Rolandt

We’re trying to decarbonize our family as much as we can. We’re not kidding ourselves that this will move any global-warming needles. But sharing the story might, a little bit. [Updated mid-2021 with a bit of progress: No more gas vehicles, heat pumps in production.]

Those who worry a lot about the climate emergency, and who wonder what they might do about it, are advised to have a look at To fix Climate Change, stop being a techie and start being a human by Paul Johnston (until recently a co-worker). It’s coldly realistic, noting that the Climate Emergency is not your fault and that you can’t fix it. Only radical large-scale global political action will, and his recommendation is that you find an organization promoting such change that meets your fancy (there are lots, Paul provides a helpful list) and join it.

Such intensity of change is possible. It happened in the middle of the Twentieth century when faced with the threat of global Fascism; Governments unceremoniously fixed wages, told businesses what they could and couldn’t do, and sent millions of young men off to die.

It’s not just possible, it’s inevitable that this level of effort will happen again, when the threat level becomes impossible to ignore. We will doubtless have to conscript en masse to fight floods and fires and plagues; which however is better than attacking positions defended by machine guns. The important thing is that it happen sooner rather than later.

Thus evangelism is probably the most important human activity just now, which is why people like Greta Thunberg are today the most important people in the world.

A modest proposal: Decarb

“Decarbonize” has four syllables and “decarbonization” six. I propose we replace both the noun and the verb with “decarb” which has only two. Mind you, it’s used in the cannabis community as shorthand for decarboxylation, but I bet the world’s stoners would be happy to donate their two syllables to the cause of saving the planet. Anyhow, I’m gonna start using decarb if only because of the typing it saves.

So, why personal decarb, then?

Well, it feels good. And — more important — it sends a message. At some point, if everybody knows somebody who’s decarbing it will help bring the earth’s defenders’ message home, making it real and immediate, not just another titillation in their Facebook feed.

There’s a corollary. Decarbing is, by and large, not terribly unpleasant. The things we need to give up are I think not strongly linked to happiness, and some decarb life choices turn out to be pretty pleasing.

Caveats and cautions

It’s important that I acknowledge that I’m a hyperoverentitled well-off healthy straight white male. Decarbing is gonna be easier for me than it is for most, because life is easier for me. I’m willing to throw money at decarb problems before that becomes economically sensible because I have the money to throw; but I hope (and, on the evidence, believe) that pretty well every one of these directions will become increasingly economically plausible across a wider spectrum of incomes and lifestyles.

Because of my privileged position and because the target is moving, I’m not going to talk much about the costs of the decarb steps. And I’m not even sure it’d be helpful; these things depend a lot on where in the world you live and when you start moving forward.

Now for a survey of decarb opportunities.

Decarb: Get gas out of your car

Obviously fossil fuels are a big part of the problem, and automobiles make it worse because they are so appallingly inefficient at turning the available joules into kilometers of travel — most less than 35%. On the other side of the coin, electric vehicles are a win because they don’t care what time of day or night you charge them up, so they’re a good match for renewable energy sources.

Family progress report: Good.

For good news check out my Jaguar diary; I smile a little bit every time I cruise past a gas station. I’m here to tell you that automotive decarb isn’t only righteous, it’s fun.

Decarb: Get yourself out of cars

Last time I checked, the carbon load presented by a car is only half fuel, more or less; the rest is manufacturing. So we need to build fewer cars which means finding other ways to get places. Public transit and micromobility are the obvious alternatives.

They’re good alternatives too, if you can manage them. If you haven’t tried a modern e-bike yet you really owe that to yourself; it’s a life-changer. I think e-bikes are better alternatives than scooters along almost every axis: Safety, comfort, speed, weather-imperviousness.

And transit is fine too, but there are lots of places where it’s really not a credible option.

Now, there are times when you need to use a car. But not necessarily to own one. It isn’t rocket science: If we share cars then we’ll manufacture fewer. There are taxis and car-shares like Car2Go and friends. (Uber et al are just taxi companies with apps; and money-losing ones at that. Their big advantage is that your ride is partly paid for by venture-capital investors who are going to lose their money, so it’s not sustainable.) The car-share picture varies from place to place: Here in Vancouver we have Evo and Modo.

Family progress report: Pretty good.

Since I got my e-bike I’ve put three thousand km on it and I remain entirely convinced this is the future for a whole lot of people. I just don’t want to drive to work any more and resent it when family logistics force me to.

My wife works from home and my son takes a bus or a skateboard to college. My daughter still gets driven to school occasionally in some combinations of lousy weather and an extra-heavy load, but uses her bike and the bus and will do so increasingly as the years go by.

I used to take the train quite a bit but the combination of Covid and leaving Amazon means it’s only rarely a good alternative to bicycling. Hmm. We use car-share a lot for going to concerts and so on because they avoid the parking hassle, and when we need a van to schlep stuff around for a couple of hours.

Now, due to the hyperoverentitledness noted above, we have the good fortune to live in a central part of the city and all these commute options are a half-hour or less. This part of decarb is way harder in the suburbs and that’s where many just have to live for purely economic reasons.

Decarb: Get fossil fuels out of the house

Houses run on some combination of electricity and fossil fuels, mostly natural gas but some heating oil. The biggest win in this space is what Amory Lovins memorably christened negawatts — energy saved just by eliminating wastage. In practical terms, this means insulating your house so it’s easier to heat and/or cool, and switching out incandescent lights for modern LEDs.

Ubiquitous LEDs are a new thing but they’re not the only new thing. For heating and cooling, heat pumps are increasingly attractive. Their performance advantage over traditional furnaces is complicated. Wikipedia says the proper measure is coefficient of performance (COP), the ratio of useful heat movement per work input. Obviously a traditional furnace can’t do better than 1.0; a heat pump’s COP is 3 or 4 at a moderate temperature like 10°C and decreases to 1.0 at around 0°C. So this is a win in a place like Vancouver but maybe not if you’re in Minnesota or Saskatchewan.

Heat pump technology also works for your hot-water tank.

Another new-ish tech, popular in parts of Europe for some time now, is induction cooking. It’s more efficient than gas cooking, which is in turn more efficient than a traditional electric cooktop. For those of you who abandoned electric for gas years ago because it was more responsive, think again: Induction reacts just as fast as gas and boils water way faster.

Note that all these technologies are electric, so your decarb advantage depends on how clean your local power is. Here in the Pacific Northwest where it’s mostly hydroelectric, it’s a no-brainer. But even if you’ve got relatively dirty power the efficiency advantage of the latest tech might put you ahead on the carbon count.

Also bear in mind that your local electricity will likely be getting cleaner. If you track large-scale energy economics, the cost of renewables, even without subsidies, even with the need for storage, has fallen to the point where it not only makes sense to use it for new demand, in some jurisdictions it makes sense to shut down high-carbon generating infrastructure in favor of newer better alternatives.

Family progress report: Good, but…

We had a twenty-year-old gas range which was starting to scare us from time to time, for example when the broiler came on with a boom that rattled the windows. So early this year we retired it in favor of a GE Café range, model CCHS900P2MS1. It makes the old gas stove feel like cave-man technology. Quieter, just as fast, insanely easier to clean, and safer.

On the other hand, it requires cookware with significant ferrous content, which yours maybe doesn’t have; we had to replace a few of ours. And one thing that really hurts: It doesn’t work with a wok so we stir-fry a whole lot less.

Now, as for those negawatts: We live in a wooden Arts-and-Crafts style house built in 1912 and have successively updated the insulation and doors and windows here and there over the years to the point where it’s a whole lot more efficient than it was. Late last year we went after the last poorly-insulated corner and found ourselves spending several thousand dollars on asbestos remediation.

Also in early 2020 we installed a Mitsubishi heat pump and a heat-pump-based hot-water tank. This turns out (in 2021 in Western Canada) to be quite a bit more expensive than heating the house with gas was. Also, modern furnaces (compared to the decades-old boxes they replaced) want to pump more air and pump it gently. There is one bedroom that we just couldn’t get properly ducted without a major house rebuild and it’s kind of cold now.

Another downside is that the tech isn’t fully debugged. The thermostat that came with the thing is really primitive and we haven’t been able to make a more modern one work with it.

Having said that, when the furnace is on, it’s a whole lot quieter and gentler than what it replaced.

One consequence is that we can turned off the natural gas coming into the house, which makes us feel good on the decarb front. And then there’s the earthquake issue; Where we live we’re overdue for The Big One and when it comes, if your house doesn’t fall down on you, another bad outcome is a natural-gas leak blowing you to hell.

Decarb: Fly less

Yeah, the carbon load from air travel is bad. The first few electric airplanes are starting to appear; but no-one believes in electric long-haul flights any time soon.

Family progress report: bad, used to be worse.

For decades, as the public face of various technologies, I was an egregious sinner, always jetting off to this conference or that customer, always with the platinum frequent-flyer card, often upgraded to biz class.

Since I parted ways with Google in 2014 and retreated into back-room engineering then retirement, things have been better. But not perfect; we have family in New Zealand and Saskatchewan, and take to the air at least annually. I haven’t any notion what proportion of air-flight carbon has business upstream, what proportion vacations, and what proportion love. I hope the planet can afford the latter and a few vacations.

Of course, Covid slaughtered biz travel and we don’t know yet how much will come back. I can’t imagine that anyone thinks it’ll go 100% back to the way it was, thank goodness.

Decarb: Eat less meat

The numbers for agriculture’s share of global carbon load are all over the place; I see figures from 9% to twice that. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization says global livestock alone accounts for 14.5% of all anthropogenic GHG emissions. So if the human population backed away from eating dead animals, it’d move the needle.

Family progress report: Not that great but improving.

We eat more vegetarian food from year to year, especially now that my son cooks once or twice a week and generally declines to include meat in what he makes. I make progress but slower, not so much because meat is tasty and nutritionally useful but because it’s easy; less chopping and other prep required. In a culture that’s chronically starved for time, this is going to be a heavy lift.

Also we’ve cut way back on beef, which is the worst single part of the puzzle. I think it’s probably perfectly OK for a human to enjoy a steak or a burger; say, once per month.

Decarb: Random sins

You probably shouldn’t have a motorboat (which we do) and if you do you should use it sparingly (which we do).

You probably shouldn’t burn wood in a fireplace (which we do) and if you do you should use it sparingly (which we do).

[To be updated].

Imagine you had a button you have to push every few hours or something really bad might happen (Lost fans rejoice!).

You can still go home in the evenings, take weekends off, and go on vacation etc…however, every few hours you’re expected to push the button.

How much would you enjoy your time away? How much can you really relax, think deeply about your work, or enjoy your time with others if you need to prevent a calamity every few hours?

Checking a community every few hours for potential problems isn’t much different to pushing that button. It doesn’t help your community, it hurts your community by not giving you enough space from it.

In the decade I’ve been doing this work, I can’t think of a single truly urgent crisis that couldn’t wait 12 to 48 hours to resolve. Larger communities have paid moderation teams to handle most problems and smaller communities don’t tend to attract problems that turn into crises.

Try to think of an urgent crisis now that absolutely couldn’t wait until Monday. Now try to imagine a time when you checking the community in your downtime has prevented such a crisis.

Do you see the point?

The odds of a major crisis this weekend are tiny.

The odds of you burning out and not being able to provide the community the support it needs are a lot higher.

Or, if you need a simpler measure, if you’re not being paid to check the community in your time off – don’t do it.

In the misinformation field there’s often a weird dynamic between the short-term and long-term gains folks. Maybe I don’t go to the right meetings, but my guess is if you went to a conference on structural racism and talked about a redesigning the mortgage interest deduction in a way that was built to specifically build black wealth rather than intensify racial wealth gaps most of the folks there would be fine with yes-anding it. Let’s get that done short term, and other stuff long-term. Put it on the road map.

In misinformation, however, the short term and long term people are perpetually at war. It’s as if you went to the structural racism conference and presented on revised mortgage policy and someone asked you how that freed children from cages on the border. And when you said it didn’t, they threw up their hands and said, “See?”

Control-F as an Example of a Targeted Approach

Here’s an example: control-f. In my classes, I teach our students to use control-f to find stuff on web pages. And I beg other teachers to teach control-f as well. Some folks look at that and say, that’s ridiculous. Mike, you’re not going to de-radicalize Nazis by teaching them control-f. It’s not going to address cognitive bias. It doesn’t give them deep critical thinking powers, or undo the resentment that fuels disinformation’s spread.

But consider the tactics used by propagandists, conspiracy theorists, bad actors, and the garden variety misinformed. Here’s a guy yesterday implying that the current coronavirus outbreak is potentially a bioweapon, developed with the help of Chinese spies (That’s how I read the implication at least).

Now is that true? It’s linked to the CBC, after all. That’s a reputable outlet.

The first thing you have to do to verify it is click the link. And right there, most students don’t know they should do that. They really don’t. It’s where most students fail, actually, their lack of link-clicking. But the second thing you have to do is see whether the article actually supports that summary.

How do you do that? Well, you could advise people to fully read the article, in which case zero people are going to do that because it takes too long to do for every tweet or email or post. And if it takes too long, the most careless people in the network will tweet unverified claims (because they are comfortable with not verifying) and the most careful people will tweet nothing (because they don’t have time to verify to their level of certainty). And if you multiply that out over a few hundred million nodes you get the web as we have it today, victim of the Yeats Effect (“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”). The reckless post left and right and the careful barely post at all.

The Yeats Effect Is Partially a Product of Time Disparities

One reason the best lack conviction, though, is time. They don’t have the time to get to the level of conviction they need, and it’s a knotty problem, because that level of care is precisely what makes their participation in the network beneficial. (In fact, when I ask people who have unintentionally spread misinformation why they did so, the most common answer I hear is that they were either pressed for time, or had a scarcity of attention to give to that moment).

But what if — and hear me out here — what if there was a way for people to quickly check whether linked articles actually supported the points they claimed to? Actually quoted things correctly? Actually provided the context of the original from which they quoted?

And what if, by some miracle, that function was shipped with every laptop and tablet, and available in different versions for mobile devices?

This super-feature actually exists already, and it’s called control-f. Roll the animated GIF!

In the GIF above we show a person checking whether key terms in the tweet about the virus researchers are found in the article. Here we check “spy”, but we can quickly follow up with other terms: coronavirus, threat, steal, send.

I just did this for the tweeted article, and repeatedly those terms are found either not at all or in links to other unrelated stories. Except for threat, which turned up this paragraph that says the opposite of what the tweet alleges:

The idea here is not that if those specific words are not found that the contextualization is wrong. But rather than reading every article cited to determine whether it has been correctly contextualized, a person can quickly identify cases which have a high probability of being miscontextualized and are therefore worth the effort to correct. And for every case like this, where it’s reckless summary, there’s maybe ten other cases where the first term helps the user verify it’s good to share. Again, in less than a few seconds.

But People Know This, Right?

Now, here’s the kicker. You might think that since this form of verification triage is so easy that we’d be in a better situation. One theory is that people know about control-f, but they just don’t care. They like their disinfo, they can’t be bothered. (I know there’s a mobile issue too, but that’s another post). If everybody knows this and doesn’t do it, isn’t that just more evidence that we are not looking at a skills issue?

Except, if you were going to make that argument, you’d have to show that everybody actually does know about control-f. It wouldn’t be the end of the argument — I could reply that knowing and having a habit are different — but that’s where we’d start.

So think for a minute. How many people know that you can use control-f and other functions to search a page? What percentage of internet users? How close to a 100% is it? What do we have to work with —

Eh, I can’t drag out the suspense any longer. This is an older finding, internal to Google: only 10% of internet users know how to use control-F.

I have looked for more recent studies and I can’t find them. But I know in my classes many-to-most students have never heard of control-f, and another portion is aware it can be used in things like Microsoft Word, but unaware it’s a cross-application feature available on the web. When I look over student shoulders as they execute web search tasks, I repeatedly find them reading every word of a document to answer a specific question about the document. In a class of 25 or so there’s maybe one student that uses control-f naturally coming into the class.

Can We Do This Already Please

If we assume that people have a limited amount of effort they’ll expend on verification, the lack of knowledge here may be as big a barrier as other cognitive biases. Why we aren’t vigorously addressing issues like this in order to build a more resilient information network (and even to just help students efficiently do things like study!) is something I continue to not understand. Yes, we have big issues. But can we take five minutes and show people how to search?

 

(Click on headline above for illustrations.)

We asked stats-and-numbers guy Andy Coupland to do a background on The Grand Bargain and what Vancouverites (City and Metro) should know about this town, especially if they are going to weigh in on the housing crisis and to participate in the City-Wide Plan. 

Here’s the first post in the Andy Coupland Primer.  And now the second:

 

WHO GROWS WHERE

If you lived your life only shuttling up and down the rapid-transit system, you’d be convinced that all the growth is happening in the suburbs – or at least some of the suburbs – far more than in the City of Vancouver. Just look at the apparent density, and certainly the height, bulk and prominence of some of the transit-oriented clusters in Burnaby at Brentwood and Metrotown, and in Surrey at King George. Even in Richmond (where the height limitation means less density), the number of projects stretches to the skyline. Each of these would seem far greater than the few towers here and there in Vancouver.

So appearances can be deceptive.  A lot of lower density developments and a series of Random Acts of Density can generate more new homes than a few clusters of very obvious towers.

In fact, Vancouver is developing clusters of new towers as well. Nearly 1,000 of those 33,300 housing starts over five years in the City of Vancouver are on Davie Street, near Denman, (right) where there are five new rental buildings under construction.  Because they’re being developed in the context of other older towers, and because they are (by today’s standards) being built to modest heights, they don’t really stand out.

There’s a similar set of towers coming on Robson Street. They’re almost invisible when compared to the very prominent Vancouver House by Granville Bridge, but overall the three towers under construction add over 400 units, half of them rentals – nearly as many as Vancouver House in total, and more of them rental.

Many of Vancouver’s new homes are even more invisible. To the annoyance of some commentators, the Cambie Corridor Plan initial phase was cautious. The plan allowed six-storey buildings along Cambie and four storeys on adjacent parts of King Edward, for example. The heights were limited because the sites all held single-family homes – often 1950s ranchers. There was a recognition that, one, not every house would sell, and secondly, across the lane the zoning wasn’t going to necessarily change, so ‘fitting in’ was important.

The Grand Bargain was still in play – but in this case it was houses that were going to be torn down up and down Cambie and replaced with apartments. Without taking into account the higher numbers and densities on the big sites like Oakridge, Pearson and Langara Gardens, there have already been over 6,000 units associated with the Cambie Plan. There are 16 tower cranes along Cambie today.

Those who lament that the densities are far too low for a transit corridor forget the huge backlash against the plan, and the parade of residents who objected to the earliest projects when they came to Council for rezoning.

Even less visible are the suites and laneway houses. Over 500 laneway homes get added every year, all rental, and all modestly sized. More rebuilt homes these days have a suite than don’t, but it’s not that far back in time that there was no way of adding a suite – or legalizing one that had mysteriously appeared underneath a home. Now, providing there’s a lane, almost every plot in RS zoning can have three homes – two of which can’t be sold off, only offered for rent. It has been argued that one unintended consequence is that house prices have been maintained higher thanks to the presence of two ‘mortgage helpers’.

This situation doesn’t apply in most of the rest of Metro Vancouver, and it might explain why the numbers of new units in Vancouver is so much higher. Of the 33,000 starts over five years in Vancouver, less than 7,000 are single detached or semi detached, (many one-for-one replacements) and that includes over 2,500 laneway homes.

by Scott

Wolfgang's Pol-e-valent with a Velogical e-bike kit

Loyal readers of this blog may recall my comparison a few years back between watches and bicycles. I was thinking back to this comparison this week when I was listening to a podcast discussing the most influential watches of the past decade - watches that came out in the past ten years and the impact on the market and in some cases on wider culture and such. One of the watches mentioned was the Apple watch. When one looks at the sales numbers for these watches, an estimated 23 million of them were shipped out in 2018, you can see why it is on a list of the decade's most influential watches.

For the first 15 years of this century, watch companies had bemoaned a drop in sales. Many felt this was due to younger generations forsaking watches for smartphones. Why have something on your wrist to tell time, if you have this telephone/computer/camera timepiece to tell you what time it is and if you are late for an important meeting? With the rise of smart watches in general (I type this with a Garmin fitness watch on my wrist), and the Apple watch in particular, the trend of wearing a watch has come back.


So what does this have to do with bikes you ask? Well, I see an analogy to bicycles. Currently, one of the only areas in the overall bike business that shows significant growth is e-bikes. When we go to industry trade shows, the vast number of booths show either e-bikes or parts for e-bikes. Most of these products do not have much to do with us, but sometimes parts can have a cross over aspect to them. Our Happy Stem is one product that was designed and tested for e-bikes, but you wouldn't know it by looking at it.

The bigger question I see is will the e-bike bring people back to cycling? Will e-bikes open up opportunities for people to ride more/longer than a standard non e-bike? With companies like GM and Harley Davidson looking into e-bikes, will the situation in 10 years be where e-bikes become the standard bike being sold, and non e-bikes are for the enthusiast only? I don't have a crystal ball (believe me if I did, I'd be sitting on a nice warm island having picked out the 6/49 lotto numbers) so I have no idea how this will go, but it sure will be interesting to see what happens. Where do you see e-bikes in the market - on the rise or on the fringe? Let us know in the comments.

Here at OU, we provide every student, faculty, and staff member with webhosting and a free URL through OU Create. We’re hoping to build digital literacy by giving students the chance to build their own websites and learn a bit about how the internet works.

While we’ve been offering these web services for a little over 5 years now, I still talk to a lot of students who use SquareSpace or Wix rather than OU Create. Some of these students were unaware of Create, but others say that Wix is just easier to use than WordPress or the other site building apps that we support in Create.

Because we have Create, I haven’t used Wix, so I went looking for a thorough tutorial on Wix. The video posted below is really thorough showing all of the steps for creating pages, the navigation menus, and everything else you need for a Wix site.

After watching the video, I can see the appeal of the graphical user interface in Wix. It’s fairly easy to add text, images, buttons, etc and place them on the page. Where Wix is really strong is the ability to place an element wherever you want it within the width of a web page without needing to write CSS manually to align the image.

The new WordPress editor in WordPress 5 can do a lot of the same stuff as Wix in terms of adding text, images, buttons or whatever else to a webpage. I think the new editor is even easier to use for a simple blog post than Wix.

However, for a page with lots of graphics, text, video, buttons, etc. Wix has a more robust graphical user interface than WordPress. However, because WordPress code is opensource, the WordPress community has built a couple of graphical user interfaces to fill this gap. The one that I use most often is called Elementor. The video below is an in depth tutorial on setting up a WordPress site using Elementor.

The process for building out a site using Elementor is really similar to what we saw in the video for Wix. Both use a fairly similar graphical user interface with drag and drop elements for text, images, video, etc. Elementor’s menu structure is a bit more complex, but with that comes the ability to be very specific about where you want everything and how you want it to look.

Both of these videos are long, and show that building a really nice looking website will take some time in either system. I still think that basic WordPress 5 is the simplest solution for students who are just wanting to put together some quick blog posts for their classes.

However, Elementor provides the types of options that Wix offers and basic WordPress lacks. While I’ll always encourage the students to use whatever tools best fit their workflow, WordPress with Elementor is going to be cheaper (free) than Wix, Weebly, or SquareSpace while they’re using OU Create, and I can actually support their sites whenever they have issues.

Also insider-trading reports, Goldman’s consumer bank, blockchain euphemisms and CLO documentation.

Here’s the spoiler: you would think that City of  Vancouver proclamations would be based upon the approved criteria as listed on the City’s website and are then vetted through an approval process and then presented to Council.

Wrong.

It was the CBC’s municipal roving reporter, Justin McElroy who along with the Breaker News  started to see that Vancouver’s proclamations were a little funky. On his twitter feed Justin noted that under Mayor Robertson there had been a  “St. George’s Rowing Day”, “The Rock Proc for Dwayne the Rock Johnson Day”,  “The Elite Canadian Champion Wrestling Day” and the ‘International Clash (the UK Band) Day”.

Surprisingly work done by Bob Mackin with the Breaker uncovered  a proclamation for Mayor Robertson’s girlfriend on her birthday, and another proclamation for the  mother of Mayor Robertson’s chief of staff on her birthday.

I was curious why the City of Vancouver would not recognize Pat Davis and her son John Junior for the remarkable multi-decade  legacy they have left the city with their streetscape on the 100 block of West Tenth Avenue and the stewardship of Mount Pleasant. What I found is that the approval process for City of Vancouver proclamations is not a transparent process, but are approved by the Mayor’s own political staff~and the Mayor. There’s no Council involvement for background or references.

The mayoral staff are the hardworking people that are hired directly by the mayor and usually leave with the mayor as he/she go onto other political jobs. Extraordinary people like Laurie Rix, Janet Fraser and Muriel Honey have held those positions.

While you fill out the proclamation here  the proclamation then goes into a political decision making process in the Mayor’s office and is not referred back to Council. The criteria that is used to decide who gets a proclamation is also not publicly available. Other journalists have had challenges even getting a list of all the approved proclamations from the City of Vancouver despite having  a Freedom of Information request. There is apparently no list.

Take a look at the City of Burnaby’s criteria for a proclamation. They are more transparent in their process and even list what proclamations have been approved for the last two years.

 

Maybe it is time for a clearer process like at the City of Vancouver Washington where everything is outlined, as well as the presentation to Council.

Somehow the City should recognize the late Pat Davis and her son John Davis for the nearly half century of work they have done in Mount Pleasant.

I don’t think there is anyone else in this city, province or country that have  been so substantially important in the design, development, and future of an entire community.  Their  legacy should be recorded in the City for future generations.

Jonathan Duda shares how he cycled the entire length of the historic Erie Canal. It is a 360 mile route across New York State from Buffalo to Albany. All who complete this route become certified “End-to-enders”!

The post Cycling the Erie Canal appeared first on Average Joe Cyclist.

And yet, after a full decade, it is still nigh on impossible to use an iPad for self-hosted development of anything but JavaScript. Pythonista, Codea and the like are amazing, but for me the lack of a shell (and a UNIX userland, even if sandboxed) is something I just can’t quite get over.

(As an example, I spent last evening compiling Janet inside the emulated x86 environment provided by iSH because I would really like to run some things locally instead of on a Raspberry Pi sidecar…)

Sometime in mid-December I paused on the J.D. Robb “In Death” binge read and moved on to cozier fields: detective novels by M.C. Beaton (aka Marion Chesney), who died in December 2019. I read the complete Agatha Raisin series, easily plowing through 2 in an evening, and am now up to book 25 in the Hamish Mcbeth series. Hamish has a Scottish wildcat, a dog with oddly blue eyes, a once-per-book longing for a cigarette even though he quit, and about 5 ex-girlfriends who all happen to show up at once for him to feel conflicted about as he discovers dead bodies. As a nice touch, he sometimes reads an amazingly exotic U.S. detective novel where everyone has guns and there are lots of high speed car chases.

In between ridiculous mystery novels, I read The Story of the Mongols Whom We Call Tartars by Giovanni Caprini, which was excellent and all too short. It’s an Italian ambassador’s account of his 13th century visit to Mongolia. He met Batu Khan and Güyük Khan, describing the journey and customs of the people he met, and rounded off the book with strategic advice on how to fight the Mongols. (Right at one of those turning points dear to writers of alternate histories as, if Ogedei Khan hadn’t died just about then, Batu would likely have overrun Europe.)

As a chaser I’m reading Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North. It’s a collection of travel narratives by Muslim writers from the 9th century to about the 14th and it’s also pretty great. There’s no way for this not to be interesting and I love a primary source SO MUCH no matter what.

Ibn Fadlan‘s story describes his 9th century journey through Kazakhstan and then up the Volga to the far north where he meets the Rus, at least writes about the Samoyedi, and describes a Viking (Varangian) ship burial.

The next section of the book promises to be good as it’s an excerpt from Abu Hamid al-Garnati’s Wonders of the World where he goes to the land of the Bulgurs and writes enthusiastically about how cool beaver dams are. I look forward to his complaints about the food, the cold, the 20 hours of darkness per day, and how gross it is when people eat their own lice.

I also have William Cobbett’s Rural Rides going in the background, as it’s perfect for when I wake up at 3am and don’t want something with a compelling plot, so I can fall back asleep in the middle. It’s just Cobbett riding around Sussex or somewhere describing the scenery (which when I look it up, no matter how dramatically he describes it, it just looks like gentle, boring hills; Hawkley Hangar, I’m looking at you) and enthusing about the soil quality, how early you can harvest the corn (ie barley/wheat) or the turnips and swedes and also continuing his obsession with anyone who plaits straw for hats. Notable in recent middle of the night hallucinatory Cobbett memories, he had whooping cough and to cure it, rode all day and most of the night in the freezing rain with his shirt off, somewhere in the South Downs. Best sort of book as you can congratulate yourself on being in a warm, dry bed, totally not riding around England with whooping cough.

At Mozilla, we often speak of our contributor communities with gratitude, pride and even awe. Our mission and products have been supported by a broad, ever-changing rebel alliance — full of individual volunteers and organizational contributors — since we shipped Firefox 1.0 in 2004. It is this alliance that comes up with new ideas, innovative approaches and alternatives to the ongoing trends towards centralisation and an internet that doesn’t always work in the interests of people.

But we’ve been unable to speak in specifics. And that’s a problem, because the threats to the internet we love have never been greater. Without knowing the strength of the various groups fighting for a healthier internet, it’s hard to predict or achieve success.

We know there are thousands around the globe who help build, localize, test, de-bug, deploy, and support our products and services. They help us advocate for better government regulation and ‘document the web’ through the Mozilla Developer Network. They speak about Mozilla’s mission and privacy-preserving products and technologies at conferences around the globe. They help us host events around the globe too, like this year’s 10th anniversary of MozFest, where participants hacked on how to create a multi-lingual, equitable internet and so much more.

With the publication of the Mozilla and the Rebel Alliance report, we can now speak in specifics. And what we have to say is inspiring. As we rise to the challenges of today’s internet, from the injustices of the surveillance economy to widespread misinformation and the rise of untrustworthy AI, we take heart in how powerful we are as a collective.

Making the connections

In 2018, well over 14,000 people supported Mozilla by contributing their expertise, work, creativity, and insights. Between 2017 and 2019, more than 12,000 people contributed to Firefox. These counts only consider those people whose contributions we can see, such as through Bugzilla, GitHub, or Kitsune, our support platform. They don’t include non-digital contributions. Firefox and Gecko added almost 3,500 new contributors in 2018. The Mozilla Developer Network added over 1,000 in 2018. 52% of all traceable contributions in 2018 came from individual volunteers and commercial contributors, not employees.

The report’s network graphs demonstrate that there are numerous Mozilla communities, not one. Many community members participate across multiple projects: core contributors participate in an average of 4.3 of them. Our friends at Analyse & Tal helped create an interactive version of Mozilla’s contributor communities, highlighting common patterns of contribution and distinguishing between levels of contribution by project. Also, it’s important to note what isn’t captured in the report: the value of social connections, the learning and the mutual support people find in our communities.

We can make a reasonable estimate of the discrete value of some contributions from our rebel alliance. For example, community contributions comprise 58% of all filed Firefox regression bugs, which are particularly costly in their impact on the number of people who use and keep using the browser.

But the real value in our rebel alliance and their contributions is in how they inform and amplify our voice. The challenges around the state of the internet are daunting: disinformation, algorithmic bias and discrimination, the surveillance economy and greater centralisation. We believe this report shows that with the creative strength of our diverse contributor communities, we’re up for the fight.

If you’d like to contribute yourself: check out various opportunities here or dive right into one of our Activate Campaigns!)

The post Mapping the power of Mozilla’s Rebel Alliance appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

From The Verge:

Steve Jobs stepped onstage 10 years ago today to introduce the world to the iPad. It was, by his own admission, a third category of device that sits somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop. Jobs unveiled the iPad just days after the annual Consumer Electronics Show ended in Las Vegas and at a time when netbooks were dominating personal computing sales…

Apple had an answer to the netbook: a 9.7-inch tablet that allowed you to hold the internet in your hands…Apple was also looking to create a third category of device that was better at certain tasks than a laptop or smartphone. The iPad was designed to be better at web browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, and ebooks. “If there’s going to be a third category of device it’s going to have to be better at these kinds of tasks than a laptop or a smartphone, otherwise it has no reason for being,” said Jobs.

Stratechery wasn’t my first (or second) blog; back in 2010 I had a Tumblr and I imported some of the posts to Stratechery, including this piece that I wrote when the iPad was announced:

What the iPad does is give Apple a product that offers a superior experience in every dimension of the mobile experience, namely, content creation, content consumption and mobility.

The reason this matters is that the vast majority of users are primarily content consumers. These are the people buying netbooks as their primary computers, or simply avoiding computers as much as possible. They simply want to go on Facebook, check their email, watch YouTube, and at most, upload pictures. Apple’s value proposition to these customers is: The iPad is a superior content consumption experience with sufficient creation capabilities to meet your needs. That is why iWork figured so prominently into the Keynote — it was reassurance that the iPad can pass as your only computer (more on iWork in just a moment).

The post holds up pretty well, if I might say so myself, but it is where it is wrong that is the most interesting.

The iPad Disappointment

John Gruber is disappointed in the current state of the iPad:

Ten years later, though, I don’t think the iPad has come close to living up to its potential. By the time the Mac turned 10, it had redefined multiple industries. In 1984 almost no graphic designers or illustrators were using computers for work. By 1994 almost all graphic designers and illustrators were using computers for work. The Mac was a revolution. The iPhone was a revolution. The iPad has been a spectacular success, and to tens of millions it is a beloved part of their daily lives, but it has, to date, fallen short of revolutionary…

Software is where the iPad has gotten lost. iPadOS’s “multitasking” model is far more capable than the iPhone’s, yes, but somehow Apple has painted it into a corner in which it is far less consistent and coherent than the Mac’s, while also being far less capable. iPad multitasking: more complex, less powerful. That’s quite a combination.

I could not agree more with Gruber’s critique. In my opinion, multi-tasking on the iPad is an absolute mess, and it has ruined the entire interface; I actively dislike using the iPad now, and use it exclusively to watch video and make the drawings for Stratechery. Its saving grace is that it is hard to discover.

What is fascinating — and, in my opinion, tragic, in both the literal and literary sense — is how the iPad arrived in its current state. That initial announcement featured Jobs reclining on a couch — it wasn’t very difficult to come up with the “content consumption” angle! Still, you could see the potential for something more. I wrote at the end of that piece:

It’s the long-term picture that is particularly fascinating, and gets back to my contention at the beginning of this post. For while the laptop has all but reached it’s potential — the consumption experience will never improve beyond what it is now — the creation experience on the iPad will only get better with time. In fact, I believe the iPad will be looked back upon as the pioneer of what will become the default way of interacting with computers just like the Macintosh.

Go back and watch the Keynote again, especially the iWork demonstration that begins 57 minutes in. The iPad doesn’t just let you create documents. It lets you create documents in a way that is simply impossible on a normal computer. It is so much more natural, so much more intuitive, that users accustomed to a keyboard-and-mouse will adapt quickly, and more importantly, users accustomed to multitouch will never understand the attachment to a mouse. I truly believe my two year-old daughter, who has already taught herself to use my iPhone, will never seriously use a mouse.

For the record, my now 12 year-old daughter still doesn’t use a mouse, but that is because she has a laptop and uses a touchpad. That was a clear miss by me. A year later, though, when Steve Jobs, in his second-to-last keynote, announced the iPad 2, the future I envisioned looked like it was right on track. The most amazing part of the launch was GarageBand:

This is the entire demo, but the most important part is Steve Jobs reaction to the demo — jump to 12:30 if you don’t have time or inclination to watch the whole thing:

Jobs look of wonderment says more than his words:

I’m blown away with this stuff. Playing your own instruments, or using the smart instruments, anyone can make music now, in something that is this thick and weights 1.3 pounds. It’s unbelievable…this is no toy. This is something you can use for real work.

GarageBand, even more than iWork the year before, was the sort of app that was only possible on an iPad. Sure, it shared a name with its Mac counterpart, but the magic came from the fact that it had little else in common.

And then Jobs died, and I’ve never been able to shake the sense that this particular vision of the iPad died with him.

iPad’s Missing Ecosystem

There was one final part of that GarageBand introduction that, in retrospect, was an inauspicious sign for the future:

It’s tempting to dwell on the Jobs point — I really do think the iPad is the product that misses him the most — but the truth is that the long-term sustainable source of innovation on the iPad should have come from 3rd-party developers. Look at Gruber’s example for the Mac of graphic designers and illustrators: while MacPaint showed what was possible, the revolution was led by software from Aldus (PageMaker), Quark (QuarkXPress), and Adobe (Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat). By the time the Mac turned 10, Apple was a $2 billion company, while Adobe was worth $1 billion.

There are, needless to say, no companies built on the iPad that are worth anything approaching $1 billion in 2020 dollars, much less in 1994 dollars, even as the total addressable market has exploded, and one big reason is that $4.99 price point. Apple set the standard that highly complex, innovative software that was only possible on the iPad could only ever earn 5 bucks from a customer forever (updates, of course, were free).

This remains one of Apple’s biggest mistakes; in 2015, when Apple first released the iPad Pro, I wrote in From Products to Platforms

When it comes to the iPad Apple’s product development hammer is not enough. Cook described the iPad as “A simple multi-touch piece of glass that instantly transforms into virtually anything that you want it to be”; the transformation of glass is what happens when you open an app. One moment your iPad is a music studio, the next a canvas, the next a spreadsheet, the next a game. The vast majority of these apps, though, are made by 3rd-party developers, which means, by extension, 3rd-party developers are even more important to the success of the iPad than Apple is: Apple provides the glass, developers provide the experience.

That, then, means that Cook’s conclusion that Apple could best improve the iPad by making a new product isn’t quite right: Apple could best improve the iPad by making it a better platform for developers. Specifically, being a great platform for developers is about more than having a well-developed SDK, or an App Store: what is most important is ensuring that said developers have access to sustainable business models that justify building the sort of complicated apps that transform the iPad’s glass into something indispensable.

That simply isn’t the case on iOS. Note carefully the apps that succeed on the iPhone in particular: either the apps are ad-supported (including the social networks that dominate usage) or they are a specific type of game that utilizes in-app purchasing to sell consumables to a relatively small number of digital whales. Neither type of app is appreciably better on an iPad than on an iPhone; given the former’s inferior portability they are in fact worse.

A very small number of apps are better on the iPad though: Paper, the app used to create the illustrations on this blog, is a brilliantly conceived digital whiteboard that unfortunately makes no money; its maker, FiftyThree, derives the majority of its income from selling a physical stylus called the Pencil (now eclipsed in both name and function by Apple’s new stylus). Apple’s apps like Garageband and iMovie are spectacular, but neither has the burden of making money.

The situation has improved slightly since then, primarily with the addition of subscription pricing for apps. Still, that is far inferior from a customer perspective to the previous “Pay for Version 2” model that sustained developers on the Mac for decades; we never did get upgrade pricing or time-limited trial functionality for regular paid apps.

Instead, as Apple is so wont to do, it tried to fix the problem itself, by making the iPad into an inferior Mac. Thus the multi-tasking disaster Gruber decries, which not only is hard-to-use for consumers, but also dramatically ups the difficulty for developers, making the chances of earning a positive return-on-investment for an iPad app even more remote. Indeed, the top two developers making in-depth iPad apps are Microsoft and Adobe, in service to their own subscription models; the tragedy of the iPad is that their successors were never given the space to be born, which ultimately has limited the iPad from truly succeeding the Mac.

---

To be fair, would that we all could “fail” like the iPad; it was a $21 billion business last fiscal year, nearly as much as the Mac’s $26 billion.1 That, though, is why I did not call it a failure: the tragedy of the iPad is not that it flopped, it is that it never did, and likely never will, reach that potential so clearly seen ten years ago.

1. This sentence originally included a revenue number that was totally wrong due to a complete brain fart on my end

As of today, the Thunderbird project will be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, MZLA Technologies Corporation. This move has been in the works for a while as Thunderbird has grown in donations, staff, and aspirations. This will not impact Thunderbird’s day-to-day activities or mission: Thunderbird will still remain free and open source, with the same release schedule and people driving the project.

There was a time when Thunderbird’s future was uncertain, and it was unclear what was going to happen to the project after it was decided Mozilla Corporation would no longer support it. But in recent years donations from Thunderbird users have allowed the project to grow and flourish organically within the Mozilla Foundation. Now, to ensure future operational success, following months of planning, we are forging a new path forward. Moving to MZLA Technologies Corporation will not only allow the Thunderbird project more flexibility and agility, but will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation. The move will allow the project to collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations, which in turn can be used to cover the costs of new products and services.

Thunderbird’s focus isn’t going to change. We remain committed to creating amazing, open source technology focused on open standards, user privacy, and productive communication. The Thunderbird Council continues to  steward the project, and the team guiding Thunderbird’s development remains the same.

Ultimately, this move to MZLA Technologies Corporation allows the Thunderbird project to hire more easily, act more swiftly, and pursue ideas that were previously not possible. More information about the future direction of Thunderbird will be shared in the coming months.

Update: A few of you have asked how to make a contribution to Thunderbird under the new corporation, especially when using the monthly option. Please check out our updated site at give.thunderbird.net!

The post Thunderbird’s New Home appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Unter den Bahngleisen

Grafitti near Mauerpark in Berlin

Some days, this is exactly how I feel. More days lately than I care to admit.

Phil Dokas is one of those rare, go-to engineers who can take on any challenge and make it look easy. He’s been a part of the Flickr team since 2011, and a Flickr member since his freshman year in college in 2004. As a well-established Flickreeno, Phil can name pretty much everybody who’s worked here for the past decade and knows all the inside jokes and “remember-whens” nobody else was around to get. He’s also a proud Michigander who happened to meet his wife through this very platform!

Phil was member 11,146 of Flickr which gives him the perfect perspective to reflect on all the good (and bad) that he and Flickr have enjoyed and endured together.

What’s your role at Flickr and what does it really entail?

I’m a front-end engineer, though with being here for nearly a decade, I’m jokingly called a historian too. My typical day is usually split between my project du jour and fielding incoming questions, requests, and bug reports. I kind of love the latter because each one’s a fun little puzzle. Helping someone who’s unsure of where to go next onto a good path is a great feeling.

What got you started here?

I’ve been here since September 2011. I’d been avidly using the site since 2004 shortly after it launched and loved it. I had a friend on the backend team who let me know about a rare frontend engineer position opening, and I knew I had to go for it. My girlfriend at the time, now wife, and I had been talking off and on about moving outside of Michigan, and San Francisco was one of our top hopes.

What’s something unique about working here?

It’s both a wonderful thing and a frustrating thing, but working on Flickr is interesting because it’s a huge site with a massive legacy, but we’re a very small team. Being small is great because you can truly be nimble and very involved in many decisions, big and tiny. It’s also tricky when there’s a bit too much important work vying for attention. But it’s a great challenge, and it’s always grounding to know that your decisions and plans will affect so many people quickly. It really helps you take a step back to put in a little extra time and attention.

You’ve been a Flickr member almost since its inception in 2004. What made you join?

It was my freshman year in college. It was actually after the game [Game Neverending] had ended. I never played the game, but Flickr grew out of the photo-sharing feature inside. When I signed up for Flickr, there was still this concept of “Shoebox” where you had your photos, and it was more of a worldwide chat. I tried it out but didn’t have much use for it. But a couple of months later, I did a study abroad and bought a camera. I used Flickr to upload all my photos so that I would have them and could get them later. I signed up for Pro too since I had more than 200 photos and Flickr had a few limits around that and uploading bandwidth at the time. Then I found all sorts of groups and interests and weird collections and got hooked. There was nothing like it at the time.

So just how DID you meet your wife through Flickr? That seems too bizarre to be true?

Ah, nothing like a love story born from metadata! So, years and years ago, I subscribed to the RSS feed for the Flickr tag of my hometown. There are some groups for the city, but I found the tag returned way more interesting stuff. And one day, as I was scrolling through, I noticed a cute lady writing about something or other of interest. We’d occasionally comment on each other’s photos, and eventually, that led to talking, which led to some dates, a move to San Francisco, a wedding, and some little feet running around.

What were your thoughts when you learned Flickr was being acquired by SmugMug?

I thought it was an easy choice. The thing I didn’t like about my job was dealing with the bureaucracy of synching up with a huge parent organization that forced decisions on us that didn’t line up with what we wanted to do or to use. So, I thought, “Ok, without that bureaucracy we’d be able to right a ton of wrongs. Cool! When do we go?”

The SmugMug folks went way out of their way to make the transition smooth. And on the engineering side of things, I knew this would be a huge opportunity to rethink some of Flickr’s technical underpinnings since we’d have to rebuild certain things without free access to Yahoo systems.

I think that effort went very well. Everyone put in Herculean work, and then on switch night, we all worked through a guide that was hundreds of steps long to transition as smoothly as possible. Now on the other side, with the site faster than ever and a huge amount of tech debt cashed out, it feels great.

You’ve been around long enough to have some wild stories. Got a favorite?

The Phil In The Wild incident is kind of funny. This was just yet another thing we had to rewrite because our free access to a Yahoo system was going away. We used Yahoo’s CDN for all of our little icons and fonts, and other little assets for the site. Well, in writing our own system, we decided it’d be good to have an obvious 404 page. One of our engineers suggested this image, which has eye-poppingly graced an internal error page in the past. That decision was quickly settled on, and we all moved on. Little did we realize that once we switched over to our new CDN that any place we had a broken URL for an image, the browser would happily accept the 404 image of my face in lieu of what was intended. And that’s how my face became an icon on a few people’s iPad home screens for a while. Besides that, there are just too many inside jokes to even know where to start.

What’s one thing you would like our members to know about you?

I hope they know that we are listening and understand the common complaints about this or that. We feel them too. All these things do matter and while I want to fix every bug I see, we usually have to carefully prioritize. We do know about these things, and we use Flickr. I have Flickr tabs open every single day, always, on my phone, and work computer, and home computer, and iPad. I’m using the sh*t out of the website, but there are only so many hours in the day, and we have really big fish to fry, and we have to focus.

Every few weeks, Flickr will feature other members of our team. Get to know all of us that make it happen! Meet Holly Lawrence, Flickr and SmugMug’s Head of Trust & Safety, and join the conversation here.

Twenty nineteen. The word of the year is “impunity.”

Here’s a nice symbol of the moment: the founder of WeWork reportedly wanted to be the world’s first trillionaire, the president of the world and live forever — but all he succeeded in doing was evaporating $40bn of market capitalization on a fake business and getting thousands of people laid off while pocketing $1.7bn. The system is functioning just fine, thank you.

Perhaps we are living through a time of transition from one type of society to the next. But as the sun sets on this decade, do we want barbarism, or…?

What did I do this year? Cam and I fled our broken Chinatown apartment for some nice country living in Brooklyn.

My second niece was born. Two of my best friends got married.

I joined the first 2020 rally of the season, trudging through the snow to see the future #46 (let’s see!)

My time at the International Rescue Committee came to a close. Leaving was not easy. I can genuinely say that I’ve never felt greater love and admiration for my colleagues. And being part of this kind of organization, but safe and thriving in a comfortable desk job, was a privilege — but could often feel a bit dissonant!

Some things in life are marathons, others are sprints. My professional mission has always been some variation on: “make technology work for people.” In fact, that’s what drew me to join IRC and help establish its nascent R&D team a few years back. The Airbel Center grew quickly in three years, with humanitarian innovation projects now underway in a half dozen countries, and the catalyst for a major early childhood education initiative that just keeps growing. I’m very grateful for having the opportunity to be part of that sprint.

But when I had an opportunity to join Consumer Reports to establish a new institute on privacy and digital rights, I had to take it. Getting the Digital Lab up and running has been fun and exciting challenge — and things are just getting started. So the office is in Yonkers now, pretty far from the homestead. I struggled with the idea of getting a car, and ultimately succumbed because of the necessity of a daily 2 hour commute (and lots of burning of the midnight oil…)

In some ways, this new mission is not unlike what I’ve been doing at IRC for the last few years: kickstarting a new team within a well-established and respected non-profit. And it’s also similar to work I did at Mozilla — incubating new research programs and software, trying to raise the standard for end users, and figuring out how to shape the market as an activist social enterprise. 2020 will be a big year — we’re building an ambitious strategy around new kinds of research and products to strengthen people’s privacy rights. Plus tons of innovative partnerships and interesting issues to work on.

So about “Big Tech.” I’m not enamored with the rhetoric but glad we’re getting back to discussion that seems to have left off in the 90s with Microsoft. This year, I participated or led in working groups on digital competition antitrust in SF, DC and Seattle, and became even more convinced that interoperability is the key to building the internet we want. Masnick’s essay for K1A inspired me and apparently some others.

I taught Faking the News at NYU again — this time introducing a little voice-cloning and text generation with the GPT-2 AI. GPT-2 is seriously amazing and having a deep learning supercomputer in the basement to help with writing is something I’m really excited to explore (exploit?) in the future.

I’m grateful that the year was filled with interesting travel — took some time off in Thailand, dropped in on Berlin again, attended my first MozFest in many years, and made a visit to Bellagio where Cam was staying in residency. (Cam, by the way, was recognized this year by everyone from TIME to MIT to Marie Claire [!] for being a rockstar, which of course I’ve known from the start). Good times at our first-ever hosted Friendsgiving; a pilgrimage to the board game Mecca of PAX Unplugged, and a little event out in Half Moon Bay.

In no particular order, here are some books that made an impression this year. Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 is a truly great novel about finance, climate change and the soul of the city — familiar to anyone who’s ever lived here. Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism deserves the hype but needed an editor. Don’t sleep on Trump Sky Alpha — an on-the-nose, semi-satirical dystopian take on how World War III and its aftermath would play on Twitter. Automating Inequality — strongly recommended to understand how privacy is a social justice issue. Writing and Selling Science Fiction — timeless advice (“Heinlein did it better!”) and one can always dream about future alternative careers. Super Pumped — not quite Bad Blood but it will scratch the same itch.

And of course the primary debates began — these are really my Superbowl, I’m ashamed to say. These have been filled with all kinds of amusing and surreal moments, like a campaign promise to “save life on this planet.”

A decent campaign promise!

Two days ago, ZDNet published this article: Meet the iPad, your work computer: These 10 apps make real productivity possible. These kinds of articles, where writers explain how they use their iPads productively, musicians talk about how the iPad is truly a professional tool, or painters show how they use the iPad for professional illustrations, are published regularly. There's probably a new one every week.

Isn't that weird?

The iPad is now ten years old, and people still have to write articles about how, no, really, you can do real work on an iPad!

In 1994, ten years after the Mac was originally introduced, I got my first computer, a Performa 450. Nobody wrote any articles about how, actually, real work on a Mac is possible. Everybody who had a Mac used it for real work.

There was no need to write articles about how you could use Macs for real work, because for Macs, it was - and still is - actually true.

---

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he introduced it as a productivity device with an "entirely new user interface." He called iWork on iPad "magnificent." Schiller came on Stage and showed off Keynote, Pages, and Numbers.

Jobs called the iPad a car, and proclaimed that, for most people, it would replace the PC, the truck of the computing world. It would usher in the next era of personal computing.[^failure]

[^failure]: Some people take exception with the word "failure" in the title of this post. To be clear, when I say "failure," I mean it in the context of this section of the article: Apple wanted the iPad to be the PC for the rest of us, and it failed to achieve that. Clearly, the iPad is making Apple money, so it's not a failure in that sense.
If you still want to yell at me about this, feel free to join the lovely people of hacker news.

Somehow, Apple managed to snatch a glorified graphics tablet from the jaws of the next era of personal computing.

---

Part of the problem is the iPad's operating system.

The fact that it is based on Apps as first-level objects, instead of files, is what hurts it most as a productivity device. An App-oriented user interface works well for playing games, browsing the web, and answering an email once in a while, but real work is typically file-centric.[^note] Even just writing an article means that you have collected sources like PDFs or links, images you want to include in your article, maybe spreadsheet files that contain data for a graph you want to show, a (hopefully versioned) text file for the actual body of your article, and so on.

[^note]: I do get that there is real work that is not file-centric. The context we're talking about here is the one Jobs introduced, the one where the iPad replaces the PC, or at least surpasses it as the primary computing device for work. Pointing out that pilots use iPads for pre-flight checks is technically correct, and that is real work, but it hardly qualifies as being "the car of the computing world."

This works great on a Mac, which presents a file-centric user interface, but on an iPad? It doesn't.

Another problem is multi-tasking, and interoperability between apps. It's still difficult to move data between apps, and to see multiple things at once, or switch between them.

There are other problems with the OS, but honestly? I don't think any of those are what truly hurt the iPad.

---

The thing that truly hurts the iPad is the App Store.

When the original Mac came out, it didn't have multitasking, either. But it also didn't have an App Store. There was no gatekeeper deciding what was allowed on the Mac. So when Andy Hertzfeld wrote Switcher, he knew that he could sell and distribute it.

Who is going to write something like Switcher for the iPad? Nobody, because it can't get on the App Store, so it can't be sold.

Who is going to write a real, truly integrated file manager for the iPad? Nobody.

Who is going to invest a year - or more - into creating an incredible, groundbreaking new app, the killer app, the desktop publishing equivalent for the iPad? Knowing that Apple could (and probably will) just decide to not put in the App Store, destroying all of that work?

Nobody.

---

Why does this matter? It's not that the iPad is a bad device, or that it is a problem that it only works for work-related tasks for a minority of people. But I do think that the iPad is a missed opportunity. PCs are too complicated, and the iPad could have been the car to the PC's truck.

But Apple's decisions prevented it from becoming that.

If you require a short url to link to this article, please use http://ignco.de/773

---

But wait, there's more!

Want to read more like this? Buy my book's second edition! Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web is now available DRM-free directly from The Pragmatic Programmers. Or you can get it on Amazon, where it's also available in Chinese and Japanese.

Donovan Smith joined Costa Enterprises in 2014 as one of the area supervisors for seven of the company’s 24 McDonald’s franchise locations. Costa Enterprises holds high standards for themselves, stressing excellent food, service, and cleanliness. And because they operate under the McDonald’s name, they must also be compliant with the parent company’s customer service rating requirements.

We spoke with Donovan about the unique challenges of customer support in the foodservice industry, and how the business has used technology to improve.

What are some of the customer service challenges in your industry?

A customer can get in touch with us many different ways --- there’s our website form, the hotline, and the feedback we get on the surveys on our receipts. And it can be about food, or staff, or the facilities. It’s a lot of feedback, and we need to get all of it to the right restaurants directly and see that it’s funneled to the right person in a timely manner. And we’re receiving feedback 24 hours a day.

How were the restaurants handling all that?

When I started years ago we were using several operator services at once to take customer inquiries. It was complicated because we were juggling information for multiple restaurants from multiple vendors. Plus, it would take days for the operating services to send us customer feedback, and even then we had to pass it on to the correct locations. So there was a delay in addressing customer concerns.

How did you use SupportBee to solve this?

When we were told we were switching to SupportBee, I was glad it was so easy to use. It was easier to manage inquiries because we could put respond templates together for different managers, some of who may not have known how to word things, so they appreciated that help.

Instead of getting information from multiple operator services, now everything comes into my core feed--even transcribed voicemails customers leave on the hotline--so I am across everything.

Now I can delegate quickly, assign tickets to different mangers and share tickets with teams so they learn how certain issues get resolved.

What were the results?

Faster time to resolution, and it’s cheaper than the operator services. For example, last night a customer called saying he had come by one of our restaurants and the bathroom was dirty. That voicemail went to my SupportBee feed, and we got it corrected that same night. Before using this platform, it might have taken more than a day to fix the issue.

Since it’s much easier to address issues immediately, my locations’ response time and especially follow up rates have really, really improved.

What features serve you best?

I always go to “all” under tickets so I get a good view of what’s open and what’s in progress each day. It’s also a great way to trust but verify that a complaint was handled, and see who commented and who sent what email.

What is Costa McD’s customer philosophy?

We have a rule of three--three touch points for customer complaints...we make three attempts to reach a customer through email and phone calls. And we like to resolve things in 24 hours.

If you met someone who was just entering their career as a food service supervisor, what advice would you give them?

I would say that there’s always a little truth to any complaint, even if it’s being a little dramatized.

Share with your team. Even if I personally handle a complaint, I have the general managers call the customer as well so they get exposure to what’s going on.

And always follow up with a customer--phone calls are a great way to build relationships so make sure to get their phone numbers [at the first point of communication].

The North Shore News just reported on a release from BC Stats of its annual population change estimates.  No surprise here: “the North Shore continues to lag behind other Lower Mainland municipalities when it comes to population growth.”

District of West Vancouver’s population: up by 228 or people 0.5 per cent between 2018 and 2019.

District of North Vancouver: up 78 people, a growth rate of 0.1 per cent.

(No. 1 complaint on the North Shore: the intolerable growth in traffic congestion.  Gee, what could have caused that?)

But here is the surprise:

Five Metro municipalities posted a net loss, the starkest of which was Pitt Meadows, which saw its population contract by 0.8 per cent. The District of Squamish, however, led all of B.C. in shedding citizens with 2.9 per cent drop, year over year.

Squamish?  The place where a headline is, typically, “Squamish attracts new population and hip businesses, along with growing pains“. Maybe that’s the difference between a city and district.  But an outer suburb like Pitt Meadows?

What’s going on here?

 

Facebook knows you’re pregnant before you’re pregnant.

Spotify is in on this game.

Yesterday I hit “shuffle” on my Spotify “Discover Weekly” playlist, and the first three songs it played were:

• The Book Of Love, Peter Gabriel
• You Can’t Rush Your Healing, Trevor Hall
• Only You, Jimi Charles Moody

Now all credit to Spotify: I had been playing covers of I Think It’s Going to Rain Today on rotation for a few days, sending up a fairly obvious signal flare.

But really, Spotify robots, you play me a song with this as the chorus:

So, you can’t rush your healing
Darkness has its teachings
Love is never leaving
You can’t rush your healing
Your healing

Fortunately, I’ve arrived at a place where descending into a torrent of tears, or some variation thereof, seems like a pretty healthy thing to be doing. So a hat-tip to the robots.

Also, The Book of Love is an amazing song, especially the Peter Gabriel cover.

And from there it’s a short hop, skip and jump to The Power of the Heart, which Lou Reed wrote for Laurie Anderson as a marriage proposal and Peter Gabriel also covered.

You looked at me, I looked at you
Your sleeping heart was shining through
Wispy cobwebs that we’re breathing through
The power of the heart

That’s not such a bad place to dwell.

Last November, PT did a series on the development of Brentwood station area (Burnaby Builds a City, starting here) – including a shot of the redesign of Lougheed Highway adjacent to ‘Amazing Brentwood’ at Willingdon:

While searching for images of new towns in Singapore, I came across this rendering for the proposed redevelopment of Pasir Ris, a residential town in the northeast corner of the island nation:

From the shape of the elevated MRT station to the design of the landscaping, from the separation of the paths to the location of the coffee bar, the similarities are so exact that it’s hard to believe this is all coincidental.  Perhaps it’s a reflection of a global similarity in high-density station-area design, with an emphasis on walkability and mixed-use.

While Amazing Brentwood is practically finished, Pasir Ris station and adjacent mall still looks like this:

Brentwood, on the other hand, used to look like this:

 

Vancouver is a settler city that has been influenced by the culture of the West – the ultimate movement of European DNA to the coast of the Pacific.  Today, of course, it is a hybrid city, as migration from the other side of the Pacific is shaping our new reality.  (It’s what the ‘West Pacific’ series of images attempts to reveal.)

While Singapore and other Asian cities have looked to us for examples of city-building and urban design, the exchange, as revealed above, seems to be mutual.  So logically we should be looking to what is happening in the dynamic cities of the eastern Pacific Rim, notably places like Singapore, for our inspiration as much as we do from the European and American antecedents we have typically turned to.  The origins of who “we” are is ‘both sides now.’

(Michael Gordon, a retired Vancouver City planner and PT contributor, just took a trip to Singapore, as it happens, and in upcoming posts he’ll be reporting back on what he saw.)

 

A History of St. Paul’s Anglican Church

St Paul’s Church’s historian/archivist Leslie Buck will share stories and photos of that West End landmark, and we look forward to hearing your own memories of worshipping, attending events, and otherwise enjoying the community spirit at this vital centre of West End community life.

There will also be an opportunity for you to share other West End related stories of your own after Leslie’s presentation and the ensuing discussion.

 

Thursday, January 30

4 to 6 pm

JJ Bean on Bidwell at Davie

 

 

Tales From The West End will take place on the last Thursday of every other month through 2020. Dates to note are Thursdays March 26, May 28, July 30, September 24, and November 26.

Thanks to Dale McKeown for picking up the torch, the baton and the feathered boa from Janet LeDuc.

I tried to push a plan for bootstrapping an automated integration test system for our Android and iOS applications. The plan was based on similar strategies I’d used, or seen used, at other companies. It didn’t fit well with the current situation and workflows. I failed to take those differences into account and the initiative failed.

Developers never saw the value of using their time and workflow on the automated integration tests. Test engineers were overwhelmed by the amount of manual regression tests required for each release. Even with the manual tests, we have gaps in regression coverage leading to some severe defects shipped to users. We are wasting valuable manual testing time on hundreds of manual regression tests that rarely break, when we should be focusing those people on new feature and exploratory testing.

Looking Forward

We want to be able to do automated testing on our iOS and Android client apps. From the simplest type of “does the application start” smoke test to more complicated tests around critical features and functionality. More test automation means:

1. Finding bugs faster
2. Focusing manual testing on high value tasks (new features and exploratory testing)
3. Shipping releases faster with higher quality

Test engineering is highly motivated to do more integration testing as a way to reduce the number of manual regression test cases. Though they don’t have development experience, those folks want to start creating the tests. So we want to keep the barrier to writing tests very low. As we automate regression tests, we want to focus on manual testing on new features, exploratory, and ad-hoc edge case testing.

Objectives for our automated integration testing reboot:

• Doesn’t require knowledge of building applications or the languages used to develop the applications.
• Requires little knowledge of the structure used to build the UI of the applications.
• Reuse integration testing framework, code, and knowledge across all application platforms.
• Reduce the amount of manual integration testing as much as possible.

Approach

We intend to use a black-box approach to installing, launching, and driving the applications. The plan includes:

• Using python-based Appium scripts as the framework for integration tests. Python is a good entry-level programming language and Appium has capabilities to black-box test Android and iOS clients. We’re leveraging the same language and framework for both mobile platforms.
• Using emulators & simulators to run smoke and integration tests. Easy to setup and run locally, while also capable in CI.
• Run the tests several times a day using CI, but not on each PR. The focus is on reducing manual regression testing, while not adding friction to developer workflows.
• Only send consistently failing tests to QA for manual verification and ticket filing.

Milestones

Milestone 1 is about creating a solid foundation for the approach. We’ve completed the proof of concept:

• Test engineers are building scripts using cross-platform tools — and learning to code.
• Developers have added a few testing hooks into the clients to allow faster, more robust tests.
• Python scripts have been created for over 200 integration tests using Appium
• Tests are running in CI several times a day.
• Test engineering created a simple system to send consistent failures to QA.
• Reliability is better than the previous Espresso/XCUITest test suite.

We’ve already saved several tester-hours a day from manual regression testing.

Milestone 2 is really just expanding the test coverage from only high priority test cases to medium and even low priority test cases. We’re also expanding the tooling to support running the Appium tests on both Alpha and Beta channels, as well as self-service support for running on pull requests. Some additional tasks:

• Get better at controlling feature flags for more deterministic test flows
• Start mocking API responses for faster testing and less variations due to live data
• Intercept outgoing requests to track and verify more analytics
• Create a smaller, faster suite for PR testing

Ambient noise apps exist to help you focus or sleep, primarily. They provide a calming effect and complement mode-switching, whether that’s switching to a specific work project, switching from awake to asleep, or some other purpose. Portal, the ambient noise app that bears no relation to Facebook, works well for these purposes – in fact, focus and sleep are two of the three pillars Portal highlights in its name. However, the third pillar – escape – is what speaks most to the app’s distinct strength.

Portal doesn’t just offer a pleasant soundtrack to work or sleep by. As its name implies, its purpose is more specific and holistic than that, providing an escape portal into another environment entirely. Portal employs 3D soundscapes, Philips Hue integration, and imagination-inspiring visuals to make you truly feel, as much as possible, like you’ve escaped to a new place.

18 different soundscapes are included in Portal, all inspired by real places throughout the world, such as:

• Redwood National Park in California
• Log Fire in Switzerland
• Julian Alps Rain in Slovenia
• Pacific Waves in Hawaii
• Dusk in Tyrol, Austria
• And more…

These 3D soundscapes are best experienced with headphones on, so you can feel the immersive impact of each multi-layered track. This means if you’re streaming the audio through a speaker, perhaps as you sleep, the benefits of Portal won’t be as notable. However, in my testing with the AirPods Pro, the app impressed me with its high quality, rich sounds.

If you like listening to ambient noise while enjoying other audio sources, Portal provides a toggle you can enable to let its audio mix with other apps, such as a game you’re playing or a podcast you’re listening to. If you do this, you can take advantage of the app’s handy slider for adjusting its own audio levels, independent of your device’s system audio.

As with any ambient noise app, the sounds are the most important feature of Portal. However, with the app’s unique focus on making you feel transported to another environment, the Philips Hue integration and visual scenes are crucial too.

If you have Philips Hue lights, Portal can directly tap into those lights and change them to better fit the sound you’re currently playing and the location it’s inspired by. This goes hand-in-hand with the visual scenes, because the UI of Portal involves swiping through an array of portals, each of which houses a different location that you can tap into for a full-screen view. This visual stimulation of seeing, for example, a beautiful HD view into a thunderstorm in the Amazon, pairs powerfully with not only the sound of the rain and thunder, but also your Hue lights that change automatically to a muted bluish-green while listening. Swipe over to the Log Fire track and you not only hear the fire crackling, and see it blazing, but the lights in your home will also turn orangish-red. Light syncing can be disabled if it’s not your thing, but it’s a really powerful way to make your chosen scene come to life.

Outside of these core features and strengths, it’s worth mentioning a few other features Portal has, and currently lacks. As I mentioned already, Focus, Sleep, and Escape are three central uses promoted for the app, so you’ll be asked to choose one of these three upon launch. All three offer the same 18 sounds, but they contain different background visuals and have different settings for Hue lighting brightness (e.g. in Sleep mode, lights are dimmed to 50% brightness). There’s also a timer aspect of the app which changes depending on the mode you’re in. In Focus mode, you can input a single task you want to focus on and set a timer to work on that item, or in Sleep mode you can set an alarm to go off, or a sleep timer to stop the audio, and finally Escape mode provides the option of a deep breathing exercise.

Portal offers Shortcuts integration, so you can set up Siri shortcuts from inside the app, or by opening the Shortcuts app. There are shortcuts to set specific timers, sync your lighting, and open into a specific mode directly; this latter shortcut features a parameter where you can configure which sound to play in that mode. The one option that’s surprisingly absent is the ability to start playback of a sound without launching the full Portal app.

There are iPhone and iPad versions of Portal, but the latter doesn’t offer Split View or Slide Over multitasking support, and settings don’t sync between the two apps, so you’ll need to set up things like Hue integration on each separate device. Another missing feature is a Today widget, which I would love to have for quickly triggering a specific soundscape – again, without launching the full app. Hopefully some of these things will arrive in future updates.

---

The best thing I can say about Portal is that it succeeds at its goal: becoming more than an ambient noise app. I’ve never used another app that provided this kind of immersive form of escape. Especially if you work from home and need a change of environment to spark inspiration, Portal becomes extremely valuable. Pairing excellent sound with appropriate visuals in the app and in your home via Hue is a fantastic idea, and it’s well-executed here.

If you don’t have Hue lights, or your main use for ambient noise isn’t through headphones but a speaker, then you’ll miss out on much of what makes this app special. But if you can enjoy the full experience – headphones, changing lights, and compelling visuals – you should definitely give Portal a try.

Portal is a free download on the App Store, with a $3.99 In-App Purchase unlocking full functionality.

---

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

Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, Jan 27, 2020

I don't play around with Alan Levine's SPLOTs because they're tied to WordPress and I just don't have the bandwidth to involve myself in that platform. But that just me; WordPress is the go-to tool for thousands, maybe millions, worldwide. Anyhow, what we have here is something that is, well, really something. "I wondered if it was possible to put a thing right in the page to record audio and have it save to the media library," he writes. It was. Here's his demo. And here's more from the SPLOTbox.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, Jan 27, 2020

I'm of two minds regarding this post. On the one hand I agree with Cory Doctorow that the world's copyright system is a mess. There's an ever tightening vice clamping down on the potential for innovation, competition, and even creativity. On the other hand, I don't care. Not because I am ambivalent, but quite the opposite. I see all that as their rules for their economy, but I have long ago moved past all that. I have always said I will make money in other ways, by offering services in person rather than content that needs protecting. I don't need or care about DRM in browsers in a world where content is shared. I don't worry about the 'feel' of music when I'm just making it for myself and my friends.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

FutureLearn, Jan 28, 2020

If you want to see the sales pitch for microcredentials, here it is (quoted):

• They’re accessible... each microcredential takes place 100% online.
• They’re fast... you can earn academic credits with a microcredential in a matter of weeks.
• They’re prestigious... led by top academic institutions... or blue-chip employers.
• They’re specialised... to identify skills gaps in specific industries.
• They’re global... learning as part of a worldwide community.

And I have to say, all that's.... way over the top. It makes it soiund like you could have gotten your PhD in a few months from your living room if only it was taught using microcredentials. But microcredentials aren't - can't be - the equivalent of traditional credentials. Can they?

 

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Davide Bacciu, Federico Errica, Alessio Micheli, Marco Podda, arXiv, Jan 29, 2020

By the second paragraph of the 'high-level overview' (the paragraph titles 'Mathematical Notation') the reader may be forgiven for thinking that this introduction is not so gentle. But stick with it, because the blend of graph theory and artificial intelligence will assume increasing importance in the future, as it allows us to advance beyond mere projection of properties based on sets of properties, to actual interactions based on networks of interactions.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]