Auf der MWC 2019 hat Huawei den Mate X vorgestellt. Dies ist das erste Telefon des Unternehmens mit 5G-Funktionalität. Jetzt hat das chinesische Unternehmen offen bekundet, für die Lieferung seiner internen Chips auch ein weiteres [...]
Clare Barry ~ One of the joys of my day is commuting to and from work on my bike. I can carry all I need and navigate very easily as the brakes, lever to shift gears and bell are all positioned correctly. The frame is lightweight so it maneuvers easily, while handling rough spots and rail tracks well due to the wider rims and tires. One rear pannier holds my workbag and in the other I carry a change of clothes, lunch and the occasional baguette.
Story and photo by Marco Sobrevinas
Mike Barry was my first mentor in cycling. His ideas and style have influenced my cycling preferences. A bike he built graced the cover of the second issue of dandyhorse, where he was featured prominently. Toward the end of the article, he talks about the ideal bicycle for commuting: “The bike you ride should be functional and efficient, but shouldn’t be fancy.” With this in mind Barry built his wife the perfect commuter bike — Clare Barry is posing with her custom Mariposa in this photo, which she’s been riding in downtown Toronto since 1986. Want one like Barry built? Here’s what you need to know:
Metal
Due to their cost, carbon and titanium frames are out of the picture. This leaves the other two commonly available frame materials: steel or aluminum. Aluminum is lightweight but tends to transmit road shock to the rider. Steel is generally heavier but has a pleasant spring to it when you hit rough patches — such as Toronto’s ubiquitous potholes.
Geometry
For a commuter bike you want relaxed, predictable steering. A long wheelbase contributes to straight tracking, and a lower bottom bracket height improves stability. Your feet should reach the ground.
Wheels
Mike Barry mentioned light 26" wheels as an ideal size for a city bike. If it’s conventionally built, repair will be relatively simple and parts easy to find. Light but strong aluminum rims are quick and durable and give a decent braking surface for wet pads when it rains. Stainless steel spokes take away the worry of rust.
Tires
Clare’s bike tires are made of road tread, which are much safer than knobbies in the rain. A light and resilient casing, wire bead and perhaps a Kevlar belt to ward off punctures are ideal. Quality commuting tires with these features range from $30 to $50 per tire.
Fenders
Get full coverage fenders that use proper stays. (They work much better than clip-ons.) A mud flap on the front fender cuts down on cold water and slush spray on your feet. Plastic fenders are easier to mount, metal are more durable.
Rack
A rack can mount panniers, which means you can ditch the knapsack.
This gets the weight off your body and onto your bike. It’s much easier to mount fenders and racks if you have eyelets and braze-ons built into the frame and fork to begin with. Otherwise, you’ll be forced to use clamps to hold those items to your frame.
Chainguard
Clare’s bike has a beautiful chainguard, a nice convenience that prevents grease marks on her pants. A chainring guard is simpler but not as effective.
Suspension
Don’t bother. It adds weight and you can get comfort from wide tires. There is one form of suspension I like on a city bike — a sprung saddle. The undisputed pinnacle for this type is the all-leather Brooks brand.
Handlebars
Drop bars are great thanks to the variety of hand positions they provide, but not really essential if your commuting rides are typically less than 30 minutes. Straight bars stretch your wrists outward, which can be uncomfortable. Bars with a pronounced sweep back towards the rider are the most ideal for commuters in an urban setting for rides under a half hour. The rider is generally more upright, allowing a natural wrist position and easy sight lines.
Lighting
The lightweight led-type lights are convenient and easy to carry and mount. A single light can be purchased for under $5. They can be easily stolen, and are not always as bright as other lighting systems. One of the best solutions is a hub-driven lighting system with a capacitor that is bolted onto the bike (featured on Clare’s bike). It is more difficult to steal, you always have lighting and you never have to worry about batteries. The biggest barrier is the cost: the generator hub alone starts at $100 and goes up. A single light can start at $50.
Bell or Horn
This is not an option. Position the bell or horn near your hands on the bars, so you can easily reach it while riding.
Gearing
Use a single-speed freewheel: it’s light, cheap, low maintenance and they’re very easy to clean in the winter. Be prepared to work hard on steep hills. Derailleurs: relatively easy to fix and very common technology. The only negative: the gears are subject to serious salt corrosion if you ride your bike throughout Toronto’s winters. Internal hub gear: the mechanism is protected inside the hub shell and you can change gears while stopped at a red light. These are commonly available from three speeds up to eight.
Brakes
Caliper brakes, which are basically clamps with brake pads, are the easiest to maintain. Clare has a nice example on her Mariposa. They can work pretty well in all weather conditions. Disc brakes perform great whatever the conditions, but maintenance can be a bit more complicated. Don’t forget the coaster brake. These can be found on some internal hub gears and work surprisingly well, especially if you travel at slow speeds.
//
If you follow this recipe for Barry’s ideal city bike, you’ll find rides to be comfortable, convenient and safe. You’ll have a bike that’s easy to handle, protects you from road dirt and keeps you visible at night.
Auch heute gibt es wieder eine Reihe interessanter Tagesangebote. Meine drei Highlights:
Wer immer schon ein Surface Pro 6 haben wollte, findet heute das i5/8/128er Modell inklusive Type Cover für 799 Euro. Das Gerät ist schnell und lautlos. Surface Pro hat einen verdeckten microSD-Slot, so dass man den Speicher für Medien wie Videos oder Fotos erweitern kann. 400 GB für 65 Euro zum Beispiel.
Wem die AirPods aus den Ohren fallen, ist häufig mit den Jabra Elite 65t True Wireless zufrieden. Diese und auch die Sport-Vaiante gibt es heute um 25% reduziert.
Tagesangebote sind häufig schnell vergriffen. Wer zuerst kommt, mahlt zuerst.
That’s the distance from Hong Kong to Beijing, and if you’re on a train that cruises at 306km/h, you can leave at 8:05AM and
arrive one minute past five in the afternoon. The train has a number and a Wikipedia entry:
G80 (check it out for some cool pix of the
train). I suspect that not that many readers have taken this, so herewith words and pictures.
It’s faster than an airport but there are really a lot of stages to get through: HK exit, HK customs, security, PRC health, PRC
customs, PRC immigration. They were all reasonably efficient and pleasant but damn it’s a lot of walking. Obvious foreigners are
waved over to the “special services” PRC immigration where they speak English. As in most dictatorships, there’s plenty of assiduous
filling-in of forms and triple-checking numbers and photos and signatures.
The train interior is, well, meh. Nothing terribly wrong with it but not as slick as either the Japanese shinkansen or
a Euro-TGV/ICE. There are classes: Business, First, Second. We took the mid-range First; the price was reasonable and the seats
were OK, with a bit of lean-back and plenty of electricity.
The food was awful, but it’s been a long time since I got good food on a train anywhere. I had to respect the staff, who
pushed the tea-carts and refreshments back and forth for nine consecutive hours without exhibiting fatigue. None
seemed to have a word of English.
If you want to travel, direct online ticket sales are difficult-at-best for foreigners. We followed leads around the Internet
and eventually bought the tickets via
China Highlights, who got them from the station and delivered them to our Hong Kong
hotel before we got there.
Traveling at 300km is sort of dreamy. I don’t have a good way to host video myself, so here are
27 seconds on YouTube.
During the first couple of hours, the sky was that South Chinese dappled-grey while the terrain was green, folded, and wet.
Two thousand kilometers, but rarely out of sight of human habitation, and never away from infrastructure: Power
lines, dikes, culverts, you name it.
As we worked our way north the land became flatter and dirtier and more industrial and more intensely under construction. This
picture is unusual in that there are no visible cranes.
Any extended exposure to China — this theme will recur — leaves most
Westerners overwhelmed by its most significant fact: its huge population. On this trip the train stopped at
Shenzhen (pop 12.9M), Guanghzhou (14.9M), Changsha (a mere 7.4M), Wuhan (10.6M), Zhengzhou (10.1M), and Shijiazhuang
(10.8M). Total: 66.7M human souls. You can claim you already knew about those places but I probably wouldn’t believe you.
It’s not subtle: as you coast from city to city, often the horizon hides behind a forest of high-rises.
In the picture above, it all looks kind of prosperous: The pretty-modern buildings in the background, the gas stations and
boulevards in front. It’s not all like that; in the hilly green southern section you see really poor-ass rural
scenes, but the surface prosperity monotonically increases as you move further north and toward Beijing.
Wherever you go in the world, you can usually tell a lot about a person by their address, and even more by visiting that address
and looking at their residence. I’m sure you can in China too, only I can’t because I don’t know anything, and it was frustrating.
There were low primitive places among the fields, little better than shacks, then two-story countryside clusters that
offered a little room but no apparent luxury, then the ubiquitous apartment towers, low and high, shiny and faded. What does
it all mean? Ask elsewhere.
I noticed that out away from the cities there was a lot of empty space on the roads; thought how much fun it might be to
do a road trip in a fast car.
Obviously, China’s decades-long avalanche of investment and development hasn’t had flawless execution. There are many towers
built but not finished, their windows unoccupied concrete rectangles, some finished partway up but no apparent work in progress.
Bridges and causeways and berms and embankments too: infrastructural work paused and left to stand like huge pieces of brutalist
sculpture.
But of course lots of construction is in active progress; this near Beijing.
Beijing West station, when you get there, is insanely crowded but reasonably efficient; the only thing you have to be careful of
is the taxi touts who I’m told will rip you off. They’re somewhat handicapped in that a native Chinese speaker who hasn’t studied
English really has trouble with our letter “x”, but they have hustle.
Follow the signs to the nice modern taxi-stand and you won’t have to wait long. It’s a good idea to visit your
hotel’s website before you go and find the place where they provide a map-with-directions you can print out and show the
driver.
Then you’re into Beijing traffic, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Too many professional communities fall into the trap of becoming a place of frustration. Members only visit when something is broken and they want it fixed.
Once they get a solution, they leave and don’t come back.
You can change this by proving value members didn’t expect. The easiest value is often career advice. In B2B communities, most people have similar careers and a lot of expertise they can share.
This means changing the content, activities, and discussions members see on the homepage to incorporate the three main areas of advice.
Best practices (i.e. what is the best way to….?)
Fears/Threats (i.e. I’m scared about [x], what should I do?)
Time-sensitive requests (i.e. I have an urgent problem, how do I fix it quickly?)
The more you can support your members throughout their day, the more they visit your community for help. You can be the widget-fixer community, or you can be their trusted peer group they visit several times a week for advice and new information.
If you’ve the means to buy an Oban 14 or a Macallan 18 whenever a decanter frees itself, you’ll probably want to saunter on past this post. However, if you like whisky but aren’t crazy about spending a good portion of your income on it, let me take a few minutes to tell you about some of my favourite everyday whiskies. I’m not going to include links because most distillers' sites are obnoxious in one way or another, and I don’t have a favourite whisky-reviews site, but a quick search should point you in the right direction.
Ich benutze täglich für viele Stunden ein iPad Pro 12.9 und dort mittlerweile auch sehr routiniert mehre Apps gleichzeitig, manchmal gleichzeitig auf dem Screen. Die Bedienung ist ein Graus, aber ich weiß mittlerweile, was man wohin ziehen muss.
Und heute war ich auf einmal erstaunt. Zwei gleiche Fenster nebeneinander? Das geht normalerweise nicht. Jedes Programm darf nur ein Fenster gleichzeitig aufmachen. Also habe ich mal auf Twitter gefragt, wie ich das wohl angestellt habe. Dennis Frank (@freshmango) hat mir dann geschwind erklärte, wie das funktioniert:
Jenny (Phire) Zhang@phirephoenix
Every time someone new learns about milk-in-a-bag a Canadian gets its wings slash free can of maple syrup. pic.twitter.com/ZveRPLSgR7
Beim Galaxy Event präsentierte Samsung sein Galaxy A80. Highlight ist dabei die Triple-Kamera, die auf der Rückseite hochgeschoben wird und so eine Aufnahme von Selfies im 180 Grad Radius ermöglicht, da sie sich automatisch nach [...]
While most Blix electric bikes are equipped with rear racks and have the option of an additional front basket, one item that has been missing is the option to add bike bags. So, we are excited to announce that we are launching a brand new line of Blix bags perfect for your bike this June 2019! Below you will find brief descriptions of each bag and fun ways to pack them.
Smart Pannier
The Smart Pannier can double rider cargo with it's stylish dual bag design. Now there is ample space for any and all of your belongings! Made with water-resistant canvas, a protective laptop sleeve, and secure attachment systems, it is great for commuting or errands. Easily transform this bag into a cross-body bag to take with you! Pack your laptop, notebooks, lunch, wallet, drawing materials, and be on your way.
Everyday Bag
This multi-purpose bag is perfect for every adventure! Stuff its many pockets full and rest assured that the secure clips, water-resistant canvas, and protected pouch will keep your items safe when riding. Fill the Everyday Bag with gym clothes, snacks, or binders for the perfect gym bag! Throw it on your bike or over your shoulder, and head out.
Blix Tote
Carry everything you need for a beach day, trip to the farmer's market, or work with the Blix Tote. Choose to fold the top over or pack it full. Securely attach it to the rear rack or attach a shoulder strap for a stylish on-the-go tote! Pack your bathing suit, throw in a towel, or fill it with fresh fruits and veggies.
Top Rack Bag
Specifically designed to help riders carry more on the Vika+, this top rack bag will allow riders to fold their bikes while increasing their cargo load! Utilize the zipper pouches and fill with lunch, phone chargers, or items picked up during quick errands. Easily attach or remove with Velcro straps to create a stylish grab-and-go bag.
I have been immersed in election geography this week, and by way of procrastinating I made this visualization that connects every address on Prince Edward Island to its polling station on election day.
Here’s a similar visualization, but for the advance polls:
I shared the map with a friend, and they asked me if I could tell them, as the crow flies, which addresses were the greatest distance from their polling station on election day, so I made this map to illustrate this. There’s one dot on the map for each civic address on PEI; the darker the colour of orange of the dot, the greater the distance to the polling station for electors at that address.
The greatest address-to-poll distances are from Goose River and Little Sands.
How does one survive and thrive as an artist in the San Francisco Bay Area? Living & Working is a multi-platform column focusing on the experiences and strategies from those who continue to live and work in the Bay Area.
On nights after work, I let myself fall to the very bottom of the pool. It is an old pool, built as part of a club for veterans in 1913, with a deep end of ten feet. I push through the water on my back and roll over, turn my face to the deep and then to the ceiling, spinning and surfacing. I go in the pool after I work at the tech company downtown. The company sells opaque hotel rooms. This means that people purchase a room without knowing which hotel they are booking; its name is revealed once their payment goes through. For enduring this uncertainty, they receive a discounted price. But few people do. Most arrive by accident, get disoriented, and then go somewhere else.
I write the words that ask people to stay. “Unlock deals”; “Save big”; “Buy before prices go up.” I try to sound human, to imagine how another human feels when they are navigating the site and to comfort them. “Oops,” I say when their credit card doesn’t work. “Something went wrong.” I want people to feel the way I do when I write the buttons: maybe they messed up; maybe they got here by mistake, but everything is going to be okay.
Each floor in our office is decorated for a theme: the Pony Express, vintage video games, Star Trek. Ours is Alfred Hitchcock. Silhouettes of birds flap against the glass partitions by my desk, while the conference rooms, named for movies—Vertigo, Psycho, A Perfect Murder—lace our vocabularies with fear.
When I am interviewed for the job, I am interviewed in a room named for Tippi Hedren, Alfred’s muse, by a man named Dustin and two men named Matt and another man named Sean. Another man is named Chris; he wears a knit blazer that drapes softly, like a pair of woman’s yoga pants, on his lithe body. I am nervous in Tippi’s room. The night before, while I was driving home from my mother’s house in the mountains, a chunk of concrete had hit my windshield, leaving a scar across the glass. I had pulled off the highway, unhurt, though it had stuck with me: that feeling of being a target, like all the cars and molecules were heading for me, the center of it all.
I say something about being the only woman in the room. Dustin laughs, and one of the Matts says, “We have lots of women. Look, there’s one, right there,” and points through a glass wall. I am mid-sentence when Chris asks me a question about web searches. “What kind of answer are you looking for?” I ask back. “I’m not interested in the right answers. I’m more interested in asking the right questions,” he says. Am I asking the right questions? I have a bad haircut that my mother’s neighbor gave me in her garage the day before, and I do not have answers for anyone.
But I try. I pretend that the twenty years I have been using the internet have prepared me for this, that the nights I spent in the Mills College computer lab in 1996, when each page took minutes to load and I stayed up all night downloading pictures of Claire Danes and watching the sky turn pink, were enough. The light would change through the windows, and then I would refresh the live camera on the San Francisco Chronicle website to watch the sun rise there, too. What a miracle it had been.
Tippi was Alfred’s star but also his prey. When they were filming The Birds he told her that the birds that flew at her would be minimal, one or two at the most, the rest superimposed after filming was done. But instead he shocked her in a darkened room filled with birds that pecked and darted. Take after take, they attacked, so that Tippi Hedren’s fear and blood were wet and real. That is the horror of being in a room that you cannot control. It is rare that it would turn on you so, the walls that you trusted, the lights that you knew, but it is possible still.
When the interview’s over, Chris gives me a fist bump, and hours later, the recruiter calls to tell me I got the job.
*
My favorite character in The Birds isn’t Melanie, Tippi’s character, but the schoolteacher, Annie Hayworth, played by Suzanne Pleshette, a woman after whom no conference room is named. She follows a man to this beachside town and is marooned. A shipwreck of a woman, but her cabin is airy, accommodating of hobbies. She gardens, paints. It is an unexpected accommodation, how an amorous pursuit can capsize into a habitable burrow. I want to be this windy-haired woman, alone in my home. I have come here by mistake, but I have stayed of my own accord.
We do not do much work here. We start projects and tend to them, like low-yielding crops, and then, mercifully, let them die. A film of pseudoscience sticks to everything we touch. We don’t just write messages to users; we calculate the correct word for a situation and deploy it. We are UX writers. We like having X in our job titles because it sounds technical. One of the least-used letters in the English language, X is one of the most frequent in mathematical equations, and its presence suggests that our work is not emotive but scientific. We are engineers, too, sort of. We have a culture of testing, I am told. New features are unveiled in waves, and users’ responses determine whether something is deemed a failure or success. It’s okay if a test is positive or negative—clarity is revered. The worst thing is an inconclusive test—one that tells you nothing at all. It’s an uncontested truth: if a person’s actions can’t be measured, they can’t be understood.
My boss is a woman named Monica. She is skinny and in her early fifties. One day in my journal when I am not feeling kind, I write that she is the type of woman straight men would describe as fuckable, no matter her age. Monica tells me to measure my velocity and capacity at the end of each week. I am a vessel that is never full, I want to say.
Matt and Sean are the two men on the four-person content team. They are white and in their forties, both born and raised in Northern California, like me. Sometimes they feel like my brothers, not because we are close, but because the possibility exists, slim but not disproven, that our histories are intertwined. Surrounded by transplants, we together inhabit a prehistoric California of 1970s sedans, rickety on the highway, hot air blowing through open windows into the backseat. Matt grew up in Berkeley and was friends with the boys I watched from the windows of my high school skateboarding on the UC campus in the early ’90s. I’d follow their wide stances as they did rail slides along the smooth cement banks, not yet studded with metal barriers, their bodies disappearing into the sky. Our coworkers had moved here to be a part of the future, but we were left over from something that had already passed.
Sean is the only man at my job that I like. He lives with his family in Half Moon Bay, south of the city. Many days on his commute he sees breaching whales. Sea monsters that lurch and then sink, seaweed and plankton rinsing from their sides. He wakes in fog misting the brown hills, the smell of salt and brine in the air. For much of his drive north, he parallels the ocean, and it is then that he sees the tails surfacing, the bodies submerging. I often use Sean like a life raft, hoping he will steer me around obstacles, both submerged and apparent. In meetings, the man talking to me will often assume that I don’t understand, and he will look to Sean instead, seeking interpretation. In such territory, a man by your side is no different than having a compass or a map.
*
The creative director keeps writing style guide as one word—in headlines, in emails, in the style guide—and I keep telling him that “styleguide,” when written this way, is not a real word. It is two real words that, when put together, become something unreal. “I guess I’m okay with words that aren’t real words,” he says. I get it. He wants to break rules, and I’m holding him back. I tell him I’m sorry.
The men I work with are not the geniuses of Menlo Park, the ones who retreated to garages and emerged with hardware that changed the world. They’re ensemble actors in an industry that favors singular greatness. They have not made fortunes or founded startups but have benefited from their proximity and physical resemblance to those who have. They bought houses and had kids in between booms; today they are balding and graying, and upon entering a room, they sniff every corner like another animal has already peed there.
Only one of our coworkers went to Stanford, and his Stanford-ness renders him visible, serving chiefly to highlight the fact that the rest of us did not go there. Cameron kicks a soccer ball from meeting to meeting and sits on the ground most of the time, stretching his calves and hamstrings when he does. His shoes are some sort of optimized wool sneaker that aims to make all other sneakers obsolete. I once heard him use the word “grok.”
We are not changing the world here. Except in the sense that everyone is always changing the world, just by moving through it. We rise each morning, drive north along the sea, notice interruptions in the water before it goes flat again. Doing so is enough to create a disturbance in the universe; why do more? I don’t want to disrupt; I only want to swim so deep that the water above me barely moves.
*
“If I give someone data and they don’t incorporate it into their process, I’m automatically going to think they are stupid,” the young man sitting one table over says to another young man at a beer garden in Hayes Valley. Another group discusses the anatomy of backpacks: the circumference of cup sleeves, the width of straps.
What dismays me about technology is this: not the machine itself but the way its architecture echoes outward, imposing a grid of quantification on everything it touches. The sadness of numbers interferes with our thoughts, begs us to apply logic to warm, messy things. What becomes of the ambiguity of feeling? That which can’t be immediately identified is derided, denied, and eventually erased.
The backpacks of my youth were not optimized. They had padded straps and meaningless loops that dangled like ponytails. My friends and I wore our backpacks at night and on weekends, on hillsides behind suburban baseball diamonds, in eucalyptus groves where the mud slipped out from beneath our feet. We wore them when we shoplifted from Payless ShoeSource, stuffing plastic sandals into their depths. Our backpacks hung on our frames as we told our moms we were sleeping at a friend’s house but stayed out all night, dodging the moons of streetlights and cars. They were our accomplices and our life vests, and we needed their compartments to be endless.
Today’s backpacks disdain excess. They are streamlined and single source, with buckles that gracefully fasten and hidden magnets that invisibly cling. Their side pockets are designed to accommodate only certain brands of aluminum: the thermos that never changes temperature, the phone that picks your eyeball out of a crowd. Today’s backpacks never get off the shuttle; they don’t even go out for lunch.
My first year in college I wore an oversize backpack with a patch that said Utah sewn on it, and I ran through redwood trees in the forests behind UC Santa Cruz each day. The heavier drug users swore they talked to fairies and nymphs back there. Rachel, from Marin, even had sex in a redwood tree. Seeing a used condom at the foot of the trunk the next day, she kicked sorrel over its yellow skin and said, “Gross.” I wore wool sweaters layered atop one another and grew a single dreadlock in my otherwise straight hair. I wasted all my time. At night I rode the campus shuttle in continuous loops, from the entrance deep into the trees, savoring the dark hills and the driver’s voice singing along to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” It rained every day in January that year, 1995—the year I took mushrooms at a Grateful Dead concert and cried in the rafters of the Oakland Coliseum, the last year that Jerry was alive. My youth was full of unnecessary trajectories and fallen branches and the time I climbed too high and could not get down, but it was textured and unrepeatable, and I fear that today it would be written off as just a bunch of mistakes.
But alongside these feelings is another, however guilty or impure. It is the rush of gaining entrance to a fortress long closed, a window now opened. What was once a wall dividing the Bay Area, cutting off my view, now has a ladder thrown over its top. Shortcuts appear where once only long roads existed. I do not look down on others from my raised seat on the company shuttle, but it no longer seems laughable that I could. I do not wear a backpack with the logo of my company embroidered on its pouch, but it’s possible that someday I might.
After the beer garden, as we walk down the street, a slightly older man, bearded and dirty, like Charles Manson but handsome, wobbles by in tattered shorts and a half-buttoned shirt. “I’m just trying to get back to New Mexico so I can die,” he bellows, and we are confronted with the starkness of those who are inside and those who are not.
*
Technology works in metaphors because it lacks in objecthood. I decide this when I realize that the contents of a screen can be seen at only the right angle and light. But for all this industry’s ethereality, I feel only bodily in this job. My hips swivel, bovine, beneath my pants. When I walk across a room, I am neither invisible nor directly seen. A woman describes the feeling in a documentary about coyotes that I watch one night: “I can’t see him but sometimes I don’t feel that I’m alone,” she says of the animal that stalks her backyard.
Over Christmas, a coyote begins roaming my mom’s neighborhood. She takes minor pains to avoid him, not going outside at night, keeping the dog close to her side. I do the opposite. I look for him. I stare out the kitchen window and absorb every hint of scrub brush, every broken tree. I memorize the jackrabbit prints in the muddy snow—two large feet, two small. I imagine the coyote’s methods of surveillance and attempt to duplicate them; I want to flash a blinding mirror that reveals his own tactics. It is unnerving to be watched but to never see your watcher, to be tracked on land where you are not meant to be by a creature thoroughly native.
We begin to track that which tracks us, even though we are unskilled. I learn to identify coyote scat, black and grassy, like rubber that burns off a tire. There is very little snow this year and what there is is melting, revealing dog piles and pine needles. The air has a raw smell, fecal and sweet. When it rains one day, I worry about the coyote. I picture him coming to me, stranded on the road like a hitchhiker, fur matted and dripping, pleading with me to stop.
In The Birds, the male love interest is a lawyer who visits his family in Bodega Bay on the weekends. He plays in pet stores in San Francisco during the week, causing trouble because he can. He is the guy standing next to the beer tap in the third-floor kitchenette, Nerf ball in his hands. “Wanna go upstairs and shoot some pool?” he asks.
On Fridays we have happy hours that begin at three. A service delivers local microbrews to the office. The beers are yeasty and thick, with flavors like peanut butter and oatmeal stout. When the happy hour is announced on Slack, a man will respond by writing “beer” and posting an emoji of a beer mug. Then another man does, and another, writing “beers,” “lots of beers,” “beers, beers, beers,” and then they post gifs of men drinking beer.
I am in a foreign country; these are my hosts. I study their dialects and graph their inflections, seeking fluency. I listen as they discuss fishing trips and ways to get their wives to watch science-fiction movies and how annoyed they get when she eats their leftover burrito from the fridge. I offer up pieces of my own life that I think they will like: stories of my boyfriend’s obsessive CD collection, memories of the science-fiction movies my brother made me watch as a child. I too cringed at the green of the Emperor’s blood in Flash Gordon; I also sat in awe when the owl in Clash of the Titans moved its brass wings. But this is belonging by proxy, a male escort at my side; it is never inherent.
These guys like to play practical jokes. One designer rubs his hands with light green hand sanitizer each time he returns to his desk. Some guys go to the drugstore and find dish soap in that exact shade and replace it, and the designer falls for it. It was hilarious, they say. I try playing practical jokes at home, in my regular life. My partner Aaron goes to Whole Foods and ties up the dog outside. I decide to meet him outside but to move the dog to another spot. I try to anticipate the split second after he sees the dog is gone and before he realizes my sleight of hand. The moment does not come. Instead he is unmoored. He finally finds me and the dog around the corner and comes to us crying, scared he has lost something we will never get back.
*
Sometime in January, I feel my butt getting bigger. It has always been round, but its proportions become askew: width and depth outpacing length. I look at my butt in the bathroom mirror. It is planetary, a single Styrofoam ball in a science fair display. I think about my butt when I stand in the office kitchen brewing tea, when I sit in the small chairs during meetings. If I stand still long enough, my butt starts to rival the magnetism of the machines that pull all the dust to their surfaces each night and in the morning let it go.
One day after a meeting, Monica says to me in a whisper, “We’re going to hire you permanently.” I am three months into a four-month contract that was initially described to me as a six-month one, and the only healthcare plan that my staffing agency offers is called, simply, Benefits in a Card. It is a flimsy card, library- not credit-card thick, as though one of many punched out of a sheet. Its website brags to employers that it offers the least amount of coverage legally allowed. It tells me there are four doctors in Oakland I can visit with the possibility of reimbursement. When I do make an appointment, I arrive to find the doctor and her assistant laughing over the meagerness of my plan. Longing for a human, I look up Benefits in a Card on Google Street View, and it shows me their office as a curb in a parking lot, ringed with dense greenery, somewhere in South Carolina.
Several weeks later, Monica takes Sean and me into a room named for a movie about a woman who is pursued against her will. Her life turns strange; the animals undermine her. She summons strength she was not bred to have. Monica tells us that Sean is being promoted and that my position is being eliminated. They are restructuring; it is not personal. The next day Dustin comes in on his day off to meet with me. He wears black gym shorts and a black tee shirt, as though interrupted mid-workout. He takes me to a floor decorated for the Pony Express. There is a stool with a saddle for a seat and a pair of cowboy boots in the corner. Dustin wants me to know that it was his decision to not hire me. “I have to feel really good about a person before I bring them on, and I don’t feel that way about you,” he says. "Tough day, huh?" he asks. I first cry in the bathroom on the floor of the Pony Express and later when I return to my desk. I try not to make a sound, but I am porous. My eyes and nose run, and my cheeks turn hot and red. My mouth takes small gulps of air like I am thirsty.
When I return the next morning, Dustin has sent me an email telling me that my crying the previous afternoon was disruptive, threatening the well-being of the group. He expects emotional stability in his employees, and my contract is dependent on my display of this quality. I have fallen into dangerous territory, asserting a pheromone profile that is not in the code. I fail to recognize myself though I visit the bathroom mirror hourly for inspection. A basket of tampons sits on the counter, but they’re not the right kind. They get longer, not wider, as they fill with blood, harder to pull out the longer they’re inside. I write back to Dustin and make him a promise: I will be emotionally stable, productive, and positive at work. When I see him at happy hour that week, he reaches out his pint glass to clink against mine, but I have long finished my drink—my mouth is already dry.
I feel heavy as I stand beside him and sense my metabolism begin to ebb. The food that enters my body is not digested but waits at the gate to my stomach. In the kitchenette bags of protein powder rest on the counter and a scale is on the ground. The last product director, fired before I arrived, was into weightlifting, I am told, and he wanted his staff to achieve similar bulk. What if I won the weight-gain contest? Would I get disqualified for my hips? Would they let me stay?
*
If you want to swim fast, you must learn to move your body in ways that reduce friction. You must cup your hands taut and twirl them down your sides. Force your body to move as the water moves: reach forward in hungry gasps and ebb in careful sighs. It is not a natural thing, but it is one that can be taught. An early lesson emerges from these tricks: to progress in a foreign substance, you must assimilate entirely.
In tech, friction is also considered an undesirable thing. It occurs when a person experiences delays on the user path. When a site takes minutes, not seconds, to load, when a set of instructions does not clarify but only misleads, a distance emerges between person and machine. An itchy sensation, like a limb that has fallen asleep. They may move to dislodge it, close their computer, even walk away. Such actions are death for the internet man, deterrents to growth and conversion, his only two goals. Growth as in mass, not a tumor but an abundance—the more users, the better. Conversion as in purchase, not foothold but transaction.
But what if the user does not want to be swallowed whole? Where is the woman who wishes to stay rigid, an intact body surrounded by foam? In Vertigo Kim Novak’s character throws herself into the water beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. Her clothing billows like moth wings; she is not absorbed. If Jimmy Stewart had not rescued her, how soon before the ocean spit her back out, realizing she did not belong?
I am not a fast swimmer. My stroke is uneven, and my left leg kicks out rather than down. I am constantly reminded of myself, my body reluctant to fully disappear. At the end of the day, I let myself fall to the bottom of the pool, resisting progression. At the end of the day, my resistance determines my speed.
There’s a literary niche on the Internet where otherwise normal people transparently catalog their purchases for all to see in an effort to dispel the taboo surrounding talking about money. Most people know them as money diaries.
This week, when the U.K.’s Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the Secretary of State for the Home Department released a white paper calling for significantly increased regulation for tech companies, the scope of the debate was predictable. The MIT Technology Review laid it out succinctly:
Technology giants will be forced to have a “duty of care” for their users, if a proposal announced by the government on Monday becomes law. The proposal — a “white paper,” in UK legal parlance, which is one of the first stages of a formal government policy — is, on the surface at least, sweeping in scope and is a serious shot across the bows for big tech companies. But it has also raised some serious concerns about how it will be implemented and the possible consequences it might have on citizens’ free speech…
The proposals have raised interest among academics and observers, and alarm among privacy campaigners. The former note that while the document is scant on details despite being tens of thousands of words long, it sets out a clear direction in a way few countries have been willing to do. But the latter fear that the way it is implemented could easily lead to censorship for users of social networks rather than curbing the excesses of the networks themselves.
This proposal comes on the tail of an exposé in Bloomberg entitled YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant; the debate around that piece, which I wrote about last week in two Daily Updates (here and here), not only touched on the question of free speech, but also the sheer scale of the problem — and, relatedly, the sheer scale of Facebook of Google.
Problematic Regulation
In short, there are clear questions that arise around all of these exposés and proposals:
First, what content should be regulated, if any, and by whom?
Second, what is a viable way to monitor the content generated on these platforms?
Third, how can privacy, competition, and free expression be preserved?
You can see how these questions quickly arrive at competing answers when looking at recent attempts at regulation:
The European Copyright Directive, specifically Article 13, makes platforms liable for copyright violations, and while the European Parliament took care to state that this wasn’t a requirement for a content filter, there is no other viable solution. Content filters are not only extremely difficult and expensive to develop (Google has spent $100 million plus on ContentID), entrenching the largest players that have the resources to fund development and the leverage to pay for it, they will also necessarily be overly strict, limiting user expression.
Even more egregious than the Copyright Directive, amazingly enough, is Australia’s new law about “abhorrent violent material” like the live-streaming of the horrific Christchurch mass shooting. Companies are liable if such content is discovered on their service period — being told it exists is sufficient evidence of recklessness — and worse, every company in the stack is liable, from ISPs to cloud providers to social networks. That leaves no choice but to spy on all user traffic or, for small-and-medium-sized platforms outside of Australia, avoid the country altogether.
At the same times, the Christchurch video and its spread are clearly problematic — there is something off about the current state of affairs.
The Christchurch Video
It hardly bears noting that in a pre-Internet world there would be no widespread video of the Christchurch hate crime. Capturing video required specialized equipment, and more importantly, broadcasting video was limited to a small number of television stations, all of which, even if they had the video, would have exercised their editorial judgment to keep it off the air.
What is critical to note, though, is that it is not a direct leap from “pre-Internet” to the Internet as we experience it today. The terrorist in Christchurch didn’t set up a server to livestream video from his phone; rather, he used Facebook’s built-in functionality. And, when it came to the video’s spread, the culprit was not email or message boards, but social media generally. To put it another way, to have spread that video on the Internet would be possible but difficult; to spread it on social media was trivial.
The core issue is business models: to set up a live video streaming server is somewhat challenging, particularly if you are not technically inclined, and it costs money. More expensive still are the bandwidth costs of actually reaching a significant number of people. Large social media sites like Facebook or YouTube, though, are happy to bear those costs in service of a larger goal: building their advertising businesses.
The key differentiator of Super-Aggregators is that they have three-sided markets: users, content providers (which may include users!), and advertisers. Both content providers and advertisers want the user’s attention, and the latter are willing to pay for it. This leads to a beautiful business model from the perspective of a Super-Aggregator:
Content providers provide content for free, facilitated by the Super-Aggregator
Users view that content, and provide their own content, facilitated by the Super-Aggregator
Advertisers can reach the exact users they want by paying the Super-Aggregator
Everything is aligned from the Super-Aggregator perspective: users give attention that content providers work to earn, and advertisers compete to buy their way in.
Moreover, this arrangement allows Super-Aggregators to be relatively unconcerned with what exactly flows across their network: advertisers simply want eyeballs, and the revenue from serving them pays for the infrastructure to not only accommodate users but also give content suppliers the tools to provide whatever sort of content those users may want.
That, there, is the rub: given that these platforms are basically reflections of humanity, what users want varies from the beautiful to the profane — and things far more ugly than that. And worse, there is no editorial judgment to keep users from what they want, or suppliers from providing it. Indeed, that such sordid content can exist on YouTube and Facebook is testament to just how popular they are; that such content is effectively incentivized speaks to the fact that YouTube and Facebook’s moneymaking mechanism is completely divorced from this content match-making.
Market Failure
This is, in its own way, a market failure, albeit not, to be clear, in an economic sense: the allocation of goods and services by a Super-Aggregator is not only efficient, but also generates significant consumer surpluses. The failure, rather, comes from videos like that of the Christchurch massacre, or problematic YouTube content. It is not good for society that terrorists be able to freely broadcast their videos, or that child-exploitation videos spread on YouTube.
The problem is that there is no way to check this behavior: the vast majority of Facebook and YouTube users self-select away from this content, and while advertisers raise a fuss if they find out their ads are alongside this content, they have no incentive to leave the platforms entirely. That leaves Facebook and YouTube themselves, but while they would surely like to avoid PR black eyes, what they like even more is the limitless supply of attention and content that comes from making it easier for anyone anywhere to upload and view content of any type.
Note how much different this is than a traditional customer-supplier relationship, even one mediated by a market-maker: users disgusted by Uber, for example, could switch to Lyft, directly impacting Uber’s bottom-line. Or go back a few years, when GoDaddy expressed support for SOPA copyright legislation: the company was forced to change its position in the face of widespread boycotts (including by yours truly). When users pay they have power; when users and those who pay are distinct, as is the case with these advertising-supported Super-Aggregators, the power of persuasion — that is, the power of the market — is absent.
The Three Frees
There are, in Internet parlance, three types of “free”:
“Free as in speech” means the freedom or right to do something
“Free as in beer” means that you get something for free without any additional responsibility
“Free as in puppy” means that you get something for free, but the longterm costs are substantial
Most in the West agree, at least in theory, with the idea that the Internet should preserve “free as in speech”; China in particular represents a cautionary tale as to how technology can be leveraged in the opposite direction. The question that should be asked, though, is if preserving “free as in speech” should also mean preserving “free as in beer.”
Specifically, Facebook and YouTube offer “free as in speech” in conjunction with “free as in beer”: content can be created and proliferated without any responsibility, including cost. Might it be better if content that society deemed problematic were still “free as in speech”, but also “free as in puppy” — that is, with costs to the supplier that aligned with the costs to society?
A Regulatory Framework for the Internet
This distinction might square some of the circles I presented at the beginning: how might society regulate content without infringing on rights or destroying competitive threats to the largest incumbents?
Start with this precept: the Internet ought to be available to anyone without any restriction. This means banning content blocking or throttling at the ISP level with regulation designed for the Internet. It also means that platform providers generally speaking should continue to not be liable for content posted on their services (platform providers include everything from AWS to Azure to shared hosts, and everything in-between); these platform providers can, though, choose to not host content suppliers they do not want to, whether because of their own corporate values or because they fear boycott from other customers.
I think, though, that platform providers that primarily monetize through advertising should be in their own category: as I noted above, because these platform providers separate monetization from content supply and consumption, there is no price or payment mechanism to incentivize them to be concerned with problematic content; in fact, the incentives of an advertising business drive them to focus on engagement, i.e. giving users what they want, no matter how noxious.
This distinct categorization is critical to developing regulation that actually addresses problems without adverse side effects. Australia, for example, has no need to be concerned about shared hosting sites, but rather Facebook and YouTube; similarly, Europe wants to rein in tech giants without — and I will give the E.U. the benefit of the doubt here — burdening small online businesses with massive amounts of red tape. And, from a theoretical perspective, the appropriate place for regulation is where there is market failure; constraining the application to that failure is what is so difficult.
The result is a regulatory framework that looks like this:
“Free as in speech” is guaranteed at the infrastructure level, the market polices platform providers generally (i.e. “free as in puppy”), while regulation is narrowly limited to businesses that are primarily monetized through advertising (i.e. “free as in beer”) and thus impervious to traditional content marketplace pressures.
This framework, to be clear, leaves many unanswered questions: what regulations, for example, are appropriate for companies like YouTube and Facebook? Are they even constitutional in the United States? Should we be concerned about the lack of competition in these regulated categories, or encouraged that there will now be a significant incentive to build competitive services that do not rely on advertising? What about VC-funded companies that have not yet specified their business models?
Still, I think this framework provides a very important foundation for addressing many of the flaws in today’s regulatory proposals, particularly the unintended effects on small-and-medium sized businesses and the platforms that support them which, I believe, are critical for the economy of the future. Regulators and lawmakers should, as always, be wary that in the well-meaning attempt to shape the world as it is they foreclose the world that might be.
Most of the feedback I received was positive, but not all of it, and
I want to continue the conversation a bit further.
The Big Idea
For some readers, the big idea of my post got lost due to some clumsy writing on my part. Here's the main thing I was trying to say, in five points:
(1) In the context of .NET ...
(2) F# usage is being hindered by the perception that adopting F# will be a terribly painful change, and ...
(3) This perception is inaccurate, as it is very possible to approach F# in an incremental and additive way, and ...
(4) To some extent, that will involve using the non-FP features of F#, and ...
(5) That's okay.
I like to think that if my post had contained only the five points above, it might have earned an "Amen" from nearly every F# fan.
However, based on the feedback I received, I now see that my post had some minor problems, and a couple of major ones.
The minor problems mostly came when I tried to illustrate my big idea with somewhat quirky examples. Perhaps it was a bit contrived to reference the issue about the F# compiler backend. Perhaps the terminology of "ML dialect" was not the best way to speak about how questions of functional programming might play into the perception of F# as a non-incremental change.
Those things don't bother me too much. It's rare to write something and never find ways it could have been better.
The main reason for this followup is to address the two problems I see as "major".
What about JS, Fable, SAFE stack?
My post doesn't clearly explain where it fits in the F# community as a whole.
F# is a .NET language, but nowadays it is also a JS language. It targets two (somewhat) distinct platforms.
Point (1) above wasn't clear at all. Picture a Venn diagram of the F# community and the .NET community. My post was intended to be applicable only to the area where those two circles overlap. When I was writing it, I was thinking mostly about .NET Core and Xamarin.
So it (understandably) seemed strange to some readers that a lot of the exciting stuff going on in the F# world right now is with Fable and SAFE, (which, BTW, are obviously awesome), and I didn't mention them. I should have, if only to provide better context.
Personally, I am extremely interested in the perception and adoption of F# in the .NET community, so that's what I was writing about.
But plenty of F# developers are focusing their attention on other areas, and that's cool too.
History
Given points (2) and (3) above, the question is "Why?".
Perhaps I should have left this in the form of a question.
Something like: "Much of the .NET community has a perception of F# that (I think) is inaccurate. How did that happen?"
Instead, I tried to proceed with the following sentence as my starting point: "My claim is that we (F# fans) need to examine how we are contributing to the problem."
Ordinarily, I would have no hesitation about that kind of approach. Every coin has two sides. I hold a basic belief that in every disagreement or misunderstanding or conflict, even if it initially seems like I am not at fault, it is profitable to ask myself how I might be "contributing to the problem".
I do think we (F# fans) have choices in how we talk about F# to others. Our words can help promote accurate perceptions or they can add confusion.
And I do still think maybe I am correct in saying that "The least effective way to promote F# adoption is the one that comes most naturally."
But my post tackled this issue with far too little awareness and respect for the full history of the F# community. I am, relatively speaking, a newcomer. In the 14 year history of F#, there have been quite a few ups and downs. I didn't start with F# until around 2014, so I wasn't there for all of that.
Quite simply, if you have been with F# for a long time, you've been through a lot. Did my piece seem like I was saying it's your fault that C# developers don't understand F#?
If so, I can understand why you saw that. And, given how complicated the relationship between the F# and .NET communities has been, I can understand why challenging you to examine your level of responsibility would be unwelcome, especially coming from someone with only a few years on the scene.
And I'm sorry.
Bottom line
I love F#. I love C#. I just want us to be a happy .NET family.
Thanks so much for those who took the time to read my post, and to those who gave feedback, both positive and negative.
Peace.
P.S.
But the memes. Not exactly fresh, but still, the memes were great, right?
Judy Osburn (right), who owns a heritage house a block away from the Larch Street site (proposed for a five-storey rental building), is organizing neighbourhood opposition.
It’s in “the wrong place,” says Osburn, who has lived in the neighbourhood for 30 years. …
“The only way they can make (the project) work is to make it higher,” Osburn said. “Make the units smaller, and make the building higher. Well, that’s like the ghetto. You’re dropping the ghetto in Kitsilano …
Councillor Jean Swanson (left) said developers are not interested in building non-market rentals, and argued the city needs to rezone parts of Vancouver as rental-only.
“I can remember when there weren’t any condos. Rentals were all there was. It was fine, it was better than now,” said Swanson.
While Qualcomm gets plenty of attention for its top-tier chipsets built for high-end flagships, the company has a whole host of mid-range processors for the device class just under the high-end.
Continue reading →
Google introduced several tweaks to Android’s app switcher — also know as Overview or Recents — in Android Pie. While some of those tweaks weren’t great, one of the best additions was the ability to copy images and text in Overview.
Unfortunately, it looks like Google has broken or removed that feature in the Q beta.
For the unfamiliar, this smart text and image selection feature allowed users to long-press on pictures and words feature in the preview of an app in the Recents menu. You could then copy the text or share the photo to another app. Unfortunately, it was a Pixel exclusive, but that didn’t stop it from being really cool.
In the second Android Q beta, however, the image selection doesn’t work. Text selection still works, thankfully. Oddly, you can select text inside images too.
We didn’t test the feature in Beta 1, so it’s not clear if it worked before.
Android Q lets you select text and text in images, but not the image itself.
Considering the text selection feature still works, my guess is an Android Q bug broke image selection, and Google will fix it. However, it’s possible the search giant removed the feature to appease app developers.
The image sharing feature allowed users to bypass the lack of sharing options in other apps, such as Instagram, Spotify or other apps that typically prevent you from copying images.
If that’s the case, it’s a sad day for a great feature. Hopefully, it’s just a matter of something broken in the beta (which would be apt), and the function will return in Q’s full release.
Google has made strides to unify Android’s design and look in Android Q, while still making it customizable for users. One of the more visible parts of that is the recently discovered Pixel Themes app, but there are plenty of little pieces as well.
Playing around with Q today, I noticed that changing the app icon shape does a lot more than switch your home screen from rows of circles to rows of squares. It transforms the search bar, Settings icons and quick settings toggles too.
In Android Q Beta 2, you can adjust the icon shape in the Developer Options menu in Settings. All the regulars are here, including the device default (in my case, circles), ‘Teardrop,’ ‘Squircle,’ ‘Rounded Rectangle’ and ‘Square.’
Whichever shape you select, the quick settings toggles in the notification shade — and the notification shade itself — will adapt to that shape. Further, the coloured icons in the Settings menu also take on the style you choose.
It also looks like changing the icon shape subtly adjusts the roundness of the corners of the search bar and other elements in the Settings menu.
The search bar acts a little differently, however. Selecting either the default — circles — or the Teardrop setting makes the search bar corners very rounded. This fits the style we’re used to on Pixel phones, with the search bar looking like a stretched pill.
Further, using the Rounded Rectangle or Square setting makes the search bar rectangular with slightly rounded corners. To my eye, the rounding on display here matches the rounding present in Android’s dialogue windows, notification shade and more.
Finally, the Squircle option gives the search bar rounder corners than the Rounded Rectangle and Square settings, but not as round as the other settings. I found this one to be particularly buggy, and sometimes it would keep the previous search bar settings.
While ultimately these options are small, it shows greater attention to detail from Google. Having my icon shape match the shape of quick settings toggles and the search bar makes Q feel more together than past iterations of Android.
I’ve lived on the edge for years, ignoring Windows’ incessant messages to ‘Safely Remove’ whatever USB storage device I have connected to my desktop.
It seems I was on the right side of history because the Windows 10 ‘version 1809’ updates Microsoft’s desktop operating system’s default setting for USB and Thunderbolt devices.
Previous versions of Windows included a setting called ‘Better Performance’ that resulted in caching on external devices. As a result, the operating system required you to ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ before popping it from a device’s USB port.
Now, the default setting has been shifted to ‘Quick Removal,’ allowing you to pull USB storage devices from your computer immediately. Given that I’ve already been doing this for almost two decades with a gleeful reckless abandon, nothing has really changed for me.
If you want to hop in a time machine and reenable Windows’ ‘Safely Remove’ feature, follow the instructions below, as noted by ZDNet:
1. Connect the USB device your computer.
2. Right-click ‘Start’ and select ‘File Explorer.’
3. In ‘File Explorer,’ identify the letter or label that is associated with the device (for example, USB Drive (D:)).
4. Right-click ‘Start’ and select ‘Disk Management.’
5. In the lower section of the ‘Disk Management’ window right-click the label of the device and click ‘Properties.’
6. Select ‘Policies,’ and then choose the policy you want to use, according to Microsoft.
And anyway, none of it matters, because once it's over the EU will say what is really happening tomorrow at the summit. May's presence in Europe today, rather than Westminster, tells you where the power lies.
Posted by
IanDunt
on Tuesday, April 9th, 2019 9:02am
No prime minister has overseen a more significant decline in British standing in our lifetime. twitter.com/jennyhillBBC/s…
Slightly awkward start to what the German press call Theresa May’s ‘begging tour’ Angela Merkel normally waits on red carpet to greet guests on arrival ....not today... pic.twitter.com/yYYG3NGy37
Posted by
jennyhillBBC
on Tuesday, April 9th, 2019 11:21am
588 likes, 321 retweets
Posted by
IanDunt
on Tuesday, April 9th, 2019 11:33am
If you’ve never bothered to organize the apps on your phone, to clean out old files, or to wrangle your notifications into a sensible order, that disorder can make your phone an overwhelming, slow, and buggy device. You can fix this and give your phone new life. Decluttering takes just a few minutes.
Delete apps you don’t use
Ever downloaded an app for a single purpose, such as a conference, work meeting, or vacation, and then left that app on your phone to digitally rot away on the home screen? The easiest way to declutter your phone is to get rid of apps you don’t need, and both Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android provide simple ways to figure out which apps you don’t use.
The easiest way to find those neglected apps is to look at all the apps in a list. On an iPhone, head to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. On Android, open the Play Store, tap the hamburger menu in the top-left corner, tap My apps & games > Installed > Alphabetical, and change it to Last Used. Delete apps that are listed as Never Used or that you haven’t opened in months. I also prefer to delete rarely used apps for services where I can just use the website instead.
Once you’ve cleared out apps you don’t need, it’s time to organize the home screen. Everyone’s sense of order is different, but having a system—-any system—in place is useful to prevent clutter in the future. Melanie Pinola, managing editor for Zapier, has a simple method for organizing folders: “One thing I learned is to group apps into folders by verb or action. So, ‘Write,’ ‘Contact,’ ‘Read,’ etc. This makes it easier to get directly to what you want to do on your phone and is also gratifying in a way to tie an app you’re opening with a purpose and action item.”
Sometimes organization is fruitless, and if your phone takes too much time to organize, there’s one easy solution: Don’t bother. Instead, get in the practice of launching apps from the search menu. On an iPhone, pull down on the home screen to open search, type the first few letters of an app name, and then tap the app when it pops up. On Android, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to pull up the app drawer and then start typing. Once you get the hang of launching apps like this, I recommend limiting your home screen to four or five rows of apps you use the most and hiding everything else on another page.
Free up storage
Sometimes I miss 16 GB phones—the studio apartments of phones—which required a certain mindfulness and decision-making to prevent them from overflowing. In this age of nearly infinite storage, it’s easy to collect more junk, and as you run out of storage your phone begins to feel sluggish. To clear this up and speed up your phone, you need to peek into some menus you may have never visited.
First up are your messages. Messaging threads filled with GIFs, memes, videos, and photos can take up a ton of space. In iOS, you can change how long your phone stores messages so it clears out old threads automatically. Head to Settings > Messages > Keep Messages. Once there, set how long you want to keep messages before they self-destruct. If you want to keep the text but delete attachments, head instead to Settings > General > iPhone Storage, scroll down to Messages, and then tap Review large Attachments. This screen will show you all the big files. Android’s Messages app doesn’t have a setting like this, but you can swipe left or right on a message thread in Messages to archive old threads. Most third-party apps, including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, have some means to clear out old messages.
The biggest storage hogs on your phone are likely photos and videos. Back them up to an online cloud backup service like Apple iCloud, Google Photos, or Amazon’s Prime Photos. Once you back up the photos, you can delete them from your phone and access them remotely through the backup service.
If you’restill short on space even after taking those steps, the culprit might be an app that’s hoarding data. Podcasts, music, and video apps are usually the biggest offenders. To see what’s taking up space in iOS, head to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. On Android, pull down the notification shade and tap the cog and then Storage. This screen displays a list of all the apps on your phone. For example, the Prime Video app on my phone takes up 2 GB of space, even though I’ve never downloaded a video. To clear out app data on an iPhone, tap the app from the Storage screen and then tap Offload. Once the phone is done deleting everything, tap Reinstall. On Android, tap the app name and then the Clear Cache button.
If you have an Android phone, you should also clear out the downloads folder. Open the Downloads app (Files on some phones), tap and hold a file name, and tap the trash icon to delete the file.
Disable unnecessary notifications
It’s not just apps and storage that get in the way. It’s also the cacophony of notifications cluttering up your phone’s lock screen.
First, enable Do Not Disturb. This way, calls, texts, and whatever other nonsense comes through when you’re supposed to be sleeping won’t wake you up. If I need to focus on a deadline for work, I enable Do Not Disturb during the day, too.
You should disable most notifications. Beth Skwarecki, health editor at Lifehacker, prefers a nearly notification-free environment: “Very few notifications are both useful and urgent. Pretty much the only notifications I allow on my phone are ones I’ve set for myself, like calendar reminders, and certain messages from actual human beings.” Another simple rule: If you already open an app a lot, you don’t need it to send notifications.
After all this, your phone will feel new, free of pointless dreck accumulated over years of use. Finding what you’re looking for will be easier and faster, and you’ll spend less time on your phone.
Shrill and Veronica Mars are set to hit Bell’s Crave streaming service on May 3rd through a new deal with Warner Bros., adding to the streaming service’s ever-growing lineup of content.
Shrill stars Saturday Night Live’s Aidy Bryant as Annie, a young woman who, according to a press release, “aims to change her life, but not her body.” Bryant also handles co-writing and is a co-executive producer on the show, along with Lorne Michaels, Elizabeth Banks, Alexandra Rushfield and Lindy West.
Veronica Mars making its way to Crave, on the other hand, includes the first three seasons of the show, as well as an upcoming revival set to launch later this year. Veronica Mars, starring Kristen Bell, focuses on the investigation of murdered spring breakers in the fictional town of Neptune, California.
The cult classic TV show’s revival features new cast members J.K. Simmons, Patton Oswalt, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Clifton Collins Jr. and Izabela Vidovic. Previous cast members, including Ken Marino, Jason Dohring, Percy Daggs III, Daran Norris, Enrico Colantoni, Ryan Hansen, Francis Capra and Max Greenfield, are also set to return to the show.
The Veronica Mars revival is also making its way to U.S.-exclusive streaming service Hulu. This isn’t the first time a Hulu original has made its way to Crave, with The Handmaid’s Tale being the most prominent example. On the flip side, Crave original Letterkenny made its way to Hulu back on July 13th, 2018.
Both Shrill and Veronica Mars will be available on Crave’s base level $9.99 CAD-per-month tier. Crave is available on iOS, Apple TV, Android and Xbox One.
This survey of some 90,000 software developers on Stack Overflow is heavily weighted toward European and North American respondents, and of course is self-selecting, but it still provides some pretty good insight into the field. Let's deal with one myth right away: the idea that programmers don't go to school. Wrong - the vast majority of them have a university degree. The vast majority are also employed full-time. But the rest of the stereotypes all fit. They are overwhelmingly young white males. They're not heavily into social media, but if they are, it's probably Reddit. Apart from their degree, how do they learn? Generally by teaching themselves, otherwise by taking a MOOC.
Adam @TheFeenMachine_
Auf der MWC 2019 hat Huawei den Mate X vorgestellt. Dies ist das erste Telefon des Unternehmens mit 5G-Funktionalität. Jetzt hat das chinesische Unternehmen offen bekundet, für die Lieferung seiner internen Chips auch ein weiteres [...]
Jenny (Phire) Zhang @phirephoenix
Beim Galaxy Event präsentierte Samsung sein Galaxy A80. Highlight ist dabei die Triple-Kamera, die auf der Rückseite hochgeschoben wird und so eine Aufnahme von Selfies im 180 Grad Radius ermöglicht, da sie sich automatisch nach [...]
Issues | Art Practical.
While Qualcomm gets plenty of attention for its top-tier chipsets built for high-end flagships, the company has a whole host of mid-range processors for the device class just under the high-end.
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IanDunt
on Tuesday, April 9th, 2019 9:02amjennyhillBBC on Tuesday, April 9th, 2019 11:21am
