Category: The Next Computer

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Data Custody Products and Design The Next Computer

What you own and what you don’t

I learnt about this case today

A crucial decision came in 1993 when the Ninth Circuit of the US Court of Appeals ruled in MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer Inc. that the local, impermanent copy of an operating system that is loaded into a computer’s RAM upon its booting up — a necessary component of a computer’s operation — is, by virtue of making a copy of intellectual property (the operating system), subject to copyright law. This “deeply stupid ruling,” Fairfield tells Vox, laid a trap, making the use of any software (broadly meaning nearly anything used on a computer system) a copyright violation unless the user followed rules set unilaterally by the manufacturer and/or seller. “That was the case that handed the keys to the kingdom to these companies,” Fairfield says. 

These legal principles have carried over to the so-called Internet of Things, in which tangible objects are embedded with copyrighted software (a.k.a. smart devices, like smart refrigerators and televisions and cars). 

– The erosion of personal ownership

This turns out to be the foundation of the legality of having ‘smart’ devices be technically owned by the manufacturer even after you have paid full price for them. This is what makes it legal – in the US at least – for manufacturers of these devices to remotely disable them, restrict their functionality, make it illegal for you to edit or repair their software, even when the manufacturer itself no longer considers it viable to support the device.

The article I quoted above is a detailed, well-considered take on the matter of not just smart devices, but personal ownership itself. Worth a read.

We have discussed smart devices many times on this site.

We have also discussed being mindful of data custody in the 21st century.

Both are issues to consider the next time you’re looking to purchase a gadget, appliance, car – anything that has electronics in it, really. In the 21st century, the stakes for caveat emptor or buyer beware are much higher.

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Products and Design The Next Computer

Our obsession with Thin and Light

[Apple’s annual environmental report] speaks of the Apple Pencil stylus as though it contains secrets lost in some fragment of the Rosetta Stone. The company is “designing, developing and testing additional disassembly tools — including new methods for recovering materials from Apple Pencil,” it says, as though the methods could only be reverse-engineered, rather than integrated from the very first stage of design.

– Your Smartphone Should Be Built to Last

It is only decades later that the full cost of our obsession with Thin and Light will be apparent. By then it will be too late.

Here are some posts I have written on this before:

An alternative future where we could Ship-of-Theseus our laptops
This ten year old Macbook Air
Oldie but goodie
Categories
Decentralisation and Neutrality Products and Design The Next Computer

The Mighty browser and web bloat

The Mighty browser, recently unveiled, “lets you have more tabs while taking 10x less memory” because it “streams your browser from a powerful computer in the cloud”.

Here’s how it works:

Mighty designed a custom server to “keep costs low,” built a low-latency networking protocol, and forked Chromium to “integrate directly with various low-level render/encoder pipelines.”…

Each browser instance is powered by “16 vCPUs” running on dual Intel Xeon processors that clock up to 4GHz, Nvidia GPUs, and 16GB of RAM.

This cloud implementation is said to let you load anywhere from “50+” to “hundreds of tabs without it stalling, freezing, and slowing down your computer

This reminds me of the Opera Mini browser I used to use on my Nokia N series phones. It pre-rendered web pages on a server before sending a compressed end result to my phone:

Unlike straightforward web browsers, Opera Mini fetches all content through a proxy server, renders it using the Presto layout engine, and reformats web pages into a format more suitable for small screens.

A page is compressed, then delivered to the phone in a markup language called Opera Binary Markup Language (OBML), which Opera Mini can interpret.

According to Opera Software, the data compression makes transfer time about two to three times faster,[29] and the pre-processing improves the display of web pages not designed for small screens.

As someone who uses ten year old laptops as my daily machines, I also can’t help but agree with this:

https://twitter.com/notnullnotvoid/status/1387093359806853127

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Ian Battaglia/Unsplash)

Categories
Products and Design The Next Computer

“A computing stack wrapped in a portfolio of consumer products”

The opportunity for competition exists” is the most true statement and response to everyone grumbling about Apple dominance. Somewhere, somehow, the ecosystem of competitors has failed to execute, got lazy, etc and now is looking to regulators to bail them out. It makes me a bit sick. Apple is nothing more than a computing stack wrapped in a portfolio of consumer products. They happen to see this future early, invested aggressively in it, from silicon to security and everyone got caught with their pants down.

– Comment on Hacker News.

This was in a discussion about Apple’s successor chip to the M1. This comment acknowledges that the company’s success is more than simply slick marketing and product pricing. They have tackled a hard engineering problem, optimised for performance (and power consumption) over compatibility, and have _also_ packaged it well.

Categories
Data Custody Products and Design The Next Computer

The tragedy of iTunes

An exasperated look at Apple Music in the Music app in Mac OS Catalina. The Music app is one successor to iTunes; the Podcasts app and the Finder itself being the others.

It’s extremely disappointing that the Apple of 2020 thought the Music app was good enough to release. It’s even worse that it continues to think so.

Mojave is the last Mac OS release that iTunes will run on. I have nearly twenty years of music carefully collated in iTunes, with hundreds of custom and smart playlists, album art, ID3 tags manually added across thousands of files. Having these corrupted, or not being able to reliably play, arrange and sync these would be a crushing loss.

The loss of iTunes is the most important reason why I won’t update any of my Macbooks to beyond Mojave (in fact, all but one run High Sierra).

Ultimately, I’m on the lookout for an open source desktop music management application for Mac OS that either syncs to the iOS music app or to a third-party music player. I realise I cannot keep putting off updates. Sooner or later I will need to; if only because my Macs are on average close to ten years old.

Categories
Making Money Online Products and Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Growth hacking infects our attention

In my mind, Farmville was the first game to really annoy people. It was also the first game I saw that sucked in for days people I knew – people who otherwise had little interest in even casual games.

In other words, Farmville was the first large-scale success of online gamification. These are techniques that are designed – deliberately – to promote anxiety, fear of missing out, hijacking attention, guilting players and their online ‘friends’, among others.

This New York Times article from December last year takes an unsparing look at the game. Even though it shut down that month,

FarmVille lives on in the behaviors it instilled in everyday internet users and the growth-hacking techniques it perfected, now baked into virtually every site, service and app vying for your attention.

The article cites examples of the techniques I listed above:

drawing players into loops that were hard to pull themselves from. If you didn’t check in every day, your crops would wither and die; some players would set alarms so they wouldn’t forget. If you needed help, you could spend real money or send requests to your Facebook friends — a source of annoyance for nonplayers who were besieged with notifications and updates in their news feeds.

It gamified attention and encouraged interaction loops in a way that is now being imitated by everything from Instagram to QAnon

I see a recurring pattern of blaming people – the ‘consumer’ – for their supposed weakness in getting sucked in by products like Farmville, and social media in general. This has happened before with tobacco, with packaged snacks, even with recycling.

This article makes clear that companies like Zynga deliberately design games and social media to prey upon our emotions and attention in ways that TV and outdoor advertising couldn’t.

They use phone and email notifications, unread counts, access to your phone contact list and facebook friend list, your location and individual pattern of use, design techniques like pull to refresh, arbitrary countdown timers – all to systematically weaken your resolve and act according to how the game or app wants you to, including spending real money to buy in-game baubles.

Unfortunately, Farmville’s techniques now pervade the tech industry. Fortunately, enough of us have been burnt by such games and are aware of our addiction to social media that – should we want to – we can in fact start of wean ourselves off it.

Unlike with viruses, there is no vaccine that immunises you from distraction. But you can build a natural resistance to it. It’s harder, but it’s also equally effective. And we will each be the wiser for it.

Categories
The Next Computer

iPhone home screen, April 2021

(Previously:August, September, October, November, December, January, February, March home screens)

Other than the wallpaper, nothing changed from last month. This marks three months of relative stability. I still get mixed up between the App Library search box and the Spotlight search box, and I wish iOS would merge both of them, though this is unlikely.

Categories
The Next Computer

Sustainable iPad accessories – Part 1

I’m thinking about sustainable hardware again today.

My iPad is effectively my primary computer.

My setup in December 2019. Hasn’t changed that much. A mousepad has set my iPad 3 free.

Despite the excellent keyboard shortcuts setup, I don’t want my only pointer to be my finger on the touch screen.

In other words, I want an external pointing device. It needs to fulfil three conditions:

One, it shouldn’t be built into a case. I already have the Smart Keyboard Folio I bought along with the iPad. It’s relatively light, the keyboard is good, and detaching the iPad is trivial.

Two, it needs to support multitouch. I have the first-generation Magic Trackpad, but it doesn’t support multitouch. That’s quite unfortunate, because it really is a beautiful piece of hardware that’s lasted me nearly seven years and it still going strong.

Three, it needs to be long-lasting. Specifically, I’m not a fan of accessories that

  • need proprietary software to work, because their lifespan depends not on their own hardware but on that software continuing to be maintained
  • need to connect to the internet to work, for much the same reasons above. We’ve discussed the perils of smart devices often on this site
  • have built-in batteries in them. The lifespan of the hardware is now linked to that of this battery. Few manufacturers make it easy to replace built in batteries (typically Li-ion ones). And even if they could, there are no standard batteries that one could buy from third parties. On the other hand, accessories that use external batteries like AA or AAA cells are far more reliable – those are standard batteries and (while they’re not great for the environment) will likely be produced much longer than I expect the hardware to last.

(Part 2 – what my options are)

Categories
Life Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

iPhone home screen, March 2021

(Previously:August, September, October, November, December, January, February home screens)

I’m very nearly at a home screen setup that doesn’t change at all month on month.

The only change from February has been changing the Shortcuts widgets on the home screen from two 1×1 widgets to a single 2×2 widget. That means instead of two Shortcuts, I have four.

The two new Shortcuts are water consumption and meditation logs.

As temperatures rise in the tropics here, I’m prone to headaches from even slight dehydration – these are different from my migraines. We have discussed water tracking via the Fitbit app earlier, but I’m taking a break from wearing a device constantly on my wrist, and I want an alternative way to track my water habits – so this shortcut simply brings up a pre-set list of water levels for me to tap, and then logs it to a comma-separated file in iCloud Drive along with the timestamp. So I can track not just my daily water consumption levels but also the number of drinks and their time.

The other is my meditation log. Years ago, I had a pretty solid meditation routine. It helped me during some very challenging years dealing with mental health issues. While I’m much healthier now I’d like to get back to a daily twenty-to-thirty minute meditation practice. This Shortcut, which I have had a long time but rarely used, is to be invoked after I have completed the meditation session. It presents a prompt for how long I meditated, and then a pre-set list from 0 to 3 to log (subjective) quality, zero being no meditative state at all. So far I’m usually at a one. This is logged to another comma-separated value file with the timestamp. Much like water, I can not just plot my meditation streak, but also its quality, number per day and the time of day I typically meditate. The infrastructure exists, now to execute.

(ends)

Categories
Products and Design Real-World Crypto The Next Computer

Nvidia limiting its graphics cards’ ability to mine Ethereum cryptocurrency

This is rather interesting.

Graphics card-maker Nvidia says it will deliberately reduce the efficiency of its latest card by 50% when it is used to mine the crypto-currency Ethereum.

Crypto-currency enthusiasts have contributed to a shortage of graphics cards by snapping up supplies to use for non-gaming purposes… Nvidia said it had intervened to make sure its products “end up in the hands of gamers”.

But it will also sell a bespoke crypto-currency mining processor.

– Nvidia limits crypto-mining on new graphics card

Nvidia’s stock has had a great run in the past year. It’s not only produced extremely popular gaming cards, but its hardware has also found use in the artificial intelligence/deep learning and cryptocurrency spaces:

I’m still reading about this, and I may update this post or add a new one about my thoughts. I thought the act of deliberately modifying one’s hardware to cripple a specific function was interesting enough to document. No value judgements yet.

A part of my reading queue:

NVIDIA’s own announcement

Nvidia is nerfing its RTX 3060 GPU to stop crypto miners from buying them all – Polygon

Nvidia May Restart Production of Crypto Mining GPUs if Demand Sufficient – Coindesk

I’m also looking forward to this being discussed on Nvidia’s earnings call for last quarter, scheduled for 24th Feb 2021.