general
There are 113 posts filed in general (this is page 10 of 12).
Some tech I’ve been thinking about
FaceID is weird
I missed the boat on FaceID for a long time. Part of it was all about my unwillingness to dump my iPhone 7 Plus. It’s still an epic phone with an excellent security system that Apple may be returning to, after all their hullabaloo about FaceID.
Now that I’m here, I can’t say I’m impressed. FaceID definitely exceeds my expectations in many ways. It’ll be pitch dark and my phone will unlock as if by magic. But if I’m too close to my phone, it’ll just forget how to work. It’s as if there’s a mandate for the software to see my entire face before it can unlock.
Which is funny, because, well, I can’t expect Apple to have anticipated COVID, but their unwillingness to move fast to accommodate for face masks is just weird. It is only now, in the iOS 14.5 beta, that they’ve finally talked about a way to use FaceID with masks. As we all know, beta features don’t always end up in release.
Early on, I tried to trick FaceID by wearing the mask when trying to add my face to the software. It was quick to point out that something is covering my face. If it’s that smart, why isn’t it smart enough to use what’s available of my face? I can’t imagine how FaceID works for those with physical disabilities or religious mandates to cover their faces.
Google is getting dumber
From Nest to Google Home, things in the IoT World aren’t what they used to be. I remember a time when Google Home was snappy! It would respond quickly and get things right. Nowadays, Alexa seems to be much faster and Google Home’s response time has worsened noticeably. We first noticed this anecdotally. Then, we saw a Canadian vlogger give a demo where clearly, Alexa responded to a pre-created routine a lot sooner than Google did. The last straw was when we recently tried to ask Google Home to put a reminder. At some point, I removed our voice profiles from Google’s apps, in a fit of privacy-fueled action. This has essentially broken the Google Home system. Many features seem to depend heavily on voice profiles. It certainly makes sense for me to ask my smart assistant to remind me of something, and later, see that notification on all the devices I own. But if I’ve not enabled that functionality, the reminder should be presented on the device itself, shouldn’t it?
This doesn’t mean we’re giving up on Google Home. There are certainly things Google does better. For example, their maps prowess stands them in good stead when it comes to finding timings or local shops. But things like reminders are off-limits and so is IMDB. A lazy stroll through some movie or TV show lists becomes a chore when it comes to asking Google Home for the ratings. This is on Amazon and probably their forced lack of integration, but you can’t ask Google for “imdb ratings”. You can ask that of Alexa and that’s what we end up doing.
This pathetic approach to lack of data sharing is causing a second disintegration in our lives fast behind the streaming wars. I’m certainly never going to get Paramount+, but Alexa and Google Home both have a home in my… well, home.
But this worsening experience with Google Home brings another conversation out – is Google reducing the resources available to their smart speakers? Have they seen not-good-enough returns and data collection through this hardware so that they are not investing in the backend infrastructure enough? The day Google Photos was launched, they stressed more about their AI capabilities than anything else. I told my brother that very day that when Google has used our data to improve their tagging capabilities, they’ll dump Google Photos. The upcoming crippling of the “always free unlimited storage” promise shows that Google absolutely uses all of these services to enhance their capabilities and when they’re done, they throw their users under the bus.
Big companies is where innovation goes to die, especially in tech
Why is Spotify available everywhere but YouTube is not? Is that not a disservice to the users of YouTube?
Spotify’s business model depends on ensuring their customers can get to their catalogue no matter where they are. Hence the offline playing capabilities, the somewhat open API for many third party tools, services, and hardware. Add to that a killer API feature which I’ve not seen anywhere else. I can start listening on my phone and Google Cast it to my entire collection of Google Home speakers. I can be on their desktop app and use Spotify Connect to move the music to my Spotify-friendly Bose speakers. Heck, I can be playing on anything and use my phone’s Spotify app as a remote control!
This amazing tech feels alien in a world where YouTube is becoming more restrictive by the day. Why can’t I play YouTube on my Google Homes? Oh, because they’re videos and the GHomes I have are audio-only? That’s a pathetic excuse. Why can’t I Google Cast just the audio parts? Because integrating the streams is a difficult job?
Google has an infinite amount of resources at their disposal, yet they cripple their subdivisions by not letting the left and right arms integrate. This brings up the Amazon model front and center – everybody is your customer and your job is to present an API for everything you do. After that, if a business unit integrates your API into their tooling, that’s good news for you! But Google is still acting as if all of its properties are separate companies and integration must come from the top down. Top down is how innovation dies.
There’s famous cartoon showing how Google and Amazon differ. With employees inside a circle and customers outside, Google has roses pointed inward and guns pointed outwards. Amazon has roses pointed outwards and guns pointed inwards. If someone finds this cartoon, please link me. A picture is worth a couple hundred words. Inflation.
Good Riddance
My apartment building has an event going on – a blind date with books. In this, participants part with a book from their personal collection, the organizers wrap books in opaque paper and write the first sentence of the book on the front. If you find that sentence to be interesting, you pick up the book and walk away.
So far so good.
As part of our Diwali cleaning, my wife and I reorganized our books into a few stacks – those we want to read some time in the future, those we want to read in the near future, those we’ve read, and those we will never read.
From that last stack, I picked up a book that I started to read and just, couldn’t. I decided that this book is popular enough that someone will like having it. But for me, it just wasn’t the right fit.
But, as I was walking out of our home and into the elevator, I realized that I have a bout of separation anxiety. As the metal box sped downwards, I thought about it.
I dislike this book, I dislike the author, I dislike the entire concept. Yet, I had serious anxiety about giving it away. I looked the book all over. It’s priced at seventeen dollars. I probably didn’t pay that much. But it’s still worth something. The font is nice, the line spacing is comfortable, the paper rich.
Yet, it’s the content. The book is The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac. Kerouac is said to be a pioneer of the Beat Generation, a 1950s literary movement related to a post World War II, spiritual, anti-materialist thinking, and apparently the the precursor to hippie culture of the next decade. The book itself is recommended as a sort of intro to Kerouac, a good first read to dip into his interpretation of Zen Buddhism.
So I was surprised when the book was just… crass. It was a warped appropriation of Buddhism. The title is very apt – it’s a couple of aimless bums who are exploring Buddhism from the bits and pieces they come across. They have no conception of dharma, having established that the author will just jump on a moving train and stowaway his way to another place instead of building a life and living it. That ideology of stealing his way on to a goods train just rubbed me the wrong way and it was downhill from there.
For Westerners, this romanticism of a life of running might seem intriguing and beautiful. But that is not in any way what we’ve been taught to be the meaning of life or spirituality in India. If you think about it, being a bhikshu is the very beginning of Buddhism. Yet the way Kerouac does it, alternating between binge partying and self-exploration atop a mountain seems haphazard and decidedly crude.
I could not digest this book and though I’m sure others might find it interesting, I am glad to have gotten rid of it.
Next, I’m eyeing my copy of The Crying of Lot 49. Thomas Pynchon is an author I thought I’ll enjoy, and the novel is included in Time Magazine’s “100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005”. But it is steeped in a hatred of womanhood and is an absurdist’s dream-come-true. Maybe I’ll shed it the next chance I get.
Gratis
I love bargain hunting for apps. And the best price for something is free, or so they say.
Whenever I chance upon an iOS App Store link that is set to Germany (‘de’ instead of ‘us’), I notice that the price for the app, if it’s free, is written in German as “gratis”. This gives me a bit of a kick, because the US version just says “Free” and it doesn’t ever encapsulate the true price of an app.
I’ve worked on a few personal project apps, websites, and services over the years, though I’ve never really released anything, specially not for any price above free. It’s because I know that from alpha to production is a hellish journey, filled with all sorts of pitfalls and work that I’m not suited for. From design to marketing to copywriting to user feedback collection, there’s a lot that indie devs do and kudos to them. But whenever we get something for free, we take it for granted. “Hey, they gave it away for free, so it must not mean much to them.” But the months of work, the blood, sweat, and swearing that goes into making anything in software makes it so that the app is never free.
Thus, when I see the price of free, even though I’m elated that I got something for free, I know that it’s anything but.
Gratis feels a better suited word for it, because a) it’s by the gratitude of the developer that you’re getting it without paying anything, and b) because you should be grateful back to the developer for it. All these words have the same root – *gwere – which, according to etymonline.com, means “to favor”.
So the next time you get some software for free, know that the person spent months working on it, and they’re doing you a favor by giving it to you for free. Maybe you’ll be a little more thankful to them for it.
Look at this app, do you think it’s “free”? It’s anything but.
Thoughts on Proficiency
When I was about thirteen, we had, as part of our English curriculum at school, a class on writing telegrams. The idea was to teach us how to write in concise form, with as much legibility as possible.
At that time, I was already somewhat good at the English language and started off the lesson with some gusto. The first task was to write a telegram about a house on sale. (Why? I dunno.)
The ask was to describe the house, throw in a price, and get away with the least number of words as possible.
Most of my colleagues wrote the following phrase –
Three bedroom one bath STOP
Where as I, thinking I’m smarter than the rest, wrote –
Three bedroom bath STOP
Now, in my mind, this was perfectly acceptable, but my teacher was quick to point out that there is a lack of clarity as to whether my house has three bedrooms each with a bath attached, or in fact, three weird rooms with a bathroom built into them. It was embarrassing in the moment, but a great lesson for me.
There’s a famous quote, which since I’ve forgotten, I’ll paraphrase here. It goes something like, “if you want to change something, you have to master its basics first.”
The gist of it remains with me to this day. When, nowadays, I see people using English in every shape and form, bending it to their will, I notice this trend more and more – people who are proficient at the language are able to bend it better, so that they do something innovative and fresh, yet are easily able to get their point across. On the other hand, people who are yet learning the nuances of the language are also using all kinds of shortcuts and short forms because of the restrictions put on us by messaging systems and twitter. But these latter people are often not able to get their message across clearly.
This is not to fault people for whom English is a second language. I recently saw a meme that said that if you see someone speaking broken English, have more respect for them, because it means they know some other language as their first language. Chances are, you who are judging them will not have the exposure and mental agility of knowing a second or third language.
Regardless, when people stick to the basics, they are able to make leaps and bounds of progress to build upon. This is true for pretty much every system/language/process in the world.
Have you ever come across a badly written passage by a neural network and it’s very easy to tell that it’s computer generated? What made you realize it’s not written by a person? There would be some basic level language mistakes made by the software which you’d pick up immediately. This gives people working on NLP a clear direction – make your algorithm better at the basics of the language, and teach it fifth standard level coursework instead of Shakespeare.
Recently, I was writing some code in JS. Whenever I’m writing quick getaway code, I opt for a simple for loop. But this one time, something irked me. Writing the same code over and over again is good muscle memory, and it frees up mental space to think about ways to improve one’s process (cue hat tip to Atomic Habits by James Clear, which I heard recently as an audiobook during a road trip). I started looking at map, which is a function I’ve gazed at before, but never bothered with. As it turns out, map fit perfectly in my code, as I wanted to apply the same function on every item in the array. So I replaced the for loop with map, and from then on, I’ve started looking at other things, like filter, to further remove the for loop from my code.
I’ve probably written hundreds of for loops over the years, across many languages and projects I’ve worked on. But it took that umpteenth for loop in JavaScript to get me to a point where I was comfortable with replacing it with something better. If I was a Software Engineer by education, I might have known about, and used map and filter all these years.
But since I came to programming as a tool, I first went through years of the basics, repeating them, partly in a fog of ignorance, till I was aware of my own abilities, and hankering to change things for the better.
There’s a flip side to this – I hate reading documentation. I rather jump into learning by doing. This is not just true for programming. I hate looking into English grammar. I can never tell you about what is a pronoun, what’s a participle, or what is the correct spelling of a complex word. But that doesn’t stop me from using English in my own writing, thinking, and blogging.
When I talk about focusing on the basics, I’m not talking about the grammar and structure of whatever it is you’re learning. I’m talking about the every day basics of doing. Focus on those, and once you’ve mastered those, you’ll be able to soar.
Thoughts on the upcoming Apple iPhone event
Apple is priced for an iPhone hit. What could go wrong?
“About 40% of Apple’s install base, based on our estimates, have not upgraded for three and a half years. If you combine that into a 5G, four phone release, we believe that really creates a perfect storm of demand,” Ives said, predicting that Apple could sell more iPhones this fiscal year than the 231 million it did in 2015.
It’s yet to be seen if consumers really care about 5G, too: A study from April found that “65.7% of consumers said they weren’t very excited,” while recent analysis has shown that 5G is in many cases slower than 4G. “5G coverage is still limited, and it’s unlikely consumers will pay extra for features they can’t use,” analyst Gene Munster recently said, adding that he expects 5G iPhone sales to quicken toward the end of next year once coverage has improved.
Watch Apple’s stock after the iPhone event on Tuesday. Facebook’s new Oculus ships on the same day.
I’m becoming a frequent reader of Protocol, if for no other reader than that they publish every day and the pressure of it flooding my RSS makes me scan it for interesting reading every day or so.
I’m one of those 40% install base that hasn’t upgraded in a few years. My family sometimes laugh at how old my phone is, since I’m on an iPhone 7 Plus, but when I buy a new phone this winter (because I’m not expecting to get it in the first run of phone sales, and because Apple screws up the first set of hardware anyways because of the sheer volume of hardware they put out), I’ll have a phone that’s newer than anyone in my family by at least a year and change, so that’s that.
But regarding 5G, I’m going to steer clear from those phones. First, I know that Apple will price them differently. But would you buy a phone with a network technology that’s not supported by a majority of the geographical area yet? Sure, in some places you’ll get faster-than-WiFi speeds, but those will be far and few between for at least two more years. Knowing USA’s shit record at rolling out new network technology (network vendors love spending on backend networking hardware that saves them money, but they’ve always been slow on customer-facing rollouts because those take a lot more money), I’d say 5G is still a good 5 years out.
This is the same as when we were buying a TV three years ago. The choice was between a Ultra-HD 65 inch behemoth that was moderately priced (this model’s price has fallen to CRT-TV rates now), or a 45 inch 4K TV that was grossly overpriced. I stayed away from the 4K even though my brother was trying hard to convince me otherwise. His ideas on 4K content being the norm are still not true, three years past. It’s just too much to expect from media and backbone tech companies to move too fast on expensive technology. Not their thing. Maybe with the coming 5G, 4K content will get a boost. But again, that’ll be 5 years from now, when South Korea will be swimming in a sea of 7G and 8K content.
Now, the fear is that Apple will introduce something radical in the 5G phones that will not be present in the 4G LTE phones. They’ve done this before with the larger phones getting an extra camera module, or OLED screens instead of LCD. They could very easily toss in a much better camera, making their 4G models less appealing, or add back the fingerprint scanner, which is infinitely more convenient than face scanning at night, or when you’re wearing a mask, or when you’re on the move, and so on.
But will they? They might have some ridiculous hardware thing up their sleeve – like a heart rate monitor (from Android phones of a few years ago), or a dedicated Siri button that you could customize to run shortcuts (again from Android phones a few years ago). Or maybe they’ll do something stupidly expensive, like throwing in a pair of airpods with the 5G phones (though this would fail if the airpods are not in the iPhone box, because them being a separate product will feel very un-Apple like, as in a small physical discount to get you to buy their product).
But most likely, they’ll toss in a year (or two) of their Apple One software subscription with the costlier phones. That would be perfect, because I couldn’t give two shits about their software subscription model. I’m not into Apple Arcade, or Apple TV+, or Apple Music, or News+, or extra iCloud storage, and certainly not their Fitness+ product.
I exclusively play one or two games on the iPhone – mostly sudoku and Call of Duty: Mobile. I have subs for Netflix and HBO and a good Plex Media Server. I prefer Spotify for their content and their high availability on Google Home devices. I find News+ to be a stupid, overpriced offering that everyone should run away from. I am impatiently waiting for Dropbox’s Family plan to drop, because that will forever solve all of my storage problems. And, well, have you seen the freely available catalogue of fitness videos on YouTube? Blows everything else out the water. Get lost Peloton, YouTube is the king of fitness videos!
So, yeah, if Apple sticks to only offering Apple One for free with their 5G phones, it’ll be very easy for me, and millions of others to stay away from those phones this cycle. Will this hurt Apple’s stock? Maybe.
I found it interesting that Protocol mentioned that Facebook’s Oculus ships the same day. Does it matter? No. Facebook took and effectively killed the Oculus. The latter was probably burning money like crazy and needed a sugar daddy, but Zuck isn’t the kind you want. Maybe, maybe, the next iteration of AR/VR will be propped up by 5G, ML-GPU chips, and Nvidia-ARM superchips. But as of right now, the more interesting thing Protocol could have pointed out is that Amazon’s Prime Day is on the same day as well! Amazon has granted me a $10 credit, which I’ll feel obligated to spend on something a lot more than ten dollars that day, as I ponder upon how much I’m going to enjoy my new iPhone, when I finally get it a few months later.
A lone ship in the water
I wonder what legends lurk in the fog?
Playing with Townscaper
I have been adoring Oskar Stålberg‘s budding idle gamer Townscaper for some time now, but today I realized that it’s available on Mac on Steam! So I immediately got it and started playing with it. It’s a blast to have a beautiful blank canvas to play with!
Here are some towns I’ve built. I’ll be adding more here over time. (design saves at the end)
My first design! I love the colors, and the lighthouses look fabulous!
I went a little crazy with this one. It was interesting to build a town that’s accessible even to it’s own residents mostly by water. The houses on the right are beautiful single family (single person?) homes and the central tower is 29 floors! I had a different design in my mind, but this one just came about.
I love the French town of Mont Saint Michel and hope to visit it one day. It’s a strange place and Oskar has said that it’s one of his inspirations for Townscaper, so getting this game was just meant to be!
Wishlist for the game –
I hope Oskar adds the following –
- Actual lighthouses – I would love these!
- Proper beaches – right now, in certain cases, a small beach shows up near some houses. I’d love a proper beach area!
- Trees! I would love trees that I can manually place!
- Little people – Birds are aplenty in Townscaper and it’s a lot of fun to watch them fly around. But I’d love to see little humans cycling around our towns!
If you’re reading till here. Go buy the game. It’s awesome and only six bucks!
Design saves (for people who own the game) –
First –
IDCH3OIEL3Wi39T0SEy7xE9T0aEyPRLg8TQ6Lq-kf_Q6Pymvf_T2AEvW_s57n-EJGyjkvW_spZvf_TA48S4TiR824wm27n-EAOyLhPJ__5PRivf_06bsAEyjtAEv6GREywPyPooPp_FW63Qi-EJ_Tk4PRiyvNhV9
Long Tower –
pSiAeJWiciaNjtmD3u4BztUezcvYkngkwhnM-jRehDPZ_Fi8EHudyDkbp8k5_QIv5Hf6Hf6Hf6Hf6Hf6Hf6Hf6Hf6HfzGfqFnyWPRiPthHph-gh3oh3shjEXLObc-4QzFlVNtg2YW1Tj5U3eaMX42Tj5x2eaM3w2Tj5M2eaMXvWPNmjWpnGwymt6s5ntDtBptMtJqtVteKTbiaVVVVVVVVVPBptMtJqPdoNR9JAsmf2E1nqwmo2U36J2sJq90Y2E1eSLbiaPFlNR9misn4yOwG7zWsB
On the price of the new Apple Watch Braided Band
I missed watching the Apple event live yesterday. Late in the evening, I looked at my phone and realized that I’d missed a notification. As I browsed YouTube to find an appropriate explainer video to watch, I also messaged my brother to ask if he’d seen the event.
I settled to watch the official video from Apple. Of course, I didn’t want to sit through the whole thing, but their human interest stories in the beginning are always nice. Most of the times, these stories help Apple get a theme across. But this time, I noticed one that was out of place – one of the participants talked about their diabetes and how the Apple Watch helps them somehow. This story would have been a great preface to if/when Apple releases a watch with a glucose monitor. If they’re able to miniaturize a transdermal glucose monitor, and launch it without unnecessary health insurance companies in the way, that there would be a great sell and a true service to people with diabetes!
But till that happens, look, new watch bands!
My brother replied that he didn’t see it live, and then followed it up with this ridiculously succinct summary of the event –
New watch, cheaper watch, cheap ipad, new straps, new bundled service with multiple tiers
nipun khanna
No surprises there, I guess, other than the new straps/bands.
I stopped watching the video and we got to discussing the Solo Loop and the Braided Solo Loop. He rued that the braided will cost a hundred dollars. I joked that soon there will be Amazon knockoffs priced at twenty five dollars. Then I jokingly plugged the name into Amazon.
?
Introducing to you, the Tefeca Colorful Braided Elastic Compatible/Replacement Band for Apple Watch! It’s priced at, you guessed it, twenty five bucks!
But that’s not the best part. THE best part (found by my brother), if you scroll down that Amazon product page, is that this band was first made available on September 6, 2019. So who stole from whom? Did Chinese manufacturers get wind of this upcoming accessory way back when and started producing it a year ahead? Did someone at Apple see this, buy it, love it, and decide to pirate it? I don’t know the answer, but it’s awesome!
The other day, my wife was showing me her iPhone leather case. It’s her first official case, and the one she’s proudly had on her phone for a long time, though she’s had other cases for a longer duration. But it’s also her first case to actually fall apart. The outer covering slowly started peeling away and is almost ruined now, to the point that it’s ugly and almost destroyed.
Official Apple accessories are not something they’re particularly good at. Their cables get ruined easily and are better replaced by Anker braided cables, their wired earphones were always too easy to tangle, and their iPad smart cases are always overpriced and under-performing. So if you’re going to ask me to buy a $100 band that I can absolutely get for $25 outside, I’ll go for the latter.
Really enjoying Call Of Duty: Mobile nowadays
I’ve been playing COD:M on my iPhone since the last few… months, and I’ve been really enjoying it. It’s a no-fuss game, with graphics settings to match even my older iPhone 7, and really good development cycles and fast moving seasons (storylines and season passes).
They’ve done a bit of work to gamify the interface though, with lots of pre-game notifications and pop ups that try to convince you to buy the season pass or individual weapons and characters. It’s just enough to not irritate me and feels not more than a hurdle to cross and get to the actual gameplay.
I’ve been getting good at the game. So good, in fact, that in the last five days I’ve gotten banned twice. Both times, I was playing really, really well, and came in first on the scoreboard, so I assumed that one or more players from the other team reported me as probably using a cheat.
I’m not, but that’s a sort of rite of passage of playing FPS games well – you get accused of cheating. Problem is, the first time I was banned for an hour and the second time, for a day! Now I’m worried that if I play too well and get reported again, I might lose access for even longer! And in typical fashion, there is no recourse in-app to contact the moderators when banned.
I wouldn’t say I’m addicted to the game, but who am I kidding. I’m afraid to lose access and this might affect how well I play in the future. But hey, every time I got banned, I ended up spending time on coding on side projects, which is awesome!
All said and done, I’m really enjoying Call Of Duty Mobile and I’d recommend it to everyone! It’s a free download.