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GitHub cited Java as one of the most popular coding languages in 2018, and there is a reason why this language has stood the test of time. We chat with Peggy Fisher, content manager at Linkedin Learning Solutions, and author of the book Get Programming with Java, about why Java is still so popular, what it’s good for, and how to get started.

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Peggy Fisher

Peggy Fisher is a content strategist and author of the book "Get Programming With Java." She love to teach and thrives on finding new ways of teaching.

Another counter-intuitive study that offsets a reasonable expectation that more electric bikes and scooters will mean less fit users – kind of like the idea that ‘riding hailing will result in less SOV use and vehicle congestion’.  (Turns out Uber et al increase congestion and reduce transit use.)  But there are qualifications.

From treehugger:

E-bikers use their bikes more, go longer distances, and often substitute it for driving or transit. …

A new study, with a mouthful of a title, “Physical activity of electric bicycle users compared to conventional bicycle users and non-cyclists: Insights based on health and transport data from an online survey in seven European cities,” finds that in fact it is true: e-bikers take longer trips and get pretty much the same physical activity gains as analog cyclists. …

But perhaps even more significant is the dramatic increase in exercise among people who switch from cars to e-bikes, a much easier transition than from cars to a-bikes.

It should be noted that this study looks at European pedelec e-bikes like my Gazelle, where people have to pedal a bit to get the 250 watt motor to kick in. Results probably don’t apply to overpowered throttle-controlled American e-bikes or scooters. Because, as the study authors note, with a pedelec, “using an e-bike requires moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity, depending on topography.”

There is so much to unpack from this study. It also looks at how e-bikes are easier for older riders, keeping them fitter longer. It also reinforces my opinion that the Europeans got it right by limiting speed and power on e-bikes and mandating that they are all pedelecs rather than throttle operated; you don’t get much exercise on a motorcycle.

You can get a lot of people to join a community and ask for help by catering to their needs.

They have questions and need answers to those questions.

“How do I fix my iPhone?”
“How do I get this software to work?”
“Which tool should I use for this job?”

The problem is once you’ve solved that need there isn’t much reason for members to stick around.

Worse yet, what if your members don’t need anything today? Or tomorrow? Or ever again?

While your members’ needs come and go with the tide, their desires are constant. They desire to feel influential, to be recognised, and build relationships with their peers.

If members aren’t sticking around, it’s not because you’re not satisfying their needs, it’s because they’re not seeing the community as a place which can satisfy their desires.

Members will always desire to feel influential, socially connected, and good at what they do. A big chunk of your strategy should be how you not only satisfy the need, but satiate the desire.

In Europe this boat is called the Merry Fisher 795 and in the New World, the NC 795. I’ve owned it for a few months and improved it a bit and taken it a few places and feel like sharing.

Why review?

At this point, regular readers are thinking WTF, boat review?!? I’ve only been on a handful, I’ve only owned one since 2012, I’m still occasionally baffled by nautical jargon, and my command of knots remains imperfect.

Here’s why. When you go shopping for a refrigerator or car or coffee-maker or TV or (especially) camera, there are loads of excellent detailed skeptical-voiced reviews you can read before you cough up the money. Boats (which cost more money than most of those things) are different. All the online reviews seem to be from dealers or magazine-writers on the comp, and are by and large paeans of praise.

There are owners’ forums out there, but they tend to focus on specific problems and solutions. What’s especially missing is “I have one of these, here are the good parts and bad parts.”

I’m not completely unqualified. It’s been at my dock for a few months, I’ve installed improvements, I’ve piloted twenty-plus hours on it, motored through extreme beauty and nasty scary rough water, taken guests on pleasure cruises and a grouchy family on a tired commute, and used it as an office for a few afternoons.

So I’ll see if I can beg a few links from other 795 owners on the forums and get this a bit of GoogleJuice with the aim of better equipping other boat shoppers like me.

Facts

Jeanneau has been making boats since 1957. That link is to French Wikipedia; the English version is mostly empty and I should fix it up. The interesting, complicated story is nicely told in English by Malcolm Perrins on a Jeanneau-owners community site. The company, since its founding by Henry Jeanneau, has been sold multiple times to US and French companies and is now owned by Beneteau.

The dealer told me that the Jeanneau powerboats are built in Poland — this made him happy because for some obscure reason it leads to favorable import-tax treatment. The Jeanneau America site says “Built in America” and the first version of this piece doubted that, but a reader from Michigan wrote “We have the NC 895. It is built in Cadillac Michigan. They took the old Fourwinns plant.”

Our boat’s curtains are labeled “Made in France” and the appliances such as chargers and thrusters and fridges are Eurobuilt and their manuals have Italian or French as the first language, with English further back in the book. So I’m inclined to believe the France/Poland story in this case.

People who are buying a boat care a lot about dimensions because one of the hardest parts is finding a place that’s big enough and deep enough to park it. The 795 is 7.34m or or 24’4" long, and 2.99m or 9’9" wide, with a hull depth of a mere 0.56m or 1’10" — that’s with the outboard hoisted, which is how you normally park it.

The 795 comes with a Yamaha outboard, either 150 or 200hp, and lots of options. It’s got a modest-sized berth in the bow, a tiny but functional head (as in bathroom), and similarly tiny stove and fridge. What electronics you get apparently depends on the dealer.

Good: Engine

We have the Yamaha F200 and since it’s an outboard, there’s more room inside the boat. I’d never really been aware of this line of motors but now when I walk around any marina I see that somewhere between a third and a half of the powerboats are wearing them. So, right in the middle of the mainstream.

It’s got a very decent little electronic control screen on the dashboard and the docs are clear and comprehensive.

We set it at 4500RPM and it pushes the boat along at a little over 40km/h, depending on wind and waves. If you open it wide up on smooth water you can get up well over fifty clicks but the experience is not relaxing, or cheap either.

Good: Comfort

Not just good, excellent. The pilothouse has room for a driver and two more people in comfort, four if they’re not chunky or need extra personal space. (Protip: The aft bench is way more comfy.) The cockpit out back has forward-facing seating for three with a cushion to lean back on, and then a couple more benches but they’re less comfy. We’ve been out for a slow cruise on a warm night to watch fireworks with seven aboard and it was just fine.

The pilothouse is really the best feature. It has a sliding “Alaska bulkhead” which means a glass door that closes, leaving the motor and its racket outside; inside, you can have a civilized conversation without shouting.

Good: Swimming platform

It’s just big enough and has a nice practical swimming ladder. We’ve used it every time we’ve been to the cabin. I shot that fireworks picture above sitting on the platform dangling my feet in the Pacific; very relaxing.

Bad: Living quarters

While they advertise two berths, realistically there’s just not enough space for more than one couple and they’d better be intimate. What with the tiny fridge and stove, I don’t think this is the boat for a lengthy family cruise up a wild coastline.

Good: Windshield

And I mean awesome. This puppy’s front glass is the size of a small European nation and when you’re sailing home with the sun behind you in a long Canadian sunset with the mountains filling the sky in front, well, there just aren’t words for that.

The wipers’ coverage isn’t that great, leaving swathes of uncleaned glass in dirty weather, but you can see the important stuff. And it comes with a windshield-washing squirter system just like your car’s, which turns out to be brilliant when you hit big waves and they splash up and want to leave sticky salt crystals where you’re trying to look out. You load it with windshield fluid from the gas station.

It’s worth mentioning the side windows too, which open and close easily and let loads of fresh air in at cruising speed without blasting your head off, and seem completely rain-proof too.

Good: Bow thruster

This is magic. We have a nice easy tie-up along the side of a dock, not crammed into a little slip, but it’s on the left as you come in and the boat wants to be tied up with its right side to the dock, so a 180° turn in tight quarters is called for. With the thruster and a light touch, it’s reasonably straightforward. The thruster is also useful as compensation for any dumb piloting errors around the dock — of course, these never happen when I’m at the wheel.

Good: It’s hackable

In the Jeanneau owners’ community I found an active boat-improvement culture; they’re always adding something or replacing something else. By dint of extensive research from primary sources, by which I mean watching YouTube videos, I have learned how to attach things to fiberglass (Protip: Get a countersink bit for your drill) and have so far improved ours by fastening the fire extinguisher to a handy bulkhead, equipping the head with a toilet-paper rod, and installing a garbage-bag holder. Call me Ishmael.

There are a variety of surfaces suitable for equipping with electronic upgrades or just decorations. We’ve decorated a couple with family photos.

Bad: Documentation

Hailing from the technology space means that I should be restrained in criticizing other professions’ end-user documentation. The boat came with a nice Jeanneau-branded satchel full of dead trees; the quality of exposition and language is, well, mixed. Highlights are the books for the Yamaha engine and the boat itself. The low point is the Lowrance navigation electronics tome, obviously executed by manic pixies on acid. The information is more or less all there but requires deep digging and Zen calm to extract.

My favorite though is the anchor-winch system, which is written in impenetrably-nautical English. Fortunately it’s accompanied by a diagram with all the parts carefully named and numbered. Unfortunately, about half the nautical names studding the text do not appear in the picture.

To be fair, I managed to figure it out well enough to anchor us (in shallow water with nearly no wind) for firework-watching.

Good: Piloting

The driver’s seat is comfy, the steering and throttle are crisp and responsive, and the view forward and aft is excellent. Steering at speed is a little heavier and slower than our previous inboard-outboard, but it’s plenty good enough to dodge a floating log. I’d actually like a bigger steering wheel that’s closer to me, so there’s another boat-improvement project.

Good: Access

Getting from the cockpit around to the foredeck, and up and down the sides for washing and so on, is all dead easy. The cabin is a little off-center, leaving a walkway along one side; and both sides have intelligently-placed handholds to make things easy and safe.

Bad: Flat bottom

The draft is remarkably small and the bottom, compared to the last boat, is pretty flat. This means that when you hit big waves, for example a ferry wake that you stupidly failed to notice until you were right on top of it cruising at 40km/h, you tend to skip along from wave to wave, hitting each one with a jarring “slap” of the flat bottom. This can fling passengers about a bit in a seriously uncomfortable way. Protip: Be on the sharp lookout for incoming waves and slow the hell down.

I’m not a bossy skipper but we have imposed one rule: If you want to move around the cabin, say so and we’ll slow down while you do. This after I nearly put my niece in orbit when she was going to get her backpack and I slammed on the brakes because I thought I saw some peril out front.

Good: Home office

I’m doing WFB (work from boat) one afternoon most weeks now, and it’s just terrific. The aft passenger-side bench is reasonably ergonomic and the table’s at a sane height. I often make a cup of tea and stash a snack in the fridge. I have taken conference calls, drafted and reviewed documents, reviewed code, and once (cackling with glee) checked in code to the AWS production repository.

I haven’t convinced any colleagues to come down for an in-boat meeting yet; it’s just a matter of time. But I’m just not gonna install whiteboards.

Mixed: Online community

The biggest is the Owners’ Forum, which is OK but suffers from Jeanneau having so many products. There’s also a group on Facebook, obviously. I’ve picked up valuable tips in both places.

Bad: Missing pieces

There’s no automatic bilge pump, which I find shocking, but on the other hand I have to say it stays almost bone-dry down there, even with mixed hot & cold weather, bashing through pretty rough seas, several days of heavy rain, and regular thorough washing (the honeymoon is still on).

There’s no horn; our previous boat had one and while I only ever used it once or twice, I was glad of it.

There’s no built-in heater. Our journeys typically aren’t long enough to need one on the water, but this might be an issue in home-office mode. Multiple owners have installed diesel heaters, and I have a nice little AC space heater that I’ll try out when on shore power. Similarly, there’s no air conditioner, which is more of a problem than you might think up here at 49°30'N because the pilothouse has so much glass, it’s a greenhouse.

There are only two cleats, fore and aft. When you’re tying up to a floating dock for a weekend in Howe Sound (see above), which after all is part of the Pacific, you really want one and ideally two spring lines along with the basic fore and aft. Several owners have figured out how to install an extra central cleat, and I’ll look to do that.

And your conclusion is?

Count the “Good”, “Bad”, and “Mixed” headlines above. The good stuff wins, by a wide margin. I’ve got no standing to say whether or not this is a winner or loser against the competition because I haven’t owned the competition. What I can say, a few months in, is that it meets our needs very well.

Accessorizing

Here are the things I’ve purchased to improve the experience:

1. SeaTeak 62634 Insulated Four-Drink Binocular Rack — I have two of these things velcro’ed down behind the sink. The binoc-shaped spaces also work for big coffee mugs with handles.

2. Dell Ultra HD 4K 24-Inch Monitor P2415Q — just the right size for outboarding to my company MBPro, and comes with USB so I only need one plug to power everything. I need to install something to hang it up on the berth bulkhead when not in use, at the moment it’s lying face-down on the mattress, which is OK but takes space.

3. 4.5" 12V Stepless Speed Car Fan — sold by different vendors in the US & Canada. Like I said, it can get toasty in the pilothouse but this guy takes care of it just by keeping the air moving.

4. Rod Holder Mount Boat Flagpole — the 795 has two fishing-rod holders but no flagpole. Hey-presto! The Canadian flag looks great out there but we haven’t figured out which minor ensign to fly beneath it. Patti Smith fan club? Antifa emblems? Not sure.

5. From Davis Instruments, Shockles LineSnubbers and LineGrabbers; nothing specific to this boat, just a coincidence that I discovered them recently. If you tie up where it might get rough, you need these.

Summary

My relationship with the previous boat was pretty prosaic. It got us back and forth to the cabin and was kind of charming with its wood trim, but it always needed fixing and there were important subsystems I never learned to understand. This is a whole different kettle of fish. I’m starting to develop sympathy with the oft-repeated Kenneth Grahame quote from The Wind in the Willows:

Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing… about in boats — or with boats. In or out of ’em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not.

For Carto, Matt Forrest explains why you shouldn’t use ZIP codes for spatial analysis:

The problem is that zip codes are not a good representation of real human behavior, and when used in data analysis, often mask real, underlying insights, and may ultimately lead to bad outcomes. To understand why this is, we first need to understand a little more about the zip code itself.

In a nutshell, ZIP Codes don’t represent geographic areas, so it doesn’t make sense to treat them like they are.

Tags: ZIP Code

Joe Cieplinski, writing on his blog:

I have reached the unfortunate conclusion that RECaf’s watch app will not be able to go fully independent this fall with the release of watchOS 6. While you have always been able to log from your wrist using the app or Siri shortcuts, I was hoping folks who didn’t want to keep RECaf installed on their phones would be able to continue using RECaf on their wrist.

There are simply too many things that can’t be done on watchOS alone at this point, however. So for now, you’ll have to keep that phone app installed.

Cieplinski outlines three main areas that independent Watch apps are currently lacking in their capabilities, two of which involve HealthKit limitations, while the third is that you can’t perform any kind of In-App Purchase on an independent Watch app, so unlocking pro features or a subscription plan is impossible without an iPhone companion.

These are significant drawbacks, not the type of edge cases that would be more understandable and expected for watchOS’ first take on stand-alone apps. App independence was the primary story Apple told for watchOS 6 at WWDC, but I suspect not many apps will be able to go independent until greater feature parity is achieved between independent apps and those still tethered to the iPhone.

→ Source: joecieplinski.com

From angry Twitter rants to #instagood affirmations, our online lives are teeming with feelings. Histories of posts and posting habits trail behind us not just as impersonal datapoints but as affect-laden narratives, leaving extensive emotional archives in the wake of each seemingly ephemeral update. However, this actively published digital footprint isn’t the only emotional record generated by our online activity. A huge amount of information is tracked, documented, and stored in the form of digital “exhaust” — metadata that is constantly generated by our online activity. Although digital exhaust may not seem so affectively revealing, it nevertheless amasses its own stores of feeling.

On the surface, data about how long you hover over a particular image on Instagram may seem fairly impersonal compared to a blog post filled with political opinions or a YouTube video meticulously detailing a self-care routine. Yet at their core, these types of digital exhaust are products of tangible offline interactions between human bodies and technology. Our corporeal feelings migrate into digital information through the ways we literally touch our devices and look at our screens, creating exhaustive records of our lives that run alongside the ones we intentionally curate on social media. Acknowledging that digital exhaust creates uncannily enduring affective archives can reframe how we think about this data — and show how profoundly intimate it really is.

Digital footprints — basically, the sum of everything you’ve ever done or posted online — are most frequently invoked in discussions about user responsibility and protection in the face of flimsy digital privacy controls. We are regularly exhorted to be wary of oversharing on the internet and to diligently monitor our digital identities in order to protect compromising information about ourselves from future employers, marketers, scammers, and other prying eyes. Coming of age in a world where there’s no right to be forgotten means acknowledging that anything you share online can (and likely will) come back to haunt you; hygienic practices around digital footprints are now compulsory education, a virtual analog of handwashing.

Digital exhaust receives less attention in conversations about online privacy than our trails of intentionally published content. This diffuse, somewhat enigmatic subset of the digital footprint is composed primarily of metadata about seemingly minor and passive online interactions. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier write, it includes “where [users] click, how long they look at a page, where the mouse-cursor hovers, what they type, and more.” While at first glance this type of data may appear divorced from our interior, personal lives, it is actually profoundly embodied in even deeper ways than many of the things we intentionally publish — it is inadvertently “shed as a byproduct of peoples’ actions and movements in the world,” as opposed to being intentionally broadcast.

In other words, digital exhaust is shaped by unconscious, embodied affects — the lethargy of depression seeping into slow cursor movements, frustration in rapid swipes past repeated advertisements, or a brief moment of pleasure spent lingering over a striking image.

This information does not pass through a cognitive filter as it is created and stored, but instead emanates from physical rhythms and actions that are usually not consciously recognized in the moment of their appearance. Within this paradigm, digital exhaust is a kind of economically valuable “affective surplus” that is extracted from human bodies and that fuels the continued evolution of the digital ecosystem.

The deeply physiological, preconscious level of emotion I’m pointing to is often referred to as “affect” by contemporary philosophers. Affects are feelings that are lodged in the body but have not found their name as a concrete, recognizable emotion. As Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth explain in the first paragraph of their Affect Theory Reader, these feelings are “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion.” Affects reside in the uncomfortable sinking sensation in your stomach that hasn’t (and might never) solidified as excitement or anxiety; they motor the barely palpable tremor in your fingers testifying to a low-lying nervousness will pass without a second thought if it doesn’t amplify in intensity.

Gregg herself gestures at resonances between digital exhaust and affect by introducing the concept of “data sweat” in her 2015 essay “Inside the Data Spectacle.” Rechristening digital exhaust as data sweat emphasizes the ways in which it leaks messily out of our pores as opposed to emerging directly from our machines as a kind of industrial waste product. “[Sweat] speaks, albeit voicelessly, on our behalf,” she writes. “Sweat literalizes porosity: It seeps out at times and in contexts that we may wish it did not.… Sweat leaves a trace of how we pass through the world and how we are touched by it in return. It is the classic means by which the body signals its capacity to ‘affect and be affected.’” Data sweat is a residue of feelings that we might not be able to name but that still circulate within us; it can reflect our intimate inner lives as much as a carefully written confessional.

The accumulation of emotional exhaust impacts the future just as a Google search conditions subsequent queries. Even if affective interactions are harder to name than search terms, they feed the same predictive algorithmic machineries that organize online experiences and pattern user behaviors. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff writes that accurate predictions of future actions generate revenue, and that “the surest way to predict behavior is to intervene at its source and shape it … machine processes are configured to intervene in the state of play in the real world. These interventions are designed to enhance certainty by doing things: they nudge, tune, herd, manipulate, and modify behavior in specific directions by executing actions as subtle as inserting a specific phrase into your Facebook newsfeed, timing the appearance of a BUY button on your phone.” The fact that our own data sweat frequently leaks out unnoticed makes it a particularly powerful resource for generating these subtle “nudges” that strive to operate below conscious awareness.

Most of the exact mechanisms that generate digital models of the self and shape our online environments are proprietarily protected or blackboxed. However, even a cursory glance at how researchers are currently striving to utilize digital exhaust as a means of assessing mental well-being testifies to this material’s unnerving ability to provide insights into our emotions. A host of publications in fields like psychiatry, neuroscience, and computer science describe their “unobtrusive monitoring” or “passive sensing and detecting” of particular mental states based on smart phone accelerometers, GPS location data, amount of time with the screen “on,” patterns of app usage, and even information about the relative presence or absence of human speech in the phones’ vicinity.

The self-proclaimed “unobtrusive” quality of these studies is oxymoronic: It hinges on the fact that their data collection methods rely on the digital exhaust that we are exuding all of the time, meaning there is no need to append new monitoring devices to study subjects. And although some of these experiments required participants to download special apps to facilitate data collection and visualization, the majority of this information could already be stored and used by third party organizations.

According to Katarzyna Szymielewicz, co-founder of an NGO “defending human rights in surveillance society,” the metadata collected about online behavior feeds profile-mapping algorithms that are designed to guess things about you that you haven’t revealed publicly. Because this data is more useful in aggregate than in isolation, “what the machines think of you” hinges on the lingering cloud of digital pollution that you’ve accumulated over time more than the exhaust you produce in real time at any given moment. Passing affects are embalmed in an exhaust(ive) warehouse as part of the ubiquitous technological processes that speculatively decide who you are and what you are feeling.

Data sweat, in addition to self-published inputs, fuels the algorithmic creation of personalized profiles which include large-scale assumptions about individuals’ identity and inner life. These categorizations generate emotional appraisals, not just topical targeting. For example, keystroke patterns or finger movements across a phone screen might differentiate a conservative shopper from a compulsive one. Advertising strategies — ranging from the content individuals receive to these ads’ aesthetic appearance and when they appear on screen — will adapt according to these affectively influenced labels. Netflix’s eerily personalized image thumbnails that pitch the same movie as a thriller to one user and a romance to another are just the tip of the iceberg.

An example of how the most minute trickles of data sweat can create uncannily intimate portraits of our emotional states is an app created by the startup company Mindstrong Health. This product tracks users’ cognitive and emotional activity entirely through smartphone data exhaust. After the app is installed it compiles data on how a user “types, taps, and scrolls” on other apps. The data shed during these physical human-screen interactions is stored and analyzed until a digital phenotype can be identified that marks the user’s “normal” state. By tracing deviations from normal, this app might be able to diagnose depression before the individual realizes they’re depressed, and even predict how a person will feel a week in the future, at least according to the Mindstrong’s founders.

It is unlikely that Google is particularly concerned with offering personalized DSM-5 diagnoses. Yet the same metadata that can purportedly be used to gauge psychic states is constantly being collected by other entities and used to construct personalized digital environments. Digital infrastructures of data collection and storage thus end up impacting human experience not just through concrete privacy violations, but also by affectively “tuning” online worlds — digital exhaust becomes an enduring part of our online environments, preserving seemingly transient affects and dragging them into the future.

Social media sites encourage users to “package their lives as a succession of dramatic emotional moments” in regular posts, profile updates, and interactions with other users. Apps like Timehop, or trends like the #10yearchallenge are potent reminders of just how far back our digital footprints stretch, and of the frequently cringe-worthy amount of personal content most of us have willingly disclosed.

The metadata that we produce on an everyday basis forms even more extensive archives of our lives than these public posts. Although digital exhaust is not so legibly emotional or neatly packaged for conscious human reflection as a Facebook photo album, it is just as laden with feeling. Indeed, the accumulation of digital exhaust makes it possible for digital environments to be uncannily attuned to our feelings even without our conscious recognition of what kind of embodied trails we are leaving. While it’s hard to trace exactly how your affective data exhaust is shaping your online experience, there is no question that it is — no matter how carefully we curate our feeds, or attempt to keep track of our online behaviors, our digital footprints are much more intimate than we would like to think.

I. Hate. To. Quit. But I’ve tried to get good at it. I’ve quit a lot of things in 60 years on this planet. I quit graduate school. I quit a marriage. I quit as CEO of a nonprofit and as founder and leader of a huge user group. I quit four jobs and one … Continued

The post On quitting appeared first on without bullshit.

Verizon has sold former social media giant Tumblr to Automattic, the owner of WordPress — the platform that pretty much every news website and blog is built on.

It’s unclear how much Tumblr was sold for, with The Wall Street Journal report stating that the transaction is valued at a “nominal amount.” That said, Axios says the publication’s sources state Tumblr sold for either $20 million USD (about $26 million CAD) or $10 million (roughly $13 million CAD).

Tumblr was first sold to Yahoo for the high price tag of $1.1 billion USD (approximately $1.4 billion CAD) back in 2013 despite not turning a profit at the time. Yahoo then eventually wrote-off $230 million USD (about $304 million CAD) from the service’s value in 2016.

Verizon released a rather cryptic statement regarding Tumblr’s sale, stating it was “the culmination of a thoughtful, thorough and strategic process.” The media giant then went on to call Automattic “the perfect partner” and said that the company “will unlock new and exciting possibilities for Tumblr and its users.”

Verizon first announced Tumblr was for sale back in February of 2019. At the time, rumours circulated that Montreal-based Mindgeek, the parent company of Pornhub, could be considering buying the platform. Verizon has moved to chop up Yahoo’s various assets, including Tumblr, since acquiring the former media giant. This resulted in the creation Oath, now known as Verizon Media.

Those hoping pornography would make a triumphant return to Tumblr following the platform’s latest purchase should probably lose all hope at this point. Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, said he has no plans to bring adult content back to the platform, during a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal. Mullenweg also stated his company wants to integrate Tumblr with WordPress in some way.

While it’s not as relevant as it once was, Tumblr maintains a rather broad userbase of 475.1 million blogs.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

The post Verizon sells former social media giant Tumblr to WordPress’ owner appeared first on MobileSyrup.

"Micro-credentials alone will not meet any nation’s future educational needs," writes Beverley Oliver in this report (56 page PDF). "The key opportunity is to enable formal qualification systems to evolve to include short form credentials, some of which might be credit-bearing." What she calls for is essentially a system of stackable credentials. But more, she argues that there needs to be common credential standards (see p.15 for examples), and a mechanism for lifelong credentialing (see p.33 for a list of national initiatives already underway).

Part Two of a seven part series on the Seven little helpers for dialogue and action

• Part 1: Presence

2. Have a good question

One of the most common questions I get asked is “how do I come up with a powerful question?” My answer is “it depends.” There are some great guides to there to making great questions, (like ORID, Strategic Questioning or The Art of Powerful Questions) but when it comes down to it, my own practice is fairly intuitive. Here are a few guiding principles I use when creating good questions.

Know where you are in the process. Good dialogue proceeds from a good question, and a good question is dependant on the context of the work. When we are working in complex situations we can derive questions from the three phases of adaptive action: “What?” “So What?” and “Now What?”

Questions that get at “What?” are questions that help us to see what is happening. They orient us to the context of work. “What is going on here?” can be a perfect question to elicit stories and perspectives on a situation. Such stories and perspectives – especially when gathered from a diversity of voices and experiences – give us a rich set of data from which to ask more questions.

“So What?” questions are all about sensemaking. They ask us to look at data and discover together what it means. Given an understanding of one’s context – even an inevitably incomplete understanding – it’s possible to ask questions about where we want to go, what we want to do, or what needs to be changed. It’s often tempting to start with these questions but in the absence of at least some data, conversations around sensemaking questions devolve into aspirational wish lists or ungrounded conflicts of opinion.

“Now What?” questions are the ones of strategic intent. These are ones that require us to make decisions and to act to respond to the sense we made of our current context and do something about it. Sometimes we need to choose one direction to go in. Sometimes we need to send out exploration parties to discover promising pathways forward. Either way asking “now what do we do?” is a move that can only come after we have made sense of a situation.

Ask a question that no one can answer alone. Perhaps it goes without saying, but a good conversation is not a cross-examination, where one person has an answer and they try to elicit that answer from another. It constantly surprises me how frequently people in power “engagement wash” projects by giving the illusion of curiosity or openness while they hide the fact that their mind has already been made up. In Canada such action is technically illegal when it comes to consultation with First Nations with respect to infringing Aboriginal rights. Resource companies and governments regularly get called to account by the courts for pulling this trick.

At the very least I find this practice unethical and it leads to distrust, anger and apathy. As a professional facilitator I sometimes get asked to lead these kinds of processes and my response is to work with the client to be clear and honest about what is one the table for discussion. In a surprising number of cases I have had clients refuse to shift their stance, and in a couple of cases I have actually had people ask me to lead engagement processes that would lead the participants to a pre-determined conclusion. Those are immensely satisfying clients to fire. I only despair to know that there is often someone out there that will do the work regardless.

Just be honest about what you don’t know and go and find people to talk to that are smarter or more experienced that you are. I guarantee when you approach people with questions like that the honour and respect you afford them will create a great conversation.

Keep it simple and let the group add the depth. There is a romance about the beautiful and powerful question. Think of Mary Oliver’s question “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” That is a beautiful question, aesthetically gorgeous, a small poem in itself. But for me such a question inspires awe and appreciation but not an answer. That may well be the kind of question that you can live into, but it is not necessarily a practical question for strategic work. Don’t get me wrong, as a person with a contemplative practice I love these kinds of questions. They give me a chance to reflect on my life; I can live them in the way that Rilke invites us to live a question.

But for a conversation in a meeting, keep your questions simple and let the group bring the depth. One of the best World Cafes I ever ran was a three round affair in which we asked the question “we are halfway through this retreat. What do we need to talk about now?” Another time, in a deeply conflicted community I asked “What the hell is going on?” These questions had the effect of opening a little space for the real conversations that were already happening to come into our process. The questions were simple, the conversations were powerful.

What are your own reflections and principles on creating good questions?

Like the original the fifth estate and e e cummings, my friends at silverorange prefer lowercase. Which makes starting sentences that start with silverorange difficult for someone like me who wants to follow both silverorange’s rules and society’s.

A conundrum I avoid simply by avoiding starting sentences with silverorange.

I have known the founders of silverorange from before they were silverorange; in some cases I’ve known them since they were 14 years old. Now they are at or approaching 40, and I have been, by times, their tenant, their conference co-organizer, their lunch companion, and their partner-in-podcasting. And, as individuals, their friend.

Their company turned 20 years old yesterday, and they celebrated with an event for friends, family, colleagues and clients at Brakish; here’s a soggy audience listening to various of the founders talk about their relationship to the company:

Being in close proximity to silverorange for such a long time has been a unique privilege: I have watched as they transformed from the chrysalis of cocky teenage entrepreneurship into the butterfly of a well-managed, well-respected company.

Silverorange (damn, I slipped) is perhaps most remarkable for the cultural transformation it’s gone through in recent years, seeking to throw off the toxic masculinity of the ironic brogrammer to become a company that thinks deeply about inclusion, respect, and diversity.

As co-founder Steven Garrity wrote two years ago, in A company on the verge of adulthood:

We’ve discovered that it’s both hard and easy to change the culture of a company. At one of our annual company retreats, we were discussing ways to improve our team over the coming year and one of our employees made a revolutionary suggestion:

    We should be nicer to each other!

He was referring mostly to a culture of sarcastic insults we had grown accustomed to, but we all agreed that treating each other with more respect was worth a shot. It seemed like a good opportunity to shed our ironically ugly humour. As one of the key culprits, I can safely say that in addition to being unnecessarily negative, it just wasn’t funny. We don’t miss it.

This small initial change was surprisingly abrupt and surprisingly easy. It seemed like only a matter of days before what had been totally normalized started to stick out as inappropriate. We even came to refer to the echoes of our former vulgarity as “old office humour” — a phrase we still use as a reminder/warning to ourselves.

If we hadn’t addressed this glaring surface-level ugly tone in our humour, making our team more diverse would have been much more difficult.

I was witness to, and at the very least a complicit bystander to, silverorange 1.0, and that the company grappled with itself and emerged so fundamentally changed gives me great hope about the possibility for positive change to happen almost anywhere. Including inside myself.

Brav[o|a]s.

Happy 20th anniversary, silverorange.

Level 3 of functional thinking is all about algebraic thinking. But what do I mean by algebra? In this episode, I try to distill down the characteristics of an algebra and explore why algebras are worth developing.

What is an algebra?

Level 3 of functional thinking is all about algebraic thinking. But what do I mean by algebra? In this episode, I try to distill down the characteristics of an algebra and explore why algebras are worth developing. https://share.transistor.fm/s/7383cd76 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh4o6lYG4Mg Tr

Transcript

Eric Normand: What is an algebra? By the end of this episode you will know the two characteristics that make an API into an algebra. My name is Eric Normand, and I help people thrive with functional programming. So this topic, I’m bringing it up because this is very important for level three of functional thinking.

People have been asking me a lot of questions. Level three is all about algebraic thinking. They’ve been asking, “How do I develop that skill?” and “How do I get to level three, I’m at level two.”

One of the things that you need to know is, what is an algebra? It’s good to describe what it is. I’ve used the term before with some programmers who don’t really understand why I would be using algebra. To them, algebra is this thing you learned in high school where you used a lot of letters instead of numbers and you learned to solve quadratic equations.

What does this software design, basically functional programming software design, what does that have to do with an algebra? What is an algebra as opposed to algebra? That’s what I’m talking about in this episode.

What is an algebra from a software-design perspective, not from a math perspective? I’m not trying to define algebra in the mathematical sense. They have a much more precise definition. It’s also used in several different ways. This is, I’m trying to get at what I’m trying to explain.

I’m not the only one to use this term. I’ve heard Alan Kay talk about it. They’re like, “The point of software design is to find algebras.” I’m not alone. [laughs] There’s prior art from people who are way smarter and more certified than I am.

The first approach I’m going to take to explain this — I’m also working on my approach right now — is that Martin Fowler wrote a book about domain-specific languages, DSL. In it, he tries to explain what an internal DSL is. When you write one, it looks a lot like just a regular interface. A regular API, you might call it.

Why would you give that a different name? He talks about it. What he says, what his idea is — I tend to agree with this — is that, a DSL is an API, an internal DSL, not like you actually create a new grammar, you parse it, and stuff like that.

An internal DSL where you use the host language’s pieces to make a new thing that it crosses some qualitative line and becomes very fluent. That’s his word. Starts to get very expressive. You can say what you need to say without resorting to any tricks or anything like that. It’s a qualitative measure.

It’s still an API but you go from this push-button API — do this, do that — to a fluency, like, “Oh, I want my picture to look like this.” It’s a very similar qualitative change going from an API, an interface’s set of functions, to an algebra. There are two qualities to it that push it over that line. It is a spectrum.

The line where it is is fuzzy, but pushing stuff toward the algebra side is a good idea. Here are the two characteristics. One, it’s abstract. Two, it is cohesive. I’ll explain what I mean.

When we’re doing arithmetic, we’re working with numbers — 4, 10, 15. We got these operations like plus, times, minus, divide. When we first start algebra class, we start to replace those numbers with letters. It can be confusing. A lot of students don’t know what’s going on. They want to know what x is, for instance.

Often you’ll say, “Oh, wait, it could be anything,” or you don’t know what x is, but you still have to figure out how to continue solving the problem. We got this number. Number is an abstract concept but it’s more concrete than a letter that represents some unknown number or all numbers. Put one number at a time but it could be out of all numbers.

It’s a much more abstract concept. It lets you realize that there are things that are true about numbers and those operations that doesn’t depend on the individual number. You could say x/x = 1, as long as x doesn’t equal 0.

This is a statement where, at the beginning of algebra class, the beginning of the year, a student could say, “What is x? I want to check. If it’s 3, then it’s 3/3. That does equal one. I can do that. If it’s 5, then it’s 5/5. Yes, it equals one.”

Eventually, by doing enough of these problems, seeing enough of these formulas, they come to realize, “OK. I don’t need to know what x is. I can operate on the equation itself in this abstract, symbolic way and still do a lot of good, interesting work.” That’s what I mean by abstract. We’re able to start replacing specific values with variables. We still have meaning.

I gave an example when I talked about level three, the three levels before. In level three, I talked about a video, “Algebra.”

I could say something like, “If I concatenate video A with video B, I get video C whose length is the sum of the length of A and B.” I’m starting to speak very abstractly. This is a true statement regardless of what A is or what B is, how it was created, what type it is, any of those things. It doesn’t matter. I’m saying A and B in the abstract meaning anything, any video. That’s abstract.

Now, cohesive, is required as well. Cohesive in the general sense means things go really well together. They are related. They work well together. I want to be a little bit more specific than that for my definition.

Yes, they have to go well together but they have to go so well together, that you can start to define relationships between them using each other. We have what we call, identities in math. They’re basically equalities, their formulas with an equal sign.

They relate how addition relates to subtraction, how addition relates to multiplication, how multiplication relates to division. You start to actually have these formal definitions for how they interrelate. It’s all expressed within the cohesive set of operations that you have. You don’t have to go elsewhere.

One thing that happens in programming is we might come up with this really nice set of operations on a data type and then to define its behavior, we go outside that, we write some unit tests, and we get to do other things in the unit test.

Wouldn’t it be better if we could say something like we say in mathematical algebra class. We could say A + B = C, means that C – A = B. We do that all the time. We will move the A to the other side of the equation.

C – A = B is derivable from the first one, A + B = C. This is setting up a little relationship that if one is true, the other is true. If we can start to do that, if our set of operations is cohesive enough, we can start to set up these equalities.

We can start to say, if I cut a video in half, or let’s say I could cut anywhere, as I say I cut the video A into B and C, and then I concatenate them back together, it should be the same as A. That’s like a little identity to say how they work, but in terms of each other very abstractly.

Then, you can start to do those kinds of symbolic manipulations that you do in algebra class. You can work on the equation, you can move stuff around and cancel things out, and move all the known to one side so that you can solve for the unknown.

You can do all those kinds of manipulations, not ever having a specific value for those variables. You don’t have to have the value. That’s the kind of place that we want to get in level three, where we don’t even have to have the value.

We’re able to reason on paper, on the chalkboard just moving stuff around and what we’re doing is true. What we’re doing is making progress toward whatever goal we have, but we never actually had a real value.

These things are so cohesive and abstract that we can start building on them and they’re likely never to change like you could get it to the point where you’ve gotten rid of all the corner cases, it’s a small API, and now you can compose them together to solve your problem.

You can compose a whole video editing suite out of these basic little operations, so you get those right and now it’s just like a game of making the UI. That’s the idea of level three, and that’s what I mean by algebra.

There’s two algebras that you’re probably familiar with as a programmer. There is Boolean algebra, which operates on true, false, and it defines all these operators like “or” and “and,” and stuff like that.

They’re defined in terms of each other. You can define or… [laughs] or you can define in terms of negation and arrow. Double arrow can be defined in terms of “arrow” and “and.” They’re all interrelated. That is what makes it an algebra.

You can transform the not of an or, the negation of an or, into the and of the negation. It’s like all these little identities that let you manipulate symbols. You don’t have to know if it’s true or false.

You can manipulate symbols and you can find an answer without ever having specific values. Another one is the relational algebra and this defines relations, which are like database tables.

They have two pools with name values in them and defines all sorts of operations on them. You can define some operations in terms of others, and you always are operating at this level of relations, which is another thing that I’m not sure of, but I’m going to bring it up.

Algebra is probably, I’m not sure, it’s probably always with one or maybe a small number two or three very related types. Usually, it’s one type. Like look at the relational algebra. It’s one type, the relation.

Even if you have one row in your table, one tuple, that it’s a relation of one. You have an empty relation, and you’re always manipulating relations. Same with Boolean algebra. You’re always dealing with true and false, a Boolean value, and you can’t escape it because everything returns another Boolean.

Likewise, in the video-editing algebra, you’re always dealing with a segment of video. You take a segment and another segment, and you put them together, now you have a new segment.

I think that’s pretty secure, but I’m not ready to go there yet. I would love to hear your thoughts on that. If you like this episode and you want to see past episodes, you can go to lispcast.com/podcast. There you will find all the past episodes including audio, video and text transcripts.

You’ll also find links to subscribe to the episodes, either podcast or on YouTube or RSS, if you’re doing the blog reader. You’ll also find links to social media, where you can get into discussions with me. If you have any ideas on this, email me, tweet me, LinkedIn message me, love to get into discussions and really dig deep into this. Cool.

My name is Eric Normand. This has been my thought on functional programming. Thank you for being there and rock on.

The post What is an algebra? appeared first on LispCast.

Ride-sharing company Lyft announced its intention to operate in Vancouver and has appointed its first general manager for the location.

Lyft said in a press release that Peter Lukomskyj will lead operations, driver and passenger acquisition, and service quality.

“His executive leadership experience at several B.C. tech companies will be invaluable as we forge ahead in bringing Lyft to Vancouver this year,” Aaron Zikfin, managing director of Lyft Canada, said in the release.

Lukomskyj has worked for Elastic Path, an e-commerce solutions company, and Quickmobile, an app for conferences and meetings.

Vancouver is currently one of Canada’s largest cities that doesn’t have any legal ride-sharing options.

B.C.’s NDP government has been criticized for delaying this legislation since it was first announced as part of Premier John Horgan’s 2017 election pledge. In November 2018, B.C. transportation minister Clare Trevena announced the legislation proposing to amend eight statues and allowing the province’s Passenger Transportation Board to have the ability to accept applications, as well as set rules and conditions for licensing taxis and ride-sharing companies.

Lyft is also encouraging “drivers interested in joining the community to begin the process of obtaining their Class 4 commercial licence.”

The post Lyft to operate in Vancouver soon, appoints first general manager for the location appeared first on MobileSyrup.

After testing most of the Chromebooks released in the past five years, we recommend the HP Chromebook x360 14. It has solid performance, a great keyboard and trackpad, excellent battery life, and a vivid 14-inch, 1920×1080 IPS touchscreen. But it’s larger and heavier than other Chromebooks with similar size screens.

I’ve long thought of Billy Goat Hill as being the Bernal Heights of Noe Valley: an anchor for a neighborhood. Whereas Bernal rises above the flat, low-built Mission, Noe crashes into Billy Goat, the hill just being the culmination of the neighborhood’s exponential incline.

Like Bernal, Billy Goat is a very functional hill. I’ve never seen it empty. It’s always a little meeting place for people catching up with friends or going on walks with children. It’s a pretty recent addition – only established 1975 – but a relatively successful one.

My gripe with Billy Goat Hill is that it’s not quite a hill. You get to the top, and there’s more hill to go: across the street, another set of steps leads you up to the Walter Haas Playground. Arriving at the playground, you’ll see… nothing. The full vista is obstructed by a row of trees, probably kept there to mute the roaring wind in this part of town. But that isn’t the top either: the peak is a group of bizarre and, in my humble opinion, hideous buildings, buffered by an undeveloped grassy hillside that might eventually house people, hopefully at a higher density.

Views: 4/5

The view from the hill is pretty spectacular. It’s not in glorious 360°, like Twin Peaks, but it isn’t like seeing a little peek of the city, like Buena Vista. For folks in the neighborhood, it’s probably a wonderful way to unwind, though the mansions in Glen Park probably have better views from their kitchens.

Running: 3/5

It’s not the elevation, it’s the grade. The approach to Billy Goat Hill is 18-22% grade, which dwarfs, say, my old Twin Peaks route that maxed out at 9%. It’s a level of steepness that, were it not for the length of the roads, merits stairs.

Thanks to CityStrides, I keep track of every road I’ve run and I’m earnestly trying to run 100% of SF (11% done so far). Which means that I’ll run Noe Valley, but needless to say I’m ‘unpumped’ for it. Even the views doesn’t make up for it that much, because you can get much better vistas in Portrero Hill or on Bernal, without running nature’s stair-stepper.

Sandwiches: 5/5

What an extraordinary hill for sandwiches. It’s almost like the city planners designed it specifically for sandwich eating. There’s a bench, and then some well-placed tree roots, and then another bench, and then stumps for sitting. Every place to hang out has an incredible view.

Places to buy a sandwich nearby are lacking, due in part to Noe Valley’s famously-regressive zoning policies. A half-mile radius around Billy Goat Hill captures a lot of 8 million dollar mansions in Glen Park and a lot of 4 million dollar gentrified-in-place Victorians in Noe Valley, but not much of anything else.

Novelty: 2/5

It doesn’t have much allure, or much to discover. This is a hill that is what it looks like as you approach it: some grass, a trail, a few trees.

It used to host a swing, which features in many instagrams, but the swing was a sort of community addition, wasn’t good for the tree, and is no longer.

Trees: 1/5

Trees aren’t the reason you go to Billy Goat Hill. There are two big Eucalyptus trees, Blue Gums in particular, that get a lot of attention, and then some coyote bush scrub and some typical invasive species, like wild radish (pictured).

I suppose Billy Goat Hill’s history shows in its current appearance: it was mined, and now has a shallow layer of soil over bedrock (Noe Valley is far from any liquefaction zone). So it isn’t really reforested, and it doesn’t feel like nature has always owned it, or has fully taken it back. Which echoes, a bit: without trees, there aren’t many birds, or shade, or many mammals, according to the city’s 2005 report.

4

Views

1

Trees

2

Novelty

3

Running

5

Sandwich

The following contains light spoilers for William Gibson’s novel, The Peripheral.

I just finished The Peripheral, William Gibson’s latest novel, published in 2014. Generally, the work documents two different futures: a time not too far off from now (maybe 15 years or so?) and then around 70 years after that. Overall, it’s extremely Gibsonian in its plot and narrative arc (my wife asked, “what’s that about?” as I started it and I could only reply, “I’ll tell you after page 50”), and for that I really loved it. His visions of the future are informed by so much more than the utopian technolust or dystopian apocalypse of Hollywood or most pop speculative fiction. Instead, they are filled with nuanced socio-political prescience, the kind that just seems to make sense as logical progressions from our current trajectory.

In many of his works, Gibson conjures technological prostheses on and in his heroes. Take, for example, all of Molly’s bodily modifications in the groundbreaking Neuromancer (1984), or Bobby Chombo’s locative AR tech in Spook Country (2007). But for The Peripheral, Gibson takes the liberty of replacing entire bodies altogether with telekinetically controlled stand-ins, the figures for which the novel is titled. In my attempt to avoid too many spoilers (and, let’s be honest, trying to summarize a Gibsonian plot is often relatively futile), I will explain only this: one character, who was maimed in battle and lives in the “closer to now” without his legs, one arm, and some of his fingers, is given the opportunity to control one of these peripherals—in the “far off from now”—who has every extremity still intact. And this is where things get a bit itchy for me. 

Conner, our paraplegic veteran, is critical to the climactic operation in the story because of his military and security knowledge. Today, those qualities would almost certainly be accompanied by physical prowess. In the “closer to now,” he has a motorized device that allows him some mobility, but nothing like the peripheral he controls in the “far off”. The first time he embodies this distant figure, he runs around, performs flips, even sprains a finger. He eventually becomes addicted: “‘Fingers, legs ’n’ shit, that’s all I want,’” he proclaims at one point, explaining he’ll go back into the peripheral at any time.

What’s unsettling about the whole thing is that there are no real injuries in the “far off”—one is either alive and fully intact, thanks in most part to an advanced portable medical technology, or they are dead, having gone beyond the point of repair. Consider here, that the history of prosthetics really begins in the mid 1800’s when what Aimi Hamraie calls “a rehabilitation regime” emerged in response to an increase in survival rates for individuals injured on the battlefield, in the factory, or in the fields. That is, prior to certain 19^th century advances in safety and medical tech, those who had been maimed or mutilated were simply not likely to return home. Those being rehabilitated, then, needed adaptive and assistive technologies that helped them navigate a world not built for the disabled body.

But Gibson’s future, for all of its intricate details imagined to describe the ramifications of climate change and extreme income inequality, doesn’t include mutilated or maimed bodies. They are either dead or alive, complete or non-existant. Alternatively, disabled people do exist and they, willingly or not, utilize peripherals for their own mobility. With this technology, their bodies can be stationary anywhere in the world (or, apparently, the space-time continuum) as their consciousness roams freely, without struggle or pain. It’s the ultimate Cartesian dualistic fantasy.

At one point, Conner throws his peripheral off the 55^th floor of a building in an attempt to kill the bad guy—a kamikaze without the fatality. It’s hard to say if Gibson is warning us against a future in which our bodies will be devalued over our consciousness or promising us one. And even though the author has a history of providing rather normative, albeit outcast-y, characters, I do believe that he doesn’t wish upon us a world where the disabled could not survive out in the open. If what I noted in my introduction is true, that Gibson’s work is important because of how “real” it seems, then maybe this is another reality—the kind that I warned about a few months ago, wherein the rush to protect the privileged from the consequences of anthropocentric near-extinction leaves out, once again, the misfits.

Gabi Schaffzin is a PhD candidate at UC San Diego. He is convinced that Hubertus Bigend is an actual person.

I’ve had a rare weekend by myself at 100 Prince Street: Oliver’s been at the Cloggeroo Folk Festival in Georgetown since Friday, and Catherine’s been in hospital, trying to get her back pain under control.

I used the opportunity to leave the car in the driveway for the entire weekend and cycle everywhere. Here’s a trace of my cycling (recorded by the Bike Citizens app on my phone):

I cycled 30 km yesterday, which included two trips to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and a trip to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market from the hospital.

I learned a couple of things along the way:

1. It takes 15 minutes to cycle from our house to the hospital. That’s really only a few minutes longer than it takes to drive, and most of the way is along the scenic multi-use trail along Riverside Drive that’s separated from vehicle traffic. The hospital should take advantage of this to encourage visitors to cycle. And if you’re going to visit someone yourself, consider taking your bicycle.
2. There appeared to be no provision whatsoever made to the multi-use trail during sewer construction in front of Riverview Country Market on Friday: the trail was blocked, but with no cycle detour, forcing cyclists to cut through the parking lot and navigate uncontrolled construction vehicle traffic. If active transportation is going to become a first class option in Charlottetown, we need to make equal provisions for routing cyclists around construction as we do cars and trucks.
3. Taking a water bottle along on cycle trips is a really, really good idea. I’ve never gotten into the habit of doing this, but I will now.
4. The cycle lane along Belvedere Avenue from Ellis Brothers to Mount Edward Road is in horrible shape, the result of several construction projects that degraded it. This is a shame because otherwise it’s a great cycle route: lots of room on a broad shoulder, and a great east-west connector across the city.
5. It would be nice if we could connect the path that goes around the Charlottetown Event Grounds with the Riverside Drive multi-use trail; as it stands cycling from one to the other requires a detour through the back of the Wendy’s parking lot.
6. The Irving Gas Station on Riverside Drive charges $1 for using its air pump. Huh?
7. The bicycle parking lot at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market is very well used. Indeed, there’s a need for more bicycle parking there, as it was full when I arrived.

I’ll bring forward many of these issues to the Mayor’s Task Force on Active Transportation; if experience so far is any guide, the city will take quick action to address them.

The (full) Bicycle Parking Lot at Charlottetown Farmer’s Market

Apple’s phone naming scheme has been all over the place the last few years, but the Cupertino-based company could be set to reign things in with a small change.

According to Twitter leaker ‘CoinX’ (@coiiiiiiiin), Apple could call the 2019 iPhone ‘Pro.’

CoinX previously leaked the name of the iPhone XS, XS Max and iPhone XR, along with other details about the devices including weight, wallpaper and more.

Unfortunately, the latest leak is light on details. CoinX doesn’t clarify how Apple plans to incorporate the name.

“Pro” for iPhone? Crazy naming schemes over the past few years.

— CoinX (@coiiiiiiiin) August 10, 2019

There are a few ways the company could implement a Pro naming scheme. For example, it could launch a tiered lineup of phones featuring an iPhone and an iPhone Pro, similar to the iPad. Alternatively, Apple could replace the ‘Max’ branding with Pro, and we’ll see something like the iPhone 11 XR, iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro.

However Apple implements the Pro branding, it will bring more unity to its product ecosystem. Both the iPad, MacBook and Mac have regular and Pro options — it makes sense for the iPhone to have a Pro variant too.

At the very least, it’d be a welcome departure from the ‘Plus’ and ‘Max’ naming scheme and, as many Twitter users said in response to CoinX, was a change Apple should have made with the iPhone XS.

A new camera system for the iPhone 11… and the iPad Pro?

iPhone 11 rumours have painted a clear picture of what to expect from Apple’s next phone and there’s little in the way of Pro features. The next iPhone should strongly resemble the XS from the exterior but will have a new square camera bump that houses a third wide-angle lens.

Internally, the iPhone 11 is expected to feature new antennas for indoor positioning, a 7nm A13 processor and reverse wireless charging similar to the Galaxy S10 series. Finally, the new iPhone will likely include some significant camera improvements to go with the new configuration.

However, that new camera system may come to the 2019 iPad Pro as well, according to Macotakara. Citing a Chinese supplier, the report claims the iPad Pro may launch with a triple-camera setup.

You should take the rumour with a healthy dose of skepticism — it’s the first time we’ve heard about a triple-camera setup on an iPad. Plus, it would be a significant leap from the current single-camera setup on the iPad Pro.

Macotakara also reports that the rumoured 10.2-inch iPad could ship with a dual-camera array. That iPad is the reported replacement for the 2018 9.7-inch iPad.

Source: CoinX (Twitter), Macotakara

Via: 9to5Mac, (2)

The post iPhone 11 may get ‘Pro’ moniker, 2019 iPad Pro might have triple camera setup appeared first on MobileSyrup.

I really like 3GPP and standards. It’s a great thing and it has brought us devices that can communicate anywhere around the globe where a network is available. Unfortunately standardization of important features doesn’t work all the time. Take the ‘In Case of Emergency’ (ICE) functionality I wrote about 10 years ago as a prime example of industry failure to implement. In essence, 3GPP specified at the time, how emergency contact information should be stored in a mobile device, and in extension, the SIM card and they standardized how the retrieve the information. At the time I was a strong supporter of ICE as a recent personal experience has shown me the value of this.

Thus, I pushed hard in all directions that ICE was actually implemented. I was very much surprised about the apathy and indifference I met and statements like ‘there’s no money to be made with feature so why should we implement this?’. I was flabbergasted and I admit that I gave up after a while. Fortunately, the mindset of other players in the industry was somewhat different.

Today, both iOS and Android have the feature implemented completely independently from 3GPP and network operators and it works in a similar way as originally intended. When the phone is locked, there’s a big ‘Emergency Information’ button above the emergency dial pad that. If the owner has assigned an entry in the address book as emergency contact, the name of the contact is presented here and the number can be dialed by the first responder. A pretty close implementation of what 3GPP had in mind. Thank you very much for this!

Which makes me wonder how many people are actually aware of the feature and have assigned an emergency contact and further, if first responders are in general aware of this feature and use it to contact the next of kin when dealing with an unconscious or delirious patient!? If you have some more information please consider leaving a comment.

Android Q Beta 6 started hitting devices only a few days ago, and users have already spotted a problem — albeit a minor one.

Several Reddit threads have cropped up noting that Trusted Face isn’t working, or is working inconsistently. Google added Trusted Face back in Android 5.0 Lollipop, which makes use of a phone’s front-facing camera to recognize users and unlock the device.

While Trusted Face isn’t the most secure option for protecting your phone, it’s quite a bit better than the easy-to-fool face unlock feature that came in Android 4.0.

With Trusted Face suddenly not working on Android Q Beta 6, many users speculated Google was phasing it out in favour of the more advanced face unlock feature the company has planned for the Pixel 4. Further, Google opted to keep the feature off of the Pixel 3 and 3 XL due to its lacklustre security. Those things in mind, Trusted Face’s disappearance in Q made sense.

However, it looks like Trusted Face isn’t working because of a bug, and the feature is still here for those who want to use it.

Reddit user ‘MawMaw2864‘ found a fix for the bug. If you’re running the beta and Trusted Face is acting up, head to Developer Options on your device. If you haven’t enabled Developer Options, find the ‘build number’ (typically in Settings under ‘About phone’) and tap it repeatedly.

In Developer Options, you’ll want to find the ‘Trust Agents only extend unlock’ feature and toggle it off and on again. Things should work fine after that.

It’s worth noting, however, that Trusted Face isn’t available for the Pixel 3 and 3 XL because of a previous Google decision.

Source: Reddit, (2), (3), (4)

Via: Android Police

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