Rolandt

More than any other question I get asked about our life, online or otherwise is... "when will we move out of 600 square feet?" or "what will we do when the kid's are older?".   The funny part is, it's the same question we've gotten since we first mentioned that we were thinking about having kids. We MUST move out of our 1 bedroom city apartment! Before the baby is born, before I get pregnant again, before baby 2 arrives.... before, before, before.

Instead we have taken a wait and see approach. Have a baby and see if the apartment feels too small. Install a wall bed and see if it helps. Have another baby and see if it's NOW too small. Purge, minimize, and re-prioritize. And in that process almost 5 years have passed! 

Financially speaking (which I rarely do on this blog as it is not a strength of mine), we have contributed to our mortgage for 5 years longer, paying off more principal and avoiding a larger mortgage or higher rent (than our current mortgage) for a bigger home. We also haven't moved in 8 years. That alone has saved us money as moving is a large expense. With the smaller overhead due to our small space we have been able to travel often, something that means a lot to our family. Also, I was able to leave my corporate job for part-time freelance work that is more fulfilling personally and creatively. I also like to think that our smaller space has kept our spending in check. Not to say we are perfect at this, as aesthetics are important to me. But staying small limits our ability to buy most new things. We don't have room for many impulse buys and usually instantly regret the space they take up. And I am aware I am speaking from a place of privilege, as we choose to live small in one of the most expensive cities in the world and I don't take this for granted.

In the end I can't answer the question... "when will you move out of 600 square feet". Ultimately, when it stops serving us as a family. When our most creative use of space stops working. Or the kids ask repeatedly for more privacy or space. I get the feeling we will just know when our time is up. But from where I am sitting right now, I'm so happy we didn't move because we were supposed to. And I feel there is still more to learn from this space. I want to simplify our possessions to even fewer, better things. Have clean and organized closets that are highly functioning. Be able to clean the house, top to bottom in 30 mins rather than 1 hour. Have all horizontal surfaces be clutter free the majority of the time. While we can still do better, I consider the achievement of staying and thriving in 600 square feet as a family of four, as something I'm really (albeit weirdly) proud of.

One of the things I think we could be looking at more in open ed in general, and the OU in particular, are authoring environments that allow educators to create their own interactives.

A significant blocker is the skills required to create and deploy such things:

• activity design in general;
• front end / UI coding (HTML / js)
• back end coding (application logic, js, or py, for example)
• runtime management (js can run in a browser, R or py likely to require a backend kernel to execute the code).

One of the things that appeals to me about the Jupyter and RStudio environments / ecosystems is the availability of packages that support end-user development by wrapping high level UI components as templated widgets that can be automatically generated from code. (See for example my own attempts at creating an HTML hexjson widget for rendering a hex map given an R dataframe.)

One of the things I started to come round to when creating various binderhub demos to show off how Jupyter notebooks can be used to generate and embed rich media assets for different topic areas (see slides 25-33 of the presentation from Dev.ac.uk embedded below, for example) was that a good collection of IPython magics could provide the basis for end-user developed online materials featuring embedded interactives.

For example, the py / folium magic I started working on makes it relatively straightforward to create an embedded map within a Jupyter notebook, that can then be saved and rendered as a standalone HTML page featuring an embedded interactive map.

It struck me that the magic should also work in the context of Scriptedforms, eg as per Creating Simple Interactive Forms Using Python + Markdown Using ScriptedForms + Jupyter.

And it does…

The markdown (text) file, scriptedforms_magic.md, on the left can be fired up as the HTML + interactive form on the right from a single command line command:

scriptedforms scriptedforms_magic.md

You can also do “live development” by editing and saving the markdown and then reloading the browser page.

By developing a sensible set of IPython magics, authors with some limited technical skills should be able to write enough “code”, as per the “code” in the markdown document above, to:

• identify form elements;
• bind those form elements as parameters in an IPython magic call.

After all, we keep saying everyone should be able to code… and that’s a level of coding where you can be immediately productive…

Charlene Li has added her own perspectives on the tenth anniversary of the publication of Groundswell. Read her post on LinkedIn or below: 10 years ago, my co-author Josh Bernoff and I released our first book, “Groundswell: Living in a World Transformed by Social Technologies”. On this anniversary, I wanted to reflect on what our expectations were when … Continued

The post Charlene Li: Reflecting on 10 Years of Groundswell — and What Comes Next appeared first on without bullshit.

This is my favorite Cure song, and the version I’m recommending is one of the best-sounding electric-music recordings ever. I like the music even though I never really understood the whole emo/goth thing; that’s OK, I can like Dub without getting Rastafarianism, and Bach while puzzled by Lutheranism.

The only Cure music I own is a 1990 set of remixes called Mixed Up which I have listened to many many times; the songs are all good the production job is fantastic. I blogged about it back in 2007, dive in if you want more details.

Here’s what I wrote about Fascination Street back then: Oh my goodness, the opening is heroic and symphonic and danceable all at once; spires of sound topple into shifting textures of tone and resolve into mainstream guitar-and-drums rock flourishes. Amazing. Then the vocals, well yeah, they’re whiny all right (and i'm begging to drag you down with me to kick the last nail in), but he’s not holding anything back, and he’s in the groove and on the beat; there’s genuine rock-&-roll desperation in the lyrics and it ends up soulful. Then the big instrumental freight train comes back, with the drums and guitars and synth bouncing off each other, fast and loud and still with lots of room between the notes. Oh, those drums-and-voice interludes.

This is the 114th in the Song of the Day series (background).

Links

Spotify playlist. This tune on Amazon, iTunes, Spotify. There’s loads of live video; here’s a good one from 2002 and with better bass from 1996. But you really want to listen to the Mixed Up version.

To find our favorite learning apps and games for kids, we spent more than 40 hours researching and testing 50-plus apps recommended by educators, experts, and parents. If your family has a tablet and you want it to be more than a game-playing and video-watching device, or if you’re trying to find apps for your smartphone that will do more than keep your kids occupied in a pinch, we have some great suggestions.

After 35 hours of research, and creating 20 sculptures out of heated plastic with 10 3D pens, we found that the 3Doodler Create+ offers the best overall experience for “drawing” three-dimensional objects. It has an easy-to-use, comfortable design and offers a hard-to-find set of tips for drawing different line sizes. Just as important, 3Doodler has responsive customer service, which is an essential feature for a relatively new type of product.

The latest episode of The Omni Show is a special episode — we talk about OmniFocus 3 and flexible inspectors, enhanced repeating tasks, batch editing, and the interleaved Forecast view.

Regular interview shows are our bread and butter, but these roundtables are fun to do too. (And I can’t wait for The Omni Show Live next door to WWDC!)

Our admiration for the assembly line is so deep that we are suckers for the promise of “proven systems” regardless of their feasibility. We so treasure predictability and control that the promise seduces no matter how many times it is broken.

I started my career at what ultimately morphed into Accenture. That tenure coincided with the development of one of the early systems development methodologies—Method/1. The methodology was an attempt to make the process of understanding, designing, and implementing a technology solution to an organization’s business problem something that was manageable and repeatable. Method/1 made Accenture a lot of money and can be seen as a distant ancestor of a host of systems for building systems; agile, scrum, rational unified, waterfall, extreme programming—the ingenuity of marketers in packaging and labeling ideas is endless.

All are variations on a theme. They embody a desire for control in a turbulent world. If Ford could manufacture identical cars and McDonald’s could guarantee the consistency of fries and shakes from coast to coast, then we ought to be able to turn out information systems with similar confidence in quality and predictability.

There seems to be an uptick in promises of proven systems in multiple settings; not simply in the arena of design and development. Given their appeal, it’s critical to recognize the limits of these promises.

The first limit is the dangerously thin data from which these proven systems are built. One of the first ideas pounded into your head when you are compelled to study statistics and research methods is that “data” is not the plural form of “anecdote.” Yet most proven systems are based on a handful of prior examples that happened to work.

Look at the history of Method/1. The late accounting firm Arthur Andersen & Co.—which birthed Accenture—automated the payroll department of a GE manufacturing plant in the 1960s. That first project failed and Andersen rebuilt the system at a loss to make good. Andersen’s sales pitch to their second client boiled down to we’ve learned what mistakes to avoid while our competitors have yet to make them. Several projects later, Andersen consultants documented what they had done and packaged their ad hoc approach into a standard project plan for internal use called the “client binders.” As an accounting firm, Andersen was accustomed to protecting client identities and to thinking of audit processes as something common and repeatable for all clients. Consequently, the client binders were devoid of client specifics and mirrored the look and feel of standardized, repeatable audit processes.

In spite of their limitations and the thin data they were built on, the client binders gave Andersen’s consultants a better starting point for new projects and helped Andersen extend and consolidate their lead in the market. They worked best in the hands of experienced consultants who could use these materials to organize and support productive conversations with clients and prospects about how to structure and manage new efforts.

Then the methodology zealots took over. The experts took the crib notes that were valuable to experts and rewrote them into recipes for reasonably smart people with limited experience to follow. Repeatable, industrial, processes promise good economics to those who invent them and acceptable quality to those who seek the outputs.

The fundamental problem is that today’s knowledge work doesn’t consist of repeatable, industrial, processes no matter how much we wish they did or how often we claim they do. I’ve written before about the problems this strategy presents (Repeatable Processes and Magic Boxes).

Where does that leave us?

Be suspicious of claims about proven systems. Look for the demands for creative leaps and flashes of insight hiding within seemingly innocuous steps. Look for potentially endless cycles of analysis with no stopping rule. Find the magic box. Be wary of maps that don’t show where the roads end and the dragons hide.

The post The Siren Call of Proven Systems appeared first on McGee's Musings.

Say you write an iOS app, and now you want to write the Mac version.

Assuming there’s a data model, maybe a database, some networking code, that kind of thing, then you can use that exact same code in your Mac app, quite likely without any changes whatsoever.

That leaves the 20% or whatever that’s user interface. AppKit is not the same as UIKit, but it’s recognizable. Same patterns and concepts, and often similar names (UITableView/NSTableView).

Given that you’ve done the hard thing — learning UIKit, Xcode, and Swift and/or Objective-C — taking the next step and learning AppKit seems like a very small thing. You’ve climbed the mountain already, after all.

You might complain that AppKit has some weird stuff. True. Some of it, though, isn’t truly weird — it’s just weird to you if you’ve never dealt with things like a menubar and multiple, live-resizable windows.

People coming from AppKit to UIKit (few people these days; many people 10 years ago) might also complain about safe content area insets (or whatever the thing is these days) and size classes and all manner of strange stuff they like not having to deal with in Mac apps. UIKit’s weird too, to some people.

Ten years ago I thought that all the new iOS developers would translate to lots more Mac developers. That that didn’t happen is a huge surprise to me. Because if you’re an iOS developer you’re practically a Mac developer already.

(And — little-known secret — the economics of Mac apps appear to be more favorable than for iOS apps.)

It’s been a while since I posted about the collapse of our industrial civilization. Background is here if you’re interested in my take on how it will occur, due to the interconnection between our global economic and energy systems and the planet’s vulnerable ecology.

My reason for posting this update is a number of conversations I’ve had with fellow “collapsniks” about whether or not the (IMO insane) gun culture of the US will mean that collapse will unfold differently there than it does in the rest of the world. My current guess is that, yes, sporadically for a while there are likely to be surges in gun-facilitated crime in the US that the rest of us won’t see, but in the long run it’s unlikely to make much difference. When everyone’s boat is sinking, stealing someone else’s at gunpoint doesn’t help you.

In recent months politicians, government agencies, corporations and mainstream media have been furiously working to persuade the poor dumbed-down, exhausted populace that our industrial growth-dependent economy is “healthy” and “vibrant”, that debt levels are “manageable”, that “the myth of peak oil is dead”, and that climate change either isn’t a problem, or everything possible is being done to avert it. This is all self-serving nonsense of course: the true statistics on the economy are really scary, debt levels of both governments and consumers are utterly unsustainable, inequality continues to soar, along with all the social and political risks that entails, the looming end of affordable energy remains critical and substantially unaddressed, and climate change continues to accelerate on its runaway course.

We are living on borrowed time. “Borrowed” from the banks, “borrowed” from struggling nations, “borrowed” from future generations, “borrowed” from exhausted land, soils and seas, “borrowed” from all the species we are rendering extinct, and “borrowed” from the disenfranchised poor, sick, gullible and uneducated. Our economy is based on the presumption of endless double-digit growth in production and income to repay today’s lenders and investors (without which neither stocks nor bonds have any real value). Since it began, every bit, 100%, of our global industrial culture’s “growth” is attributable to ever-accelerating use of cheap, readily available energy. The Ponzi scheme that is our global industrial economy is way overdue for collapse. For a while longer — a year, a decade perhaps — those investing in this economy will continue to believe the impossible story that the value of their investments can not only be repaid, but repaid with profit. Or that, at least, someone else will be willing to take their position when their doubts get too great, and will keep the scheme going a while longer.

I continue to believe that it is economic collapse, rather than energy or ecological collapse, that will bring down our industrial civilization. Economic collapse will come first, and (affordable) energy collapse and ecological collapse will just aggravate, extend and inflame the misery of global economic collapse.

What is important to note, however, is that this collapse will not be an overnight global phenomenon that will produce a Hollywood dystopia — it will occur slowly and sporadically, in fits and starts, over the coming decades. And this time there will be no “recovery”. Financial collapse will precipitate a long and slow and finally permanent emergency: economic, political, technological, educational, health and ultimately social collapse. It will be the collapse of our now-global civilization. The collapse will take decades, but it will be without hope of recovery: rebuilding new human societies and cultures from its ashes will take millennia, and transpire based on a much smaller, relocalized and diverse human population. This is nothing new, of course; it is the story of every human civilization that has ever arisen on our planet.

I wanted to try to present an alternative portrait of collapse to the sensationalist, simplistic, Mad Max, dystopian story that those who haven’t lived through an economic collapse imagine will happen — they imagine the sudden, sensational, violent end of what most now think of as the only way to live (ie industrial growth capitalism), and degeneration into chaos, brutality and (we should be so lucky) “anarchy”. There is a far more likely scenario, based on what has happened when previous civilizations have fallen — not overnight, but rather slowly, unevenly, and mostly peacefully, as the edifice built on an unsustainable foundation gradually but inexorably grinds to a halt. The chart above summarizes that portrait. I will walk you through what it portrays. But first, I want to introduce a thought exercise to support some of my predictions.

Suppose I asked you to play a game. There’s a very large jar with an unknown number of marbles in it, covered with a cloth, with a spigot at the bottom that dispenses the marbles. The object of the game is to ensure every player has at least one marble at all times, and the “winner” of the game is the one with the most marbles when the game ends — ie when the jar runs out. You have no idea how full of marbles the jar is. On your turn you have two choices: to stick with the marbles you have, or to “invest” one or more marbles (putting them in the top of the jar), and then turn the spigot that many times, and collect the marbles it dispenses. The number dispensed varies from zero to several. Seems simple enough, right?

But now let’s add a wrinkle. Every second turn a certain percentage of your marbles are “depreciated” — they lose their value and are taken away from you and placed in a second jar of the same very large size, called “waste”. And when you run out of marbles, you’re out of the game. And there’s a second wrinkle: Every round, another player is added, and collectively the players have some responsibility to ensure there are always enough marbles for everyone (after all, that’s the objective of the game, which is now somewhat at odds with who is the “winner” of the game).

To make this game a little less depressing, we’ll add a third wrinkle: the game-master (who is not a player in the game) uses a random number table to determine how many marbles (from a secret stash no one else can see) to add back to the jar after each round; that could range from zero to enough marbles to fully replenish the jar, but none of the other players can see what is added. Can you feel the stress building, and the seemingly optimal strategy shifting?

Now you have some players saying there are so many marbles that the focus should be on getting lots of marbles out of the jar — after all, those with lots of marbles could “donate” some to those running out. The secret stash could be infinite, right? So let’s keep that spigot turning! But others point to the quickly filling “waste” jar and say that no stash is infinite, and that rather than giving every individual a choice each turn, there should be a collective decision on who gets to turn the spigot that round, and how the total number of marbles received by the collective should be distributed. Suddenly the game evolves into two separate games — one group whose members are free to make their own “selfish” decisions, aiming to “win”, and another group agreeing to be bound by their collective decision, aiming to keep the game going so that everyone “wins”.

Let’s add one final wrinkle — the fuller the “waste” jar is with marbles, the fewer new marbles the game-master adds proportionally each round (using a mysterious algorithm only the game-master knows). Once the “waste” jar is full, no more marbles are added! At the same time, each round a certain (but quite small) percentage of the marbles in the waste jar are “restored” (removed) by the game-master, and possibly they are added back to the secret stash (that’s up to the discretion of the unfathomable and indifferent game-master, who always “bats last” after all the players have had their turn).

Now you’ve got players running simulations and models to tell the others whether to turn the spigot or not on each turn (guess what we call them?), though of course these models make all kinds of assumptions, and few people understand or pay attention to them. And there are players trying to get the game to reach a “steady state” where the “waste” jar never gets quite full and the game goes on forever, but few players pay attention to them either, and it gets harder and harder each round as another player is added.

You get the idea. Now let me walk you through the 5 boxes in the chart above, which the marble game is a highly-imperfect but useful model of. Gotta love metaphors.

1. Box 1: Precipitating Factors: Collapse will likely begin with the same three elements that very nearly brought down the economy in 2008:
   • Some players, seeing the “waste” jar filling up quickly and worrying that the main marble jar may be running low, and the cost of turning the spigot too risky, will opt to “invest” fewer marbles each turn, or even pass entirely and hoard what they have. This is the end of the Ponzi scheme — no new investment in the jar means there is less and less in the jar to dispense to the new players. Eventually everyone stops investing, since they don’t want to contribute if the spigot isn’t giving much, if anything, back. This is called a liquidity or credit crunch. When those with money refuse to invest it out of fear they won’t get a payback, there’s no money to pay to anyone else. The marbles are going to run out fast.
   • With the disappearance of credit and liquidity, stock markets, which depend on constant growth in new investment to pay for constant increases in production and profits, will then begin to fail. No one will be able to get new or renewed loans or mortgages, leading to failures of banks, real estate and commodity markets. Bonds will become junk bonds and then worthless, as the borrowers lose the wherewithal to repay them. Banks will freeze your assets because they have no collateral to fund withdrawals by customers.
   • Governments will desperately print more money and give it essentially interest-free to the rich to get money circulating again, but the rich will just hoard it, rather than risking investing it. The rich (the 1% who own half the world’s wealth and as much as 90% of the disposable income) realize that there’s a limit to how much money governments’ central banks can print before you get, very quickly, hyperinflation and a worthless currency (ask citizens of Zimbabwe or Argentina). Unlike the situation in 2008, there is no Plan B. A global Great Depression will begin.
2. Box 2: Economy in Free Fall: Everyone will now blame everyone else for mismanagement of the economy. The stock market will repeatedly stumble and then briefly recover as those who have not experienced a real Depression keep betting on economic resilience, when the system has none left.
   • Finally, the stock market will begin to collapse entirely, first with prohibitions on transactions at prices more than x% below the previous day’s, and prohibitions on short selling, and then with delistings and short-term closures of markets, before finally, over time, the markets cease trading entirely, leaving investors to paper their walls with their stocks and bonds. Although it’s only “paper” wealth, it will produce the greatest redistribution of wealth in history, as the 1% suddenly find themselves in much the same struggle as the 99%.
   • The ripple effect on other assets will leave real estate worth only a fraction of its current Ponzi value (resulting in a flood of foreclosures, before the banks that still exist give up trying to get blood out of a stone and allow ‘owners’ to stay in ‘their’ homes indefinitely). It will also decimate the value of commodities, and essentially paralyze import/export markets (too low-value to ship and no money for buyers to pay with). And it will collapse currencies, requiring most of us to transact mainly by barter, gifting and scrip (personal, re-transferable IOUs). Although prices will plummet, wages will plummet faster, and large global companies selling non-essentials sourced from many countries will be unable to stay in business, laying off millions working in non-essential jobs.
   • As tax revenues evaporate with the collapsing economy, governments will begin to curtail, devolve and privatize services, and finally give up providing them at all. As the situation worsens and local governments lose the revenues needed to pick up the slack, it will fall to local communities to “reinvent” everything from ferries to hospitals at a subsistence, community-based level, mostly on a gift basis.
3. Box 3: Temporary Annoying Crises: While the Box 2 problems will be chronic and steadily worsening, what will be most infuriating for those trying to struggle with the economic collapse will be some of the temporary but paralyzing anomalies that this collapse will bring with it:
   • Prices of essential goods (food, energy etc) will alternately soar and plummet, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere. That will make planning, and coping with emergencies, a difficult and complicated process. We will see store shelves briefly and spasmodically empty, and then suddenly be full again. We will see gas rationing, on and off (balancing supply and demand is complex and delicate). We will see frequent and intermittent blackouts and brownouts, making anything requiring stability and scheduling almost impossible. Whole systems will fail for lack of one infuriatingly unavailable part.
   • The result will be, at times, the paradoxical situation called “stagflation” — very high unemployment, negative economic growth, yet high price inflation for things we really need, all at the same time.
   • In most of the world, we’ll just have to put up with these massive annoyances. But it’s these “annoyances”, not the chronic problems where everyone is in the same boat and the situation seems unlikely to improve, that will inflame tempers, lead to the election of demagogues, a rise in racism and xenophobia, and the temptation to use violence where the situation seems unfair, outrageous and unnecessary. This is where, in the US with its entrenched gun culture, horrific inequality and cult of individualism, local level violence could flare. But it will be mostly fruitless, so my guess is it will be sporadic rather than endemic as the collapse progresses.
4. Box 4: Ecological Collapse Adds to the Misery: The above situation will probably prevail for at least a decade, maybe two or three, before the problems of climate change weigh in heavily and the collapse of our entire civilization becomes a foregone conclusion. At first, these will be mostly intermittent problems:
   • We are likely to see a series of pandemics resulting mostly from climate change but also from the lingering effects of globalization as humans destroy what’s left of the natural environment to try to get what they need to cope with economic collapse. These will include human pandemics (most severe of which will be naturally evolved or deliberately weaponized diseases that spread without direct contact and for which we have no natural immunity or scalable treatments), but also pandemic diseases of plants, trees, ocean life and confined animals that will devastate our food supplies and the local ecologies on which we all depend.
   • Climate change will also produce, unevenly and intermittently across the globe, unpredictable and extreme climate events that will make some cities and some local ecosystems uninhabitable for us, and for the crops we grow for food. Like New Orleans, Fukushima, and Detroit, these areas will eventually be abandoned — it will simply be too expensive to rebuild them. And they’ll become more and more plentiful as climate change accelerates. Southern Europe and Southern Asia, much of the Western US and Central America, and coastal and dry areas worldwide will be especially vulnerable.
5. Box 5: The Great Migration: The culmination of all of these dislocations, disruptions, the “death by a thousand cuts”, will be what I have been calling the Great Migration. This will entail the necessity for as much as a third of humanity to repeatedly move from uninhabitable areas to habitable areas as climate change worsens and its effects become more enduring and widespread. This has happened before — during the last ice age the same proportion of humans had to move to warmer, drier areas that will have to move to cooler, stabler areas in the current century.
   • In the process, the world will have become a less habitable place not just for us but for every species on the planet that has not already been extinguished or decimated by our industrial civilization. Forests will disappear everywhere. Soils, already impoverished by human overuse, will become even poorer and dry up and blow away as deserts occupy more of our planet. The oceans will become largely toxic, uninhabitable and sterile, their diversity destroyed. Sea levels will rise, drowning low-lying (by then long-abandoned) coastal cities and islands. The remaining ecosystems will become so brittle that 90% of all species will go extinct. Industrial agriculture will cease entirely, as human endeavour returns to relocalized permaculture and the local provision of necessities (food, water, clothing, shelter, health, education, local transportation) by subsistence communities for their own members, with little left over.
   • This desolated world, as I’ve written before, will likely support less than a billion people, probably much less. It will take decades, but most of the depopulation will come from plunging birth rates rather than from diseases or wars (or people freezing or burning to death). For who would want to bring children into such a world? That is the way almost every civilization has ended. Slowly, in fits and starts, over an extended period, as members who can no longer get what they want and need, walk away to seek another culture that will work in its place.

I offer no solutions to this predicament — I don’t think it’s in our power to change it, for a whole series of reasons I’ve written about ad nauseam elsewhere. If we were to play the marble game I think we’d see the same scenario playing out, and learn that, despite how fascinating and engaging the game is, it can ultimately have no winners.

Valet: Print Your Own Vintage Images from the Library of Congress. “Download all this old school WPA artwork (legally!) for free.”

“You see, we just stumbled upon a vast archive of historic images digitally housed at the Library of Congress. The Library shares the images (available for download in multiple sizes) because the artwork is “either in the public domain, has no known copyright, or has been cleared by the copyright owner for public use.” What does that mean? We’re all free to print them and hang them in our place, at no charge.

There’s plenty to choose from, but we’re particularly drawn to the WPA posters. Between 1935 and 1943 the Work Projects Administration’s Federal Art Project printed over two million posters in 35,000 different designs to stir the public’s imagination for education, theater, health, safety and travel.”

I especially like the Travel Posters and the Work Projects Administration (WPA) Posters.

Link via Garret (dangerousmeta).

Facebook, Apr 28, 2018

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This document is being depicted as Facebook's "content moderation standard" but it isn't that. It's a document aimed at users and describes what Facebook is calling its "community standards" but is more like a plain-language version of its terms of service. This is an important distinction because the concept of "community standards" is originally (and still!) a representation of what the community thinks is appropriate, not a service provider.

That said, the document is worth a close read because it contains a number of what I might call "head-scratchers". For example, it disallows threats, but only "credible" threats. With some very few limitations, it is fine with guns and gun culture, but promotion of marijuana (soon to be legal in Canada, and already legal in many places) is a violation. Oh, and no swearing. Facebook redefines "spam" as "false advertising, fraud, and security breaches" (as opposed to the original definition, which is "unwanted advertising"). It disallows fake accounts but still won't remove fake news. It resists monetization of its incentives (eg., by requiring people to like, share, or recommend before allowing access to content). hen it receives copyright complaints, it takes down the content instead of simply notifying the person posting it.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

If you’re a Roomba owner and you shop on Amazon, you’ve likely been tempted by the myriad knockoff Roomba-filter listings offering three times as many filters (or more) for the cost of one three-pack of genuine replacements. After spending a few weeks testing four third-party filters against their first-party counterparts using two different Roombas, I found that the knockoff filters offered similar performance at a much lower price. Even though they’ll likely clog faster and need to be replaced more often, most Roomba owners can probably save about $20 per year with them. That being the case, I’d be comfortable buying knockoff filters for my own Roombas, but I stop slightly short of recommending them to most people.

An iRobot representative confirmed to Wirecutter that the company was not aware of any instances of a Roomba being seriously damaged by an inauthentic filter. However, using one would technically void the warranty on a Roomba (although the legality of that issue is also up for debate). That said, even if your Roomba does need service for some reason, iRobot has no way of telling what type of filter you’ve been using, unless you accidentally ship the vacuum to the company with that particular filter still installed.

With a knockoff filter, performance and longevity also take a slight hit, but not by as much as you might expect. Amazon reviewers, while generally happy with the knockoffs, also acknowledge that the filters seem to limit the Roomba’s cleaning power a bit and don’t last as long. My testing supported these claims as well: The dust bins were not packed quite as full, or as densely, as they were in the cleaning sessions using genuine filters. I’d guess it’s about a 10 percent difference—noticeable, but not dramatic. Wirecutter new formats editor Michael Zhao has been using fake filters for about five months now in his Roomba 860 (which runs three times a week in a one-cat household). Michael reported that the knockoffs have lasted about two-thirds as long as genuine filters before needing to be replaced; your mileage may vary.

This performance dip was pretty consistent across all four of the filters I tested—some brands performed slightly better than others, but none did better than the real thing. I happened to test filters for the Roomba 800 and 900 series from I-clean and Hongfa, which turned out to be identical. For the Roomba 600 series, the Amyehouse filters did a slightly better job than the other brand we tested. Judging from my findings, most (though not all) knockoff filter brands seem to sell the same products in different boxes, so the results I got should apply across the category.

I asked iRobot what differences between the real thing and the fakes might be causing the performance discrepancies, and Ken Bazydola, product manager for Roomba at iRobot, told me that the most important difference between genuine and knockoff filters was the filter media (the paper, basically). The media is a generic material, so theoretically anyone could buy it and make a filter that’s nearly identical to iRobot’s. But there are hundreds of generic filter media available, so it’s tricky to find an exact match. Paper that’s too porous will let some dust through, making filtration less efficient. Paper that’s too tight will restrict the airflow and hamper cleaning performance.

iRobot is much more concerned about off-brand moving parts, including the side brushes and especially the main brush rollers. If they’re not perfectly round or if they have bad bearings, they can damage the robot.

The knockoff replacements we tested clearly used different filter media than the genuine article. The paper folds on the I-clean and Hongfa filters, for example, felt softer and didn’t snap back into place quite like they did on the iRobot AeroForce filter. The knockoffs also had a thin mesh screen on the rear. We don’t know the impact of either of those differences, but they obviously weren’t carbon copies.

The other concern Bazydola brought up was that knockoff filters might have gaps around the edges, where the filter media is not fixed to the plastic frame. In theory, uncaptured debris that passed through the gaps could damage the Roomba by jamming the blower assembly, though Bazydola told us that he couldn’t recall this ever happening with third-party filters. In any case, all the filters we tested seemed to be sealed all the way around the frame, but it’s something to be mindful of before you install any filter.

Bazydola stressed that iRobot was much more concerned about off-brand moving parts, including the side brushes and especially the main brush rollers. If they’re not perfectly round or if they have bad bearings, they can damage the robot.

But again, the risk that off-brand filters pose is minimal. If you choose to go this route, buy whatever filter is cheap and has decent ratings and reviews written by real people (you can use Fakespot to help filter out bogus reviews). Both the I-clean and Hongfa filters worked well for our 800- and 900-series bots, and the Amyehouse filters performed well in the 600-series model. But Roombas are expensive, and it’s totally understandable that you might want to get the best possible performance—while also complying with the explicit terms of the warranty.

Wired is calling for an RSS revival.

RSS is the most important piece of internet plumbing for following new content from a wide range of sources. It allows you to download new updates from your favourite sites automatically and read them at your leisure. Dave Winer, forever dedicated to the open web, created it.

I used to be a very heavy RSS user. I tracked hundreds of sources on a daily basis. Not as news but as a way to stay informed about the activities and thoughts of people I was interested in. At some point, that stopped working. Popular RSS readers were discontinued, most notably Google’s RSS reader, many people migrated to the Facebook timeline, platforms like Twitter stopped providing RSS feeds to make you visit their platform, and many people stopped blogging. But with FB in the spotlight, there is some interest in refocusing on the open web, and with it on RSS.

Currently I am repopulating from scratch my RSS reading ‘antenna’, following around 100 people again.

Wired in its call for an RSS revival suggests a few RSS readers. I, as I always have, use a desktop RSS reader, which currently is ReadKit. The FB timeline presents stuff to you based on their algorithmic decisions. As mentioned I definitely would like to have smarter ways of shaping my own information diet, but then with me in control and not the one being commoditised.

So it’s good to read that RSS Reader builders are looking at precisely that.
“Machines can have a big role in helping understand the information, so algorithms can be very useful, but for that they have to be transparent and the user has to feel in control. What’s missing today with the black-box algorithms is where they look over your shoulder, and don’t trust you to be able to tell what’s right.”,says Edwin Khodabakchian cofounder and CEO of RSS reader Feedly (which currently has 14 million users). That is more or less precisely my reasoning as well.

Going through the list of this year’s Hugo Awards finalists, and buying the novels I hadn’t read yet.

A quick note for displaying R htmlwidgets in Jupyter notebooks without requiring pandoc – there may be a more native way but this acts as a workaround in the meantime if not:

library(htmlwidgets)
library(IRdisplay)

library(leaflet)
m = leaflet() %>% addTiles()
saveWidget(m, 'demo.html', selfcontained = FALSE)
display_html('<iframe src="demo.html"></iframe>')

PS and from the other side, using reticulate for Python powered Shiny apps.

In school, we learn about a few algebraic properties. These apply very well in functional programming because their expression is so simple, their definitions are so simple and they really focus on how things compose.

Transcript

Hello, my name is Eric Normand, and these are my thoughts on functional programming. The thought I was having was about composability and algebraic properties.

In school, we learn about a few algebraic properties, we learn about commutativity, we learn about associativity, we learn about the identity of addition, which is zero and the identity of multiplication, which is one.

“In school, we learn about a few Algebraic properties, we learn about commutativity, associativity, the identity of addition, which is zero and the identity of multiplication, which is one.”https://t.co/CUy8yLRQAC

— Eric Normand (@ericnormand) July 28, 2018

These apply very well in functional programming, I think not so much because they are mathematical ideas, but more because their expression is so simple, their definitions are so simple that they really focus on how things compose.

What mathematicians have done is figured out a bunch of ones for mathematical operations like addition is associative and commutative, multiplication likewise. When you have that, you have these very simple ways of saying how addition composes with itself.

Now, when we’re building abstractions in a functional language, where because our primary means of building a program from smaller parts is composition, we want to focus on how things compose first and foremost.

"When we're building abstractions in a functional language, where because our primary means of building a program from smaller parts is composition, we want to focus on how things compose first and foremost."https://t.co/sWhU2i00j4

— Eric Normand (@ericnormand) November 16, 2018

I believe it’s important to define upfront how things compose before you implement the thing. What do I mean by that?

I would say that if you want to define an operation, let’s say, I have an example that I gave in a presentation that is, you want to define a way to rotate an image and also translate the image, move it around on the screen.

You want to define how they compose, thus translate and then rotate. Is that different from rotate then translate? What if I do two rotates or two translates? How do they affect each other?

By thinking that through before you start implementing the thing, and even battening those things down with testing, then you will be able to…You can guarantee upfront that they compose in the way you’re expecting.

Now, mathematical definitions, mathematical properties are not going to give you everything you need because they’re kind of analyzing existing properties of existing operations.

They’re not engineering, they’re not designing new operations so much. What you want to be able to do is take the lessons from those algebraic properties and the lessons that are the most important are that they have very simple expressions.

“What you want to be able to do is take the lessons from existing algebraic properties and the lessons that are the most important are that they have very simple expressions.”https://t.co/5fNtkzbBmS

— Eric Normand (@ericnormand) June 17, 2018

You can do, with one or two…This expression is usually an identity meaning an equality. You say rotate then translate is equal to translate and then rotate or you say for idempotence, A or F(A)=F(F(A)). You’re saying how it composes with itself with multiple invocations in the same operation.

What this let’s you do is, these are simple ones, but you can define new ones because there’s no algebraic property that…There’s few algebraic properties that relate to. There’s like the reverse or the inverse, something like that. We got to cross the street.

There aren’t as many as we would want, but what’s important is that it’s simple, that it’s a very short expression, and that it defines how things work. The other thing that you can play a little bit looser with is the notion of equality because, very often, in software we use an if statement to reduce the scope of when something is applicable. What do I mean by that?

In general, adding an item like a key value pair to a hash map is not commutative so the association operation enclosure is not commutative because if you add the same key, if you add the key A with a value one, and then you add the key A with the value two, the two will overwrite the one. The order matters. Whichever one comes second, that’s the one that gets kept.

“assoc in Clojure is NOT commutative because if you add key A with value 1, then key A with value 2, the 2 will overwrite the 1. The order matters. But you can say “in this case, the keys will never collide.” Under that constraint, assoc is commutative.”https://t.co/XOHxHBcvAi

— Eric Normand (@ericnormand) July 11, 2018

They’re not strictly equal, but you can say, “Well, I know in general that’s true, it’s not commutative, but in this particular case, I know that I’m never going to collide keys.” You can make that assertion that’s kind of like a run-time assertion that, in this case, I will never collide keys.

Then, it becomes commutative again because if you never collide keys, you never have that overwrite situation. Then, again, it doesn’t matter what order you put stuff in. Another thing you can do is you can say they might not be equal, but they’re still both valid, they’re still both correct. If I do A=1 and then I do A=2, so the result is A=2 is stored in that map.

I could say that’s a valid result, but also I could say A=1 was a valid result as well. That can happen too where you’re not comparing them on strict equality, but on something else like there there is no contradiction. They’re both equivalent.

Like, for instance, the timestamp. Sometimes, you don’t care about the exact timestamp, you just want to know that it’s after a previous one. That’s a way of saying it’s consistent, it’s valid, they don’t have to be equal, strictly equal, like that.

There’s ways of of using these properties where they’re not strictly defined the way they are in mathematics, that they can be defined a little bit more loosely, that two things could be commutative modulo. I know that there’s no key collisions or modulo the timestamps don’t matter or modulo they are both consistent.

I’m probably going to talk more about algebraic properties. I just wanted to get that idea quickly out there. Thank you so much, hit subscribe, and I’ll see you later, bye.

The post Algebraic Properties and Composition appeared first on LispCast.

Algorithms used by Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms keep us clicking. But those systems often promote misinformation, abuse, and polarization. Is it possible to temper them with a sense of decency?

Today, recommendation engines are perhaps the biggest threat to societal cohesion on the internet—and, as a result, one of the biggest threats to societal cohesion in the offline world, too. The recommendation engines we engage with are broken in ways that have grave consequences: amplified conspiracy theories, gamified news, nonsense infiltrating mainstream discourse, misinformed voters. Recommendation engines have become The Great Polarizer.

More >

My personal failure rate with the butterfly keyboard is 100%, and at the prices Apple charges, I am unwilling to take that chance again. (Went to Surface Pro instead.)

— Marko Kloos (@markokloos) April 14, 2018

In October 2016 I was watching the Apple keynote with Max. He was ready to buy a new Macbook Pro, credit card humming. Then Apple announced the new Macbook Pro with USB-C only and after much deliberation he decided to buy the old model. What I learned much later was that some of his friends got the new one and after having had difficulties with them, sold them back and also got the tried and true older design.

Now things are cooking up. There appears to be a problem with the keyboard that is much more prevalent than I thought. Casey Johnsten writes "Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion". This can escalate quickly.

I have some Apple products that are outright fantastic: the Series 3 Apple Watch, the AirPods, the iPhone X. On the other hand, there have been lots of misses lately. The butterfly switch keyboards mentioned above. Products that have been announced and then delayed (still no HomePod available here). There have been products that were announced but never shipped like this wireless charger for three devices. There have been products that haven't even been announced ike a new Mac Pro, a new Mac mini, new Airports. Software that has been announced and did not ship like AirPlay 2 or iMessage on iCloud come to mind. Siri, first out the gate, now trails other voice assistants in capabilities. HomePod, a fantastic speaker, has been hobbled by software that does not deliver.

Maybe Apple has been distracted by their huge construction project for Apple Park. Now would be a great time to make some hard decisions.

Google Tasks is a service many Google users may be unfamiliar with. Historically it's been a somewhat hidden feature of Gmail and Google Calendar, but today alongside a redesign of Gmail, Google is helping Tasks break out and receive slightly better treatment with the launch of a new iPhone app.

I have to say up front: if this app wasn't a Google property, tied to an existing Google service, it likely wouldn't merit much attention. Essentially it's a barebones home for task lists, with a couple small task manager-like functions. Each task you create can include additional details in a note area, be assigned a due date, and can include embedded subtasks. And that's basically it. You can create multiple lists to store your tasks, but there's not even a smart list that consolidates all your tasks containing due dates.

Ultimately, this is an extremely lightweight task manager that makes Apple's Reminders, its closest analog, seem like a heavy duty task powerhouse by comparison. Rita El Khoury of Android Police sums it up well in her take on the Android app:

I struggle to see who Tasks is for with this first version, and hope it's quickly iterated upon. If you're deeply invested in the Google ecosystem, and have very minimal task needs, but want something integrated with Google's other products, I guess Tasks could be for you. But only on the iPhone; there's no iPad version at this time.

Google Tasks is available as a free download on the App Store.

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Last month I was delighted to discover a new plain text editor for iOS, Textor, that focused simply on the basics of text editing. Though I valued Textor's minimalism, one feature I did miss was support for Markdown styling. This hasn't been added to the app since then, but fortunately, I no longer have to wait for it; a new app just launched that's essentially Textor with Markdown, and its name is Pretext.

Pretext integrates directly with iOS 11's Files app, making it easy to create or edit Markdown and plain text files stored across any of your file providers. Open the app and you'll see a document browser for choosing a file to edit; alternately, you can create a new file by hitting the plus button in the top-right. If you're creating a new file, Pretext asks you to set a file name, with the option of automatically prepending the date to it, and you can choose to make it either a .md or .txt file.

While the simplicity of Pretext's "just you and the text" environment is its greatest strength, the app does offer a few specific features that are of benefit to Markdown writers especially. First is the great keyboard shortcut support: all the basics of Markdown syntax can be done with a quick shortcut, including tasks like link insertion; because of this, Pretext offers one of the most efficient means of adding links to an article. The remaining few features of the app are found by hitting the share icon during editing, which offers access to the share sheet, the app's settings screen, and previewing your Markdown file as HTML – the latter is especially useful for anyone who publishes their work online. Options in settings include tweaking the text size, switching themes from light to dark, and a couple alternate app icons.

I've been using Pretext in beta for the last few weeks to edit Markdown files shared by other MacStories collaborators in Working Copy, and the app has been exactly what I need. I can open Pretext, make my edits aided by visual Markdown styling and keyboard shortcuts, and preview the finished product as HTML. All changes are then saved directly in the file's source.

Pretext is a simple utility, and isn't going to replace Ulysses for me as a daily driver, but for some people it legitimately could. Too often writing apps are overly complicated, and Pretext focuses on offering just what a writer needs: space, and a few key tools to aid the writing process.

Pretext is available as a free download, with a $0.99 In-App Purchase unlocking the app's dark theme and alternate icons.

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Last week, we shared the first half of our Q&A with Raspberry Pi Trading CEO and Raspberry Pi creator Eben Upton. Today we follow up with all your other questions, including your expectations for a Raspberry Pi 4, Eben’s dream add-ons, and whether we really could go smaller than the Zero.

Live Q&A with Eben Upton, creator of the Raspberry Pi

Get your questions to us now using #AskRaspberryPi on Twitter

With internet security becoming more necessary, will there be automated versions of VPN on an SD card?

There are already third-party tools which turn your Raspberry Pi into a VPN endpoint. Would we do it ourselves? Like the power button, it’s one of those cases where there are a million things we could do and so it’s more efficient to let the community get on with it.

Just to give a counterexample, while we don’t generally invest in optimising for particular use cases, we did invest a bunch of money into optimising Kodi to run well on Raspberry Pi, because we found that very large numbers of people were using it. So, if we find that we get half a million people a year using a Raspberry Pi as a VPN endpoint, then we’ll probably invest money into optimising it and feature it on the website as we’ve done with Kodi. But I don’t think we’re there today.

Have you ever seen any Pis running and doing important jobs in the wild, and if so, how does it feel?

It’s amazing how often you see them driving displays, for example in radio and TV studios. Of course, it feels great. There’s something wonderful about the geographic spread as well. The Raspberry Pi desktop is quite distinctive, both in its previous incarnation with the grey background and logo, and the current one where we have Greg Annandale’s road picture.

And so it’s funny when you see it in places. Somebody sent me a video of them teaching in a classroom in rural Pakistan and in the background was Greg’s picture.

Raspberry Pi 4!?!

There will be a Raspberry Pi 4, obviously. We get asked about it a lot. I’m sticking to the guidance that I gave people that they shouldn’t expect to see a Raspberry Pi 4 this year. To some extent, the opportunity to do the 3B+ was a surprise: we were surprised that we’ve been able to get 200MHz more clock speed, triple the wireless and wired throughput, and better thermals, and still stick to the $35 price point.

We’re up against the wall from a silicon perspective; we’re at the end of what you can do with the 40nm process. It’s not that you couldn’t clock the processor faster, or put a larger processor which can execute more instructions per clock in there, it’s simply about the energy consumption and the fact that you can’t dissipate the heat. So we’ve got to go to a smaller process node and that’s an order of magnitude more challenging from an engineering perspective. There’s more effort, more risk, more cost, and all of those things are challenging.

With 3B+ out of the way, we’re going to start looking at this now. For the first six months or so we’re going to be figuring out exactly what people want from a Raspberry Pi 4. We’re listening to people’s comments about what they’d like to see in a new Raspberry Pi, and I’m hoping by early autumn we should have an idea of what we want to put in it and a strategy for how we might achieve that.

Could you go smaller than the Zero?

The challenge with Zero as that we’re periphery-limited. If you run your hand around the unit, there is no edge of that board that doesn’t have something there. So the question is: “If you want to go smaller than Zero, what feature are you willing to throw out?”

It’s a single-sided board, so you could certainly halve the PCB area if you fold the circuitry and use both sides, though you’d have to lose something. You could give up some GPIO and go back to 26 pins like the first Raspberry Pi. You could give up the camera connector, you could go to micro HDMI from mini HDMI. You could remove the SD card and just do USB boot. I’m inventing a product live on air! But really, you could get down to two thirds and lose a bunch of GPIO – it’s hard to imagine you could get to half the size.

What’s the one feature that you wish you could outfit on the Raspberry Pi that isn’t cost effective at this time? Your dream feature.

Well, more memory. There are obviously technical reasons why we don’t have more memory on there, but there are also market reasons. People ask “why doesn’t the Raspberry Pi have more memory?”, and my response is typically “go and Google ‘DRAM price'”. We’re used to the price of memory going down. And currently, we’re going through a phase where this has turned around and memory is getting more expensive again.

Machine learning would be interesting. There are machine learning accelerators which would be interesting to put on a piece of hardware. But again, they are not going to be used by everyone, so according to our method of pricing what we might add to a board, machine learning gets treated like a $50 chip. But that would be lovely to do.

Which citizen science projects using the Pi have most caught your attention?

I like the wildlife camera projects. We live out in the countryside in a little village, and we’re conscious of being surrounded by nature but we don’t see a lot of it on a day-to-day basis. So I like the nature cam projects, though, to my everlasting shame, I haven’t set one up yet. There’s a range of them, from very professional products to people taking a Raspberry Pi and a camera and putting them in a plastic box. So those are good fun.

And there’s Meteor Pi from the Cambridge Science Centre, that’s a lot of fun. And the seismometer Raspberry Shake – that sort of thing is really nice. We missed the recent South Wales earthquake; perhaps we should set one up at our Californian office.

How does it feel to go to bed every day knowing you’ve changed the world for the better in such a massive way?

What feels really good is that when we started this in 2006 nobody else was talking about it, but now we’re part of a very broad movement.

We were in a really bad way: we’d seen a collapse in the number of applicants applying to study Computer Science at Cambridge and elsewhere. In our view, this reflected a move away from seeing technology as ‘a thing you do’ to seeing it as a ‘thing that you have done to you’. It is problematic from the point of view of the economy, industry, and academia, but most importantly it damages the life prospects of individual children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The great thing about STEM subjects is that you can’t fake being good at them. There are a lot of industries where your Dad can get you a job based on who he knows and then you can kind of muddle along. But if your dad gets you a job building bridges and you suck at it, after the first or second bridge falls down, then you probably aren’t going to be building bridges anymore. So access to STEM education can be a great driver of social mobility.

By the time we were launching the Raspberry Pi in 2012, there was this wonderful movement going on. Code Club, for example, and CoderDojo came along. Lots of different ways of trying to solve the same problem. What feels really, really good is that we’ve been able to do this as part of an enormous community. And some parts of that community became part of the Raspberry Pi Foundation – we merged with Code Club, we merged with CoderDojo, and we continue to work alongside a lot of these other organisations. So in the two seconds it takes me to fall asleep after my face hits the pillow, that’s what I think about.

We’re currently advertising a Programme Manager role in New Delhi, India. Did you ever think that Raspberry Pi would be advertising a role like this when you were bringing together the Foundation?

No, I didn’t.

But if you told me we were going to be hiring somewhere, India probably would have been top of my list because there’s a massive IT industry in India. When we think about our interaction with emerging markets, India, in a lot of ways, is the poster child for how we would like it to work. There have already been some wonderful deployments of Raspberry Pi, for example in Kerala, without our direct involvement. And we think we’ve got something that’s useful for the Indian market. We have a product, we have clubs, we have teacher training. And we have a body of experience in how to teach people, so we have a physical commercial product as well as a charitable offering that we think are a good fit.

It’s going to be massive.

What is your favourite BBC type-in listing?

There was a game called Codename: Druid. There is a famous game called Codename: Droid which was the sequel to Stryker’s Run, which was an awesome, awesome game. And there was a type-in game called Codename: Druid, which was at the bottom end of what you would consider a commercial game.

And I remember typing that in. And what was really cool about it was that the next month, the guy who wrote it did another article that talks about the memory map and which operating system functions used which bits of memory. So if you weren’t going to do disc access, which bits of memory could you trample on and know the operating system would survive.

I still like type-in listings. The Raspberry Pi 2018 Annual has a type-in listing that I wrote for a Babbage versus Bugs game. I will say that’s not the last type-in listing you will see from me in the next twelve months. And if you download the PDF, you could probably copy and paste it into your favourite text editor to save yourself some time.

The post Continued: the answers to your questions for Eben Upton appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

In a rather surprising marketing move, Amazon has announced a new venue for parcel delivery for people who feel apartment lobbies and front porches are not secure enough — into the trunk of your car.

“Starting Tuesday, people in dozens of cities across the United States can start getting their Amazon orders delivered to a parked car, provided their vehicle has the proper technology. With a few taps on a smartphone screen, the courier can unlock the car and drop the box inside the trunk or on the back seat.”

Here is the kicker — and of course it involves a piece of current motordom technology.

The in-car delivery works “for a 2015 or later Chevrolet, Buick, GMC or Cadillac vehicle with an active account with OnStar, the roadside assistance and navigation service from General Motors. Car owners with 2015 or newer Volvos with a similar service, On Call, can also receive in-car deliveries from Amazon.”

Of course, there are a few other situations where you’re not getting any Amazon delivery to your car trunk.

In-car deliveries won’t happen for Amazon customers who park inside gated lots or communities, or in underground parking garages where satellite signals often can’t penetrate. Thus, the service seems aimed especially at people who leave their vehicles in the lots of large, easily accessible suburban office parks, or open street level parking.

There’s no comment yet on whether the “porch pirates” who steal packages from front doors will adapt to vehicle thefts, or if there’s a safeguard in place to deter potential break-ins from deliveries made to cars.

Amazon also understands that everyone has been taught NOT to leave valuables in cars, and they have agreed to take care of broken windows and locks on cars that are broken into because of a delivery.

 

On April 22, the City of Vancouver formally apologized for the historical discrimination against Vancouver residents of Chinese descent. This apology was a long time coming for the descendants of all those who endured racism and unspeakable bias while helping to build this country and its railway.

Chinese Canadians in British Columbia were not allowed to vote until 1949; despite all this, family bonds remained strong, and efforts to unite loved ones in this land were sustained throughout.

Inspired by this troubling period, artist Paul Wong has launched an installation entitled “Occupying Chinatown” as part of a year-long term as the artist in residence at Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Chinatown.

As reported in The Star, “Much of Wong’s artwork created throughout the year will be based on 700 handwritten letters sent to his mother from more than a dozen different people, from 1946 to 2016, when she passed away. Wong said his mother was a “mail-order bride,” and met his father in 1947 when he travelled to Hong Kong from his home in Prince Rupert to pick her up…The letters are filled with mundane, yet fascinating, details that reveal the realities of living in Canada for early Toisanese immigrants in Canada.”

Paul Wong is commencing his residency with the screening of his film “Ordinary Shadows, Chinese Shade” looking at the Chinese community of China and Canada. To give you an example of the significance of this 1988 film, it has been accessioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

The film is available on Vimeo and can also be seen in the Scholar’s Study inside the Sun Yat-Sen garden from April 22 to June 11.

Paul Wong will also be placing a neon sign which says “咸水埠温哥华 – pronounced Haam Siu Fow Wun Goh Wah in Cantonese – which translates to “Salt Water City Vancouver.” This was the old name for Vancouver familiar to early Chinese inhabitants and visitors to Vancouver.

The sign will be installed on the south wall of the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen garden. Wong sees his return to this Vancouver residency as coming full circle back to the community and believes that Chinatown, like Gastown should be recognized and protected as a historic place and neighbourhood.

And he references back to the theme of his work “Occupying Chinatown”: “It’s a very timely reminder that while there is a fight for Chinatown, among different factions and certainly developers, it’s about who are these places for – who gets to occupy Chinatown?”

To go along with a revamped Gmail for web filled with new features, Google is also rolling out the ability to snooze emails in the Gmail for Android app. The feature has long been found in Inbox for Android and Google is now finally bringing it over to Gmail. Continue reading →

The post Rogers, Bell and Telus low-cost plans don’t address concerns: Consumer groups appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Now that Canada’s three major national carriers — Rogers, Bell and Telus — have submitted their proposals for affordable data-only plans, it’s time for the public to weigh in.

Of course, you can (and should) take the time to submit a comment directly to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). In the meantime though, we’d love to hear your thoughts here in our comments and through the poll included in this post.

For those who haven’t been following this saga, a brief backgrounder: in June 2017 the minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED) Navdeep Bains instructed the CRTC to reconsider a decision that effectively shut down backdoor wireless MVNO Sugar Mobile.

MVNOs, or mobile virtual network operators, generally purchase wireless service wholesale from larger incumbent carriers and resell it at lower rates. ISED suggested that the introduction of a true wireless MVNO market in Canada might lower wireless prices for Canadians, offering a budget alternative to the rates offered by Bell, Telus and Rogers.

In late March 2018, chairman Ian Scott’s — as his first major decision at the CRTC — affirmed that the Commission would be not be mandating wireless MVNOs. 

However, in response to ISED’s concerns that Canadians pay some of the highest wireless rates in the world, the Commission instructed the Big Three to offer low-cost data-only plans to fill a gap at the low end of the market.

All plans must provide 4G LTE service and must be available to both prepaid and postpaid customers.

Below is what the national carriers proposed:

Rogers: $25/400MB

• BYOD
• No extended domestic coverage
• No Roam Like Home

Bell: $30/500MB

• Available through Virgin Mobile for postpaid and prepaid (BYOD)

Telus: $30/500MB

• Available through Koodo for postpaid (BYOD and Tab Small)
• Available through Public Mobile for prepaid (BYOD)

Find more details here.

What do you think of the plans? Weigh in on our poll and let us know in the comments below.

Take Our Poll

Image credit: Skitterphoto via Pexels 

The post Poll: What do you think of Rogers, Telus and Bell’s low-cost data-only plan proposals? appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Bell Media has announced all of the new shows that will start streaming on its CraveTV service in May 2018.

Below you can find comprehensive list of everything set to hit the service:

May 4th

• Scorned: Love Kills: season 4
• 2017 Rock and Roll Hall ff Fame Induction Ceremony
• Warning: This Drug May Kill You
• The Wizard of Lies
• Pat Thornton: Different Times

May 6th

• SweetBitter: season 1, episode 1 @ 10:30pm ET
• Vida: season 1, episode 1 @10:30pm ET

May 11th

• Pit Bulls and Paroleea
• Bruce Springsteen: In His Own Words
• I Am Heath Ledger

May 12th

• Patrick Melrose: episode 1 @ 9pm ET

May 18th

• Game of Thrones: season 4-6
• Detroiters: season 1
• Drunk History season 5A
• Chris Gethard: Career Suicide
• Mommy Dead and Dearest

May 25th

• Graham Chittenden: Reluctant Adult

May 27th

• The Fourth Estate: episodes 1-4 @ 8pm

This is your last chance to watch

• The Listener: season 4 (05/15/2018)
• The Late Late Show Carpool Karaoke Primetime Special 2017 (05/21/2018)
• S&M: Short & Male (05/23/2018)
• Graceland: season 1 – 3 (05/24/2018)
• Murder in the First: season 1-3 (05/25/2018)

Here’s the full list of shows and movies that includes shows coming soon and ongoing series.

The post Here’s what’s coming to CraveTV in May appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Apple has recently shared statistics showing what percentage of iOS devices are running each version of Apple’s operating system.

The company shared its stats on the Developer Support webpage. So far iOS 11 is installed on 76 percent of devices, while iOS 10 is still running on 19 percent of iPhones and iPads. This is a pretty large amount of installs for iOS 11, but it isn’t overly surprising since Apple devices are usually kept up to date.

The last time the company shared these types of stats was in January of 2018. Back then iOS 11 was running on 65 percent of phones and tablets and iOS 10 was running on 28 percent of devices.

Since January almost 15 percent of iOS users updated to the latest version so it will be interesting to see if in the next few months if iOS 11 adoption rises to reach closer to a 90 percent install base.

While the adoption of iOS 11 has been a little slower than usual it is still much better than the typically splintered adoption rates on Android handsets.

According to Google’s developer website, only 4.6 percent of Android phones are currently running Oreo, while 30.8 percent of users are still using Android Nougat and 26 percent of users are three generations behind and are running Marshmallow.

This splitting of the install base does look much different than iOS, but it’s par for the course with Android because updates to Google’s operating system are controlled by a wide variety of carriers and manufacturers.

Source: Apple, Google  Via: Mac Rumors

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