way I record episodes to work around the iPad’s limitations for the same reasons Federico articulated in Beyond the Tablet.

What made these two tasks frustrating is that they’re both tied to schedules that have limited flexibility. When I was traveling more, that left me with little choice but to take a Mac. I prefer to travel with my iPad Pro, but regardless, I’d rather pick how I work myself, even when I’m at home.

I’m not doing as much traveling now, but a recent road trip to Michigan led me to start thinking about my podcasting setup again. As with many trips in the past, I wound up taking my MacBook Pro along, in this case so I could record interviews for an episode of AppStories. The setup was perfectly fine, but it felt like too much equipment for recording a few short interviews. Plus, I took my iPad Pro because I prefer it for writing and wanted to stay connected to mobile data as I wrote a story in the car.

Ever since Jason Snell wrote about his iPad Pro podcasting setup on Six Colors early last year, and Federico adapted it for his setup when he can’t use his Mac mini, I’ve wanted to try something similar. What held me back, though, was a combination of the complexity, cost, and infrequency with which I assumed I’d use the setup.

I also held out hope that iPadOS 13 or 14 would include improved audio routing that would make it possible to talk on Skype and record a local audio track. That hasn’t happened. Although I expect Apple will add that functionality eventually, it’s been 18 months since Safari solved my Mailchimp problem. With only podcasting standing in the way of my goal of device independence, and no software solution from Apple in the early iPadOS 14 betas, I figured it was time to revisit my hardware options.

I wanted a solution that worked equally well when I’m sitting at my Mac or iPad, allowing me to talk over Skype and record myself locally. What I discovered was an incredibly versatile solution that accomplishes in a single device what Snell and Federico cleverly constructed from a field recorder and USB audio interface: the Sound Devices MixPre-3 II.

There is more than one way to record a podcast, so it’s worth a brief aside about how we record at MacStories. As I already mentioned, Federico covers the same ground in more detail in his Beyond the Tablet story, so I won’t belabor it here. However, it’s important to keep in mind that the conversation happens over Skype, and we each record our audio tracks locally. When we’re finished, Federico sends me his track, I line everything up, and edit them to produce the show. We record the Skype call as a reference track and backup, but we don’t use that audio in production. Like Federico, I wanted an iPad solution that replicates what I do on the Mac to cut down on the equipment I need and ensure consistent quality from episode to episode regardless of whether I’m using a Mac or iPad.

The trouble with the iPad is the inability to run a Skype call and record your local audio track at the same time without some sort of additional hardware. Snell and Federico’s solutions work around this by recording to an SD card in a Zoom H6 field recorder, routing the audio from the H6 to a Sound Devices USBPre 2 audio interface, which handles the Skype call on the iPad Pro, so everyone can hear each other. What’s cool about the MixPre-3 II is that it replicates the same setup in a single, smaller device that costs less and has a few additional features that make it easy to use.

It’s not surprising that the solution to what I was looking for is hardware made by Sound Devices. After all, Snell and Federico’s approaches incorporate the company’s USBPre 2 audio interface, which is a terrific piece of equipment. Due to the limitations of iPadOS, though, the USBPre 2 isn’t enough on its own. Snell’s insight that led him to add a Zoom H6 recorder to the mix captures the difference between the MixPre-3 II and the USBPre 2.

When I came across the MixPre-3 II, I quickly realized that I couldn’t be sure if the MixPre would suit my needs until I tried it. That’s because there doesn’t seem to be anyone using gear like the MixPre with the iPad Pro and writing about it. Fortunately, Amazon has a generous return policy, so I decided to see if I could figure it out for myself.

The MixPre-3 II is an incredibly versatile device, which makes it inherently complex. However, most of the complexity is tucked away in the device’s menu system, accessible from a tiny touchscreen on its front, and once it’s set up, you can ignore the complexity. In addition to the touchscreen, the face of the MixPre-3 II includes three satisfyingly metal knobs for each channel, plus play, stop, and record buttons. The left side of the MixPre-3 has two XLR microphone inputs, an on/off switch which is too hard to access, USB-A and USB-C ports, and a 3.5 mm stereo out jack. On the right is another XLR input, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, a 3.5 mm Aux/Mic In jack, a micro HDMI port that records codes from a connected camera, and a dial that serves as a volume control for the headphones and an alternate means of navigating the touchscreen UI. The back of the device houses a battery pack that can be used to power the MixPre, and behind it is a slot for an SD card to capture recordings.

When the MixPre-3 II arrived, I immediately set it up using my Audio Technica ATR2100-USB microphone that I use when I travel, connecting an XLR cable to channel 1 on the MixPre. I grabbed some headphones, connected those, and tethered the MixPre to my iPad Pro using the USB-C to USB-C cable that came with it. What followed was several frustrating hours of experimentation.

The trouble was that, although I could record my audio locally to the SD card, the audio of the Skype call still played over my iPad’s speakers and used the iPad’s microphone. It was a perplexing problem because audio from other apps was properly routed over the USB-C cable.

The solution was to disconnect the USB-C cable from the iPad Pro and use the USB-C to 3.5 mm adapter Apple sells for wired headphones plus a 3.5 mm to 3.5 mm cable from the adapter to the Aux/Mic In jack on the MixPre-3. That properly routed the Skype call, including my voice, to my headphones. This solution comes with one pretty significant caveat. Although the audio is routed over the 3.5 mm cable, Skype still uses the internal iPad microphone. The sound quality of conducting a Skype call this way is acceptable. However, it means that if the local track recorded by your external microphone fails, your only fallback is a Skype call where you’ve been recorded over the iPad’s internal microphone, which will not sound as good as it would if your external microphone was used for the Skype call too. Whether this is a Skype, MixPre, or iPadOS limitation isn’t entirely clear, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

There are several ways to power the MixPre, including its USB-C port and the battery sled that attaches to the device’s back and can take AA batteries or Sony L-Mount batteries. The MixPre needs 7.5W to operate, so it can be powered by the iPad Pro’s USB-C port, which delivers the necessary power. However, because I’m using the iPad’s USB-C port to route audio to the MixPre, I’ve been powering the MixPre with a USB-C cable connected to a rechargeable battery pack or plugged into the wall with the AC adapter that comes with the MixPre.

The setup is nearly the same when I’m at my Mac, except in that mode, I attach the USB-C cable to my Mac mini. Because the Mac doesn’t have the same audio limitations as the iPad, I can use Skype’s Mac app to conduct the call and Audio Hijack to record my audio just as I’ve always done.

I have only recorded a couple of podcast episodes with this setup so far, but I like it a lot already. The hardware is solidly built, and the touchscreen is bright, showing off each track’s levels as I record. Another nice touch is that the channel knobs are ringed with LEDs too, which provide a second visual indicator of your levels.

However, one of the biggest advantages is just how little needs to be changed to move from the Mac to my iPad. The USB-C cable needs to be connected to a power source, and I need to add the 3.5 mm cable to the Aux/Mic In jack, but that’s it.

Because the MixPre handles three separate channels, the adjustments I need to make there are minimal too. I dedicated channel 1 to my microphone, which needs a couple of tweaks when switching between my Shure Beta 87A and Audio Technica ATR2100-USB microphones. Channel 2 handles audio coming into the Aux/Mic In jack when I’m recording on my iPad, and channel 3 handles audio coming over USB-C when I’m working on my Mac. Whichever channel I’m not using can be turned off. Better yet, I can save my Mac and iPad settings as tiny files that sit on my SD card, where they can be reinstalled if things get messed up.

The hybrid solution developed by Snell and Federico took advantage of hardware they already owned, which is perfectly understandable, but purpose-built hardware like the MixPre has several advantages. Two are size and weight, which is important if you’re using an iPad Pro to record on the go. The USBPre 2 is 180 x 100 x 43 mm in size and weighs 500 grams. The MixPre-3 II is 144 x 110 x 36 mm and the same weight as the USBPre 2, but about 33% smaller by volume. To provide additional context, the MixPre has about the same footprint as a Magic Trackpad and thickness of an Apple TV. When you add the Zoom H6 to the mix, which is 77.8 x 152.8 x 47.8 mm and 280 grams, the entire package becomes substantially bigger and heavier than the MixPre alone.

Another issue is cost. The MixPre-3 II isn’t cheap at $680. However, it’s nearly half the price of a USBPre 2 and Zoom H6 together. You’re still paying a premium price for pro-level gear, but in the world of high-end audio equipment of this quality and versatility, $680 is a fair price.

I’ve discovered a few other advantages to the MixPre that I didn’t anticipate too. The first is that the device records poly WAV files to its SD card. That means it can record multiple channels to a single WAV file that you can later split into separate tracks for editing. This isn’t limited to the usual left and right channels used for stereo sound. I can record the full Skype audio, my local audio, and a track that isolates Federico’s audio simultaneously in both configurations. Federico’s audio is still coming over Skype, so the quality isn’t as good as his locally recorded track. However, if his recording ever fails, having a separate track with just his voice will be an advantage when editing.

When I record on my Mac, I record to its internal SSD using Audio Hijack. What the MixPre gives me that I didn’t have with the Tascam US-2x2 that I used before is the ability to record on an SD card too. What’s nice about that is it’s a backup that’s completely separate from my Mac’s hardware in the event the Mac catastrophically fails.

The backup situation with the iPad isn’t quite as robust, but it’s better than I expected. The MixPre has a USB-A port to which you can attach a small USB thumb drive or even a powered external drive.¹ As soon as you stop recording on the MixPre, the record button begins to flash, indicating that the file saved to the SD card is being automatically backed up to the thumb drive, while the progress is shown on the MixPre’s display. Having a second copy even if it’s not created simultaneously as you record provides additional protection. Because it’s automatic, you won’t forget to do it either, provided you leave the thumb drive plugged into the MixPre.

I also love that the MixPre can act as a mass storage device. From the System menu on the device, tapping File Transfer switches the MixPre to storage mode. In this mode, moving the USB-C cable from powering the MixPre to plugged into the iPad Pro is a quick way to copy files from the SD card to the iPad without needing to open the battery compartment and remove the SD card. It’s both a convenience that avoids the need for an SD card reader and another way to quickly offload recordings for safekeeping in the cloud and locally on your iPad.

Sound Devices also makes an iOS and iPadOS app called Wingman that works with the MixPre using Bluetooth. The app is in serious need of some design love, but it works well. The app allows me to start and stop recordings, monitor levels, edit file metadata, which is much nicer with the iOS keyboard than the MixPre’s touchscreen, and manage recordings. Especially with a new device like this, I’ve appreciated the ability to prop up my iPad mini nearby while keeping an eye on levels and making small adjustments.

It’s fairly common for field recorders, but the MixPre comes with tripod connection points on the unit’s top and bottom too. That allows you to connect a camera when you’re shooting video and using an external microphone. However, simpler alternatives work too. I’m using a small tabletop tripod by Manfrotto to elevate the MixPre off my desk and tilt it up a little, making the display easier to read and creating a shelter for Pikachu.

With a hardware solution to recording locally and monitoring a Skype call, the only other piece of the iPad Pro podcasting puzzle is editing, which is straightforward. My editing process involves file preprocessing for loudness matching and cleaning up audio. I use Mac tools for that step of the process, but they are easily accessed by saving remotely-recorded tracks to iCloud Drive and then opening them by accessing my Mac mini from anywhere with Screens. I wouldn’t want to edit that way, but preprocessing requires me to open the files and click only a few buttons to start the processing.

For editing on the go, I’ve been experimenting with Ferrite. I haven’t produced a released episode with Ferrite yet, but I’ve experimented with it enough to be comfortable that I can. It took a while to find my way around the app. Still, between Jason Snell’s excellent video demonstrating how he edits using the Apple Pencil, the app’s terrific help system, and finding the keyboard shortcuts I needed, Ferrite is ultimately easier to use than Logic Pro X. I like Logic a lot, but it does so much more than the subset of tools I use that Ferrite is a refreshing change. I just wish it existed on the Mac too, so I could edit in similar ways on the iPad Pro and Mac.

---

I started podcasting in 2015 and used a Tascam USB 2x2 for the last four years. It has served me well, but it was never a device that was designed for travel. The Tascam is just a little too big for that. When I traveled, I used a Zoom H5 field recorder, but I didn’t use the Zoom regularly, which meant I always had to refresh my memory on how to use it before a trip. The Zoom’s monochrome display is also difficult to read compared to the MixPre.

In contrast, I’ll use the MixPre to record 2-3 shows per week, regardless of whether I’m in front of my Mac. That means its menus and settings will become second nature quickly, making recording on my iPad Pro just as effortless and comfortable. That alone makes the MixPre-3 II worth its price to me. The MixPre-3 II liberates podcast recording from a single device, allowing me to choose how I want to record instead of having how I work dictated by the task at hand.

Still, I don’t expect to start recording our shows all over my house or in the backyard. There remains an advantage to recording in a controlled environment sitting in front of my 27-inch display. That isn’t going to change. The point is not to escape from the Mac’s clutches; it’s freeing me up to choose how I work and providing more options when recording at my Mac isn’t possible.

If you’d asked me a month ago why my podcasting setup and workflow was the way it was, my answer wouldn’t have been very far from “Because that’s how I’ve always done it.” Fortunately, my awkward recording setup while vacationing rekindled my quest for a device-independent workflow that started last year.

The difficulty and expense of solving a problem to work around an iPadOS limitation show that Apple still has work to do to support creative professionals on the iPad. For many people, the MixPre-3 II is probably not worth the cost. But for me, the MixPre is worth it because podcasting is a big part of the work I do each week, and I was no longer willing to wait for a software solution.

Workarounds are inherently frustrating. I spent several hours experimenting and studying Sound Devices’ documentation before I was content that the MixPre-3 II would work the way I wanted. I expect Apple will eventually get to iPadOS limitations like the inability to record locally while conducting a VoIP call. After all, it’s the sort of involved production workflow the company seems to want the iPad to be able to address. Until then, though, the MixPre-3 II is an excellent solution to recording podcasts on an iPad Pro if you record the way we do here at MacStories.

---

Support MacStories Directly

Club MacStories offers exclusive access to extra MacStories content, delivered every week; it’s also a way to support us directly.

Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Plus, it’s made in Italy.

Join Now

Seven is one of those numbers. I have written before about thinking of my life movements in blocks of seven years. Just about every seven years of my adult life a major change comes a long: seven years in LA, seven years back in NYC, 10 years in Fredericksburg (that’s where it may seem to break down a bit, but I’ll explain), and now going on five years in bella Italia. But before you throw me under the bus for bad math, I believe I can close the gap between the 10 years in Freddy and the 4+ year in Trento. You see, for almost three of those years in Virginia I was working with the great Tim Owens to hatch the plan and then build what is Reclaim Hosting. This is something we codified at city hall on this day in 2013, and for that I am still ever thankful. What’s more, this logic preserves my theory that major life transitions happen every seven years, and this is the one that has made all the little transitions over that 7 year period, like moving to Italy, possible. Long live Reclaim!

So, are you with me? Are you ready to buy my self-help book called Seven Years to a New You? I’ll host regular webinars, get you on my mailing list, and even keynote your kid’s seventh birthday party, you can never start becoming a successful business person too young!

More seriously, I have already written about Reclaim’s Lucky Seven which praises the brilliant team of seven we are right now, and how much ass we are kicking on a daily basis. YEAH!

But the other piece I think about a lot is the road to get here. I remember sometime in 2014 when it seemed that Reclaim might be a bit more than Tim running a single shared hosting server for a thousand people off the side of his desk for $12 a pop. There was a moment that year when things changed for sure, but I already wrote that long short history.

The thing I am thinking about these days is how long it took Tim and I to become expendable. To be clear, Tim and I are still very much a part of the day-to-day, but if we weren’t I think Reclaim is now in a situation where that would not be a show stopper. While I have always been replaceable, there are still a few things in Tim’s head we probably need to extract, but apart from that we have all but operationalized the work we do at Reclaim Hosting. This is a gigantic achievement, thanks in great part to Lauren Brumfield‘s organizational acumen! Because once you move beyond the “big idea,”  drumming up interest, and the long, ongoing work of supporting folks, the real challenge and power of a small company like Reclaim is to create an organizational framework where others can join the culture and thrive. That is arguably the biggest challenge a company faces after it has a modicum of success; the ability to move beyond the mentality of everything depends on what’s in this person’s head or how this person frames it, etc. To last it needs to move beyond the “cult” of the founders and become a shared vision that everyone feels they can join in, take up, and make theirs.

When I was talking to Martha Burtis about Reclaim back in 2014 or so I remember her suggesting that you can’t run a business always doing all the work. This is a fuzzy paraphrase, I’m sure she said something smarter and cooler, but the jist was was going full blown with Reclaim as a company is going to take a group of people that share a sense of the work’s importance, and believe in what we’re doing. I wondered at that time a) was that even possible? and b) how long would that take? Well, I can answer both those questions: a) Yes, it is definitely possible and b0 in my experience it takes about 7 years, Martha

Seven Years also marks the beginning of a new era for Reclaim Hosting, we are tight enough organizationally that we are all comfortable taking the shuttle to the cloud to provide a whole new facet of hosting for our community, and I think that further reinforces my point about seven being a magic number. Are you ready to buy this self-help guru’s book yet? Are you?! Cause while I might be an asshole, I’m am definitely not wrong, Walter!

Smartphones and tablets may have taken over much of people’s screen time, but there’s still a need for a real computer sometimes—and for most people, that means a laptop. For school and office work and tasks like creating spreadsheets and editing video, there’s no good substitute for a decent keyboard and a big screen. But exactly which laptop you should get depends on how often you’ll use it, what you’ll use it for, and (of course) how much money you can afford to spend on it.

Twitter’s user base has increased by 34 percent year-over-year to 186 million amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The social media giant released its second-quarter figures on July 23rd, which show that it’s seeing a record surge in users. This isn’t surprising, especially since people around the world were looking for more things to do online while being stuck at home due to the pandemic.

However, although the pandemic can be attributed to an increase in users, it also contributed to a slowed economy and companies slashing their advertising budgets. This is significant for Twitter because it is reliant on ad money.

Twitter’s revenue decreased 19 percent year-over-year to $683 million USD ($916 million CAD). The social media giant faced a loss of $124 million USD (about $166 million CAD). These figures show that Twitter may be facing a tough time until things go back to some sort of normal.

It’s important to note that the pandemic and its impact aren’t the only things affecting Twitter, as the company faced a major breach recently where hackers got control of several high-profile users’ accounts including Barack Obama, Elon Musk and Bill Gates.

This breach may cause some to rethink their usage of the service, especially high-profile individuals. However, Twitter is trying to add some reassurance by disclosing that it has deleted 15,00 misleading tweets and challenged 4.5 million accounts.

Source: Twitter

The post Twitter sees record increase in users amid COVID-19 pandemic appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The federal government has launched a beta test program for its upcoming voluntary nationwide COVID-19 contact tracing app.

“This app is now in its Beta phase and we need your help to test it. Beta phase means the software is built, but we need people (like you!) to test the app and ensure it’s working smoothly,” the beta program reads.

Participants have to be residing in Canada and be over the age of 18. Once you sign-up for the program, you will receive detailed instructions about how to download the app to your phone. Then you will be asked to complete a task using the app, and provide feedback on your experience.

The government notes that the entire process will take between two to four days. Participants can stop at any time for any reason.

“By participating in this research you consent that your email address, preferred language, experience using the app, and brand or type of smartphone device and related details that you provide will be collected,” the beta program sign-up page notes.

Participants’ email addresses will be shared with Apple or Google as part of their beta testing program. The government outlines that your participation and answers will not affect your access to Government of Canada services or benefits.

CDS and Health Canada may collect participants’ personal information such as their email, and experience using the app. They may also publish or share with other government institutions a summary of what they learned from the research, including quotes or narratives, without associating them to an email.

“Your feedback will help us know if the app is working as intended and where we might improve it. Notifications sent during this study will not be real. This is simply a test of COVID Alert.”

The app uses Apple and Google’s notification API, which uses Bluetooth technology to share randomized codes with other nearby smartphones, which can’t identify users. Apple and Google’s API is being used in several countries, including Australia, Denmark, Germany, Italy and the U.K.

You can learn more about the beta test program and sign-up for it, if you choose to, here.

The post Government launches beta test program for COVID-19 contact tracing app appeared first on MobileSyrup.