Rolandt

It’s tough being a fitness-tracker maker. Nike, Jawbone, and Microsoft all abandoned the market entirely. Fitbit soldiers on, but it hasn’t been easy.

It’s not that people have stopped caring about their health. It’s that little by little, smartwatches have been eating fitness bands’ lunch. So Fitbit Inc. (FIT) figured: “Well, we better make a smartwatch then!”

The first attempt, last year’s Fitbit Ionic, was a dud. It was huge. It looked like you were wearing a car door on your wrist. And it cost $300, almost as much as an Apple Watch did at the time.

Well, good news all around: Fitbit has brought forth a second smartwatch. It’s called the Versa, and it takes a sledgehammer to everything that was wrong with the Ionic.

Size and shape

The Versa costs $200 instead of $300. Nicely done, Fitbit. (The Apple Watch 3 starts at $330 and goes up to $750.)

And instead of being big, homely, angular and wrapping halfway around your wrist, the Versa is small, sweet and unbelievably light, even though it’s made of metal (aluminum).

The Versa is smaller and thinner than the Apple Watch. It’s slightly wider, but that’s fine — it makes much more sense to expand along the direction that your arm goes, rather than trying to be a flat object on your curved wrist.

Small is huge. Small means less obtrusive. Small means better suited for many women.

And small means stylish. You can get the Versa in black, silver, or peach aluminum; a “special edition” costs $30 more and comes in dark gray or rose gold. All of them look great, and you can make them look even greater by replacing the included silicone band with a leather, cloth, metal- mesh, or metal-links band.

You can swap bands without tools, although it takes practice. Even after 20 minutes, I never could get the leather band to go on.

And here’s the truly great part: Fitibt says it goes “four-plus days” on a charge, but it always under advertises battery life. My review unit is happily ticking away on Day Six. Take that, Apple Watch, which you have to charge every single night (and therefore can’t use to track your sleep)!

You do, however, sacrifice something for the cheaper price and smaller size: built-in GPS. The Ionic has it, the Versa doesn’t. If you want to map your runs or rides, you have to take your phone with you; the Versa’s software grabs its GPS information from the phone itself.

On the U.S. base model, you also lose Fitbit Pay, which lets you pay for things with your wrist at wireless terminals. Alas, the list of recognizable participating banks are still limited — American Express, Bank of America, Capital One, Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bank. Chase is coming soon. If your credit card comes from one of those banks, and you care about this feature, it’s available for an additional $30 on the Special Edition.

The features

The Versa’s features are mostly identical to the Ionic watch’s, although the new operating system (coming to the Ionic later this year) greatly simplifies navigation.

The Versa has water resistance down to 50 meters, swim tracking and lap counting, 2.5 gigabytes for storing music to play (over wireless earbuds), and auto-recognition of 20 different exercises. It offers guided breathing sessions when you need to relax, and optional hourly reminders to get up and move around.

When it comes to tracking your health, the Versa is a champ. It tallies your steps, calories, and distance; flights of stairs you’ve taken; minutes of exertion; continuous heart rate; and your stages of sleep, which is remarkably accurate and informative.

Underneath, the heart-rate sensor has a third LED light, capable of detecting how much blood oxygen you’ve got (your relative SPO2). Someday, that statistic could provide early detection for conditions like atrial fibrillation or sleep apnea, which would be a huge deal for millions of people.

(Personal sob story: My favorite Fitbit is the incredibly slim, small Fitbit Alta. It does a great job of tracking my stats, including heart rate, during the day and night. But when a foot injury drove me to switch from jogging to stationary biking, I discovered, like many others, that the Alta wouldn’t record my heart rate during exercise! It either dramatically under-reported my pulse rate, or didn’t pick up a pulse at all.

Online, many people with that problem solved it by switching to the fatter Fitbit Charge 2 band. For me, that band did much better — but still sometimes underreported compared to a Polar chest strap. I’m happy to report that the Versa’s heart-rate monitor is dead on during exercise —within a beat or two of the chest-strap’s measurement. Every time.)

You can pay $40 a year to use Fitbit Coach: guided video workouts that play on the Fitbit website or on your smartphone. (They don’t play on the watch itself, although audio-only guidance is available.) There’s a huge variety of duration and intensity, no equipment is required, and Fitbit says that the workouts adjust their intensity based on your own feedback.

Versa the smartwatch

Is the Versa, in fact, a smartwatch at all? I guess it depends on how you define that term. Smartwatches from companies like Apple and Samsung usually offer features like these:

Choice of watch faces. Maybe you like digital, or analog, or elegant, or complicated. The Versa’s app store now offers dozens of faces. Unfortunately, you have to choose them from the phone app (not on the watch) — and making a new selection involves a very slow Bluetooth transfer.

Notifications. Smartwatches can notify you on your wrist whenever one of your phone apps is trying to get your attention (you choose which apps). That’s especially useful when incoming calls and texts arrive. On the Versa, you can’t freely reply or take a call, as you can on the Apple Watch. In May, you’ll be able to respond with canned shortcut responses, but only on Android phones (not iPhones).

Music. You can load about 300 songs onto the Ionic, for playback through Bluetooth wireless earbuds when you’re working out. But you must load them from your computer using a crude Mac or Windows app called Fitbit Connect; it shows only playlists, not songs or albums. There are also Pandora and Deezer apps, but they require a paid subscription. There’s no Spotify.

Voice assistants. On real smartwatches, you can speak to Siri or the Google Assistant, and hear spoken replies. The Ionic has no speaker or microphone, so it can’t do any of that.

An app store. Fitbit’s smartwatch app store has finally begun to pick up steam. There are now about 500 apps available to install on your Versa, including Starbucks, Strava, New York Times, Weather, and so on. They’re all fairly slow and very simple.

Still to come

Fitbit is working hard to make the Versa attractive to women. Starting in May, you’ll be able to record every detail of your menstrual cycle in the Fitbit app — intensity, symptoms, and, of course, dates. Thereafter, it will display a calendar depicting your predicted period week in pink, and fertility window in blue.

Plenty of phone apps do exactly this, but having it part of the Fitbit app makes a lot of sense, because it’s tied in to all your other health stats. Eventually, the company plans to incorporate this other data (heart rate, for example) into its calculations, for even better accuracy.

A semi-smartwatch

To be clear, the Versa is not a smartwatch in the Apple Watch or Samsung Gear sense. It’s not a premium piece of jewelry that runs incredibly fast, runs thousands of apps, has a voice assistant, lets you respond to calls and texts, offers magnetic charging, have its own cellular connection, and so on.

But the Versa’s specs — five-day battery life, a $200 price tag, and small, sweet looks — define a worthy category unto itself. You’ll really like this thing.

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. You can sign up to get his stuff by email, here.  

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Nach zwei Tagen voller China-Kracher gibt es heute mal wieder ein paar Qualitätsprodukte, die sich lohnen. Und nein, das Lumea wende ich nicht auf meinem Kopf an, um ihn immer schön glatt poliert zu halten. :-)

• Philips Lumea Advanced IPL für 174 € statt 400 € (minus 57%)
• Kopp Powerversal Steckdosenleiste 10-fach für 29 € statt 52 € (minus 44%)
• Bose QuietComfort 25 dauerhaft im Angebot für 169 € statt 330 € (!)
• Der Spiegel im Monatsabo auf Kindle für 8 € (minus 64%), 30 Tage kostenlos, jederzeit kündbar

Die 330 Euro für das QC25 ist ein absoluter Mondpreis, wie er so typisch für Bose ist. Aber für 169 € ist das ein tolles Angebot für Leute, die einen Kopfhörer speziell zum Reisen brauchen. Das ist der Goldstandard für Geräuschunterdrückung, klein zusammenzufalten und läuft miteiner kleinen Batterie, die man an jedem Kiosk nachkaufen kann. Wegen der Batterie aber nicht so toll für Dauereinsatz.

Das sind zum Teil Tagesangebote, also eher fix zugreifen.

This is not what Facebook knows about you. This is only what you voluntarily shared. Facebook tracks you everywhere it can. Every single web page that has a Facebook like button, every location it can get from your phone, every call it can track, every text it can track, simply everything it can record through its apps like Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram or WhatsApp. Notice the "can record". There is stuff on Android that you cannot do on iPhone.

On top of that Facebook tracks every detail you click, every photo you look at, every comment you read, wether you click on replies or on Show Previous Comments. It knows that you always click on "Show Recent", but it will always show you "Top Stories". It knows what you look at other sites. It recognizes your face in every photo your friends upload, it knows your location from the embedded geotag and when it was taken. Your friends trained it by tagging you in photos. And so did you with your friends.

Facebook's AI has long outsmarted you. It knows your desire for gratifications. To see that your photo, your post, your comment was liked. It is the perfect manipulation engine and the tighest knit surveillance ever built. Nothing knows you better than Facebook. Not even Google.

You have nothing to hide.

Almost every Canadian’s list of Songs-of-the-Day is going to include a Tragically Hip number or two, and I’m no exception. They had a lot of great tunes and this one is right up there. Can’t write this without getting kind of damp, because we lost Gord yesterday it feels like. If you’re not Canadian and have no idea who The Hip are or who Gord was, listen to this anyhow and if you like rock music you’ll probably like it a lot.

For non-Canadians here’s the tl;dr: The Hip were a guitar-rock band with strong songwriting, a charismatic singer in Gord Downie, and a fabulous sound based on Downie’s voice cutting through Rob Baker’s wall of harmonious electric-guitar thunder. They always sold lots of records in Canada but never managed much in the US market. I saw them just once, many years ago, and they were pretty magic.

Gord Downie was diagnosed with terminal cancer and they made a last tour in 2016, an almost unbearably emotional sequence of shows; the last one was broadcast live end-to-end on the CBC and everyone I know watched it. A lot of Kleenex was consumed.

At the Hundredth Meridian is just another guitar rocker, with a great rhythm and a great sound, and another example of the Hip’s amusing habit of having numbers in their lyrics.

If I die of vanity, promise me, promise me,
They bury me some place I don't want to be,
You'll dig me up and transport me, unceremoniously,
Away from the swollen city-breeze, garbage bag trees,
Whispers of disease and the acts of enormity
And lower me slowly, sadly and properly
Get Ry Cooder to sing my eulogy.

Gord didn’t die of vanity, but I’m still a little pissed they didn’t get Ry to sing at his funeral.

This is part of the Song of the Day series (background).

Links

Spotify playlist. This tune on Spotify, iTunes, Amazon. Now, as for video, here’s the official one, not live but kind of fun; here they are in 2000 at the Fillmore, and of course the last performance. Excuse me, have to blow my nose now.

Most of the week was spent at home, with Y being ill (so she couldn’t go to day care). Things I worked on this week:

• Gave a workshop for a policy department at Province Overijssel, looking for cases where open data helps achieve their own policy goals
• Wrote some final input for an international 2-year project with libraries,
  which is now submitted
• Discussed national data infrastructures and other topics, catching up with a Swiss colleague
• Started collecting some more recent open data impact assessments, such as from Denmark, for a piece of research for UNDP Serbia
• Thought about course and content for my work in the coming years
• Reviewed a changed proposal for 18 months of work in/with Malaysia, to implement my recommendations in the Malaysian open data readiness assessment
• Had our yearly walk and dinner with my old fraternity friends and their families

Frans has shared his to-do-lists for Facebook Detox with me. He has gotten pretty far.

It’s 2018 and it’s still a bad idea to trust centralized publishing platforms. Film at 11.

It’s been entirely too long since I last wrote about my home automation setup and a number of other things have started cropping up, so this is a more pragmatic update to point out some of the pitfalls and outline what else I’ve been doing with my HomeKit setup.

Node-RED May Save You, Or Make You Mad

I’m running a Node-RED instance on my ODROID alongside HomeBridge, and as it turns out it too can talk directly to HomeKit and publish virtual accessories, buttons or sensors. It has some pretty nifty features (I can, for instance, build up live dashboards of input data, bridge web services with HomeKit or MQTT, and even run my own automation), but it can be a right mess to “program” and debug, leading to some situatious that would give Rube Goldberg pause.

Besides requiring a fair amount of hidden code inside those bubbles (and a few specific plugins), these things aren’t versionable (so no source control), and debugging requires sticking little green boxes all over the place and figuring out how to filter the relevant logs on the web UI, which just doesn’t scale.

The thing is, there aren’t many options out there right now–I would be happy as a clam if I could simply run everything as a set of tiny Python daemons exchanging messages via MQTT, but there aren’t that many HomeKit implementations out there, and right now Node-RED is OK for quick and dirty experimentation¹.

Naming Things Is Hard

Getting voice control to work through the Apple Watch turned out to be a fun little game of charade, since Siri figures out what you want to do largely through the names you give accessories, and Apple has lobotomized it to the point where it cannot fathom context at all, so any mention of “play”, “pause” or “start” is invariably tied to built-in iOS apps.

“TV” is somewhere in an unfathomable limbo, because “Start TV” or “Play TV” can’t be made to work, but I was able to assign “Pause TV” to a fake accessory and wire that up to my IPTV set-top box:

Proper English, however, seems to be beyond Siri’s ken, so after some experimentation “Heater by the Sofa” was shortened to “Sofa Heater”. Setting scenes works fine (as does “turn off everything in the living room” or “all the outlets”), but be prepared for naming things in awkward and inconsistent ways in order to get voice control to work.

Sonoff-Tasmota Firmware Is Still a Work In Progress

I now have ten S20 ITEAD sockets flashed with Sonoff-Tasmota, three of which are spares (they are that cheap).

They’re all running version 5.11.1, but two of them keep hanging, requiring them to be reset to factory defaults (four quick button presses) and re-configured.

Among the many suspects (cleaning lady unplugging them to power the vacuum, Wi-Fi signal variations and firmware instability), I haven’t yet been able to pinpoint the actual issue, but the end effect is disconcerting: the sockets reboot every minute or so, toggling the relay due to the way ITEAD wired it to the GPIO pins (which are cycled on reset by the base firmware).

To mitigate/debug this, I’ve been doing a few things:

• The devices report telemetry data since day one (including RSSI and Wi-Fi BSSID) on the tele/# MQTT topic.
• I’ve (manually) set all of them to use WifiConfig 4, which means they will keep retrying to connect to Wi-Fi rather than fall back into configuration mode (bewilderingly, this is not the default, which took me a while to realize).
• I’ve also set all of them to PowerOnState 0, which means they default to be powered off when plugged back in.
• The two problematic sockets now have syslog enabled as well, which so far has yielded no new insights.

Setting the parameters above requires you to use the web console or MQTT commands, and (maddeningly) neither are part of the web interface. I’m still fascinated by WifiConfig defaulting to re-entering configuration mode upon signal loss and not retrying the connection and filed an issue accordingly, but I don’t think it will get fixed without some serious refactoring of Wi-Fi settings.

Dumb Appliances are Another Challenge

In order to control my air conditioner and other appliances, I got my hands on a Broadlink RM Mini 3, which is nothing more than a glorified IR blaster–but one that looks nice and is relatively unobtrusive.

The very first thing I did was build a simple MQTT proxy for it, so that I could control any IR device by publishing hex codes to a topic:

#!/usr/bin/python -u
import os, pwd
import paho.mqtt.client as mqtt
import broadlink

def on_connect(client, userdata, flags, rc):
    print "connected"

def on_message(client, userdata, msg):
    print msg.topic, msg.payload

def on_send(client, userdata, msg):
    print devices, msg.payload
    try:
        if devices and len(devices):
            devices[0].send_data(msg.payload.decode('hex'))
    except Exception as e:
        print e

def run():
    c = mqtt.Client("mqtt_ir")
    c.on_connect = on_connect
    c.on_message = on_message
    c.connect("localhost")
    c.subscribe([("broadlink/#",0)])
    c.message_callback_add("broadlink/send", on_send)
    c.loop_forever()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    devices = broadlink.discover(timeout=5)
    if devices and len(devices):
        devices[0].auth()
        print devices
    else:
        print "no Broadlink devices"
    run()

However, this only provides part of the solution–in order to control things, you need to be aware of their state, so I ended up spending a good deal of time trying to figure out how to cope with some fairly simple notions, such as detecting whether the TV is on.

As it turned out, that bit was relatively easy, since I have a Chromecast plugged into it:

However, turning Chromecast state into TV state and tying it to IR commands gets hairy fairly quickly:

In the end, though, it’s a lot simpler to just ignore current state and do some tricks with the IR codes (avoiding power on/off toggles and sending out, for instance, HDMI input select codes to force power on).

HomeBridge Can Be Unnacountably Slow

Every now and then Siri complains that an accessory isn’t responding, or the Home App on my iPhone effectively locks up with every accessory displaying an “Updating…” message.

At first I thought this was because I had my iPad set as the Home Hub and it had trouble connecting to HomeBridge, since everything would go back to normal after a minute or so. However, after a few months, it was obvious that relying on my iPad for scheduling wasn’t the way to go, so I caved in and got a new Apple TV 4K.

Response times have improved, but the unnacountable pauses are still there, and I’ve noticed that only HomeBridge accessories lock up–the ones I have bridged through Node-RED respond immediately, so I’m starting to think about replacing HomeBridge itself (which isn’t going to be easy).

A Note On Security

One of the hassles about modern home automation is that nobody seems to have designed it with basic security principles in mind, and everyone assumes you’re running everything atop your home Wi-Fi network in the clear (or with otherwise elementary security precautions), or that you’re OK with having a device you don’t really control inside your LAN, exposing control points to the Internet–which is an iffy proposition even if they’re “secured” with SSL or use outbound connections (buffer overflows in embedded devices are a dime a dozen, and can you really trust every manufacturer to have top notch security?).

I started out running devices on our family SSID for debugging purposes, but I’m fast reaching the point where it makes sense to move the whole shebang to a dedicated Raspberry Pi 3 that sits on both the wired LAN and a dedicated SSID for IoT. It’ll take a while, though.

Power Measurement

Finally, a FAQ of sorts–everyone who saw the original post asked me if I was looking into power measurements, and the answer is… well, not really, or at least not using these devices.

I’ve been looking into measuring overall wattage, but since all the electricity conduits and breakers are sealed, I can’t use a split-core clamp sensor (there’s no way for me to get at a single wire), and my meters are quite dated–I have two, which seem to be contemporaries, and they are both of the rotary digits/spinning disk variety, so there’s no nice, easy to get to blinking LED or any sort of digital interface).

So I’m doing it the hard way–I stuck a Raspberry Pi Zero in front of the meter, tweaked the camera lens for close range (just rotate the lens carefully with needlenose pliers) and have been playing with OpenCV and Azure Cognitive Services since November or so:

It “works”, but not reliably enough due to the rotary digits, and I’ve yet to spend the time to train a dedicated digit recognizer–I gathered a nice, fat training set and started on it, but I ran out of time around Christmas and ended up passing the images to a friend for him to put together a demo, but it’s apparently really hard to get past 80% accuracy on this kind of meter reading, so I’m looking at other options.

And that’s all for this week.

I suspect I’ll eventually churn out another of these behemoth posts in a few months (probably concerning the nitty-gritty details of how I ripped out everything and rebuilt it in a slightly saner fashion), but this will have to do for now.

On Exponent, the weekly podcast I host with James Allworth, we discuss The Facebook Brand.

Listen to it here.

On Friday, the weather forecast told me rain was approaching, so I walked quickly to a nearby beach. While sitting on a log, I noticed dark clouds and bluer skies in the distance, and wondered, which would reach me first. I thought how the unknowns about the weather could be a personal metaphor.

As a cancer patient, I find that I could spend all day thinking about possibilities, potentials, and maybes, as I live with long-term chemo. I try not to let these ‘dark clouds’ dampen my spirits. Instead I regularly find opportunities to laugh and smile, when something good unexpectedly brings sunshine to my day.

These ‘blue skies’ moments recharge me and are a reminder to remain calm and be ready to use positive energy to ward off negativity, whenever necessary. Just like packing my umbrella in case of rain, I remain prepared.

To recap: On Sunday, March 18th, I completed Cycle 41 Week 2. I have multiple myeloma and anemia, a rare cancer of the immune system. Multiple myeloma affects the plasma cells, a type of immune cell that produces antibodies to fight infection. These plasma cells are found in the bone marrow. As a blood cancer, it is incurable, but treatable. Since February 9th 2015, I have been on Pomalyst and dexamethasone chemo treatment (Pom/dex). On July 16th, my dexamethasone treatment ended, due to eye damage, reported by my Glaucoma Specialist, from long-term use. On January 9th I began Ninlaro chemo to combat steadily rising cancer levels.

Weekly chemo-inspired self-portraits can be viewed in my flickr album.

May 2014:

The post Week 162 of chemo complete: Dark clouds or blue skies on the horizon? appeared first on Fade to Play.

1. Start referring to COO as Sheryl "Stormy" Sandburg

2. Adopt new corporate slogan: Google Is Even Worse

3. Use data-driven analytics and artificial intelligence to test concept of "telling the truth"

4. Legally change Zuckerberg to Vaynerzuck

5. Launch Social Responsibility initiative: Hire someone over 30 or a black person or something

6.  Send out 50 million "save-the-date" evites to next Hackathon

7. Always refer to stolen personal private information as "fun files"

8.  Tweak logo design: Two thumbs up

9. Hire Kendall Jenner to give every member of Congress a Pepsi

10. Move a little more slowly and break things

The current scandal goes way beyond the usual “you are the product” admonishments and crosses over into dystopian territory, and the worst thing about it is that it was obvious in retrospect.

Not being an active Facebook user (I keep it around mostly as a way to keep tabs on far-flung friends and family), I’ve long removed it from most of my devices because of the recurring updates with squirrelly pseudo-features and battery drain, and now I’m pretty glad I did that.

Recently, Steve Yegge published two rants, each of which has gone viral and moved the Internet conversation needle a bit. I liked both of them, thought they were generally well-argued and useful. Unfortunately, there are a few assertions of fact there that are just wrong, and may be damaging. So I thought that, first of all, I should encourage people to go read these pieces and, second, point out the things that are counterfactual.

The posts

Now at Medium (sigh, it makes me sad when another indie blogger migrates off their own platform): why I left Google and Who will steal Android from Google? Go read ’em.

Wrong: Google’s customer focus

Steve asserts that “Google has become 100% competitor-focused rather than customer focused.” He’s making the all-too-common error of mistaking Google’s users with its customers. Customers are the people who pay you money for your services, which in Google’s case means advertisers. Bear in mind that something like 90% of Google’s revenue is still based on search advertising. Google takes really good care of search advertisers, and deeply understands their needs.

Google also does a pretty good job of reaching out to developers because it needs people building on its platforms. I spent four years in the Developer Relations group, and know whereof I speak.

But users? Nope, because that means basically everybody, and nobody can afford to provide high-quality support to everybody. The only way to deal with customer pain is to make expert help from a real human being, and that’s just not affordable for search or Gmail or Docs or YouTube. The number of people who’ve only had their hideous, life-blighting Google problem resolved because they happened to know someone who works there is substantial.

Wrong: Amazon’s customer focus

Steve alleges that Amazon staffers only interact with customers once a year. Nope. Part of the problem may be that he pre-dates AWS, where I work, and where we talk to customers obsessively all the time, and I mean all the time. I personally do, and I don’t know anyone who works anywhere near me that doesn’t.

Wrong: Language coolness

Steve: “At the top of Snoot Mountain sit the lofty Search engineers writing in C++, which is considered cooler than Java, which is cooler than Python, which is cooler than JavaScript. And Search is cooler than Ads, which is cooler than Apps, which is cooler than Tools, which is cooler than Frontends. And so on. Programmers love to look down on each other.” That’s just crazy. I think a whole lot of programmers would rather work in high-level languages like Ruby and Python; it’s just that if you want to build infrastructural services that can handle a million requests a second, you probably can’t use that stuff even if you want to.

And last time I looked, all the coolest, hippest, “thought-leader-ish” people I know are building radical JavaScript frameworks.

Steve correctly notes that front-end programming is hard, but leaves out maybe the single most important reason why: It’s super-hard to unit-test properly. He also correctly notes (here and in previous outings) two of Android’s most horrible mis-steps: The Fragments API, and Gradle.

Wrong: What Android is for

Steve says Android is Google’s most important channel. That’s only if you don’t measure by money. From a business point of view, AdWords is five times more important than anything else. My personal opinion is that Android originally existed to prevent Apple getting a monopoly lock on the hand-held market and lock Google entirely out of mobile ads. Mobile ads still completely suck as a business, BTW.

And it’s actually not obvious that in the big picture, Android has had a positive ROI for Google. (Yet another reason why Oracle’s litigation is so stupid.)

Oh, and did I say?

They’re excellent blogs. You should read them.

Vega-Lite is a grammar for interactive graphics primarily used for analysis. Altair is a visualization library in Python that is based on this grammar.

With Altair, you can spend more time understanding your data and its meaning. Altair’s API is simple, friendly and consistent and built on top of the powerful Vega-Lite visualization grammar. This elegant simplicity produces beautiful and effective visualizations with a minimal amount of code.

Jim Vallandingham just put up a useful introduction to the library if you’re looking to get your feet wet.

I do very little visualization-wise with Python since my current toolset typically covers my bases, but this has me curious.

Tags: Python

Das Angebot wird dünner. Aber trotzdem versteckt sich darin noch so mancher Hammer.

• Die Sony Alpha 6300 ist immer noch eine der besten kompakten Systemkameras. Mit Kitobjektiv 18-50mm für 699 €, das ist nominell 600 € unter Listenpreis, der aber durch den Nachfolger 6500 längst nicht mehr erzielt wird. Trotzdem 200 € günstiger als das beste Alternativangebot.
• Unlängst hatte ich ja schon über die Abzocke mit Tinte geschimpft. Dafür habe ich einige Kommentare bekommen, die Canon als Ausnahme hervorhoben. Da passt der Canon Pixma TR8550 All-in-One für 100 Euro ins Angebot. Das ist immerhin 25 € günstiger als das beste Vergleichtsangebot. Das scheint ein Alleskönner zu sein: Drucker, Scanner, Kopierer, Fax, USB, WLAN, LAN, Apple AirPrint. Druckt also drahtlos direkt von iPhone und iPad.
• Diverse Philips Hue Angebote. Gibt es immer wieder mal. Einfach reinschauen, ob was dabei ist, was noch fehlt.

Das sind zum Teil Tagesangebote, also eher fix zugreifen.

Ich kann das Genöle nicht mehr hören. Klappe zu, Affe tot, Kirmesplatz geschlossen.

Der hochgeschätzte Kollege Dr. Michael Spehr hat ja gerade noch in der FAZ über die Macht von Facebook geschrieben. Welche Macht eigentlich? Die von Philip Morris, Reemtsma und British American Tobacco über die Raucher? Auch wenn man sich das als Raucher schwer vorstellen kann, man kann auch ohne Zigaretten überleben.

Wie wäre es mit ein bisschen Konsequenz? Ich kann doch nicht über den Machtmissbrauch von Facebook jammern und im selben Atemzug Urlaubsbilder auf Facebook und Instagram posten. Als ob es keine Alternativen gäbe.

Wie ich letztens schrieb:

Ich arbeite nicht für jemanden, dem ich nicht vertraue. Ich arbeite schon gar nicht für jemanden, der die Absicht hat, mich zu hintergehen. Und ganz besonders nicht für jemanden, der mich schon betrogen hat.

Facebook und Instagram habe ich schon lange geloscht. WhatsApp jetzt auch.

Jeder, der WhatsApp hat, kann auch simple Textnachrichten erhalten. Sonst hätte er ja kein WhatsApp. Und wer ein iPhone hat, der kriegt dann automatisch eine iMessage. Ihr wisst schon, das grüne Icon ganz links. Die Amis haben noch nie WhatsApp benutzt. Da musste ich sowieso schon auf Signal ausweichen. Und das bleibt.

Das Schöne ist, man muss nichts machen. Textnachrichten und Signal funktionieren "einfach so". Messages ist vorinstalliert. Und Signal kann das, was WhatsApp kann: Android, iOS und Desktop, also Windows, Mac und Linux. App installieren, fertig. Selbes Protokoll, Ende-zu-Ende verschlüsselt, null Konfiguration. Tschüss Facebook.

According to a report in the New York Times, producers and executives who have met with Apple recently said the company is targeting sometime between March 2019 and summer 2019 to launch a video service. With about a dozen shows signed in the past several months, the Times says Apple is on track to spend significantly more than the $1 billion or so that it told TV executives last year it had budgeted to spend on programming. The report says the turning point came last summer:

The week after “Planet of the Apps” made its debut, Mr. Cue greatly improved the company’s standing in the entertainment industry by hiring the veteran television executives Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht away from Sony Pictures Television, the studio behind “Breaking Bad” and “The Crown.”

The two executives moved quickly to build Apple Worldwide Video from the ground up, expanding its staff to roughly 40 people and opening divisions for adult dramas, children’s shows and Latin American and European programming. In putting together its slate of 12 projects (and counting), Mr. Van Amburg and Mr. Erlicht made deals with big names including Reese Witherspoon (for three shows), Steven Spielberg, Damien Chazelle, M. Night Shyamalan, Jennifer Aniston, Octavia Spencer and Kristen Wiig.

As reports have trickled in about new shows that Apple has signed, it’s become clear that the company has plans to launch a full slate of original programming. Although it remains unclear how Apple intends to roll the shows out to consumers, the New York Times' report provides an interesting peek at where the project stands today and when it might launch.

→ Source: nytimes.com

After putting more than 100 hours of research into 210 models over three years, we’ve learned that most dishwashers are good cleaners. But it’s also worth paying a little more for a model that’s quiet, reliable, and easy to load. That’s why we think the new Bosch 300 Series SHEM63W55N is the best dishwasher for most people right now.

One lesser known improvement to the Health app in iOS 11 was the addition of Heart Rate Variability data, which can be obtained in a variety of ways, including via the Apple Watch. According to Apple's description in the Health app:

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is a measure of the variation in the time interval between heart beats. Apple Watch calculates HRV by using the standard deviation of these beat-to-beat intervals measured by the heart rate sensor (also known as SDNN).

While that offers a basic explanation of this data type, Serenity Caldwell of iMore just completed a deep dive into exactly what HRV is, how tracking it can be beneficial, and Apple's current methods of tracking it. She writes:

Apple currently records HRV averages in your iPhone's Health app through Apple Watch readings (as well as any third-party apps that have chosen to write data to the repository). When you first put your Apple Watch on for the day, you'll trigger an HRV morning reading; the wearable monitors your heartbeat steadily for one minute, then uses under-the-hood calculations* to come up with your HRV average, displayed as ms (milliseconds) in the Health app for iPhone.

Caldwell also shares recommendations for different apps that can be paired with additional tracking methods – such as third-party heart monitors or even just your iPhone's camera – to obtain more extensive data than the Apple Watch provides with its daily readings.

If you're interested at all in Heart Rate Variability, and what your iPhone or Apple Watch can do to track it, Caldwell's write-up is a fantastic resource.

→ Source: imore.com

Doc Searls, Doc Searls Weblog, Mar 29, 2018

Two things are true. First: " Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please." And second, "the same is true for the Times, along with every other publication that lives off adtech: tracking-based advertising." He then backs up this assertion with a detailed description of the tracking tools employed by news websites. Don't think for a minute that education is immune from this. You can't see the tracking tools in an LMS because the LMS is the tracking tool. Nothing prevents your educational institution (or the LMS vendor, if it's in the cloud) from packaging and selling detailed student data with the intent of, ultimately, influencing future behaviour. Which means, most likely, that this is exactly what's happening. As Ben Williamson writes, "the science of personality testing is slowly entering into education as a form of behavioural governance." 

Autonomous Vehicles (or AVs) were to make life easier with less road crashes and carnage. Nearly 38,000 people in the United States are annually killed on roads, and that number is rising. Autonomous vehicles would enable transportation for people who did not have drivers’ licences, and also dealt with the pesky problem of  drivers getting older. Statistics Canada figures from 2009 show that almost 28 per cent of drivers over the age of 65 are driving with some form of dementia. Autonomous vehicles would allow everyone to be mobile that could afford to use their services.

Transportation experts have continually pointed out that despite the positives of universal access to AVs there are some fundamental problems. Autonomous vehicles do not get rid of congestion, they just add to it. And while there may be less parked cars in downtowns and in cities, the streets may be designed to allow for the flow of autonomous vehicles and may not be inclusive of active transportation users such as cyclists and pedestrians. Perhaps that is the fundamental question: are we so engaged by this shiny new technology that human-powered active transportation and human based design of place and cities will be suppressed for the latest iteration of motordom?

In Tempe Arizona a homeless lady with her bicycle was struck and killed by an autonomous Uber. Sadly as reported in City Lab  by David Alpert, the police reported that the lady was not in a crosswalk, and the fatal road violence was blamed upon the dead victim. Nine other pedestrians had died in Arizona that week, but this death, by an autonomous vehicle was the one that garnered attention. But if all road deaths are reduced by 90 per cent, is that a reason to embrace this technology? “The woman was, indeed, not in a crosswalk. Bizarrely, there is a direct, curving brick path through the area, but it’s strictly ornamental: Pedestrians are forbidden from using it, and there are multiple signs posted to tell people not to use the path. The path follows what seems to be the most logical route to a nearby bus stop, and crosses the roads at narrower (and thus less harrowing) spots than the official crosswalk, which requires traversing seven lanes, counting turn lanes.This is the engineering reality of much of Tempe, and much of suburban America: Designers create inhospitable environments in which to walk, then try to prohibit walking in the least inhospitable parts of those environments. And often, when someone is killed, police rush to exonerate the driver.”

The Federation of International Pedestrians has been resolute in saying that no death is acceptable, and has insisted that autonomous vehicles be programmed to save all road users, not just the ones in the vehicle. There is an interest in adopting edicts like “Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities” which prioritizes people’s lives over the vehicle occupants. But as Alpert observes “We can insist that any pedestrian death is not acceptable, just as we do for aviation, where all incidents are studied intently, and commercial aviation deaths worldwide have plummeted from 2,469 people in 55 crashes in 1972 to just 44 fatalities—and none in a passenger jet—worldwide in 2017. There have been zero deaths on U.S. airlines since 2009.” 

It is time to stop justifying deaths on roads because of “speed” or “convenience”.  “Let this, the first recorded pedestrian killed by an autonomous car, set a better example for what we expect of our roads, and the technologies transforming them.”

	mkalus shared this story from Price Tags:
	Oh great, finally open again. Will have to check out, especially with regards to the road surface.

A cold Sunday in March, time to check out the new, improved South False Creek Seawall in Vancouver. It’s fabulous.  For me, the biggest improvement is for people on foot — no longer sharing a busy narrow space with people on bikes.

For me, what was once a 1975 design, a narrow shared path, rough-on-the hands, weaving among knots of people on foot, is now a smooth separated path where I can  enjoy a unique and spectacular place.

It’s a real improvement, and all thanks to a multi-year effort involving major consultations with all involved groups of people who use this space.

Things to note:  new cherry trees, lighting, more benches. Mode separation. At least one formerly inhospitable space transformed into something much more welcoming.

More on the project HERE.  And photos below.

As usual, click on any photo to see a slide show of larger versions. 

In the “you just can’t make this stuff up” department, Bike Biz notes that Manuel Marsilio, general manager of the Confederation for the European Bicycle Industry has spoken out about the need for cyclists to “identify” themselves for autonomous vehicles. With the salvo that lives will be saved with “cycle to vehicle” sensors,  Marsilio made his comments at the Geneva Motor Show in Switzerland. “It is the goal of the “connected car” industry to make cyclists wear sensors or beacons so they can be detected more easily. Currently, “erratic” cyclists are hard to detect by autonomous vehicles. And pedestrians, too, are often not spotted by a plethora of detection devices on the most tricked-out “driverless cars.”

Of course the example of the lady killed by a self-driving Uber car in Arizona was also trotted out as an example of why pedestrians could benefit from wearing a “vehicle tracker”. While there have been previous iterations of bicycle to vehicle communication systems, “B2V is a new addition to the Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything technology. C-V2X connects equipped vehicles to a larger communications system allowing them to communicate with other vehicles, pedestrian devices, cyclists and roadside infrastructure, such as traffic signs and construction zones.”

It has been pointed out that if cyclists need to have beacons and pedestrians need trackers that “smart” cars are not yet smart. While cycling is growing for health and to get around congestion, Mr. Marsilio stated that the main concern was cycling safety, and the need for communication with other road users, and a good legislative environment was needed for users to adopt tracker technology. Mr. Marsilio observed “Bicycles of the near future will have sensors that will allow cyclists to be detected by car drivers. It’s not a [case] of putting a chip in bodies or to force everybody to have a smart watch, the main idea is to have bicycles equipped with the necessary equipment in order to be able to be connected with all vehicles.”

As expected, there has been plenty of reaction to this story and the motordom based solution to have beacons on all road users. And once again, it shows how the embracing of a new technology can warp the understanding that active transportation users and pedestrians need to be embraced and embedded into a city’s living fabric. Should cyclists and pedestrians be bowing to the new needs of autonomous motordom? Not so much.

Spotify edges closer to a float on the stock market with a valuation of between $6-$20 billion. Who will most likely be receiving a slice of the cash windfall?

Our best estimates and guesses – visualized.

No surprises that the big four record-companies may own as much as 16% of Spotify, meaning a potential payout of up to $650 million.

Which they will no doubt immediately share with all the musicians and artists who have made Spotify such a desirable platform, right?

It is hard to believe that a former farming community like the City of Richmond, which has championed density in its downtown areas has neglected to protect its agricultural roots and  assets. The City of Richmond has Class One  farmland, the very best in Canada within its municipal boundaries. While other communities would perceive that farmland is probably the most important legacy that can be passed onto to future generations as part of local food security, the City of Richmond has dithered at reducing the square footage of mansions allowed on farmland in its jurisdiction.

Price Tags Vancouver has previously written about the fact that Richmond City Council has allowed houses of over 10,000 square feet if there is a piece of farmland over one half an acre to plop it on. Ostensibly these houses were for large farming families, but the land instead has been turning  into gated privately owned mansions owned by off shore investors, who pay no foreign buyers tax on agricultural land, and can get taxed as an agricultural property if they produce a nominal amount of farm product. You can bet that these large residences will not return to the market at any price a farmer can afford. In January Price Tags Vancouver discussed the house and land located at 11400 No. 2 road that was purchased with an assessed value of $88,000. A few years later with a mansion not yet completed on the same property, the assessed value is now $8.3 million dollars.  “As Richmond Farm Watch and Richmond resident Laura Gillanders observes “One by one each of these farms is being taken out of production and making sure it is never farmed by a farmer who can live on that land. It goes to show these mansions are not being built for farming.”

It is no surprise that with yet another vote expected today at Richmond City Council that those in favour of selling agricultural land for offshore mansions are worried about anyone stopping  projected enormous development profit  being reaped by selling farmland for wealthy private estates. Indeed The Farmland Property Owners Association has just released a statement accusing a tweet from Councillor Harold Steves, one of the founders of the Agricultural Land Reserve and an outspoken protector of farmland as “dividing Richmond residents based on their ethnicity,” and asked Steves to recuse himself from an upcoming vote on farmland size. 

Steves is hoping to have housing size changed on farmland from over 10,000 square feet to 5,382 square feet, making the land not as attractive for gated mcmansioned estates.  Once again instead of seeing arable land as one of the greatest generational gifts that can be handed down for the future, the spectre of supernormal development profit and land lift means private estate developers want to  nullify the vote of one of agricultural land’s stronger voices. This is not a vote about ethnicity or indeed about development potential. This is about the right of a community to have food security now and in the future, and to recognize that agricultural land is its highest and best use. That is what the Agricultural Land Reserve was supposed to be.

Mr. Steves has stated that agricultural land in Metro Vancouver is under “the worse threat it has ever been due to speculation, since the Agricultural Land Reserve was created in 1973.”  Today’s vote will show whether Richmond City Council are stewards of the farmland or contributors to farmland’s demise to large gated estates for the wealthy. You can get more information and follow the discussion and vote at Richmond City Council here.

Jillian Glover, of This City Life, launched her latest series, My Affordable City:

My Affordable City is a series profiling people in cities to learn more about their housing situation, how they budget for urban life, and what cost-saving tips they can share.

In the early Nineties there was suddenly this thing called Trip hop, which manifested out of another dimension and came to earth in Bristol, not otherwise famous for very much. Its distinguishing characteristic is being slow and dreamy and, I always thought, kind of sexy. Sour Times is probably the most famous Trip-hop song ever, by Portishead, along with Massive Attack the canonical trip-hopheads.

When you listen to it first, you tend to just sink into the slow melody and Beth Gibbons’ beautiful, haunting singing. But there’s a lot more happening; this one is worth listening to a few times.

There are two recordings of this song; it was the big hit on their debut album Dummy, and appeared on Roseland NYC Live, in an elaborate arrangement with a big orchestra. They’re both great, and they made a movie of that concert too, which I think is way cool. Anyhow, any time you’re in the mood for something silky and seductive, you can’t beat Sour Times, assuming you can ignore the fact that it’s kind of sad.

This is part of the Song of the Day series (background).

Links

Spotify playlist. This tune on Amazon: Roseland/Dummy; on iTunes: Roseland/Dummy; on Spotify: Roseland/Dummy. Here’s really excellent live video of the live recording.

Normally we don’t cover when a mid-level executive leaves a smartphone OEM for a new gig, but in the case of Mo Versi — someone we love dearly at MobileSyrup, even though we’ve never met him — we decided to make an exception.

After eight years at his post, Versi is leaving HTC.

Versi announced the move via Twitter on Monday morning. Since 2014, he has served as the company vice-president of product management. Of course, while that was his official role, most HTC fans knew Versi as the guy who told them when to expect the next software update for their HTC device.

After 8 amazing years, today is my last day @htc It was a great run and I feel lucky to have worked with such an amazing team. Thank you @HTCUSA. Wish you all the best! For any questions on software updates, please reach out to @urbanstrata

— Mo Versi (@moversi) March 26, 2018

Versi hasn’t said where his career is taking him next, nor if anyone will take on the mantle of keeping the HTC faithful up-to-speed on the company’s latest software developments permanently. In the meantime, Versi has asked HTC fans to direct their update-related questions to Jeff Gordon, HTC’s global director of public relations.

Source: Twitter Via: Android Police

The post Mo ‘Updates’ Versi is leaving HTC appeared first on MobileSyrup.

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

Find a comprehensive list below:

April 6th

• Cold Water Cowboys: season 3
• Angie Tribeca: season 3
• Abortion: Stories Women Tell

April 13th

• Floribama Shore: season 1
• Daria: season 1-5
• Amy Schumer Presents: Mark Normand: Don’t Be Yourself
• Amy Schumer Presents: Rachel Feinstein: Only Whores Wear Purple

April 14th

• Bosch: season 4

April 15th

• The Circus: Inside The Wildest Political Show On Earth: episode 1 @ 8pm ET.

April 16th

• The 4/20 Collection

April 20th

• The Leftovers
• The High Court: season 1
• Joe Rogan: Rocky Mountain High
• Elvis Presley: The Searcher

April 27th

• Debra DiGiovanni: Here’s The Thing
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• Mostly Sunny
• Saving My Tomorow: Kids Who Love The Earth

This is your last chance to watch

• Married With Children (04/01/2018)
• His Way (04/03/2018)
• The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (04/07/2018)
• Catfish: seasons 1-4 (04/12/2018)
• Beavis & Butthead: The Mike Judge Collection (04/12/2018)
• Shark After Dark: (04/14/2018)
• The X-Files: season 10 (04/21/2018)
• Perception: seasons 1-3 (04/25/2018)
• The Amazing Race Canada: season 1 (04/30/2018)
• The Smoke: season 1 (04/30/2018)

Season Finale

• Our Cartoon President (04/08/2018)
• Counterpart (04/01/2018)

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