I attended a Google I/O Extended event on Tuesday at Google’s Kitchener office. It’s a get-together where there are demos, talks, workshops, and networking opportunities centred around watching the keynote live on the screen.
I treat it as an opportunity to keep an eye on what they’re up to this time, and a reminder that I know absolutely no one in the tech scene around here.
The first part of the day was a workshop about how to build Actions for the Google Assistant. I found the exercise to be very interesting.
The writing of the Action itself wasn’t interesting, that was a bunch of whatever. But it was interesting that it refused to work unless you connected it to a Google Account that had Web & Search Activity tracking turned on. Also I found it interesting that, though they said it required Chrome, it worked just fine on Firefox. It was interesting listening to laptops (including mine) across the room belt out welcome phrases because the simulator defaults to a hot mic and a loud speaker. It was interesting to notice that the presenter spent thirty seconds talking about how to name your project, and zero seconds talking about the Terms of Use of the application we were being invited to use. It was interesting to see that the settings defaulted to allowing you to test on all devices registered to the Google Account, without asking.
After the workshop the tech head of the Google Home App stood up and delivered a talk about trying to get manufacturers to agree on how to talk to Google Home and the Google Assistant.
I asked whether these efforts in trying to normalize APIs and protocols was leading them to publish a standard with a standards body. “No idea, sorry.”
Then I noticed the questions from the crowd were following a theme: “Can we get finer privacy controls?” (The answer seemed to be that Google believes the controls are already fine enough) “How do you educate users about the duration the data is retained?” (It’s in the Terms of Service, but it isn’t read aloud. But Google logs every “consent moment” and keeps track of settings) “For the GDPR was there a challenge operating in multiple countries?” (Yes. They admitted that some of the “fine enough” privacy controls are finer in certain jurisdictions due to regs.) And, after the keynote, someone in the crowd asked what features Android might adopt (self-destruct buttons, maybe) to protect against Border Security-style threats.
It was very heartening to hear a room full of tech nerds from Toronto and Waterloo Region ask questions about Privacy and Security of a tech giant. It was incredibly validating to hear from the keynote that Chrome is considering privacy protections Firefox introduced last year.
Maybe we at Mozilla aren’t crazy to think that privacy is important, that users care about it, that it is at risk and big tech companies have the power and the responsibility to protect it.
One comment Jutta Treviranus has often made to me is that if we begin from a perspective of designing for accessibility, we improve the experience for everyone, and not only the people who really need accessible resources. As I read this article I came to conclude that the same is true of trans-inclusive design. For example, consider the case of names. Most trans people change their name when they transition, but many online systems cope very poorly with name changes in general. But why not allow people to select their own display names? To name their own genders? And why not allow people to select their own titles (or, as is my preference, none at all)? The article examines some other factors to consider as well.
Mesh Wi-Fi kits are a great way to provide fast, reliable Wi-Fi to a big house that a single router just can’t cover. But after spending the better part of two months rebuilding our Wi-Fi testbed in a new house and and testing new kits for our mesh-networking guide, we found that if you have a compact home (such as a townhome or a single-family house around 2,300 square feet at most), a standalone router can actually be more effective than a pricey mesh kit.
Wi-Fi extenders, routers, and mesh networks: What’s the difference?
A new router, mesh network, or Wi-Fi extender can improve the Wi-Fi coverage in your home, but each has different strengths and weaknesses.
Upgrading to a new router is a good idea if you need just a smidgen more coverage (for example, if you’re mostly happy with your Wi-Fi but have a few rooms where downloads are a little slow). In most cases a standalone router will outperform the one you might be renting from your ISP, and a new 802.11ac (also known as Wi-Fi 5) router will certainly be more powerful than an old 802.11n (Wi-Fi 4) router.
A new router’s faster processor and additional memory and antennas will also help if you’re adding more devices, like a new roommate’s gadgets or the family’s new smart speakers. But standalone routers do best when you have them centrally located in your home, something that isn’t always possible if your Internet comes into your house on a lower floor or a faraway room.
Extenders seem to be a quick solution, as the sales pitches suggest that you simply have to plug in an extender and your network will expand itself. But because extenders merely rebroadcast your existing Wi-Fi and can’t coordinate with your router to make sure devices are connected to the best signal, you may need to create different network names and manually switch between them to get the best performance. If the router and extender have the same network name, your device might be stuck on a weak connection to one when it would be getting a stronger signal from the other. Extenders also have their own apps or Web-administration interfaces separate from your router’s.
In our latest round of testing, we found that many extenders actually degrade network performance—our top pick was the one extender that successfully improved 802.11ac network coverage and performance. Powerline extenders, which use your home’s electrical wiring to transmit data, improve performance more consistently, but their effectiveness depends on the age and complexity of your home’s wiring; they may perform slowly or, in extreme cases, even interfere with other stuff that’s plugged in.
The Eero Beacon, like other mesh satellites, extends your Wi-Fi network more intelligently than an extender because it works with all the other Eero devices in your home to make sure each device in your house has adequate coverage. Photo: Michael Hession
Mesh-network kits are the best choice if you need to cover a home of 3,000 square feet or larger, particularly if you have dead zones such as in heavily trafficked rooms that are far from your main router. We also recommend mesh for smaller homes with obstacles like metal-framed walls or metal-and-glass doors. Mesh-networking kits consist of two or more nodes (boxes) that act as a combination of a router, a Wi-Fi extender, an access point, and in some cases an Ethernet switch. You place the usually identical nodes around your house to increase the Wi-Fi coverage, and each node creates a new Wi-Fi bubble to which you can connect your devices; nodes often have additional Ethernet ports you can use for a console, printer, or PC that lacks Wi-Fi. Each node should be within range of at least one other node—an arrangement that the apps walk you through during setup—so that the network traffic can hop from one node to another and ultimately to whichever room you have the Internet cable entering your home.
Mesh networks also offer the benefit of being centrally administered. You need to use only one phone app or website to set up the network and change settings, instead of needing to use a separate interface for your router and each extender. Your devices connect to the node that can deliver the strongest signal and seamlessly switch to different nodes as you move, so each of your devices maintains a strong connection instead of trying to hold on to a weak signal and slowing the rest of the network.
And because each node has its own antennas and radios, a mesh kit can distribute the load so that your network doesn’t get overwhelmed by your laptop, your phone, and all your smart-home devices fighting for bandwidth. Mesh networks adapt to additional devices quickly, and they automatically compensate in case, for instance, a pet knocks the power cord loose on one of the mesh nodes.
Mesh doesn’t always help
We tested and retested 10 wireless mesh-networking kits over several weeks, and what we found was somewhat surprising: In a 2,300-square-foot home with few obstructions, our best-performing mesh kits did almost exactly as well as the standalone Netgear R7000P Nighthawk router, rather than outperforming the single router as we expected them to.
We’ve been using the netburn Wi-FI networking test to measure the effects of multiple wireless devices simulating everyday tasks such as browsing the Internet, holding a FaceTime or Skype video call, playing a 4K video, and downloading a Windows update, all operating at the same time. We’ll eventually be building a Wi-Fi testbed in a new facility in Long Island City, New York, but in the interest of updating our guide more quickly, we tested a group of 10 mesh-networking kits and our top pick for standalone routers in a 2,300-square-foot home that is not only smaller but also less complex than the 3,500-square-foot home we had been using earlier.
Pull Quote
In a 2,300-square-foot home with few obstructions, our best-performing mesh kits didn’t provide better performance than a standalone router.
After a couple of weeks of setup and network configuration, we ran the netburn tests on each of the new mesh router kits. We also retested the Eero and Netgear Orbi kits, the picks in our mesh-networking guide, with their latest firmware updates installed. And then we ran the test on the Netgear R7000P, our current standalone router pick, for reference.
One of the things the netburn test measures is latency, or the network response time, while multiple clients are using the network simultaneously. A poor latency score means that your browsing experience will be unpleasant: Poor latency scores at the 90th percentile mean that you’ll be sitting there waiting for portions of websites to load about one in 10 times; poor scores at the 75th percentile mean that you’ll notice slowdown about a quarter of the time, and so on. Our recent tests showed that the network in a smaller home would feel just as speedy whether you’re using one of the top-performing mesh kits or the R7000P router.
What this means is that for a 2,300-square-foot home with traditional wooden construction (or anything smaller, including most one- and two-bedroom apartments), you can skip the upgrade to a mesh network. Replacing your router with a mesh network in this case may increase complexity and cost with little extra benefit. The extra nodes may even slow things down because of the extra “hops” from the device to the node to the Internet connection. Or all your devices may just connect to the main node and ignore the others entirely.
The throughput rates (the speed at which data passes through the wireless network) for the top mesh networks were very close to the performance of the standalone router. The computer in our first-floor bedroom was the closest to the main router/node, while the one in the garage was the farthest and the most likely to connect to one of the other nodes. For most of these networking kits, you’d pay twice as much for the same performance as you’d get from the R7000P.
If you’re experiencing bad network performance—low speeds or dropped connections, in particular—in a 1,800- to 2,500-square-foot home, think about upgrading to a newer standalone router instead of installing an expensive mesh network. But if your home has a true dead zone due to obstructions such as a masonry wall, the added coverage from a mesh network makes sense.
Stay tuned: Our current picks for mesh-networking kits stand firm for now, but we’ll be revisiting and retesting mesh kits once we’ve settled into our new offices later this year. We’re hoping that the extra floor space will allow for a more strenuous test so that we can reassess which mesh network is the best option for the people who need one.
Over time, it becomes harder for members to find the good stuff, follow conversations, recognise other members and know which events are worth attending.
A good rule of thumb is to spend half as much time pruning and cleaning what’s in the community as adding more to it.
An easy way to improve most communities is to spend some time taking down less relevant content, archiving old discussions, pruning inactive members, and removing lesser used features. Look at your event calendar too and cease events which aren’t clearly driving great results.
I’d remove:
The bottom 10 to 20% of content (by landing page visits from search results).
All discussions which have seen <5 visits within the past 30 days.
Events which don’t attract at least 50 to 100 participants.
Members who haven’t visited within the past year.
Ironically, removing stuff is as likely to help you achieve your goals as adding more stuff. It increases your search rankings, improves the member experience, retains confused newcomers etc…etc…
Subtracting stuff from your community can be as valuable as adding to it.
In this day and age it rarely happens that I’m in libraries with poor Internet access. In most cases, library officials have recognized the signs of the times and installed a usable Eduroam Wifi network on their premises. The University of Vienna is a good example. But there are unfortunate exceptions as well. One of those is the Library in the Centre Georges Pompidou. It’s a great place to study in the center of Paris, used by thousands of people at any time. They have a great selection of books as well as video and audio content, no doubt about it. When it comes to Internet access for online research, however, it’s rather a place not to be unless you have a trick or two up your sleeve.
Mind you, they do have their own open Wifi there but, believe it or not, only deployed on 2.4 GHz. This obviously makes the Wifi barely usable on any normal day. For good measure they also block a lot of TCP ports, so using a VPN or open an SSH session on non-standard ports is also not possible. O.k. so no big deal, you might think, let’s just tether to your smartphone and use the LTE network. While the library doesn’t have indoor repeaters, it is fortunately located on the two upper floors of the building so there is sufficient cellular coverage through the windows. But that doesn’t work too well either with speeds and reaction times being very slow.
It’s Not The Cellular Network, Stupid!
I’ve heard complaints about slow cellular tethering in the library from other members of the household before that visit the library frequently. However, only when I was there myself and noticed that they don’t have their Wifi deployed on 5 GHz did it hit me what the real problem was. Since all people in the library use the 2.4 GHz band, not only for the library’s Wifi but also for Wifi tethering with their smartphones, it’s not the LTE network that is slow but the Wifi link to the tethering device. With that realization the fix is easy. If you have a mobile device that lets you select the frequency band for tethering, select 5 GHz and then activate tethering. Done! Many devices, however, despite supporting 5 GHz, don’t have such a setting. In this case, the second option is to use USB tethering. It’s a bit more of a hassle because one has to activate the option in Android every time tethering is activated, but its a very small price to pay for reasonable Internet in the library.
The Microsoft Create startups tour arrives in Paris next Tuesday. If you’re going to be in Paris next week, be sure to register and come by for the afternoon.
I’ll be giving a talk titled “Building your technology roadmap.” It’s aimed at technology leads or first-time startup CTOs. Here’s the abstract:
As a startup engineer, you need a different roadmap than what would be useful in a more established organization. Instead of building a robust set of skills in a narrow area, you need to be able to leverage a lot of different technologies that operate at different levels, and an understanding of how they fit together across both the client and server.
We’d love to give you a universal roadmap, but every startup has a different set of technical needs to get from ideation to product-market fit. You’re going to have to build your own specific roadmap as you go. What we can do is give you our opinionated viewpoint on some of the most critical technologies that we think should be on your roadmap, including functions as a service (aka serverless), containers, data storage, and mobile frameworks.
Even if a listener doesn’t end up using any of the technologies we talk about, or even if they don’t use them on Azure, my intent is to give the listener enough information to consider what should be on their technical roadmap as a startup developer in 2019.
Just for kicks I updated a 2008 Samsung NC10 to the next version of Windows. Yes, this took a few hours, but it eventually ran just fine. This machine originally came with Windows XP, which Microsoft licensed to OEMs at a lower price than on PCs. I upgraded it from XP to Windows 7, skipping over Vista. That was already an improvement. Eventually I upgraded it to Windows 8 and 8.1.
When Windows 10 was released, it tried installing that and succeeded. I did not have any use for this little machine anymore since I was already using iPads and a Lenovo Yoga with Windows RT. Until yesterday, this Netbook had Windows 10 1507, so that was a four year old Windows 10 version.
I decided to try my luck with a current version. Downloaded the assistant from Microsoft to then install Windows 10 1809. Once that was running, I joined the Windows Insider Slow Ring and installed Windows 10 1903. It has now been removed from the Slow Ring and continues to run this very latest O/S from Microsoft.
This is a very lowly machine with an Atom N270 CPU, 2 GB of RAM and a 150 GB spinning HD drive. It takes a while to boot from a cold start but it would still serve me well if I needed it. No planned obsolence here. Can other vendors please take a hint from Microsoft?
Craig Hockenberry of The Iconfactory has an in-depth look at the challenges developers, designers, and marketers will face bringing their iOS apps to the Mac. Although Marzipan may make it possible to simply flip a switch in Xcode to build Mac and iOS versions of an app simultaneously, it’s unlikely to be that simple in practice. As Hockenberry notes:
that build setting is just the first step on a long and complicated road. Good interaction doesn’t come for free.
That’s because user interactions are different between iOS devices and Macs and driven by multiple factors including differing input devices, screen sizes, and individual UI elements.
The most obvious design element that will change as you move from iOS to macOS is the screen. If you’ve designed for the iPad, you already understand the challenges of a larger display surface and adapting your views as that size changes. It’s not easy work, but an alternative design that’s just “a big iPhone” is highly unsatisfying for a customer.
The Mac alters this scenario slightly because your app is presented in a window that’s resizable: you might be running with the constraints of an iPhone SE one moment and the expansiveness of an iPad Pro the next.
Hockenberry also raises concerns about how developers will make money from Marzipan apps if they are universal apps as is the case with the iPhone and iPad versions of many iOS apps:
It’s my opinion that Universal apps were the worst thing to ever happen for the iPad ecosystem. There’s no way for a developer to recoup the costs for new interactions and the extra work needed for more sophisticated apps. Apple makes it easier for a customer up front by offering a single download, but at the same time they make things worse because a Universal version of the user’s favorite app isn’t financially viable.
One thing's for sure, change is coming to the Mac. For some, it will be exciting, and for others, it will be fraught with peril. Mistakes will be made, and adjustments will be necessary, but for iOS developers, designers, and marketers new to this sort of transition, Hockenberry's post is a great place to start thinking about bringing their apps to the Mac. He's been through similar changes in the past, and with the magnitude of what Apple likely has in store at WWDC, there's no time like the present to start considering these issues.
The report notes that some people included in this number are still on the two services’ free trials. YouTube told Bloomberg that YouTube Music and YouTube Premium have grown 60 percent between March 2018 and March of this year. It’s worth noting that the two YouTube services didn’t launch under their current branding until May of 2018 in the U.K. and Australia. Meanwhile, it didn’t come to Canada or the U.S. until June.
Bloomberg’s sources say five million people have joined YouTube Music since its launch, while The Wall Street Journal’s sources say the platform has grown by six million. These statistics lead us to believe that there are close to five or six million people on the service total. While this number is unconfirmed, it’s what the numbers suggest. This means that there are possibly around 10 million users on Google Play Music, which Google is slowly shuttering.
During December 2017, Billboardcited anonymous sources that stated Google Play Music and YouTube Red — which became part of the current YouTube Music Premium tier — have a combined 7 million subscribers.
When Google finally shuts down Google Play Music, it will be very intriguing to see if those users migrate over to YouTube Music or if they try out other services like Apple Music, Tidal or Spotify.
Google recently let users listen to YouTube Music for free on Google Home and other Google Assistant enabled smart home devices. That said, you can only play playlists, not specific songs, artists or albums. Just before this move, Google also added a cheaper student plan in Canada for YouTube Music and Premium.
MobileSyrup has reached out to Google for more specifics and clarifications on total subscriber counts for its two music streaming platforms.
In South Lake Union, you see folks zipping along on monowheels, hoverboards and electric bikes and scooters. These electronic gadgets seem less intrusive and more versatile than, say, a Segway, and some can be carried by hand or in a backpack.
Other innovations are in the works. Boeing is testing a pilot-less “autonomous” air taxi — a kind of flying Uber. Is the era of the flying car, as envisioned on The Jetsons, finally at hand? In Snohomish County, Amazon is testing a small delivery bot, named Scout, that can bring Amazon Prime customers their order. It looks like a robotic cooler on six wheels. It could someday be more efficient than fleets of street-clogging delivery cars and trucks.
The quest for car-free city living is speeding up, not slowing down. Seattle was reshaped and improved by a technology that arrived as a circus toy. Don’t be too quick to dismiss the driverless novelties that might be flying overhead or rolling along the sidewalk to deliver goodies in your neighborhood.
Cyclists can be a nuisance, running red lights, riding on the pavement ... but are they dangerous, and if not, is it a problem if they break the law? Peter Wallker, Guardian journalist and author of Bike Nation: How Cycling Can Save the World, explores our fixation with cycling behaviour and whether it is distracting us from solving the real causes of death on our roads
Gregory Scott’s friends have asked him to find a quiet restaurant for dinner. Until recently this would have been a challenge, given that Scott lives in New York. “It’s known to be one of the noisiest cities in the world,” he says. Now he feels confident that, although he has never been, a small borscht joint called Ukrainian East Village will fit the bill.
That’s because last year Scott set up an app called Soundprint – the “Yelp for noise”. It allows users to search for restaurants conducive to conversation – and, in turn, asks them to record decibel (dB) levels (the app comes with a meter) in other establishments. It has had more than 60,000 submissions, with more than 500 coming from the UK. Ukrainian East Village has been measured four times by app users and averaged 74dB, a “moderate” level that Scott says is great for conversation. As someone with permanent hearing loss, he has a particular interest in such places.
The dB levels at many restaurants far exceed this pleasant thrum. The average sound level recorded in UK restaurants on Soundprint, taken between 6pm and 9pm, is 79dB. “I’m sure many of those are above 80, and I’m sure some are above 85,” says Scott. “It’s really loud for conversation.” In 2017, the UK charity Action on Hearing Loss (AoHL) found that noise levels in some well-known chains, such as Patisserie Valerie, topped 90dB on busy evenings. That’s the equivalent of munching your croissant next to a lawnmower or motorbike.
The knock-on effects are clear. According to AoHL, 79% of people, both those with and without hearing loss, had experienced difficulty holding a conversation while eating out. Eight out of 10 reported having left a restaurant, cafe or pub early because of the noise. Ninety-one per cent said they would not return to venues where noise levels were too high, and 43% have opted for a takeaway instead of going out and decibel-dodging.
Anecdotally, at least, it hasn’t always been this way. “It certainly seems restaurants have got louder,” says Roger Wicks, director of policy and campaigns at AoHL. “That’s what people are saying to us.”
So why are they so loud? “The restaurant trade is ‘a young person’s game’,” says the Observer’s restaurant critic, Jay Rayner. Although a “mere 52” himself and with no hearing problems, he knows first-hand the impact they can have. “My dear late mother, Claire, loved restaurants, but eventually closed down on them because she couldn’t hear conversation in them – it was massively distressing for her.”
Thanks to the Lombard effect, which means that noise breeds noise, even limited background music can lead to shouted exchanges, as speakers raise their voices in order to be heard. Modern restaurant designers aren’t helping. As Rayner puts it, they love “bare brick, filament light bulbs, vaulted ceilings” rather than soft, sound-deadening surfaces.
Some commentators, including the FT food writer Alexander Gilmour, think ageism plays a part. “There is a theory that young people are cooler than older people, they eat faster, drink the bar and dig the music. And they yell,” he wrote last year. “Why bother creating spaces in which people – beyond the drunken 20-year-old – can thrive?”
As a thirtysomething with tinnitus and some associated hearing loss who, even as a twentysomething, was sometimes unable to hear in “younger” establishments, I find this take a little narrow. Who hasn’t, 18 or 80, hearing problems or not, occasionally nodded along and pretended to hear? But, of course, “most people with hearing loss are older,” as Wicks says. “Eleven million in the UK and increasing every year. By 2035 that will reach about 13 million.” It will, according to the professor of auditory neuroscience Jennifer Bizley, increasingly become a problem, with younger generations “pretty doomed” because they are exposed to so much noise.
So what can be done to bring volume levels down? Some restaurants have called in acoustic experts. Stefano Meloni is the senior manager at Tozi in Victoria, central London, where the high ceilings and bare walls provoked Rayner to write in a review: “If you are one of those with hearing issues related to hard surfaces … Tozi will not make you happy.” It was a problem the restaurant was already aware of, Meloni says, and it has since had sound-dampening panels installed on the ceiling. “It improved a lot,” he says.
This isn’t something every restaurant will be able to afford. “To get a quieter restaurant may well cost you,” Wicks acknowledges. However, there are cheaper fixes. Restaurateurs “could provide quiet areas, certainly away from the kitchen and speakers. And whenever they can, introduce soft furnishings, something that absorbs the sound.”
Yet few restaurants seem to take noise seriously – despite the fact that noisy venues are more likely to have a lasting effect on their staff than on their patrons. “Some restaurants and chains have said the right thing,” says Wicks, “but nobody’s really engaged.”
To make restaurateurs appreciate the value of bringing sound levels down, the perception that noise equals “everybody’s having fun” needs challenging. “Noise doesn’t create the atmosphere,” Meloni insists. “The atmosphere is created by the waiters and the managers.”
Ben Hancock is a director at Oscar Acoustics, which installs acoustic finishes. As he explains, noise reduction doesn’t have to mean killing the vibe – recently, working with Ottolenghi, the brief was to absorb enough sound to make speech easy, but also “keep an atmospheric buzz”. The level of sound absorption depends on the thickness of Hancock’s sprayed-on acoustic finish – what they went for “fine-tuned the acoustic so it was right on the edge”.
And what can diners do? For a start, we can complain when we find ourselves somewhere unacceptably noisy. If you find this embarrassing, take heart. I was emboldened recently while at a burger restaurant to ask for the music to be turned down. Granted it was only changed a smidge, but we were offered a quieter table – and I suspect the request had something to do with the free wine that was later brought over. More and more, people are using social media to feed back, too. TripAdvisor – where the now-quieter Tozi was once described as a “noise bomb” – and Open Table have become powerful weapons in diners’ toolkits.
This is also where data from apps such as Scott’s or the AoHL-recommended Decibel X comes in. “You’re starting to hear a lot more from the users of the app that they feel empowered to let the venue managers know: ‘The food is great but please do something about the noise,’” says Scott. The more data on just how loud these places are, the easier it will be to make restaurants prick up their ears.
All this noise can’t be good for business, particularly given that one recent study found that loud noise compromises taste. Many restaurateurs probably don’t realise how bad things have got. For city-dwellers especially, life in general is extremely loud. I measured 104dB on the London underground the other night – that’s louder than a jackhammer. “Lots of people will say, ‘The restaurant wasn’t that loud,’” says Scott. “But go to a quiet place and acclimate yourself and you’ll realise how loud a lot of them are.”
Finding quieter spots, even if you have tiptop hearing, might just make meals out more enjoyable. As Rayner says: “One of the joys of restaurants is that they’re a brilliant place for disclosure. If you’re going, ‘Sorry, what? You did what? To whom?’ you’re going to miss out on the juicy details. What’s the fun?”
In Cannstatt hat ein Autofahrer bei einem Parkmanöver einen Radfahrer angefahren und schwer verletzt. Ein Zeitungsbericht verkehrt das ins Gegenteil: Der Radler rammt das Auto.
Wenn ich die Polizeimeldung lese, glaube ich, dass folgendes passiert ist: Der Radfahrer radelt die Starße entlang. Ein Auto kommt ihm entgegen, der Fahrer zieht urplötzlich auf seine, des Radlers, Fahrspur hinüber. Der Radler prallt gegen das Auto. Nach meiner Einschätzung hatte er keine reelle Chance, den Unfall zu vermeiden, er konnte nicht damit rechnen, dass der Autofahrer auf die Gegenfahrbahn kommt und ihm direkt vors Vorderrad fährt. Ob das so war, das darzutellen machen sich weder die Polizei, noch die Zeitung die Mühe. Die Polizei schildert das, zwar immer noch nicht mit entschlossener Täter-Opfer-Benennung, aber doch mit viel Aufmerksamkeit für den Radfahrer, so: Pedelecfahrer schwer verletzt Ein 59 Jahre alter Pedelecfahrer hat am Donnerstag (02.05.2019) bei einem Unfall in der Ziegelbrennerstraße schwere Verletzungen erlitten. Rettungskräfte waren vor Ort, kümmerten sich um den Mann und brachten ihn in ein Krankenhaus. Der 59-Jährige befuhr mit seinem Rad gegen 16.15 Uhr die Ziegelbrennerstraße in Richtung Schmidener Straße. Ein 26-Jähriger, der ihm mit einem Seat entgegenkam und die Absicht hatte, nach links in eine Parkbucht einzufahren, übersah den Zweiradfahrer offenbar. In der Folge kam es zur Kollision und der Pedelecfahrer stieß mit erheblicher Wucht gegen das Auto.
Auch wenn hier wieder das Wort "übersah" drin ist, (besser wäre, "sah den Radfahrer nicht") und die Formulierung, der Pedelecfahrer mit sei Wucht gegen das Auto gestoßen, andeutet, er habe doch irgendwie auch Schuld, so ist das noch respektvoll verglichen mit der krachenden Floskelwolken-Schreibe der Stuttgarter Nachrichten, die von der Perspektve "schuld ist immer der E-Bike-Fahrer" nicht recht wegkommt, während der Autofahrer nur einen kleinen Fehler macht:
E-Bike-Fahrer rammt Auto und wird schwer verletzt Ein 59 Jahre alter E-Bike-Fahrer wird von einem Autofahrer beim Einparken übersehen. Der Radfahrer kann nicht mehr bremsen und kracht in das Auto. ... Am Donnerstagnachmittag hat es in Bad Cannstatt gekracht. ... Der Autofahrer wollte nach links in eine Parkbucht fahren, als er den Radfahrer wohl übersah. Der E-Bike-Fahrer konnte nicht mehr bremsen und krachte in das Auto ... (Stuttgarter Nachrichten)
Mal abgesehen davon, dass bei "krachen" arg verniedlichend klingt, wenn man bedenkt, dass der Radfahrer für den schweren Fahrfehler des Autofahrers mit seiner Haut, seinen Knochen und seinem Blut bezahlt hat ...
Das hat Blogleserin Andrea so geärgert, dass sie mich auf den Artikel aufmerksam geamcht und der Zeitung einen Leser/innenbrief geschrieben hat. Darin ist alles gesagt. Ich darf ihn zitieren:
Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, ... der Titel „E-Bike-Fahrer rammt Auto und wird schwer verletzt“ suggeriert, dass der verletzte E-Bike-Fahrer selbst die Schuld am Unfall trägt. Im Untertitel liest man: „Ein 59 Jahre alter E-Bike-Fahrer wird von einem Autofahrer beim Einparken übersehen. Der Radfahrer kann nicht mehr bremsen und kracht in das Auto.“ „Wird übersehen“ klingt nach einem kleinen Versehen des Autofahrers, das ja mal passieren kann, … „kann nicht mehr bremsen und kracht in das Auto“ dagegen nach Unvermögen des Radfahrers. Beim genaueren Lesen stellt sich jedoch ein anderes Bild dar: Der Autofahrer hat diesen Unfall durch Unachtsamkeit verschuldet und hat die schwere Verletzung des Pedelec-Fahrers verursacht. Als Pedelec-Fahrerin, die selbst tagtäglich durch Fehlverhalten und Rücksichtslosigkeit von Autofahrern gefährdet wird, wünsche ich mir eine seriöse und nicht manipulative Berichterstattung von den Stuttgarter Nachrichten ... Freundliche Grüße, Andrea
Ich wünsche dem Radfahrer gute Besserung und eine vollständige Genesung.
The coming census also will break with history with a controversial restoration of a citizenship question, as well as with the adoption of new technologies that change how the count is performed
The census will move away from paper as the primary way to collect data, for the first time since it began in 1790. You will be able to answer the census on the Internet, and census workers in the field will use mobile phone apps.
For the first time since 1880, census workers probably won’t visit your neighborhood to confirm your address. Instead, they’re relying mostly on high-resolution imagery to verify their maps.
Great initiative. My colleague @palinuro sometimes wears a #missingdata hoodie to get this discussed. Dutch example, now solved McGyver-like, is election results per candidate per polling station, which isn’t collected/kept by election council, just aggregates per municipality. See https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2019/05/missing-numbers-the-gaps-in-government-data/
How should we best teach digital and media literacy? How can such teaching respond to today’s politically and technologically polarized milieu? Last week a discussion brewed across Twitter…
Towards the end of his critical discussion he makes
One more point: I’m a bit surprised to not see more calls for the open web in this conversation. If we want to get away from platforms we see as multiply dangerous (Facebook in particular, it seems), then we could posit some better sites. I’m for RSS and the blogosphere. Others may plump for Mastodon.
I think this an important aspect. To me the open web is about agency, the power to do something, to act. In this case to critically engage with information flows and contributing your own perspectives on your own website.
Every centralised platform or web silo you use means an implicit vulnerability to being kicked off by the company behind it for arbitrary and not just valid reasons. Even when using it, it means hard borders are drawn about the way you can share, interact or connect to others, to protect the business behind it. Facebook forces you to share links outside your commentary, and doesn’t allow inline hyperlinking as is actually the web’s standard. Your Facebook account can’t directly interact with my Twitter account, not because of technological limitations but because of both their wishes to be silos monopolising your online conversations.
On the open web you acknowledge the existence of various platforms, silos and whatnot, but the interaction circles around your own online space. Your own platform-of-1 that monopolises your own interaction but puts that monopoly in your own hands and that makes no assumption whatsoever about what others do, other than expecting others to use core internet standards and protocols. Your platform-of-1, is your online presence, like this website, from which you alone determine what you share, post, link-to, in what way it is presented, and who can see what.
This includes pushing things into silos. For instance I post to Twitter, and respond to others on Twitter from my own website, and reactions on Twitter come back to me on my website. (Not Facebook, you’re no longer allowed to post / peek over their fence).
This is a source of agency. For me as an individual, as much as for a group. There’s a marked difference between a protest group coordinating themselves on a Facebook group, and e.g. Edgeryders, a network of changemakers building sustainable projects for the common good, which runs their own group platform to interact using Discourse. A direct difference in agency to be able to shape the way you interact versus having to follow predefined common denominator functionality, and an indirect difference in resilience against push-back from others (does someone else control your off-switch?).
In media literacy, as much as in other, complexity-induced, aspects of our connected lives, agency of both you and yours, a networked agency is a key ingredient. Not to build your own competing platforms or media outlets to the existing ones, a common misconceived and unvoiced underlying assumption I feel (“we’ll build the perfect news platform ourselves!”), but to be in control yourself of what comes at you and what flows out from you. You still very well may end up in a bubble of uncritical bias, yet it will be one of your own making, not the making of whichever company happens to run the most popular platform du jour. The open web is your toolkit in gaining and maintaining this agency.
...nu blijkt er ook Yarns te zijn, een WordPress plugin te zijn die deze server integreert in je WordPress omgeving. Het is allemaal in beta en de interface vind ik niet heel fijn in gebruik...
Da’s wel een understatement ja, “de interface niet heel fijn in het gebruik”. Die interface is nog ronduit slecht. Zelf Aperture draaien lukt me nog niet, pogingen om het op mijn laptop als localhost te doen gingen mis. Dat zou ik nog prettiger vinden eigenlijk, op localhost, dan in mijn WP database al is dat al beter dan op de server van een ander. Om die reden speel ik ook nog met TinyTinyRSS, die is goed zelf te draaien (straightforward PHP and MySql), en je kunt makkelijk zelf in de code wat klooien. Ik zoek natuurlijk uiteindelijk het schaap met 5 of zelfs meer poten.
As someone who often walks around town with a son with service dog in tow or with a partner using a walker, I notice, a lot more than I used to, when shops and restaurants don’t have accessible power-operated doors. I asked the City of Charlottetown Planning Department about this, and the Building Inspector helpfully replied with a reference to the 2010 National Building Code, Section 3.8 Barrier Free Design:
Except as provided in Sentences (6) and (12), every door that provides a barrier-free path of travel through an entrance referred to in Article 3.8.1.2., including the interior doors of a vestibule where provided, shall be equipped with a power door operator that allows persons to activate the opening of the door from either side if the entrance serves:
a) a hotel,
b) a building of Group B, Division 2 major occupancy, or
c) a building of Group A, Group B, Division 3, Group D or E major occupancy more than 500 m2 in building area.
(See Appendix A.)
Pulling this apart, power doors are required for:
Hotels;
Buildings “of Group B, Division 2 major occupancy”: these are hospitals, nursing homes, and similar facilities;
Buildings “Group A, Group B, Division 3, Group D or E major occupancy more than 500 m2 in building area”: this includes everything from cinemas to libraries to banks to shops and restaurants.
The places I’m concerned about most often fall in the third item–shops, restaurants, etc.–and the reason that the examples I cited to the Planning Department as lacking accessible doors are, it seems, exempt under the “more than 500 m2” provision.
Five hundred square meters, or 5381 square feet, is a pretty large space (our house is 2400 square feet over two floors). This means that most shops and restaurants would fall under the amount of space, and not be required to have an accessible door.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that such spaces can’t install a power door, and I encourage everyone, in their comings and goings, to encourage shops they patronize to improve accessibility in all ways, including this one.
(The City of Charlottetown is migrating from the 2010 National Building Code to the 2015 National Building Code; the Building Inspector confirmed with me that nothing has changed with regards to the 500 m2 cut-off in this regard).
Nike has been experimenting heavily with augmented reality for a few years now, and the company is continuing to work on new experiences powered by the technology. The sportswear giant is now introducing Nike Fit, a feature that uses a combination of computer vision, scientific data, artificial intelligence and recommendation algorithms to scan your feet and find the right shoe fit for you. And you can do it all in augmented reality, using the Nike app on your smartphone. Nike says that, according to industry research, over 60 percent of people wear the wrong size shoes. With Nike Fit, the company is hoping to solve that problem.
The AR experience itself is fairly simple: You open up the Nike app, go to a product page and, next to where there's usually a menu that lets you pick the size of your shoes, you'll see a new option to measure your feet. From there, the camera will pop up and you'll be asked to stand next to a wall and point your smartphone at your feet, which will prompt a view that uses two AR circles to level your phone. Once the feature recognizes your feet and your physical environment, it starts scanning your feet and then tells you your ideal shoe size for Nike footwear. The entire process takes less than a minute.
It’s been two years since Apple introduced ARKit, yet there are still very few AR apps I’ve found add meaningful value to my life. Outside of measuring apps, the only ARKit experiences I’ve enjoyed related to shopping for furniture and other home accessories. It looks like shoe shopping will be the next major area where AR becomes more than a fun demo. According to Alvarez, the Nike Fit feature will be added to the Nike app this July.
We dim the status bar in our Android app so readers can focus on, well, reading.
Illustration by Miguel Porlan
The status bar on Android devices may only take up a fraction of the screen, but it holds one of the most distracting features: notifications. To help reduce the distraction, we introduced a feature that dims the status bar when users are reading. But in Android, figuring out whether a user is reading is not as easy as it seems. As is often the case, seemingly small changes can be the most complex to engineer.
To track whether a user is reading, we listened to the scroll event in the components that display articles. Unfortunately, not all the Views in the Android system were built with scrolling capabilities in mind, so we had to add this ability wherever we needed it.
In our News Reader, we have two systems that display article content, depending on the type of content: a RecyclerView for native applications and a WebView for hybrid web content. Depending on the Android OS version, certain WebViews do not have a setOnScrollChangedListener, so we created a custom scroll change observer interface (OnScrollChangedObserver) that polyfilled the functionality missing from the API.
Luckily, RecyclerView support was simple, so all we had to do was extend the RecyclerView.OnScrollListener, which is available right out of the box. But finding a solution for WebViews wasn’t as easy.
Because not all Views support the OnScrollChangeObserver we created, we needed a way to distinguish between a View View that supports this listener and one that doesn’t. Some Views don’t support native scrolling, so we had to find a way to see which Views needed the extra support. We had to create another interface that would let us add a reference to the observer so we could attach it to the View and act on it.
Every View already listens for scroll events, but since these events are usually consumed inside the View itself, the View needs a little extra help passing events through so they can be managed externally. To accomplish this, we extended the system WebView with a custom View and implemented a ScrollableViewCompat interface. This allowed us to add a listener that the event would notify during a scroll — we did this by overriding the onScrollChange() method.
We implemented the OnScrollChangedObserver and created two versions of the attachTo() method. The first method type accepts a ScrollableViewCompat parameter in order to get a reference to the attached Activity. The second takes a RecyclerView and AppCompatActivity parameter in which the View is inserted, so that we can add a listener to the RecyclerView and hold a reference to the container.
Because we extended RecyclerView‘s scroll listener, we had to implement two methods that would allow the app to know when a user is scrolling and reading. onScrollChange() will be invoked by the WebView when scrolling, while onScrollChanged() will be called by the RecyclerView. Both methods will then redirect to onScrollingInvoked(), which accepts an Int value.
For WebViews, to see whether a user has started scrolling, we check the vertical Y axis. If the Y axis is greater than zero, we pass scrollY to onScrollingInvoked(). In order to achieve the same effect for RecyclerViews, we check whether the first completely visible child (with index zero) is hidden. If it is, we know the user has started scrolling. To see whether a user has scrolled back to the top, both the scrollY and the first completely visible child would be zero.
The last part of this puzzle was to determine when to dim the status bar. Whenever the parameter dy that is passed to onScrollingInvoked() is greater than zero, we fade the status bar by setting the View.SYSTEM_UI_FLAG_LOW_PROFILE flag to the system UI. However, whenever the parameter dy is exactly zero, we reset it to the default, which is View.SYSTEM_UI_FLAG_VISIBLE.
Bonus trick
Configuration changes introduce a glitch: if a user scrolls down and triggers a dim but then rotates their device, the system resets these window flags and the next scroll event will re-trigger a dim. To avoid this glitch, we leveraged the host Activity by saving the flag in the onSaveInstanceState() method and setting it back in the onCreate(). In this way, the configuration change is taken into account and we can finally provide a seamless experience to our users.
It has to be said that the Google Pixel 3a (and 3a XL, not shown here) is something of a work of material science magic. So much of this handset screams ‘premium Pixel’, yet it’s plastic and yet it costs less than £400 in the UK, roughly 60% the cost of last Autumn’s Pixel 3. So what’s missing, does it matter, and how will the Pixel 3a fare in the mainstream ‘normob’ market? Read on for my verdict!
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Vancouver-based national carrier Telus added 11,000 new mobile wireless subscribers and now has a total of 9,736,000 subscribers as of Q1 2019.
According to its earnings results that were released on May 9th, Telus said this total was a 14,000 year-over-year increase that was “driven by lower mobile phone churn rate and higher mobile phone gross additions.”
It is worth noting that Telus reported 49,000 mobile connected device net additions, which reflects the company’s Internet of Things offerings. Connected devices are any device other than a mobile phone with its own SIM or IMEI number. These data-centric devices include tablets, internet keys, Internet of Things, wearables, connected automobile systems. In addition, Telus has a direct billing or support relationship with the user of each device.
The company reported it added a total of 99,000 new wireless, internet and Telus TV customers in Q1 2019.
In the three months that ended on March 31st, Telus reported a churn rate of 1.02 percent, which improved by eight basis points over the same period a year ago. This churn rate is reflected in only mobile wireless subscribers.
Churn represents the rate at which subscribers left Telus for one of the company’s competitors.
“Without a question, our continued strong performance is owing in no small part to our team’s unparalleled dedication to providing exceptional customer experiences. Telus, once again, achieved industry-leading wireless loyalty, with a record first quarter low mobile phone churn of 1.02 percent,” Telus’ CEO Darren Entwistle said in the earnings report.
“This unrelenting commitment to our Customers First promise is buttressed by our meaningfully differentiated product offering, as well as the ongoing significant investments we are making synergistically in our world-leading broadband network and technologies across both our wireless and wireline operations.”
In Q1 2019, Telus reported a 0.1 percent increase in its average billing per user to total $72.19.
The carrier said this increase was because of “growth from customers selecting plans with larger data buckets or periodically topping up their data buckets, the introduction of our Platinum rate plan and more higher-value smartphones in the sales mix were partly offset by declines in chargeable data usage, the impact of the competitive environment putting pressure on best rate plan prices in the current and prior periods and the changing customer mix.”
In Q1 2019, Telus’ operating revenue totalled to $3.5 billion, an increase of 3.8 percent from $3.3 billion that was reported in the same period a year ago.
Telus said this growth was driven by “higher wireless and wireline data services revenue growth.”
Telus also reported a net income of $437 million, an increase of 6.1 percent from the $412 million that was reported during the same period a year ago.
Nintendo has quietly shut down its anti-piracy site without any official statement or apparent provocation.
Interestingly, as spotted Nintendo fan ‘Akfamilyhome,’ the site seems to have been inactive since February 18th, 2019. However, it’s only starting to be picked up now since Akfamilyhome tweeted about it this week.
Nintendo's anti-piracy site, originally at https://t.co/SlsgUtwZQY, has been shut down and redirects to the main Nintendo site now. According to the Wayback Machine the last time it was known to be active is February 18, 2019. pic.twitter.com/IJhkkmsg0H
Up until February, Nintendo had a dedicated anti-piracy page at http://ap.nintendo.com, but that link now simply directs users to the main Nintendo website.
While many Nintendo gamers likely didn’t even know of its existence, the anti-piracy page has become infamous its depiction of an uncharacteristically angry Mario. Following the news that the site had been shut down, Twitter users took to honouring the pouty plumber.
The Japanese gaming giant has a reputation for constantly cracking down on unpermitted use of its intellectual property, which makes this latest move seemingly come out of nowhere. That said, given how dated the previous site was, it’s likely that Nintendo is preparing to launch a more modern anti-piracy portal.
In any case, hopefully Angry Mario can live on in some capacity. Or better yet, maybe it’s time to give another Nintendo icon a chance to let their emotions out. Angry Princess Peach, anyone?
Just a few weeks ago news leaked that Toronto-based smart thermostat manufacturer Ecobee is reportedly working on Wi-Fi-enabled camera.
Now, that same source — Dave Zatz (@davezatz) of ZatzNotFunny — has revealed images of what seems to be a contact sensor that would be placed on a door or window to control smart home devices.
Sensors like this are typically used to notify a home security system when a door is closed or opened. That said, using one to control your smart home could yield some pretty interesting results.
For example, it could turn on a camera when the door is opened so you could see who is coming into your place. You could also even use it to turn off your air conditioning when you open a window.
Ideally, the contact sensor could also be used to trigger alarms, lights and even adjust the temperature of an Ecobee thermostat when you get home. How it works is when one of the two parts of the sensor is moved away from the other — when a door is opened, for instance — some sort of smart home action could be triggered.
Given Ecobee only sells smart home thermostats, the Switch+ light switch and room sensors designed to work with its smart home thermostats, it’s likely this contact sensor will work with products from other smart home manufacturers like Google and Amazon.
It could also potentially be used in combination with Ecobee’s rumoured smart camera to create a more affordable take on Amazon’s Ring Alarm, which includes a contact sensor but only for home security purposes.
The Verge says Ecobee told the publication that the image of the contact sensor is just a “render” that may not end up being an actual product.
Regardless, with both a camera and a contact sensor leaking recently, it’s likely that Ecobee is moving beyond smart thermostats and is working on a number of smart home accessories.
The carrier has launched a new promotion where customers can purchase a 64GB iPhone XR for $0 on a two-year Ultra or Premium+ tab ‘Share Everything’ plan. Alongside the phone, interested customers will also need to buy a 32GB 6th generation iPad on a two-year Share Everything tablet plan for $25 per month.
Together this nets customers 10GB of data bonus.
This works for new activations or phone upgrades to a two-year Ultra tab or Premium+ tab ‘Share Everything’ plan.
On the Premium+ and Ultra tabs the iPhone XR costs $0 outright and offer each respective plan’s base amount of data. Currently, there’s a promotion that offers customers 10GB of data on an Ultra tab for $115 or 6GB (regularly 1GB) of data on a Premium+ tab for $115. The data bonuses are not stackable with this promotion.
This means you can’t get 20GB of data if you purchase the iPhone XR on a $115 Ultra tab — at least not according to the Rogers sale associates I spoke with.
We’ve reached out to Rogers for confirmation.
It’s also important to note that while the 32GB 9.7-inch iPad costs $0 outright, customers still need to pay an extra $25 per month as the tablet will have its own line and have its own SIM.
There is also a one-time ‘Setup Service Fee’ of $35 per line to set up the devices in the store.
Rogers’ website does not mention when this promotion will end.
The Pixel 3a is Google’s first attempt at a mid-range device. And so far, it looks like they’ve delivered a great device. It’s the only mid-range Android phone with a great camera. If you’re looking for a great Android phone under $500, Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL are definitely worth considering. But the question remains. Which color Pixel 3a or Pixel 3a XL should you buy? Read our guide to find out.
Continue reading →
Other innovations are in the works. Boeing is testing a pilot-less “autonomous” air taxi — a kind of flying Uber. Is the era of the flying car, as envisioned on 
The Guardian.
The Guardian.
Radfahren in Stuttgart.
jwz.
It has to be said that the Google Pixel 3a (and 3a XL, not shown here) is something of a work of material science magic. So much of this handset screams ‘premium Pixel’, yet it’s plastic and yet it costs less than £400 in the UK, roughly 60% the cost of last Autumn’s Pixel 3. So what’s missing, does it matter, and how will the Pixel 3a fare in the mainstream ‘normob’ market? Read on for my verdict!
The Pixel 3a is Google’s first attempt at a mid-range device. And so far, it looks like they’ve delivered a great device. It’s the only mid-range Android phone with a great camera. If you’re looking for a great Android phone under $500, Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL are definitely worth considering. But the question remains. Which color Pixel 3a or Pixel 3a XL should you buy? Read our guide to find out.