My daughter was asked to pick an ecosystem and write a paragraph about it, then make a list of things she learned while doing the assignment. She had exactly the same homework last year, so after thinking for a moment about resubmitting the same work (and being told “no”), we got this:

The ecosystem I have chosen to study is the Moon. Nothing lives there, which makes it the simplest possible ecosystem to analyze. (It easier to understand a parked car with its engine off than a big truck hurtling down the highway with a mad clown at the steering wheel.) There are no producers, consumers, or decomposers on the Moon except maybe for whatever food or poop the astronauts left behind, so the nutrient cycle is about as basic as it can be. Climate change hasn’t had an impact that we know of.

What I learned:

• There are no whales on the Moon.
• There are also no trees.
• Which means there is also no deforestation.
• Or predators.
• Probably because there is no prey for them to eat.
• No native species are listed as “endangered”.
• Yet.

We conducted more than 27 hours of research, investigated 42 different rake models, consulted with five professional landscapers from around the country, and tested five samples with members of the seasoned volunteer landscaping crew (ages 16 through over 70) at a tree-stuffed Audubon sanctuary, and found that the 2915600 Steel-Tine Leaf Rake from Ames is the best leaf rake available—its handle was sturdier and more firmly attached, and its tines were springier than the competition.

To put it briefly, PureOS provides ISO images and packages for download. Recently, we’ve seen increased traffic on our download site, and we expect that traffic to grow. We’re hoping to address increased traffic with mirrors for both package updates and downloads.

We’re very happy to announce that Sonic, a highly-ranked and privacy-respecting ISP, has offered to host a mirror for PureOS. This will alleviate some of the traffic, especially for those in North America, without compromising security. The security of the packages remains guaranteed by our signatures; the mirror simply holds another, identical set of packages, signed with Purism’s key.

The mirror is easy to use. For example, if you’d like to use the mirrors for downloading an image, simply use this URL: https://mirrors.sonic.net/pureos/downloads/. And here’s the link to the most recent GNOME Live build.

If you’d like to use the mirror for your packages, you have two choices:

1. use the command line to edit your /etc/apt/sources.list
2. use Software to add the mirror URL

The first choice is pretty quick and easy. In the terminal, use your favorite text editor to edit this file, /etc/apt/sources.list, and insert the following line:

deb https://mirrors.sonic.net/pureos/repo/pureos/ amber main
deb https://mirrors.sonic.net/pureos/repo/pureos/ amber-updates main
deb https://mirrors.sonic.net/pureos/repo/pureos/ amber-security main

Then run and apt-get update, and you should be all set.

If you prefer to use the Software tool, simply open Software. You can find it among the apps, by going to the upper left-hand corner of the desktop and clicking on “Activities”; then “Show Applications”, which is the last icon in the dock usually–a collection of nine squares.

Once you see all your apps you can either search for “Software” or scroll down a bit until you see it. And once the first “Software” is open, go to the menu on the top bar where it says “Software” again. There, the drop-down menu will show you an entry for “Software repositories”–and that is where we’ll make our changes, in order to use the new North American mirror. Appropriately enough, once you’ve clicked on the Software repositories menu entry you’ll see the “Software & Updates” screen. In the “Other Software” tab you can enter the new mirror’s URL by clicking on the “Add” button in the bottom left. Now, enter this entire line:

deb https://mirrors.sonic.net/pureos/repo/pureos/ amber main
deb https://mirrors.sonic.net/pureos/repo/pureos/ amber-updates main
deb https://mirrors.sonic.net/pureos/repo/pureos/ amber-security main

You’re almost done. Hit the “Add Source” button and authenticate with your password. Finally, hit “Close” then “Reload” and you should have a snappy, speedy new mirror for your packages.

Packages are updated four times a day on the mirrors and more can be done if necessary, but this will be more than enough for now. Enjoy! And thank you very much to Sonic.

The post Mirrors for Speedier Downloads appeared first on Purism.

A few months ago, WWDC 2019 bought some really incredible Mac software and hardware announcements. A brand new, ultra-powerful Mac Pro, the stunning Pro Display XDR, and of course the awesome software news with macOS Catalina and all its new features.

Now, after several months of hard work, we’re almost ready to release a major update to Pixelmator Pro, adding support for all this. And today, we excited to share a public beta version of Pixelmator Pro 1.5 (codenamed Avalon) so you can test it out before the update hits the Mac App Store.

In our blog post after WWDC, we focused mostly on Mac Pro, Pro Display XDR, and Sidecar, but this update has a whole lot more than that. For example, there’s ML Denoise, which removes noise from photos while intelligently preserving details using, you guessed it, advanced machine learning! What’s more, ML Denoise can even remove JPEG compression artifacts. There’s also some major performance improvements, including a completely redesigned and always responsive zoom engine, painting tool improvements, and faster effect rendering. We’ve even squeezed in full support for SF Symbols!

This is going to be another awesome update and if you’d like to get an early look at it before everyone else, all you need to do is sign up for our public beta. Feedback is always welcome at beta@pixelmator.com!

Join Beta

Hillel Wayne: Performance Matters

"It wasn’t even that slow. Something like a quarter-second lag when you opened a dropdown or clicked a button. But it made things so unpleasant that nobody wanted to touch it. Paper was slow and annoying and easy to screw up, but at least it wasn’t that."

James Somers: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

"The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more."

I used to work really fast, but these days not so much. I wish I did though. It's liberating to just throw stuff out there and move around and iterate quickly.

I think the reason I don't work fast anymore is because the code I write and any other actions I take for work cause ripples that effect a whole lot more people now than they did 10 years ago. I have to be conscious of this (at least I assume I do, or should be). But at the same time, it bugs me that I can't just stream ideas out there and iterate without people instantly becoming dependent on these ideas, which might not be fully baked. If I change the behavior of a filter in Acorn is that going to screw someone up? What about a node in Retrobatch which is surely being used in some sort of production environment?

And then I have ideas for apps. Tons of ideas, but which I don't have time or the will to setup a proper website or introduction, and certainly not support. Just fun things that I want to quickly get up and out there. I used to do this all the time!

Maybe I need a skunkworks branch of Flying Meat.

A bit ago was my fifth Gran Frondo, the last was in 2018.

Last year I dropped 25 minutes off my time and that made me really happy. This year my goal was 4 hours. This was just an aribtrary number, but it was also based on an attempt to qualify for the 2020 version of this race which is a UCI World Cup Event.

Up to May I was almost continually running with the BMO Half Marathon in May which I did in 2h 08m. In March, April and May I was running up to average of 40km a week. I guess I was kind excited by that:

2:08:42 for my first half marathon - woot! Next year the full deal. pic.twitter.com/uwBDROsGSD

— Destroy all cars (@andymckay) May 5, 2019

Because I focused a lot on running this year, my riding patterns changed a lot.

So in 2019, I spent less time on the bike. In fact I haven't spent this little time on a bike since 2015, which was my first year. After May I ran less frequently, but carried on running, varying between 0 (on bad weeks) to 30km (on good weeks).

I did Mount Seymour at least 9 times (most yet) and broke my own personal record 4 times. I managed quite a few 100km plus rides: including the 160km Penticton Gran Fondo race, the challenge route of the Ride to Conquer Cancer, a ride up to Whistler, and a couple of trips to Golden Ears park.

Also this year I got a little more organised with my training. This is taped to my bedroom wall:

This year I rode with Steed group 2 a few times, that's the second fastest group and sometimes they go at a hell of a pace. Last year I stepped up from group 4 to group 3. Next year I aim to have group 2 as my default.

So the race came and as usual I spent a few days before hand excited and not sleeping too well. Yet again I hadn't lost enough weight and I really doubted if the 4 hour figure was reasonable. Just thinking through what I did last year to get to 4:19 seemed daunting.

Again I started in the 4 to 4.5 corral which is essential to getting in with a good group. The first 30km was marred by several large and nasty looking crashes. I focused on going fast up to Squamish but needed to save something for later. As I passed my marker in Squamish I thought I was behind but honestly I didn't feel like I'd pushed myself too hard and felt fresh.

Unbeknownst to me, I'd set personal records all the way and crushed it. My average was over 32km/h an hour at that point. To get close to 4 hours, my goal was to not let it drop below 30km/h. This year I couldn't find good draughts in Squamish, the people were going too slow so I kept pulling out... and as a result pulled an awful lot of people through Squamish.

I piled up the hills and again failed to find good draughts, despite thinking strategically and doing my best to line them up in the right places. About 25-30km out from Whistler I bonked again and realised I hadn't been eating right. About 15km I was struggling hard and failing to keep up. My average km kept dropping and dropping. I was just pissed off and couldn't understand why I couldn't go faster.

The result? I ended up crossing at 4h 16m. That's 3 minutes faster - I was happy and sort of pissed off that I wasn't faster. It's my fastest ever time, I've been faster every year so I'll take that.

Actually I guess I was pretty happy with it:

Fuck yeah! Fastest time yet 4:16 pic.twitter.com/DSdOEe33NG

— Destroy all cars (@andymckay) September 7, 2019

I did not qualify for the World Cup race for next year, but I've signed up again to do the normal race.

I've signed up again and I'm going to crush 4 hours.

I stopped my car along Rte. 101 this evening, as I was driving from Dublin to Brattleboro, to take this photo of the sun starting to set on Brewster Forest. This is, by far and away, the best time of year to visit New England, and, by my count, the 12th year since 2000 that I have done so.

When Fall comes to New England
And the wind blows off the sea
Swallows fly in a perfect sky
And the world was meant to be
When the acorns line the walkways
Then winter can’t be far
From yellow leaves a blue jay calls
Grandmothers walk out in their shawls
And chipmunks run the old stone walls
When Fall comes to New England

— Cheryl Wheeler, When Fall Comes to New England

Today we celebrate software freedom!

In case you haven’t heard of it before, “software freedom” is a commitment made by programmers: to release apps in a way that always benefits the everyday user. A “free software” application upholds these four essential freedoms, defined by the Free Software Foundation:

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose

• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish; access to the source code is a precondition for this

• The freedom to redistribute copies, so you can help others

• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others; by doing this, you give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes (access to the source code is a precondition for this)

As part of its social purpose charter, all software released by Purism is free software. That means our software includes a lot of free software created by others–thank you!

We make this commitment with a “free software license” that formally grants these freedoms. This means you don’t need to ask us permission to use our software–you already have it. If you are a programmer, you are free to tweak or even overhaul an application. If you are a consultant, you are free to provide supporting services. If you are an everyday user, you are free to choose whoever you like to provide programming and other services, or even learn how to do it yourself.

There’s a veritable rabbit-hole of information about the software freedom movement out there

But here are four simple actions you can take today to support software freedom:

1. Join or donate to the Free Software Foundation. They originated, and continue to spearhead, the free software movement. In many ways they foresaw the troubles with digital civil rights that we have today; giving them a louder voice will very likely help forestall more troubles tomorrow.

2. Buy something from Purism 😉 Whether you buy a laptop, pre-order a phone or subscribe to our services, your support funds our ongoing efforts to advance software freedom and safety.

3. Try out some free software! Here are some great options:

   • Krita, a drawing program every artist will love. Customize your brush with 9 brush engines, or download ready-made brush packs and other community resources.

   • Thunderbird–stop relying on a centralized web client, and check your email from the comfort of your desktop. Also, it supports encryption!

   • The Battle for Wesnoth is a top-down strategy game set in the fantasy world of Irdya. It is made up of six factions, sixteen campaigns and even some poetry. You can also play community campaigns, or make your own.

4. Switch to copyleft. If you are a programmer and lead a project that uses CC-BY, MIT or Apache-2.0, consider switching to CC-BY-SA-4.0, GPL-3.0-or-later or AGPL-3.0-or-later. Any free software license is good, but a copyleft license is better because it enshrines the four freedoms for your users. This is also applicable to commercial software. Our own software uses copyleft licenses by default–it’s just one of the ways we put the user in control. You can dive into the weeds at copyleft.org.

That’s it–feel free to use, study, modify, distribute and share free software. Happy software freedom day, and may the source be with you!

The post Software Freedom Day appeared first on Purism.

Δεντρολίβανο says the packet on the table. And I, of course, know that this says DENTROLIBANO, pronounced in my head in a clear southern, English accent, every syllable delineated.

I do not know what Δεντρολίβανο is, and have to look further down the packet to realise that it is ROSEMARY.

I studied dead languages at school. (And, for reasons, a bit at University too).

Most of our peers didn’t understand why we’d do Greek. It seemed pointless, even more dead than Latin, and there was the hassle of a whole new alphabet to learn.

To me, it seemed obvious: someone gives you the chance to read words written over two thousand years ago. Wouldn’t you say yes? Wouldn’t you at least be curious?

Here is what I am left with:

• ten years of Latin lets me stumble through gravestones and churches around the world, just enough vocabulary to decipher a decent amount (bar the eccentricities of Church Latin), and I can probably still scan poetry if I had to. It is exciting to look at stone, and see something come to life.
• three years of Greek leaves me with a mere handful of words, practically no grammar, but I still know the alphabet.

What this translates to is: I can read road signs. It takes me longer than I’d like, which can be distracting when I’m driving, and there’s usually a romanisation underneath. But: I can read road signs!

I can read lots of other things too, speak them out loud, say them excitedly as we walk by or browse a menu.

I can speak the letters, and for every word that I recognise, either through old muscle memory of vocabulary, or, more likely, because it’s pretty similar to something in another language, there are a hundred more that I have no idea what they mean. (Like the Latin in churches, I fare better at the ancient sites – a few words in the stone at Messene, but mainly names, gods, goddesses, and my favourite of all, the long list of all the wrestlers at the Palaestra. At the pace I read it, it sounds like a classroom register).

And I definitely, absolutely, cannot pronounce it, as shopkeepers and restaurant staff across the Peloponnese can attest.

It’s not really DENTROLIBANO; it’s ‘dentrolivano’, spoken softly, with that beta becoming more like a soft ‘v’ in modern Greek pronunciation.

In my head, Greek is pronounced with the lugubrious tenor of my classics teacher. “ζῷον”, he says: “zdaw-ohn”, that omega extended with the lips in a perfect oh. (Zoon, “animal”, and off into zoological and so forth we go).

Dead languages read like history, but they sound like your classics teacher; all these ancient men and women (but mainly men) thousands of miles away, speaking in a plummy classroom accent where you can hear every letter and especially the endings of the words to catch their declension.

This is not what Greek sounds like any more, because Greek is not a dead language.

I knew this in theory, but I was really not prepared for how pretty it would be: those same characters spoken by tripping, delicate, mediterranean voices, breathy on the chis (but less on the breathings which I can’t see any more), all manner of rough edges smoothed, all those syllables neatly danced around. “ευχαριστώ!”, “thank you”; we get the Eucharist, the giving of thanks, from this, but here it is “ef’hristo!”, an everyday word that I find myself saying a great deal, somewhat apologetic at my lack of the rest of the language.

(We go to a chemist for some eye drops, which we manage to acquire between us, the chemist, the people in the queue and the chemist’s friends who hang out in the shop. I hear the old lady grumble something about Ελληνικά, and I want to say “Yes, I know! I’m annoyed I don’t speak Greek, you’re annoyed I don’t speak Greek, we’re all annoyed I don’t speak Greek!”. What I really say is: “ευχαριστώ!”)

Betas have become soft vs, upsilons are somewhere between an english “f” and “v”, the etas I say like “air” are now “ee”. It all makes sense when you think about it, but it is upside down to me. (My partner’s Greek colleague at work sighs when she tells him I studied Ancient Greek – “we had to do that at school, I hated it – it’s all backwards!” So we both agree on that, then).

But it’s alive, floating, bubbling. I think back to Xenophon’s Persian Expedition – Anabasis IV, my set text at 16, written around 2400 years before I was taught it – and imagine all those men standing in the snow, marching on the spot in bare feet to keep warm (and in preference to the un-tanned sandals that froze to their colleagues’ feet), chattering in this rolling, living language. I have to admit, it makes more sense now.

I know better what their faces look like, and what their tongues sound like.

Was ist der Unterschied zwischen diesen beiden Bildern? Links ist der Bildschirm der Apple Watch aus, rechts ist er an. Im Ernst!

Man erkennt das eigentlich nur an zwei ganz feinen Merkmalen: im "ausgeschalteteten" Zustand fehlt der Sekundenzeiger und alles ist ein bisschen feiner gezeichnet. Das passiert mit einem einzigen Ziel: Strom sparen. Bei OLED braucht Schwarz keine Energie. Die Apple-Ingenieure haben sich da was ganz Feines einfallen lassen: Das Display kann 60 mal pro Sekunde neu gezeichnet werden. Oder nur einmal pro Sekunde. Statt den Sekundenzeiger in einer gleichmäßigen Bewegung anzuzeigen, verschwindet er ganz, wenn das Display nicht aktiv ist. Auch der Minutenzeiger bewegt sich nur einmal pro Minute, ebenso alle Komplikationen.

Wenn man diesen Immer-an-Bildschirm ein paar Stunden getragen hat, will man ihn nie wieder hergeben. Das ist der wesentliche Unterschied zwischen einer Series 4 und einer Series 5 Apple Watch. Als kleine Zugabe gibt es noch einen Kompass. Das hat den Vorteil, dass man zum Beispiel bei der Fußgänger-Navigation stets präzise angezeigt bekommt, in welche Richtung man laufen muss. Bisher habe ich immer geschaut, ob der blaue Punkt in die richtige Richtung wandert und bin gegebenenfalls umgedreht. Wenn man aus einem U-Bahnschacht rauskommt, ist eine Orientierung oft schwierig.

Das isses. Das Display und der Kompass. Und zwei neue Gehäusematerialien. Am teuersten ist wieder das aus Keramik, aber das mag ich nicht empfehlen, weil es eine spürbare Kante am Rand des Displays hat. Das Keramik-Gehäuse ist einfach ein bisschen dicker. Titan ist auch neu, das fühlt sich samtig an. Stahl, hier in Schwarz, ist glatt und spiegelnd. Alu ist dagegen matt und rauh. Gefallen tun mir alle. Bei Alu hat man die Wahl, sich das LTE-Modem einzusparen. Bei allen anderes ist es drin. Farben gibt es ausreichend, außerdem kann man das Band im Apple Store beliebig kombinieren. Das deutete sich letztes Jahr schon an, weil auch im dünnen Umkarton der Series 4 zwei Packungen für Uhr und Band waren. Realisiert wird die freie Kombination aber erst jetzt.

watchOS 6 bringt auch eine Menge Neuigkeiten mit, vor allem sehr schöne Zifferblätter für Series 4 und 5. Mittlerweile ist erkennbar, warum Apple die alle selbst macht. Erstens haben sie dann keine geklauten Designs anderer Uhrenmarken im Shop, aber außerdem können sie sehr genau managen, wie sich Zifferblätter im Standby-Modus verhalten. Auch die Series 3 hat neue Zifferblätter, allerdings ein paar weniger. Series 1 und 2 bekommen das Update erst später, "Series 0" gar nicht.

Neue Versionen des Betriebssystems lassen sich ab watchOS 6 direkt von der Uhr einspielen und benötigen das iPhone nicht mehr. Der App Store auf der Uhr erlaubt auch die Softwareinstallation. Apple macht die Uhr immer unabhängiger vom iPhone. Die Frage ist also nicht, ob jemals Android unterstützt wird. Es geht vielmehr darum, die Uhr komplett autark zu machen. Sie ist heute schon mein zweites Telefon, wenn ich das iPhone zu Hause lasse.

Jede Generation der Apple Watch hat ordentlich was drauf gelegt: Series 2 eine akzeptable Geschwindigkeit, Series 3 das LTE-Modem, Series 4 ein neues Design mit viel größerem Display und nun Series 5 mit einem Always-On-Display ohne faule Kompromisse.

Watch ist mein liebstes Apple-Produkt. Und das nicht nur, weil sie dazu beigetragen hat, dass ich den Herbst 2017 überlebt habe.

In Westerpark yesterday, I came across this colourful composition, in which suit, bike, train, grass, sky, headset and handbag all play their part. We went to Unseen, a photography fair and exhibition of all new work.

[Updated 2019-11-17]

On September 10, 2019 while I was in London, UK at the Python core dev sprints, I got a message from a user named "spacedrop" on Keybase. The message said I was being given 356.2904939 XLM as a surprise gift of "free Lumens worth $20.98 USD" from the Stellar Development Foundation. All of that screamed "cryptocurrency" which isn't my thing, so my initial reaction was this was some scam by someone who randomly messaged me on Keybase trying to get me to buy into some new cryptocurrency. But then I realized that Keybase wouldn't let a random person message me like that. Curious, I read the rest of the message and found a link to Keybase's "airdrop" announcement which explained that Keybase was actually facilitating the message. Trusting that Keybase wasn't getting into anything nefarious,  that enticed me enough to dig a little deeper into Stellar and find their overview page which has the following summary:

Stellar is a multi-currency payment backend that tens of thousands of people  use every day. It’s decentralized, open-source, and developer-friendly,  so anyone can issue assets, settle payments, and trade.

Stellar is a blockchain, but it works more like cash—Stellar is much faster and  cheaper than bitcoin, for example. And it uses far less electricity.

Okay, that sounds nice. But when I was poking around the web site and I found a code of conduct and a roadmap that both seemed reasonable, that's when I decided to dive into Stellar and I came out thinking that's it's actually a rather cool piece of technology for people to track "what they own ... and and what they want to do with what they own".

So this blog post is basically me writing down what I learned about Stellar and why I found it interesting from the perspective of trying to find a cheap, secure way to send remittance to the United States from Canada (which, spoiler alert, Stellar can't do for me yet, but the technology is there if someone would let me get CAD on to the Stellar network).

What is Stellar for?

I will go into more detail later, but to help motivate reading the rest of the blog post, I want to quickly outline what Stellar is. Basically it's a public ledger that tracks ownership of assets. Those assets do not need to be inherent to Stellar, and in fact a key part of Stellar is that 3rd-parties can provide their own assets to have managed on the network. Or put another way, Stellar is trying to become a global payments network.

On Stellar you can trade assets. Stellar lets you put out buy and sell orders on assets and the network will figure out the necessary orders for you to get the best price for your assets. This is just like a stock market with buy and sell orders, but instead of stock certificates it's assets on the Stellar network. But one extra twist is that since Stellar lets anyone put assets on to the network, the network will do up to 6 different exchanges to try to get you the best value for your assets. For instance, if you're trying to buy spam with bacon, but people are only selling bacon for eggs and buying spam for eggs, the network will do the bacon → eggs → spam trade for you to get you the best result.

Now substitute "bacon" for "CAD" and "USD" for "spam" and you start to see how Stellar might be really handy for global payments.

Lumens (yes, there's a digital currency)

To start discussing Stellar you need to know about lumens (or XLM for short). There's 50,000,000,000 lumens in existence with no mining new ones like with Bitcoin. The smallest unit of lumens is called a stroop and it's 0.0000001 of a lumen which is 1/10,000,000 (and they are named after stroopwafels which my wife and I like, and stroopwafels are Dutch which just makes the Pythonista in me smile 😊).

Now when I read that Stellar had lumens, I 🙄 like this was yet another cryptocurrency that people are just speculating with (which some people are), but when I began to read about what lumens are used for I realized it's actually an anti-spam mechanism and baseline asset more than a play to make money from lumens themselves (although they are how the Stellar Development Foundation is funding itself).

Accounts

Accounts on Stellar are a public key and a private seed. Nothing crazy, but also nothing terribly difficult to calculate either. So how does Stellar prevent people from creating a ton of accounts to spam the network?

By having a minimum account balance required to even create an account. Since lumens are the original asset on Stellar they are what you need to open an account (and keep it open). As of today it's 1 XLM which is about $0.07275 USD as I write this. In other words it shouldn't be a financial hardship for nearly anyone in the world to have a single lumen to open an account, but it also won't lead to everyone creating 1 billion accounts on their own either.

Trading

So now you have your account, how do you do something as simple as send or receive an asset? Once again, lumens are used as an anti-spam mechanism for trading.

Every change you want to make to the Stellar network is an operation. All the operations you want to do as a single unit is a transaction (just like with databases). All the transactions that get resolved end up in a new version of the ledger which tracks the state of the network at that point in time.

Each transaction costs at least the base fee of 100 stroops per operation (0.00001 XLM or 1/100,000) contained in that transaction. That way you can't flood the network with operations without having to at least pay a little bit for it.

And what exactly are you paying for? Well, there's a limit to how many new operations can occur on the Stellar network per ledger update. Protocol 11 made it so the network votes on what the maximum number of operations per ledger should be, and as of right now it's sitting at 1000 operations/ledger (if you look at any ledger like ledger 25923589 you will see max_tx_set_size and that shows the network's current operations/ledger rate). Even with ledgers resolving every 5 seconds, that still means there's limited capacity if the network gets backed up (i.e. it's about 200 operations/second). In those instances where there's not enough capacity there's surge pricing.

You specify the maximum base fee you're willing to pay when you create a transaction. An auction is held where your maximum base fee is offered to fund resolving your transaction. In the end, though, you end up paying only what was required for you to get your transaction resolved (e.g. you might offer to pay a total of 1000 stroops as a maximum base fee for your one operation, but if all it took was 150 stroops for your transaction to get resolved during surge pricing then that's all you end up paying).

So you're paying to prevent spam, and you're paying to potentially prioritize your transaction in case the network is backed up. Now currently the network is not at capacity so worrying about surge pricing isn't a big deal, but even if it did increase we're talking about minuscule amounts of XLM. With the price for 1 XLM that I quoted above, 100 stroop is $0.0000007275 USD, so even if you had to go up by several orders of magnitude to get your operation resolved it wouldn't exactly be expensive.

Anchors (or what makes Stellar interesting)

So up to this point you're probably wondering how to heck remittance from Canada to the United States might work if everything is being done in lumens and I said they are not meant to act as investment vehicles. And the answer to that is assets and anchors.

Basically anchors join the network and offer tokens which represent assets that the anchor holds. The anchor can then send those assets as tokens to other accounts on the Stellar network, expressing the fact that an account owns those tokens representing that asset. While lumens is the asset we have talked about up until now, anything can be an asset on the network.

Let's say I run a bank and it acts as an anchor on the Stellar network that will generate tokens representing CAD. What that would mean is customers could withdraw CAD cash from their bank accounts and exchange them for CAD tokens on Stellar. My bank would hold the physical CAD in escrow to back the tokens in circulation. This allows people to then exchange their CAD tokens for real/fiat currency at my bank by sending the tokens to their account, whereby my bank would destroy the token so there isn't double-counting of the money in the world.

To take this bank analogy a little farther, think of physical cash as tokens, your wallet as your Stellar account, and the world of Canadian money as the Stellar network. When you withdraw money from the ATM, you are exchanging money in your bank account for a different format; in this case it's physical cash. You can then transact with it at stores, etc. And then eventually that physical cash comes back out of circulation when you deposit money into your bank account and becomes bits in some bank database.

And this is how anchors that back fiat currency work. For instance, AnchorUSD takes money in USD from you and then converts it 1:1 into a token on Stellar for you to send to whomever. It also lets you receive those USD tokens and then convert them back into USD money by destroying the token. Basically it's a gateway between the USD money and Stellar.

In order to prevent people from trusting any random anchor, Stellar has the concept of trustlines. Basically it's a way to say on the network, "we both agree that this token represents what the anchor says it does". That way you enter into an agreement with the anchor to avoid getting ripped off. You also must pay into your trustline, once again acting as an anti-spam mechanism so people can't fake trust of an anchor by opening a ton of accounts that all trust a single anchor.

An example of sending money

Pretending for a moment that I live in the eurozone, what would it take to send €50 to someone in the United States?

1. I create a Stellar account with 1 XLM
2. I open a trustline to an anchor that will take € and give me tokens on Stellar as an equivalent asset (e.g. EURT) for 0.5 XLM
3. I convert €50 to 50 EURT on the Stellar network via the anchor I trust
4. My friend in the US also opens a Stellar account  for 1 XLM
5. My friend opens a trustline to an anchor that will let them receive their tokens as an asset and exchange it for real USD (e.g. USD) for 0.5 XLM
6. I put in a payment of 50 EURT to USD on Stellar to my friend
7. Assuming the liquidity is high enough for both token types, the transaction completes in at worst 10 seconds (assuming I just missed the last ledger and have to wait for the next one)
8. My friend exchanges the resulting USD tokens for actual USD via the anchor they trust and has them deposited into their bank account

So for the cost of 3.00001 XLM between me and my friend, I just sent money across the world in less than 10 seconds at the best exchange rate available to me on Stellar for less than $0.22 USD. Now there's no guarantee that the exchange rate will be better than what my bank will give me nor that the fees the anchors on either end charge won't eat into how much this whole transaction costs, but you can see the potential here.

Why this interests me

When I realized that the Stellar network was set up so that it would be feasible for a CAD-equivalent of AnchorUSD to exist such that I could send family in the United States actual USD that they could deposit into their bank accounts from CAD money in my bank account, that got me excited. Typically I use TransferWise (which I have a referral link for that gets me and the first couple of people who use it some money), but it takes a few days for the money to arrive and I have to go through some hoops to get the cheapest fee with the fastest result by letting them log into my bank account to check I actually have the funds which has always bugged me from a security perspective.

Add on to that the fact that PayPal is about the only solution I know of for sending small amounts of money internationally – which happens regularly to me when I'm at a conference outside of Canada and the restaurant won't split the cheque – and you start to wonder why there aren't more potential solutions out there for sending money internationally in a fast, cheap manner.

And apparently I'm not the only one who thinks this: IBM has a service called World Wire built on the Stellar network specifically for moving money quickly and cheaply between banks. So now I'm just waiting for someone to set up a CAD-based anchor which acts as an Interac e-Transfer bridge between my Stellar account and my Canadian chequing account so I can send money to the United States cheaply and easily.

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has laid out a 10 year plan to get Stellar to a good spot where it is self-sustaining. They have their funding set aside for this and have discussed how they plan to go about trying to make Stellar attractive enough to get appropriate anchors on side to support various currencies around the world. They are also trying to make sure that Stellar can survive on its own without the SDF needing to prop it up in any way (i.e. the network is fully decentralized and self-sustaining).

Interesting Links

Stellar - an open network for money

Stellar lets you hold, send, and swap digital versions of everyday currencies. Dozens of financial institutions issue assets and settle payments on Stellar.

an open network for moneyGithub IconTwitter IconKeybase IconReddit IconFacebook Icon

Stellar Dashboard

Stellar Dashboard.

StellarExpert | Stellar XLM block explorer and analytics platform.

Explore detailed stats, price history, and analytic reports for all assets on Stellar Network. View comprehensive account history, search transactions and payments, examine well-known accounts, analyze XLM and Stellar Network performance.

Stellar XLM block explorer and analytics platform.

Stellarbeat.io - Stellar network visibility

Giving insight into the Stellar public network through various tools & visualizations.

stellarbeat.io

Keybase Stellar Space Drop, 2 Billion Lumens for the World

Keybase is for keeping everyone’s chats and files safe, from families to communities to companies. MacOS, Windows, Linux, iPhone, and Android.

https://www.coinbase.com/earn/stellar/

(If you want to watch some videos from Coinbase and get some free lumens if you have a Coinbase account. If you don't have a Coinbase account and you want to sign up for one, you can use this referral link which will give me some extra lumens.)

My friend Paul Heft has written a synopsis of the ‘advice’ that a score of writers have recently given on how to respond to accelerating climate collapse. You probably know that I no longer offer advice on what to do, since I don’t think collapse can be averted or mitigated, don’t think any advice will make any difference, and doubt whether we have free will over what we do in any case. Nevertheless, this is a pretty illustrious list of engaged writers on collapse, and this is an excellent synthesis of their current thinking. Paul has given me the OK to publish his synopsis here. His full paper in .docx format, with quotes and links to the writers’ articles from which they’re taken, is downloadable here.

How to Respond to Impending Collapse 

by Paul Heft

I have more frequently been seeing articles (blog posts, etc.) reflecting on the collapse of civilization that appears increasingly likely. What advice do they offer to individuals who are looking for a path into the future?

For context, my current beliefs are:

• Trends in politics, economics, environment, etc. are such that collapse is probably inevitable. Our civilization will not be able to continue much longer in anything like the present mode, nor will it be able to plan a sensible transition to a sustainable mode. The current ecological overshoot will be followed by a crash, including a dramatic drop in global population. The current institutional arrangements will change radically, becoming unrecognizable, in an atmosphere of increasing conflict (including warfare).
• Technological advances will make differences but will not solve the multiple global problems that are becoming increasingly apparent.
• People across the world will tend to distrust and separate from each other, even while a portion continue to call for universalism (human-centered or not).
• Beliefs about progress, order, standard of living, and “obviously right” ways of doing things will gradually fade, as life becomes much more precarious and unpredictable for the vast majority of the world population. People will decreasingly rely on religion, tradition, education, law, electoral politics, and other cultural components that used to be fairly constant.
• People will increasingly wonder how they should think about the world. Do they have loyalties and moral obligations toward others in a group, or toward all humans, or toward all life? Can they take responsibility for the predicament that becomes clearer every year? Do they have agency as voters, as workers, in mass movements, or otherwise? Do they have legacies? Should they have children? Do they have any wisdom to pass on? Do their lives matter?

For this review I am not considering:

• Discussions about how likely collapse of civilization might be

Whether it can be avoided; whether climate change or other factors are more important or more immediate; whether collapse will be dramatic or will proceed in various places at various paces

• Recommendations for new political and economic systems or reforms of institutional arrangements or policies

Whether socialism or a new form of capitalism is required to avoid collapse; whether democracy or autocracy will prevail; various reforms and new policies; social justice; internationalism and global governance; possible actions at global, national, or more local levels

• Tips for survival as individuals, or how to “prosper”

I am trying to orient my own thought, and I imagine that more and more others are likewise looking for orientations that make sense to them. I am interested in how my ideas are gradually aligning with or diverging from others’ ideas, and my impression is that worldviews are continually shifting without any obvious clear trend. Mine are slowly shifting too.

I describe below some rough categories of advice, numbered in an outline format, that I derived from reading various authors. For each category I give a short opinion of my own, but see the full document for the various authors’ advice and references to the sources. My own opinions are hardly as interesting as the quotations in that document.

Categories of advice

1.    Demand the truth

I appreciate the advice to not fool others and not fool ourselves; it seems foundational. Sometimes this results in being resented or being outcast—more often, in just being ignored.

1.1. Tell the truth. Stop hesitating from fear, or to avoid scaring others (as a political communications strategy).

1.2. Learn to live with the truth: have courage. Seek truth from within, without letting others impose their ideas on you.

1.3. Have the humility to realize that there is no single right approach—or perhaps no right approach.

2.    Follow spiritual advice

This category of advice is common to various spiritual traditions, and has been repeated in one form or another through the ages. None of it is particularly easy to follow, since it usually conflicts with our habitual thought patterns and culturally developed worldviews. (“Demand the truth” is an example above.) While this advice is generally useful even without the impending collapse of civilization, but it may be particularly useful as we face great uncertainties and changing ideas.

2.1. Awaken from delusions of separation, and help awaken others.

2.2. Open our hearts. Allow grief.

2.3. Reconcile with one’s mortality—the impermanence and uncontrollability of life. Let go of attachment to how things should be, hoping for the good ending.

2.4. Attend to the present. Pay attention, make life relevant and beautiful.

2.5. Respond to wonder, engage with the mystery of life, rejoice in our existence.

2.6. Live with love and compassion.

2.7. Engage in contemplative gratitude: reflection, acceptance (facing the unknown with courage and an open heart), compassion, kindness, and equanimity.

2.8. Reconcile with others and with nature. Open to our interconnectedness to all beings and the natural world.

2.9. Reground to the earth.

2.10.Live with inconsistencies even while fixing problems.

3.    Reconsider what to hope for

“Hope” has become a controversial term. Increasingly authors are trying to avoid illusory hope and magical thinking. What sort of hope is appropriate when our ideas of the future are darkening, when the promises of “progress” are slipping away? Is hope merely a convenient delusion, or all that’s left as uncertainty and sorrow grow? A new term, “radical hope”, is gaining currency. In my own case, even this very limited hope is elusive.

4.    Design the sequel

Shaun Chamberlain coined the term that I use for this category, which well describes the project to leave our current civilization behind and construct a more beautiful world based on imagination and an understanding of what’s wrong with the current civilization. The positive orientation is very attractive to writers who have not really accepted the collapse of civilization (they imagine it still can be reformed) or who look forward to a better, newly self-organized society after collapse. They seem to believe that if something can be imagined and desired, people can make it a reality. (To me that smacks of magical thinking.) My own opinion is decidedly pessimistic: I believe the opportunities for reorganized domination with continuing environmental destruction and human misery are much greater than for something beautiful to arise from the ruins of civilization.

4.1. Live creatively. Imagine the future, what we might gain.

4.2. Orient toward a positive outcome. Create a more beautiful world.

5.    Believe that what we do matters.

We want to know if what we do really matters, if we have any agency in the world beyond our immediate relationships. Are each of us part of a large “we” that has real influence in world affairs, and that can address the predicament of our civilization? If we only really affect those near us, that feels unsatisfying. In my opinion, most people believe that they matter even though evidence mounts that the world is out of our control, and (at least to a large extent) our individual lives are out of control. The belief is comforting while we identify primarily as individual egos, fearing oblivion.

6.    Accept moral obligations

A number of writers assume a moral obligation to do something. They imply that their readers probably share the same moral beliefs, rather than arguing for their particular morals. Perhaps the morals are commonly held much less often than they imagine, which might explain why environmental (and other) campaigns are so slow to build steam. I have no argument with people for whom moral obligations drive their activism, but that is not happening in my case.

6.1. Keep pushing forward, driven by moral urgency. Fight for what can be achieved, even if it’s not enough.

7.    Aim for goals

Writers propose a variety of goals for their activism. Are the goals typically quite vague because pinning them down is actually impossible (except within a small organization)? Or in the case of a demanding goal (such as reducing CO2 to 350 ppm), perhaps everyone believes it’s impossible so it doesn’t have to be taken seriously. I interpret the goals as being aspirational and think they point in useful directions, but I don’t take them seriously as guides for political strategy or building mass movements. At present, I have not adopted any of these goals.

7.1. Lessen suffering. Reduce harm and misery.

7.2. Avert further disaster.

7.3. Aim for human flourishing.

7.4. Strengthen useful systems; save what you love.

7.5. Move from fear to trust, creating spaces of belonging and trust.

7.6. Serve and care for Earth and its life. Preserve the planet.

.     .      .

Here are the authors who proffered this advice. The full paper from which this article is taken is available here, and it contains pertinent quotes by each author and links to the articles from which they’re taken:

• Jem Bendell: “Hope and Vision in the Face of Collapse – The 4th R of Deep Adaptation”
• Jem Bendell: “Responding to Green Positivity Critiques of Deep Adaptation”
• Jem Bendell: “A Year of Deep Adaptation”
• Jem Bendell: “Don’t police our emotions – climate despair is inviting people back to life”
• Shaun Chamberlin: “Humanity – not just a virus with shoes”
• Patrick Farnsworth and Ian MacKenzie: “#204 | The Village That Heals: Love School, Lost Nation Road, & Exploring The Edges w/ Ian MacKenzie”
• Jonathan Franzen: “What If We Stopped Pretending? The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.”
• Catherine Ingram: “Facing Extinction”
• Dahr Jamail: “Dancing with Grief”
• Robert Jensen: “Struggling to be ‘Fully Alive’. Reports on Coping with Anguish for a World in Collapse”
• Robert Jensen: “From the Royal to the Prophetic to the Apocalyptic: The Case for a Saving Remnant”
• Robert Jensen: “The Danger of Inspiration: A Review of On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal”
• Meghan Kallman: “Three Practices for a Time of Crisis”
• Jeremy Lent: “What Will You Say to Your Grandchildren?”
• Jeremy Lent: “Our Actions Create the Future: A Response to Jem Bendell”
• Aimee Lewis-Reau and LaUra Schmidt: “Tools for the Awakening”
• Susanne Moser interviewed by Laurie Mazur: “Despairing about the Climate Crisis? Read This.”
• Dave Pollard: “The Work That Seems Worth Doing Now”
• Peter Russell: “What If There Were No Future? Some Overlooked Consequences of Exponential Growth”
• Adam Sacks: “The fallacy of climate activism”
• Roy Scranton: “Lessons from a genocide can prepare humanity for climate apocalypse”
• Martin Shaw: “We are in the underworld and we haven’t figured it out yet”
• Shante’ Sojourn Zenith: “Grief-Tending and the Ecological Imagination”

You would be hard pressed to find anybody at Apple who puts their iPhone inside a case. And they keep making fun of me when I do. Actually, I have only done it with Plus sized iPhones, after I broke a 6 Plus once.

I was able to use the iPhone X without a case, and the iPhone 11 Pro as well, actually much better than the 11. Which I was curious about, because the matte glass on the 11 Pro back is more slippery to the skin than the polished glass on both the 11 and the X. I think there are two reasons for that:

1. The X and the 11 Pro have exactly the right size for my hands. The Plus models as well as the 11 are just a tiny bit too large.
2. The Pro models have a polished stainless steel band. And that is easier to grip than the aluminium frame of older iPhones.

There is more friction between skin and a polished surface. You can feel it if you run your finger over the back of the Pro models. When you hit the polished Apple logo, friction goes up. And since I hold the phone by its steel band, I get a better grip.

Apple will need to replace my iPhone when I break it. I am pretty confident that won't happen. Keeping my fingers crossed.

This is eventually about the public cloud and Open Source, but — apologies in advance — takes an indirect and long-ish path.

In AWS engineering, we develop stuff and we operate stuff. I think the second is more important.

We have good hardware and software engineers, and infrastructure that feels pretty magic to me (faves: the racks and networking gear, the consensus manager underlying QLDB, and the voodoo that makes S3 go). But, like Bill Joy said, “Wherever you work, most of the smart people are somewhere else”, so I’m not gonna kid myself that we’re magically unique at programming.

But on the operations side, the picture is really unique. First of all, there are very few places in the world where you can get operational experience at this scale. Second, AWS doesn’t run on SRE culture; the same engineers who write the code live by the dashboards and alarms and metrics that try to reflect and protect the customers’ experience (not perfectly, but we make progress).

The obsessive focus on operational excellence isn’t subtle and it’s not a secret. There’s been a re:Invent presentation about how we run our ops meetings and we even open-sourced the AWS Ops Wheel.

But it’s not all meetings. We build and deploy a lot of technology with no direct connection to any feature or function or API that a customer will ever see. These are all about having the right dashboards, and being able to extract the key ratio from petabytes of logs, and predicting what might melt down before it even gets warm.

The asshole ratio

I’ve already written that at AWS, it’s lower than I experienced at other BigTech outfits. Here’s why this is relevant: There is plenty of evidence that you can be a white-hot flaming asswipe and still ship great software. But (going out on a limb) I don’t think you can be an asshole and be good at operations.

Because ops requires being humble in the face of the evidence, acknowledging fallibility, assuming that the problem is your problem even when quite likely it’s not, and always eager to investigate theories B, C, and D even when you’re pretty sure your current theory A is right-on. Since problems in complex services are almost never solved by a single individual’s efforts, you have to be good at working with people under pressure.

Those LPs

I have a hypothesis about that good ratio and it involves the Amazon Leadership Principles (we just say LPs). I’ve gotten flack from friends who think having such things is lame and corny. But in practice they turn out to be useful, and to explain how I’m going to take side-trip into modern clinical medicine.

There’s this guy Atul Gawande, a surgeon and writer whose work I’ve admired, mostly in The New Yorker, for years. I recommend pretty well anything he writes but in particular I recommend The Checklist Manifesto. Do me (and yourself) a favor, follow that link and read the Malcolm Gladwell review excerpt. From which:

“…the routine tasks of surgeons have now become so incredibly complicated that mistakes of one kind or another are virtually inevitable: it’s just too easy for an otherwise competent doctor to miss a step, or forget to ask a key question or, in the stress and pressure of the moment, to fail to plan properly for every eventuality.“ [Sounds just like updating a million-TPS Web Service. -Tim] “Gawande then visits with pilots and the people who build skyscrapers and comes back with a solution. Experts need checklists–literally–written guides that walk them through the key steps in any complex procedure.”

Well, one insanely-complex routine task that we do all the time is hiring. You know what the LPs are at hiring time? A checklist. Now even the typical all-day interview marathon isn’t gonna reliably dig into every LP, but we do an acceptable job of taking a close look at enough of them. I believe that’s very helpful in bringing down the asshole ratio.

Open Source

Which brings me to the touchy subject of the relationship between Cloud Providers and Open Source. We and our competitors have made a good business of infrastructure operations, keeping service-oriented software servicing; reliably, durably, 24/7/365. The core EC2 business is about operating Linux boxes and IP networking at extreme scale, efficiently enough that we can rent them out at an attractive price and still make a buck.

In recent Open-Source years, some very gifted people have created wonderful pieces of software — Kafka, ElasticSearch, Mongo — and taken a new course, launching VC-financed companies to monetize with service and support. Then sometimes they find themselves competing with multiple public-cloud providers.

I have a load of sympathy for the virtuoso engineers who created these wonderful pieces of work. But here’s the thing: I have at least as much for the customers who (let’s take Kafka for an example) just need reliable high-performance streaming. A direct quote: “I’ll cheerfully pay monthly to never worry about Zookeeper again.”

On the other hand, I have little sympathy with modern VC-driven business models.

It’s like this: The qualities that make people great at carving high-value software out of nothingness aren’t necessarily the ones that make them good at operations. This has two unfortunate effects: They don’t necessarily have the right skills to build and run a crack operations team, and they might not manage to get a job at an operations-obsessed company.

I have recent personal experience with failing to hire a senior committer to a well-known OSS project, and also with paying an “open-source company” for tech support when we were spinning up a service around a package we didn’t know very well. Both of these left me unhappy.

Jack and Jonathan

Let me tell you a story. Sometime around 2008, I and Jonathan Schwartz, then the CEO of Sun Microsystems, made a sales call on Jack Dorsey at Twitter. Sun had acquired MySQL and Twitter was using the hell out of it. We wanted them to start paying us for support; after all, they were existentially dependent on this technology and everyone knew that serious Enterprises would never use unsupported software.

Jack was nice, and listened to our pitch, but we didn’t get the business.

And while, as a career software guy, I entirely love open-source culture and technologies and methods, the hypothesis that Open Source in and of itself constitutes a business model is not well supported by the evidence.

Which way forward?

Google Cloud’s recent Open Source partnerships are interesting. I look at that list of companies and it’s not obvious to me that they’re going to offer better operational excellence than Google’s, but maybe I’m wrong. It’s an interesting and probably useful experiment.

At the end of the day I’m not that worried. Most of us who’ve open-sourced stuff love the creative process for its own sake; touching and improving other engineers’ lives. The skillset evidenced by having done so will probably help you get really good jobs. Yeah, you might not get to be a Bay Area Unicorn. But you probably weren’t going to anyhow.

Michael Dowd recently interviewed me (again), this time as part of his series on collapse, our preparedness for it, and looking beyond it. The interview is here, and the complete set of interviews he’s done on this topic is here.

Thanks to Michael for his excellent interviewing skills, and to his partner Connie Barlow for her brilliant editing work.

When I arrived tonight from Montreal on Air Canada 1686, my bicycle and trailer were where I left them a week ago at Charlottetown Airport

Forty minutes later I pulled up in front of 100 Prince Street. Exhausted. But chuffed.

I started my day driving a Chevy Bolt EV from Burlington, Vermont to Montreal. After dropping it off I rented a car2go electric Smart car and drove across town for lunch, then took Metro and bus to the airport.

What a day.

Elizabeth Renieris and Dazza Greenwood give different words to my previously expressed concerns about the narrative frame of personal ownership of data and selling it as a tool to counteract the data krakens like Facebook. The key difference is in tying it to different regulatory frameworks, and when each of those comes into play. Property law versus human rights law.

I feel the human rights angle also will serve us better in coming to terms with the geopolitical character of data (and one that the EU is baking into its geopolitical proposition concerning data). In the final paragraph they point to the ‘basic social compact’ that needs explicit support. That I connect to my notion of how so much personal data is also more like communal data, not immediately created or left by me as an individual, but the traces I leave acting in public. At Techfestival Aza Raskin pointed to fiduciary roles for those holding data on those publicly left personal data traces, and Martin von Haller mentioned how those personal data traces also can serve communal purposes and create communal value, placing it in yet another legal setting (that of weighing privacy versus public interest)

....viewing this data as property that is capable of being bought, sold, and owned by others is in large part how we ended up with a broken internet funded by advertising — or the “ad tech model” of the Internet. A property law-based, ownership model of our data risks extending this broken ad tech model of the Internet to all other facets of our digital identity and digital lives expressed through data. While new technology solutions are emerging to address the use of our data online, the threat is not solved with technology alone. Rather, it is time for our attitudes and legal frameworks to catch up. The basic social compact should be explicitly supported and reflected by our business models, legal frameworks and technology architectures, not silently eroded and replaced by them.

The second prototype I built for Task Specific Programming in Precalculus is about using wave functions for building textures. As I mentioned in my last blog post, my goal is to use computing to make precalculus less abstract and more relevant. I want to provide a programming experience that can be used in five minutes which can be integrated into a precalculus class. In this prototype, I explicitly designed for inquiry and debugging. What would debugging look like in task-specific programming when the goal is learning precalculus and not programming or computer science?

I’m going to describe this one bottom-up. Wave functions are a common topic in a precalculus class (like in this YouTube lecture). These are typically taught in the form:

A sin(B(x-C)) + D

Or

Amplitude sin(frequency(x-horizontalShift)+ verticalShift

I built a tool where the student specifies a wave function, then that wave is used to define a texture in terms of gray, red, green, or blue components.

This equation is plotted (lower right hand corner) where the X-axis controls the darkness. Each pixel is evaluated left-to-right, and it’s X-position is plugged into this formula. The Y value mapped to a gray scale. The plot should (if it all worked right, and it doesn’t really in this example) line up with the texture so that darkness and lightness maps to rise and fall in the darkness level of the texture.

Let’s set the “Challenge” section aside for just a few minutes.

We can map equations to other colors, and swap sine for cosine, and use the X or Y components of the pixel to determine the color. Like in the first prototype, each wave function appears on a separate card in a deck.

You can have an arbitrary number of these cards. When you get to the front page of the deck, you have a program of all the wave functions. These are then composed to create a more complex texture.

What does debugging look like here?

With this prototype, I thought more about the student’s process than I did with the image filter tool. In my work with both precalculus and social studies teachers, I’m increasingly thinking about inquiry, and I see debugging as a form of inquiry. You have some output, and you’re trying to understand it — and by “understand,” I mean being able to explain how the parts constitute the whole. The impetus to inquire (i.e., to debug) is that the output you have is not the output you expect or want. So, if we want to support inquiry as debugging, we have to support starting from a goal — an example, a requirement, or a set of tests.

I’m inspired by Diana Franklin’s group’s work on La Playa, a Scratch-like programming environment for 4th-6th grade students (see paper here). In La Playa, the programming tool opens up onto a starter file. The student could ignore it and just do open-ended programming, but more likely, the starter file guides the student and serves as a scaffold.

I made a prominent Challenge texture on the front page (and the challenge image appears on every wave card afterward). Can you make this? If you need a Hint, press the Hint button for a suggestion about is needed to make this texture.

In general, my challenge textures don’t really work. I built a bunch of cool textures to use as hints, like below, but the composition of color waves is one of the more complicated parts here — I talk more about it in Part 5 of the series.  But on the other hand, I showed some of these textures to researchers in culturally-relevant curricula who said that they reminded them of woven cloths from the cultures that they study.  Could we use wave functions in a form of culturally-relevant curriculum that blends precalculus and computing?

Imagine that you have a texture that you generated on the first page, and now you want to understand how your existing waves contribute to this texture, e.g, to figure out which equations need to be changed. One tool is the Pop button on the front Texture Program page. This pops out the texture into a separate window.

Now, you can drag the texture over the individual wave textures to understand how the pieces compose into the whole.

Each wave has a checkbox, so that the wave can be removed from the texture (without deleting), then put back in.

The idea is that a student can apply basic debugging principles: Compare to the example, find how this statement/computational-unit impacts the final outcome (like a print statement), and remove the statement/unit (like with a comment) to see the effect on the final outcome.

Multiple-linked representations

As I’ve shown this to math teachers, one of the things they like here are the multiple linked representations. We’ve got the equation:

When the student hovers, they get an explanation for each of the terms:

The plot and the texture, and if you press the “Points” button, you see exactly which points were plotted — both x,y on the graph, but also the computed x and y before they were mapped to the discrete points:

When I showed this to teachers, they wanted it to support more exploration. For example, they told me that students struggle to understand the difference between 3sin(x) and sin(3x). I was thinking that a useful addition to this tool would be a Bret Victor inspired scrubbing gesture over each of the terms in the wave function (as in his fabulous Learnable Programming essay, or in the Scrubbing Calculator). I want to be able to click on the “3” above, drag up, then move the cursor left or right to make that number less or more. As I scrub, I want to see the plot change and the texture change — but with some kind of shadow/echo so that I can compare the “3” plot/texture to the new values for “C.” Students can’t generally keep the original curve “in their head” when seeing the new one, so they need both to be visible to understand the effect of the equation change.

I built these in Livecode. The source file is available here. I’m also making binaries available for Macintosh and for Windows. (Yes, I can provide Linux, if someone’s interested.) These are provided with no warranty or guarantee — these barely do what I describe, and probably have lots of other mistakes, holes, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. They’re slow as molasses. I strongly discourage you from using my prototypes with students. As I describe in Part 4 of this series, this is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to be useful.

Ja, een tilde account, dat is een blast from the past. Bij mijn oude studievereniging hadden we de utelscin server staan (Universiteit Twente, ELektrotechniek SCINtilla). Op die utelscin hadden we ook ~ accounts om spullen van actieve leden te delen. Kwam het ook altijd tegen op de servers van andere universiteiten waar je via telnet verbinding mee maakte. Naast de utelscin doos (de servers stonden op de kast in de verenigingskamer) hadden we ook mailserver Betty, een afkorting van Betty Serveert e-mail.

Een paar jaar geleden was het een snelle hype, de tilde-pagina’s, gestart door Paul Ford. Als een grap. Maar al snel werd het meer. Ik wilde graag toegang tot die tildeclub, maar de inschrijvingen waren dicht. Tot een paar dagen terug. Een oude fan van tilde wilde het weer nieuw leven inblazen, hi...

The modern keychain with one physical key.

It’s probably about time to migrate that USB key to USB-C.

Apple revamped CarPlay in iOS 13 and it now has the ability to display on two in-car screens at the same time, but no cars on the market currently support the feature.

The feature allows users to theoretically display an app like Spotify on the main infotainment screen and another app like Maps on another screen behind the steering wheel.

The Verge reached out to 10 popular automotive manufacturers ranging from GM and Toyota to Ford and Volkswagen, plus others. Most companies just mentioned that they didn’t have any cars on the market with dual screens that support the new CarPlay feature.

What is interesting is the handful of companies hinted at the feature coming in the future. Notably, GM ended its email to The Verge with the words “stay tuned..,” and Fiat Chrysler said it would have “more information at a later date.”

While it is a tad bit annoying that no cars offer users a dual-screen CarPlay experience legacy manufacturers have a bad habit of lagging behind tech companies’ in-car innovations.

Source: The Verge

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An iOS 13 bug is making some major mobile game titles, including PlayerUnknown: Battlegrounds and Fortnite, unplayable.

Essentially, iOS 13 introduced a bug to a three-finger tap-and-hold gesture that affects games. The gesture should conjure up a toolbar for editing text, featuring copy/paste and undo and redo. However, the bug causes the toolbar to appear during games, even though there isn’t a text field to interact with.

The bug is especially bad with games like Fortnite and PUBG as they require players to have three fingers on the screen regularly — two thumbs control the joysticks and a third to fire a weapon.

Several users have taken to social media to complain about the problem and PUBG now warns players not to update to iOS 13 because of the bug.

@Apple @AppleSupport how to disable 3 finger formatting bar ? Its very annoying when i play pubg mobile game. Always appear when i walk,shoot and scope in wilful.
So guide me how to disable or remove that annoying feature in ios 13. Thank You. pic.twitter.com/XqYR9oDxyZ

— Aldio Putra (@aldiohp) September 20, 2019

It doesn’t just affect games, however. The bug affects Apple apps too, such as playing the virtual piano in GarageBand.

Thankfully, Apple is aware of the problem and has a fix in iOS 13.1. The next software update will adjust the gesture so it only activates when editable text is present. Further, iOS 13.1 should include a way for app developers to customize when and where the text editing toolbar appears.

iOS 13.1 is only a few days away now. Apple has it set to launch on September 24th.

Until then, there’s no way to disable the gesture so you won’t be able to enjoy some games until then.

Source: 9to5Mac

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The new ‘QuickTake’ feature that lets iPhone users record a video by holding the shutter button down isn’t coming to older iPhones.

According to support documents on Apple’s website, QuickTake will only work on “supported models,” which include the iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max.

The detail was included on the support page along with an explanation of how to use QuickTake. It says that when in Photo mode, users can touch and hold the shutter button to start recording. To go hands-free, users can drag their finger over the lock icon and let go.

Apple announced QuickTake along with the new iPhones at its recent event. However, it didn’t mention that it would be exclusive to new iPhones.

It’s a helpful new feature and one that we’ve seen in other camera apps like Snapchat and Instagram.

That said, it’s odd that it isn’t coming to older iPhones. Considering other apps have been able to offer similar features for some time, you’d think it’d be a simple matter to include it for older iPhones.

However, according to Gizmodo, Apple said during a briefing that the feature uses an element of the new hardware in the iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max. In other words, older iPhones don’t have the hardware to make it work.

Source: Apple, (2)

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Not long after the iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max became available, iFixit has done a teardown of Apple’s latest and greatest.

The company kicked things off with a livestream of its iPhone 11 Pro teardown, and now it’s analyzing all the exciting findings — including a mystery board in the 11 Pro Max.

iFixit found the mysterious component beneath the iPhone’s battery and suggested it could be part of the rumoured bilateral wireless charging feature.

In the lead up to the iPhone announcement, several sources said that Apple would include bilateral wireless charging in the new iPhones. However, just ahead of the event, reports surfaced that Apple had scrapped the feature because it hadn’t met the company’s efficiency requirements.

Because of the sudden and late change, many suspected that the new iPhones would sport the necessary hardware for bilateral wireless charging. However, the feature would be disabled via software.

Along with the mystery board, which served as an interconnect between the battery, wireless charging coil and the Taptic Engine, iFixit found a secondary battery connector for the first time ever in an iPhone. It plugs in directly adjacent to the wireless charging coil. iFixit notes it isn’t sure what Apple was trying to do. It does say that it could be part of the new hardware for monitoring and managing battery performance, but that it “looks suspiciously like bilateral charging hardware.”

The interconnect board itself contained three chips, one for audio amplifiers and two chips that it isn’t clear what they do.

Ultimately, the results of the teardown are inconclusive. It certainly appears that the new iPhones could have included bilateral charging hardware, but the parts could also be something else entirely. In other words, don’t hold out hope that Apple will enable bilateral charging via a future software update.

Source: iFixit Via: 9to5Mac

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The Nokia brand’s renewed Canadian presence is dominating the ultra-low-end smartphone market, which is a stark departure from its heyday in the early 2000s. The latest two devices launched by the current owner of the brand, HMD Global, are the Nokia 2.2 and its sibling the 4.2, and they prove why Nokia is a name that refuses to fade into the shadows.

The two phones are similar in several ways, but the more expensive $300 CAD Nokia 4.2 has a few perks that make it worth the extra $70 compared to the 2.2.

If you’re looking for a great starter phone for a child or a device for someone who isn’t interested in flashy specs, check out these phones because the value they offer is outstanding.

Cut from the same cloth

Both phones look very similar, but a few key differences make the 4.2 more expensive, and, in my opinion, a better buy.

The duo of devices run Android One, which is a near-stock version of the operating system (OS) that manufacturers can’t overlay a skin on top of. This means that this version of Android is clean and gets at least two years of software updates.

If you’re a stock Android purest, this OS is perfect.

It looks just like Android Pie on a Google Pixel and uses stock apps like Photos, Gmail, Calendar and Files. They even feature Google’s impressive Call Screening feature.

While HMD has yet to update the devices to Android 10, it says the two handsets should receive updates by the first quarter of 2020.

Both phones also feature a 5.71-inch 720 x 1520 display, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, a MicroSD card slot and also charge with micro USB.

Additionally, the phones both have a 3000mAh battery

On average, I was getting a day’s worth of charge. I was even able to use the 4.2 from 6AM to midnight one day with heavy use. This is because of their big batteries, small 720p screens and mediocre processors.

From the front, they both look the same, with a full-screen display and a tiny notch for a single camera.

The pair of handsets also feature a button on their left edge that triggers Google Assistant. I was a big fan of this functionality as it made me interact with the digital helper more than I typically would.

It’s worth noting that both speakers offered similar sound quality, which is to say they were usable in a quiet space, but not mind-blowing or incredibly detailed. Overall, they had a tinny and hollow sound that was usable, but not ideal

The devices are also both sported 3.5mm headphone jacks.

The higher-end version

First off the Nokia 4.2, the higher-end variant, feels a lot better to hold compared to the 2.2. It’s built with rounded edges and although it’s plastic, it feels reminiscent of the iPhone X’s shape which is high praise for a $300 phone.

In the notch there’s an 8-megapixel selfie camera and on the back, there are two lenses, a 13-megapixel shooter and an accompanying 2-megapixel camera.

This lets the 4.2 take slightly better pictures than the 2.2, but by no means is it a game-changer. At the end of the day, it’s still not competing with even other mid-tier phones like the Huawei P30 Lite.

It’s also got a fingerprint scanner on the back which I was a big fan of. This isn’t at huge selling feature, but it was nice to have and worked well.

The 4.2’s power button also doubles as a notification light. It only lights up as white, but it’s a cool addition that gave the device a bit of personality, and since it doesn’t have an always-on Ambient display, I found myself looking at it a lot.

All of these things are much smaller improvements over the 2.2, but the real reason to get the 4.2 instead of its lower-priced sibling is its Snapdragon 439 processor. This is an octa-core processor that makes using the phone smooth and totally usable. I even played Hampsterdam on the phone for a brief period of time. The game wasn’t quite playable on the 2.2 because of long load times and significant lag. Even opening apps and scrolling through the phone’s OS was much snappier on the 4.2.

The cheapest phone worth buying, if you know what you’re getting into

The Nokia 2.2’s design is a bit different than the 4.2 since users can remove the rear of the device to reveal a SIM card, a MicroSD slot and a removable battery.

This means that it doesn’t sit as nicely in my hand and it feels a bit cheaper — though it is, so it’s hard to hold this against it.

Beyond this, the device’s front camera is only 5-megapixels and its single rear shooter is 13-megapixels. One thing that I noticed when taking pictures with the two phones is the 2.2 featured a wider crop than the 4.2 and its photos had a bit more of a bluish tint.

It still took okay photos, but it’s worth noting. It also lacks the ‘Pro’ camera mode from the 4.2, but in all honesty, this just makes it easier to use since the Pro mode doesn’t seem to help the 4.2 take better photos.

Both phones also take quite a bit of time to snap photos, so it’s nearly impossible to take pictures of moving subjects.

One thing that I did like about the 2.2 was its screen. While on paper both phones’ displays have the same specs, to my eyes, the 2.2’s seemed less washed out and more vibrant.

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sillygwailo shared this story from Marshall's Musings.

The Major Street Boulder

On September 18, Toronto Star columnist Jack “The Fixer” Lakey wrote about a boulder that was dug up during construction in the Annex. Bloor Street is currently being dug up between Bathurst Street and Spadina Avenue as the city replaces watermains and reconstructs the roadway. New parkettes at Major Street and Howland Street are also part of the work. As this is going on, bike lanes and parking spaces have been removed, and traffic is rerouted to one side of Bloor Street.

The billion-year old boulder (its age is unremarkable; the Canadian Shield is older than that) will be incorporated into a nearby parkette. For now, it sits on the side of Major Street immediately south of Bloor. When I visited Thursday evening, the boulder was moved slightly south by a construction crew that was working on the parkette.

Major Street, despite its grand name, is a minor residential road that leads one-way south from Bloor towards Sussex Street. It is part of a one-way maze of local streets intended to discourage through traffic and permit on-street parking (while frustrating cyclists looking to cut through quiet local streets instead of taking Bathurst or Spadina).

Lakey was informed about the Major Street boulder by a motorist complaining of turning right onto Major from Bloor and scraping the passenger side as she passed the boulder. She said she couldn’t see the rock because it was below the height of her windows, though there were pylons adjacent to the rock. Lakey visited the site and found two pylons next to the boulder. The city’s response was to ensure that pylons be secured to the rock with caution tape, and to block it off if necessary, as it can not easily be moved.

Bloor Street is a mess of construction and signage as construction continues through September

Though the city was right to improve the visibility of the boulder, placed in a spot where it wouldn’t be expected, I can’t say I have too much sympathy for drivers who miss it and scratch their cars. Bloor Street is a mess, but it is an active construction site. The bike lanes have been closed off, with cyclists expected to travel with traffic, single file with motor vehicles. The lane configuration has changed, and pedestrians must navigate the construction clutter, signs, and fencing on sidewalks and crosswalks. Such an environment calls for slow and considerate driving.

The motorist quoted in Lakey’s column said that she could not see the 80-centimetre tall boulder as it was below her line of sight. Other things that might be below a driver’s line of sight at close proximity include pylons, knock-down posts, mailboxes, garbage bins, dogs, cats, recumbent bicycles, strollers, small children, wheelchairs, and other mobility devices. As the average vehicle size has become larger (with Ford and General Motors phasing out sedans in favour of SUVs and light trucks), the line of sight has become higher as well.

But this gives me an idea that can balance the City of Toronto’s supposed commitment to Vision Zero with the mayor’s desire to keep property taxes too low to pay for the implementation of true Vision Zero across the city. Just add rocks. Lots and lots of rocks.

Boulders can take a pounding, unlike plastic knock-down poles that motorists can just drive over to get into a cycle track. They can be used to narrow wide residential streets at strategic points and discourage fast turns at intersections. Of course, they can be marked with metal reflective signs, but they’d be cheap to install and very effective.

Boulders are easy and cheap to source with of all the construction going on in Toronto, with foundations being dug for high rise offices and apartment buildings. But if we’re stuck, we can source rocks from Northern Ontario, where the Canadian Shield is blasted away for resource extraction and the twinning of Highway 69.

Vision Zero on a zero-vision budget.

sillygwailo shared this story from Toronto – Azure Magazine.

Some of the urban-design and technology ideas in Sidewalk’s plan, from tall timber to automated shuttles, get a lot of attention. But there’s something else about the plan to consider, something less easy to grasp or see: time.

Technology companies have an interesting strategic relationship with time. When Uber arrived in Toronto years ago, it wasn’t explicitly announced as a competitor to public transit. Political leadership embraced the company, despite the way it steamrolled civic stakeholders, doing what it wanted and begging forgiveness later. In recent months, as Uber prepared a regulatory filing prior to its IPO, it stated that “its growth depends on better competing with public transportation, which it identifies as a $1 trillion market it can grab a share of over the long term.”

Beyond the fact that Uber is now competing with public transit, the regulatory vacuum from which it emerged created other unresolved issues that have become clearer over time, including its impact on congestion, public safety and labour. With Uber, corporate capture of our regulatory environments occurred in two distinct ways through the use of time. First, time went fast: The company went directly to the public to build a user base and support. But concurrently, time was slow to reveal the company’s long-term plan. Uber has been burning through hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital over the years to establish market position and compete with public transit. Earlier this year, it lost over a billion dollars in its first quarter as a publicly traded company. 

Uber is an example of the direct-to-consumer threat that Internet-enabled businesses pose to the democratic governance of the city. Through software and the use of time, tech companies can go straight to their users via the Internet. They build a supportive constituency for their product before it’s regulated. People get used to something they enjoy and don’t want it to change. Social norms are established before policy is created and cities are left to clean up the mess. 

Airbnb followed a similar cycle. Policy-makers are playing catch-up to deal with negative impact on rental stock and quality of life for those living in buildings with a lot of Airbnb activity. As with Uber, a supportive constituency – property owners – was created, presenting the same political challenge for regulators. The business strategy here is consistent: Tech companies use time to wedge themselves between residents and government, painting governments into difficult corners when it comes to dealing with any negative consequences that fall onto the collective. When tech companies invariably need to be reined in, political leaders are fearful of appearing anti-innovation or anti-progress.

Many potential cases of long-term privatization exist in the Sidewalk plan. In the mobility space alone, where Alphabet has a deep portfolio of subsidiary companies, there are several proposed urban innovations that fit the pattern: dynamic curbs, mobility management subscription plans, parking. The integrated mobility package subscription idea, for example, imagines a monthly plan that integrates various modes of public and private transportation, one that would “enable residents and workers to see all their trip choices in real time and pay in one place.”

A number of Sidewalk Labs’ urban innovation ideas merge the physical with the digital at a high level. Public assets are combined with hardware (such as sensors and mobile phones), software and data to create a layer of digital infrastructure. These urban innovations turn what were once publicly managed infrastructure assets into markets where mediating companies can make money. Now extend this thinking and pattern to any of the products that could be sold directly to a resident or commercial buyer in a more relaxed regulatory environment: energy, waste management, telecommunications – the list goes on. 

None of these technologies appear as privatization plays in the plan. They are presented as seemingly neutral technology products. Urban innovations. But time is the unknown. And just as with Uber and the taxi industry, the public administration regimes overseeing these infrastructures are dysfunctional. Or, as the tech industry likes to say, “ripe for disruption.”  

Sidewalk Toronto is the continuation of an arc created by decades of neglect and privatization of public assets. This round adds new features: the ruthless instincts of venture capital and monopoly power. The project as a whole brings Toronto to a distinct fork in the road. Do we want to reorganize the status quo of public infrastructure asset management through democratic or through corporate thinking? Speed has given corporate capture the advantage, but there’s time yet to correct course. 

Bianca Wylie is an open-government advocate with a dual background in technology and public engagement. She is the co-founder of Tech Reset Canada and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

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