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The leaked specs of Samsung’s Galaxy Fold 2 have been revealed months before its anticipated release.

Industry analyst Ross Young recently shared the display specs of the sequel to Samsung’s Galaxy Fold through a series of tweets.

Galaxy Fold 2 leak – Front Display
•Size: 6.23”
•Resolution: 2267 x 819
•Refresh Rate: 60Hz
•Backplane Technology – LTPS
•Notch/Hole/UPC – Hole#Samsung #GalaxyFold #foldable

— Ross Young (@DSCCRoss) April 20, 2020

Galaxy Fold 2 Leaks
Main Display
•Size: 7.59”
•Resolution: 2213 x 1689
•DPI: 372
•Refresh Rate: 120Hz
•Backplane Technology: LTPO #Samsung #GalaxyFold #Foldable

— Ross Young (@DSCCRoss) April 20, 2020

The leaked specs reveal the 60Hz outer display of the Samsung Galaxy Fold 2 is much bigger and roomier than the first foldable phone in this series. The main display increases in size too while doubling the outer screen’s display rate at 120Hz. Young reveals in a later tweet that the Fold 2 will be shipping with an S-Pen.

Concept designer, Ben Geskin gives us a better idea of how the phone will look like based on Young’s tweets.

Here's how Samsung Galaxy Fold 2 can look like

(based on display specs from @DSCCRoss) pic.twitter.com/qqueu9ksWA

— Ben Geskin (@BenGeskin) April 20, 2020

There is no clear launch of the Fold 2 but it’s rumoured to come out this August, but Young says he will possibly reveal the phone’s camera specs, price, launch date and more next week.

Ross Young isn’t that well known of a phone leaker, so one should keep this leak with a grain of salt.

Source: Ross Young

The post Samsung Galaxy Fold 2 to feature a 7.59-inch inner display with 120Hz refresh rate: rumour appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Nice post by John Gruber on the new iPhone SE and the likely thinking behind it. Of course, the sheer amount of explanation needed here showcases just how insane and bloated Apple’s naming scheme has become for the iPhone. 

Size aside – and put me firmly in the camp that Apple should offer a 4-inch iPhone – I think even with the 4.7-inch size, the naming needs to switch to: iPhone mini, iPhone, and iPhone max. 

Keep. It. Simple.

Now, I think I’m okay if we have a “Pro” version of each – maybe not the “mini”, but that would be cool too. So we could have five options: iPhone mini, iPhone, iPhone Pro, iPhone max, iPhone Pro max. 

As for how you distinguish versus last year’s iPhone, I think you just use the year it launched. Just like with Macs. So you could have a, say, 2021 iPhone Pro and a 2020 iPhone Pro. But that isn’t for marketing, just for the little bar code area on the packaging – and, of course, the price. Last year’s models would be $100 cheaper than this year’s at the time of this year’s release, of course. 

This isn’t that complicated. So it shouldn’t be. I suspect the last reason above is the main reason Apple keeps up with the silly numbers (there will now officially never have been an ‘iPhone 9′ it seems). They may as well slap a “NEW!” star-shaped sticker on the damn box. But with XR, XS, SE, etc, it’s just getting ridiculous now. Microsoft-level ridiculous. 

Look what came in the mail today from Condor Cycles.

Early reports on an early production run of these tires reported that they didn’t quite fit under the rear fender of a Brompton. This was actually music to my ears since I was looking for a higher volume tire that was similar to the Greenspeed Scorchers. Word was this production run would have smaller dimensions to avoid this issue.

Time to take out the calipers. My comparators were the Schwalbe Marathon, and the original old OEM Brompton tires that were an emergency replacement during RSVP.

The height was measured from the edge of a stock Brompton rim to the top of the tread. The width was for the tire mounted on a stock rim as well. Surprise: the old Brompton tire has the highest volume. The Conti is only slightly larger than the Marathon, and so it should have no problem fitting under a standard fender.

The Conti is similar in weight to the Marathon Racer (nominally 240 g), and heavier than the Kojak (190 g). The claim is that it is more flat proof than the competition. We shall see. I do appreciate that it has a reflective stripe on the sidewall. Also, it was much easier to mount on the rim than the Marathon. It also easy to get it concentric to the rim. The other difference from the Schwalbe tires was that the inner surface of the tire was a very slick plastic lamination.

It’s a nice looking tire. We’ll see how they do in the long run.

Of course I had to do a few laps of High Park to make sure everything was OK.

The sakura are probably about two weeks from blooming. It will be interesting to see how they are going to control the crowds this year.

Nothing in this post from Marc Andreessen should be too shocking, but it feels like it captures our moment in time well. Two parts stand out:

The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

And:

In fact, I think building is how we reboot the American dream. The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don’t, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price. What’s the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.

One thing not explicitly stated – but actually calls back to Andreessen’s last zeitgeist-y post: Software is Eating the World – is that we’ve seemingly moved from building things in the real world to building things in the digital world. That is, from hardware to software. That’s not a good or bad thing, and it has been an extremely profitable thing. But there are trade-offs and some downsides in the times like these: being caught flat-footed in manufacturing, for example. 

What’s the last great hardware company to be built in America? There are several smaller ones which are doing well, but massive ones don’t jump to mind. I suppose it’s Tesla, but that’s also a pretty divisive company. Maybe another Elon Musk company, SpaceX? But it’s still private. Or is it Apple, founded way back in 1976? 

Of course, they’re also increasingly focused on software. And, of course, almost all of their physical stuff is actually made in Asia. 

This article was written during abnormal circumstances, with much of the planet under lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Parents with children at home have far less time, and pretty much everyone is feeling stressed and distracted.

Under more normal circumstances there are only so many hours in the day to do your job; now it’s even worse. And yet work needs to get done: code needs to get written, features need to be shipped, bugs need to be fixed.

Faced with an ever growing list of tasks, how do you get everything done?

The short answer is, you can’t. You will never get everything done.

What you can do, though, is choose the right work, the most valuable work, the most useful work, the work with most leverage. Choose the right work and you can gets orders of magnitude improvement in your output.

Let’s see how.

The goal: increased output

Your output as a programmer is based both on your productivity and on how much time you work:

Output = Productivity × Time Worked

The first thing to notice is that there is a hard limit on how much increasing your working hours can help. After all, there are only 168 hours in a week.

If you never slept, ate, or did anything but work—and this will literally kill you—you can work 4.2× as much as a 40-hour workweek, and that’s it. And even with smaller increases in work hours, the gains quickly decline. As you work more hours you’ll become fatigued and make more mistakes; beyond a certain point those extra work hours will decrease your productivity, canceling out any gains.

What is output for a programmer?

Since increasing working hours isn’t really an option, the key to increasing your output is increasing your productivity. Productivity is the output you produce in each fixed unit of time, for example:

Productivity = Output per week

If you’re going to improve your productivity, you need to understand how to measure output.

The obvious measure is how much code you write: the more code, the better. This measure is obvious, popular, and completely wrong.

All other things being equal, is it better to implement the same feature with 10 lines of code, or 10,000 lines of code? If we measure output by code produced, the latter solution is better, but in most cases a 10 line solution is preferable to 10,000 lines. More code means higher maintenance costs, not to mention more opportunities for defects.

Your job as a programmer is not writing code, your job is solving problems: software is a tool, a means to an end. Software becomes valuable because of the problems it solves.

As a rough measure, your output as a programmer can be measured by the problems you solve: the more significant the problems you can solve, the better.

If you work for a business, significance eventually translates directly or indirectly into monetary terms: money made or money saved. In other areas you can come up with domain-specific concrete measures of usefulness: number of people served, carbon emissions reduced, number of scientists using your software, and so on.

Note: If the problems you solve produce negative value you will become anti-productive: the better you are at your job, the more damage you will cause.

If making money hurts people or the environment, your work may be productive for your employer but anti-productive for society as a whole. So make sure you’re carefully considering the ethical consequences of your actions as a worker.

How to increase productivity

Given the above, here’s how you can increase your productivity:

1. Find the most significant problem you can work on.
2. Come up with the most efficient solution to that problem.
3. Implement the solution with minimum wasted time.

Let’s go through these steps one by one, and see why they’re key to productivity.

1. Find the most significant problem

Let’s consider our formula for productivity again:

Productivity = Significant problems solved / Week

There are many problems you could be working on, so first you have to choose one. If you could solve either of these problems, should you be working on:

1. Implementing a particular missing feature; this will increase revenue by $50,000.
2. Fixing a bug that was decreasing customer retention; this will increase revenue by $1,000,000.

All other things being equal, the second problem is obviously the one you should be focusing on. Even if it takes 10× as long to solve and implement that bug fix, it should still be the highest priority:

Productivity of #1 =    $50,000 /  1 Week  =  $50,000 / Week
Productivity of #2 = $1,000,000 / 10 Weeks = $100,000 / Week

Here’s the issue: in order to fix that expensive bug and improve customer retention, you need to know the problem exists. If no one ever notices that customers are leaving, if no one ever finds that bug, if no one realizes the connection between the two—then that problem will never be solved.

And that’s why finding problems is the first and most valuable step in increasing productivity.

2. Come up with an efficient solution

Once you’ve identified the most significant problem—or once your manager assigns you a problem they identified—you need to come up with a solution.

Which solution do you think is better?

1. Takes 1000 lines of code and 4 weeks to implement.
2. Takes 100 lines of code and 3 days to implement.

All other things being equal, the second solution is obviously better. But again, you need to find that solution.

If you only ever find that first solution, then no matter how efficiently you implement it, no matter how focused you are, no matter how much you manage to speed things up—you’re still implementing a much less efficient solution.

And that’s why identifying better solution is the second most valuable step in increasing productivity.

3. Implement the solution without wasting a time

Once you’ve identified a problem and chosen the solution, there is only so much leverage you have to improve productivity. You obviously want to avoid getting stuck and spinning your wheels, because wasted time reduces your productivity.

But given a particular solution, there’s only so much waste you can reduce, only so fast you can go:

Wasted time → $50,000 / 2 weeks = $25,000 / week
No waste    → $50,000 / 1 week  = $50,000 / week

Efficient implementation is the last and least valuable way of increasing productivity.

Technological skills aren’t enough

While you get the most increased productivity from identifying problems and the least from efficient implementation, your career as a programmer progresses in the opposite direction:

1. Junior engineers implement solutions.
2. Senior engineers find solutions and implement them.
3. Principal or staff engineers identify problems, find solutions, and implement them.

So becoming more productive isn’t just about helping your employer’s bottom line, it’s also about learning the skills that will give you more pay and more influence.

Critically, technological skills are necessary but not sufficient to increase your productivity:

• Your JavaScript skills don’t matter if you can never meet deadlines.
• Your testing skills don’t matter if you can’t convince your manager of the value of testing.
• Your software architecture skills don’t matter if no one has ever heard of your product.

Why these skills are “secret”

Most discussions of programming productivity tend to end up focusing purely on technology, coding, and design skills, and skip over these problem-solving skills. Of course, this isn’t a conspiracy of silence, no one is deliberately hiding the existence of the skills.

My guess is that experienced programmers still have to learn new technologies, so they’re more likely to realize the need to explain those particular skills. But having learned them once, they apply skills like timeboxing, or considering multiple different solutions to a problem, without even noticing they’re doing it. And so they end up talking about problem-solving skills rather less, and about technological skills rather more.

How do you learn these skills?

This article is an excerpt from my book, The Secret Skills of Productive Programmers, covering the non-technical skills you need to get better at identifying problems, solving problems, and implementing them on schedule.

Elsewhere on this site you’ll find many free articles on building up your skills.

Tired of scrambling to get your job done?

If you were productive enough, you could take the afternoon off, confident you’d produced high value work. Not to mention having an easier time finding a new job when you need one.

Learn the secret skills of productive programmers.

Facebook has plans to expand its symptom tracking survey globally in an effort to measure the spread of COVID-19.

The social media giant has been able to effectively measure the spread of the virus in the U.S. after conducting a two-week survey of Facebook users. The findings from the survey, which were shared by Carnegie Melon, correlate with public data and show how the virus spread across the country.

Facebook has now partnered with the University of Maryland to gather symptom data from around the world. If users around the world respond to the survey at the same rate that users in the U.S. did, then it could provide a map of potential global hotspots.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge that the global maps could outline countries that have been slow in their response to the pandemic.

“Some of these governments, frankly, are not excited about the world knowing how many actual cases there might be, or indicators of how it’s spreading in their countries. So getting that data out there is very important,” Zuckerberg told The Verge.

Since the start of the pandemic, Facebook has taken a number of measures to show that it could be effective in relaying important information and combating misinformation.

However, these new data collection measures come as the social media giant is being investigated for privacy issues. Facebook is still under scrutiny for its data privacy measures. It’s possible that that the company may face some pushback for its global plans.

Source: The Verge 

The post Facebook to expand its COVID-19 symptom tracking survey worldwide appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Known internationally as industrious with a sporty outdoors culture, New Zealand has a population of 4.8 million people, 300,000 less folks than British Columbia.

Can you imagine in B.C. (or Canada for that matter) any Associate Transportation Minister  saying they want to consider bicycles, e-scooters and e-bikes on the sidewalks?

In a public process and  questionnaire  just released by the New Zealand government, “Accessible Streets” is asking citizens whether e-skateboards, hoverboards, and electric unicycles can be considered non motorized and be allowed on sidewalks. And bicycles would be allowed on sidewalks as long as they are being operated at a speed below 15 km/h.

Motorized items less than 75 cm tall  (that includes those mini foldable motorcycles) are also being considered as legal on the sidewalk.These are the fiddly bits of motorized technology also called “micro mobility”, and governments are looking where they should be placed in the public realm. I have written about British Columbia’s approach to E-Scooters here.

In New Zealand’s proposal there are  some good things~ motorized wheelchairs and assistive devices  are allowed on sidewalks and on cycle lanes, and pedestrians and cyclists have to give them priority.  And on roads, vehicles  making turns will be required to give way to pedestrians

New Zealand has undertaken some responsive Covid-19 initiatives, including making wider sidewalks to accommodate the needed 2 meter separation for physical  distancing, and widening bikeways for the same reason. Perhaps it is that widening of sidewalks (called footpaths in New Zealand) that emboldened the federal government’s strange policy proposal.

You can imagine the reaction from sidewalk users to this proposal.

The  Associate Minister of Transport  is an avid cyclist and is being criticized as having her “enthusiasm for cycling  clouded her vision of what a footpath (sidewalk)  should be.”  Worse still, the minister and the New Zealand cycling lobby are being said to  “want everyone to work around them”.

Andy Smith with Walk Auckland spoke succinctly about the issue: he stated that it was “absolutely ridiculous” to shape sidewalks into sharesies for bikes, e-bikes and e-scooters.

“At the moment we have got kids on bikes and skateboards on the footpath and that is fine. We don’t want any more than that.  People, particularly the elderly, would be scared to go out for a walk if they had to share the footpath with electric vehicles, like e-bikes that can weigh up to 50kg and cause serious harm from accidents with pedestrians.”

Consultation with the Federal Government is open until May 20. You can review the package and the proposals here.

It’s a big day for the iPad! Apple is shipping out their new Magic Keyboard, which for the first time includes a trackpad that lets you control an on-screen cursor. We’ve now updated Things with full support for it.

Apple surprised us all last month when they added cursor support to iPadOS. Even though apps get basic cursor support “out of the box”, there’s a lot developers can do to make the experience great. That’s what we’ve done for today’s release.

The good news is, this feature works with any Bluetooth trackpad or mouse, so if you’ve got one lying around you can play with it right now 🎉

The first thing you’ll notice when you connect your trackpad is that Things’ entire interface responds to the cursor. As you move it near a button, for example, or a to-do’s checkbox, it now magnetically “hops” into place and takes on the shape of whatever you’re clicking. It’s quite playful!

Of course, there are all the normal benefits you would expect from using a “mouse” – you can click, select, drag & drop, just like you would on a Mac – but it has also made a few other great features possible.

New features

Context menus everywhere. You can now right-click stuff! This will reveal context menus with powerful actions. To see what’s possible, right-click a to-do, project, or area. It also works for lists in the sidebar like Today or Upcoming.

Open a new window. New windows are now just a click away: right-click a list in your sidebar and you’ll find the option to Open in New Window. This puts Things into Split View so you can see your two lists side by side. To close one of the windows again, just hit Cmd W.

Swipe gestures. As a touch-based app, Things for iPad has many great gestures available. We’ve now made these work for the trackpad as well; just swipe with two fingers. For example, swipe right on a to-do or project to schedule it, swipe left to enter selection mode, or swipe left within a to-do’s checklist to delete rows.

Selection tips

When it comes to selecting things, it’s worth mentioning a few tips:

• Clicking on a to-do will open it, just like when you tap with your finger. If instead you want to select the to-do, hold down Option when you click it.
• To select multiple items, hold down Cmd or Shift when you click. Or, while in multi-select mode, click and drag downward on the dots to the right.
• To deselect something, just click in an open space.

Today’s update is all about the trackpad, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that Things also has excellent keyboard support. The app’s entire interface is navigable at the touch of a key, and there are powerful shortcuts, too.

Together, the iPad, the Keyboard and the Mouse provide a truly wonderful experience for Things, and we can’t wait to hear what you think!

I haven't followed up on the 'unstructured and unplanned' debate because it began to drift (but if you want to, here's Brian Lamb's post, and here's George Siemens's reponse, and my main reaction is gratitude that they cared enough to be honest and clear in what they said). But I did like this summary of the discussion from an arm's length perspective, and I'm sympathetic with the argument. "Lockdown will give them plenty of food for thought about the differences between their online experiences. It may lead them to consider whether they might learn more from the creativity of TikTok or Houseparty, making music videos or publishing art on Instagram, than in the hair-shirt of Internet-1. University leaders and teachers would do well to consider this question too with some urgency: their future may depend on it."

From HuffPost Canada:

In a tweet late Sunday, Kenney shared a screenshot showing Western Canadian Select oil falling to minus-$0.01 per barrel.

However, as of Monday morning, Canadian oil prices appeared to be even lower, with finance blogs reporting that some Alberta oil was selling for as little as minus-$4.68 per barrel.

I have a small but nice thing to report. For the first time in 10 years, I can stand on my toes.

The thing that has done the trick is a simple pull-up bar which is mounted in a doorway. I saw this in my friend Erica’s house & bought one for something like 25 bucks back in January. It’s mounted in the bedroom closet doorway, the only one in the house that has room since I took the doors off the closet.

So, every day at least once or twice I stand there and do 20 or 30 half-pullup, half toe stands. With my “bad” leg, I have to think very carefully about where the weight is balanced and concentrate on the ball of the foot. It’s also good to keep my stomach muscles engaged.

There’s no way I can do an actual pull up, and I certainly couldn’t stand on my toes, but with the combined support I can do a weird hybrid. Bonus side effect, it straightens out my mid and upper spine amazingly so now I’m doing this so that my back will crack.

Last night there were bins of clothes in front of the closet. I was too tired to put them away. But I kind of wondered… could I stand on my toes without holding onto anything?

Tried it first holding onto a bookshelf and was able to do it. AMAZING. Then …. balance difficult… bad leg freaking out and slightly-less-bad leg screeching in protest . . . I did it unsupported and held the position. Showed this off to Danny and then quit as I don’t want to be unable to walk at all the next day!

10 years ago I couldn’t place my feet flat on the ground! Fixing that took me a year!!!!

I’d like to also say that therabands drive me up the wall, not sure why, a combination of factors. I’ve never really mastered them. Probably I need the kind with handles (the elastic hurts my hands). The closet bar has been so much more helpful and less painful.

I’m also doing the world’s tiniest weight lifting project with 2 lb weights, straight up, then straight up with arms rotated, then a “tree hug” type of move. At least once a day. It is also helping my neck and upper spine.

Well, that’s all — it’s just a lovely feeling that I can make this small change through easy and gradual habits.

Nemesis: “a downfall caused by an inescapable agent.”

Emily Carr School of Art and Design, Great Northern Way

Skateboarders are masters at creating impromptu gyms: Gym 2 at Emily Carr.

Alongside launching the Surface Go 2 in May, Microsoft is expected to unveil a refresh to its Surface Book line.

Fans of the Surface Book 2 have been eagerly awaiting a refresh. Microsoft released the Surface Book 2 back in 2017, and gave the laptop a slight refresh last year. However, the Surface Book line is past due for an upgrade, and we may get one soon.

According to details leaked by some retailers — and spotted by Winfuture — Microsoft plans to equip the new Surface Book 3 with Intel’s latest 10th Gen processors. Further, the Surface Book 3 could potentially have up to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Specifically, the leaked details point to the Intel Core i5-10210U and Core i7-10510U, both quad-core CPUs with respective base clocks of 1.6 and 1.8GHz and turbo clocks of 4.2 and 4.9GHz.

On top of that, some configurations of the Surface Book 3 could include Nvidia’s Quadro graphics chips. Quadro chips are better optimized for professional apps instead of gaming and cater to 3D animators, designers and engineers.

Like with the Surface Book 2, the Book 3 will likely come in two sizes, a 13.5-inch and a 15-inch model.

Considering the pro hardware like the Quadro graphics indicated in the leak, the Surface Book 3 reportedly will come with a high price tag. The leaked details we could see a price ranging from €1,023.05 EUR at the base to €4,323.52 EUR at the high end (roughly $1,569.26 to $6,631.85 CAD). Of course, considering the nature of the leak, those prices should be taken with a grain of salt. Further, there will likely be differences in regional pricing and the final Canadian price could be higher or lower.

Microsoft is expected to launch the Surface Book 3 alongside its refreshed Surface Go 2 at an event sometime in May. However, the exact date has yet to be determined.

Source: Winfuture Via: The Verge

The post Microsoft could launch Surface Book 3 in May with Intel 10th Gen CPUs appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Getting in your workout while you shelter in place can be challenging, to say the least. You might have limited space. And fitness equipment is in high demand right now, with many items either sold out or on back order for weeks or months. Also, knowing that you’ll go back to the gym when life (eventually) returns to normal, you may not want to invest in workout gear that you’ll use only for the short-term.

From this article on coveillance - the surveillance we do of each other. "It seems reasonable to posit that the shift to an information-rich, publicity-oriented environment would affect the collective understanding of selfhood. Many theorists of the networked information society argue that the relationship between self and society is undergoing fundamental change." As always, I ask whether this applies to myself. And I think it does and it doesn't. But I grew up in a small town where everybody knew everybody, and to me the fear of surveillance feels like a very urban concern. To me, the similarities between (say) Twitter and high school are striking, for example, "the emergence and increasing primacy of forms of collective consciousness that are 'tribal,' or essentialized and politicized."

Zoom’s business partners were aware of the platform’s security flaws years before its recent surge in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A new report from the New York Times reveals that Dropbox was concerned about the flaws in Zoom, and was afraid that its own security may be compromised. Dropbox then started to privately offer rewards to hackers to find problems with the software.

The Dropbox engineers started to police Zoom’s security practices, and claimed that they were shocked by the numerous severe security flaws that the hackers found in the software’s code.

In 2018, Dropbox had privately paid hackers to find problems with the platform. Its own security engineers had also looked into the problems. Once the engineers shared their findings with Zoom, it took the platform months to fix the problems. Zoom allegedly only fixed the issues once another hacker publicized the flaws.

What’s interesting about these new findings is the fact that another tech company was the one to push Zoom to address its security shortcomings.

Zoom’s recent and sudden rise in popularity has led to the uncovering of several security and privacy issues, such as ‘zoombombing,’ which allow unauthorized users to enter meetings and display racist or pornographic images.

“I have no doubt that Zoom was better able to address the current ‘zoombombing’ craze thanks to Dropbox’s early involvement,” a former head of security at Dropbox told the New York Times.

Zoom recently hired former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos to help improve the platform’s security measures. This came after Zoom CEO Eric Yuan noted that the company “messed up” in launching a service that has been easily exploited by hackers and trolls.

Source: The New York Times 

The post Zoom’s business partners were aware of its security flaws years ago: report appeared first on MobileSyrup.

In this episode, we're talking about COBOL, with Pete Dashwood, CEO of PRIMA Computing, a company that helps other companies move off of COBOL. Pete talks about what it was like to be a programmer working in COBOL in the 60’s, what the programming language is good at, and the current state of COBOL.

Show Links

• Compiler (sponsor)
• Porkbun (sponsor)
• PRIMA Computing
• COBOL
• COBOL, a 60-year-old computer language, is in the COVID-19 spotlight
• High-level programming language
• Assembly language
• Java
• C#
• Python
• IBM Basic Assembly Language and successors
• Mainframe computer
• BASIC
• PL/I
• Von-Neumann Model
• Object-oriented programming
• Batch processing
• Cretaceous COBOL Can Spawn Jurassic Java
• Object-oriented COBOL
• Commodore 64
• Sams Teach Yourself COBOL in 24 Hours
• Straight and Crooked Thinking

Pete Dashwood

Pete Dashwood is the CEO of PRIMA Computing, which helps companies migrate off of COBOL. He started programming computers before what most people call a "computer" was invented. He started with punched cards and paper tape, and much of the history of computing is the history of his career.

Ich habe noch kein eigenes iPad Magic Keyboard, aber ich darf mit einem spielen. Erste Eindrücke:

• Holy moly, das Ding ist schwer. Deutlich schwerer als das iPad Pro selbst. Die Kombination wiegt beim 12.9" iPad Pro 1340 Gramm*. Zum Vergleich: iPad Pro 12.9" mit Smart Keyboard Folio 1030, Surface Pro X 1060, Surface Pro 1090, MacBook Air 1290, MacBook Pro 13" und X1 Yoga 14" beide 1370, jeweils in Gramm mit Keyboard.
• Das Keyboard kennt nur zwei Zustände: zugeklappt und 80 Grad aufgeklappt. Das geht nur mit zwei Händen. Ist es aufgeklappt, kann man die Neigung des iPads stufenlos anpassen, aber nicht so weit nach hinten wie bei einem Smart Keyboard Folio in der flacheren Stellung.
• Wenn man das iPad nicht als einfachen Laptop nutzen will, muss man es vom Keyboard trennen und in die Hand nehmen. Das geht erfreulich zackig. Es gibt keine Stellung, in der man zeichnen könnte. Hier also auch zwei Zustände: iPad auf dem Keyboard und iPad in der Hand.
• Das Material hat die gleiche Haptik wie die Außenseite meines (alten) Smart Keyboard Folio, nun aber innen und außen. Es war sofort dreckig und zieht den Staub magisch an. Ich bin mir aber nicht sicher, ob es genauso empfindlich ist. Es scheint etwas härter zu sein, was mir Hoffnung macht, dass es länger hält.
• Das Schreibgefühl ist anders als beim Smart Keyboard Folio, eher wie bei einem Surface Pro Type Cover. Das Trackpad ist ebenfalls auf dem gleichen Niveau. Unterschied: Das Surface Pro Trackpad klickt nur vorne, das Magic Trackpad überall.
• Der USB-Port im Keyboard dient nur zum Laden des iPad. Accessories werden nicht erkannt.

Zusammengefasst: Wer ein Smart Keyboard Folio hat, nehme bei Bedarf erst mal eine Bluetooth Maus dazu, um den Pointer Support in iPadOS zu testen. Das Magic Keyboard ist dem Smart Keyboard keinesfalls haushoch überlegen. Wer sowieso ein neues Keyboard kaufen will und sich den exorbitanten Preis leisten kann, der fährt mit dem Magic Keyboard besser, weil er dann nur zwei und nicht drei Teile hat.

Magic Keyboard (oben) und Smart Keyboard (unten), jeweils steile und flache Stellung

Was nach meiner Erfahrung schlecht funktioniert: Eine Sammlung von Bausteinen. Also etwa ein Smart Folio für das iPad, eine Tastatur und dazu eine Maus. Was nicht dran ist, schleppt man nicht durch die Gegend. Das macht übrigens das Origami-Keyboard des normalen iPad (Air) so genial: Ein einfaches Cover auf dem iPad, das eine Tastatur enthält. Wer sein iPad meistens in der Hand hat und sich zu Hause ab und zu mal an den Tisch sitzen will, um etwas zu schreiben, dem empfehle ich immer noch die geniale Logitech K780 Multi-Device-Tastatur.

Surface Pro X steilste und flachste Stellung, jeweils mit hoher Tastaturposition

Mit etwas weiterem Horizont sieht man, wie viel praxisnäher das Design des Surface Pro X ist. Kickstand im Tablet eingebaut, justierbar von fast senkrecht bis fast waagerecht, mit oder ohne Tastatur. Keyboard Cover mit Trackpad und Platz für den Stift, wo er induktiv geladen wird, die hintergrundbeleuchtete Tastatur flach auf dem Tisch oder leicht angestellt. Und nicht zuletzt, zwei ausgewachsene USB-C Anschlüsse, die beide voll nutzbar sind.

*) Weniger dramatisch ist das Gewicht beim 11" iPad Pro. 600 Gramm für die Tastatur, 470 das iPad Pro. Diese Tastatur ist aber für mich wie beim Smart Keyboard zu klein. Als Laptop taugt mir nur das 12.9" iPad Pro.

What strange times we are in. Many of us are having to adapt and learn quickly how to cope with working life from home combined with childcare and education. I am working from home as a single mum with three boys, Dylan is 12, Josh is 10 and Jack is 7. Here are my coping strategies and guidance.

Structure is your friend

I suggest that you ask one of your children to write a timetable each day. What time do they want to do schoolwork? What time for lunch and free time? And what time for exercise? It gives them some ownership and will hopefully be more likely to stick to the timetable. Create a structure for yourself and your working patterns as well. Early morning is a great time to get a couple of hours of work done (when its hopefully calm and peaceful). My children like to chill out watching YouTube or a film early on, this is perfect quiet time to crack on with work.

Throughout the day can be more of a challenge, so its important to grab those 30 min/45 min slots when they are focussed on their schoolwork or running around the garden doing their PE. I have had quite a few calls and meetings when I do need quiet, at these times I absolutely let them watch YouTube or play on their tablet or the Xbox! 

Early to bed will also be a huge help to working parents where another couple of hours can be done once they are in bed and asleep. It’s a huge juggle that requires very different ways of working. Some days will be easier than others!

Do not beat yourself up if the timings go wrong

I honestly thought that we could do two hours of Maths, English, Science per day. Turns out we can’t do it, especially with the younger children, around one hour is their limit before they get bored or angry. 

Every child is different. Instead focus on fun things that can be classed as learning, colouring in, crafting with the recycling box. Or even Minecraft, that has some excellent free to download educational world, e.g. the human eye.

Board games are brilliant

They fill time and can be good for learning. We are big fans of The Game of Life and Scrabble here. The boys love the money element of The Game of Life and the decision making and are quite happy to play this by themselves now that they know the rules! My 7-year-old has learnt that he will earn more if he takes the university life path! They get very excited at the end when they count their piles of cash. 

The daily walk

Or run, or bike ride has been a saviour in some of the more challenging days. We go out every day and it is the highlight of my day getting out into nature. I save it for mid afternoon by which time the boys are like caged animals and really need to escape, run around the fields nearby, climb trees and breath in the fresh air. We have experimented with treasure hunts as well, where I give them a list of things in nature to spot and tick off.

We have done a lot of baking!

So far, we have made pancakes, cupcakes, marble cake, Victoria Sponge and Chocolate Chip cookies. This is a perfect task for all my children, each really enjoys baking and the licking of the bowl. Here is my perfect recipe for Chocolate Chip cookies, I can promise that they will not stay uneaten for long.

Keep a spending diary and share it with your children

Mine is on the fridge and I update it at the end of every day with how much we have spent. The daily act of keeping a record is making us mindful about the amount we are spending, we also talk about what we are saving. 

The boys are missing football, saving around £100 a month of petrol costs. Missing school means no train costs, a saving of around £50 a month. And no trips to the cinema or trampoline park are saving around £100 per month. It’s not all saving though as we have treated ourselves to a pizza delivery.

At the end of each month I will comparing our spending to our monthly budget. In normal times I have a budget of £920 per month which cover all monthly spending including essentials like groceries, petrol, school dinners, clothes. I then include an element for more random costs like school trips, birthdays, Christmas, dentist, vets, car servicing.

I know this month we will spend no where near £920. I estimate more like £400 based on my spending diary so far! Any savings will be moved straight off to my emergency savings. Times are so uncertain; any spare money is going straight into an easy access emergency savings account.

I have had a panic day about money. What helped me put it into perspective was taking a prudent view of my income and expenses for the rest of the year and doing a very basic cash flow forecast. 

For each month I worked out a worst-case monthly income and compared that to my expected monthly expenses. This gave me clear information by month where I could move more money into my emergency fund and other months where I would need to use money from my emergency fund. You can then work out what cash flow position you will be by the end of the year. It’s a very reassuring exercise.

Find learning in household tasks.

I have got the boys writing a list of dinners they would like using the ingredients in the fridge/freezer, chopping up vegetables into shapes, counting the money in the coin jar. They have also been a huge help with decluttering the garage, utility room and cupboard (of doom) under the stairs. They have discovered long forgotten toys and sorts equipment that have kept them amused for hours!

Lynn James is a personal finance blogger, Mrs Mummypenny, follow her on Instagram here @MrsMummypennyUK.

The post Tips on Working from Home with the children around appeared first on Zopa Blog.

There’s a lot of chat, and a lot of reports out (I’ll get around to listing them when I take the time to…) regarding the potential use of phone apps of various flavours regarding contact tracking as a possible tech solutionist contribution to any release of lockdown, particularly at scale over extended periods…

…so I’m really surprised that folk aren’t making use of the coveillance / #coveillance tag to refer to the strategy, playing on “covid-19″, “contact tracing”, “surveillance“, and even at a push, “panopticon” and so on…

From a quick search, the first reference I could find is from a course several years ago at Berkeley, 290. Surveillance, Sousveillance, Coveillance, and Dataveillance, Autumn/Fall 2009, taught by Deirdre Mulligan, which had the following description:

We live in an information society. The use of technology to support a wide array of social, economic and political interactions is generating an increasing amount of information about who, what and where we are. Through self documentation (sousveillance), state sponsored surveillance, and documentation of interaction with others (coveillance) a vast store of information — varied in content and form — about daily life is spread across private and public data systems where it is subject to various forms of processing, used for a range of purposes (some envisioned and intended, others not), and subject to various rules that meet or upend social values including security, privacy and accountability. This course will explore the complex ways in which these varied forms of data generation, collection, processing and use interact with norms, markets and laws to produce security, fear, control, vulnerability. Some of the areas covered include close-circuit television (CCTV) in public places, radio frequency identification tags in everyday objects, digital rights management technologies, the smart grid, and biometrics. Readings will be drawn from law, computer science, social sciences, literature, and art and media studies

This gives us a handy definition: coveillance: documentation of interaction with others

A more comprehensive discussion is given in the CC licensed 2012 book Configuring the Networked Self by Julie E. Cohen (printable PDF), specifically Chapter 6, pp. 13-16:

Coveillance, Self-Exposure, and the Culture of the Spectacle

Other social and technological changes also can alter the balance of powers and disabilities that exists in networked space. Imagine now that our café-sitting individual engages in some embarrassing and unsavory behavior— perhaps she throws her used paper cup and napkin into the bushes, or coughs on the milk dispenser. Another patron of the café photographs her with his mobile phone and posts the photographs on an Internet site dedicated to shaming the behavior. This example reminds us that being in public entails a degree of exposure, and that (like informational transparency) sometimes exposure can have beneficial consequences. (It also reminds us, again, that online space and real space are not separate.) Maybe we don’t want people to litter or spread germs, and if the potential for exposure reduces the incidence of those behaviors, so much the better. Or suppose our café-sitter posts her own location on an Internet site that lets its members log their whereabouts and activities. This example reminds us that exposure may be desired and eagerly pursued; in such cases, worries about privacy seem entirely off the mark. But the problem of exposure in networked space is more complicated than these examples suggest.
The sort of conduct in the first example, which the antisurveillance activist Steve Mann calls “coveillance,” figures prominently in two different claims about diminished expectations of privacy in public. Privacy critics argue that when technologies for surveillance are in common use, their availability can eliminate expectations of privacy that might previously have existed. Mann argues that because coveillance involves observation by equals, it avoids the troubling political implications of surveillance. But if the café-sitter’s photograph had been posted on a site that collects photographs of “hot chicks,” many women would understand the photographer’s conduct as an act of subordination. And the argument that coveillance eliminates expectations of privacy visà-vis surveillance is a non sequitur. This is so whether or not one accepts the argument that coveillance and surveillance are meaningfully different. If they are different, then coveillance doesn’t justify or excuse the exercise of power that surveillance represents. If they are the same, then the interest against exposure applies equally to both.
In practice, the relation between surveillance and coveillance is more mutually constituting than either of these arguments acknowledges. Many employers now routinely search the Internet for information about prospective hires, so what began as “ordinary” coveillance can become the basis for a probabilistic judgment about attributes, abilities, and aptitudes. At other times, public authorities seek to harness the distributed power of coveillance for their own purposes—for example, by requesting the identification of people photographed at protest rallies.23 Here what began as surveillance becomes an exercise of distributed moral and political power, but it is power called forth for a particular purpose.
Self-exposure is the subject of a parallel set of claims about voyeurism and agency. Some commentators celebrate the emerging culture of selfexposure. They assert that in today’s culture of the electronic image, power over one’s own image resides not in secrecy or effective data protection, which in any case are unattainable, but rather in the endless play of images and digital personae. We should revel in our multiplicity, and if we are successful in our efforts to be many different selves, the institutions of the surveillant assemblage will never be quite sure who is who and what is what. Conveniently in some accounts, this simplified, pop-culture politics of the performative also links up with the celebration of subaltern identities and affiliations. Performance, we are told, is something women and members of racial and sexual minorities are especially good at; most of us are used to playing different roles for different audiences. But this view of the social meaning of performance should give us pause.
First, interpreting self-exposure either as a blanket waiver of privacy or as an exercise in personal empowerment would be far too simple. Surveillance and self-exposure bleed into each other in the same ways that surveillance and coveillance do. As millions of subscribers to social-networking sites are now beginning to learn, the ability to control the terms of self-exposure in networked space is largely illusory: body images intended to assert feminist selfownership are remixed as pornography, while revelations intended for particular social networks are accessed with relative ease by employers, police, and other authority figures. These examples, and thousands of others like them, argue for more careful exploration of the individual and systemic consequences of exposure within networked space, however it is caused.
Other scholars raise important questions about the origins of the desire for exposure. In an increasing number of contexts, the images generated by surveillance have fetish value. As Kirstie Ball puts it, surveillance creates a “political economy of interiority” organized around “the ‘authenticity’ of the captured experience.” Within this political economy, self-exposure “may represent patriotic or participative values to the individual,” but it also may be a behavior called forth by surveillance and implicated in its informational and spatial logics. In the electronic age, performances circulate in emergent, twinned economies of authenticity and perversity in which the value of the experiences offered up for gift, barter, or sale is based on their purported normalcy or touted outlandishness. These economies of performance do not resist the surveillant assemblage; they feed it. Under those circumstances, the recasting of the performative in the liberal legal language of self-help seems more than a little bit unfair. In celebrating voluntary self-exposure, we have not left the individualistic, consent-based structure of liberal privacy theory all that far behind. And while one can comfortably theorize that if teenagers, women, minorities, and gays choose to expose themselves, that is their business, it is likely that the burden of this newly liberatory self-commodification doesn’t fall equally on everyone.
The relation between surveillance and self-exposure is complex, because accessibility to others is a critical enabler of interpersonal association and social participation. From this perspective, the argument that privacy functions principally to enable interpersonal intimacy gets it only half right. Intimate relationships, community relationships, and more casual relationships all derive from the ability to control the presentation of self in different ways and to differing extents. It is this recognition that underlies the different levels of “privacy” enabled (at least in theory) by some—though not all—social-networking sites.Accessibility to others is also a critical enabler of challenges to entrenched perceptions of identity. Self-exposure using networked information technologies can operate as resistance to narratives imposed by others. Here the performative impulse introduces static into the circuits of the surveillant assemblage; it seeks to reclaim bodies and reappropriate spaces.
Recall, however, that self-exposure derives its relational power partly and importantly from its selectivity. Surveillance changes the dynamic of selectivity in unpredictable and often disorienting ways. When words and images voluntarily shared in one context reappear unexpectedly in another, the resulting sense of unwanted exposure and loss of control can be highly disturbing. To similar effect, Altman noted that loss of control over the space-making mechanisms of personal space and territory produced sensations of physical and emotional distress. These effects argue for more explicitly normative evaluation of the emerging culture of performance and coveillance, and of the legal and architectural decisions on which it relies.
Thus understood, the problems of coveillance and self-exposure also illustrate a more fundamental proposition about the value of openness in the information environment: openness is neither neutral nor univalent, but is itself the subject of a complex politics. Some kinds of openness serve as antidotes to falsehood and corruption; others serve merely to titillate or to deepen entrenched inequalities. Still other kinds of openness operate as self-defense; if anyone can take your child’s picture with his mobile phone without you being any the wiser, why shouldn’t you know where all of the local sex offenders live and what they look like? But the resulting “information arms races” may have
broader consequences than their participants recognize. Some kinds of openness foster thriving, broadly shared education and public debate. Other, equally important varieties of openness are contextual; they derive their value precisely from the fact that they are limited in scope and duration. Certainly, the kinds of value that a society places on openness, both in theory and in practice, reveal much about that society. There are valid questions to be discussed regarding what the emerging culture of performance and coveillance reveals about ours.
It is exactly this conversation that the liberal credo of “more information is better” has disabled us from having. Jodi Dean argues that the credo of openness drives a political economy of “communicative capitalism” organized around the tension between secrets and publicity. That political economy figures importantly in the emergence of a media culture that prizes exposure and a punditocracy that assigns that culture independent normative value because of the greater “openness” it fosters.28 Importantly, this reading of our public discourse problematizes both secrecy and openness. It suggests both that there is more secrecy than we acknowledge and that certain types of public investiture in openness for its own sake create large political deficits.
It seems reasonable to posit that the shift to an information-rich, publicity-oriented environment would affect the collective understanding of selfhood. Many theorists of the networked information society argue that the relationship between self and society is undergoing fundamental change. Although there is no consensus on the best description of these changes, several themes persistently recur. One is the emergence and increasing primacy of forms of collective consciousness that are “tribal,” or essentialized and politicized. These forms of collective consciousness collide with others that are hivelike, dictated by the technical and institutional matrices within which they are embedded. Both of these collectivities respond in inchoate, visceral ways to media imagery and content.
I do not mean here to endorse any of these theories, but only to make the comparatively modest point that in all of them, public discourse in an era of abundant information bears little resemblance to the utopian predictions of universal enlightenment that heralded the dawn of the Internet age. Moreover, considerable evidence supports the hypothesis that more information does not inevitably produce a more rational public. As we saw in Chapter 2, information flows in networked space follow a “rich get richer” pattern that channels everincreasing traffic to already-popular sites. Public opinion markets are multiple and often dichotomous, subject to wild swings and abrupt corrections. Quite likely, information abundance produces a public that is differently rational — and differently irrational — than it was under conditions of information scarcity. On that account, however, utopia still lies elsewhere.
The lesson for privacy theory, and for information policy more generally, is that scholars and policy makers should avoid investing emerging norms of exposure with positive value just because they are “open.” Information abundance does not eliminate the need for normative judgments about the institutional, social, and technical parameters of openness. On the contrary, it intensifies the need for careful thinking, wise policy making, and creative norm entrepreneurship around the problems of exposure, self-exposure, and coveillance. In privacy theory, and in other areas of information policy, the syllogism “if open, then good” should be interrogated rather than assumed.

From that book, we also get a pointer to the term appearing in the literature: Mann, Steve, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman. “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments.” Surveillance and Society 1.3 (2003): 331–55 [PDF]:

In conditions of interactions among ordinary citizens being photographed or otherwise having their image recorded by other apparently ordinary citizens, those being photographed generally will not object when they can see both the image and the image capture device … in the context of a performance space. This condition, where peers can see both the recording and the presentation of the images, is neither “surveillance” nor “sousveillance.” We term such observation that is side-to-side “coveillance,” an example of which could include one citizen watching another.

Mann seems to have been hugely interested in wearables and the “veillance” opportunities afforded by them, for example, folk wearing forward facing cameras using something like Google Glass (remember that?!). But the point to pull from the definition is perhaps generalising “seeing” to meaning things like “my device sees yours”, and whilst the device(s) may be hidden, the expectation is that: a) we all have one; b) it is observeable, then we are knowingly in an (assumed) state of coveillance.

By the by, another nice quote from the same paper:

In such a coveillance society, the actions of all may, in theory, be observable and accountable to all. The issue, however, is not about how much surveillance and sousveillance is present in a situation, but how it generates an awareness of the disempowering nature of surveillance, its overwhelming presence in western societies, and the complacency of all participants towards this presence.

Also by the by, I note in passing a rather neat contrary position in the form of coveillance.org, “a people’s guide to surveillance: a hands-on introduction to identifying how you’re being watched in daily life, and by whom” created by “a collective of technologists, organizers, and designers who employ arts-based approaches to demystify surveillance and build communal counterpower”.

PS as promised, some references:

• COVID-19 Rapid Evidence Review: Exit through the App Store?, Ada Lovelace Institute;
• COVID-19 Rapid Response Impact Initiative | White Paper 5
  Outpacing the Virus: Digital Response to Containing the Spread of COVID-19 while Mitigating Privacy Risks, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics;
• interesting draft of a Coronavirus (Safeguards) Bill 2020: Proposed protections for digital interventions and in relation to immunity certificates, by privacy concerned academics such as Lilian Edwards;
• an EFF paper on The Challenge of Proximity Apps For COVID-19 Contact Tracing.

Please feel free to add further relevant links to the comments…

I also note (via tweet a few days ago from Owen Boswarva) that moves are afoot in the UK to open up Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs) and Unique Street Reference Numbers (USRNs) via the Ordnance Survey. These numbers uiniquely reference properties and would, you have to think, make for interesting possibilities as part of a coveillance app.

And finally, given all the hype around Google and Apple working “together” on a tracking app, partly becuase they are device operating system manufacturers with remote access (via updates) to lots of devices…, I note that I haven’t seen folk mentioning data aggregators such as Foursquare in the headlines, given they already aggregate and (re)sell location data to Apple, Samsung etc etc (typical review from within the last year from the New York Intelligencer: Ten Years On, Foursquare Is Now Checking In to You). They’re also acquisitive of other data slurpers, eg buying Placed from Snap last year (a service which “tracks the real-time location of nearly 6 million monthly active users through apps that pay users or offer other types of rewards in exchange for access to their data”) and just recently, Factual, the blog post announcing which declares: “The new Foursquare will offer unparalleled reach and scale, with datasets spanning:”

• More than 500 million devices worldwide
• A panel of 25 million opted-in, always on users and over 14 billion user confirmed check-ins
• More than 105 million points of interest across 190 countries and 50 territories

How come folk aren’t getting twitchy, yet?

The post Apple’s Magic Keyboard makes the iPad Pro a viable laptop replacement appeared first on MobileSyrup.

There’s a lot of Slacking on the planet right now. The essential practices of shelter-in-place are forcing us to rethink how we get work done especially when that work is dependent on a vast amount of interconnected humans. Pre-Pandemic, one of my opening pitches to current and future customers as the VP of Engineering for Slack¹ was, “How often do you get a chance to reimagine how you work?”

Our work habits are precious. We’ve developed these habits over the years to bring calm predictability to the work chaos. They are personal, they are dependable, they are habits. These habits mustn’t change while everything around us – because of the industry we work in – continually changes. Turns out, it’s that nutritious chaos often results in evolutions to products and services that could improve our habits. Still, our resolute focus on our hard-earned habits to encourage productivity can blind us to these improvements.

As we collectively learn what it means to work from home, I’ve been giving a lot of advice regarding my Slack habits, and I want to focus on what I consider to be the most important advice: Channels are free.

Channel Guidelines

Before I explain why channels are free, I want to walk through my guidelines and decisions regarding how and when I create a channel.

Default to public. There are a great many justifiable reasons to make a channel private. There are a large amount of unjustifiable political and power trippy reasons to keep your channel private. Information wants to be free. You never know what value is created by a random piece of useful information landing in the brain of a person unknown to you.

Ask yourself as you stare at that PRIVATE or PUBLIC switch in channel creation. Why is my instinct to make this public? Is it company confidential information? PRIVATE. Are we going to discuss personnel topics? PRIVATE. Those are obvious ones, but after that, there is a lot of a grey area. There are corporate human habits here that run deep. This is my project. Or my idea. And I want only known people to see it. I get it, but what’s the risk of letting that idea be shared with others. Ideas get better with eyeballs.

A channel name should make sense to a random someone who is looking for it. #hgt-sla-qa? It’s a QA something. You’re not just making the channel readable to future members, but making it memorable to current members. This is related to…

A channel name should aspire to channel naming conventions, but not be beholden to them. The consistency police will have an issue with this guideline. If there are clear channel naming guidelines, I would greatly encourage you to follow said guidelines. Your channel will be easier to find and grok. However, the idea that the folks who set-up your Slack channel naming guidelines thought of every channel use case is flawed. There are emergent guidelines that are going to help channel name legibility and discoverability. Here are two I’ve been riffing on:

• #tmp-channel-name – indicate to everyone this channel is going away when it’s purpose is served.
• #priv-channel-channel – An obvious reminder to channel denizens that this channel is private for a reason and to keep that in mind.

My default attitude when creating a channel is consistency. Still, I also believe that part of the joy of moving over to Slack is reimagining better ways for the team to communicate and collaborate. Channel names effectively curate the content within a Slack workspace. They need to be useful, and channel naming conventions most certainly help, but they aren’t the complete answer.

Group DM or Channel? This feels more like a personal preference, but I almost always default to a channel versus a group DM. The primary reason is the recurring them in this piece: discoverability. It’s a genuinely short-lived topic-less conversation (It never is – why’d the channel get created? That’s the topic), then perhaps a group DM is the answer. Still, the moment that short-lived topic-less conversation goes on for three hours without resolution, I convert it to a channel with a proper name.

Should I Create a Channel?

For the new Slack user, a lot is going on. Workspaces, users, channels, emoji, threads, along with a slew of names and conventions to learn. After a few weeks of learning the ropes, there’s a moment when a new user will ask themselves, “Well, I have this thing I want to get done. It involves several people. It’s not just a conversation; it’s a project. Should I create a channel?”

Yes. Create a channel. Do it now. Don’t worry about the name. Don’t worry about inviting the right people. Just create the channel. Stop thinking. Click on the “+” and create that channel.

Done? Great. I want you to think about what you’ve just done. You’ve created a small virtual long-lasting focused place on the Internet for work to get done. It’s likely not the actual work but is the conversation, debate, and fact-finding that can improve the eventual quality of the work.

That’s the most important lesson I want to convey. There is very little negative consequence to the act of creating a channel² and a channel created is a meeting that no longer needs to occur. It’s a mail that doesn’t need to be sent. It’s a mailing list – never created.

Don’t think. Just create the channel.

Mark Gurman:

The Cupertino, California-based tech giant is working on at least two variations, including a premium version with leather-like fabrics and a fitness-focused model that uses lighter, breathable materials with small perforations, the people said.

Prototypes of the headphones have a retro look with oval-shaped ear cups that swivel and a headband connected by thin, metal arms. The arms stem from the top of the ear cups rather than the sides, the people added. They asked not to be identified discussing products that haven’t been announced.

The ear pads and headband padding attach to the frame of the headphones magnetically so they can be replaced by the user. That approach is similar to some headphones from Master & Dynamic and Bowers & Wilkins, though those models only have magnetic ear pads. Apple’s more modular design will allow users to customize their headphones like they do with the Apple Watch. The design may also mean the same set of headphones would be convertible from comfort to fitness use and back again, the people said.

At first, the early rumors of Apple moving into the high-end over-ear headphone market made little sense to me. You have AirPods Pro, let Beats take on that market? But the Apple Watch analogy actually makes a lot of sense. Make these just as much about fashion and style as performance. Also:

In its last fiscal year, Apple generated $24.5 billion from accessories, including AirPods, Beats headphones and the Apple Watch, almost as much as it took in from the Mac and about $3 billion more than the iPad. The accessories business is instrumental to the company’s push to generate more revenue per user as people hold on to their iPhones for longer.

It’s easy to forget, but this general market is bigger than than of the Mac or the iPad for Apple. One day in the not-too-distant future, headphones alone may be bigger than the Mac and iPad. Which sounds crazy, but is undoubtedly exactly why Apple is doing the above.

This post captures the tenor of the times. "Suddenly, everywhere, it seems like care trumps structure," writes Hannah McGregor. Maintaining academic rigidity seems out of touch with the current environment. Still, "feelings, especially feelings that cluster around the concepts of compassion, empathy, and care, can be used as justification for great violence." And "care as deployed by corporations or by the state in the interests of oppressive systems will not save us." We need to be careful how we wield the ethics of care. "We need to be suspicious when institutions claim to care, and when care is being used to maintain, rather than dismantle, fundamentally dehumanizing systems."