Gordy's Discourse

I couldn't find anything I wanted to watch on telly yesterday evening so I downloaded 'Hunter Killer' from Apple and watched that. This is my brief review of that film.

Y2K went off without too much trouble despite the predictions of many doom-mongers. Legacy GPS systems face a similar situation on 6 April 2019 when their internal week number will roll over back to zero. So are we all doomed?

Mark Zuckerberg says:

I believe we should be working towards a world where people can speak privately and live freely knowing that their information will only be seen by who they want to see it and won’t all stick around forever.

If we can help move the world in this direction, I will be proud of the difference we’ve made.

Hmm, forgive my disbelief from a man whose reputation in areas of privacy is, frankly, terrible and has recently even exploited two-factor authorisation security as means to invade users’ privacy via their phone number.

It’s a bit like hearing Hannibal Lector plead he’s strictly a salad man these days.

As a content creator you’d have to be window-licking mad to sign up to Facebook’s planned fan subscription model.

Amongst the truck-load of things wrong with it, you give Facecbook:

Non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use [creators’ content]

and

This license survives even if you stop using Fan Subscriptions.

Which essentially says Facebook has control of your content now and forever more.

On top of which they can take up to 30% of creators’ royalties.

Facebook is trying to compete with Patreon (which, incidentally, only takes 5% of your royalties) and Patreon do indeed have similar terms to the ones Facebook propose. There are differences, though. Patreon is a dedicated platform for this sort of stuff. Facebook isn’t and it has a poor reputation when it comes to data, content and the treatment of creators, as recent scandals have demonstrated.

I really hate flat-pack furniture. I'm terrible at putting it together because I'm a clumsy oaf. I would not, however, deprive anyone who likes this sort of junk but I'd certainly like a change to he way flat-pack items are advertised.

Having failed in my first attempt to replace my Omega with a new watch, I went back to the drawing board and started researching watches again. This time I ended up with the Suunto Core All-Black, which I'm quite happy with. It has one or two minor faults, though, which I describe in this review.

Jed Oelbaum at Gizmodo tells the (long) story of Ong’s Hat, which involves physics, mysticism, inter-dimensional travel and government raids. It was only ever a game but the early internet got hold of it and turned it into a conspiracy.

Any article with this sort of stuff in it is going to be fun to read for me:

According to the brochure, which included detailed, technical descriptions of the scientific activities and day-to-day life at the Ashram, “the spiritual rhythms permeating the place proved ideal.” The group thrived, living in “a scattering of weather-gray shacks, Airstream trailers, recycled chicken coops, and mail-order yurts,” as its experiments grew increasingly bizarre and esoteric, in an effort to train the powers of the mind to manipulate the quantum underpinnings of reality itself. Finally, after some years, they produced “the Egg,” a pod that could actually pierce the veil between parallel universes, enabling travel to other dimensions.

It’s complete tosh of course but what’s interesting is the way these things expand and grow, driven mainly by people who just love to believe a conspiracy.

I was reminded of a truly awful song from the 1970s whilst watching Eggheads yesterday evening. I thought I'd look around for another four dreadful songs from that sort of era to go with it and that resulted in this article. With YouTube clips for your delectation.

I lost Radio by TuneIn under Sonos 9.3 but upgrading to Sonos 10 restored it.

It’s a subject I keep coming back to. If you write content for the web, keep it all under your control. Text, images, code, domains …. the lot.

Colin Devroe writes about how even big, 100m-user sites can just suddenly disappear because they’re just “not worth the bother” to some big tech companies.

On a related note, companies can just change APIs at will too, screwing up some of the services you use. The Red Sweater blog writes about how MarsEdit can no longer support Blogger because Google is shutting down the Picasa Web Albums API.

I helped a friend of mine set up a Wordpress site a while ago and we were up and running with a blog on his own domain name, on a private server within about an hour. That’s all it takes.

I worry when people effectively journal on places like Facebook. They’re just not in control of their data. It seems incomprehensible that Facebook might one day disappear, but why take the risk? Why leave years of journals in a place where you have no real control? Use your own site and simply point to it via social media if you must.

Keep control of your data and back it up regularly.

By technical frippery I mean technology and gadgets that really aren't worth the bother. They don't really save a great deal of time or effort. There's a lot of them around these days and I thought I'd muse on the subject for a few hundred words.

Simon Beard and Lauren Holt of the BBC have written an interesting article on what might pose the biggest threat to humanity.

Obviously climate change features, as do volcanoes, diseases, asteroid strikes, AI and similar.

However, I think they’ve forgotten a big one: overpopulation. We simply cannot support the population we have on the planet already and it it is increasing rapidly. When I say we cannot support the population, I mean we do not. Wealth spread evenly may well be able to do so but anyone who thinks that might ever happen is seriously overestimating human nature.

Even if that were to happen there would come a point, with current rates of population increase, where we’d just have too many people to feed and provide for.

We need a turnover of population of course. Put bluntly the old pay for the young until they leave home and then the young pay for the old when the young are working: pensions, medical care and such.

It’s not just the rising population but the rate at which it is rising has gone off the scale in the last few hundred years and, I believe, it’s unsustainable.

But I guess woe betide any government who tries to restrict breeding. The Chinese did it for a while but then again they’ve got a grip on their people that Western governments simply don’t have.

It is noticeable even between the 1970s and now. There are just far more people around and it just can’t go on unchecked.

I do like my tea. I probably drink too much of it. But with my old kettle playing up I had the perfect opportunity to upgrade to something interesting and I ended up with Smarter's iKettle 3, which I review here.

My trusty Omega Seamaster went bang after 20 years and I wanted something completely different, so I went for a Casio Mudmaster which is about as different as you can get to an Omega. Anyway here's my review of the watch.

I'm so unfailingly lazy that a duvet one doesn't need to extract covers from to wash is always going to appeal. In this case I'm talking about one of Marks' Washable Duvets, which I review here.

Bricks and mortar retailers have been moaning a lot recently. They decry the demise of the High Street, often justifiably if the assumption is that we want to save it. I'm just not so sure we do.

The BBC takes a look at Fortnite hackers and the money they make from it.

I find it all a bit bizarre. Not that Fortnite gets hacked but that people actually pay money to the hackers. I appreciate the ‘victims’ the BBC interviewed were very young and such things seem disproportionately important to the young, but — and here’s the important bit — it’s a just a game.

When you get young hackers appearing in a documentary about a game with their faces covered like they'd just beheaded someone on the internet, you have to wonder if the world has gone completely mad.

Hacking is a scourge in today’s technological society and the nature of the world’s IT is such that I can’t see it being prevented any time soon, but I believe the authorities will catch more hackers and the punishments will become more severe.

In this particular instance, though, a clearer sense of perspective would help. I find it hard to be particularly sympathetic to the victims of the hacking of a misspelt game.

Does your HomePod ever do things you haven't asked it to do? Mine does. In this short article I just talk about my initial experiences with the Apple HomePod.

Fancy hosting your own email but don’t want the sysadmin overhead? Maybe Helm is for you and Lee Hutchinson at ArsTechnica has written a fantastic overview of the service.

This definitely interests me as I’m always looking at ways to get away from corporate silos. I currently use Microsoft’s Office365 Exchange service for my email and it’s perfectly fine, but I like to extract myself from the global tech companies as much as possible.

Alas I can’t use Helm at the moment. It doesn’t yet support multiple domains (and I need two) and, crucially, it’s not yet available in the UK.

I’ll be keeping an eye on it though.

I've always suffered from poor wi-fi here, just one room away from the router. That's due to the thick walls in the old building I live in. I've previously used Powerline plugs but I wanted to see if a mesh wi-fi system could handle things. The one I went with was a Tenda Nova MW6, which I review here.

How can people take so long to operate the damn things?

Rhett Jones at Gizmodo reports on the alleged hell that comes with a job at Netflix:

Kill or be killed seems to be accepted as a mode of operation. One employee expressed the feeling that they live in fear of being fired every day at an executive meeting. A vice president named Karen Barragan was said to have responded: “Good, because fear drives you.” Barragan disputed the account.

Apparently it even stretches to managers being fired for not firing enough people.

Of course an atmosphere of extreme corporate fear is doomed to failure eventually. There is no doubt that fear is a ‘motivator’ of sorts — it’s one of the primary emotions that drives the human psyche — but fear leads to defensive working practices, stifling invention and creativity.

Seriously underperforming staff should indeed be sacked and a little fear is no bad thing, but anyone who cares about their job has a little fear anyway and there’s no need for upper management to instil more.

The sort of environment described can succeed for a while, particularly if high salaries tempt people to put up with it, but it won’t last. In the long term there’ll be a lack of innovation and, as the corporate reputation spreads, people just won’t want to work there.

All of which says nothing about the people at the top who drive these sorts of working practices. I have no idea how they sleep at night knowing their modus operandi is to scare people shitless during the day. There are other qualities a ‘good’ person needs beyond making their company a corporate success. It sounds like someone's obsessed with trying to prove they're a hard-nosed corporate leader.

I find Apple's Reminders app frustrating. It could so easily turn from something that's a bit 'meh' into an app that's central to everything I do. It feels unfinished at present and I hope it's something Apple will address in the future.

Bradley Chambers on 9To5Mac asks the question a lot of Apple users are probably asking. You can now spend just shy of £1500 on an iPhone if you spec up a top of the range XS Max and that, in my opinion, is silly money.

I do think Apple produce high-quality products that are indeed better than most of the competition, at least in terms of the raw hardware you get, but I’m not convinced the whole user experience of owning an Apple product is worth the premium.

Look at the HomePod, for example. I believe it’s a better bit of hardware than either Amazon or Google’s offerings but a HomePod is all about interoperability and Amazon wins that battle hands down, and for a lot less money.

If you use mainly macOS and iOS devices you probably want to match them up with a HomePod, but I’m not sure it makes sense at the moment. You’ll pay two or three times the money for a lesser experience. I’d certainly back Apple to improve the HomePod — and, perhaps more importantly, expand the hardware it can be used with and the intelligence of its interface — but Amazon will improve too and they seem to have a bit of a head start.

There are areas where Apple really take the piss too. MacBooks don’t come with an RJ45 port of course and if you want to buy a Thunderbolt to Gigabit ethernet adapter to hard-wire your internet connection, Apple will charge you an eye-watering £26 for the privilege. All for a few inches of wire that probably costs about £1 to manufacture, if that.

Apple’s last set of results indicated a drop in the rate of sales of their phones but that was offset by an increase in the average profit Apple are making from each unit they sell. Apple have to be careful here, though, because an evangelical following will only go so far. There is a price point that simply isn’t worth it even for superior hardware.

For me, Apple have already exceeded that point with their iPhone by quite some margin. When I buy hardware I like to spec it up quite high to future-proof it to some extent in terms of the oomph it has, but there is no way I’m spending £1500 on a phone. Or even £1000. As it stands I might spend £750 on a phone but only if it was top of the range, so Apple are 2x my own price limit for phones.

I might spend £2500 on the best MacBook Pro but Apple would want £1000 more. The iPad Pro fares a bit better: I might spend £1000 on that and a high-spec one goes for about £1100 these days.

So I’m being outpriced by Apple even as a believer that, in general, quality is worth paying for.

I shudder at the thought of going back to Windows for my laptop and tablet needs and I’m not too keen on switching to an Android phone either, but it’s looking likely if Apple don’t rein in their prices.

There are two ways you could look at this.

The first is that we already have ‘companion’ devices anyway. The iMac’s companion is the MacBook, whose companion is the iPad, whose companion is the iPhone. All we’re doing is continuing the succession with a ‘cardphone’, for want of a better phrase.

The second is that we’re getting into a ludicrous Russian doll-style situation here and we can expect a phone the size of postage stamp next, then one the size of a flea and then one the size of molecule. If we see things this way, the world has clearly gone bonkers and it needs to stop spinning for a moment so we can all get off.

I'd be surprised if this idea catches on, although stranger things have happened.

I've used schemas on my website almost since I started it. I haven't found the internet particularly helpful in guiding me with schema for a blog so maybe everyone else just makes it up as they go along like I do. In this article I show how I use schema, which seems to work reasonably well for me.

I had the pleasure of visiting Wilkins Cider Farm a few weeks ago, which is excellent. I recommend a visit if you're ever in Somerset.

Despite no longer coding professionally, I still code for my own purposes. It's mainly web-based coding and I need some sort of code editor to help me out. In this article I review Coda, which is one of the main code editors in my toolbox. Over all, it's a great app but it suffers from a couple of problems.

Since upgrading to PHP7, my session class stopped working. This is how I fixed it.

Tim Berners-Lee has developed something called Solid, which is meant to act as sort of a silo for all your personal data. The intention appears to be that you can then allow companies to access your data only as you choose.

Mr Berners-Lee said:

With Solid, you will have far more personal agency over data — you decide which apps can access it.

I read Solid’s own introduction to what it’s about and still wasn’t clear on how this will help me. I mean I can see that it’s a bit of online storage with permissions that I can control and allocate as necessary, but there are lots of online repositories where I could store my data and control who accesses it.

Solid’s documentation says:

Store anything you want in your own Solid POD. PODs are like secure USB sticks for the Web, that you can access from anywhere. When you give others access to parts of your POD, they can react to your photos and share their memories with you. You decide which things apps and people can see.

Think of your Solid POD as your own private website, except that your data interoperates with all your apps, which means you have your own personal API to go along with it. When you post comments or videos online, your friends can view them with whatever app they like, such as an album viewer or a social feed. It’s your data, that can be shaped in any way or form.

Presumably, then, this relies on companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google and such ‘signing up’ to the idea of grabbing your personal data from solid instead of asking you to store it on their own servers.

If I’ve understood this correctly I can see how that might be useful. If I wanted to stop sharing an item of personal data, I’d go into Solid and tell it to stop sharing it and all the apps that used that item of personal data would lose access. I don’t have to go into each app individually.

But it will rely on other companies signing up to the idea and I don’t think they will. Why would they? I suppose they could be forced to if everyone moved to Solid en bloc, but I think that’s unlikely.

Maybe I’ve misunderstood something.

Either way, it doesn’t go far enough for my liking. I want to get paid to give over my personal data. Big Tech profits massively from our data and it’s time we got our cut of the profits. We have the power here, we just aren’t organised enough to wield it effectively.