It is always fun to see a well done academic treatment of a subject of wide general interest. A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H. G. Wells to Isaac Asimov
Category Archives: Technology
Ajit Pai, Donald Trump, and the Republicans Killed Net Neturality Today.
There will be consequences. Continue reading Ajit Pai, Donald Trump, and the Republicans Killed Net Neturality Today.
How to share keyboard and mouse between two computers?
I use two different computers, each with a different operating system, to do my stuff. Actually, I use five, but only two where I would ideally like to switch between them while I’m using them. I’ve experimented with some solutions, so I can offer some advice. Continue reading How to share keyboard and mouse between two computers?
Official 2017 Maker Tech Gift Guide
You loved the The Official 2017 Cool Tech Gift Guide, and here is its sister-post, focused on things that are not entirely built yet, along with a few books about how to do that.
Continue reading Official 2017 Maker Tech Gift Guide
The Official 2017 Cool Tech Gift Guide
Not to be confused with the Official 2017 Maker Tech Gift Guide!
I’ve mixed a wide range of techno-stuff in this guide, so there is stuff that flies, stuff that cooks, and stuff that makes noise. This is your prompt. It is up to you to match and expand on the ideas and integrate them with target gift recipients you know and love. Or, you can always put items on your personal wish list and see what happens!
Without further ado: Continue reading The Official 2017 Cool Tech Gift Guide
A Great Echo Math Skill-Building Skill
An Echo
(See this review of the Echo and related devices.)
An Echo “skill” is an app, essentially, which you can turn on and have available at any time to do whatever it is that that skill does. You can safely think of the word “skill” as equivilant to “app” for most purposes. Continue reading A Great Echo Math Skill-Building Skill
Just got Makey Makey, in search of a banana …
I just got this Makey Makey kit
A Makey Makey is a device that allows a do-it-yourselfer to create a closed loop electrical signal, that the Makey Makey device converts into a specific serial signal that is sent via USB to a computer. The signal is a keystroke or mouse event. So, you can hook the Makey Makey to, say, a banana and a laptop, then when you touch the banana the laptop gets a mouse button click or a space bar or something. The kit is designed to give easy access to the key signals most used in gaming, but I think it allows the full range of keystrokes, and it can also interface as a sensor to an Arduino
I’ve not used it yet, so this is not a review, just a note that I’ve got one. Do you have one? This should be fun.
OK, off to get the bananas.
Which is creepier, the future, or Mark Zuckerberg?
Hacking The American Election System: Getting It Right
In every area of life, but especially in the overlapping realms of technology, science, and health, misunderstanding how things work can be widespread, and that misunderstanding can lead to problems.
In the area of voting, the main problem seems to be the expenditure of great amounts of outrage and concern over things that are not real. At the same time this happens, things that are real matter a great deal.
I’ll give you one example. Remember the special election for the Congressional Representative for Georgia’s 6th district, earlier this year? Several media outlets reported “voting machines stolen,” which, in turn, caused great outrage and concern on The Internet because, well, voting machines had been stolen.
Now, pause for a moment and think what this means. What does it mean to have voting machines stolen? What is a voting machine? What would you do about voting machines being stolen? How might you try to solve the problem of voting machines being stolen just before an election was happening (like,the day before)? How might this affect the election? Who likely did it? How would you find them and what would you do to them?
I hope you did not spend a lot of time on those questions because if you did, you probably wasted it (unless you already know about the Cobb County Georgia story). Continue reading Hacking The American Election System: Getting It Right
Does Apple intentionally slow down your phone to make you want to buy a new one? YES it turns out!
ADDED: Sort of. Let me explain.
Apple does slow down the clock speed on the main processors of your phone as the battery wears down. I assume there is a good technical reason to do this, and it kind of makes sense. So, yes, they slow down your phone but not to sell you a new one, but rather, to help your phone be a better phone.
But, the slowdown can be reversed by replacing the battery. And, Apple has never made even the slightest move to inform people that this is a thing. So, it is like the time Homer Simpson was told by Marge to not eat a pie she had just made. Homer found himself walking across the kitchen with his mouth making an up and down scarfing motion in an arbitrary direction that happened to lead directly to the pie. “If that pie doesn’t get out of the way, I’m going to accidentally eat it” he proclaimed. Sure enough, the pie remained still and Homer ate it.
Similarly, people will buy a new phone because performance is way down, when all they had to do was to replace the battery. Apple is Homer pretending to innocently happen to eat a pie. The phone is homer walking along. You are the pie. Not a pretty picture.
So, really, the slowdown is a) engineered into the phone, b) causes people to buy a new phone, not a new battery, and c) the fix that would be so much cheaper is kept out of the available information from Apple.
So, yes, Apple intentionally slows down your phone to make you want to buy a new one, it turns out. Effectively.
How do I know this? From this excellent and well documented source.
And now, back to my original post in which I argue that something suspicious is going on but I don’t quite know what it is:
ORIGINAL POST:
It is a widespread belief that Apple, as well as other computer manufacturers, do things that make your device, be it a desktop computer, a notebook, a smart phone, or anything, slow down as they lead up to and release, and begin to sell, a new version of their product.
I want to point to a study done that concludes that they don’t do this. The study is by FutureMark which is basically a benchmarking software producer. They to not explain in their methodology where they get their data from, but I will guess that it is from the phones of people who install their benchmarking app.
If so, then right there we have a problem with the study. Without describing the sampling design, the study is useless right out of the gate. But if it includes the sorts of users that will install a benchmarking app on their phone, the that’s a bias (and uncontrolled mysterious one at that).
The study has other problems. Continue reading Does Apple intentionally slow down your phone to make you want to buy a new one? YES it turns out!
Headless Robot Cat
A good automatic cat feeder
Here are two videos demonstrating the concept:
What computer mouse is best?
I did some research on mice, and I thought I’d pass it on. First, though, let me suggest that you get some of this stuff
There is some interesting and exciting stuff going on with mice.
Best but most expensive small mouse for general mobile use
The Logitech MX Anywhere 2 Wireless Mobile Mouse, Long Range Wireless Mouse
This mouse uses a small USB dongle or bluetgooth (Bluetooth Smart Ready). You can pair up to three different devices. It has hyper-speed scrolling.
The Most Magical of Mice: Flow technology
There are several mice in this category ranging across price. One of them is the Logitech MX Anywhere 2S Wireless Mouse with FLOW Cross-Computer Control and File Sharing for PC and Mac – 910-005132
This supposedly works on Linux, Macs and Windows.
Super Ergonomic
I am suspicious of the whole ergonomic thing. Ergonomic, in mice and similar devices, seems to be “we fit your hand so well you will only move one or two muscles ever,” which seems a bad idea. I think a mouse should require more movement and adjustment by the hand in order to Not cause repetitive motion syndrome. Note that this is entirely my non-expert opinion and I may be quite wrong.
Anyway, one of the top rated and coolest Ergonomic mice is probably the Anker 2.4G Wireless Vertical Ergonomic Optical Mouse
General all round mouse
The affordable Logitech M720 Triathalon Multi-Device Wireless Mouse 
Glows in the dark
I have a keyboard that glows in the dark. Maybe I need the ASUS ROG Gladius II Aura Sync USB Wired Optical Ergonomic Gaming Mouse with DPI target button
. This $100 computer critter is a high end gaming mouse, and note that the interface is a wire. Proof that new technology (in this case, wireless interface to mouse) is sometimes inferior, and the old technology gets you more.
Other mice
The Logitech M330 Silent Plus Wireless Large Mouse 
The super accruate, wired, Corsair Gaming M65 Pro RGB FPS Gaming Mouse, Backlit RGB LED, 12000 DPI, Optical
The mouse I need is probably the one I hope to find over at Goodwill; I need a plug in USB mouse to allow quick access to any computer any time without needing a dongle dangling off the back of something.
Things that are broken because we fixed them
A lot of things are broken because we fixed them. Somewhere out there is a web site that specializes in listing these things; Please let me know if you have a link, I can’t find it at the moment. There is a web site that specializes in these things called “This is Broken” run by Set Godin (see video below). Anyway, it is annoying when some advancement causes something to not work. And it is especially annoying when the advancement is something that specifically should cause something to be improved in a certain direction and instead it gets unproved, er, messed up in that direction.
Examples are myriad but I’ll give you just a couple here.
I just looked up “Zoonosis” in Wikipedia because I wanted to see if I could get a quick and dirty list of diseases that we get from domesticated animals to throw on a slide I’m making for a lecture. If I cared a lot about this I’d go get a PhD in the subject and then make the ultimate perfect and most authoritative possible slide, but what I really want to do is to make sure that the list I already have in my head does not have anything obvious missing or wrong, and I want to do that without standing up and walking across the room to dig out any of a dozen books or thirty or fourty papers I have on shelves or in file cabinets, or search through my hard drive or Google Scholar for the 20 or 30 electronic or on line references that would be embedded among or mixed up with stuff I did not want, in order to spend two hours researching and verifying.
And on the Wikipedia page for Zoonosis there is a list of animals that are implicated in human diseases. It looks like this:
Now, in theory, since this is the internet and this is an encyclopedia of sorts I’m looking at and information should be all organized and stuff, I should be able to click on “cattle” (for example) and get a list of cattle related diseases sometimes transmitted to humans.
That would be good. But no. What I get when I click on “cattle” is the wikipedia page on cattle, on which there is no information about diseases transmitted to humans. Information Technology Fail.
One could argue that making the Wikipedia page on Zoonosis half-baked is somehow the correct thing to do, and I’m sure there are those who will. They’d be wrong. This is not the time and place for Wikipedia to tell me it has a page on cows. Jeesh. It is the time and place to give me organized information, that it knows about and probably has somewhere.
A second example is different structurally and while the wikipedia zoonosis example may be flawed, this one is not. If you use Netflix you will probably know what I’m talking about the moment I mention the word “series” or the phrase “tv series.” Series …. like “House” or “Betwitched” or “MI-5” or “Law And Order: Criminal Intent” are things where there is one name (given just now) followed by another phrase such as “season 1” and then “season 1” and so on. Then, within a season, there is “episode 1” and “episode 2” and so on, and often those episodes are named. So there may be a series called “Murder on the Maya Riviera” which ran for three seasons and included episodes such as “Murder on the Maya Riviera: Season 2, Episode 7 ‘Killer Coral'” and an episode called “Murder on the Maya Riviera: Season 3, Episode 1 ‘Pedro is not Dead'” and so on.
Netflix does recognize that episodes are grouped into seasons (but see below) but it does not recognize that a series has multiple seasons. So, when looking at a set or list of items from a series, you can’t always tell what you are looking at because of truncation of the absurdly long names that result from this hierarchical structure. You can’t tell “Murder on the Maya Riviera: Episo…” from “Murder on the Maya Riviera: Episo….” See what I mean?
Also, when searching for or otherwise managing such things, it would simply be easier if the entity that is the series was considered as one thing. There are complexities in doing this (i.e., earlier episodes are available on instant view, others on DVD only, etc.) but that is really unimportant. Such complexities can be managed. Honestly. They can be.
(Note: DVD only series are not grouped by year … they are subgrouped because a typical DVD holds only a few episodes. This adds to the length of the actual naming of the item, and to further annoying confusion.)
There’s more. There’s lots more stuff that’s got broken when it got fixed. One could develop an entire web site on this topic. In fact, some guy did. Here’s his Ted Talk.
The Loudness of Coffee Shops
The coffee shop was already loud. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the Caribou are all made of sound-bouncy materials. The equipment behind the counter is loud to begin with and is not muffled by any structure. The barista has developed the typical barista habit of banging shit on other shit as loud as he can and as often as he can.
Continue reading The Loudness of Coffee Shops