A useful list from the Guardian “Ten common myths about bike lanes – and why they’re wrong” which uses mostly UK data. And it is about a month old, but I only saw it today. For local readers, the switch of the Downtown Vancouver Business Association from anti-bike lane to pro, simply based on the business data of the members should be proof enough. It was thought that the loss of parking would hurt retailers, but it turns out that the people who ride bikes have more disposable income than those who spend a lot on owning and using a car.

Also from the Guardian – from their Cities section – is a useful explanation of how people use public spaces, based on research in New York City by SWA Group – in a gallery with useful commentary on the left hand side.

You can read “Our Renewable Future” by Richard Henberg and David Fridley on line. It was published a couple of years ago and if you haven’t had a chance to look at it you should.

“SERVICES over London Overground’s Gospel Oak – Barking line are now exclusively operated by four-car class 710 Aventra EMUs after the legacy two-car DMUs were phased out. One month free travel will be offered between August 31 and October 1 as compensation for the late delivery of the new fleet.” from the International Railway Journal

This used to be mainly a freight line transferring trains from the docks at Tilbury to the rest of the country, in between which ran one of the few peripheral passenger services around London (as opposed to to and from the centre). In recent years these services have been greatly improved by taking them into the regional service provider rather than the national railway which had tended to neglect them. Even though I lived in East Ham for 18 years or so, there was never really much need for us to use this line, but as a train enthusiast I found reasons to, later on.

I quite like the way that people who were inconvenienced by the switch now get compensated. This is common in Europe – but almost unheard of here. Apparently Canada is going to make airlines do something similar. Of course no compensation is ever considered for those stuck by the Greyhound withdrawal – or the appalling unreliability of VIA rail.

Since the summer I am holding three questions that are related. They all concern what role machine learning and AI could fulfil for an individual or an everyday setting. Everyman’s AI, so to speak.

The first question is a basic one, looking at your house, and immediate surroundings:

1: What autonomous things would be useful in the home, or your immediate neighbourhood?

The second question is more group and community oriented one:

2: What use can machine learning have for civic technology (tech that fosters citizen’s ability to do things together, to engage, participate, and foster community)?

The third question is perhaps more a literary one, an invitation to explore, to fantasise:

3 What would an “AI in the wall” of your home be like? What would it do, want to do? What would you have it do?

(I came across an ‘AI in the wall’ in a book once, but it resided in the walls of a pub. Or rather it ran the pub. It being a public place allowed it to interact in many ways in parallel, so as to not get bored)

Pride Vancouver Festival image from Daily Hive attributed to Public Disco/Facebook

This past week was Pride Week in Vancouver. It’s a great parade and festival, and a celebration of the growing and hard-fought freedom of non-straight (LGBTQ+) folks to be open and unafraid about their sexual/romantic preferences, 50 years after Canada finally began to decriminalize them. It’s great that this has been happening here (sadly, it’s not the case in many other countries) and it’s wonderful that there are now resources to help those who have faced oppression based on sexual orientation to achieve acceptance instead of opprobrium from others, especially their families, friends, communities, and legal authorities. Their fight is, of course, still far from over.

And hurray for the end of third person singular gendered pronouns, that the LGBTQ+ community has been largely instrumental in achieving! Even Oxford now accepts the “singular ‘they'”. Ridiculous that we should have to know a person’s gender before we can properly refer to them in speech or writing.

One of the things they have accomplished is to begin to raise awareness of the dangers of labelling people — which inevitably means inclusion for some and exclusion for the rest. Paradoxically, perhaps, LGBTQ+ people have done this by embracing the labels themselves, and disarming the stigma of them by celebrating them and showing the fear some have of them to be utterly unwarranted.

For those in other groups, the challenge of overcoming personal and collective stigma continues to be enormous. While those coping with physical disabilities are getting more amenities to help them in their homes and communities, the much higher cost of accommodating their “differences” can tax budgets and cause some resentments, and prevent a lot of worthwhile changes that could make their lives better from happening at all.

For those dealing with, for example, addictions, chronic poverty, mental illness and chronic disease, the attitude of most communities has not noticeably improved at all: the stigma remains fierce, programs to support sufferers remain absurdly underfunded, and an enormous amount of misplaced blame, self-blame and denial often makes the situation even worse. These are long-term, intractable problems that generations of effort have largely failed to alleviate.

Part of the challenge for those oppressed by, and those trying to deal with, these problems, are the labels themselves. Few like the label of “disabled”, and even fewer ever want to be called “an addict”, “poor”, “mentally ill”, or “chronically ill”. The labels make their situation sound hopeless, and carry the suggestion that their inability to overcome them is due at least in part to some personal weakness or character flaw (of course, that used to be said, by some, of homosexuality as well).

Lakoff’s arguments notwithstanding, trying to relabel a condition in order to achieve more respect and action for its sufferers is a tricky business. While it is fairer and more respectful to use the term “person with a disability” it is a mouthful, more likely to be inappropriately abbreviated than not.

Some programs for people suffering from addictions actually encourage enrolees to self-label (“My name is X and I am an addict”) and self-blame as a means of accepting primary responsibility for their illness is offered as a means of “curing” them, which is an egregious throwback to old religious dogma, and which, not surprisingly, usually fails. There is, partly as a result of a rush to blame the victim, still a stigma associated even with terms like “diabetic” (the implication is that someone with this label probably doesn’t eat properly). Meanwhile, a person suffering from mental illness, chronic physical illness, or addiction may live in constant terror of being “outed” to their employer or insurer, adding to the anxieties and shame they are trying to cope with.

It does no harm to change to a fairer and less blame-y label — though such labels can be hard to come up with and often don’t “stick” well. “Person with an addiction” or “person suffering from (chronic disease)” are better, but they’re still clunky and conjure up suffering and misery, which most people don’t want to think about. And they conjure up the realization that the only way (unlike the freedom of expression of sexual orientation) the sufferer will ever move from being stigmatized to celebrated is if they are “cured”. I suspect most of those suffering from addiction, poverty, mental illness or chronic disease do not expect a cure in their lifetime.

So if one can’t ameliorate and shift the discussion and responsibility for these social crises by relabeling them more fairly, what might work better?

Two things, I think. First, one can recognize, challenge, and work to undermine, the perceived legitimacy of all labels of collective identity as the abstract, generalizing, oversimplified fictions they are (however convenient and galvanizing they may be in the moment). At their worst (as in “make our country great again”; “those people should go back to where they came from”; “some of my best friends are group x”) they are divisive, code words that reflect and promote hatred, violence, war, theft, abuse, genocide, discrimination and segregation.

Even at their best (“what we all need to do to solve this problem is…”) they are throw-away excuses for inaction, or wishful thinking that denies the reality of how change actually happens.

Pausing before every use of a collective pronoun or label provides an opportunity to stop and fiercely challenge the validity of our assumptions, judgements, beliefs and perceptions about who “we” are, and are not — about who our labels actually refer to, and who they include, and exclude.

Acting on this can be as simple as removing the labels on public washrooms and remodelling them to allow the privacy of each user. Or it can be as exhausting as highlighting all the collective nouns in news stories and contemplating the judgements, myths and hatreds they imply and perpetuate.

Thinking about the generalizations implicit in every collective label and plural pronoun, not only as they arise in one’s own thoughts and communications, but in all our personal encounters and our consumption of media, can be enlightening. Even if one can’t stop using them (it’s probably impossible to do so), one can be aware of just how enormously the generalizations inherent in our language enable, and even encourage, judgement, discrimination, anger, polarization, fear, shame, and finally violence and oppression.

The next headline you read about the “opioid overdose crisis among street addicts” may strike you somewhat differently if you do so.

Secondly, one can fight to eliminate inequality of power, of every kind, by calling it out as the unnatural and destructive force that it is, and then making it a source of embarrassment to those who don’t cede it voluntarily (and it mostly won’t be ceded voluntarily). That means working to strip the respectability and prestige of being ultra-rich, and working to end the outrage of corporate “personhood”). It means fighting to restore historical, high rates of taxation on very high incomes (90% is not too high, and it does not discourage the rich from working), and to reinstate and expand wealth taxes (especially inheritance taxes). And it means treating wealthy tax cheats as criminals, not as clever entrepreneurs.

It means fighting to end classism of all kinds, right down to “business class” travel, and pointing out to those who exploit the benefits of their class gleefully or ignorantly that it always comes at the cost of deprivation to everyone else. Do “business class only” and “for our customers’ use only” toilets remind you of anything from earlier in human history?

It means refusing to acknowledge and respect the “rights” and privileges that come specifically from power (which means just about all “rights”, and most privileges). It means recognizing the self-identified “philanthropist” for what that person is — someone who has stolen wealth from everyone else (or whose parents have stolen it and passed it down) and who now wants fawning recognition, fame and celebration for returning its dividends to the powerless — who otherwise have to use “you fund me” campaigns, the latest form of public begging, to pay for their vitally-needed surgery.

Inequality of power and wealth of every kind is obscene and monstrously destructive, and every act legitimizing it (including almost every financial transaction) enables it to continue.

Battling the inequality of power and wealth is probably even more difficult than challenging the labels we use in our thoughts and communications. It’s hard, if you’ve grown up in our culture, not to esteem those who have wealth and power, not to assume it’s deserved, not to be envious of it. And in our culture, inaction inevitably leads to more and more inequality — with all its commensurate costs.

As with our collective labels, one can start by being aware — of power and wealth inequality, and the misery its continuance inflicts on the powerless. Of power abuse and the inappropriate adulation of the rich and powerful. Of the understandable rage those without power feel every time it is exercised indifferently and unconsciously by those who have it.

Collective discrimination, segregation and hate-mongering could not, I believe, survive the realization of the inherent illegitimacy of collective labels and of inequality of power and wealth. Sadly, that realization will likely not come before this ghastly industrial culture collapses under the weight of its ruinous economic and ecological practices, and in so doing makes labels and inequality the dreadful stuff of history. I’d like to think that, starting over, our human successors will avoid making the same mistakes.

Why should older white men get all the respect? I’ve been talking to a diverse collection of executives, thinkers, and authors: men and women; old and young; white, black, Hispanic, and Asian; North American, European, Asian, and Australian. Here’s a shocker: if you’re seeking attention for your ideas, it’s easier if you’re an older, white, … Continued

The post For minority authors, a book can generate respect and counteract bias appeared first on without bullshit.

This is an extensively revised article on one of the more interesting (and difficult) philosophers of the 20th century, Jacques Derrida. I won't pretend to be able to speak with any authority on his work. But here's the ten-cent perspective of at least some of it: there are no simple irreducible concepts. Every concept (every work, every perception) contains both itself and the negation of itself inherently in its presentation. For example, "what is happening right now is also not different from every other now I have ever experienced. At the same time, the present experience is an event and it is not an event because it is repeatable." Or for example, "for a decision to be just, not only must a judge follow a rule but also he or she must 're-institute' it, in a new judgment. Thus a decision aiming at justice (a free decision) is both regulated and unregulated." What's important here (to me) is that you can't separate these different aspects of the concept; they are one and the same thing.

Readdle launched PDF Expert 7 today with a few new features and an all-new business plan. The app was previously paid-up-front with an In-App Purchase for advanced features. With the launch of version 7 though, Readdle has moved the features that were previously part of PDF Expert’s In-App Purchase and some of what were part of the base paid-up-front app to a PDF Expert Pro subscription that costs $49.99/year with a 7-day free trial. Despite the change, however, existing PDF Expert 6 customers will retain the features they purchased under the old model.

The free version of PDF Expert allows users to access and manage PDFs from cloud services, read and annotate PDFs, and fill out PDF forms. In addition to the other PDF Expert 6 features that are now part of PDF Expert 7’s Pro subscription, Readdle has added three features: conversion of Word, Excel, and image files to the PDF format, PDF compression to reduce file sizes, and customizable app toolbars. For a complete breakdown of free and subscription-only features, be sure to check out Readdle’s blog post about the update, which also lists which features existing customers will retain.

The move by Readdle to a free app plus a subscription is an interesting one that we’ve seen before with other apps, including in the PDF app market. It’s a model that makes a lot of sense for a category where users’ needs vary widely from extremely simple to complex. Whether the price point and feature bundle Readdle has chosen is attractive to enough users to sustain the app’s subscription will be up to the market to decide, but I expect this is a trend we will continue to see with feature-rich apps like this.

PDF Expert 7 is available as a free download from the App Store with an optional $49.99/year subscription for advanced features, which users can try free for 7 days.

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OPP (Other People’s Problems)

Camille Fournier provides a comprehensive guide to picking your battles: in a large organization how can you navigate the enormous array of problems you can see that you'd like to fix, especially when so many of those problems aren't directly in your area of control?

Via @ossanna16

I think one of the biggest breakthroughs in wireless connectivity was, when looking at it from a smartphone point of view, when Android pioneered tethering, i.e. the possibility to share a cellular connection with other devices over Wifi. However, one thing that didn’t happen over the years was that a smartphone can be connected to a Wifi hotspot as a client, e.g. at a hotel, and then share this connection over Wifi with other devices instead of the cellular connection. By accident I found out that one of my devices is now actually able to do just that!

Not that this is a terribly important function for me but there are scenarios where this could be quite useful. When I’m at a hotel with a multitude of devices, for example, with cellular connectivity being bad. In such a scenario one would only have to get past the paywall or landing page of the hotel with one device instead of repeating the tedious exercise with each device. The smartphone I discovered that supports this is a Samsung Galaxy S9. At first I couldn’t quite believe it but there are other reports out there confirming my observation. Very well done, Samsung!

Rogers’ flanker brand Fido plans to eliminate data overage fees with the launch of its new Data Overage Protection program.

The new feature is included with all Fido Data, Talk and Text plans starting today, a press release said.

The feature will allow customers to manage their data usage by “pausing data once they reach their limit.”

Fido will send customers a text notification once they reach 90 percent of their data limit and then send another message once they use 100 percent of their data, at which point their data access will be paused.

Fido said that if customers want more data they can buy 1GB of data for $15 CAD. This is a one time charge per month, but if you want more data you can charge another $15 and get more data. This is not a recurring monthly cost and the data will remain until your next billing cycle.

Fido offered a similar option where customers can buy a monthly add on when they’re about to exceed their data limit. But that option no longer exists for customers.

The monthly add on option allowed customers to buy 300MB for $10, 1.5GB for $20 or 3GB for $30. This was a monthly recurring charge.

Though it is worth adding that the new Data Overage Protection feature will be applied to all customers getting onto a new plan. Existing customers will still have access to the monthly add on option.

The new data overage protection feature also builds on the company’s Data Bytes, that allows customers to have one free hour of data five times a month, and Fido XTRA, which offers Fido postpaid mobile and internet customers new perks every Thursday.

“We know that data overage fees are a major concern for some customers, and that many hold back from using the full data included in their plans,” Nancy Audette, vice-president at Fido, said in the release. “With Data Overage Protection, our customers can get the most out of their wireless plans and enjoy their services worry-free with no surprise charges.”

It is worth noting that as per the rules in Canada’s Wireless Code, subscribers will have to consent to overage fees that total more than $50.

Source: Fido

Update 07/08/19: The article was updated by providing more clarity into the new data protection feature.

The post Fido introduces new data overage protection feature appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Google is rolling out the sixth and final Android Q beta today to Pixel devices.

Since this is the final beta, the features Google’s added or left in will be the ones in the full release of the yet-to-be-named Android Q. For reference, Android Pie was named on August 6th last year so it seems like we might not know the name until the full release this year.

The Android Developers Blog post details a few final tweaks to gesture navigation. It says there’s now a “200dp vertical app exclusion limit for the Back gesture.” Beyond that,  Google’s added a sensitivity preference setting for the back gesture.

These tweaks seem to make it easier to open side-panel menus within apps.

There are also some smaller, less noticeable “behaviour changes to help improve performance, battery life, security, and privacy,” reads the company’s release notes. 

As of the time of writing, we’re downloading the update so we’ll update this post if we find any other interesting tweaks.

To see some of the features added in beta 5 check out our previous post. 

Source: Android Developers Blog 

The post Android Q beta 6 is rolling out now for Pixel phones appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Google Images added an on-demand side panel that will display the image users have selected from a sea of search results, the company says in a blog post.

Without a doubt, the new design makes it easier to keep track of search progress because it will keep showing the selected image unless the user clicks on another picture.

Aside from that, the panel will attempt to provide a one-stop experience by showing relevant information like brand name, price, review scores, and availability.

In addition to the keyword ‘bubbles’ located underneath different search parameters and settings, the new Google Images will also display a ‘Related searches’ window with three suggestions.

This is not the first time the company introduced a new feature into an otherwise standard search service.

Back in late July, Google Images, on iOS and Android, streamlined the process of sharing GIFs from search results directly to apps like Hangouts, Gmail, Android Messages and WhatsApp.

Google said it would bring shareable GIFs to more mobile browsers and services in the future. The company also acquired GIF platform Tenor to welcome more content creators to submit their work to Google Images.

Source: Google

The post Google Images for desktop now has a handy side bar and other features appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Coverage and discussion on Metafilter of the publishers' push-back against libraries, especially with respect to eBooks. "When we tell them, 'Sorry, there is only one copy of that e-book, and a waitlist of over 200 people,' they ask the completely reasonable question, 'Why?' In Macmillan's ideal world, that library patron would get frustrated with the library and go purchase the e-book instead." But that logic never worked with physical books, and there's no real reason to expect it to work with eBooks (especially when the price savings are minimal).

This is a lot of 'inside baseball' for the Javascript world, but if you're using Javascript, the article contains a lot of helpful advice. "Simple code consumes less mental resources, makes us more efficient, and results in more reliable software. This article along with some of the available JavaScript tooling will help you achieve that!"

Yesterday I visited CODAM, a new Amsterdam coding college. It’s part of the 42 network, which originated in France, and offers a free 4 year curriculum to learn how to code (one or more of unix, graphics, machine learning). The education is free, and aimed at those who didn’t fit or couldn’t afford the regular educational options, dropped out or never had the opportunity to opt-in. The commitment is however large. The first month is a heavy filter, expecting students to keep a steady rhythm, and afterwards a high attendance is expected (some 50 hours per week).

CODAM’s mission of allowing students from all backgrounds to increase their capabilities, using coding skills as a path to agency, has a good overlap with the IndieWeb’s ambition of allowing people to own their own on-line identity, be in control of what they publish and share, and connect and interact outside the silos.

A month ago CODAM’s Lisa Stamm, the community and communications person, offered CODAM as a venue for IndieWebCamp Amsterdam. Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit their location on the old Amsterdam naval yard, near Central Station. CODAM and their location are a good fit with IndieWebCamp’s needs, so the conclusion was easy:

IndieWebCamp Amsterdam will take place at CODAM on September 28th and 29th.

Registration is already open, and free of charge. Both the View Source conference and the Fronteers conference take place in the days after, so if you’re in web dev you could turn it into a full week in Amsterdam.

Some pictures of the CODAM venue, and its surroundings below

Summary: The benefits of automation are not limited to saving time. We go over many advantages, some pitfalls to avoid, and some principles to follow.

Here’s an XKCD cartoon about the pitfalls of automation.

It shows how automation is sometimes a fool’s errand. We think we are spending a lot of time on the task. We decide to automate it by writing some software. We wind up spending much more time on the software than we ever did on the task.

I have to admit that I’ve done this before. I’ve tried to automate something and found that in the end, the bugs and general unreliability of software made it not worth it from a “time spent” perspective. Automation is not all roses.

However, in my experience, automation does help tremendously, despite sometimes being a wild goose chase. Further, I think the focus on time spent is a very Taylorist view of the way we spend our time. We shouldn’t measure productivity or efficiency with a stopwatch. There are many human factors involved. For example, building a robot to mow your lawn may be more fun than mowing your lawn, even though it’s unlikely to replace you without lots of work.

It’s a silly example, but it shows that there are many benefits besides time savings. I want to explore automation from a system-level perspective—including human factors and other system-level thinking.

Let’s start with the benefits.

Time saved

Sometimes you do hit gold and an automation straight up saves you time. Computers are fast. You no longer spend one hour doing a task. Now it takes you three minutes, thanks to software. You could easily imagine a formula to calculate the time saved. The variables are how long it used to take, how long it takes with the automation, how many times you do it, and how long it took to build the automation.

Bottom line: computers are faster than humans at many tasks.

Consistency

I send a newsletter out every week. I have a lot of the process automated, including layout. It does save time, but more importantly, the automation allows me to be more consistent. There are stylistic decisions that I’ve encoded right into the software. I care a lot about stylistic consistency, so I would spend the time to maintain it. But now that it’s automated, I can relax. This frees me up to focus on the content. Likewise, if I find a way to be more consistent, or if I choose to change one of those decisions, I have a place to put it.

Bottom line: computers are more consistent than humans at many things.

Fewer defects

My newsletter often has many links in it. When I lay it out by hand, there are many ways you can get the link wrong. Sure, there are copy-paste errors. But sometimes it’s more subtle. You put in a placeholder link, then forget to come back to it. I rarely have those problems these days.

Why? Because having an automated system, I have a place to add in automated checks. These are checks I probably should have done manually before. But look at the process: send myself a test email. Click on each link in the email and see if it goes to the right page. Make sure I’m using an incognito browser so that I’m not logged into my own blog, because if you’re logged into the blog, you’ll see your drafts, even before they’re published. It’s a total pain! I just never did it.

Automation lets me do those things I wouldn’t have done. And here we see the first bit of alchemy that is missing from the stopwatch measurement of efficiency. The software is adding benefit that the human wouldn’t add themselves. You need to have at least the beginnings of an automation to be able to add these kinds of benefits.

Bottom line: computers can avoid certain errors better than a human.

Frequency

I’ve automated most of my podcast production and publishing as well. I decided early on that I wouldn’t do the podcast if it took too much time away from my direct money-making activities. It would have to fit into the unused spaces in my life. For instance, while walking or driving. In short, I needed to spend nearly zero minutes editing and uploading.

I experimented with a few different ways to do it, but in the end, I settled on a pretty stable workflow: film myself with my phone, upload it to YouTube (setting title and description). From there, an automation would download the video from YouTube, extract out the audio, title, and description, then create a post on my blog and attach the audio.

The fact that it was automated made it so I could do it at all. When it was so easy, I was posting 3-5 new episodes per week (that would publish at a twice-a-week cadence).

Programmers will also be familiar with continuous delivery. If we make deploying fast and easy, usually through automation, we do it more frequently. If it is entirely manual, we will do it less frequently. If you just did the stopwatch math, you would conclude that we don’t do it enough to justify automating it. The automation unlocks the ability to deliver features in hours instead of weeks.

Bottom line: automations enable us to do a thing more frequently than we would have without it, and frequency might open up new benefits.

Ease

There are many tasks that are harder than they need to be, just because of the user interface. Although a person could do them, and even do them quickly, there’s an amount of tedium to them that makes the work stressful. When I use Twitter, I often want to add someone to a list. To do that, the best way I’ve found is to open that person’s profile in a new tab, wait for the profile to load, click the menu, choose “add to list”, click the list I’d like to add them to, click “Save”, then close the tab. That’s a lot of work, especially when you consider how “easy” the task could be.

On the other hand, I could easily script up the same thing. Even though the task might take longer to perform (I’d have to switch to the command line, type in the command, etc), a script that added someone to a list might be easier. And by going to the command line (an easier place to automate in general), I could benefit from other automations, such as text expansion to auto-insert the command.

Bottom line: bad interfaces (especially mouse-driven ones) can make some tasks difficult, even when they shouldn’t be. Sometimes it is better to make a task easier, even if it takes more time, because you’re reducing coginitive load.

Scalability

Because the newsletter layout and sending is mostly automated, I feel like I could handle another newsletter or two. Better, I would trust someone else to be able to send the newsletters while maintaining the consistency. What that really means is I don’t have to find someone with my unique blend of tastes and talents. They could be an expert on the topic of the newsletter, and not give a hoot about how consistent it is. That person would be easier to find.

Bottom line: even if it doesn’t save time, automation can make it easier to scale out.

Waiting

You don’t know how many processes I have to wait for before I can continue working. That puts me in a dilemma. I can either wait for it (and waste time and increase stress) or work on something else which will be interrupted when it’s time to get back to it. Both are evil in human-factor terms. That time when you’re expecting an interruption is rarely productive.

Automations can eliminate this waiting time. I transfer a lot of big video files over the internet in order to publish them. These can take forever. Some workflows require you to upload first, then take an action when it’s done. Do I really have to wait for it? Too often, the answer is “yes”.

Automations can help you move the work around, because they’re like a little assistant who does the work for you. For example, to upload my video to YouTube, I have it ask me up front for the title and description. That way, I can type those in when I’m still engaged, hit Enter, and walk away. The automation handles retries and sets the title and description at the right point in the process. I don’t have to be there.

Bottom line: waiting is evil and automations can reduce waiting. You might say “do something else while you wait”, but that time is usually unproductive.

Queues

Many tasks come in batches. If you got one X per week, and X took 2 hours, it may be something you just do manually. But what if you get ten Xs one week, and none for the other nine? If you devote 20 hours to it, that might eat into other responsibilities you have to get done every week. And if you queue them up, the turnaround time for the last one will be really bad. You could work overtime to finish them quickly, but that’s not sustainable.

However, if you automate it, you might be able to get through them faster when they come in all at once. That would avoid the pileup. But what if that automation costs 3 hours per week to maintain? That means 30 hours of regular work vs. 20 hours of rushed work. Is it worth it?

Of course, it depends on what X is and how valuable it is. But it’s worth considering that you should trade off time for regularity, so that you can avoid long queues and long turnaround times.

Bottom line: long queues of work are bad, and have secondary consequences. It may be worth it to spend more time automating than you spend on the task to avoid queues.

Simplifying

It has happened to me many times that automating something has made the task simpler. For instance, I would never use `ffmpeg` to edit video. It’s a command-line application. To really edit video, I need to see what it will look like. That’s why I use a video editor with a nice interface. However, once I start automating my video pipeline, a switch to `ffmpeg` and a little time figuring out how to do the tasks I do in my video editor with it, may remove the video editor—an entire piece of software—from the process.

In general, the fewer moving parts you have, the more reliable your process can be. Automation can often remove the need for whole steps. For instance, my workflow before required me to open Screenflow (my video editor), create a new document, import the video file, trim it to size, etc, etc. The new workflow does not require Screenflow at all. Those steps are now unnecessary.

Bottom line: automation can simplify a process by removing steps that were necessary when done manually.

Learning

Automating a task is a learning process. You get to know the workflow better since you are essentially encoding your tacit knowledge into a program. You are also learning more about the tools available, how they work, and what they are capable of. Those learnings could be valuable for manual processes as well as future automations.

Bottom line: learning about your tools and media can open up the door to better automations or more efficient manual work.

Mental space

I can’t switch between lots of different cognitive tasks very quickly. I doubt anyone can. Automating a task often means that I don’t have to think about it for it to happen. It could be set up on a timer or something, and it just happens without intervention. That frees up space to get more important work done. And that space is very valuable, more valuable than the time spent automating the task.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say I work from 8-12 am. I have to tweet at 10 am every day. It doesn’t take long, maybe 10 minutes, but it cuts the morning in half. Anything I have been working on in the early morning is swapped out and it will have to be swapped back in to continue work on it. Swapping out and in can take 20-30 minutes.

However, if I automate the task well, I can forget about it. My morning becomes one continuous four-hour block without interruptions. That is invaluable.

And I have automated many of my tweets. I use a service that sends out tweets from a reservoir. It takes time to fill up the reservoir, but it’s paid back in continuity of focus.

Bottom line: automating a task can give you more continuity of focus, which is more valuable than the time it takes to automate the task.

Infrequent tasks

Some tasks are so infrequent that I forget how to do them. If I did it every day, I’d remember the steps and I could to it in 20 minutes. But because I haven’t done it in three months, I can’t remember where the pieces are that I need. I clumsily search for them, and I sometimes interrupt other people to figure out how to do it. The task that should take 20 minutes takes 45 minutes.

However, if it’s automated, there might be just one step. My favorite is when the automation guides you through the steps, like a wizard. You just have to remember how to start it.

Bottom line: it’s easy to forget how to do infrequent tasks and have them take longer than they should. Automation can turn them into self-driving workflows.

Compounding

The more you automate, the more ability you have to build higher-order automations. As a programmer, I think this one is pretty cool. Seriously, once I have a script to upload a YouTube video, I can write a script that uses that one to upload 100 videos. Things compound pretty quickly. Even an automation that isn’t “worth the time” (because it took longer to write than you save by running it) might become part of a larger automation that does save time. It’s non-linear.

Bottom line: compounding is real. The more you automate, the more you can automate. And piece of automation gives more benefit.

Accumulating

Many automations won’t actually compound. You’ll never use one automation to automate another process. However, even when that doesn’t happen, automations do add up. You automate yourself some mental space, that gives you more mental space to use automating. And if you automate half of a process today, in six months you might find the secret to automate the rest. The point is, starting to automate little things can snowball into entire processes taking care of themselves.

Bottom line: start automating now, even if you can’t see the end of the process. Every little bit counts.

Now that I’ve sung the praises of automation, let’s talk about the downsides.

More code

Automations typically require code. Code is a liability. It rots. It has to be maintained. And bugs can cause serious problems. If you’ve got a script to order transcripts for your videos or to email your customers, a poorly written for loop can do serious damage.

Rabbit holes

Some automations don’t work. You think it’ll save time and you’ll use it a lot. But you don’t. Or you spend ten hours trying to connect to that API and you can’t get it to work. They’re mistakes in judgment. I chose to do X because I thought it would be good, but X was not good. I was wrong.

But that’s not what I’m talking about with rabbit holes. Rabbit holes are different. Rabbit holes are failures of judgment. You’re not making decisions. You’re letting the decisions make you.

If you’re in a rabbit hole, you think you’re making progress. You’re perpetually almost done, but not quite. You get carried away with features. You spend a lot of time on it. And maybe it works, but it adds no value. This is probably what the xkcd cartoon is referring to.

Rabbit holes are dangerous because it’s so easy to focus on the problem ahead without checking back in with the big picture. It’s wise to be skeptical of automation because one fall down a rabbit hole could eat you alive.

Almost automated

There’s another phenomenon where a process is almost 100% automated, but still requires some human steps in it. That seems like it should be acceptable. After all, you removed a lot of the work. But I find it frustrating that what should be doable from a shell script still requires human intervention. What’s more, I’ve invested money and time into those tools under the false belief that they would be automatable.

For instance, I send email with a service that calls itself an “automation platform”, but their API does not work according to their documentation. My newsletter workflow still requires me to copy and paste html and text versions of the newsletter into their web gui.

But instead of thinking “they just don’t have that feature”, I get frustrated by it in a way that would not frustrate me if I hadn’t automated it. Is that frustration a cost? Yeah, probably a minor one. But I can’t help but notice every time I run that workflow that there’s only one step left that’s not automatic. Do I file a feature request? Do I switch services? I think about it a lot.

Now let’s talk about some principles that I use to minimize the downside and

Simplicity

The KISS rules applies to automations. It’s very easy to overcomplicate a process in order to save work. Processes that are complicated, whether they are automated or not, are more work than they need to be.

In general, removing steps is good. Removing moving parts is good. Removing choices is good. Keep it simple, silly!

Outsourcing

Sometimes you will benefit from an external service or software. For instance, I publish a lot of videos for my membership site. I want them to be available online to watch, and also available to download in different sizes—HD, MD, and Phone. People pay for the content. The video is just the medium for that content. Video codecs is not my area of expertise.

That’s why I outsource video transcoding to Vimeo. I upload a video, it gets converted to a web-friendly format for embedding in a web page. And Vimeo also produces the HD, MD, and Phone videos that I can download and host. They do a better job than I can do, and I’m happy to pay for it.

Insourcing

Sometimes, however, you want to bring the service under your control, so you can modify it. You might want half of a process, or you genuinely might have a better way to do it. For instance, I may one day bring my automated tweets back into software I write. I’ve written Twitter clients before, so I have the code. That will let me automate it a bit more how I like it, instead of how they’ve done it as a mass-market service. I like the service, it’s just not exactly how I would do it.

Human-in-the-loop

As a programmer, I have the temptation to completely automate a thing. But sometimes it’s best to stay in the loop. Even Toyota is keeping humans in the process. Even when they can automate something fully with robots, they choose to pay a person to be there. Why?

Well, according to them, humans can spot problems and further remove waste from the system. Humans have general intelligence and can come up with new ideas. Keep a human in the loop and build the process around them. Think about enhancing a person instead of replacing them.

Small pieces

It’s a fool’s errand to automate away an entire complicated workflow. You likely won’t succeed. But if you automate a piece of one, you’ll finish quickly and have something to show for it. Add bits to it over time. But start small and let it grow as your time allows.

Lowered expectations

Your software will never paint like Picasso. Hell! It won’t paint like my six-year-old daughter. But that’s okay. If you really need to automate it, maybe it’s okay that it’s not hand-crafted and artisanal. If you need human-level artistry, automation is not going to work.

Sometimes, automating a task forces me to really think about what is important about the task. I’m surprised by how much human attention I’m paying to things that nobody cares about—not my reader, not my customers, and not even me, when I am honest with myself.

Different process

Automatic workflows are different from their human-run equivalents. Humans and computers have different ergonomic needs. A computer can do many things at once. A human wants to get immediate feedback for every action. We have different needs.

Because of that, I often find that I have to rearrange parts of the process to make it make sense for a computer. Some steps would be ridiculous for a person to do, but to a computer it’s natural.

For instance, if I’m publishing lessons to a course, I know what lessons I just recorded. I can upload them, make pages on my site, and embed the videos to just the ones I am working on. However, my automated software doesn’t know what I’ve done. It has to find out. So the first thing it does is download metadata for all videos, for all lessons, and for all files. It uses that information to figure out what is missing, what has changed, and what is extra. From there, it can take the right actions.

The software runs every 15 minutes, checking for new videos that need publishing. I, as a human, would never do that. I would start the process only after I recorded a new video. We’re different, and we have to change the process.

Ongoing process

Automation is an ongoing process. Our automations evolve over time. We will never be done.

That should be relaxing and permissive. We should feel okay to not have everything automated yet. And we should feel okay to start anywhere and automate just a little.

Take your time

I find one of the best ways to make good automations as opposed to bad ones is to let them sit a while. Don’t rush to automate something. Do it manually first. Understand it well. Search for tools. Casually read documentation that might help you. Let it simmer. Slowly gather the ingredients. Do tests to see if you can perform a step adequately.

When you’ve got all the pieces, start assembling them. There is no rush. You can continue doing it the manual way if it doesn’t work. Take your time. Comment your code. If it’s a good automation, you won’t be reading the code very often; on the contrary, you’ll let how it works slip from your mind. Time is a good test.

Conclusions

When we do a simple time accounting of a task, it rarely takes into account the real benefits of automation. Yes, there are rabbit holes we can go down. There are automations gone wrong. But you can’t look at the modern world and say that automation has been all bad.

I like automation. It has helped me grow my business and avoid tedium. As an experienced programmer, I find it very pleasing to construct a helper that relieves me of work and does a good job of it.

That said, I find it challenging to keep it organized and simple. There is simply a lot that needs to be done, and I’m not that organized of a person. Further, I really dislike most software. Most software offers very little room for automation. A lot of software even requires the mouse for interaction. Dragging and dropping might be okay for moving a few files around. But if you need to move thousands, the mv command works way better. I wish that the features of applications were accessible outside of those applications. I paid for them.

In the end, I’m always on the lookout to make things run smoother and to make processes add more value. Automation is just one technique we have to do that. Don’t overuse it. But when it’s good, it’s real good and it can multiply your effectiveness.

The post The Surprising Benefits of Automation appeared first on LispCast.

My friend and (lucky for me) boss Joi Ito has an excellent essay in Wired which considers the challenges of measuring the impact of philanthropy. For Joi, one of the key problems is that social problems are complex, and the metrics we use to understand them too simple. Too often we’re measuring something that’s a proxy for something else – we can measure circulation levels at libraries as a proxy for their usage, but we’ll miss all the novel ways libraries are reaching communities through makerspaces, classrooms and public spaces. What we need are better ways of understanding and measuring the resilience and robustness of systems, not just simple proxies that measure growth or contraction.

Joi’s meditation on measurement is consistent with his current intellectual interests: irreducible complexity and resisting reduction. And, like Joi, I’m obsessed with how philanthropy could do a better job at making progress on social challenges. I’ve done my own work around measuring impact with the Media Cloud platform, as my friend Anya Schiffrin and I explored in this article on measuring the impact of foundation funded journalism.

But I came away from Joi’s article wondering if there wasn’t a major factor he missed: the disappearance of governments from the equation of social change. Joi works with some of the biggest and wealthiest players in American philanthropy – the Knight and MacArthur Foundations. I work with some of the others – the Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation. We’ve both been involved with helping invest enormous sums of money… and we’ve both learned that those sums aren’t so enormous when you put them up against massive social challenges, like addressing poverty through improved school quality. There are models that could work at scale – the model pioneered by Geoffrey Canada as the Harlem Children’s Zone starts working with children pre-birth, through parenting classes and follows students through high school and into college. But it’s depended on massive infusions of private investment, and when the Obama administration sought to replicate its success as “promise zones”, the project received only a small percentage of the funds the President sought for it, and its impacts are likely to be quite diffuse.

It’s possible for philanthropists to fund experiments, even multi-decade experiments like Harlem Children’s Zone. But it’s unlikely that philanthropists can, or should, take responsibility for solving problems like intergenerational poverty in African American communities. At best, we ask phianthropists to enable and lift up promising experiments, in the hopes that governments could learn from those results and adopt best policies. But since the Reagan/Thatcher moment of the 1980s, we’ve expected less and less from our governments, and they’ve seemed less able partners to transform societies for the better. I’m increasingly worried that working with philanthropies – something I spend a great deal of my time doing – is missing the larger point. We need revolutionary change, where government becomes part of the solution again, not better metrics within philanthropy.

In the spirit of the mid-2000s, Joi, I’m opening a blog conversation – do I have it right, or do you believe that philanthropy without handing ideas off to governments to scale? And if those governments aren’t there to receive these experiments, what are we spending our time on in philanthropy?

Today my old friend Max interviewed me in our garden. We discussed the role of digitisation in general, and of open data in particular, for the energy transition. This in preparation for the energie.digital conference I will be speaking at in Germany next month. It was a good rehearsal as well, as I will be speaking in German, and I need to work on my German language jargon

Heute hat mein alter Freund Max in unserem Garten ein Video-Interview mit mir gemacht. Im September werde ich auf der von seiner Firma organisierten Konferenz energie.digital sprechen über Open Data, und wie offene Daten eine Rolle spielen in der Energiewende.

Max setting up his equipment, and borrowing some more equipment from Elmine, my in house video professional

I am going full in on HomePod. Initially I wasn't too impressed by them, but I have used two of them in my living room and my studio in parallel to the existing Sonos infrastructure. At first, that was a hard fight for the small HomePods. But increasingly I have used HomePod more than Sonos. It's just a lot easier to call Siri to do something. Siri and I get along really well. More so than Google Assistant, which I run on a Sonos One, and Alexa on an Echo Show 2 in the kitchen.

HomePods are better AirPlay speakers than Sonos. They seem to have a larger buffer and don't get thrown off so easily. And I can tell them to play my podcasts or switch HomeKit scenes. Yes, they are limited to Apple Music, but that's what I use.

And now there are four of them. Bath, bedroom, living room, studio. I have put all of Sonos subs and most of my speakers behind smart switches, so I can turn them on when needed. But most of the time, it's HomePod that fills the house with music.

Having multiple HomePods gives you a Sonos-like experience. Not only can you send your iPhone audio to multiple rooms, but you can also let HomePods stream music all by themselves individually ("West Coast") or as a group ("Love Machine"). Having more than one Home Hub will let HomeKit fail over but it also helps with Bluetooth coverage. If a Bluetooth connected device cannot talk to the active Home Hub, it can use any of the other hubs on hot standby.

While this works quite well within the Apple ecosystem, you cannot play HomePods and Sonos speakers in sync, even if the Sonos players support AirPlay 2. There is a noticeable lag from HomePod to Sonos.

Standby power consumption for Sonos went from 461 kWh to 26 kWh for the year. The only player that has to stay on is PlayBase which provides sound for TV. Everything else can be powered up on demand.

It took Sonos about two years to turn me away.

City of North Vancouver Councillor Tony Valente has been involved with The Shipyards development for at least ten years as a community member, leader, and now a City Councillor.  I asked Tony to tell the story of his involvement and how The Shipyards Commons came to be.  He begins with referring to the “bloodlessly named” Lot 5 that was his motivation for engaging with local government back in 2009.

I was one of a group of neighbours in Lower Lonsdale (LoLo) who petitioned the City to get moving on the North Van central waterfront following the failure of the National Maritime Project.   The petition was, sadly, promptly filed by City Council following my delegation and presentation.

It wasn’t over, of course. The petition connected me with other neighbours, including the owner of the Cafe for Contemporary Art (Tyler Russell who has continued to spread culture across our province) – where we held our own guerrilla consultation, discussing elements of what could be on Lot 5. That turned into a non-profit society – the North Van Urban Forum – which brought together a diverse group of community members to transparently and openly engage in ideas for developing our public realm.

One of our first events, The Commons: Sharing Public Spaces (download the summary report) focused on what people look for in common spaces and sought to connect those ideas with Lower Lonsdale.

There were presentations from Capilano University (now part of The Shipyards project), the North Vancouver Museum and Archives (soon to open in LoLo), panels on sustainable building design and district energy (The Shipyard’s ice sheet will create heat for the Lonsdale Energy Corporation) and a host of others.

All of our efforts culminated in a Design Jam for Lot 5, with celebrity judges Darrell Mussatto and Gordon Price. You can download the report, Project Waterfront: North Van Design Jam.

As North Van Urban Forum wound down, I was invited by Mayor Mussatto to become part of the Central Waterfront Brand Development Team, grouping local businesses and residents together to advance a plan. This team developed The Shipyards moniker and the big concepts behind what was required to make The Shipyard Commons a reality. From there it was over to the then-City Council to allocate the funding and design the public-private partnerships required to deliver this paradigm-shifting amenity.

That took courage and vision, especially early on, and all those members of the then City Council should be commended for making this happen.  Today as a newly elected Council member who risked little politically to make this project happen, it was an honour to be present at the opening to celebrate this space and what it will do for people in North Vancouver.  And to raise the bar for other public spaces in the region.

Unfortunately, the North Van Urban Forum ceased to exist as an official non-profit some years ago.  However, its legacy continues in the Shipyards Commons – a realized project that offers us infinitely more than the National Maritime Centre aspired to.

As a public space designed around people first, it’s a milestone in the relationship between the City of North Vancouver’s and its citizens.

In the wake of the shooting in Texas, Donald Trump has asked the nation to come together to condemn white supremacy and racism. Given his own past statements stirring up racial animosity, how are news media supposed to write about that? For context, he’s been telling women of color in Congress to “go back where … Continued

The post Hypocrisy in headlines: How newspapers covered Trump’s call to end racism appeared first on without bullshit.

Few things are more satisfying to me than one elegant line of Bash that automates hours of tedious work. As part of some recent explorations into automatically re-creating my laptop with Bash scripts (post to come!), I wanted to find a way to easily clone my GitHub-hosted repositories to a new machine. After a bit of digging around, I wrote a one-liner that did just that. Then, in the spirit of not putting all our eggs in the same basket, I wrote another one-liner to automatically create and push to GitLab-hosted backups as well. Here they are.

How to clone all your GitHub repositories with a Bash one-liner

Caveat: you’ll need a list of the GitHub repositories you want to clone. The good thing about that is it gives you full agency to choose just the repositories you want on your machine, instead of going in whole-hog.

You can easily clone GitHub repositories without entering your password each time by using HTTPS with your 15-minute cached credentials or, my preferred method, by connecting to GitHub with SSH. For brevity I’ll assume we’re going with the latter, and our SSH keys are set up.

Given a list of GitHub URLs in the file gh-repos.txt, like this:

git@github.com:username/first-repository.git
git@github.com:username/second-repository.git
git@github.com:username/third-repository.git

We run:

xargs -n1 git clone < gh-repos.txt

This clones all the repositories on the list into the current folder.

What’s going on here?

There are two halves to this one-liner: the input, counterintuitively on the right side, and the part that makes stuff happen, on the left. We could make the order of these parts more intuitive (maybe?) by writing the same command like this:

<gh-repos.txt xargs -n1 git clone 

To run a command for each line of our input, gh-repos.txt, we use xargs -n1. The tool xargs reads items from input and executes any commands it finds (it will echo if it doesn’t find any). By default, it assumes that items are separated by spaces; new lines also works and makes our list easier to read. The flag -n1 tells xargs to use 1 argument, or in our case, one line, per command. We build our command with git clone, which xargs then executes for each line. Ta-da.

How to create and push all your repositories to GitLab

GitLab, unlike GitHub, lets us do this nifty thing where we don’t have to use the website to make a new repository first. We can create a new GitLab repository from our terminal. The newly created repository defaults to being set as Private, so if we want to make it Public on GitLab, we’ll have to do that manually later.

The GitLab docs tell us to push to create a new project using git push --set-upstream, but I don’t find this to be very convenient for using GitLab as a backup. As I work with my repositories in the future, I’d like to run one command that pushes to both GitHub and GitLab without additional effort on my part.

To make this Bash one-liner work, we’ll also need a list of repository URLs for GitLab (ones that don’t exist yet). We can easily do this by copying our GitHub repository list, opening it up with Vim, and doing a search-and-replace:

cp gh-repos.txt gl-repos.txt
vim gl-repos.txt
:%s/\<github\>/gitlab/g
:wq

This produces gl-repos.txt, which looks like:

git@gitlab.com:username/first-repository.git
git@gitlab.com:username/second-repository.git
git@gitlab.com:username/third-repository.git

We can create these repositories on GitLab, add the URLs as remotes, and push our code to the new repositories by running:

awk -F'\/|(\.git)' '{system("cd ~/FULL/PATH/" $2 " && git remote set-url origin --add " $0 " && git push")}' gl-repos.txt

Hang tight and I’ll explain it; for now, take note that ~/FULL/PATH/ should be the full path to the directory containing our GitHub repositories.

We do have to make note of a couple assumptions:

1. The name of the directory on your local machine that contains the repository is the same as the name of the repository in the URL (this will be the case if it was cloned with the one-liner above);
2. Each repository is currently checked out to the branch you want pushed, ie. master.

The one-liner could be expanded to handle these assumptions, but it is the humble opinion of the author that at that point, we really ought to be writing a Bash script.

What’s going on here?

Our Bash one-liner uses each line (or URL) in the gl-repos.txt file as input. With awk, it splits off the name of the directory containing the repository on our local machine, and uses these pieces of information to build our larger command. If we were to print the output of awk, we’d see:

cd ~/FULL/PATH/first-repository && git remote set-url origin --add git@gitlab.com:username/first-repository.git && git push
cd ~/FULL/PATH/second-repository && git remote set-url origin --add git@gitlab.com:username/second-repository.git && git push
cd ~/FULL/PATH/third-repository && git remote set-url origin --add git@gitlab.com:username/third-repository.git && git push

Let’s look at how we build this command.

Splitting strings with awk

The tool awk can split input based on field separators. The default separator is a whitespace character, but we can change this by passing the -F flag. Besides single characters, we can also use a regular expression field separator. Since our repository URLs have a set format, we can grab the repository names by asking for the substring between the slash character / and the end of the URL, .git.

One way to accomplish this is with our regex \/|(\.git):

• \/ is an escaped / character;
• | means “or”, telling awk to match either expression;
• (\.git) is the capture group at the end of our URL that matches “.git”, with an escaped . character. This is a bit of a cheat, as “.git” isn’t strictly splitting anything (there’s nothing on the other side) but it’s an easy way for us to take this bit off.

Once we’ve told awk where to split, we can grab the right substring with the field operator. We refer to our fields with a $ character, then by the field’s column number. In our example, we want the second field, $2. Here’s what all the substrings look like:

1: git@gitlab.com:username
2: first-repository

To use the whole string, or in our case, the whole URL, we use the field operator $0. To write the command, we just substitute the field operators for the repository name and URL. Running this with print as we’re building it can help to make sure we’ve got all the spaces right.

awk -F'\/|(\.git)' '{print "cd ~/FULL/PATH/" $2 " && git remote set-url origin --add " $0 " && git push"}' gl-repos.txt

Running the command

We build our command inside the parenthesis of system(). By using this as the output of awk, each command will run as soon as it is built and output. The system() function creates a child process that executes our command, then returns once the command is completed. In plain English, this lets us perform the Git commands on each repository, one-by-one, without breaking from our main process in which awk is doing things with our input file. Here’s our final command again, all put together.

awk -F'\/|(\.git)' '{system("cd ~/FULL/PATH/" $2 " && git remote set-url origin --add " $0 " && git push")}' gl-repos.txt

Using our backups

By adding the GitLab URLs as remotes, we’ve simplified the process of pushing to both externally hosted repositories. If we run git remote -v in one of our repository directories, we’ll see:

origin git@github.com:username/first-repository.git (fetch)
origin git@github.com:username/first-repository.git (push)
origin git@gitlab.com:username/first-repository.git (push)

Now, simply running git push without arguments will push the current branch to both remote repositories.

We should also note that git pull will generally only try to pull from the remote repository you originally cloned from (the URL marked (fetch) in our example above). Pulling from multiple Git repositories at the same time is possible, but complicated, and beyond the scope of this post. Here’s an explanation of pushing and pulling to multiple remotes to help get you started, if you’re curious. The Git documentation on remotes may also be helpful.

To elaborate on the succintness of Bash one-liners

Bash one-liners, when understood, can be fun and handy shortcuts. At the very least, being aware of tools like xargs and awk can help to automate and alleviate a lot of tediousness in our work. However, there are some downsides.

In terms of an easy-to-understand, maintainable, and approachable tool, Bash one-liners suck. They’re usually more complicated to write than a Bash script using if or while loops, and certainly more complicated to read. It’s likely that when we write them, we’ll miss a single quote or closing parenthesis somewhere; and as I hope this post demonstrates, they can take quite a bit of explaining, too. So why use them?

Imagine reading a recipe for baking a cake, step by step. You understand the methods and ingredients, and gather your supplies. Then, as you think about it, you begin to realize that if you just throw all the ingredients at the oven in precisely the right order, a cake will instantly materialize. You try it, and it works!

That would be pretty satisfying, wouldn’t it?

Telus is bringing the benefits of unlimited to its home internet plans too.

The Vancouver-based telecommunications company announced that unlimited data would be available on all internet speed tiers.

In other words, home internet customers won’t need to worry about going over a monthly usage cap with Telus going forward.

In the past, Telus offered a variety of internet speed tiers with corresponding data caps. If you hit the maximum cap, Telus would charge you overage fees.

Now subscribers won’t have to worry about going over. Telus says new and renewing customers will have access to the new unlimited options across all speed tiers in B.C. and Alberta.

It’s worth noting that Telus includes the unlimited option on internet plans for free on a two-year term. However, customers can add unlimited to any plan for $15 per month if they aren’t on a term.

You can learn more about Telus’ new unlimited options on the company’s website here.

Update 08/06/19 at 7:32pm: Adjusted the headline to more clearly reflect how the unlimited internet works.

The post Telus offers unlimited home internet on any speed tier on a two-year term appeared first on MobileSyrup.

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Air purifiers are not complicated machines: Fundamentally, they consist of just a dense filter and a fan that draws air through it. But there’s a fair amount of confusion about what they can remove from the air—and, just as important, what they can’t.

Today Apple is officially launching its latest service, Apple Card, but only to a subset of users ahead of a broader rollout later this month. The new credit card is limited to US users running at least iOS 12.4, and today it will only be available to certain people who signed up on Apple’s website to be notified about Apple Card. If you’re part of that chosen group, applying for Apple Card can be done right inside the Wallet app, where the card will be added for immediate use upon credit approval; a physical credit card is also mailed out if you choose to receive one, built from titanium. For those who don’t get invited for early access, the full Apple Card launch will arrive before the end of August.

Apple Card is the company’s first official entry into the personal finance sector. In partnership with Goldman Sachs, Apple is positioning Apple Card as the kind of tech-native, user-friendly, hassle- and fee-free card that you can’t get anywhere else – at least not with the same level of Apple device integration. Once you’re an Apple Card customer, then inside the Wallet app in iOS 12.4, you’ll be able to find all your transactions, current balance, tools to help you avoid or minimize accruing interest, and more. Some of Apple Card’s features are common among competing credit cards and banking apps, while others are more rare. Even with something common though, like a transaction list, Apple is putting its own spin on the feature: using machine learning and location information from Apple Maps, Apple makes transaction data more informative for Apple Card purchases, so that rather than an obscure line item like ‘3519 N Clark, C101’ you’ll see ‘7-Eleven, Chicago, IL’ and even the 7-Eleven logo. The use of business logos next to transactions is a small, but impactful differentiator.

Like other credit cards, Apple Card offers its own reward system in the form of Daily Cash. As you make charges on the card, you’ll accrue cash back that can be withdrawn daily via the Apple Cash card in iOS, which previously debuted as a way to send cash to friends over iMessage using Apple Pay. Daily Cash rewards earned from Apple Card can be accessed at any time by managing your Apple Cash balance, which you can transfer to a bank account at no charge. 2% Daily Cash is earned for Apple Pay transactions, 3% for purchases from Apple (including the App Store), and 1% for everything else.

Select journalists received hands-on time with Apple Card ahead of its soft rollout today, such as Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch and Nilay Patel at The Verge, and their early impressions indicate Apple has successfully delivered the kind of experience it promised for Apple Card – simple, iPhone-native, and with a touch of Apple whimsy.

Apple first debuted Apple Card at its services-oriented event this March, and it now becomes the second service announced at that event to launch publicly, following Apple News+ and preceding Apple Arcade and Apple TV+. It’s very different from all the other services announced in March, and indeed stands apart from any other product offered by the company, so perhaps it’s fitting that the service’s rollout is different too. Initial interest in Apple Card was high, so it will be interesting to see whether a successful rollout might lead to more finance-related services in the future.

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Three months ago, I met the CEO of RoVedana and asked him to allow my nephew to come around his office and watch how work happened in the real world. The aim was simple, I wanted something that will occupy his time and kill idleness. Anything that will take him out of the house and limit his chances of getting into issues teenagers will usually find themselves.

Thankfully, Lekan accepted, took him and the quickly found something for him to do. He became useful, earned his first pay and for the first time, had a taste of what it meant to work and earn a pay.

This evening, his mum forwarded this article that he wrote to me. I’m not going to steal the young man’s thunder, but to say I am blown is an understatement. I read the whole thing with a tears filled eyes.

How i got into UX design.
I had always been fascinated by any kind of designs, be it graphics designs, illustrations
and even cartoons — Still watch cartoons till this day—. I experimented with photoshop
and some things I learned off youtube. I completed my secondary school and found my
way to graphic design with a diploma in watching hours upon hours of youtube
tutorials. Although it was a little hard to keep up with all the commands and shortcuts,
it became very useful in my UX work later on.
While learning to use Photoshop, I also learned how to use Adobe Draw which wasn’t
as hard as I was expecting so I dumped photoshop for a while and made drawings
instead. One day I was asked to google and read about UI/UX Designs and I was
amazed by it and I wanted to be a UX designer since then.
My first job is as a product design intern and it has been good for most parts. When I
got here the design landscape changed a lot: UX design came into its own as a field.
Got to understand that what my uncle looks at all day is actually the backend of the
applications and websites I used every day (Coding).
Why I ultimately choose to specialize in UX design.
UX is much broader than what I did previously because it involves looking at all aspects
of the user’s experience. It’s about how the user engages with a product or a process,
how they feel about it, and how it fulfils or doesn’t fulfil their needs. When someone
asks me what I do while I'm waiting to get into college I usually say: “You know those
apps on your phone? I design those.” But that doesn’t really speak to UX’s full potential.
What I should say is: “Have you ever used an interface and found it an extremely
painful process? Well, I’m trying to rethink that process to make it easier for people like
you to use.”
I wanted the broader perspective that UX offered so that I could be part of shaping
product strategy. There is nothing worse than spending six months designing and
building something only to find that it doesn’t actually solve a customer’s needs or that
they can’t use it. As a UX designer, I am able to prevent that: I can conduct thorough
user research and user testing to ensure we create products that are actually useful to
our users.
What I thought was going to be challenging about UX
design, and the actual challenges.
Perfection is the enemy
When I first started out, I knew the big challenge was to make everything
“pixel-perfect”. We had to take time to create well-designed, polished, high-fidelity
mockups. I have to move fast — using wireframes and low-fidelity mockups — to learn
as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Now the challenge is to avoid becoming too
attached to my creations, so I can rapidly improve upon and, when necessary, discard
them.
My way for this is to release something I'm working on for testing long before I feel it’s
completely “finished” or “ready”. After all, the design is never “done”. You will always
be making changes and improvements — and that’s OK. It’s important to fall in love
with the process of rapid rerun and improvement, not the finished result. This way,
you’ll find a sense of accomplishment in your progress, even though the product might
not be “done”.
Accepting critique.
Another surprisingly big challenge turned out to be learning to accept critique. As an
intern, I found it difficult to accept that someone didn’t “like” my work or that there was
something “wrong” with my solution. I felt that, implicitly, they were criticizing me as a
person — that I must be really bad at my job. Consequently, I avoided soliciting
feedback as far as possible, out of fear for being hurt. But sometimes e dey pain sha.
Gradually, though, I realised that people were critiquing my work, not me and that this
was an opportunity for me to become better at what I do. What helped me was to
constantly remind myself that I am not the customer. I’m designing something for
someone else. That means that my own ideas are less important than the feedback and
critique I get from my users and my peers. I can’t create a better solution without it.
What has been most rewarding about being a UX
designer.
I haven’t really gone into the design world well but it’s extremely rewarding when I can
use UX design to make products and services accessible to people. This article
eloquently shows examples of how design can be used to do this.
At Rovedana in Lagos, my team and I are currently working on an app to make Payroll,
HR management and other additional features easier for a company. It’s rewarding to
see that I can contribute to that through UX design.
Resources
Books:
● Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. This book makes design intuitive because
it’s super practical, witty, and easy to digest.
● Rocket Surgery Made Easy , also by Steve Krug. A great book to help you
bootstrap and “guerilla user test” your prototypes.
Articles:
● The Invision blog’s newsletter . Every issue has loads of articles on UX, as well as
career advice and insights from some of the top companies in the design
industry.
● I follow UX Collective and UX Planet for really great articles on UX, Product
Design and User Research.
● Behance has huge amounts of design inspiration, along with Dribbble . Great for
coming up with ideas.
Video tutorials:
● Learn UX are probably my favorite video tutorial of all time. Really informative
and gives tutorials on lots of different design tools, not just Adobe XD or Sketch.
They also cover a few topics on coding which I’m about to get into.

A while ago, I wrote an article about SQL being a really strong tool in today’s business environment. In that article, I argued why ML was an overkill for really simple business processes and how the implementation and or adoption of SQL can bring tremendous value to businesses.

Most businesses, in my opinion, collect data and do nothing with it. While I am aware of data privacy laws and data exploitation, what I’m alluding to here is collecting data solely for the main purpose of efficient user experience and beneficial customer engagement. I’ll spend some time in the next few paragraphs and talk about how brick and mortar businesses can take advantage of their data, build brand loyalty and drive consumer engagement.

My focus here will be on pharmacies. But the insights shared here can be applied to any other industry. I will use childbirth, infants and their early years as a case study.

Pregnancy

When we were expecting our first child, I’ll go out almost every fortnight to get a pack of Vitabiotics’ Pregnacare. This was the prescribed supplement. I did this from the first trimester to the third and this began my long-running relationship with pharmacies. What surprised me most was the fact that the pharmacist never asked a question. It felt almost as though s(he) was more interested in handing me the supplements and sending me on my way. Not that I hold any grudges, but I think they missed an opportunity to become part and parcel of the entire pregnancy journey. And the opportunity to be part of something special.

During a consulting session with a client, we used this pharmacy as a case study and talked about what we could have done differently. Here’s what we would have done differently.

Aside from taking down my phone number to sign customers up for a loyalty program which the pharmacy did, I would have gone the extra mile to collect the customer’s email. Given that this might be their first interaction with the store, I would have treated this as their onboarding process too. With the knowledge of the drug the just purchased, we can infer that this is an expectant parent and we will begin a relationship of being helpful. The first thing we will do is send them health tips and other self care tips during their pregnancy journey. This can be automated to come in once every month. These tips will come in the form of a newsletter with contents like; exercise for pregnant women, links to mobile apps that can help track their journey. For this to be effective, we would have collected two extra information; pregnancy stage and expected date of delivery(EDD).

Infancy(0 - 6 months).

With the EDD collected, it’s a lot easy to infer the child’s birth, while this is an opportunity to send a congratulatory message to the parent, I will advise against this as this is a slippery slope. For parents that had a successful delivery, this is super exciting, but for those that didn’t have one, this is a recipe that could trigger bad memories; think about the husband that lost his wife or the couple that lost their baby. Our honest advice will be to hold on and put a pause here. Now let’s take the happy route. The route where the birth was successful and the parent is returning for a set of diapers or any baby care product.

As first-time parents, one thing that we did every other month was buying prescription drugs and toiletries for our son. These drugs ranged from regular vitamins to ailments common amongst kids; teething, stomach upset, cold, etc. The routines that led to these regular visits were simple and predictable. The child’s temperature gets unusually high, we take him to the hospital, a few examinations here and there and we are handed a prescription. Standard. We have, for the most part, patronised every big pharmacy chain in Lagos. Every time I walk out of any of the stores operated by the pharmacy, I worry that they don’t know me or have any records about my purchase, except for the standard inventory that most businesses keep. So this got me thinking, what if this pharmacy knew a little about me? What will that look like? What possibilities can come out of this?

A pharmacist or a pharmacy can almost accurately predict the age of a baby based on the drugs that the parents buy. And they can also predict the developmental stage of that child based on these purchases. Let’s take a simple scenario for instance, if I had walked into a store to buy a pack of Milton, there’s a high likelihood that I am buying this for a newborn. What if during that purchase, I added a pack of size 1 diapers, this also gives the pharmacy a good indication of what stage the child is. Wouldn’t it be natural, to say after 3 months the pharmacy recommends the size 2 pack for me, considering the baby would have outgrown the previous size.

The scenario above is just one case. What if during the wet season, the pharmacy sends me a newsletter on how to handle my child during this period and also recommend drugs for common issues. This will be a lot more beneficial to me as the pharmacy acts like a trusted advisor while also maintaining good customer relationships and this further translates to repeated purchases.

Let’s get into the operations side of things

Every parent today will buy diapers. Depending on the brand, some diaper boxes contains about 180 pieces Assuming the baby uses 4 pieces per day, this will come down to 45 days. That means, every 40 days, the new parent will get an SMS/email reminder urging them to restock. Trust me, this will be super helpful.

A few days after the first interaction (assuming we skipped the Pregnancy phase), let’s call it onboarding, I will send the parent an email on “baby care tips” 1) Bathing tips and techniques. 2) Appropriate sleeping positions and patterns for a newborn. 3) Nutritional aid and guide, this is assuming the baby’s mum aren’t lactating. 4) Fabric care tips for babies. Then upsell with infant formula recommendation or any baby care products.

Towards the end of the 3rd month and also depending on the baby’s weight at birth, we will recommend the next diaper size via email and SMS. This could be something like “SELECT * FROM table WHERE baby weight >= 3 AND age > 3” where the first 3 is in KG and the next 3 in months. Trust me, without proper guidance most new parents don’t know about this.

6 - 12 months

As the baby grows towards the 6th month, we will send the appropriate formulae recommendations, follow that with diaper size and recommend common drugs for infant allergies. If we do our job very well, we will quickly become the parents trusted advisors and go-to store for any baby health and nutrition-related issues for these new parents.

During this phase, the “night cries” begins and it can be both frustrating and stressful. Providing tips on how new parents can cope with this phase can’t be overemphasized. They will thank you for a long time. Between month 7 - 9, most babies will begin to pull themselves up by holding onto pieces furnitures, it’s important for parents to be vigilant at all times. For most parents, recommending that they move out their LED TVs from the babies reach could be the difference between life and death. Also, recommending sanitisers as well for both visitors and the parents will go a long way to help fight common ailments that could be a result of bacterial infection.

By month 9, most babies begin teething. This is almost always followed by stomach upset. This is our chance to recommend solutions like Grip Water and upsell them on that. We will also recommend pacifiers too as most babies do well with them.

Remember, we don’t have to recommend only SKUs that we stock. While we try to upsell and drive traffic, the grand plan is to build customer loyalty.

With all of the information we have about the family, we can start a monthly subscription service for new parents. It can be a combination of diapers, formulas, toiletries and common drugs + vitamins. It cost north of N50,000 for babies monthly supplies. Creating a value box of say N45,000 will be God sent. The amazing thing here is that you will spend next to nothing promoting this as you already have an existing customer base.

If you have a steady membership pool of 100 parents, that’s a N4.5M/month revenue stream. To even sweeten the deal, they can pay membership fee a lá Amazon Prime that gives them access to a paediatrician and a monthly physical meetup. New parents love to connect with other new parents. The great thing about this is also the word of mouth advert that this will generate. Free publicity. New parents trust fellow new parents. Our focus will be to keep tracking the child’s age and milestones and be there for their parents every step of the way.

First birthday and beyond

When the child clocks one year, we will send a birthday hamper to further seal the relationship. This could be anything from gift cards, stuffed toys or a LEGO pack. Nothing gladdens the hearts of the parents like a small thank you gift.

When it’s the holiday period, kids are home, running, jumping and tripping too. Put together a “one-time” deal for home first-aid boxes; plaster, spirits, cold medication and any other thing that can go into a first aid box.

Tap also into these parents online life; start a Facebook group, encourage them to join and provide them with an opportunity to meet fellow parents. Help them by providing information that will help them become better parents.

My oldest kid is 2.8yrs today. I don’t know what happens from age 3 and above. But I am certain the pharmacy I patronize would have been a lot more useful to me if they did any of this.

Do you have data and need help making sense of it? I’m happy to listen to you.