Category: The Next Computer

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The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Realists of a larger reality

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – the realists of a larger reality.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

This was part of Le Guin’s acceptance speech in 2014 for the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This is the video; the introduction is by Neil Gaiman, and this quote starts at about 7 minutes 30 seconds in:

Speculative fiction is influenced by today’s technology, but it influences tomorrow’s. We’ve had a couple of decades of dystopian fiction, including that which is set in the near-future.

Fiction that is both optimistic and realistic is hard. As we saw in our recent series on Misinformation and how to counter it, these are hard problems that require both large-scale cooperation and innovative solutions.

And that is why fiction that imagine such futures – ones that face and overcome such problems – are not just inspiring, hope-giving, but at their best they are a spark that lights, however slightly or briefly, a path to an actual real-world solution.

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Nationalism, capitalism and the Indian App Store

A Swadeshi App Store. It may well happen.

It began with the temporary removal of the Paytm app from Google’s Android Play Store. And snowballed with Google’s announcement that it would enforce its existing policy of a 30% commission on the in-app sale of all digital goods (with some exceptions). We discussed this a couple of weeks ago.

Soon after, the founders of some of India’s best-known tech companies put out statements not just condemning Google’s policy but also its intent, calling it a new Lagaan, after the tax that the British occupation of the 19th and 20th centuries levied on Indian peasants.

Vivek Wadhwa, a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, lauded the banding of Indian entrepreneurs and likened Silicon Valley giants’ hold on India to the rising days of East India Company, which pillaged India. “Modern day tech companies pose a similar risk,” he told TechCrunch.

And they called for a local, all-Indian app store, piggybacking on the new term Atmanirbhar, one that the current government has coined to promote local manufacturing and services.

“This is the problem of India’s app ecosystem. So many founders have reached out to us… if we believe this country can build digital business, we must know that it is at somebody else’s hand to bless that business and not this country’s rules and regulations.”

Inevitably, as is the case in India, at least some heads turned to the government for help:

Even though Google said it will allow developers to sell their services through other app stores, or websites, the industry doesn’t see this as an option either. Naidu suggested that unless the government chooses to intervene, there may be no other solution. According to tech policy analyst Prasanto K. Roy, the government’s Mobile Seva Appstore has over a thousand apps and 85 million downloads, yet it is unknown among Indian users.

To which the government, of course, responded with a why nothttps://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/centre-open-to-launching-an-indian-app-store/articleshow/78438620.cms:

Weighing in on the issue, union minister for electronics and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad said in a post on Twitter that he is happy to receive notable suggestions from Indian app developers on how to encourage the ecosystem. “Encouraging Indian app developers is vital to create an #AatmanirbharBharat app ecosystem,” he tweeted on Thursday.

The Indian government “is not averse to the idea” of launching its own app store, officials said. The existing digital store for government apps, developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), hosts a slew of applications such as e-governance app Umang, health app Aarogya Setu and storage app DigiLocker.

Paytm has since created and advertised heavily what it calls a mini-app-store, but is in reality a catalog of shortcuts to 3rd party web apps. Google has postponed the implementation of its policy to 2022.

In this tale, everyone’s actions and responses have been predictable. Google’s been tone-deaf and has immediately switched to appeasement. Tech company founders have been cynically opportunistic. They have been happy with Google’s (and Apple’s) stores for distribution, even advertising heavily on them, until the moment it worked against them and they switched immediately to victim mode, some even raising the spectre of neocolonialism. Though they’re among the most visible figures of India’s capitalists, they’ve quickly appealed to the government for a solution favourable to them, further pushing the nationalist angle. And of course the Indian government, regardless of its political learnings, is happy to intervene and get into the business of running business.

(Featured image photo credit: Mika Baumeister/Unsplash)

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The Next Computer

iPhone home screen, October 2020

Updated the phone to iOS 14 between the last Home Screen post and now, but that hasn’t made much of a change to the layout.

The Dock has remained constant for the third month running.

  • Drafts has become my most-used app. I use it as a scratchpad wherever possible: I’m typing this very post in it, after which I’ll copy it into WordPress. I’m not using many of even the free app’s features, such as tagging, or universal sharing, or the new iOS 14 widgets. All I use is the word counter at the top, the markdown formatting menu and preview, and search.
  • Todo is still in the menu but I’ve hit a plateau in its use. I want to use it as a general-purpose ‘checkout later’ tool, but I only use it for that sporadically. I think that has more to do with that I don’t have a process to revisit things I have captured, a weekly review.
  • The rest of the Dock has Safari and Launch Center Pro, the latter of which I use to launch my shortcuts, as we have seen every month.

My usage of Launch Center Pro has reduced this last month for two reasons:

  • One, Back Tap. In iOS 14, you can set your iPhone to perform preset actions – including Shortcuts – on tapping the back of your phone twice or thrice. I have set double-tap to launch my image-stitching shortcut, and triple tap for my expense-logging one. I’ve been using it for over a week and it still feels like magic.
  • Two, Shortcuts automation, which debuted in iOS 13 but I have only begun using now. Until now, I used Launch Center Pro to run my Shortcuts on a schedule. The Shortcuts app can also do this by itself. So I have set my headache-logging shortcut to run as usual at 9pm without LCP.

On the rest of the Home Screen, I have trimmed three rows of apps down to two by moving Settings, Files, Reeder and Overcast to the second screenful of apps. I don’t use Settings often enough for it to warrant a Home Screen location. Ditto with Files. Reeder and Overcast – I mostly read my RSS feeds on the iPad, and since I’ve begun working from home, I’ve barely listened to any podcasts. I know I enjoy them, but the context is missing – either a walk or a drive to/from the office.

I tried using iOS 14’s new home screen widgets, but they didn’t take. I found them adding too much clutter. I was intrigued by the Siri Shortcuts widget, which adds eight icons to your home screen seamlessly. Their positions adjust automatically based on usage, just like with the Siri Suggestions drawer. In any case, they added too many icons on the Home Screen:

I’m looking forward to trying out other widgets to see if any will stick.

Finally, on the dedicated widgets screen itself, I have replaced the old Fantastical widget with the new iOS 14-optimised one. It’s not a great improvement over the previous one, but I don’t lose any information either:

By and large, despite the big update to iOS 14, the home screen has changed little. In fact it has gotten even simpler. This is unequivocally good, because it means I’ve been using fewer apps but more deeply. I look forward to what November brings.

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300

7th October marks three hundred days since I began writing daily on this website.

While I have written on and off on the site from late 2002, this is the longest publishing streak the site has had. The streak began in December 2019 as something I wanted to do for myself at a time I felt low. It has now become a habit. If I remember correctly, Seth Godin had said on Tim Ferriss’ podcast that at some point after he started writing regularly on his blog, his thinking changed from ‘should I write tomorrow?’ to ‘what should I write about tomorrow?’.

I’ve gotten somewhat comfortable with drafting, writing and scheduling posts for the week ahead. Now I plan to build a healthy information consumption habit. My reading is too scattered, both in subject and in time. It doesn’t leave me with enough time to absorb things and think them through. I plan to trim my reading sources and structure my week so there are distinct chunks for reading, thinking and writing.

Community
This site has always explored questions about how you and I deal with technology in our lives. Those questions are so much more important in 2020 than they were eighteen years ago. My framework to understand this are the Five Megatrends and Five Big Questions.

Ultimately I’d love for the readers of this site to be a community that discusses and helps each other navigate opportunities that tech brings to our lives, and the challenges we face to our mental and physical health and to our relationships: by being conscious that tech serves us instead of us serving tech, or serving those that control tech. About Living Well in the Always-On.

Interested in being an early community member? Get in touch: Email or Twitter.

(Featured image photo credit: Jeff Golenski)

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Products and Design The Next Computer

More USB-C standards confusion

We have seen before how confusing USB-C can be: what cables and device support what capabilities. This article has more examples of confusion about the standard:

If you buy a USB-C charger that doesn’t support Power Delivery and try to use it with a Microsoft Surface, for example, the laptop will complain that it’s “not charging” despite receiving some power. Fixing this requires figuring out whether or not it’s the cable or wall charger that doesn’t support Power Delivery, and replacing it with something that does support it. There would be no way for a layperson to hold two USB-C chargers and know the difference between one that supports Power Delivery and one that doesn’t.

Furthering the confusion, some devices actually can’t be charged with chargers supporting Power Delivery, despite sporting a USB-C port — because they weren’t designed to negotiate the higher wattage being delivered by the Power Delivery standard. A pair of cheap Anker headphones I own, for example, refuse to charge when plugged into a MacBook charger. Other devices, like the Nintendo Switch, only partially support the standard, and some unsupported chargers have bricked devices, reportedly due to the Switch’s maximum voltage being exceeded.

If you need to use different ‘supported’ chargers and cables with different devices, how is that any better than a proprietary standard?

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Products and Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Sustainability and the ‘joy of fixing things’

From this short, beautiful piece on the joy of fixing things:

Watch a story about the owner of a priceless collectible car or wristwatch, and you’ll notice that they often state that they aren’t the owner of that object, but instead the steward who is keeping it till it moves on to the next owner.

It’s that same feeling that I have about all the objects in my possession. Whether it’s a vacuum cleaner, a knife, or tape measure, when I look at it, I think about the people that brought it to fruition. I think of the people who designed it, assembled it, shipped it across continents, and placed it on a store shelf. When it breaks, I think of its possible future in a landfill somewhere, all of that effort then forgotten. No object deserves that future.

As readers of this site know, I feel strongly about this.

And using well-constructed hand-me-downs has also forced me to become at least somewhat proficient at repair and maintenance, meaning I get to know these things better, which in turn teaches me what about them makes them great in the first place.

Finally, adopting a mindset of being okay using such tools has over time helped me get better at identifying new items that are likely to last long, perpetuating the cycle.

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Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Work, tools and agency

From the writer Anne Helen Petersen, on “How Work Became An Inescapable Hellhole”:

 Like email, Slack allowed work to spread into the crevices of life where until that point it couldn’t fit. In a more efficient, instantaneous manner than email, it brings the entire office into your phone, which is to say, into your bed, when you land on the plane, when you walk down the street, as you stand in line at the grocery store, or as you wait, half naked, on the exam table for your doctor.

 It didn’t just accelerate communication; it standardized a new, far more addictive form of communication, with a casualness that cloaked its destructiveness. When you “shoot off a few emails” on a Sunday afternoon, for example, you might convince yourself you’re just getting on top of things for the week ahead—which might feeltrue. But what you’re really doing is giving work access to be everywhere you are. 

… the technology writer John Herrman… predicted the ways in which Slack would screw with our conception of work: “Slack is where people make jokes and register their presence; it is where stories and editing and administrating are discussed as much for self-justification as for the completion of actual goals. Working in an active Slack … is a productivity nightmare, especially if you don’t hate your coworkers. Anyone who suggests otherwise is either rationalizing or delusional.”

While I fully agree with tools like Slack breaking down of boundaries between your work sphere and your other spheres, the state of mind that the writer describes is one of a poor pre-existing relationship with work.

It’s important to recognise that the normalisation of remote work and the ubiquity of work tools that are model led on addictive hyper-communicative social media have made this relationship worse, not caused it. Unless you are a bottom-of-the-rung worker drone with no flexibility and no voice, you have the ability, however little, to push back against a 24×7 work culture, a culture that causes enough anxiety that people need to show off their input instead of their output. As the writer herself says,

Many of us still navigate the workplace as if getting paid to produce knowledge means we’re getting away with something, and have to do everything possible to make sure no one realizes they’ve made a massive mistake. No wonder we spend so much time trying to communicate how hard we work.

If it weren’t for these tools, distributed work would have been much more difficult – in many cases impossible. For those companies that have been distributed for a while, it’s given employees the opportunity to optimise their location and time for their other interests and constraints. It’s lowered the overhead of building and scaling an organisation of people. It’s reduced the friction of communication – just five years ago your only option as a smallish company was email, with long chains, lost contexts and renamed file attachments as some form of version control. Today you’re split for choice with Slack, Google Docs, Trello, Notion, Airtable, Zapier and thousands more tools, free and paid.

But no matter how good they get, they are tools meant to serve us. Never the other way around. Regardless of whether you’re a founder or CEO, part of the leadership, or in some position of authority in the company. Be aware of your relationship to work. Make it easier for the ones whose work time your control to immerse themselves in their other sphere. Push back when people above you intrude into your non-work spheres. It’s not always going to result in you getting fired.

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Making Money Online Personal Finance The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

My portfolio of US stocks for the post-pandemic world

The New York Times:

The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated trends that were building for years by forcing large swaths of the population to work from home and shop online. And many obscure companies are taking off, driven by investors who expect them to flourish in an economy whose future arrived ahead of schedule.

“When it comes to remote work in particular, the past 10 weeks have seen more changes than we’ve seen in the previous 20 years”

Erik Brynjolfsson

Erik Brynjofsson co-wrote the seminal The Second Machine Age in 2014 – he is a keen observer of this trend.

Surveys conducted by Mr. Brynjolfsson and economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that the share of Americans working from home jumped to about 50 percent this year, from around 15 percent before the pandemic.

The article describes companies whose stocks have risen much faster than the overall tech-dominated NASDAQ index:

Fastly is up more than 310 percent this year. Zscaler is up over 180 percent. Chegg and Veeva are up 75 percent and 90 percent. In a tech universe dominated by Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the share prices of little companies you’ve probably never heard of are soaring… Zoom — the suddenly ubiquitous video conferencing service — has been an investor darling, up close to 500 percent this year as workplaces shut down. Peloton, the home video cycling company, is up almost 200 percent amid widespread gym closures… [Docusign’s] shares are up 166 percent this year.

My own US stock portfolio are based on a similar thesis, and have seen similar performances this year. My qualifying criteria for companies are the following (as with things like this they are perennially a work in progress):

  1. B2B companies enabling
    ~ Remote working
    ~ At-home lifestyle
    ~ Small business commerce
    ~ Internet infrastructure
  2. Dominant in one of above categories
  3. Low political risk domestic (US) and international
  4. Resilient during the March-April 2020 crash
  5. A business I understand

Some companies in my portfolio:

A. Companies other than ones mentioned in the article:
~ Atlassian
~ Cloudflare
~ Twilio
~ Nvidia
~ Wix

B. Companies also mentioned in the NYT article:
~ Shopify
~ Docusign
~ Peloton
~ Fastly

C. Companies that are Big Tech but fall within my thesis
~ Amazon (because of AWS)
~ Microsoft (Office, Teams, Github, Azure)
~ Apple (iPad, Macbooks)

Featured image photo credit: Rohit Tandon/Unsplash.

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The Next Computer

Retina fun

Some recent fun: for a while, I gave my non-retina 2012 MacBook Pro a retina screen and used Mac OS on a crisp high-res screen.

Years ago, I had purchased Duet Display, using which you could use your iPad as a second display for your Mac. You’d connect your iPad via a cable, run the Mac and iOS Duet Display apps. That was all there was to it.

It works quite well. As much as I’d like to be, I’m not a two-monitor person, and so it never stuck.

Clearly, Bill Gates loves a multiple monitor setup

Recently, for no real reason, I gave it another shot. While arranging displays under Settings → Displays, I noticed that the Mac OS menu bar was duplicated on both the iPad Pro and the Mac – so the iPad wasn’t really a second monitor. So instead of setting the iPad off to the side, why not put it up front and center?

It worked quite well – I had a 12.9″ Retina display in front of me running MacOS Mojave. I could put my Macbook out of sight if I liked, and I’d have a pretty great combination – the iPad Pro display and the still-quite-fast internals of my MacBook Pro.

I used it for an hour, and it was fun while it lasted. The problem? There’s just a slight lag with the pointer and keyboard input, which is enough to make the MacBook Pro seem like an older machine. Sure, apps start up quickly, no tabs reload because the system’s run out of memory, but a lag in input is a deal-breaker. It’s fine if you’re using the iPad for a window you don’t interact with much, like your email inbox or your twitter feed, not as your main display.

Well. Too bad.

My bet is I’ll end up using an iPad with an external display once letterboxing is no longer an issue. This post from Federico Viticci of Macstories describes his experiences using his iPad Pro with different peripherals for a full-time setup.

Viticci’s iPad desktop setup. You can see the letterboxing of the iPad display on the widescreen monitor.
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The Next Computer

iPhone – and iPad – home screen, September 2020

We’re adding the iPad to the monthly home screen post. Here goes:

iPhone

My iPhone home screen didn’t change at all between August and September; my choices worked out well.

My prediction about Drafts was incorrect; it’s become one of my most-used apps on iPad and iPhone. The app is light, the sync is near-instant, Markdown highlighting is adequate, formatted preview is pretty good. I use it, as intended, to quickly capture and start all manner of text notes, and send it to different places: paste in WordPress or in Google Docs, send a tweet or a Slack message, save to a plaintext file in my notes.

Microsoft Todo and the Fitbit app, as we wrote in August, are daily companions. The Todo app is a collection of ideas and articles for this and other sites. The Fitbit app helps me maintain a baseline level of fitness.

iPad

The iPad is my main computer. The flexibility of touch and iOS combined with the canvas of a 13-inch laptop screen means it’s more powerful than either an iPhone or a Macbook.

For work, my most-used apps are Slack, Drafts, Safari – for the web versions of Google Docs and Sheets, and for Whatsapp. I take and make phone calls from the iPad via the iPhone – Continuity is quite terrific. Of course there’s also Meet, Telegram and Facetime calls – again all via the iPad. The only limitation is Whatsapp, which is still, in September 2020, tied to a single device:

For entertainment, I use common video-streaming apps: Netflix, Prime Video, Hotstar. VLC for video files that I drag into the iPad Files app from an external hard drive. And Books for my daily 20-minute reading session.

Outside of them, it’s not very different from the iPhone. Pixelmator and Notability are a joy to use with the large screen and the Apple Pencil. I’m giving the Notion app a try, but I might as well just use the (desktop) website in Safari.

Along with no Whatsapp iPad support, the other limitation is the bare-bonesGoogle Docs and Sheets apps: they lack many important features that their web app has. They also, notably, lack external keyboard and pointer support. Since iOS 13, the Safari browser displays the vastly more capable web versions well, but it’s not the same as on mac OS. I make do.

I thought I’d find iPad OS’ display of home-screen widgets to be useful, but they’re really an afterthought. When I’m using a keyboard, opening Fantastical via Cmd + Space, typing ‘FA’ and tapping enter takes a fraction of the time that swiping down, then right, and then revealing the widget. Muscle memory. Ditto for Shortcuts. The only thing I use really is the Authy widget for quickly copying two-factor codes. And, infrequently, the Klok time-zone widget.

This is what it is in September. Next month onwards, we’ll see what’s changed. Just like with the iPhone.