I’m pretty sure Ne Nehledej, which is said to mean “Stop Searching”, is in the Czech language, because
Iva Bittová is Czech. I don’t know that much about her and frankly this Song of the Day
mostly exists to highlight remarkable video, but Ne Nehledej is a nice song and Bittová is a great entertainer while
also being
out there on the edge. She sings and plays violin, and is as much performance art as music. But (unlike some performance artists)
this performance is all about music.
It’s a bit confusing, because this song appears on Bittová’s
eponymous first album from 1986, but then there’s another 1994 album with that title, which in
that listing is translated as “No, Do Not Seek”.
One gathers perhaps that it’s a signature song for her?
Credits go to
Lauren for this suggestion; I’d never run across Ms Bittová till she pointed her out.
Amazon,
iTunes (you have to buy the whole album),
Spotify.
Now, here’s that
video of a live performance. I strongly recommend that you go hide
somewhere for six minutes and pay attention.
“It is the national interest to move forward with the Kinder Morgan pipeline, and we will be moving forward with the Kinder Morgan pipeline.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, today, in Nanaimo
The national interest requires that we adhere to our international commitments. The rest of the world (with the notable exception of the United States) is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Canada signed on to the Paris agreement – which I thought meant that we shared that commitment.
“We don’t have a plan to meet Paris target, and reduction shortfall is about same as GHG growth from tar sands, which account for vast majority of national emissions growth”
Kathryn Harrison, Professor of Political Science UBC via Twitter (By the way, Jason MacLean of USaskLaw also chipped in to the Twitter conversation with this paper – but it is in draft and warns “do not cite or quote”)
To be clear, that idea that we can avoid a 2℃ increase in the global average temperature seems to be shrinking in the rear view mirror. If we were reducing emissions then perhaps that would not be the case but since we have now passed 400ppm it seems to me very unlikely. It is the “tipping point” that catches us. It really was a deadline, because once past that the permafrost starts melting and that releases more carbon than we have released since the industrial revolution. It is not clear if that can be stopped. We talk about this being a threat to human civilisation, but it is an existential threat to life itself as we know it. The planet will survive, and adapt. In aeons of time. But we won’t be around to see it and much of the life with which we share so much of our DNA will be gone. So will many low lying islands in the Pacific, and much of the current coastline. Because the methane from our fracking was ignored, our emissions weren’t getting better as we thought, but very much worse. And what has already been emitted is now the problem. And “carbon capture and storage” is mostly a pipedream. And the carbon contribution from oil sands extraction is not trivial even if we do not count burning the stuff we manage to export.
Digging up bitumen for export to Asia is an unlikely economic venture, since the market is currently awash in better, cheaper, easier to deal with oil. And other sources of energy have now proved to be cheaper than fossil fuels in many applications. But we are convinced, against all evidence to the contrary, that somehow expanding extraction of the oil sands is necessary for Canada’s well being. The current extraction is uneconomic. It would not be happening without billions in subsidies from us, the hard pressed citizens. Somehow, the profits of a few corporations are far more important than the well being of ordinary Canadians.
In the more immediate future, the local resident orcas will be gone. Even if we actually manage to stop the pipeline, the lack of salmon that they feed on is already an issue. I do recall when we were campaigning against freeway expansion that we lamented the lack of charismatic megafauna to feature in our arguments. (The Nooksack Dace didn’t quite fit the bill despite the “don’t diss de dace” plea.) Well, if the most intelligent mammals on the planet don’t fit that description, I don’t know what does. But apparently the survival of the resident orcas isn’t in the National Interest, even though tourism is one of the most economically significant issues of the Pacific coast – along with fishing – and the people who depend on the health of its ecosystem.
There will be a spill. There has already been one, but that was at the terminal, so that was actually cleaned up. Quite what happens when the spill is out in more open waters, in worse weather isn’t clear. The idea that somehow the diluent (condensate from natural gas) is going to hang around long enough so the rescuers can scoop up the bitumen seems far fetched to me. It wasn’t the case in the Kalamazoo River. And “world class spill response” that we have seen so far for other kinds of spills has been less than impressive. Which is why the province is saying that we need to get that right before the spill happens, which seems only reasonable to me. Because, once again, once the bitumen hits the bottom of the sea it is almost impossible to recover and the long term impacts, while we cannot be precise, are not going to be good.
The pipeline crosses the traditional lands of several First Nations. Prime Minister Trudeau has made a large number of speeches about reconciliation. Apparently that too is a National Interest only for as long as it does not butt up against some generous contributor to party funds.
Justin Trudeau, Rachel Notley and John Horgan all share in the same ethos. They were elected because they represented change from former conservative governments. The conservatives were wrong about nearly everything. None of the outcomes they predicted for their policies have come about. Instead we have seen an increase in the wealth of very few at the expense of the many. Wealth did not trickle down from tax cuts. Wages remain stubbornly low – except for CEOs. Housing remains unaffordable for many. In too many places there are still totally unacceptable threats to clean air, clean water and edible food. We keep being told we cannot afford essential services like health, education and childcare. All three of these politicians, elected to bring about change, are stuck in the past, clinging to outdated ideas and technologies. The National Interest is that we join the leaders in clean energy and renewable resources. We can no longer simply cut down more trees or dig up more minerals when we need more money. We have a huge legacy from these outdated industries – asbestos, tailing ponds, poisoned land and water are problems in nearly every part of the country. Trains blow up in the middle of towns, cars continue to kill thousands every year, schools cannot withstand expected earthquakes – the list is long and daunting. Keeping jobs in the oil sands does not seem to be one of the best ways forward – especially in a week when one of the largest operators announces that it is laying people off and buying self driving trucks. Given these problems, clinging stubbornly to a failed philosophy seems to me to be indefensible.
It is really sad that the people who went to Nanaimo to bring these problems to the Prime Minister’s attention failed miserably – and are now charged with the worst imaginable Canadian sin. Being impolite.
For more about the National Interest and how NEB defends its decisions you should really read this oped by Elizabeth May
Longtime readers of OLDaily will remember I created something called mIDm back in 2004. The idea was to put an identifying URL in the browers so I could automatically log into sites. Three days later (literally!) the first proposals for OpenID were released and that's the direction the web went. OpenID was basically replaced by Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which gives us the third party ID system we use today. It is not satisfying. See also: WebID and the W3C WebID Community Group.
As Aza Raskin writes in this post, "Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company. Your friends are too important to be owned by any one company." Mozilla, he writes, has been working on a browser-based alternative (yay!). The full discussion is here. The first draft of the protocol is here. "The browser user requests 'connection' to the site. The browser negotiates account setup, possibly disclosing some personal information about the user, and learns a userid-credential pair. On a subsequent visit, the browser notices that it does not have an active session, and automatically establishes one."
The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL might not look like outstanding handsets on paper but once you start using either of them, you will realize what a workhorse they are. Right from their camera to their battery life their daily performance, its really hard to find faults in the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL.
Continue reading →
Today was Cycle Toronto’s annual Coldest Day of the Year Ride. Unlike some years’ past, today it was genuinely cold at about -8°C, although it was not too windy. The ride was planned partially along the Danforth to show support for bike lanes on Danforth.
A small group of us rode in from High Park as a feeder to the main group.
Before we got going, I had to take a picture of John’s fancy Michelin snow tires.
And we’re off.
We picked up a few more riders at Bloor and Spadina before riding through downtown.
Across the viaduct. You can see that they remove the bollards during the winter for snow clearance, which is too bad.
As we pulled up to Danforth and Logan, I was impressed by the size of the gathered crowd. Here Jared makes a few announcements at the beginning.
On the other hand, Honey does not look impressed.
Councillors Fletcher and McMahon show their support for bike lanes on Danforth. Mary Margaret admitted that she doesn’t ride in the winter, but she wore an appropriate toque.
Staging the large number of riders at the start.
Pause at Broadview.
Across the Viaduct.
Paused at Sherbourne.
Down Sherbourne.
We are riding safely under the speed limit.
Stuart and Mark.
Along Richmond.
In the above picture, just to the left of the woman in red, you can see someone with a massive pair of orange pogies. I got a better shot of them at the start. They are by Dogwood Designs.
Kids were along for the ride as well.
Smile!
This fellow from Whitby was part of a group from Durham County who came in to ride with us and to show their support.
Along King, being careful of the streetcar tracks.
At our destination: Betty’s.
Thanks to Cycle Toronto for organizing the ride, and to everyone else for riding along.
Since I started working as the designer here at Rogue Amoeba in 2015, I’ve contributed to several major updates. However, our new soundboard app Farrago is the first Rogue Amoeba app I’ve designed from the ground up.1 The design process for a new application is very involved, with countless discussions, hours of research, and even plenty of guesswork. A long sequence of hundreds (or even thousands) of little choices is required, with each decision impacting choices made later on. Ultimately, designing a new app feels more akin to pruning a bonsai tree than to simply drawing a picture. The design lives and grows in ways you can’t always predict.
Planning for Farrago began in 20162 with a simple pitch: “We want to provide users with a fast way to play short audio clips”. Building on that, we prepared a rough list of features the app would require, including basic playback, looping, volume control, and much more. With that, we began to flesh out what the app would look like, and how it would work. Farrago went through many iterations to get to the version we shipped late last month. I thought it would be interesting to share a look at a few different parts of our design process.
Early Sketches
From its very first mock-up, Farrago focused on easily arrangeable tiles. The rigidity of other grid-based interfaces was something we wanted to avoid. While many things changed from my initial sketches, there’s still a clear resemblance to the Farrago we shipped almost 2 years later.
The earliest sketch of Farrago I could find. The top bar and tiles were present from day one. The idea of sets on the bottom was abandoned not too much later (phew!).
Early on, we also decided we wanted to split the app into two modes: a nonlinear mode shown as a grid, and a sequential mode shown as a list. To quickly work out a basic transition between the grid and list views, I used Keynote and its indispensable Magic Move transition. This ultra-fast tool provides a quick sense of how an idea will work (or fail).
The five-second movie above shows the first mockup of the transition between grid and list views. We eventually went one step further, making the tiles follow arced paths that don’t overlap as much while transitioning.
Tile Troubles
Farrago’s UI is built around tiles, with each tile containing a single audio file to be played, along with many controls and settings for playback. My initial planning had each tile’s face containing multiple click zones to enable different functions. These early drafts show different click areas for playback, ducking, scrubbing, and editing settings.
Assorted sketches of sound tiles, with controls on the tiles itself.
A good amount of time was spent tweaking the layout of the tile face, but the ideas were all excessively busy. These sketches were fussy, filled with too many click areas and tiny icons. The design went in circles, as I repeatedly tried to cram the functionality I wanted on the tile’s face. We wound up stuck on how this critical aspect of the design would work.
There were a lot of conflicting sketches like this. We couldn’t decide how to proceed.
Ultimately, we realized tiles with multiple click areas were a dead end. Getting there, however, actually required us to reevaluate some of our base assumptions for the app.
User Interviews Cut Through the Clutter
Despite a key element of the app being up in the air, work was progressing in many other areas. Eventually, I knew we needed to figure out a way to solve the problem of how tiles would look. To break out of my rut, I decided to bring in outside viewpoints.
I reached out to my social network here in Montreal, and sought out the sort of people who might use a soundboard app — podcasters, radio folks, theatre techs, and more. I bribed several of them with free lunches, during which I showed them mockups and got their responses.
The feedback I got was immediate and consistent: Prospective users didn’t want to rely on a mouse or trackpad to play clips at all! They wanted to use their Mac’s physical keyboard to play sounds. Though I’d been focused on providing access to many controls right on the tile face, it turned out that mouse-based controls should be secondary.
This pivotal insight gave us a clear path forward, and in fact, it now forms the basis of how we expect Farrago to be used by most people. At this point, we decided the tiles would be mapped directly to the keyboard, and this would be the primary way to trigger sounds. Rather than being cluttered with on-face controls, each tile would consist of one large click area. A simple click anywhere selects the tile, while a double-click provides an alternate method of triggering playback.
The final tile design is all one big click area.
This change led us to move many secondary controls into our Inspector area. In that location, they’re still easy enough to reach, without being obtrusive.
The inspector in its final form.
Close(r) to Complete
At this point, my mockups really started to resemble the Farrago 1.0 we eventually shipped. The keyboard-focused interaction model seems clear to us in hindsight, but it took a serious amount of work to arrive there. The outside feedback we solicited was invaluable in helping us move forward.
A mock-up from spring 2017 that pretty closely matches the final design.
Zooming in on this mockup will show you the ridiculous placeholder names nobody was ever meant to see, such as “Onions” and “Fudge”. Ugh. You’ll also see the code name under which Farrago was developed: Iron Beetle.
The above mock is similar to our final product, though we still made many smaller adjustments and tweaks after this. The value of outside feedback continued to be proven during our private beta period as well, as testers forced us to reconsider more of our assumptions, and make changes based on real-world usage.
While our design was getting pretty close to what we eventually shipped, actually getting it all coded and tested would take many more months of work. From this point though, the design work was more about making things look nice, as well as solving smaller functional nitpicks.
Farrago’s Icon
After the design was largely complete, I took some time to work on nailing down Farrago’s app icon. While the design of the actual application is crucial for long-term use, the application’s icon is often the very first thing people see, and we all know how much first impressions count . Ideally, the icon should be distinctive and pleasing to look at, while also conveying something about the software itself. Farrago’s icon went in several different directions before arriving at its final form.
Most of the iterations riffed on the general idea of tiles and playback in some form. Here’s an assortment of different sketches I toyed with:
Very early rough sketches done on paper or iPad.
A key part of my design philosophy is to put designs in place as soon as I can. I created icons from these early hand-draw sketches, so we could use them in early builds of Farrago. This way, we could see how well they worked in places like the Dock.
One of the very rough hand-drawn drafts actually being used in the app.
Later designs began to look a lot more like what we eventually shipped. The final icon design started out purple, temporarily took a sidetrack into a rainbow neon phase, and ultimately returned to our toned-down final purple shade.
The design on the left looks pretty similar to the finished icon, while the design on the right shows a temporary experimentation with neon colors.
Icon design is less scientific than application design. While feedback on icon designs is useful, in the end it makes sense to just go with what feels best. After numerous iterations, we landed on the final Farrago icon. It’s not too flashy, but its distinct shape and color make it easy to differentiate.
The final icon design is quite a bit more subdued than its livelier neon predecessor.
A Team Effort
I led the design for Farrago, but I was very lucky to be able to work with fantastic teammates. No designer wants to hear that their design is “impossible” to implement, particularly when the developer actually means it’s merely “impractical”, or even just “difficult”. Farrago’s lead developer Grant never once backed down from hard problems I threw at him. In fact, he frequently went the extra mile to make the Farrago interface really shine.
To show just one example, we could have only allowed dragging tiles into open spots on the grid. Instead, tiles dynamically rearrange themselves when needed, to make space.
As a result, you can do ridiculous stuff like dragging 15 tiles at once, and it just works:
In addition to Grant’s great work, Rogue Amoeba co-founders Quentin and Paul did everything they could to help the project succeed. They served as the final decision makers on the app, but they also gave us the time and space needed to complete the project, while keeping distractions to a minimum. Working as an ad-hoc team of four, with one designer, one developer, and two “editors”, proved quite successful.
Beyond 1.0
After many months of work, Farrago shipped to the world on January 24th, 2018. We’re very happy with the 1.0 version of Farrago, but we also look forward to making it even better. At this point, the design process will be more externally influenced. More and more people are using the app in real situations and giving us great feedback.
Over time, we’ll gather more data and discern trends in how the app is used, and how it can be improved. I’m looking forward to the next iterations of Farrago’s design. For now, we hope you’ll check out the first version of our new soundboard app, and keep an eye out for updates as well!
Footnotes:
In an amusing coincidence, this is not the first app I’ve worked on with the name “Farrago”. That distinction belongs to a now-defunct augmented reality app. ↩︎
The idea of a soundboard app from Rogue Amoeba was actually several years old at this point. Prior to my joining Rogue Amoeba, development was done on a soundboard plugin for Audio Hijack called QuickSounds. This work never made it past the early stages of development. In fact, I didn’t see it until after Farrago shipped!
QuickSounds in all its glory, circa 2011
While this app didn’t influence my own thinking directly, years of folks at Rogue Amoeba mulling the idea undoubtedly helped our final product. ↩︎
A few weeks ago I spent several days marching around CES in Las Vegas (along with close to 200,000 other people), and as in previous years I saw 'smart' versions of just about anything you can imagine and many you can't. I also heard just about any thesis you can imagine, from 'this is all nonsense' to 'this is the next platform and voice-based AI will transform our homes and replace the smartphone.'
I'm not quite sure what my grand unified thesis on 'smart home' is, but I think there are some building blocks to try to get closer to one:
Will people buy 'smart' anything at all? Will people buy a whole lot of smart things, or just one or two (for example, a door lock, a thermostat and nothing else). Why?
If they do buy more than a handful of things, will they all be connected into one system, with a voice front end?
Finally, if lots of people do have three dozen smart things all connected to Alexa (or Siri, or Google), does that change the broader tech environment? Does it result in massive company creation? Does it give, say, Amazon a major platform advantage - is the end result anything more than the sale of a bunch of ultra-low-margin generic Shenzhen boxes and a small reduction in the number of people cancelling Amazon Prime?
My answers: yes, maybe and no.
Let's start with 'why?'
Why?
My grandparents could probably have told you how many electric motors they owned. There were one or two in the car, one in the fridge, one in the vacuum cleaner and so on, and they owned maybe a dozen in total. Today, we have no idea how many motors we have (or even how many are in a car), but we probably know how many things we own with a network connection or some kind of digital intelligence. There's a phone, and a tablet, and a laptop, and the TV, and... but again, our children will have no idea. It won't be an interesting question. "How many smart devices do you have?" will be like asking how many incandescent lightbulbs you have.
Many of the things that get a connection or become 'smart' in some way will seem silly to us, just as many things that got 'electrified' would seem silly to our grandparents - tell them that you have a button to adjust the mirrors on your car, or a machine to chop vegetables, and they'd think you were soft in the head, but that's how the deployment of the technology happened, and how it will happen again. The technology will be there, and will become very very cheap, so it will slide unnoticed into our lives. On the other hand, many things that people did think might get electrified did not, and many of the ideas that did work were not adopted in a uniform way. Most people in the UK have an electric kettle, but that's not true in the USA, and most people in Japan have a rice cooker, but this in turn isn't true in the UK. Anyone who's baked a few times has bought an electric whisk for $20, but not many people use electric carving knives.
The smart home, or connected home, or internet of things (choose your term) will probably look much the same. Electrical components became cheap commodities that let people experiment with all sorts of ideas - today, the smartphone supply chain is a firehose of cheap commodity components that, again, let people experiment with all sorts of ideas for smart things. Some will work, some won't, but our children will take the ones that do work for granted.
Though this determinist model of deployment will be much the same for smart things as for electricity, there is a difference in the character of what might get created. Washing machines and vacuum cleaners saved huge amounts of time and effort - they replaced entire jobs and liberated people from drudgery. Televisions take over hours of your time, for better or worse. In post-war Japan a television, refrigerator and washing machine were sometimes half-jokingly called 'the three sacred treasures'. No-one would really call a smart light switch or a digital thermostat a treasure. Many smart home devices do not look as though they're solving the same magnitude of problem (which is one reason people can get quite upset looking at some of these experiments).
But if a connected light switch isn't a treasure, neither is an electric kettle. You can put a kettle on a stove, turn on the heat, wait for it to boil, turn off the heat and pour your tea. You could even use a saucepan. But a cheap electric kettle is much faster and turns off automatically when it's ready. So, pretty much everyone who drinks tea owns one. Taking the analogy further, you could say the same about a simple vegetable peeler. Of course you could peel fruit and vegetables with a kitchen knife - you idiot! - but the tenth time that half of the apple and a small part of your thumb end up in the sink, you pick one up for $3 at the supermarket. An electric kettle or a vegetable peeler don't save hours of your day or free you from drudgery - they just remove a tiny piece of friction a few times every single day for the rest of your life.
Today, the world of smart devices is trying to discover quite what other pieces of friction it might be able to address. By their nature, these often don't look like a problem at all until you automate them away - any more than adjusting your wing mirror by hand did. Some of them don't even look like a problem when you point them out - my grandmother could not understand why anyone would buy a dishwasher. Lots of pieces of friction are going to go away.
How might that discovery work? If we're looking for things that take not hours of people's time but little pieces of unnoticed friction, where do you start? One useful model, perhaps, is to look for questions. There's an old line that a computer should never ask a question if it should be able to work out the answer, so what are the questions in our home? Well, when I go into my bathroom, do I want the light turned on? The answer is always yes, so why do I have to press the light switch? When I walk up to my front door, do I want it to be locked? The answer is always no, so why do I need to take a bunch of little pieces of carved metal out of my pocket, pick the right one and put it into a slot? When the kettle is boiling, do I want it to continue boiling until it's dry? No, so turn off the heat. I'm baking something, and I want the oven pre-heated, do I want to fiddle with buttons, or just tell it to turn on and heat to 350 degrees? If I run out of pods for my automatic coffee machine, do I want to order more? Yes, so why ask?
These kinds of questions can start to sound a little like fairy stories. There's an old joke that you can drive a car perfectly well (at least for a while) while believing that it is powered by little magic horses hidden somewhere inside. A smart door lock that watches for your phone or your watch or your car (or perhaps your face), and unlocks for you, but only you, is another kind of magic - there is a little genie living inside that will only let you in.
This takes me to the second question - if you do have half a dozen or a dozen or two dozen 'smart' things, will they all be part of a unified system in your home? Will they all talk to Alexa, or be controlled from a single smartphone screen, or do what I want without any controls at all? Do I want one genie or lots of genies, and which is less friction?
One system or many?
Should everything 'smart' in my home talk to everything else, and perhaps be controlled through one unified UI? The obvious answer is 'of course it will all be one system' but really, it depends what they are, and on what the right way to interact with that device itself might be. Some things would ideally need no interaction at all, some need to be interacted with directly, some can be controlled remotely, and some might get some value from talking to other devices but others might not. And many might fit into several of these.
Hence, the front door locks by itself, after all, so it should perhaps unlock by itself as I walk up the path, and there should really be no UI at all to that. A lot of smart home stuff should be invisible - you should never see it or talk to it. But then, the door might tell the alarm that you're home so you don't need to disarm it yourself. If you do need to interact deliberately, is voice or a screen the right model - and does that mean a screen on the device itself or just your phone? An oven that lets you tell it what you're cooking might want a screen on the device, but also be accessed from your phone to check progress, and also talk to Alexa: 'pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees please, and turn it off 30 minutes after I put the dish in'. Conversely, a connected camera clearly doesn't need a screen on the device itself, but also doesn't work well with an Echo unless the Echo has a screen, in which case why not use a phone (or use the Google Assistant app on your phone)? Then, there are also lots of use cases where talking might be less friction than anything else - it might be nice to say 'Alexa, turn on the lights' or, again, 'Alexa, pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees'. But is it better to say 'turn on the bathroom light' or to walk into the bathroom and have a dumb IR sensor turn it on automatically? To have a phone that senses movement and location and tells the garage door to open, or to say 'open the door' - and would it be Siri or Google in the car and Alexa in the kitchen? Will there be lots of Venn diagrams, or one unified system, or many disconnected appliances?
That, is, the obvious answer to all of this complexity is to say 'let's just make it all Alexa or Siri or Google', but that might actually be more complex, and more friction, and might make little sense for some use cases. We don't worry about our fridge, door lock and light coming from different companies with different kinds of switch today, after all. We'll see.
Part of the challenge is that very few people will convert their entire existing home to 'smart' all in one go, even if all of the possible products were available. You might buy a smart door lock or camera, or thermostat, but you probably won't replace all the light switches, plug sockets, locks, blinds and appliances at the same time. Many of those other things are on long replacement cycles - we buy new smartphones every two to three years, but fridges and water heaters last for a decade or two. If you want people to replace a 'dumb' thing with a 'smart' thing, then either you must fit into the existing replacement cycle for that thing, or that thing must be cheap enough to be replaced off-cycle. You can keep a garage door opener for 20 years or buy a new smart one now, but no-one will replace a two-year-old fridge just to get a smart one.
This means adoption overall will take a long time no matter how much sense you think it makes, but it also means that most smart things have to make sense as a single thing by themselves without being part of a larger system. 'Would it be good if I could have one voice control for all my lights, the curtains, blinds, doors, heating oven and music system?' is a different question to ''do I want that light, and the washing machine (but not the dryer) to be controlled by Alexa?' This makes some use cases more difficult, but it's also why so many of these things tend to have their own app, or (on the larger devices) their own screen and user interface. The theoretical end-state might be no UI except a unified voice system, but you can't sell an oven with no controls on the front today.
You can see this challenge in the way that the industry (or rather industries) are trying to implement it: if the consumer model is pretty unclear, there is an awful lot of industry push, but that comes with lots of bases being covered at once. Google, Apple and Amazon would obviously like there to be one UI, controlled by them, for reasons I'll return to later. The motivations of Samsung and LG, the Silicon Valley company making a door camera, and the hundreds of Shenzhen companies each churning out 50 different things, are a little more mixed.
Samsung Group's strategy is very clear - it wants the fridge, the cooker, the AC unit and the dishwasher all to use the Samsung voice assistant, so that people who bought the Samsung fridge have a reason to buy the Samsung cooker. The trouble is that the Samsung dishwasher team wants to sell to people who bought an LG fridge or a Subzero fridge as well, so they also want to support Alexa, Google Assistant and so on. They might also of course think that supporting any of these is an annoying waste of time that's forced on them by Group. A nice side-effect of this is that the world could well fill up with appliances that notionally have Alexa or Google Assistant embedded (and probably both) but whose owners don't actually know or ever use this, just as for years most 'smart TVs' never connected to the internet.
Meanwhile, Shenzhen and the 'smart home startup' have almost exactly opposite motivations to each other. The smartphone supply chain means that there are an enormous range of very sophisticated, very small, low power and cheap commodity components available off the shelf for anyone else to pick up and turn into products. That, plus the contract manufacturers that are also part of the smartphone supply chain, is behind a lot of the current Cambrian explosion in smart device creation, but it also means that hardware differentiation is extremely hard. Many of these device categories (smart light switches, say) will be commodity products using commodity components - some categories will have 50 companies making near-identical devices. These companies will embrace Alexa/Google Assistant/Homekit because it gives them a commodity front-end as well, just as Android did for phones.
Conversely, a Silicon Valley startup trying to make a device in this world has to find a way to make something that cannot easily be copied, and since it mostly uses the same components as everyone else that generally means something to do with the software. So, is there a network effect? A cloud service? Something with the use of aggregated data across all the devices? Or, do you have a route-to-market advantage? If not, then your whole category will probably go to the incumbents - generic ‘consumer electronics’ devices (baby cameras, say) will go to Shenzhen and washing machines will go to the washing machine companies, where smart becomes just another high-end feature. The challenge for the startup is that if I can control your device entirely with Alexa or Siri, you don't have much of a moat left, but if you don't support them, won't people just buy a generic Chinese one that does? How do you square the circle?
You can see a fascinating case study of this question in connected door locks. Is it harder for the incumbent lock companies, with all their manufacturing scale and route-to-market advantages, to learn how to add ‘smart’, than for software companies to learn how to make a good lock at scale and get it into the channel? Is there enough work to the user experience of a lock that it’s harder for Yale than for a startup? is there a network effect?
That is, is a connected lock really a piece of software wrapped in metal and plastic, or is it just a better lock?
So far, it’s an open question. Again, though, if this does become an Alexa use case, that’s good for Yale - they can go back to worrying about competing with Schlage (and the Chinese entrants they've been thinking about for a decade or more) and let Amazon and Google worry about the network and the UX.
That takes me to the third question - if everything is Alexa, or Google Assistant, or Siri, so what? If everyone does buy lots of these devices, and they are all connected into a central assistant UI of some kind, so what? How much leverage would that give - how much ecosystem power?
Smart speakers and ecosystem value
Self-evidently, Amazon and Google make little to no money from selling cheap smart speakers per se, nor from the sale of smart devices with their tech embedded (Amazon of course makes some money as a retailer, but that's the same regardless of which system the devices use). Apple or Google will make a real margin from a $350 speaker but not much relative to the money coming from iPhones and Adwords, and there are lots of other things it could probably sell at a good margin but chooses not to.
By extension, it's also not terribly clear that they get much value from being the hub to a smart home of itself. There's a lot of handwaving about knowing more about you ('now Google knows when you do the dishes!'), but that's part of a mosaic with much more, much more specific information - after all, an Android phone already knows everywhere you go. Then, there's also a story about opening the door for an Amazon delivery when you're not home, but that could be done with Google Assistant or Homekit - Amazon doesn't need Alexa for this. Rather, controlling the smart home is a use-case to get you to buy the device, and making the device into the hub of a smart home makes it sticky, but the value of the device to Google or Apple is something else. The point is not really sales of the device, nor the smart home, but the leverage to their ecosystems, in some way, that it provides.
What leverage? Well, there are maybe three levels worth thinking about.
First, these devices help with retention - they keep you in the broader ecosystem. The HomePod, Watch, Apple TV and AirPods are all accessories to your iPhone - they have some reason of their own to exist, and some margin of their own, but their main benefit to Apple (like Apple Music) is make you more likely to replace your iPhone with another iPhone and not an Android. Equally, almost everything that Amazon is doing right now trickles back in some way to making Prime more attractive to join and less attractive to cancel, and having an Echo binds you that much more into Amazon. On this level, Google might have a weaker strategic benefit - it has no directly equivalent subscription to stop you cancelling (and the iPhone is in effect a subscription) - you can use a Chromecast or Google Home pretty happily with an iPhone.
Second, like Apple TV or Google Maps, these devices also extend the number of touch points to those ecosystems in new ways, sometimes in ways that let them do quite new things. An enormous amount has been written about what it would mean if you said 'hey Alexa, I need more soap' instead of choosing Tide on a screen or in a shop - Amazon would take an even stronger and more embedded role in people’s buying, and gain even more control over its suppliers - what do you have to pay to be the default choice for ‘Alexa, order more toothpaste’?. (Of course, people also said that the Kindle Fire would be a buying platform, which never happened, and this presupposes a major shift in consumer behaviour, but that’s far from impossible.) Equally, a large part of Google’s strategy for years has been to move beyond ‘ten blue links’ to a fundamental understanding of what you might be searching for, and perhaps to anticipate that search - machine learning is part of this, but having touch points in mail, map, messaging, mobile and now perhaps in the home are ways to shift the character of its reach and its ability to answer or anticipate question from a search bar in a browser to much more of your daily internet life.
Third, however, the huge amount of excitement around Alexa clearly doesn’t actually come from the prospect of decreased churn in Amazon Prime accounts or even seamless toothpaste ordering. Rather, there is now an idea that voice is a new fundamental platform, with possibilities for search, discovery and application development platform that might be as significant as smartphones or social. Voice wil be as important as multitouch, apparently.
I am extremely skeptical about this, as I explained in detail here. Essentially, I think this mischaracterises the nature of the breakthroughs that machine learning has given us in voice recognition: we can now transcribe audio to text, and we can turn text into a structured query, but have no scalable way to be able to answer more and more kinds of such structured queries. ML means we can use voice to fill in dialogue boxes, but the dialogue boxes still need to be created, one at a time, by a programmer in a cubicle somewhere. That is, voice is an IVR - a tree. We can now match a spoken, natural language request to the right branch on the tree perfectly, but we have no way to add more branches except by writing them one at a time by hand. If Alexa or Siri or Google Assistant can give you cricket scores but not rugby, it’s because someone wrote the cricket score module, by hand, but hasn’t written a rugby score module yet.
Worse, even if you do create hundreds or thousands of such queries (which Amazon is trying to do with Alexa Skills), you haven’t solved the problem, since there is no way for the user to know what they can ask, nor remember what skills Alexa does and does not have. The ideal number of skills for such a system is either 3 or infinity, but not 50 or 5000.
This means voice can work very well in narrow domains where you know what people might ask and, crucially, where the user knows what they can and cannot ask, but it does not work if you place it in a general context. That, I turn, means I see these devices as, well, accessories. They cannot replace a smartphone, tablet or PC as your primary device.
Of course, I might be completely wrong here, and the limitations of voice recognition as we have it now might be expanded, or not matter. There is, though another consideration to think about as we try to assess the broader impacts of these devices - there appears to be little or no network effect, and so little or no winner-take-all effects. Even if voice and smart speakers are very, very important, that doesn't necessarily mean that Alexa or anyone else will run away with the space.
There is word-of-mouth - your friends will visit your home, see your set-up and want it (hopefully). There is notionally a data network effect in that the largest platform will collect the most ML training data in the form of voice commands - but Apple and Google already collect vast quantities of voice commands though their other end-points (Apple has said it gets 2bn Siri requests every week). There may be a network effect inside your home - you may want everything that is centrally controlled to be on the same system, and not have to talk to Google for the lights and Alexa for the appliances (though this might not be the case, as I suggested above).
However, there is almost no network effect between homes. You don’t have to buy one product over another because your friends have it, not will one product get irresistibly better if it has more market share. Most things you can buy will support all of the interconnection systems, for the reasons outlined above. There may be some network effects around developers, but as above I highly doubt many people will use large numbers of third party apps, and even if they do these are not of the same scale, cost and opportunity cost as smartphone apps. In turn, if there are no network effects, there won't be a winner-takes-all effect. Windows squashed the Mac, and then iOS and Android squashed Windows Phone, because once a product’s market share fell below a certain level it stopped being as useful, since developers did not support it. PCs and Smarpthones were winner(s)-take-all markets. But a Google Home can answer the same questions and control much the same devices whether it has 15% or 85% market share. Google can mess it up, but Alexa’s success can’t kill or, nor vice versa.
This takes me back to accessories. Accessories can add incremental revenue and margin, and they can make an ecosystem more sticky - they can can make it harder to churn. But they don’t change the market dynamics. Apple TV or Chromecast or Daydream make an ecosystem more attractive and harder to leave, but they don’t change the market. Neither, I suspect, do smart home, Alexa, or smart speakers.
Today’s song comes from Africa (first in the series); Diaraby is a slow dreamy electric African blues with exquisite
singing and guitar, by Ali Farka Touré; seven minutes of pure
musical joy.
Let’s start our trip to Africa in
Mali, famous among other things for being the location of
Timbuktu; and for its music. In 1994
Ry Cooder and Malian musical godfather
Farka Touré collaborated on
Talking Timbuktu, which includes Diaraby and is one of my very favorite
recordings.
It’s a can’t-miss record, cheerful yet deep, bluesy and African, especially appropriate for sitting outside on a warm day.
I read the back story once of how Mr Farka Touré got into playing music that sounded simultaneously like John Lee
Hooker and African campfire music, but I can’t remember it. I sure do love the music though.
Diaraby is just one of a half-dozen beautiful outings on this record. Ai Du has the blues runs played
largely on an acoustic African violin. Gommi has the prettiest singing. Amandrai has an absolutely
cosmic guitar break by Ry Cooder at 3:30, like liquid gold.
But Diaraby is as sweet as any, a little more lively and, well, I could find a video of it.
Vieux Farka Touré
He’s Ali’s son, also a guitarist and singer, definitely an artist to watch. He does solo records and then a couple with
Israeli keyboardist
Idan Raichel as
The Touré-Raichel Collective, which are awfully
pleasing. For a taste, here’s
their take on Diaraby (Spotify).
Spotify
playlist. This song on
Spotify,
iTunes,
Amazon.
As for video, I can’t find any of Ali and Ry playing together, but here’s
a German TV clip that’s mostly an interview with Ry about Ali, with a
couple of brief performance clips. Here’s a serene, crystalline
performance of Diaraby, proving he didn’t need Ry Cooder
around to be great.
As an extra bonus, here’s
Vieux Farka Touré playing Ai Du.
As the cold season started creeping in and the need to balance energy savings while keeping the house warm became more important, I began laying out plans for doing home automation “the modern way”, i.e., without clockwork timers all over the place and with some intelligence thrown in.
As you’d probably expect, it quickly got out of hand and turned into a full-blown “Internet Of Things” saga, of which this is but the first installment.
Background and Use Case
Back when X10 was a thing, home automation was too much of a pain (and costly) to get into, but these days, thanks to inexpensive microcontrollers like the ESP8266 and the Alexa/Cortana/Google Home hype, all sorts of solutions are competing for market share as supporting pillars for the lofty vision of the omnipresent, omniscient home assistant that turns on the mood lights, plays some light jazz and orders pizza when you get home.
I, however, have a rather more pragmatic take on things. The staple of X10 was physical monitoring and control: sensors of all kinds, lighting, outlets, shades, etc., and that’s largely what I put together, focusing on a very simple use case–lowering our power bill by managing heaters during the cold season, and laying down the groundwork for doing the same to the AC later in the year.
Monitoring power consumption on a per-device basis isn’t one of my goals–I have a pretty good idea of which appliances spend what and already replaced the vast majority of my lamps with LED lighting, so I’m only concerned about the overall consumption (which I’m working on monitoring centrally1).
So my use case effectively boils down to:
Switching heaters on and off via some a smart outlet
Controlling the ACs (which use pretty nasty infra-red remotes)
Placing and monitoring some sensors around the house
Technical Criteria
There were, however, five things I tried to stick to in my approach:
As simple as humanly possible (quick operation, manual overrides, etc.)
Avoiding bleeding edge/proprietary solutions
Minimal reliance on Internet access for operation (above all, zero open ports to the outside)
Even as I started getting into the nitty-gritty of hardware and building my own sensors2, I began checking out possible Open Source automation solutions–of which there are now literally dozens out there.
I tried out Domoticz, Home Assistant, etc., but most of them were overly complex, although Home Assistant struck my fancy, given that it’s written in Python and has, by far, the most extensive device coverage I’ve seen yet.
However, I didn’t want to rely on web interfaces. And even though I wasn’t originally looking for voice control (reading Charles Stross‘ books and watching Black Mirror tends to deflate the excitement around having an active microphone in your home), I tried to get the original Google AIY Voice kit (which was made out of pure unobtainium for many months) to test Google Assistant and Alexa in a controlled environment.
I eventually got a ReSpeaker dual-mic HAT, which let me play around with various speech recognition APIs and understand how the home automation integrations worked at a very low level. As everything else related to Linux audio, that little board is somewhat temperamental, but I managed to get both Alexa and Google working for quick tests; the Alexa SDK worked (slowly) on a Raspberry Pi Zero, but the Google SDK required armv7, so I only managed to get it working on a Pi 3.
This took a fairly long time (i.e., most of November), during which I realized I wasn’t keen on having to connect my home devices to somebody else’s cloud, especially given the varying (sometimes haphazard) levels of security required (some scenarios required me to expose devices on the Internet, even if indirectly, or to let them “phone home” to their manufacturers, which, to be honest, I’m not at all keen on allowing).
HomeKit and HomeBridge
So I turned back to Apple. HomeKit is LAN-centric by default (your devices can talk to cloud services of their own, but they’re controlled via the LAN), and only relies on Apple servers for remote control (using an Apple TV or an iPad as relay).
Since all iOS devices now include the Home app (which even given its dumbed down interface is still a lot better than fiddling with web UIs), it also solved the problem of having an easy-to-use3 UI to control and monitor devices.
But it had a nice side benefit: it let me use Siri–a big challenge in terms of brains (or apparent lack thereof when compared to the Alexa and Google integrations I’ve been playing around with), but a big advantage in terms of hardware: Siri works beautifully with my Apple Watch, and it’s with me in every room.
Siri does rely on Apple servers for speech processing, but automation and device control is entirely local to my LAN–I don’t have to open ports on my home router for Alexa/Google/etc. API callbacks, and everything else is reasonably easy to lock down.
And there are a lot of HomeKit integrations out there, the most popular of which is HomeBridge, an Open Source HomeKit bridge with dozens of plugins, including MQTT support.
Picking Out Hardware
Going “the Apple way” and just buying stuff that worksTM was something I’d love to do, but HomeKit-certified hardware is still a little thin in the ground, and spending €200+ on a brand new Apple TV is something I have budgeted for next Autumn (or whenever the living room TV dies and we can go 4K). On top of that, all the interesting hardware seems to be US-only and/or expensive, and I certainly wasn’t going to pay €50 for a smart socket.
So I hunted down alternatives, the most interesting of which was the ITEAD S20 Smart Socket, which is part of an entire family of products with the same internals and can be had for around €12 if you shop around.
Plus (and this is the amazing bit) is based on the ESP8266 and can be re-flashed with Open Source firmware, enabling support for add-on sensors:
A couple of S20s and a DHT22 temperature/humidity sensor. Note the 4-pin placeholder, which allows hooking up sensors to the GPIO pins.
Plus it has a physical button you can press to toggle the outlet state (which is pretty useful in a couple of places where the outlets are raised and/or easy to reach).
Making It Your Own
I ordered 4 S20s back in November and re-flashed them with Sonoff-Tasmota firmware using a very neat project called SonOTA, that spoofs the ITEAD OTA upgrade server and lets you re-flash the devices without having to open them and wire them up to an FTDI adapter (which is doable, but undesirable given the proximity to live mains).
You should be aware that ITEAD has recently started shipping a firmware version (1.6) that prevents SonOTA from working, but outlets I ordered 2 weeks ago were still running version 1.5. Your mileage may vary.
This effectively removes any chance of the devices calling home to the manufacturer or punching holes in my LAN–all they talk to is a local MQTT broker and HomeBridge, thanks to a plugin called homebridge-mqtt-switch-tasmota.
The end result is pretty decent–it all works fine from both the Apple Home app and Siri, and I soon realized that the entire system ran pretty well without any sensors given that all the heaters have built-in thermostats.
So most of the power optimization boiled down to some smart scheduling depending on where we were in the house. Scheduling with simple constraints works fine with my iPad mini as a Home Hub, but I’ve been investigating other options.
Caveats
There are a few, obviously. The first is that there is a degree of assembly required if you want to have a sane, easy to manage configuration, since HomeBridge requires NodeJS.
The second is that Homekit only lets you share control of your entire house, which is… well, sub-optimal. I’d like to have finer-grained delegation, and (ideally) scheduled delegation.
The third is that Apple‘s Home app is pretty much useless for anything more complex than on/off buttons. I don’t have any smart light bulbs (or plan to), but I’m reliably told that the Philips Hue app puts Apple‘s attempts to shame.
But the Home app is enough for providing device names (and speech intents) for Siri, which in turn is clever enough to “turn off all outlets” or “everything in the living room” provided you name your devices properly–although it can be a bit trying at times, since many keywords are reserved for Apple apps.
Finally, there are a few things where HomeBridge itself falls short. For starters, each individual platform/accessory plugin is its own private little universe, and there is no central API for checking or setting device statuses or even a way to manipulate all acessories programmatically.
But there are workarounds, and on the next post I’ll go into the nitty-gritty details (and into more hardware).
This is an interesting twist on its own, and I’ll write it up later, but in short I’ve stuck a Raspberry Pi Zero with a camera to my electricity meter and am working on reading the digits straight off it. ↩︎
Which I’ve kept optimizing for power consumption, something I’ll get into in another post. ↩︎
Last weekend, I got a new 27” iMac. Despite my earlier musings towards going fully thin-client and getting dual 4K displays, I was so fundamentally fed up with my current office setup (a Mac mini with dual displays, which lasted me all of eight years) that I had to do something about it. Worryingly, and despite my ingrained distaste for all-in-ones after owning a few of the early models, the logic behind it was a no-brainer.
In short, the five main reasons were:
It was discounted €300 (bringing it to €1870).
My long-suffering desktop machine was, until today, a mid-2010 Mac mini, and eight years is a long time to live with that setup, even if I managed to keep it running with upgraded RAM and an external SSD.
Despite it shipping with a Fusion drive (with a measly ~32GB SSD), it is still upgradable to a degree (it has accessible RAM slots).
At current prices, I would have to spend an equivalent amount of money to get a comparable monitor (if there is such a thing) plus an upgraded Mac mini (which still doesn’t exist).
And the latter, I think, is the key aspect here. I have very little faith that Apple will release an affordable modular Mac, and I suspect that whatever they might be planning as a Mac mini replacement will not be user-upgradable in any way.
Furthermore, given what they did to the iMac Pro (which foregoes even the RAM slot this iMac still has), I suspect that upcoming consumer iMacs will also not be user-upgradable by default, so I figured this was a great opportunity to buy a Mac that would allow me to upgrade something a few years from now. And I’ll take upgrading the RAM if that’s my only option, thank you.
Also, my thin client plans wouldn’t be very efficient investment-wise. Although theoretically I could get a moderately decent 4K display and an Intel Atom box with HDMI 2.0 and good enough integrated graphics to drive a single monitor for around €800, I already own a 4K LG Ultrafine (which I cannot plug in to anything but a Mac at this point), and replacing it with something else just doesn’t make sense.
In the end, being able to enjoy a dual Retina setup with 5K and 4K while my eyes still work properly won the day, and I’m quite pleased with the results–including connecting to my Surface Pro via Remote Desktop, which renders beautifully in HIDPI and is very snappy over the LAN.
Bugs
Migrating my stuff across went swimmingly (as ever), and I took my usual approach: I migrated my user account and reinstalled only the applications I use daily, which removes a fair amount of accumulated crud.
So far, I only had two issues:
FileVault refuses to let my migrated users unlock the encrypted volume (and a cursory search for fixes reveals that Apple has pretty much broken the setup process in High Sierra).
My LG Ultrafine refused to wake up from sleep (another very common bug, it seems).
I fixed the latter by installing the LG Screen Manager from their site (sorry, no easy link, their site is a mess of JavaScript-driven navigation, like most tech support sites these days) and upgrading the monitor’s firmware, and am currently trying to fix the former by disabling FileVault and re-enabling it.
Yes, like an animal. After four hours of fiddling with fdesetup and sundry, which did not work (it did in Sierra…), and given that I have zero options in System Preferences to add or enable existing users to unlock FileVault (which is also obviously a bug), I decided to just turn the bloody thing off and on again.
One thing that appeared to work was giving admin privileges to my user account (something I never do for security reasons), but that did not work in practice–so I’m now waiting to see if restarting the entire process will set the right security tokens and update the boot screen.
Update: I eventually had to completely reinstall macOS to fix the boot screen, which was another low-brow tack but easier to do when I have other work to do. I haven’t tried to re-enable FileVault yet, but I suspect there will me some snags, so I’ll hold off on that until I’ve read up on the state of APFS on Fusion drives, since if that requires another reinstall I’d rather do both in sequence.
Caveats
This is the low-end 27” configuration, which is relatively modest:
3.4GHz quad‑core Intel Core i5 (Turbo Boost up to 3.8GHz)
8GB (two 4GB) of 2400MHz DDR4 memory, leaving 2 slots available
1TB Fusion Drive (with a 32GB SSD, according to lore, although the specs page conveniently omits that detail)
Radeon Pro 570 with 4GB of VRAM
At this point, I’m not worried about the Radeon (I don’t plan on doing much gaming, if any, on this machine) nor the CPU (it is zippy enough for my typical workloads, even with a Windows VM on top).
The Fusion drive is more of a compromise, largely because darktable and other I/O-intensive applications do feel a little slower than on my MacBook Pro. But having it generate thumbnails for six months’ worth of photos is not unbearably slow (and darktable tends to feel slower on macOS anyway), so the jury’s still out. It wasn’t converted to APFS (which is also fine by me), and if it ever becomes a bottleneck then I’ll just start investigating Thunderbolt 3 cases for external SSDs.
The RAM, on the other hand, is already slated for removal and upgrade–sometime next year (or whenever DDR4 RAM prices start approaching sanity again) I intend to juice it up to the full 32GB.
The one thing that irks me the most right now is the utterly asinine way that I have to charge the new mouse (i.e., the Lightning port on the underside). It looks like a dead bug skewered on my desk, and I wonder what possessed Apple to come up with such a dumb, clumsy idea.
But hey, they never really liked removable batteries in the first place, right?
While I work on urban water governance issues, I’m not an expert on every city, and particularly, I am wary of offering any “silver bullet” kind of solutions to drought crises because cities are heterogeneous entities and therefore there is no single policy decision that will have the necessary impact. When I first started reading about Cape Town’s water crisis, my first thought was “why not apply a soft path approach?”
The soft path approach to water management is predicated on the premise that behavioural change can occur and water demand can be properly managed in a way that reduces stress on urban infrastructure and reduce challenges facing cities. I first heard about the soft path when I started working with one of my students on a paper, and when I first met Dr. David Brooks (with whom I share the privilege of being an editorial board member of Water International, the journal). Dr. Brooks has championed the notion of a soft path to water management.
My own view (given that many of the cities that I study are facing critical water stress) is that we probably need a mixture of soft path and hard path approaches, but since I know very little about the geo-hydrology of Cape Town and behaviour of South African water users, I’m very wary of wanting to propose a solution. But I do see that this will be a critical case for other cities to follow closely, because from the information I’ve been getting, the situation is quite critical. Not sure if a soft path management approach will be enough, to be quite honest, but I do look forward to seeing how the situation develops.
What worries me is that even though the concept of water recycling and the value of wastewater treatment is now en vogue (thanks to the World Water Assessment Programme’s 2018 report on wastewater as an untapped resource), I have been calling for a reconsideration of wastewater as a resource since 2004 and it’s 2018 and we are still not treating 100% of our wastewater, and we’re not recirculating it to our water systems, and we continue building houses and expanding cities, and covering areas where recharge could occur. Human behaviour in the face of a water crisis continues to be incredibly stupid, and I don’t know whether we will be able to change it in the near future, or fast enough to solve looming crises like Capetown’s.
You can read some more stuff on the soft path management approach here, and here, and here, here and here.
What is freedom anyways? Doug Belshaw posted this article from last July. It argues that the move toward a cashless society means the end of freedom, because government and corporations could then surveil your every transaction and cut off your access to money. But is freedom the same as skulking in the dark and operating outside the law? Maybe I have "some sort of mental impairment of imagination and ethics," as the author suggests. We need safeguards, yes.But it's hard for me to see how we would be more free when the will of the criminal and corrupt prevail.
I watched the AlphaGo documentary yesterday
and it brought to mind this passage from Atomic Awakening, a book about
atomic weaponry, power, and science.
And so transpired the birth of the Atomic Age, at 5:29:45 in the New Mexican desert.
It would be an interesting time to be alive, as the coming decades would be a
hectic period, filled to capacity with new discoveries, new hardware, new physics,
and a lot of funding. Nuclear power had been born backwards. Instead of looking down
a long tunnel at the lamp of knowledge in the distance, there was a blinding flash,
right at the entrance, after only a few years of intense theoretical speculation.
As they say in nuclear engineering circles, if the first use of gasoline had been
to make napalm, we’d all be driving electric cars now. - Atomic Awakening
This comes to mind a lot. There’s this certain aspect of technology, especially
in computer science, where generality and specificity interact. We know that
a chemical like gasoline has many uses, including napalm. Nuclear reactions
can be a power source or a weapon. And machine learning can be a tool for cancer
researchers, or an opponent in Go.
What if Bitcoin’s initial users were teachers accepting donations for classroom
supplies, instead of nerds and criminals? How does Zuckerberg’s horrible VR stunt in
Puerto Rico reflect the future of VR? Despite technology being general
enough for many purposes, what it’s used for initially, and associated with initially,
has an outsize impact on its public perception and, in many cases, future application.
I’m going to start more casual blogs again, with low production polish and so on.
This could have been ‘Twitter storms’ but I’d like to narrow my Twitter scope
and keep more of my content in my own domain.
The header image is from the Department of Energy’s Operation Plowshare:
“Cut-away view showing an artist’s concept of the location of a number of nuclear explosives properly buried so that simultaneous detonation will excavate a ditch-like crater. c. 1966”
Thanks Kyle McDonald for mentioning
the documentary and lending another interesting viewpoint.
I watched the AlphaGo documentary yesterday
and it brought to mind this passage from Atomic Awakening, a book about
atomic weaponry, power, and science.
And so transpired the birth of the Atomic Age, at 5:29:45 in the New Mexican desert.
It would be an interesting time to be alive, as the coming decades would be a
hectic period, filled to capacity with new discoveries, new hardware, new physics,
and a lot of funding. Nuclear power had been born backwards. Instead of looking down
a long tunnel at the lamp of knowledge in the distance, there was a blinding flash,
right at the entrance, after only a few years of intense theoretical speculation.
As they say in nuclear engineering circles, if the first use of gasoline had been
to make napalm, we’d all be driving electric cars now. - Atomic Awakening
This comes to mind a lot. There’s this certain aspect of technology, especially
in computer science, where generality and specificity interact. We know that
a chemical like gasoline has many uses, including napalm. Nuclear reactions
can be a power source or a weapon. And machine learning can be a tool for cancer
researchers, or an opponent in Go.
What if Bitcoin’s initial users were teachers accepting donations for classroom
supplies, instead of nerds and criminals? How does Zuckerberg’s horrible VR stunt in
Puerto Rico reflect the future of VR? Despite technology being general
enough for many purposes, what it’s used for initially, and associated with initially,
has an outsize impact on its public perception and, in many cases, future application.
I’m going to start more casual blogs again, with low production polish and so on.
This could have been ‘Twitter storms’ but I’d like to narrow my Twitter scope
and keep more of my content in my own domain.
The header image is from the Department of Energy’s Operation Plowshare:
“Cut-away view showing an artist’s concept of the location of a number of nuclear explosives properly buried so that simultaneous detonation will excavate a ditch-like crater. c. 1966”
Thanks Kyle McDonald for mentioning
the documentary and lending another interesting viewpoint.
At the end of this month, Samsung will unveil the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus — its flagship handsets for 2018. Riding high on the success of the Galaxy S8 and Note 8 from last year, Samsung seems to be following an ‘S’ upgrade style this year. Leaks point to the Galaxy S9 looking largely the same as its predecessor but packing major under the hood changes.
Continue reading →
This week didn’t feel very productive. Lots of various stuff to think about, meant I did less focus work. Some of the things this week I did spend time on.
Open data work for the Province of Overijssel, meeting some departmental heads
Had a preparatory meeting for upcoming work in Serbia for the UNDP early March, and wrote a first draft for how to approach it
Provided feedback on a project proposal for an open data readiness assessment by the Palestinian NGO Leaders.
Made a first draft for a planned talk at the Open Belgium 2018 Conference
Discussed a potential project in Georgia
Made a short video on using data sharing and open data as a way to find out things you don’t know yet about your core client group, as part of a proposal for project in health care.
Activated a Things Network gateway, and reached out to the local community group to get more involved
One of the sensors (number 105), located two streets away from our house, is now using my gateway to log its data to the central Measure your city database.
sillygwailo
shared this story
from Getting Things Done® - David Allen's GTD® Methodology.
Procrastination. I hear it all the time. My clients confide in me, “I am procrastinating on sending in the contract/mailing the gift/fixing the appliance/etc…” you name it, I’ve heard it. And just between us, I used to think I was the ultimate procrastinator.
When I first heard David Allen say that the type of people who procrastinate the most are the creative, bright and sensitive ones, I perked up and thought to myself, “Hey, that’s me! Smart and imaginative, how did he know? And how very kind of him to describe us (people who procrastinate) that way…”
The one example that stands out to me of how the GTD methodology resolves procrastination, happened a few years ago… the engine light flashed on in my car. My first thought was, “This is going to cost me thousands of dollars and that’s not in my budget.” I didn’t want to think past the doom and gloom of how much it was going to cost. Also, the idea of getting my car fixed meant figuring out so many other logistics, like do I take it to the car dealership or my own mechanic? On top of that not having a car meant having to coordinate carpooling for myself and my family. The general inconvenience and the unknown overwhelmed me. Every time I would get into the car the engine light would go on and all those thoughts would be triggered in my head. For a couple of seconds I would feel the anxiety but soon I would be distracted by something else and forget about it.
Three months later after seeing the engine light go on yet again, I thought to myself, “OK, this is ridiculous. I need to practice what I preach.” I took out some paper and asked myself what I would like the SUCCESSFUL OUTCOME to be. Just like the engine light in my car, a light went off in my head. I wrote down: R&D engine light in car. Then I asked myself, “What’s the NEXT ACTION to get there?” So I wrote down: Call the car dealership and ask them about the engine light. I started to notice that even though I hadn’t made the call and didn’t know what the outcome of that call would be I felt so much better. I took a moment to reflect on why suddenly I didn’t feel so overwhelmed and stressed about my engine light.
I realized that the two things I did that caused me to procrastinate were:
1) I had a negative definition of the outcome (too much money that I didn’t have in my budget)
2) I focused on the complexity involved in getting it fixed which overwhelmed me so I did nothing.
What I did that got it moving was:
1) I changed the negative definition of the outcome to a positive definition that motivated me (R&D engine light in car)
2) I clarified and defined the next action which simplified what I needed to do so I could relax about the complexity around it. (Call car dealership about engine light in car.)
All this required was a few minutes of focused thinking. Within two weeks my engine light was handled and ended up costing a whole lot less than what I had imagined.
Now, this is just one small example from my life. But I think it has had an enormous impact on me because it’s magnified by the professional and personal decisions, possibilities and responsibilities that come my way each day. It makes sense that this methodology can handle any amount of volume or intensity.
–Meg Edwards
Meg is a coach with GTD Focus, the exclusive partner for the delivery of Getting Things Done® (GTD®) individual coaching in the United States and Canada.
I wrote a Twitter thread today this is probably worth keeping. I reproduce it here with minor edits for clarity. (And yes, I delete tweets eventually)
=================
What McKew describes here is what researchers have been seeing in the data for ages now. Trolls, bots, and borgs aren’t just putting out fake news — they are framing our national discussion, setting the terms of the debate.
They can do this partially because these tightly integrated networks can test hundreds of memes and then quickly promote the ones that work through systems of automation. They can jump on a crisis and ramp up in minutes while everyone else is still disorganized.
The Russians run a farm league system that feeds the bot-borg networks that the right started constructing from 2012 forward. Those conservative borg networks are like a water cannon that can be turned on anything instantly.
Along the way the flood of fakery and semi-fakery and amplified authenticity starts to peel off real figures through relentless mention campaigns. This is how many of the things Trump retweets reach him, for instance. And it fools reporters into thinking they are watching a real debate.
(I’ve said it before — this is a form of “laundering”, where the fake is slowly leveraged into the real.)
None of this is secret. Maybe you don’t like McKew. Check out @DFRLab. Check out @katestarbird’s work. Or @krisshaffer. We as a society are applying atomistic transactional models to systems problems. It doesn’t work. These researchers can show you why.
Or, here, let Hannah Arendt explain it to you, yet again. The idea of totalitarian propaganda is to construct grand narratives out of the refuse of civilization:
The thing is, computational propaganda automates this process, allowing people to manufacture a sense that something big is being covered up OUT OF NOTHING and ALMOST INSTANTLY. That article describes how it is done, by first collecting the refuse, sorting through it, identifying the promising pieces and propagating the narrative.
It’s the narrative that is key. The bits its composed of are junk. The effects of computational propaganda are not “Oh, well climate change was disproved” or “I think Hillary killed people” it’s “Well, there’s something fishy going on there.” When a narrative digs in the facts don’t stand a chance.
Arendt goes on to explain the main trick of repetition in propaganda — it isn’t about helping the population remember, it’s about providing a consistency in a world where most things are uncomfortably inconsistent. People see things that are universal and consistent as feeling “true”. That’s why conspiracy theories are so attractive, and that’s why the lifting up the right sustained topic and framing is more useful than the organic, shifting dialogue.
Unbotted, unborged, and untrolled Twitter might be an organic and shifting firehose of info. Maybe. But computational propaganda replaces this shifting world of shades of gray facts and organic trends with self-consistent, persistent, and broadly imaginative trending topics that tie together in generative narratives that require little work to grasp.
This is Arendt’s propaganda machine, automated.
The thing is, the way Twitter and Facebook are set up — the way they let themselves be gamed, willingly, by these groups — all but ensures those Arendtian narratives will root and supplant the more organic discussions and investigations.
Machines have always been sought to provide the level of consistency that humans can’t reproduce. And that’s what’s going on here, as bots and borgs produce the consistent narratives that individual actors will not be able to replicate. And that automated consistency wins over organic discussion and debate every single time.
In other words, without change in policies, norms, and tech us humans don’t stand a chance.
Other than Canon, all the Japanese camera companies have the end of their fiscal year on March 31st. That's important for two reasons. One, the first window of new product launches is always in this first calendar quarter because of a series of trade shows ending in CP+ in Japan (this year March 1st). …
By late spring, four million people in the city of Cape Town—one of Africa's
most affluent metropolises—may have to stand in line surrounded by
armed guards to collect rations of the region's most precious commodity:
drinking water.
Population growth and a record drought, perhaps exacerbated by climate
change, is sparking one of the world's most dramatic urban water crises,
as South African leaders warn that residents are increasingly likely to
face "Day Zero."
That's the day, now projected for mid-April, when the city says it will
be forced to shut off taps to homes and businesses because reservoirs have
gotten perilously low—a possibility officials now consider almost inevitable.
"The question that dominates my waking hours now is: When Day Zero
arrives, how do we make water accessible and prevent anarchy?" says
Helen Zille, former Cape Town mayor and the current premier of South Africa's
Western Cape province, in a guest newspaper column published last week.
For years, a shutdown of this magnitude in such a cosmopolitan city had
been almost inconceivable. But as overdevelopment, population growth, and
climate changeupset the balance between water use and supply, urban
centers from North America to South America and from Australia to Asia
increasingly face threats of severe drinking-water shortages.
Nowhere has that threat seemed to come on faster and catch more by surprise
than it has in Cape Town.
"I'm afraid we're at the 11th hour," says South African resource-management
expert Anthony Turton. "There is no more time for solutions. We need
an act of God. We need divine intervention."
Approaching “Day Zero”
The situation seems to be worsening by the day.
The city is prepping 200 emergency water stations outside groceries and
other gathering spots. Each would have to serve almost 20,000 residents.
Cape Town officials are making plans to store emergency water at military
installations, and say using taps to fill pools, water gardens, or wash
cars is now illegal. Just this week, authorities stepped up water-theft
patrols at natural springs where fights broke out, according to local press
reports. They're being asked to crack down on "unscrupulous traders"
who have driven up the price of bottled water.
For months, citizens have been urged to consume less, but more than half
of residents ignored those volunteer restrictions. So earlier in January,
the city requested even steeper cuts, asking residents to consume just
50 liters per day—less than one-sixth of what the average American uses.
If consumption doesn't drop steeply and quickly, city officials warned this week,
everyone will be forced into Day Zero, where all will have to live on far
less—about 25 liters a day, less than typically used in four minutes of showering.
"I'm not sure if we'll be able to avert Day Zero," says Kevin Winter,
lead researcher at an urban water group at the University of Cape Town.
"We're using too much water, and we can't contain it. It's tragic."
Says David Olivier,
a research fellow at the Global Change Institute at South Africa's University
of the Witwatersrand, "The fundamental problem is the kind of lifestyle
we're living. There's almost a sense of entitlement that we have a right
to consume as much as we want. The attitude and reaction of most posts
on social media is indignation. It's 'we pay our taxes' and therefore we
should be as comfortable as possible.”
The Complications of Climate
The path to Cape Town's crisis is both typical—and not.
Much like southern California, South Africa is arid, but Cape Town's most
recognizable land mass, Table Mountain, traps onshore breezes coming off
warm ocean waters, creating local rains that power rivers and fill underground
aquifers. It is an oasis surrounded by desert with a Mediterranean climate.
Its beauty has driven populations skyward and brought increasing wealth
and prosperity. There are pools and water parks and wineries and lush gardens,
though even as the city modernized, hundreds of thousands still live in
impoverished settlements. Unemployment tops 25 percent.
Over the last 20 years, the city recognized some of the increased threat.
It made strides in reducing water use from its six major reservoirs, which
hold up to 230 billion gallons of water. Per capita consumption declined,
the city reduced leaks, it forced large users to pay more, and generally
promoted water efficiency, says Winter. Cape Town won several international
water management awards. It even tries to shame top water users by publishing
their names.
Tap images for captions
But officials also made an increasingly common mistake: They assumed future
rainfall patterns would resemble the past, or at least not change too quickly.
"It's like driving a motor car and looking in the rear-view mirror,"
Winter says. "They solved the old problems, but they didn't recognize
the risks ahead. Now here comes the juggernaut."
"They were warned, but those warnings were not enough to shift attention
from schools or hospitals or all the other things on the agenda,"
Winter says.
In the end, the dangers came suddenly. In 2014, the six dams were full,
but then came three straight years of drought—the worst in more than a
century. Now, according to NASA data,
reservoirs stand at 26 percent of capacity, with the single largest, which
provides half the city's water, in the worst shape. City officials plan
to cut the taps when the reservoirs hit 13.5 percent.
While it's not clear how much of the current dry spell is driven by natural
variability as opposed to climate change, "it's clear our current
system is no longer reliable enough," Olivier says. "We may not
have another drought like this for a few decades. But extreme events are
only going to become more common."
And consequences could be felt in many other places across the globe.
Other World Cities at Risk
Already, droughts in recent years have helped spark famine and unrest in
rural nations around the Arabian Sea, from Iran to Somalia.
But water crises are also threatening massive cities around the world.
Already, many of the 21 million residents of Mexico City only have running
water part of the day, while one in five get just a few hours from their
taps a week. Several major cities in India don't have enough. Water managers
in Melbourne, Australia, reported last summer that they could run out of water in little more than a decade.
Jakarta is running so dry that the city is sinking faster
than seas are rising, as residents suck up groundwater from below the surface.
Much like Cape Town's fiasco, reservoirs in Sao Paulo,
Brazil, dropped so low in 2015 that pipes drew in mud, emergency water
trucks were looted, and the flow of water to taps in many homes was cut
to just a few hours twice a week. Only last-minute rains prevented Brazilian
authorities from having to close taps completely.
"Sao Paulo was down to less than 20 days of water supply," says
Betsy Otto, director of the global water program at the World Resources
Institute. "What we're starting to see are the confluence of a lot
of factors that might be underappreciated, ignored, or changing. Brought
together, though, they create the perfect storm."
Competition for water is increasing, as population growth drives demand
for drinking water and agriculture and as countries become more affluent.
In fact, cities aren't always even aware that the water they think they
can count has been claimed or polluted or is being consumed by other users.
Meanwhile, climate change is causing wider swings in weather, with more
intense storms and more extreme events. "Think of southern California's
record snowpack after five years of drought followed by more drought—such
swings are likely to be the new normal," she says.
At the same time, as with Mexico City or Jakarta, infrastructure is often
inadequate. Water management is unsanitary, leaky, polluted by heavy metals,
or not sufficient to deliver enough supply to support demand. "It's
simply not up to the task," Otto says.
Often the failure is about money, but there are almost always political
dynamics at work, too.
Political Miscalculations
"Frankly, where it gets dangerous is the inability of our political
institutions to keep up," says Geoff Dabelko,
associate dean and director of the environmental studies program at Ohio
University. "The overriding story of the coming decade is going to
be about how well our institutions deal with the increased rate of change."
In South Africa, the ruling African National Congress and the Democratic
Alliance, the opposition party that runs the city, each have some responsibility
for maintaining or administering water. Experts suggest that each made
fundamental missteps.
"Both believed that this would be a short-term drought and that things
would return to normal at some point," Turton says. "But climate
change is a factor now, and it's only begun to dawn on them how much the
demand for water will just keep increasing."
For the moment, the region is scrambling to bring new supplies on line.
Four new desalination plants
are under construction. New water wells are being drilled and a plant that
would reuse effluent is being built. Most of those projects are more than
half completed.
All but one, however, is behind schedule, as city leaders push to at least
get something up and running soon.
"Residents of Cape Town are very surprised by how dramatically the
situation has escalated, says Magalie Bourblanc,
a public policy analyst specializing in resource management at South Africa's
University of Pretoria. "But I think people are realizing very quickly
just how bad the situation could be."
O Canada! Now gender-neutral, though just as syntactically convoluted. And God is still there to replace one of the dorky stand-on-guards. Still, better than God save the Queen, the anthem I grew up singing. nytimes.com/2018/02/01/wor…
Posted by
sapinker
on Saturday, February 3rd, 2018 5:56am
Amazon Canada launched its Fire tablets in Canada early December 2017, which was well after the USA launch.
Both the Fire 7 Tablet and the Fire HD 8 Tablet were priced to sell as low as $59.99 and $99.99, respectively. Now, in what seems to be a ‘limited time offer,’ Amazon Canada has discounted the cost of each model.
The Fire 7 Tablet are both $10 of and is available for $49.99 for the 8GB version and $79.99 for the 16 GB. The Fire HD 8 Tablet drops by $20 to $79.99 for the 16GB and the $109.99 for the 32GB model.
The Fire 7 Tablet features a 7-inch display and offers up to eight hours of battery life, while the Fire HD 8 Tablet sports an 8-inch HD display and can give you up to 12 hours of battery life. Both tablets feature a Quad-core 1.3 GHz processor, front- and rear-facing cameras and support free, unlimited cloud storage from Amazon for all photos taken on Fire devices.
Sean Marshall @Sean_YYZ
thermal jumpsuit @JodiesJumpsuit
Karen Quinn Fung 馮皓珍 @counti8
Duane Storey @DuaneStorey
The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL might not look like outstanding handsets on paper but once you start using either of them, you will realize what a workhorse they are. Right from their camera to their battery life their daily performance, its really hard to find faults in the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL.
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Since I started working as the designer here at Rogue Amoeba in 2015, I’ve contributed to several major updates. However, our new soundboard app Farrago is the first Rogue Amoeba app I’ve designed from the ground up.1 The design process for a new application is very involved, with countless discussions, hours of research, and even plenty of guesswork. A long sequence of hundreds (or even thousands) of little choices is required, with each decision impacting choices made later on. Ultimately, designing a new app feels more akin to pruning a bonsai tree than to simply drawing a picture. The design lives and grows in ways you can’t always predict.
The earliest sketch of Farrago I could find. The top bar and tiles were present from day one. The idea of sets on the bottom was abandoned not too much later (phew!).
Assorted sketches of sound tiles, with controls on the tiles itself.
There were a lot of conflicting sketches like this. We couldn’t decide how to proceed.
The final tile design is all one big click area.
The inspector in its final form.
A mock-up from spring 2017 that pretty closely matches the final design. 
Very early rough sketches done on paper or iPad.
One of the very rough hand-drawn drafts actually being used in the app.
The design on the left looks pretty similar to the finished icon, while the design on the right shows a temporary experimentation with neon colors.
The final icon design is quite a bit more subdued than its livelier neon predecessor.
QuickSounds in all its glory, circa 2011
At the end of this month, Samsung will unveil the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus — its flagship handsets for 2018. Riding high on the success of the Galaxy S8 and Note 8 from last year, Samsung seems to be following an ‘S’ upgrade style this year. Leaks point to the Galaxy S9 looking largely the same as its predecessor but packing major under the hood changes.
Continue reading →
Getting Things Done® - David Allen's GTD® Methodology.
gift/fixing the appliance/etc…” you name it, I’ve heard it. And just between us, I used to think I was the ultimate procrastinator.
sapinker on Twitter.
sapinker
on Saturday, February 3rd, 2018 5:56am
archpics on Twitter.
archpics
on Sunday, February 4th, 2018 12:58pm